GHWB’s Gallery of Irony

You could fairly ask why the National Constitution Center – a museum devoted to the US Constitution – would name a new gallery for George H.W. Bush. This, after all, is the president who irresponsibly appointed Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court’s least qualified appointee since at least WWII, whose signature contribution during 20 years on the bench is his ongoing effort to legitimize prison beatings. (Really.) VP while the Reagan administration was running roughshod over the Constitution during the Iran-Contra affair, Bush, as president, pardoned everyone implicated, arguably to obstruct investigation into his own law-breaking.

But the salient facts are that GHWB is a former chairman of the Center, and that his son Jeb is the current chair – and so with nauseating irony GHWB is getting his eponymous gallery. According to Center president Jeffrey Rosen, the George H.W. Bush gallery will for the next three years, “be the focal point… of debate and education about the meaning of the Bill of Rights.” Barf bags, anyone?

As if to double-down on the grotesque, the task of obfuscating George Bush’s antagonistic relationship to the Bill of Rights was given to Justice Samuel Alito, who Bush appointed to the Third Circuit in 1990. Alito, after all, has himself been hard at work eviscerating the Bill of Rights since Bush Duh put him on the Supreme Court in 2006. It’s kind of like adding a George Wallace wing to a Black History Museum – with the dedication ceremony conducted by Charles Murray.

Conservatives like Alito cannot sing the praises of the Bill of Rights without irony. Speaking at the dedication ceremony, Alito distinguishes the American Bill of Rights as “having teeth” – as compared to other declarations of human rights that, through history, have not been so readily enforceable. The joke is that Alito has made a career of knocking those teeth out at every opportunity.

Three Constitutional cases were deadlocked 4-4 at the time Alito was seated on the Court, each implicating the Bill of Rights. Solely for Alito’s benefit were they reargued, so that he might cast the tie-breaking vote. Alito went 3-for-3: his was the fifth vote to undercut liberties protected by the 1st (speech), 4th (search and seizure) and 8th (cruel and unusual punishment) amendments in those three cases, respectively.

Alito was just warming up. His subsequent decisions have undermined women’s right to choose, expanded the police power, and reduced free speech protections; his dissents have often advocated even greater violence toward the Bill of Rights. So perhaps it’s unsurprising what his short talk on the history of the Bill of Rights included – and excluded.

Alito began by asserting that the Bill of Rights is a “codification” of those “unalienable rights” alluded to in the Declaration of Independence. He conveniently fails to mention that, as a codification, it is explicitly incomplete. Which is probably why, in his discussion of the views of the late 18th century supporters and opponents of the Bill of Rights, he fails to mention one of the Bill’s most important objections: that the absence of a particular right from the Bill might be used as evidence that that right does not exist. This problem was cured by the 9th amendment, which forbids that specific form of reasoning. But go try finding a conservative like Alito who has ever used the 9th amendment to expand the protections of the Bill of Rights.

Alito goes on to discuss the importance of the defeat of fascism in WWII for the spread of human rights worldwide. Ever more ironically, he fails to acknowledge that the Bill of Rights itself was not generally operable against state governments until the 1960s. Before then, the state police could break into your house without a warrant, arrest you and beat you for a confession, and the Constitution had nothing to say about it. That only changed when liberal justices changed the law, over the objection of the Court’s conservatives.

If the National Constitutional Center were enhanced by a gallery dedicated to efforts to undermine the Bill of Rights, it could hardly have a more fitting name, nor a more apt individual to introduce it.

 

Everybody Must Get Keystoned

The Keystone XL pipeline is not a very big deal. While its politics are complicated, the ultimate effects from building the pipeline – or not – are not going to have a big impact on anything or anyone. The reason: Canada’s tar sands are (duh) in Canada – beyond the reach of US policymakers. And Canada is intent on seeing them exploited to the fullest. Whether the oil coming out of Alberta gets piped down to refineries on the US Gulf Coast or not, it’s going to be extracted from those tar sands and burned for energy somewhere on planet Earth just the same.

Much controversy stems from the fact that tar sands yield an exceptionally dirty oil, via processes that release far more atmospheric CO2 than conventional oil extraction – even more than is released by extraction from the Bakken formation. And the environmental harm is not limited to greenhouse gases. Considerable harm also occurs on the local level, to Alberta’s boreal forest, which is itself a carbon sink; and to numerous local animal species.

Some make the economic argument that, by allowing the project to move forward, the US will be lowering the production costs of an especially dirty fuel source, making it that much more competitive in the world market for energy, and consequentially making alternatives to fossil fuels that much less attractive. The problem with this argument is that the effect of the pipeline on production costs is not likely to be significant enough to impact development of the tar sands. It will not impact the price of oil one way or another, and as such will have no effect on oil consumption at all.

Some raise concerns about the environmental hazards of the pipeline itself. While it’s true that it would pass over vital stretches of the Ogallala aquifer – a massive underground formation that sprawls beneath much of the US high plains, critical to the region’s multibillion dollar agriculture industry – the pipeline does not pose a significant threat to the vitality of the aquifer as a whole, because any spill would likely be locally contained in its effects. (A far more serious concern about the aquifer is the unsustainable rate at which agribusiness is currently drawing water from it.)

The oil from Alberta is presently being moved across the US via road and rail, which are far more carbon-intensive modalities than a pipeline. And even if the US doesnt approve Keystone XL, Canada has a back-up plan: to build an all-Canadian pipeline, east to New Brunswick.

The struggle to protect the planet from the risk of global warming occurs on many fronts – but this is not a good fight. The real problem with fossil fuels is economic: their use carries enormous costs that are not borne by end-users, and as such these fuels are priced much more cheaply than they should be. If those costs were internalized by the industry and its customers, fossil fuel prices would rise dramatically, and their desirability as an energy source would drop precipitously – making renewables immediately more attractive for use and development.

Instead of looking to throw up arbitrary obstacles to oil production and use – like refusing to build a pipeline that would probably shrink the carbon footprint of tar sands exploitation – governments should take the direct route of tax policy. Specifically, taxes should be levied on oil consumption such that end-users pay something that approximates the true cost of burning oil. That cost includes local environmental degradation, the use of the atmosphere as a carbon sink, health costs from pollution, and military costs concomitant with the enrichment of states like Iran, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, who use revenue from oil sales to support repressive regimes and-or terrorism worldwide.

US President Obama should not sign off on any plan to approve Keystone XL that does not include a provision to significantly increase taxes on coal and oil. That is the compromise liberals should aim for. The real problem with fossil fuels comes down to dollars and cents. Force producers and consumers to absorb the true cost of their actions, and those actions will change – faster than you can build a pipeline through Nebraska.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Net Neutrality

The Federal Communications Commission is working on a decision to either stay the course on net-neutrality, or to permit internet service providers (ISPs) to charge websites for faster, preferential delivery speeds – thus also permitting ISPs to deliver non-preferred websites at slower speeds.

“Net Neutrality” conceives the internet as a “dumb” network, which doesnt know who’s sending what to whom, and thus treats everything from Wikipedia to Netflix to Craigslist to pornography to this blog the same, with respect to transmission speed and quality. An alternative scenario might let ISPs (like Time Warner or Comcast) charge Skype or Youtube to deliver their data faster… for a price – but as a consequence, everyone else will be delivered slower.

The economics of net neutrality are tricky. On the one hand, there’s a very basic free market notion that finite resources should be allocated to whoever values them more. If some websites place greater value on faster content delivery, and given that the volume and speed of data on the net are finite, then it makes sense to let the market decide who moves faster. Letting ISPs put a price on speed will allow whoever values it the most to obtain it. (This arrangement has always been permitted for end users, who can choose to pay more for faster up- and downloading speeds.) ISPs claim that unless they can establish these faster “toll roads,” they will not make enough money to continue to make investments needed to upgrade their services and increase bandwidth.

The problem with establishing faster internet “toll roads” is that internet innovation has always been driven by the quality of services and content, which has always depended on ideas and technology, not a special fee-arrangement with ISPs. If you want to drive traffic to your site, you have to make your content or your services more attractive. (Advertising helps too!) It has never been possible to compensate for inferior content and services with faster delivery speeds.

It’s also worth taking a closer look at ISP claims that the current net-neutrality model doesnt work for their business. ISPs today make their money by charging end-users to connect to the internet. Cable companies typically charge $30-50 per month for broadband service. In the US, there tends to be little competition for broadband – within a given market, there may be just one or two carriers. Such market conditions are highly favorable to ISPs, allowing them to vastly inflate consumer prices. Compared to consumers in other advanced countries, Americans are commonly charged ten times more for broadband, receiving slower, less reliable service for their extra cost.

Net neutrality is a good thing. It rewards innovation, and it lets the internet live up to its best promise: to be an even playing field, where we all connect on equal terms – and may the best mousetrap win. American ISPs are already fat pigs in cushy markets – if they cannot thrive on monopoly profits from consumers, then they should be excluded from the retail ISP business entirely, and forced to sell their bandwidth wholesale, to allow for real competition.

 

Refs:

http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/whos-sticking-internet-users

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/isp-lobby-has-already-won-limits-on-public-broadband-in-20-states/

http://www.extremetech.com/internet/178465-woe-is-isp-30-of-americans-cant-choose-their-service-provider

http://fortune.com/2014/06/26/is-municipal-broadband-more-important-than-net-neutrality/

 

 

A Big Deal on Climate

The details are barely in, but it seems, at long, long last, that the number 1 and number 2 world economies – also the number 2 and number 1 world polluters – have finally come to an agreement on carbon emissions. This is such a big deal, and such good news, that conservatives are tripping over themselves to take a giant dump on it – as a preemptive first strike, since this deal is poised to take a giant dump on them.

That’s because conservatives for years have used China as a shield to avoid serious discussion of the issues related to climate change. Cap and trade, the subsidization of renewable energy sources, new EPA standards on greenhouse gases: name a climate-change initiative, and you can line up conservatives around the block to oppose it, with China the first and last word they utter. They’ve been telling us for years that the US would be a sucker to work toward any reduction in emissions, because the US would merely be encouraging Chinese polluters – with the logic that whatever the US doesnt pump into the atmosphere, the Chinese will pump extra to compensate, taking American jobs and profits along the way.

China, for their part, have long opposed adhering to a common set of standards with the developed West, reasonably asserting that (1) present atmospheric CO2 levels are chiefly attributable to the past activity of Western economies, not China; and (2) unfettered Chinese development has lifted hundreds of millions of people from poverty, and promises to lift hundreds of millions more – just as it did in the West over the past two centuries.

The rest of the world has thus been held hostage to the intransigence of the world’s two largest economies and polluters. After all, any deal on climate change that doesnt include the US and China leaves out nearly half the world’s emissions and half the world’s economy.

But everything changed when US President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping announced that they reached agreement on greenhouse gas emissions. China has finally agreed to capping emissions, while the US has agreed to steeper reductions. And now there is every reason to be optimistic that the US, China, and the rest of the world can hash out the deal that has long eluded them, when the climate summit meets in Paris in late 2015.

Obama seems ready to do an end-run around the US Senate, which is now controlled by conservatives, and headed by Mr. Coal himself, Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell. Any further international deals on climate are likely to be styled as “Agreements” – as opposed to “Treaties” – further to a 1992 treaty, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Treaties require 67 votes in the Senate, where even 50 are now impossible. In past decades, what was once the world’s preeminent deliberative body could have been relied upon to see past partisan posturing on the most critical issues of the day, to at least have an intelligent debate. No more: the cancer that is conservatism has made the US Senate so dysfunctional that it cannot even meaningfully address matters concerning the planet’s long-term ability to support life.

 

Refs:

http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2014/11/awkward-supercut-republicans-using-china-excuse-climate-inaction?utm_source=huffingtonpost.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=pubexchange_article

http://news.yahoo.com/angry-gop-backlash-obamas-historic-climate-accord-171428262.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/27/us/politics/obama-pursuing-climate-accord-in-lieu-of-treaty.html?_r=0

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/13/world/asia/deal-on-carbon-emissions-by-obama-and-xi-jinping-raises-hopes-for-upcoming-paris-climate-talks.html?_r=0

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/13/opinion/climate-change-breakthrough-in-beijing.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Framework_Convention_on_Climate_Change

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post%E2%80%93Kyoto_Protocol_negotiations_on_greenhouse_gas_emissions

 

 

 

 

 

Deficits and the Party of Duh

Since the Field Guide last discussed the dramatic decline of the US budget deficit, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office came in with its revised numbers for Fiscal Year 2014, which ended September 30th. According to CBO, the deficit for FY 2014 shrank to $486 billion, or 2.8% of GDP. Because the US economy grows, on average, at a rate of about 3% per year, deficits smaller than that can be sustained forever. The US fiscal crisis is over.

The turnaround of the nation’s finances under the Obama Administration has been remarkable. FY 2009, which began while Obama was yet Illinois’ junior senator, had a budget deficit of 9.8% of GDP – the highest since World War II. Under Obama, that figure has fallen every year, to at last slip below 3%. FY 2014’s deficit is in fact slightly smaller than the average of the past 40 years.

If conservatives were thoughtful by nature, they might be scratching their heads. According to their dogma, Obama’s increased taxes on the wealthy, and the ACA’s expanded social insurance for the poor, should have led to mounting deficits and economic stagnation. That’s what they’ve been predicting for the past 6 years – along with hyperinflation. But the fact that reality has returned the precise opposite of conservative predictions – decreasing deficits, economic growth, increasing employment and below-average inflation – has not caused conservatives to reconsider their beliefs.

Responding to facts, after all, is only something that rational people do. Conservatives in the end are dogmatists whose beliefs are fundamentally religious in nature – they dont care a whit about reality. This is how conservatives can continue clinging to the discredited notion that tax cuts pay for themselves, and that social insurance is a black hole of waste and inefficiency. Despite being wrong again and again, they are unable to learn and move on.

Shortly after Reagan came to office in 1981, he got through his signature legislative initiative: slashing taxes on the wealthy, while affording smaller tax cuts to everyone else. The nation’s finances never recovered. Though the economy rebounded – as was expected, following the sharp recession of the early 80s – deficits remained unsustainably high until Reagan left office in 1989, and were still averaging nearly 4% of GDP during the Bush years that immediately followed. To fully grasp the significance of Reagan’s policy failure, it helps to appreciate that the Carter’s administration never ran a budget deficit greater than 3% of GDP, despite a poor economy.

Clinton came to power as the unReagan: he raised taxes on the wealthy (without a single GOP vote in Congress), while also increasing government spending on stimulus programs that typically help middle income families. With conservatives predicting gloom and doom, the US economy responded with its longest sustained expansion in history, while the deficit shrank to zero.

You’d think this experience would be the slam-dunk/death-knell of Voodoo Economics – if, after all, tax cuts demonstrably worsen deficits, while tax increases shrink them to nothing, while coinciding with unsurpassed economic growth, how could conservatives persist in their folly? But the charm of conservatives is their inability to learn from experience, no matter how obvious or unequivocal its lessons. And thus Bush Duh continued with the same conservative foolishness, cutting taxes on the rich, which gave away the nation’s hard-won surplus, replacing it with deficits stretching far into the future, culminating in a lackluster economy and the nation’s worst fiscal straits in more than 60 years.

Under Obama, the US has expanded its social safety nets and raised taxes on the wealthy, while lowering the deficit and growing the economy. In other words: it’s the same old story – and if conservatives in the Party of Duh had any connection to reality, they wouldnt be surprised at all.

 

The Field Guide is off mid-week for Veterans’/Armistice/Decoration Day – we’ll return with new material on Friday.

 

 

Quit Sulking and Party Like It’s 2016

There comes a time when circumstances demand a people, party or ideology to pull back and reconsider its premises and positions. For liberals, this is not that time. The so-called Republican Wave of 2014 was a perfect storm that is not likely to be repeated anytime soon. In fact, 2016 stands to be a Liberal Wave of even greater magnitude. So quit sulking, and get ready to fight the family fascists over Thanksgiving dinner. The election past was disappointing, but many of its specifics point to good things ahead.

We begin by observing that the change in Senate leadership changes nothing. Before the election, the two parties had to compromise to pass any legislation. Since legislation requires the president’s signature, that has not changed. Looking at the individual Senate seats that went red, surely the losses in North Carolina, Iowa and Colorado are a concern, because they are swing states. But when you step back to consider that North Carolina and Colorado only became swing states in the past decade, you realize that the long-term strongly favors liberals. That’s why the fight occurs primarily in conservative country, as states in traditionally conservative areas trend toward liberalism. Democrats held onto seats in Virginia and New Hampshire, for example, which used to be reliably conservative.

Then you have Arkansas, South Dakota and Nebraska: all of whom went strongly for conservative candidates, but nonetheless passed ballot initiatives raising the minimum wage, which would surely be opposed by the conservative candidates on the same ballot! This schizophrenia drives home the longstanding point that conservatives fundamentally fail to recognize the candidates who support their self-interest. The electorate’s backing of conservatives is significantly based on ignorance and misapprehension, and as such it can be readily turned.

Other liberal ballot initiatives also succeeded, including the legalization of marijuana for recreational use in Oregon and Alaska, as well as the legalization of marijuana possession in DC. Another measure in Florida that would have legalized medical cannabis received 57% of the vote, though it ultimately failed, since Florida requires 60%. In California, where Jerry Brown was reelected by a wide margin, a ballot initiative changed several non-violent crimes from felonies into misdemeanors, including possession of most kinds of illegal drugs. It’s expected to help ease the incarceration rate.

Liberals should look forward to 2016, where a disproportionate number of vulnerable Senate Republicans come up for reelection (Iowa, North Carolina, Illinois, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and Wisconsin), during a presidential election cycle when turnout among traditional Democratic voters (minorities and young people) typically surges. Further, as the GOP continues to rely more and more heavily on white male voters, that demographic is shrinking as a share of the electorate. In 2014 the GOP got 35% of the Latino vote – less than the 38% it got in the 2010 midterms.

But the 800 pound gorilla for conservatives is the electoral math for presidential elections. Since 1992, of the 50 states and DC, 19 have voted every time for the Democratic candidate, and 13 for the GOP candidate. The problem for the GOP is that those 19 solidly Democratic states contain 242 electoral votes – while the 13 GOP states contain only 102. Putting aside the fact that Democrats have won the popular vote in 5 of the past 6 presidential elections, a Democratic presidential candidate may need just 28 electoral votes in swing states to win – while the Republican needs practically every swing state. A Democratic victory in Florida, with its 29 electoral votes, may by itself be enough to secure the presidency.

So, fellow liberals, get up off the mat, and get ready for the big stakes game just around the corner. In the long-term, the 2014 midterms will be looked back upon as a statistical blip in a trend that will, inevitably, bring liberalism to every corner of the US.

 

Refs:

http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2013/nov/10/george-will/george-will-paints-dire-electoral-picture-gop-says/

http://news.yahoo.com/how-hillary-clinton-won-the-2014-midterms-075943434.html

http://ballotpedia.org/2014_ballot_measures

 

Hope on Election Day

Conservatives have spent the past 6 years doing everything they could to wreck the US economy – from obstructing stimulus programs, to slashing valuable government services and education at the state and local level, to opting out of Medicaid expansion, to delaying appointments to crucial executive branch positions, to hamstringing Congress on critically needed pieces of legislation, like immigration – even when there was strong bipartisan support for a solution. And now instead of receiving the electoral flogging they’ve earned, they are almost certain to gain seats in the House and Senate, and perhaps even win a majority in the upper chamber.

Obama stands to reap a whirlwind not of his making – and that’s because the great swath of America’s electorate that stumbles, misinformed, into voting booths on Election Day is sometimes large enough to carry the day. This is why it’s critical that liberals turn out and vote, to ensure that the voice of reason is heard above the din of ignorance.

In the end, a lot of good may come out of it. Several truly nasty GOP governors may be shown the door, paving the way for new states to expand Medicaid, which will be of enormous benefit to millions of working poor.

In Florida, the defeat of incumbent Republican Rick Scott will likely lead to a change in Florida’s absurd, regressive and anachronistic felony disenfranchisement law, which currently prevents about one-third of adult black men in Florida from voting in state or federal elections. Such a change would transform Florida overnight from a swing state to one that is solidly democratic, just in time for the 2016 presidential election.

Four years ago Sam Brownback became governor of Kansas with more than 63% of the vote. But in his campaign for reelection, he’s trailing Democratic challenger Paul Davis – and rightly so. Brownback’s massive tax cuts for the rich have forced the state to reduce public services, including deep cuts in public education. The state’s fiscal crisis is so bad that Kansas has seen its credit-rating downgraded, with red ink projected far into the future. Many Kansas Republicans have come out in support of Davis, whose election would be a big win for Kansans, but perhaps an even bigger win for sanity.

People in Wisconsin have grown disaffected with the extremist right wing policies of Governor Scott Walker, and the deficits that follow conservative policies whenever and wherever they’re put into effect. His defeat by Democrat Mary Burke would be a big win for Wisconsin’s working poor, who might at last gain access to Medicaid; and as well to Wisconsin families who stand to see reductions in education spending reversed.

While Brownback, Walker and Scott have all earned voters’ scorn through their terrible policies, Pennsylvania’s Republican Governor Tom Corbett is simply a poor politician. While he holds a conservatives’ typically medieval views on gay marriage and marijuana legalization, his administration has not been very effective at doing much of anything, good or bad – his reelection campaign’s failure is part of Corbett’s larger ineffectiveness. Heading into Election Day down double-digits, Corbett will almost surely lose to Democratic challenger Tom Wolf, to become the first incumbent Pennsylvanian Governor to lose a reelection bid since 1854.

On the Congressional level, winner-take-all elections suck because they diminish the marginal value of each individual vote. Imagine if a party gaining n% of the vote for Congress actually got n% of the seats. That style of election obviously correlates with much higher turnouts, because every last vote – and failure to vote – makes a difference. But whether you’re in a state or district that’s close or not: please, if you’re a liberal, get out today and make yourself heard. At least you can spend the next two years reminding everyone you know that at least you tried.

The Liberal Field Guide eschews the politically correct position that everyone should vote. Surely everyone reading this post should vote – such people are almost surely much better informed than the ordinary voter. The unfortunate fact is that the price of careless, uninformed voting falls on everyone equally – if its effects were concentrated on the individual malfeasor, people might be more diligent about researching candidates and issues. And so if a conservative asks you today – do your nation a favor and tell them that the election is next week. They’ll believe anything.

 

This is a special Election Day dispatch – the Field Guide will return on Friday.

 

 

 

 

 

The Simmering Pot Movement

Seems hardly an election cycle passes without several marijuana initiatives on the ballot. This season’s players are Washington, Alaska and the District of Columbia. The states would allow for retail pot shops, like those recently established by law in Colorado. D.C.’s ballot measure would merely legalize possession. And for what it’s worth, Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley recently announced he would himself vote for the Oregon ballot measure – to become the first US senator to ever support marijuana legalization.

The tide for pot legalization is rising nearly as fast as that for gay marriage – and, reassuringly, it doesnt depend on the learned liberalism of federal judges; it is rather the consequence of its popularity in an increasingly liberal electorate. Medical marijuana is now legal under state law in nearly half the states, and possession has been decriminalized in about one-third of all states.

Opposition to marijuana legalization is as lovely a dunce cap as a conservative ever wore. People who claim to fear government power, and who eschew a state’s paternalism toward its adult citizens, should arrive easily to the policy position of marijuana legalization. Not so for conservatives, whose fear of government power is somehow not triggered by the American gulag system, which has given the US the highest incarceration rate in the world, driven significantly by drug prohibition. Conservative esteem for “personal responsibility” is somehow inapplicable to the idea of letting adults decide what’s best for their minds and bodies. One hears conservatives babble about the need to “protect society” from the scourge of individual drug use, and wonders why they dont have a similar desire to protect society from individual decisions to go without health insurance, acquire firearms, or not save for retirement.

Conservatism, after all, is defined by its lack of principles. Compared to real political philosophies, such as liberalism, conservatism is ten pounds of crap crammed into a five-pound bag, thrown together by historical accident, and bound together by the perspicacious philosophical insight that everything was better in the old days. Except for slavery, women’s subjugation, Jim Crow, witch burnings, the Japanese internment, the eugenics movement and the McCarthy hearings, America’s past is a veritable touchstone of enduring values and right-mindedness – ah, the good ol’ days….

One day – hopefully soon – people who come out opposed to slam-dunk liberal policies like gay marriage and marijuana legalization will sound as loony as advocates for slavery and the repeal of women’s right to vote – policy positions so extreme that they have become publicly unspeakable, relegated to extremist movements like the Taliban or white supremacists. This is why elements within American conservatism are branded as the “American Taliban”: they espouse policies as comparably baseless, venal and backwards. Opposition to science – whether on the subject of evolution, global warming, or the safety and efficacy of medical cannabis – is indistinguishable from opposition to rationality itself. And once untethered from reality, human belief systems are free to wander among the fields and streams of mythology, leaving infinitely every viewpoint as valid as any other.

 

 

 

 

Who Lost North Korea

As South Korean spies ended weeks of speculation by revealing the mundane cause of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un’s recent absence from public view (ankle surgery), a much more ominous bit of news was simultaneously reported: North Korea has begun work on a submarine-based nuclear missile launching system. With present technology, North Korea may be able to strike Alaska, or perhaps Washington state. With sub-based missiles, they could potentially hit any city in the US. While this project will take years, the long-term prospects are chilling. And no matter how conservatives try to wriggle out from under the inescapable truth, blame for North Korea’s nuclearization falls squarely on the Bush Duh administration.

A little background info is crucial. There are just two paths to creating a nuclear fission weapon. One uses uranium, which involves a technologically complex enrichment process. The other uses plutonium, and is much quicker – if you have a ready supply of plutonium, which can be readily produced in certain kinds of nuclear reactors.

When Bill Clinton came to the White House in 1993 – fresh out of Little Rock, without a scintilla of foreign policy experience – he inherited a Korean peninsula already in nuclear crisis. Clinton competently negotiated a deal, and under the 1994 “Agreed Framework,” North Korea halted its uranium enrichment program, and also shut down its plutonium-producing nuclear plant – blocking both paths to nuclearization. In exchange, the US promised to build North Korea two new nuclear plants – of a kind that could not be harnessed to manufacture weapons – and to supply them with fuel oil in the interim. The Agreed Framework also put the US and North Korea on track for improved relations.

Fun fact: North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear reactor – source of its weapons-grade plutonium – was constructed on Ronald Reagan’s watch, during 1980-86.

Enter Bush Duh. Late in 2002, the US accused North Korea of violating the Agreed Framework by restarting its uranium enrichment program. Whether or not that’s true, in the 21 years since the Agreed Framework was signed, North Korea has never detonated a uranium-based nuclear weapon. What is true is that the US failed to follow through on its promises to build two new reactors and deliver fuel oil. The reactors were far behind schedule, and oil shipments were often delayed – all because conservatives in Congress opposed the agreement, and sought to sabotage it by withholding funding. This makes it particularly laughable for conservatives to blame North Korean nukes on Clinton, since they did everything they could to undermine his otherwise effective policies.

And so because of congressional conservatives, North Korea had legitimate gripes about the US failing to keep up its end of the bargain. With ham-handed diplomacy, Bush Duh so thoroughly alienated North Korea that they pulled out of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, restarted their Yongbyon reactor, and – while Bush Duh slept – they ran it for two years, producing enough plutonium to build several bombs. Duh dozed on as North Korea shut the reactor down, extracted the plutonium, and got to work. They successfully detonated their first nuclear weapon in late 2006 – during Duh’s 6th year in the White House.

Bush Duh followed up that 6 year snooze-a-thon with inaction in the face of North Korea’s missile tests, as the North worked on the development of a nuclear weapons delivery system to allow them to strike US allies, as well as the US mainland. He was, after all, quite busy in Iraq, confirming what UN inspectors said before the US invasion: that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. Duh!

Stealing Votes from Prisoners

With the midterm elections fast approaching, a little-known and unfortunate quirk in the American electoral system merits attention. It may surprise you to learn that prisoners are counted as residents of whatever town, county, and-or state in which they are imprisoned. And since most states do not permit prisoners to vote, counting prisoners in this way artificially inflates the voting power of people who happen to live close to prisons. Upon incarceration, an American adult isnt merely stripped of the right to vote – his vote is taken from him and given, collectively, to people who share the prison’s political subdivision.

This policy reduces the electoral representation of cities and sends it out to rural areas where large prisons are most commonly situated. In some cases, the residents of sparsely populated areas have double the voting power of other voters – courtesy of the incarcerated, who havent even necessarily been found guilty!

This policy is worse than was the three-fifths compromise, itself a high-water mark for cynicism. While slavery was still legal in the US south, southerners wanted to have their pecan pie and eat it too. With respect to civil and political rights, they didnt want to regard blacks as human beings; but in order to gain more representation in Congress and more votes in the electoral college for presidential elections, southern politicians needed to maximize their headcount. And so for purposes of the US Census, if the South had its way, lawsy mercy, yes: blacks are people too!

North and South struck an unseemly compromise, which permanently mars the US Constitution: a slave was to be treated as three-fifths of a human being for purposes of apportionment. Of course slaves werent allowed to vote – the votes their bodies accrued went, perversely, to free white southern voters, who consequentially got 30% more Congressman and 30% more electors in the Electoral College.

Though their absolute numbers are smaller, US electoral practices with respect to prisoners are even more unjust. They are denied the right to vote in 48 of 50 states. (Maine and Vermont are the exceptions.) And yet they are counted as full-fledged residents of their place of incarceration – literally transferring their voting power, intact, to others. Since the federal prison system often shifts inmates across state lines, this practice serves to arbitrarily transfer voting power from states with high crime rates to states with large prison populations.

This practice isnt confined to the usual backward states. In New York City, prisoners incarcerated on Rikers Island are counted as residents of Astoria, inflating the voting power of that neighborhood’s residents on the City Council. Similar distortions are seen in municipal governing bodies all across New York State.

It was only recently that college students were finally treated as residents where they attend college, to allow them to participate in the politics of the place they spend most of their time. By a similar logic, prisoners who are allowed to vote should either be counted as residents of their place of incarceration, or of their last place residence. But for the 99% of US prisoners who are not allowed to vote, their voting power should not be arbitrarily bestowed on the people who happen to live near the prison. Instead, it should remain in the community where the prisoner last resided. Even better, if states insist on denying the right to vote to prisoners and felons, their representation should be accordingly diminished for purposes of federal elections.

 

Refs:

http://www.acslaw.org/acsblog/counting-on-prisoners-the-use-of-inmates-in-apportionment

http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/faq.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/07/nyregion/07inmates.html?_r=3&

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Fifths_Compromise