MotherJones.com | MoJoBlog - Social Issues and Political Commentary: February 5, 2006

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February 10, 2006

Force-Feeding at Guantanamo

While the number of detainees on hunger strike in Guantanamo Bay has dwindled down to four, the tactics that were employed by U.S. personnel to force-feed many of the strikers remain controversial. Guards were strapping detainees into "restraint chairs" for hours at a time and inserting feeding tubes down their nasal passages. Additionally, protesters were being held in isolation from one another and denied shoes, towels, pillows and blankets, in order to break them down. Authorities at Guantanamo call the practice "humane and compassionate"—a preventative measure against possible violence and rioting. But who knew it was so difficult to control starving people?

At any rate, the hunger strike, the largest in history at the 500 person facility, called for the release of any detainees who had no affiliation with al-Qaeda or other Islamist groups. As noted in Brad’s post yesterday, a new report based on Pentagon data indicates that 40 percent of the detainees have no affiliation with al-Qaeda—and 18 percent have no affiliation with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban.

Not surprisingly, lawyers representing the detainees have called the force-feeding measures a form of torture, and a violation of medical ethics. These practices also bring into question whether U.S. military doctors are required to abide by the same moral codes as their civilian counterparts. A 1975 declaration by the World Medical Association states that doctors should not participate in force-feeding under any circumstances, but should keep prisoners informed of the consequences of starving themselves.

U.S. doctors are legally bound to abide by the declaration through their membership to the American Medical Association. But the U.S. Department of Defense feels differently, and argue that the care taken while inserting nasogastric feeding tubes makes the practice ethical and humane. The Pentagon also mentions that "no detainees have died at Guantanamo Bay," because, as stated by Deputy Commander Brig. Gen. John Gong, "We have a great desire to ensure they are healthy."

Thousands of FEMA motor homes stuck in Arkansas

There is an airstrip in Hope, Arkansas where close to 11,000 80-foot motor homes are stored. These motor homes belong to FEMA, and were purchased to serve as temporary housing for victims of hurricanes. FEMA has signed a two-year contract with the city of Hope to keep them at the airstrip for a $25,000 a month rental fee.

People in New Orleans and the surrounding areas need these motor homes desperately, but FEMA refuses to put any of them in a flood plain because they would then have to be raised and anchored. Raising and anchoring them would make them, according to FEMA officials, permanent housing, and the parish governments of Louisiana do not want that type of permanent housing.

As it stands now, the only way Hurricane Katrina victims can live in one of these motor homes--assuming some of them actually leave the Arkansas airstrip--if by moving to another area. In the meantime, FEMA spokesman James McIntyre says most of the trailers will end up in Mississippi or in Rita-ravaged sections of Louisiana. An argument can probably be made that by the time the units leave Arkansas, their intended inhabitants will have moved away, anyway.

Goss Attacks Leakers

Always nice to see the CIA Director getting down and dirty. In the Times today, Porter Goss takes to berating people who leak national security secrets to the press:

As a member of Congress in 1998, I sponsored the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act to ensure that current or former employees could petition Congress, after raising concerns within their respective agency, consistent with the need to protect classified information. Exercising one's rights under this act is an appropriate and responsible way to bring questionable practices to the attention of those in Congress charged with oversight of intelligence agencies. And it works. ….

On the other hand, those who choose to bypass the law and go straight to the press are not noble, honorable or patriotic. Nor are they whistleblowers. Instead they are committing a criminal act that potentially places American lives at risk. It is unconscionable to compromise national security information and then seek protection as a whistleblower to forestall punishment.

Unconscionable, eh? Now admittedly I tend towards the extremes when it comes to thinking about classified information and national security secrets—"leak early, and leak often" is the motto 'round these parts—but even from a more "reasonable" angle, Goss' position doesn't seem right.

The Whistleblower Protection Act does provide some channels for whistleblowers to complain to Congress, true, but it's still very incomplete. Russell Tice, the guy who's supposedly privy to a bunch of "illegal actions" taken by the NSA in its domestic spying program, is not allowed to testify before Congress, because even the members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, who are technically supposed to oversee this stuff, don't have the necessary clearance. If the executive branch is allowed to possess secret information that no one else can have, then it becomes a bit difficult to find an "appropriate and responsible way" of bringing illegal activities to Congress' attention, no?

Meanwhile, the normal channels for reporting wrongdoing that Goss prefers have become much more treacherous since 1999, when a federal court ruled that whistleblowers can be protected from retaliation only if there is irrefutable evidence of wrongdoing—a high bar to meet (the wrongdoer basically has to cop to illegal activity). According to the Government Accountability Project, prior to the court ruling, 36 percent of whistleblowers who went to the Merit Systems Protection Board won their case on the merits; post-ruling, it's 7 percent. Presumably, many potential whistleblowers have been deterred from using "legal" avenues to report wrongdoing. So that leaves the press.

Is it ignoble or dishonorable to leak classified information to the press? Even I would agree that some national security secrets need to be kept under wraps (although I'm less enamored of the idea that "covert" CIA agents toppling governments and fueling crack epidemics deserve special protection, but whatever). But what counts as a real secret here? Classification of "national security secrets" has always been arbitrary and subjective. The CIA still classifies the intelligence budget total from 1947, despite the fact that budget figures for, say, 1998 have been declassified. Similar examples are everywhere. Is this the sort of whimsy that should be backed by criminal prosecution? I'd say no.

(Moreover, if ever it became a felony to leak classified information—as Congress proposed in 2000, only to be vetoed by Bill Clinton—then the executive branch, which can classify and declassify things at will, would also have the power to create or dissolve at will the conditions for felony prosecution. Surely more than a few people can see an abuse-of-power problem lurking here.)

Under the current administration, moreover, the executive branch has revised the rules on classification, allowing documents to be classified "even in cases of significant doubt." In 2004, classifications rose 25 percent, at a cost of some $6.5 billion. Was this all due to national security? Hardly—a record number of agencies are keeping things secret, including Health and Human Services and Agriculture. Agriculture. The administration has also decided to ignore the "Seven Member Rule," under which, if seven members of the House Government Reform Committee request information from the executive branch, they get it. No longer. In many cases, the members simply wanted to look at adjusted census records—and couldn't even get that. When the rules become this capricious, I'd argue that whistleblowers have less of a duty to respect government secrecy.

The last thing to say is that leaking doesn't always put "lives at risk," as Goss has it—sometimes it does a world of good. Here's an example everyone can agree on: In 2002, press reports on the classified Nuclear Review Posture—in which the administration was considering the use of nuclear weapons—proved pretty damn important, since the Pentagon hadn't even bothered to create an unclassified report on the subject, as it usually does. Some administration officials, reported the Los Angeles Times, even welcomed the leak and "said privately that a national debate on nuclear strategy might be healthy." To put it mildly, yes. If Goss had had his way, there might have been no "healthy" debate at all.

At any rate, those are more scattered observations than specific recommendations. Very few people would agree with me that we should declassify nearly everything, but it seems uncontroversial enough to say that current whistleblower protections are inadequate and the current classification system is hardly the sort of thing that should inspire as much reverence and awe as Porter Goss is demanding.

Killing Privatization, Again

As Allen Sloan of the Washington Post reported last week, President Bush tried to sneak in Social Security privatization into his latest budget proposal. Much reference to the zombie that wouldn't die and all of that. (Sloan made a good catch, although his remark that Social Security is any sense "unsustainable" is, of course, totally false.) It's doubtful that Congress will want anything to do with that fiasco again. Just today, Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, blanched at even Bush's more "modest" cuts to Social Security:

"I have no plans to pursue these proposals," said GOP Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.

The budget that Bush submitted to Congress on Monday proposes eliminating a $255 lump-sum death benefit that has been part of Social Security for more than 50 years. It also urges Congress to cut off monthly survivor benefits to 16- and 17-year-old high school dropouts.

Other Republican luminaries, such as Bill Frist and Dennis Hastert, praised Bush's budget but specifically offered "no comment" on his measures to take away benefits from impoverished widows. It's almost enough to make them seem all cuddly inside. Meanwhile, the official position around these parts is that Social Security needs to be expanded, not trimmed—in particular, disability insurance is sorely inadequate for hundreds of thousands of workers at present—but that doesn't seem to be on the agenda right now.

February 9, 2006

Key States Miss Reform Deadline

Two years after the 2000 presidential election was determined by a mere 537 votes (and the Supreme Court), Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) to solve many of the problems that arose that year. HAVA aimed to make state electoral practices more consistent by developing statewide voter databases and addressing each component of the voting process: registration, identification, ballots and machines. The deadline for these changes was supposed to be January 1, 2006, so as to allow enough time for these upgrades to be fully integrated by the midterms this year.

But according to a new report from electionline.org, approximately half of the states, including California, Florida, New York and Ohio have failed to meet that deadline. Doug Chapin, the president of electionline.org, acknowledges the concerted efforts made by many states, but is concerned about widespread distrust towards the system if these faulty electoral systems are not rectified. "The possibility for error, and the willingness of people to challenge those errors, are both growing every day. And that could have tremendous impact on elections in 2006 and beyond,” he said.

Among the report's findings:

In Ohio, the state legislature is still fighting over voter identification requirements

In California, concerns about voting machines have left some counties with warehouses full of new e-voting machines deemed unsuitable for elections.

In New York, continued inaction has left localities scrambling to replace lever machines on a short timetable. And the required statewide database has yet to be implemented – with no contract to a vendor even awarded yet.

Colorado cancelled its $10 million dollar contact in December 2005, leaving the state unable to meet the federal deadline.

If the November 2006 Congressional elections come down to the wire, we could be putting our faith in what Chapin refers to as "19th century election machines." And that could very well be how majorities in the House and Senate are won.

More on the Los Angeles 'Thwarted Plot'

For those a bit sick of hearing the president dredge up details about some "terrorist plot" or other every time he needs to change the subject, Zachary Abuza has an interesting post over at the Counterterrorism Blog wondering whether the thwarted Los Angeles plot being touted today might not be all it's cracked up to be. And it does sound a bit dodgy. Then again, whether the Bush administration stopped a hijacking plot in 2002 or not is irrelevant to the question of whether it's allowed to break the law when engaging in domestic surveillance.

Evangelicals Against Global Warming

Yesterday the Pew Center for Global Climate Change released a report outlining a comprehensive set of recommendations to address climate change. Interestingly, 85 evangelical Christian leaders have come forward in support of the Pew proposal, taping a television campaign proclaiming, "With God’s help, we can stop global warming for our kids, our world and our Lord."

The spot calls for Congress to prioritize legislation that would require both transportation industries and power plants to cut their greenhouse emissions. Hoping to gain visibility nationwide, the evangelical leaders are hosting televised sermons on the issue over more than 1,400 radio stations. Although some of President Bush's notable evangelical backers—such as James Dobson—are absent from the push, it's still a welcome move to bridge what had often been seen as a purely partisan issue.

So with several conservative Christian leaders on board, what are the actual recommendations to address climate change? The Pew report is here, and notes that there won't be one single technological fix to slow the increase in greenhouse gases—any effort will require a combination of: new science and technology; market-based programs; a reduction in sectoral emissions; a change in energy production and use; and international engagement. Among other things, the report recommends that the United States "Engage in negotiations to strengthen the international climate effort." The fifteen components of Pew's proposal are all capable of being implemented immediately.

Who's in Guantanamo?

Jeralyn Merritt of Talkleft looks at a new report by Joshua Denbeaux, a law professor at Seton Hall, which finds, using data supplied by the Pentagon, that "55% of the detainees [in Guantanamo] are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or its coalition allies."

Also: "Only 8% of the detainees were characterized as al Qaeda fighters. Of the remaining detainees, 40% have no definitive connection with al Qaeda at all and 18% are have no definitive affiliation with either al Qaeda or the Taliban." Perhaps not surprisingly, the vast majority of detainees in Guantanamo were captured not by U.S. forces, but by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance at a time when the United States was offering very large rewards for any "suspected enemies."

So why are they all still being held? See also Corine Hegland's cover story on Guantanamo in National Journal, which reports, among other things, that evidence considered "persuasive" in the military tribunals "is made up almost entirely of hearsay evidence recorded by unidentified individuals with no firsthand knowledge of the events they describe," according to one legal adviser to the tribunals.

TIA Is Back

Back in 2003, Congress voted to deny funding to TIA, the "Total Information Awareness" program originally run by convicted felon and Iran-Contra star John Poindexter, because of privacy concerns. Well, the Christian Science Monitor is reporting today that the vast data mining program may be back, under a somewhat different name:

The US government is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity….

The core of this effort is a little-known system called Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE). Only a few public documents mention it. ADVISE is a research and development program within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), part of its three-year-old "Threat and Vulnerability, Testing and Assessment" portfolio. The TVTA received nearly $50 million in federal funding this year.

Meanwhile, in Newsweek, Michael Hirsh reports that "today, very quietly, the core of TIA survives with a new codename of Topsail." And William Arkin of the Washington Post reports that the NSA is centralizing its domestic eavesdropping capabilities in a new "warning hub and data warehouse" in Denver, Colorado, which will become the new hub of "data mining" and analysis development, working in conjunction with the CIA and the military's Northern Command.

How ominous is all of this? It really depends. After all, credit card issuers use data-mining to identify fraud, and that seems to fly under the radar of most civil libertarians. But without the appropriate protections in place, Poindexter's "brainchild" starts to seem a lot more disconcerting. According to CSM, no one really knows what the scope of ADVISE is—even Curt Weldon, the vice chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee hasn't been briefed on the program "yet." Yet? Another expert notes that "ADVISE has no funding for privacy technology." Given that we're dealing with an administration that treats congressional oversight with contempt, none of that should go by without strict scrutiny—even if "total information awareness" could be useful at foiling this or that terrorist plot.

MORE: Kevin Drum has a few good questions that should be asked about any data mining program.

VA Nurse in New Mexico accused of sedition

Here is part of the text of a letter to the editor written by Laura Berg, a clinical nurse specialist in Albuquerque, New Mexico:

I am furious with the tragically misplaced priorities and criminal negligence of this government. The Katrina tragedy in the U.S. shows that the emperor has no clothes!...The public has no sense of the additional devastating human and financial costs of post-traumatic stress disorder....
Bush, Cheney, Chertoff, Brown, and Rice should be tried for criminal negligence....This country needs to get out of Iraq now and return to our original vision and priorities of caring for land and people and resources rather than killing for oil. . . . We need to wake up and get real here, and act forcefully to remove a government administration playing games of smoke and mirrors and vicious deceit.

Otherwise, many more of us will be facing living hell in these times.

Berg, who works at Albuquerque's VA Medical Center, wrote the letter to the weekly paper, the Alibi. When it was published in late September, VA officials seized Berg's computer, accusing her of using it to write the letter, and accusing her of sedition.

The head of the human resources management services later acknowledged that Berg's office computer hard drive did not contain the letter, but he defended the sedition charge.

In your letter...you declared yourself "as a VA nurse" and publicly declared the Government which employs you to have "tragically misplaced priorities and criminal negligence" and advocated, "Act forcefully to remove a government administration playing games of smoke and mirrors and vicious deceit."

The ACLU of New Mexico has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for documents relating to the incident, and is asking for a public apology to Berg. In the meantime, Berg has learned that the VA may have contacted the FBI about her, a charge the VA denies.

February 8, 2006

John McCain vs. Why We Fight

Eugene Jareki’s much-anticipated film, Why We Fight, is currently in limited release across the country. And it’s already causing a stir among major politicos, including Sen. John McCain. According to Roll Call, McCain’s chief of staff, Mark Salter, is up in arms, accusing Jareki of manipulating clips in which McCain is portrayed as critical of both Dick Cheney and Halliburton. McCain is scheduled to appear on David Letterman tomorrow, during which the clip in question will be shown.

The film, inspired by Eisenhower’s famed 1961 farewell address referring to America as an “industrial war machine,” tries to examine how the military-industrial complex both profits from war, and perpetuates it. With stratospheric defense budgets and international violence dominating the current political landscape, one can identify with Eisenhower’s concern that this “machine” could potentially threaten democracy on a worldwide level. In making the film, Jareki is trying to address why our nation “has become the savings-and-loan of a system whose survival depends on a state of constant war.” The film includes military and political insiders such as Gore Vidal, Air Force secretary James Roche, Richard Perle, Jon Eisenhower and Charles Lewis, among others, who explore what road all this violence will lead us down. Hopefully, McCain’s spot on the late show will lead a broader audience to the theater.

Sweden to Go Oil-Free

This is genuinely exciting news (there's so little these days…). It looks like Sweden is preparing a plan to become an "oil-free" economy by 2020:

The attempt by the country of 9 million people to become the world's first practically oil-free economy is being planned by a committee of industrialists, academics, farmers, car makers, civil servants and others, who will report to parliament in several months.

The intention, the Swedish government said yesterday, is to replace all fossil fuels with renewables before climate change destroys economies and growing oil scarcity leads to huge new price rises.

Sweden has a decent head start—about 26 percent of its energy already comes from renewable resources (the EU average is 6 percent)—and plans to meet its goal by using biofuels, along with wave and wind power, to generate the needed electricity, rather than relying on new nuclear plants, which already supply half of the country's electricity.

The Volvos, meanwhile, will all run on hydrogen. Or at least that's the plan, though granted, lots of smart people think hydrogen-run cars are easier said than done. Joseph Romm, a former Energy Department official under Clinton and the author of The Hype of Hydrogen, has leveled a number of criticisms along this front—for one, a hydrogen-powered economy can end up using more total energy because all of that hydrogen needs to be transported around to filling stations, and it's harder to ship than gasoline. And a relatively recent study by Argonne National Laboratory estimated that installing the vast infrastructure to equip 40 percent of American vehicles to run on hydrogen would cost $500 billion or more. Obviously Sweden's not as big as the United States, but that's a lot of money, and it will be interesting to see whether the Swedes can pull this all off.

Now the obvious question: Why can't the United States do something like this? There are major differences between us and Sweden, sure: the latter is much smaller, uses less oil, has an abundance of rivers, more nuclear power plants, and less sprawl. That all makes things much easier. And, according to Prime Minister Goran Persson, Sweden's farms and forests are more conducive to generating biofuel than America's. But as I've pointed out before, it's physically impossible to power the whole world—or even more than a small portion—with biofuel, and the United States would have to find its own mix of renewable resources no matter what (most likely involving a heavy dose of solar). So Sweden's not, in a strict sense, a "model" here.

Still, this is what a grown-up approach to energy policy looks like. Nothing mind-blowing. Nothing impossible. All you need is a government willing to act. The contrast between the Swedes and an administration that backtracks from even modest statements on ending our oil addiction—and then lays off 32 workers at the National Renewable Energy Lab because of a $28 million budget shortfall there—pretty much speaks for itself. Lucky us.

February 7, 2006

Purging the State Department

This sort of story is pretty commonplace nowadays, but Warren Strobel reports: "State Department political appointees have sidelined career weapons experts who don't share their animosity to arms control agreements and have placed less experienced political operatives in key slots, according to 10 current and former officials and documents obtained by Knight Ridder."

Meanwhile, SALT I, the 1991 treaty that is currently the "only mechanism for verifying U.S. and Russian nuclear arms cuts" is set to expire in three years, and the Bush administration is in the middle of purging any State Department expert with experience in arms control. Luckily, though, their replacements will all be "loyal" to the president and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, and we all know that's almost as good as expertise.

More on Chinese Journalists...

Yesterday Diane reported that a Chinese reporter had been sentenced to a ten-year jail term for warning foreign journalists, via Yahoo!, of potential local violence. As Chinese journalists continue to suffer the brutal consequences for their candid reporting, today the deputy editor of Taizhou Wanbao, Wu Xiangu, succumbed to injuries sustained while beaten by fifty policemen in response to an article published in his paper, alleging that police were overcharging people for bicycle licenses.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists reports that Chinese “authorities had prevented local media from reporting on Wu's death, and that his colleagues believed that criminal charges should be filed in the case. Journalists who report on local crime and corruption in China's newly competitive media environment face increasing incidents of violent attack in retribution for their work.”

New Nuclear Weapons on the Way?

The Oakland Tribune reported today that lab officials in California are "excited" by the prospect of "designing a new H-bomb, the first of probably several new nuclear explosives on the drawing boards." This threw me for a loop at first—"Hang on, new nuclear weapons? Who said this was okay, again?"—but I think I get what's going on. (Although correct me if I'm wrong.)

It's no secret that the Bush administration has long wanted to develop new types of nukes, including those entirely frivolous "bunker-busters," for god knows what purpose. In Congress, on the other hand, sensible folks such as Rep. David Hobson (R-OH) have instead called for a "thoughtful and open debate on the role of nuclear weapons," and have opposed adding new weapons to existing stockpiles. Good luck with that, right? But in 2005 Hobson introduced the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program as a means of finding a middle ground here.

RRW was supposed to allow scientists to "refurbish" our existing nuclear stockpiles and make them more reliable "without developing a new weapon that would require underground testing to verify the design." Even the "refurbishing" is a bit questionable: our warheads are already plenty reliable, and even warheads labeled "unreliable" by experts can still inflict as much massive death and destruction as anyone could hope for. The current "stockpile stewardship" program set up by the Clinton administration in 1992 has never found any problems with the viability of the U.S. arsenal. (See this Bulletin article for more on this.) Still, RRW would channel the energies of the nuclear establishment away from the task of dreaming up new nuclear weapons and into something relatively harmless. That's useful.

Anyway, it wasn't long before Energy Department officials decided to co-opt and expand upon Hobson's RRW idea, and many administration officials now seem to see it as a means of creating an infrastructure that can eventually churn out new weapons if necessary. All of the sudden, everyone had a different interpretation of what the program actually entailed. Last April, Everet Beckner, deputy administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, told the Tribune, that building new warheads "was not the primary objective [of RRW], but [it] would be a fortuitous associated event." Oh, fortuitous. Right.

That July, as reported by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the Energy Department was presenting plans before Congress for a completely overhauled nuclear stockpile that would use the RRW program to get there. The department's report "envisions a stockpile to meet an evolving or changing threat environment" and recommends that "a new version of RRW" be implemented to "form the basis of the sustainable stockpile of the future."

Now the new explosives currently being "designed" are still, as I understand it, intended to renovate existing stockpiles, and aren't brand new weapons. In fact, Sen. Pete Domenici explicitly prohibited any funds for the purpose of implementing the recommendations in the Energy Department report.) But the RRW program has slowly and subtly been morphing into a program intended to build new nuclear weapons—despite the fact that this was clearly not Hobson's original goal. And the Bush administration is continuing to push it in that direction, and presumably hopes it will continue to morph in the future. So that's something to watch.

More to the point, the overarching assumption here is that we somehow need all these new nuclear weapons. For what, no one can say. It's pretty clear that nuclear "deterrence" hasn't stopped North Korea or Iran from going nuclear—or 9/11 for that matter; and the United States' insistence on augmenting its own arsenal almost certainly undermines nonproliferation efforts. The administration's desire for "low-yield" nukes—weapons that could conceivably be deployed on the battlefield, and lower the threshold for use—seem completely insane, although Congress seems to have put an end to that little fantasy for now.

New Orleans Goes Begging Abroad

Great moments in U.S. history: "Shortcomings in aid from the U.S. government are making New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin look to other nations for help in rebuilding his hurricane-damaged city." Nagin had to ask the King of Jordan, who heads up an economy that is two one-hundredths the size of the United States', if he could spare any change to help rebuild the Lower Ninth Ward.

Wartime Socialism

In the grander scheme of things, it probably isn't the soundest of decisions to boost defense spending up to even more obscene levels, as the president proposed in his 2007 budget yesterday. But then, who knows, maybe the economy needs it. Last week, the Economic Policy Institute put out one of those "ironic in an Alanis Morissette sort of way" reports estimating that between FY2001 and FY2005, defense spending created 1.5 million additional private sector jobs in the United States. Some might call it pork. Some might call it socialism. Either way, it's hardly anything new in this country.

Disney, which seems to be grabbing all the headlines these days, is one of my favorite socialist success stories over the past fifty years. Walt Disney, as the tale goes, revolutionized the animation business by creating a Ford-style production line in the 1930s, with animators confined to mundane, repetitive tasks in order to churn out all those cartoons so quickly. In the 1940s, the animators went on strike over their dismal working conditions, and Disney—who had little in common with his father, a passionate socialist—fought back: hiring scabs, using private guards to attack the picketers, bringing in a mobster to negotiate a deal, and eventually, long after he had lost the union battle, became embittered and served as an informer for the FBI against uncouth Communists in Hollywood during the McCarthy era.

Quite the free marketeer, that one. Or at least he was until his company started flailing in the 1940s and Disney had to rely on the government dole, mostly in the form of defense contracts, to keep his business afloat—at one point, federal funds paid for nearly 90 percent of his studio's work. The company made propaganda and training films for the Department of War, and later worked with postwar administrations to provide further government agitprop promoting American technology, space travel, and nuclear technology. ("That included the 1958 classic, "Our Friend the Atom," teaching kids in the classroom to "duck… and cover" in the event of a nuclear attack.)

At any rate, Disney's story is hardly unique—all sorts of modern corporations got where they were because of military socialism, especially the automobile and oil industries. As EPI showed, the American economy is addicted to it: since 2001 a little under half of the 3.4 million new jobs created have been paid for by the Pentagon (and another 1.3 million have been created by non-defense discretionary spending; more socialism!). It's not a huge surprise that the Pentagon's latest Quadrennial Defense Review called for virtually no major cuts in spending, or that members of Congress routinely ignores calls to close bases or kill weapons programs. Where else will the jobs come from?

In economics, the usual Keynesian line is that pretty much any sort of government spending can help pump-prime the economy. But that doesn't distinguish between different types of spending. After World War II, a variety of American policymakers worried about sinking into another depression, and believed that only wartime socialism—and not Roosevelt's domestic programs—had saved the American economy previously. "One of the first things we must realize is that in the 1930s we never did find the answer to full employment," said New Dealer Chester Bowles. "Only the defense program in 1940 put our people to work, and only the war and the cold war that followed have kept them at work."

Since 1950, when in the Korean War caused the federal tax burden to leap from 14.4 percent (and falling) up to 19 percent in just under two years—and then remain at that level for most of the Cold War—policymakers seem to be thinking like Bowles, regardless of whether he was right or not. (Certainly some economists deny that the defense program "put our people to work:" for a right-wing view that the domestic economy in the 1940s wasn't quite as prosperous as the history books remember, see Robert Higgs' "Wartime Prosperity? A Reassessment of the U.S. Economy in the 1940s.")

One contrary view came from the late Seymour Melman, an economist and ardent pacifist, who wrote in 1974 in his book, The Permanent War Economy, that military spending had a negative effect on the economy in the long run, by diverting research and development away from more productive and wholesome purposes other than war. Certainly military spending has led to some marvelous innovations—the internet, whose precursor was built by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, is one—but compared to what? Military research dollars surely aren't the only way we can invent fancy computers.

And the other question is whether even more jobs could be created if some of those Pentagon dollars were shifted to direct spending on housing and infrastructure. That seems quite likely, and this was Melman's view—as for instance, he argued in a 2003 Counterpunch essay. If we're going to have a socialist system here in America—and already we have a Federal Reserve Chairman who perhaps exercises as much control over the U.S. economy as GOSPLAN ever did in the Soviet Union—we may as well do it right. The other upside is that not building all those fancy weapons will give us even less excuse to use them. And then there's the fact that, regardless of the benefits of military socialism, we can't keep paying for all this empire with piles of debt forever…

February 6, 2006

Chinese journalist serving 10-year sentence for sending email

Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist, wrote for Dangdai Shang Bao (Contemporary Business News), a Chinese Daily. On April 30, he was convicted of sending foreign-based websites the text of an internal message that the Chinese government had sent to his newspaper to warn journalists of possible unrest that could result from the return of certain dissidents on the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Shi concurs that he sent the email, but denies that he is guilty of "illegally providing state secrets to foreign entitites." He has been sentenced to ten years in prison.

Shi's case is of interest, not only because he is a journalist, but because the Chinese government obtained his email from Yahoo!. Here is part of Yahoo!'s response to a letter from Amnesty International:

Yahoo! Hong Kong, our subsidiary in Hong Kong, was not involved in any way in the disclosure of Shi Tao's information to the PRC authorities. In this specific case, the PRC government ordered Yahoo! China to provide user information and Yahoo! China complied with applicable PRC law. Neither Yahoo! Hong Kong nor any other Yahoo! subsidiary would respond to a PRC law enforcement request, other than in accordance with their own applicable laws. ...
Yahoo! China received a valid and legal demand for information from PRC law enforcement authorities according to applicable PRC laws and the procedures we had established with Chinese law enforcement officials. As in most jurisdictions, including the United States, the Government of China is not required to inform service providers why they are seeking certain information and typically does not do so.

According to Reporters without borders, Yahoo! Holdings (Hong Kong) is subject to Hong Kong legislation, which does not spell out the responsibilities of companies providing email services in this type of situation. However, the mail servers appear to be located on the Chinese mainland, which would explain the existence of a court order from China.

Both Amnesty International and Reporters without borders have questioned to what degree Yahoo!'s desire for Chinese business has blurred the company's commitment to ethical responsibilities. Internet companies, including both Yahoo! and Google, have established self-censoring search engines in China

Will Congress Actually Make Those Budget Cuts?

On the face of it, there isn't much of surprise in the Bush administration's FY2007 budget proposal, which was released today. Lots of painful cuts to programs for the poor that don't really affect the fiscal picture all that much but will leave a lot of people diseased and dying. Lots of unnecessary tax breaks for the wealthy and extravagant increases in defense spending that will affect the fiscal picture quite a bit. And an increase in the deficit as a result. It's cruel and innumerate—that always-adorable combination. What's surprising, though, is that the administration is proposing bigger cuts to domestic programs this year than it has in years previous.

Normally we see a bit of a kabuki dance during budget season. The White House comes out in February and makes a big fanfare about limiting the growth of domestic spending and then, after much praise, Congress quietly refuses to go along, seeing as most senators and representatives actually want to get re-elected, and most of the programs up for hacking are actually popular. And the press mysteriously refuses to point out that this is all a stupid charade meant to allow the president to appear "fiscally responsible" and appease the slobbering fan base without actually doing anything. Still, life goes on, more or less.

But this year, the proposed cuts are much deeper than anything contemplated in the past—the president has suggested cutting 141 programs, including food aid to the poor, at a paltry "savings" of some $182 billion over five years—which makes one wonder whether Republicans in Congress will start to feel some pressure to start hacking away, especially with a deficit that's still out-of-control, the costs of Iraq and Katrina rising, and "earmarks" and corruption getting so much media play. Cuts of that sort would be a terrible thing—from a liberal-left perspective, it's much better to have the GOP act like a bunch of free-spending hypocrites than to actually go and terminate programs like these (from CBPP):

The Commodity Supplemental Food Program, which provides nutritional food packages for less than $20 a month to more than 400,000 low-income elderly people, one-third of whom are over age 75;

The Preventative Care Block Grant, which is operated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and provides grants to states for preventative health services for underserved populations;

The TRIO Talent Search program, under which colleges and universities — and in many cases, Historically Black Colleges and Universities — assist disadvantaged secondary school students (two-thirds of whom are minority) by providing them with academic, career, and financial counseling so that they will be better be able to finish high school and attend college;

The Community Services Block Grant, which provides funding for a range of social services and other types of assistance to low-income families and elderly and disabled individuals.

Or stick the knife in programs like these:

Section 202 housing for the low-income elderly — cut 26 percent in 2007 below the 2006 level, even without adjustment for inflation.

Section 811 housing for low-income people with disabilities — cut 50 percent in 2007.

The Community Development Block Grant formula grant program — cut 30 percent in 2007.

Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) — which promotes community policing, primarily by putting police on the streets, would be cut 79 percent.

The Child Care and Development Block Grant — The President’s budget calls for cuts in discretionary child care funding totaling $1.03 billion over the next five years as compared to FY 2006 funding levels adjusted for inflation (funding levels also would fall without adjusting for inflation). Data from the President’s budget show that the funding levels proposed would mean that the number of children receiving child care assistance in 2011 would drop by more than 400,000 as compared to the number receiving assistance in 2005 and by more than 650,000 as compared to 2000 levels.

Now it's also an election year, so the chances that Republicans in Congress will actually work up the nerve to force the elderly to live in cardboard boxes and eat dog food seem slim, but it's certainly something to be nervous about.

Spare a thought for Iraqi journalists

New at Mother Jones:

David Enders considers the main workaday challenge facing Iraqi journalists: staying alive. Their ordeals don't grab the headlines but they probably have it even harder than their Western colleagues. (Link)

Tom Engelhardt tries to wrap his head around the weirdness of Bushworld, as attested by an action-packed State of the Union week featuring, among other oddities, a defense budget that doesn't pay for warfighting, a new mega-contract for Halliburton to build "detention facilities" in the homeland, and a jihad against T-shirts. (Link)

Reactions to Massachusetts gay bar attacks

Jacob Robita, the Massachusetts gay bar attacker, is dead following a shootout with police in Arkansas. Robita attacked two bar patrons with a hatchet, and shot another. He then went on the run and killed a woman he picked up on the road, after which he kiled a police officer.

Robito had once attended a police academy for troubled adolescents, and had neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic, and racist materials in his room. After Robito launched his attacks at Puzzles Lounge in New Bedford, the Web was abuzz with responses. Here are samples from some message boards, one of which is a popular Republican board with a daily prayer thread:

You can't help wondering whether these lunatics are put up to this by the left simply to create "victims" and provoke public outrage over "hate crimes" and thereby advance the left's various agenda of "reparations", "affirmative action", "gay marrage", "diversity leadership" and anything else that they can think of to drive wealth transfer and the amoral secularization of society.

"which ones are considered *Love Crimes*?"
The ones that happen at highway rest stops.

Reportedly, the teenager was asked: "Is that a pistol in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?"

A teenager armed with a hatchet and handgun opened fire inside a gay bar early Thursday, wounding at least three people
Lover's spat.

Ever see a queer hit on the wrong guy?
The "fag" deserves it.

What caused the rampage?
Did he watch Bareback Mountain?

Way to go Jacob!
It's people like you and Rudolph that that make America great!! Keep the liberal trash in their place or better yet, DEAD.
Thanks.
They will drop the case.

I'M SHAKING MY BUTT PLUG IN ANGER

swallow that, libfags!

REVENGE FOR BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN!