Category: Criticism

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Criticism Financial Crisis Holy Cross

Profiling Holy Cross Grad Mark Walsh

Devin Leonard for the Times wrote this weekend about Mark Walsh, formerly of Lehman Brothers. The article portrays him as one of Wall Street’s top deal makers whose decisions were one of the major factors that led directly to the fall of the bank. Yet the article is also strangely positive in describing Walsh. 

What stood out for me most were the numerous connections Walsh has to me. As the article describes his brief biography:

Mr. Walsh grew up in Yonkers, the son of a lawyer who once served as chairman of the New York City Housing Authority. He attended Iona Preparatory School in New Rochelle; the College of the Holy Cross, where he majored in economics; and, finally, the Fordham University School of Law.

And then a bit later:

He bankrolled Tishman Speyer in its purchase of the Chrysler Building in 1997.

I am a fellow alumnus of Holy Cross – a fact which by itself causes me to be irrationally positive about individuals, from Chris Matthews to Bob Cousy to Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau. He also went to Fordham Law – which is one of the schools I am considering. And I currently work in the Chrysler Building. All tenuous connections, but enough to make me root for the guy.

Of course, it’s hard to get around the damning nature of this reporting:

[I]t wasn’t long before Mr. Walsh found a way to do an even bigger deal with Mr. Speyer’s company. In May 2007, Lehman and Tishman Speyer offered to buy Archstone-Smith Trust, a $22 billion deal struck at the peak of an already dangerously frothy market. Tishman Speyer put up a mere $250 million of its own equity. Lehman, in a 50-50 partnership with Bank of America, put up $17.1 billion of debt and $4.6 billion in bridge equity financing.

The most enlightening aspect of the article were the way in which it spotlighted the oddness of what was going on. Leonard describes one of Walsh’s biggest clients pulling out his money saying that:

 [T]he real estate market — and, indeed, the entire financial system behind it — was becoming increasingly bizarre.

In an example of this from 1997 – well before this observation – Leonard describes one of Walsh’s coups – how he managed to steer Lehman clear of the financial crisis resulting from the failure of Long Term Capital Management that Nassim Nicholas Taleb had predicted at the time:

On the eve of the financial crisis brought by the near collapse of Long Term Capital Management in 1998, Lehman flushed $3.6 billion in commercial real estate loans through its securitization machine, avoiding some of the losses that crippled other firms, including Nomura and Credit Suisse.

I hate to say it – but I have no idea what that means. And that’s not unintional – at least according to a lecture given by Financial Times reporter Gillian Tett at the London School of Economics. (A lecture very much worth listening to – and which I will blog about later.)

But to demonstrate the oddly positive take on Walsh, here’s how Leonard concludes his piece:

His friends say they believe that Mr. Walsh will eventually emerge from the rubble of Lehman’s collapse and return to deal-making.

“Guys like this are very rare,” says Mr. Rosen, the developer. “He’ll be back. He picked up the phone and people listen. Nobody can take that away from him.”

Back in the game perhaps – but hopefully a bit wiser.

Categories
Criticism Economics Politics The Opinionsphere

Taxing the Wealthy

[digg-reddit-me]Liberal orthodoxy has made the state dependent on a volatile source of revenues – high income tax rates on the wealthy.

That’s George Will in his most recent column. As phrased, I’m not sure it makes sense. A tax rate is not a source of revenue. A tax is. And while an income tax rate can be volatile – that doesn’t seem to be Will’s point – it is that the revenue generated from the tax is. So, let me correct Mr. Will:

Liberal orthodoxy has made the state dependent on a volatile source of revenues – taxes paid by the wealthy.

Now, I won’t argue about the volatility of any financial strategy based on depending on just a few individuals to generate revenue. 

But let’s pose a hypothetical for a moment. What if those that made over $200 million were taxed at a lower rate than everyone else – let’s say 18% – and those who made less than $100,000 were taxed at a 35% rate. And what if – even given this, the revenue generated from taxing those making over $200 million far exceeded the vast majority who made less.

Wouldn’t that complicate things just a bit?

And now, what if it were true?

The stats here are national – not based on California which Will is talking about. And there are only concerning the top 400 taxpayers who despite being just over 1/one millionth of the population, pay nearly 2% of all income taxes. But based on my previous research, I’m pretty confident the pattern holds – that those at the top of the income scale pay a lower rate of taxes than those at the bottom (Warren Buffett famously explained that he was taxed at a lower rate than his secretary)  – and yet because wealth and income is so concentrated in America, the richest 5% pay about 60% of all taxes.

Volatility is built into any system in which wealth is concentrated – which is why I’m not sure Will’s point here is well-founded. What does he suggest is a more stable type of taxation? If wealth were distributed more broadly, then our economic system – and tax revenues  – would undoubtedly be more stable – but I doubt this is what Will wants. If consumption were taxed rather than income, then the system would likely be even more unstable – especially in a downturn such as now when everyone is cutting back. So, what is the solution?

Categories
Barack Obama Criticism Law National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

Andrew C. McCarthy’s Self-Righteous Sophistry

[digg-reddit-me]Andrew C. McCarthy was a prosecutor on a few terrorism-related cases back in the 1990s. But it wasn’t until after September 11, 2001 that he found his true calling – writing opinion pieces for the National Review and Commentary. As a prosecutor, McCarthy had to go through that exhausting process of finding evidence to back up his case – and use that evidence to convince a skeptical audience that his case was right. As an opinion writer for two right-wing publications, McCarthy is free from both constraints as he preaches to the converted. McCarthy – who previously had a career as a criminal prosecutor – now uses this background to give him added credibility when discussing the two issues he cares most about: detainee policy in the War on Terrorism and torture. This is a man who said of McCain’s Anti-Torture legislation that it was “two parts grandstanding and one part suicide” and declared that McCain by supporting it, had “no business serving in a government whose first obligation is the security of the governed.” Of course, McCarthy found it necessary to support McCain over Obama in 2008 – because Obama was “disqualified” from office because of his ties to America-hating leftists – and because his policies were even more suicidal(!) than McCain’s. Yet, even so, over McCarthy’s strongly worded objections, America elected Obama.

You’ll never guess what happened next. Obama – being the partisan, leftist, America-hating, suicidal guy that he is – invited Andrew C. McCarthy to be part of a panel that advised him on the issue which McCarthy had been most vocal – the detention and torture of suspected terrorists. McCarthy, of course, would have none of it – and declined to join the force – taking the unusual step of releasing his letter of declination to the press and writing about it in an opinion piece in the National Review. 

All’s fair in love and politics – you might say. But it’s clear McCarthy has gone soft from years of presenting his arguments to those already agree with him.

Let’s look at a few of the premises to McCarthy’s piece:

Obama’s Bad Faith. McCarthy knows that Obama – in instructing the Justice Department to determine if any laws had been broken in instituting the torture policy of the Bush administration is acting in bad faith.

“[Obama] has unleashed his Justice Department to criminalize political disputes after claiming for weeks that he did not want to do this. And the president is being a bully about it…Any experienced prosecutor would know there is no criminal case here.” And what nefarious purpose does Obama have for bullying such upstanding citizens? ” McCarthy explains Obama’s prime motivation: “To satisfy his antiwar base and to put paid to commitments offered by his top campaign advisers.”

Obama’s Bad Faith (II). McCarthy also knows that Obama is acting in bad faith in creating this task force to advise him.

McCarthy clearly has divined Obama’s intentions as he declares that “the exercise known as the ‘President’s Detention Policy Task Force’ is a farce. The administration has already settled on a detainee policy: It is simply going to release trained jihadists.”

Bush’s Good Faith. Because McCarthy is so good at divining the intentions of people in the news, he also knows that the legal advisors to the Bush administration – including those who issued binding legal opinions for the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department – were acting in good faith when they issued opinions in contravention of every precedent in American history.

“Former Justice Department attorneys John Yoo (now a law professor at Berkeley) and Jay Bybee (now a federal appeals-court judge in California), as well as other government attorneys, were asked during the emergency conditions that followed the 9/11 attacks to advise Bush administration policymakers on U.S. interrogation law. They did that in good faith and, despite the fact that it’s now de rigueur to castigate them, quite reasonably…Bad legal advice given in good faith is not an ethical violation.”

McCarthy doesn’t explain why he knows these men were acting within the legal definition of “good faith.” And for what it’s worth, Jack Goldsmith, a Republican who replaced Jay Bybee, one of the lawyers McCarthy is defending, as head of the Office of Legal Counsel, wrote of the torture memos that they were designed with the purpose of providing a “golden shield” to the interrogators, had “no foundation in prior OLC opinions, or injudicial decisions, or in any other source of law” and were deliberataly biased. That sounds like an acknowledgment of bad faith to me.

Criminalizing Advice. McCarthy – being an expert in national security law apparently – also knows that while the Office of Legal Counsel’s binding legal opinions “are controlling on questions of law within the Executive Branch” [pdf], they are also no different from any advice any lawyer gives. 

That’s why “If the Holder Justice Department decides your good-faith advice promoted what it considers illegal activity, you could face criminal prosecution or ruinous ethical charges.”

Criminalizing Policy Disputes. McCarthy also apparently believes that if an administration sets a policy that is criminal, no one should be held responsible. So, now that it is clear that war crimes were committed – and that any nation in the world can now prosecute those American officials responsible thanks to Ronald Reagan’s Convention Against Torture. The only way to prevent other nations from bringing up Americans on charges of war crimes is to have our own investigation. McCarthy sees all this – yet maintains that instituting a policy of torture is a mere policy decision. Would McCarthy continue to hold this position if the war crime were genocide instead? If the Office of Legal Counsel declared genocide legal, the president ordered it be done, and other carried it out – would it still be a policy dispute that shouldn’t be criminalized? McCarthy’s point about not prosecuting torture only holds then if you first buy his declaration that “torture” isn’t illegal – or at least it shouldn’t be.

Mitigating Circumstances. Despite the fact that these lawyers provided advice that McCarthy still considers sound and McCarthy testifies were acting on good faith, McCarthy still wishes to qualify that these men gave these opinions in “wartime service to the country” under “the emergency conditions that followed the 9/11 attacks.” These facts don’t matter if you believe as McCarthy does that we should still agree with them now – but by bringing them up, the indicate, perhaps a single humanizing glimmer of doubt.

A few odds and ends.

The Uighurs. McCarthy speaks of how Obama is preparing to unleash the Uighurs who are “trained jihadists” who, once released, will be “plotting to menace and murder us” onto American soil! For those ignorant of the plight of the Uighurs, this can sound quite alarming. The facts are a bit less so. The Uighurs have been cleared of any charges as of five years ago, and it was declared that they “pose no terrorist threat” and have “not [been] charged with fighting or plotting against the United States.” Which brings us to the question: Why haven’t we repatriated them to their home country as the Bush administration did with hundreds of detainees? Because they are Chinese seperatists who China has vowed to execute if they return. Why not to a outside state? Because China has made threats against any nation that accepts them. (Albania accepted some of the Uighurs a few years ago – and since has faced threats from China.) McCarthy though – knowing the facts – decides to obfuscate all these “technicalities” – so he can focus on the core “truth” – that Obama wants to unleash trained jihadists in your neighborhood!

The standards of justice. Finally, is a throwaway point McCarthy makes as he concludes his feat of sophistry. He blames Obama for the fact that he has “no plan for what to do about the terrorists there, many of whom cannot be tried under the standards of the civilian justice system.” Those with critical faculties might wonder – why is it that these terrorists can’t be tried in a manner consistent with American traditions of justice? McCarthy himself prosecuted terrorists – and wannabe terrorists – it’s his claim to fame. So why can’t these men who participated in a far worse crime be tried now?

And here we return to the beginning – because our justice system has accepted the long-held truth – that confessions tainted by torture are likely to be untrue – and so are ignored. Thus, these men who attacked America – who killed Americans – who McCarthy is opposed to – can never be brought to justice according to our traditions.

McCarthy does have some good advice for the man he considers unfit for public office – a leftist, America-hating, dangerous man who is aiding our enemy. McCarthy advises Obama: “We can arrive at a sound policy, or not, without demonizing our adversaries as crooks and cads.”

Perhaps – but you can’t write for the National Review with that attitude these days.

Categories
Criticism Economics Political Philosophy The Opinionsphere

The Government Role in a Capitalist Economy

[digg-reddit-me]Robert J. Samuelson does a pretty good job in his column from last week of illustrating the incoherence of “the Establishment’s view” of government’s role in capitalism.

He begins his article discussing the prescient observations of Joseph Schumpeter, a 20th century economist who predicted that capitalism “sowed the seeds of its own destruction.” He described Schumpeter’s understanding of capitalism:

[Capitalism’s] chief virtue was long-term – the capacity to increase wealth and living standards. But short-term politics would fixate on its flaws – instability, unemployment, inequality. Capitalist prosperity also created an oppositional class of “intellectuals” who would nurture popular discontents and disparage values (self-enrichment, risk-taking) necessary for economic success.

Samuelson observes that Schumpeter’s observations seem to get to the heart of capitalism – yet he says, their conclusion is wrong – because capitalism survived. It survived Samuelson observes because:

We have subordinated unrestrained profit-seeking to other values. “We’ve gradually taken into account the external effects (of business) and brought them under control,” says economist Robert Frank of Cornell University. External costs include: worker injuries from industrial accidents; monopoly power; financial manipulation; pollution.

Samuelson goes on:

Successful capitalism presupposes three conditions: first, the legitimacy of the profit motive – the ability to do well, even fabulously; second, widespread markets that mediate success and failure; and finally, a legal and political system that, aside from establishing property and contractual rights, also creates public acceptance. Note that the last condition modifies the first two, because government can – through taxes, laws and regulations – weaken the profit motive and interfere with markets…

Now we’re really getting somewhere. Capitalism, it seems, must not be a matter of pure natural forces. It is not “unrestrained profit-seeking” in Samuelson’s view – nor does it exclude government intervention, as legal and political structures must modify markets and profit-making in order to “create public acceptance.” That’s a bit of an odd formulation, as anything could be justified as being done in order to “create public acceptance.” Circuses, beheadings, propaganda, war, large-scale confiscation of property – whatever. What Samuelson must mean – although it has to be inferred – is that measures designed to “create public acceptance” can only go so far before the essence of capitalism is destroyed – as he warns is imminently possible in his concluding paragraph. There is only a “thin line” he explains between capitalism and socialism – because:

If companies need to be rescued from “the market,” why shouldn’t Washington permanently run the market? That’s a dangerous mindset.

To illustrate this dangerous mindset which is empowered by an equally dangerous populism, he points to interjections of the government into the economy in the past half-century that have not been for the good – that is, those interjections in which the benefits are concentrated and the costs are dispersed, for example, ethanol subsidies and the promotion of the advantages for politically-connected companies; and those interjections that have scapegoated various groups – such as the anti-bonus tax bill. This implies – if nothing else – a confusion on Samuelson’s part.

Political actions in which the benefits are concentrated and the costs are dispersed are – as George Will put it “the supreme law of the land.” They have been the main business of American government since shortly after it’s founding – from subsidies for railroads to the laws enabling the various cartels of the Gilded Age to the military-industrial complex to agriculture subsidies in general to the bailouts of various industries. Only a few presidents have ever taken on this “supreme law of the land” and decided to extract costs from the politically influential few for the good of the many – Teddy Roosevelt as he sought to bust the trusts; FDR as he re-wrote the social contract. Most other presidents have tried to have it both ways – to give the politically influential few what they want while also attempting to achieve some common good. This has often been the source of their failure. The populist scapegoating is an entirely different matter – and is generally fleeting and while distasteful does little real damage. 

Both of these have been part of American capitalism since the beginning. Yet for some reason, Samuelson believes that capitalism is more under siege today than in the past. He never makes the case why – except to point to distasteful and inefficient aspects of American capitalism that have been around since it’s inception. This is little reason to believe that either populist scapegoating or actions with concentrated benefits and dispersed costs have increased significantly. And Samuelson does not try to make that case. Rather, he reveals the same unease that the rest of “the Establishment” has with any significant change. 

The incoherence and of this worldview is clear. What is less obvious is why. The answer is a theme I have been coming to again and again in this blog: that the free market is not a natural phenomonen, but a creation of a society and government. Thus – we did not really “[subordinate] unrestrained profit-seeking to other values” as Samuelson suggests – rather the government created costs to balance the marketplace. If a company was polluting, it was damaging those around it just as much as if it had been stealing from them. By imposing costs, the government was not so much “subordinating unrestrained profit-seeking” to some other values – but preventing one party from stealing from another. So, the government enacted regulations to reduce that pollution – and exacted costs if companies did not follow those limits. The cap-and-trade legislation promises to be an even clearer interjection of the government in this manner. The government and the society of which the government is a part together create the circumstances in which a market can truly be free.

Capitalism – alone, without a society to provide a marketplace – is a meaningless concept. Pairing a capitalist economic model with a democratic state has become a long-term successful model for progress because the “seeds of destruction” that capitalism produces are mitigated and sometimes used by the democratic state to the confer legitimacy on the model. The problem with capitalism has proved to be not as much the “instability, unemployment, inequality” that Samuelson describes – but the concentration of power among a monied and politically-influential elite that has attempted to protect the status quo and their own interests at the expense of the legitimacy of capitalism itself. Once the concentration of power reaches a certain tipping point, the market becomes less free. Which is why the government must, from time to time, step in to allow some sort of balancing to take place and to create rules for the market which allow it to operate freely.

Samuelson is concerned that this means that Washington may take it upon itself to “permantly run the market.” In this he demonstrates his lack of understanding. The government – and the society at large – have always created the rules by which the market is run – have always sought to mitigate the damage wrought by robust competition and worse. What is different now is that once again the government failed to adequately police the market. Or alternately, you could argue that the government failed to ensure the market stayed free, allowing firms to become so big and powerful they posed a systematic risk. Either way, while it would be dangerous to have a government declaring it would “run the economy” – that is not the situation we are now facing. Samuelson’s unease seems more the result of a desire to protect the status quo than any real regard for or understanding of capitalism and free markets.

Categories
Criticism Political Philosophy Politics

Ruminations on the Egg and the Wall

[digg-reddit-me]About a month ago, one of my two favorite living novelists, Haruki Murakami, went to Jerusalem to accept an award. He had been advised, he said, by many of his friends and admirers in Japan, not to go to accept this award because of Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. From this point in his speech it was clear he could go one of two places – to stand forthrightly with Israel (as Rupert Murdoch recently did) or to use his place of honor to criticize. Murakami apparently struggled with what to do – and it was apparent in his speech. He tried to do neither. But he laid out this basic tenet of his philosophy:

“Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg.”

Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be?

Murakami explains that the wall can be many things, and the egg many things – but that more than anything else, the wall is the System, and the eggs are individuals:

I have only one thing I hope to convey to you today. We are all human beings, individuals transcending nationality and race and religion, fragile eggs faced with a solid wall called the System. To all appearances, we have no hope of winning. The wall is too high, too strong — and too cold. If we have any hope of victory at all, it will have to come from our believing in the utter uniqueness and irreplaceability of our own and others’ souls and from the warmth we gain by joining souls together.

Take a moment to think about this. Each of us possesses a tangible, living soul. The System has no such thing. We must not allow the System to exploit us. We must not allow the System to take on a life of its own. The System did not make us: We made the System. That is all I have to say to you.

I’ve struggled with this critique of Murakami’s since I read it a month ago. I wanted to dismiss it as too simplistic, too easy. It struck me as – to some degree – embodying the worst of Western leftist movements. At the same time, it reminded me of the critique Ann Coulter, that shrill harpy, made of liberalism in her Treason:

Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy.

In her view of history, liberals sided with criminals over law enforcement, terrorists over counter-terrorists, Communists over patriots, Vietcong over the American military, hippies over the cops bashing the hippies in the head. And, though Coulter neglects to mention these: blacks over racist Southern mobs and sheriffs, the poor against a system that allowed them to be impoverished, and the public against faceless, greedy corporations. There’s a certain logic and appeal to Coulter’s view – but to accept it one must first be wiped of all knowledge of American history and liberalism – which is the story of tough, pragmatic choices by men and women trying to uphold the system by reforming it and protecting it. Reform – not treason or revolution – has been the rallying cry of the American liberal.

There is a strain of thinking on the left that is and has been mainly marginalized in America that sees the “System” as the problem. In many other countries in the world, this strain of thinking is more mainstream – as are the leftist movements in those countries. I think what Coulter was referring to in her comment is the attitude that Murakami displayed in his speech – siding with the egg over the wall, regardless of “right” and “wrong.”

And yet, I still struggle with Murakami’s construction. It reminds me of the Catholic Church’s “preferential option for the poor.” And at the same time, it’s modesty appeals to me. Murakami does not say that he is “right” – only that it is his duty, his role to take the side of the “egg.” I believe it is important to have the worldviews of everyone articulated – as it is the only way to understand. 

But after struggling I cannot say I am on the side of the egg or the wall. What I finally realized is that the problem with this construct is not in the description of the egg or the wall – but in the lack of empathy for either side. I think in a real sense, this attitude – “May the egg always be right, but the egg, right or wrong!” – explains and motivates a great deal of the left, with it’s sympathy to any group or individual who presents themselves as attacking the “System” or as a victim of the “System.” Whether that individual be José Bové or a Gazan covered in blood or Hugo Chávez. The problem for me is that this egg versus wall scenario provides no meaningful distinction between Mohandas Gandhi and Osama Bin Laden.

The failure of this metaphor seems to arise – for me – in it’s lack of empathy. The “wall” – or the “System” is itself fragile – and individuals are far more than mere shells containing souls – they interact with the environment, they see, they hear, they make choices. This split between self-contained, solitary individuals and a menacing system is a basic theme of Murakami’s work – and the lack of culture or society within these works is actually what makes them so accessible to a Westerner like myself. At the same time, it makes them surreal. The heightened reality in these novels reveals something true about the nature of our world – but it is incomplete.

Categories
Criticism National Security Politics The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

The Jack Bauer Archetype

Timothy P. Carney at the National Review:

24 is a true American drama and Jack Bauer is an American hero. When I was in Germany a few years ago, a Cabinet official said that Europe was once half-full of free-thinkers and independent spirits, but then they all got up and moved to America. The American hero is the cowboy: He is Maverick, he is Han Solo, he is Batman (though, when Batman is in trouble, he turns on the Jack Bauer signal), he is the rag-tag minuteman fighting the well-trained Lobsterbacks…

What Carney gets wrong is his identification of Jack Bauer’s character as a cowboy archetype. Bauer belongs to a different but related tradition of American heroes. 

The Westerns – in which the cowboy is the hero – often had characters that, like Bauer, were vigilantes imposing their own justice on a chaotic world. Living in a land beyond civilization, they were only constrained by their own character. Without society and order, the characters of villians and heroes were more obvious. Without the law to protect the weak, it was up to the conscience of the strong to do so. The heroes not only refused to take advantage of the weak, but took it upon themselves to protect them against other strong men. But the story of the West – and the background to the Westerns – is the advance of civilization, law, and society to this chaotic world. The irony of this story of the West is that while the fortitude and heroism of strong men made the settlement of the West possible, it also made them obsolete. See especially The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance but also the more recent HBO Western, Deadwood. 

By the 1930s, as society and the rule of law had extended to virtually every corner of America, there was no longer a place for vigilantes and strong men imposing their own rough justice. Our problems were now external as great forces abroad threatened us – and gangsters undermined society at home – and so the superhero was created. The superhero fought with the police and military to defeat the enemies of civilization. 

But the 1970s saw a change in this dynamic. People felt vulnerable and threatened within their own society – and the rules of society seemed to be protecting those attacking it. The superhero became a persecuted figure – restored again to the place the cowboy had occupied in the final days of the Wild West. Dirty Harry and Batman represent this – both violent vigilantes who break the law in order to protect it.

Jack Bauer belongs to this tradition, that of the condemned superhero – condemned by society yet needed by it.

Carney concludes his piece with this nonsense:

If we believe 24, we don’t think Bill Buchanan or President Palmer will keep us safe. We believe Jack Bauer will keep us safe (if everyone on the show listened to Jack Bauer, the show would be called 12), but we also believe we are Jack Bauer.

The Capitol Dome stands today because of a handful of regular Americans—not soldiers, not bureaucrats, and not even “first-responders,” but American guys who got on a plane on a September morning…

 The lesson of the show is not that Big Brother will keep us safe. The lesson is that we need ruthless bravery from Everyman to keep us safe.

This precisely is not the lesson of 24. Jack Bauer is not “everyman” but superman. He stops cars by standing in front of them; he dies several times in a single hour, but keeps running; he has super-human determination; he gives up his family and friends to stop attacks; he can do seemingly anything. He is considered in the show to be unique – not an ordinary guy in extraordinary circumstances. 

The lesson of the saviors of the Capitol Dome is a very different one than that of 24. It did not involve superheroes – but ordinary people armed with information about a threat taking action. In the world of 24 – and in the Bush administration policies justified by 24 – secrecy is paramount; torture is required; breaking the law is always necessary; great latitude must be given to the executive branch, and especially the president. The lessons of Flight 93 are that local and spontaneous action by citizens armed with information is the best defense.

Categories
Criticism

The Specter of Suburban Contentment

Ron Charles in the Washington Post:

Here we have a generation of young adults away from home for the first time, free to enjoy the most experimental period of their lives, yet they’re choosing books like 13-year-old girls – or their parents. The only specter haunting the groves of American academe seems to be suburban contentment.

Charles does see signs of hope though – in the same place everyone seems to see hope these days, the tubes of the internet.

Categories
Criticism National Security Politics The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

The Significance of Jack Bauer

[digg-reddit-me]Dahlia Lithwick in Newsweek:

The most influential legal thinker in the development of modern American interrogation policy is not a behavioral psychologist, international lawyer or counterinsurgency expert…the prime mover of American interrogation doctrine is none other than the star of Fox television’s “24,” Jack Bauer.

Though Lithwick’s statement may sound like an exaggeration, the most common defense of America’s torture policy has been to invoke the character of Jack Bauer on 24. John Yoo, Diane Beaver, Michael Chertoff, Tom Tancredo, and most famously Antonin Scalia have all invoked the TV show 24 in describing and defending national security law under George W. Bush. U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point, saw the show’s influence as so pernicious that he he flew to visit the show’s producers to ask them to stop representing torture in such a positive light as it was undermining national security:

[Brigadier General] Finnegan told the producers that “24,” by suggesting that the U.S. government perpetrates myriad forms of torture, hurts the country’s image internationally. Finnegan, who is a lawyer, has for a number of years taught a course on the laws of war to West Point seniors—cadets who would soon be commanders in the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. He always tries, he said, to get his students to sort out not just what is legal but what is right. However, it had become increasingly hard to convince some cadets that America had to respect the rule of law and human rights, even when terrorists did not. One reason for the growing resistance, he suggested, was misperceptions spread by “24,” which was exceptionally popular with his students. As he told me, “The kids see it, and say, ‘If torture is wrong, what about “24”?’ ” He continued, “The disturbing thing is that although torture may cause Jack Bauer some angst, it is always the patriotic thing to do.”

It sounds as if the gullible students in Finnegan’s class have taken their lead from Justice Scalia who, in defending the extraordinary measures of the Bush administration, asked: 

Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles…He saved hundreds of thousands of lives…Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?

Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver, whose legal memoranda aided the justification torture, claimed that Jack Bauer “gave people lots of ideas” about how to interrogate prisoners.

One thing that most of these defenders of torture do not mention – and that many opponents of torture fail to bring up – is that torture doesn’t seem to work. This is in many respects a secondary question – as the morality of torture and the “by any means necessary” approach of Jack Bauer as well as the Bush administration is debated. But Matthew Alexander, a pseodonym for a military interrogator who led the team that found Abu al-Zarqawi in Iraq, has been a vocal defender of the view that torture is an inefficient and counterproductive interrogation tool. The FBI has long maintained that their methods are proven and get reliable information from subjects – as opposed to the new torture techniques that do not. Neither the Nazis nor the Communists interrogated their high-value detainees – not because of their respect for human rights, but because they saw what was most effective. The greatest Nazi interrogator was a Hanns-Joachim Schraff who never even raised his voice, let alone tortured his subjects. He was one of the few top Nazis not tried for war crimes. Matthew Alexander – the man who got the intelligence that led to Zarqawi’s death – was one of the few adherents to Schraff’s view of interrogation in Iraq. His interrogation tools, rather than fear, violence, torture, religious persecution, and intimidation were “respect, rapport, hope, cunning, and deception.” 

Ann Applebaum points to the obvious question:

Given the overwhelmingly negative evidence, the really interesting question is not whether torture works but why so many people in our society want to believe that it works.

It may be unfair to blame 24 for this belief in the efficacy of torture. There is something deeper at work here than the propaganda of a television show. But 24 puts forth a persuasive cultural argument in which the extreme circumstances that occur every hour on the show justify extreme actions (such as threatening to harm an infant, mock executions of children; regular torture) are then used to justify American policies.

Categories
Barack Obama Criticism The Opinionsphere The Web and Technology

Obama on the Blogs

This just peeved me – from Obama’s interview with the New York Times over the weekend:

Even so, [Obama] said he did not find blogs to be reliable, citing the economy as one example.

“Part of the reason we don’t spend a lot of time looking at blogs,” he said, “is because if you haven’t looked at it very carefully, then you may be under the impression that somehow there’s a clean answer one way or another — well, you just nationalize all the banks, or you just leave them alone and they’ll be fine.”

Now that’s just a stupid thing to say – not only because he’s gratuitiously insulting many people who worked hard for him during his campaign – including me – but it makes him look like an idiot technologically. The problems isn’t “blogs” – and in fact, the substance of his criticism probably applies best to cable talk shows.

Categories
Barack Obama Criticism Domestic issues Politics The Opinionsphere The Web and Technology

Don’t Be Idiots: Stop Talking About the Fairness Doctrine

[digg-reddit-me]

I didn’t think the Democrats were stupid enough to start talking about reimposing the Fairness Doctrine. But I was wrong.

For those not up-to-date with the Fairness Doctrine controversy, it goes back to the late 1960s when the FCC began to push radio and television stations to air material about controversial matters including some consideration for both sides of the issue. ((The Fairness Doctrine was actually created earlier, but it was not incorporated into FCC guidelines until the late 1960s.)) The justification for this government interference was that with a very limited amount of media channels available, and with the airwaves owned by the public and merely licensed to the media companies profiting from them, this was a reasonable request and a necessary one in order to encourage an informed citizenry. By the late 1960s, the powerful corporate forces in the right-wing movement had begun to bankroll a conservative movement at this point – giving enormous amounts of money to create advocacy groups, think tanks, magazines, and other means of pushing conservative messages. One of their goals was to eliminate the Fairness Doctrine – and in 1987 they succeeded. At right about this time with no more obligation to be fair or present both sides of controversial issues, right-wing talk radio took off. Simon Rosenberg publicized this sequence of events – and Steve Rendall at Commons Dreams gives an overview of the liberal take on this history which is worth a read. Since then, conservative talk radio has mobilized the conservative movement – and perpetuated quite a few lies and distrortions. 

In this context, you can see why some Democrats want to bring back the Fairness Doctrine.  After all, if Steve Marlsburg, nemises of this blog, can use the public airwaves to talk for two hours about how Barack Obama is evil and no good people can support him and go on and on supporting this with one lie after another distortion, wouldn’t everyone benefit from a bit of the other side getting a word in edgewise? And if a handful of media titans control almost all of the media, the concentration of power in their hands ensures that opinions they agree with are aired – and oftentimes, that opinions they disagree strongly with are not aired. 

In this context, Bill Clinton mused about reimposing the Fairness Doctrine on a liberal radio show; Democratic Senator Stanbow wants hearings on something like a Fairness Standard; Senator Tom Harken was quoted on another liberal talk radio show saying, “We gotta get the Fairness Doctrine back in law again;” and a number of other Senators and Congressman have similarly suggested something be done to restore “fairness” to the radio. ((It’s worth noting that all of these more recent comments were made by politicians on liberal talk radio – and only after being prompted by their hosts.)) Barack Obama though made it clear during his campaign that he did not support this – and reiterated his opposition again after he took office.

And with good reason: reimposing the Fairness Doctrine might sound like a decent idea given the above history. But there are some major reasons not to:

  1. It won’t accomplish much. Cable and broadcast television shows already give alternative views on controversial issues. They might present one side much better than the other (think Hannity and Colmes) but they give the other side a platform as well. Listeners to conservative talk radio today choose to listen to right-wing nutjobs who don’t try to balance their opinion with facts over more serious sources of news. They have other options if they want them.
  2. It would endanger the important goal of net neutrality. Conservatives are already calling net neutrality a “Fairness Doctrine for the internet.” This is a ridiculous claim – but it will gain some credence if those who support net neutrality also support the Fairness Doctrine. The right continues to push this meme [pdf] and has been having some success in polarizing the support for net neutrality, picking off those right-wingers who are most gullible. As I wrote earlier about this campaign to link these two very different policy ideas: 

    3. [T]his propaganda campaign [to link net neutrality and the Fairness Doctrine] does not seem directed to the public at large, but at conservative activists. The Fairness Doctrine is not something that gets the blood of the average American boiling. But it does evoke a Pavlovian response among conservative activists and right-wing radio listeners. And although these groups are not large enough to force their way, they are large enough to derail the political conversation and make it harder to enact this obvious policy.

  3. It would also endanger other goals such as breaking up media monopolies. In terms of other issues, Rush Limbaugh in his recent Wall Street Journal op-ed began to lump in rules about “local content” and “diversity of ownership” as the Fairness Doctrine by other means. Rush Limbaugh here is clearly carrying water for Clear Channel Communications who recently gave him a $400 million contract and who would be threatened by rules regarding local content and diversity of ownership as they already own such a large portion of America’s radio stations. Byron York followed Limbaugh’s lead repeating the same talking points in a recent column.
  4. It will provoke a backlash. Right now, aside from the musings of a few prominent liberals and impassioned editorials from liberal talk radio hosts themselves, there is no serious effort to push this idea forward. Liberal ideas are out there – on newspaper editorial pages, on political opinion shows, and most of all on the web. The people most excited by the revival of the Fairness Doctrine are the conservative talk radio hosts and the right-wing movement they lead. I follow this matter closely – reading most articles published on it – and almost every article I read is from some conservative publication or blog hyping the threat to free speech and all that is good and holy that is the Fairness Doctrine. Which is why the Heritage Foundation has this piece of trash written by Rory Cooper insisting that the White House is “rushing” to the Fairness Doctrine – despite the aforementioned opposition by the White House. (A propaganda outlet such as Heritage has not patience for such “subtlties” as facts.) Which is why Senator Inhofe is promoting the view that the Fairness Doctrine as yet another assault on the Christians. Which is why Bryon York recently penned a column linking the Fairness Doctrine to breaking up media monopolies as assaults on “media freedom.” Which is why the World News Daily has distorted Senator Sherrod Brown’s comments to claim he supports the Fairness Doctrine. Which is why Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the talking heads can’t shut up about it. This is a fight the right wants – and for good reason. It plays into the liberal stereotypes conservatives promote – especially the idea of a nanny-state attempt to control free speech. It makes the right look important; it makes the Democrats look petty; if the right loses, they will be able to claim the mantle of victimhood that conservatives seem to relish as much as any other group.