Omniarchy

The Excessive Compensation Assessment

2005-09-02T10:42:00.000-04:00

Everybody knows that our nation's top business executives receive an excessive amount of financial compensation annually, but I hadn't realized the extent of this profligacy until I did a little bit of digging. As we enter a holiday weekend that commemorates American labor, I think that it is especially appropriate to reflect upon some numbers that are truly mind-boggling.

How much did the average CEO of America's 500 biggest companies collect last year? Well, it was probably at least a million dollars, right? Nope, that's their pocket money. More than two million? Sorry, that doesn't even get them out of bed in the morning. More than three million? You're headed in the right direction. More than five million?!? Getting warmer. More than ten million dollars?!?!?! You're almost there.

According to Forbes magazine the average CEO of one of our largest companies received approximately $10,200,000 last year:

"The heads of America's 500 biggest companies received an aggregate 54% pay raise last year. As a group, their total compensation amounted to $5.1 billion, versus $3.3 billion in fiscal 2003."

America's top 500 business executives raked in almost TWO BILLION dollars more in personal income in 2004 than they pocketed in 2003?!?!? Did I miss something last year or did the corporate earnings of America's 500 largest companies increase by more than 50%? Did the prices of their stocks and bonds jump by more than 50%? Did our national economy grow by more than 50%?

In short, what the hell is going on out there? Something is seriously wrong with this picture.

And it's not just the top 500 business executives, either. Since the advent of Reaganomics in 1980, the percentage of the total American income received by the top percentiles has increased steadily. Notwithstanding the dip in incomes since the bust of the Internet bubble earlier this decade, according to an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, the percentages of total income received by the most highly compensated Americans has risen to levels comparable to the Roaring Twenties. How bad is it? The top 10% receives of more than 40% of all income; the top 1% gets 15% of all income; the top 0.1% gets 6% of all income; and the top 0.01% gets 2% of all income, or 200 times more than the average American wage-earner!

This gaping disparity in incomes yield two distinct questions. Ethically what, if anything, can the American people and their elected representatives do to diminish them, and even if it is ethical to diminish them, what, if anything, should we do?

To begin, the ethics of "fair market" capitalism (i.e. the regulated "free-market" capitalism that exists in today's industrialized democracies) forbid the placement of some kind of hard or fixed limitation upon the amount of personal compensation that any individual receives. Significant pecuniary rewards are justified for those who take advantage of the opportunities presented to them by the marketplace and in so doing realize significant economic achievements. In a capitalistic environment, those achievements produce economic value, and the reward for the production of economic value is the acquisition of private property. Fixed limitations upon personal remuneration cannot be implemented ethically because corresponding limitations cannot be placed upon personal initiative and accomplishments. Because we are capable of producing virtually anything, we should be capable of earning virtually anything. Placing a fixed cap upon personal income would certainly imply and probably induce the placement of a fixed cap upon personal productivity, which is the antithesis of the Americanism. Although Horatio Alger is more of a myth than a reality, he endures as an integral component of the American self-definition.

The reinstatement of the steeply progressive tax rates of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society is not an ethical solution either. Although the taxation of income is ethical, the more progressive the rate of taxation becomes, the less ethical it becomes. The opportunity to acquire personal property exists as a direct result of the stable and secure economic environment created and maintained by our federal government. Therefore, our government is entitled ethically to be compensated for the services it provides, which it receives in the form of personal income taxation. The syllogism is simple: personal remuneration cannot exist without profit; profit cannot exist without a stable and secure marketplace; and a stable and secure marketplace cannot exist without government. Thus, since personal remuneration could not exist without government, income taxation is ethical. Because it is based on the same principle as an income cap, however, the steeper the progression, the less ethical and productive it becomes. Highly progressive individual tax rates might narrow the huge chasm between the incomes of workers and executives, but they also reduce the incentive for personal productivity concomitantly. This ancillary consequence renders them an economically inefficient and counterproductive method of mitigating income disparities.

Conversely, the most fundamental precept of the American government can be summed up in Lord Acton's famous aphorism, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Hence, the founders of the United States created an elaborate system of checks and balances in order to mitigate any dangerous concentrations of political power. Economically, the possession of large amounts of property connotes the possession of cultural power. Since both political and economic power tend to corrupt, it follows that massive accumulations of capital tend to corrupt those who possess them and the economies in which they operate. Thus, although the placement of a fixed cap upon income or steeply progressive tax rates would be contrary to America's economic ethic, placing some kind of check so as to discourage excessively large personal incomes appears to be economically analogous to the political ethos upon which our nation was founded.

If placing some kind of check against dangerous concentrations of economic power represented by excessive incomes is valid ethically, what would be the practical consequences of doing so? In other words, even if we can do it, should we? As socially and economically inefficient allocations of scarce financial resources, massive concentrations of income tend to discourage genuine economic productivity in two ways. First, excessive compensation inefficiently diverts the capital resources of private corporations from more productive applications such as dividends, investment, product research, market development, and employee benefits. Second, it engenders the complacency and arrogance inherent in excessive affluence. The acquisition of property induces productivity; the possession of it induces apathy. Ethics notwithstanding, economic efficiency implies the validity of placing some kind of negative economic pressure upon excessive compensation.

Therefore, we've arrived at an apparent conundrum: if checks upon concentrations of economic power are both ethical and efficient but imposing a fixed limit or a steeply progressive tax rate upon personal income is not, what, if anything, should our government do to reduce the American income gap?

Since our economy relies upon an open labor market to determine the degree of personal remuneration, that same open market must be relied upon to determine a commensurate amount of governmental compensation. When any private organization compensates its employees exorbitantly, despite the adverse effect this compensation has upon the individual recipient, the organization itself and society at large, it implies that the government, by facilitating this compensation, must be entitled to a correspondingly exorbitant amount of remuneration, as well.

Companies are legal fictions created by governments. Unlike people, their very existences would not be possible without governmental assistance. Thus, any economic success that these organizations enjoy that is disbursed to its owners or operators subsequently as extravagant compensation could not occur without the direct cooperation and assistance of government. Since our public institutions share in the responsibility for the economic success of these private organizations, whenever the degree of that success justifies an organization to provide any individual with an excessive amount of personal remuneration, then the government is ethically entitled to an equally excessive amount of public remuneration. Therefore, because the government has provided these private organizations with the public conditions that have enabled them to realize a degree of prosperity that permits luxurious remuneration, it is entirely ethical and appropriate for that government to receive a similar degree of luxurious remuneration, a corporate luxury tax if you will, as compensation for its efforts.

In sum, although the federal government should never discourage excessive individual achievement or the remuneration it implies, it can and must discourage private companies from compensating their owners and employees excessively.

As a result, Congress must enact an Excessive Compensation Assessment (ECA). The ECA would be a graduated, non-deductible surcharge payable by any economic entity that provides any form of personal compensation in excess of $1 million per year, and it would be applied at a rate of 10% per million dollars of income per year. In this way, the ECA would be more similar to the limitations placed upon the personal remuneration of professional baseball players than professional basketball players: it does not institute a fixed salary cap; rather, it imposes a surcharge upon those organizations that compensate their employees lavishly. For example, a corporation might provide its CEO with $8 million in annual compensation for the essential private services that this individual rendered to it. If it did so, it would then also be compelled to provide the federal government with an ECA surcharge of $6.4 million (80% of $8 million) for the essential public services that the government rendered to it. Of course, the ECA would compel corporations to match any annual remuneration in excess of $10 million on a dollar for dollar basis. If the ECA surcharge should increase the cost of conducting business for a corporation, this cost is undoubtedly justified by the increased value that this excessively compensated individual has added to that corporation's productivity.

In conclusion, just as in any uncontrolled market, a laissez faire approach to executive compensation will yield unethical and inefficient concentrations of power inexorably. Concentrations of power that affect a particular industry create monopolies, which is why Congress adopted the Sherman Anti-Trust Act as well as a myriad of other laws designed to preclude the creation of dangerous and inefficient consolidations of economic power. Concentrations of power that affect the personal incomes of the leaders of every industry create aristocracies, which is why Congress must adopt the ECA. Much like the flip side of the same coin, just as a fixed cap on income is the antithesis of Americanism, so too is aristocracy. Successful private companies that choose to compensate their employees generously must extend that same generosity to the public institutions that facilitate these profligate incomes. The ECA will provide the United States government with a commensurate amount of public income for the lavish private remuneration it abets.

Stop Illegal Immigration - Arrest Illegal Employers

2005-08-26T16:54:00.000-04:00

According to The New York Times, the United States spends $7.3 billion annually to secure its borders, an increase of 58% since the terror attacks of 9/11. What do we get for our $20,000,000 per day? We get emergency declarations from the governors of New Mexico and Arizona telling us that the international borders of their states are as porous as sieves.

Last Tuesday, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff responded to these emergency declarations by admitting the failure of his department to staunch the flow of illegal immigrants and by suggesting that we need to completely rethink our entire approach to illegal immigration.

"We have decided to stand back and take a look at how we address the problem and solve it once and for all," Mr. Chertoff said at a breakfast meeting with reporters. "The American public is rightly distressed about a situation in which they feel we do not have the proper control over our borders."

I couldn't him agree more. Nevertheless, I'm pessimistic about our prospects of resolving the problem of illegal immigration anytime soon because the federal government is only confronting one aspect of it. We must institute a comprehensive approach if we want to stop illegal immigration "once and for all."

Until the mid-1980s, America's immigration regulations concentrated on reducing the supply of inexpensive workers by prohibiting or restricting the number of foreign nationals permitted to migrate to the United States. As huge numbers of college-educated baby boomers began to enter the workplace in the mid-1960s, the price of unskilled labor began to rise rapidly, approaching annual growth rates during the 1970s of double digit percentage increases. These increased costs began to create a thriving black market for cheap and illegal labor, and illegal immigrants began to pour into the United States.

By 1986 Congress was forced to do something to staunch the flow of illeal immigrants, and it passed the Immigration Control and Reform Act (ICRA). In addition to providing amnesty for millions of undocumented workers, this law stipulated that employers were required to ensure that their employees were permitted to work in the United States legally. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was selected to enforce the ICRA and investigate employers of illegal alien workers. The INS could prosecute those employers who were found to be in willful violation of the ICRA between $250 and $10,000 per illegal worker and even imprison flagrant recidivists for up to six months.

Even the best laws must be enforced to be effective, however. Although it rarely, if ever, instituted criminal prosecutions against the employers of illegal workers, the INS did enforce the ICRA by imposing civil penalties, albeit anemically, throughout the 1990s. By 1996, however, Congress reverted to its traditional and politically expeditious approach of immigration control: sealing the borders and attacking the defenseless immigrants themselves. Congress doubled the size of the Border Patrol, increased its technological resources, and restricted the access of non-citizens to numerous social welfare programs such as Medicaid and food stamps regardless of any federal income taxes that these workers might have paid. Finally, as the primary focus of law enforcement shifted back onto the undocumented workers, the prosecution of the domestic employers of illegal immigrants deteriorated from negligible to virtually non-existent. In 1992 the INS fined more than a thousand companies for violating the ICRA, but the number of prosecutions dwindled throughout the 1990s. By 2002 the INS estimated that more than 7,500,000 illegal aliens lived in the United States, and it fined all 13 of their employers.

Thankfully, the INS was not the only federal bureau responsible for the enforcement of federal laws intended to preclude the employment of illegal workers. Federal law also empowers the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to fine employers who submit W-4 forms with incomplete or incorrect employee identification information such as inaccurate Social Security Numbers. According to the Government Accounting Office, (GAO) the IRS estimated that 353,000 illegal workers paid federal income taxes in 2000 and that more than 265,000 of them did so by using fallacious Social Security Numbers.

Unlike the INS, however, the enforcement of federal law by the IRS has not diminished recently. Surprisingly, the GAO found that IRS had fined exactly same number of companies in 2003 as it had in 2002 and 2001 and 2000. Unfortunately, that number was zero. Yes, zero as in absolutely none. In fact, since the IRCA became federal law nearly twenty years ago, the GAO reported that IRS has not fined a single company for filing incomplete or incorrect Social Security Numbers. Ever. Although the IRS has been totally negligent in enforcing federal immigration statutes, instead of merely perfunctory like the INS, its policy does contain the virtue of consistency.

Moreover, the enforcement of the employer provisions of American immigration law is likely to continue to deteriorate. As a response to the terrorist attacks of September 11th, the Congress created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2002. It removed the INS from the Department of Justice (DOJ) and placed it within the DHS, renaming it Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS) in the process. According to the DHS, however, the priorities of the CIS are

"to promote national security, continue to eliminate immigration case backlogs, and improve customer services."

Thus, the enforcement of the immigration regulations of the United States government has shifted from criminal prosecution in the DOJ to the quasi-military function of national security in the DHS. The CIS is charged with protecting America's national borders from illegal incursions and ensuring, to the greatest extent possible, that every foreign national in the United States has entered this country legally. Thus, the CIS focuses on preventing illegal immigration, deporting illegal immigrants and prosecuting their domestic abettors; it does not focus on eliminating the inducement that gainful employment offers to destitute aliens by prosecuting their criminal employers.

Although the investigative divisions of the CIS and IRS must focus on securing our borders and collecting our taxes respectively, one organization within the federal government is concerned with enforcing American labor regulations: the Employment Standards Administration of the aptly named Department of Labor. Its Wage and Hour Division (WHD) is responsible for "enforcing a number of federal laws which set basic labor standards," including issues that pertain to migrant and immigrant workers. In 2003, the WHD spent over one million hours conducting nearly 40,000 investigations, more than eighty percent of which pertained to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938. Furthermore, it conducted nearly 13,000 investigations in industries that hire undocumented workers frequently such as agriculture, lodging, restaurants and healthcare.

Thus, simple logic dictates the Congress must relocate the enforcement of the employer provisions of the IRCA from the Department of Homeland Security to the Department of Labor immediately. In short, Congress must equate a violation of the ICRA with a violation the FLSA and demand that the Department of Labor enforces this law assiduously.

Amoral employers who sought cheap and docile unskilled workers a century ago would often employ young children as menial labors in atrocious conditions. As an employment practice, child labor was considered to be a social rather than economic issue during the Nineteenth Century and, hence, beyond the purview of the federal government. In fact, federal statutory prohibitions against the employment of juvenile workers were deemed to be unconstitutional not once but twice by the Supreme Court in the early Twentieth Century. This attitude changed during the New Deal, however, and the scourge childhood labor was eradicated by the FLSA.

As a method of exploiting employees and deflating the wages of adult American, child labor differs very little from the employment of illegal immigrants. Child labor was eradicated by prosecuting exploitative employers, not victimized employees. Similarly, the federal government must shift its enforcement policies of the IRCA. Instead of persecuting hapless and vulnerable undocumented workers who migrate here illegally in order to improve their standard of living, the federal government must prosecute their unscrupulous American employers who hire them in order to improve their profit margins unfairly and illegally. In this way, and this way only, can the federal government begin to eliminate the scourge of illegal immigration.

By itself, the harassment, arrest and deportation of undocumented workers will not end or diminish illegal immigration. These efforts attack only the supply of cheap labor, not the demand for it. If a commodity, such as the illegal employment of undocumented workers or the illegal use of narcotic drugs, is to be extirpated from a society, prohibitions against both the purveyors and the consumers must be instituted and enforced equitably and vigorously. To concentrate on the supply of an illegal commodity exclusively while ignoring the demand for it completely obviates any realistic possibility of its eradication. The dynamics of supply and demand are immutable: if the demand for an illegal commodity exists, suppliers will endeavor to meet it arduously. Penalizing the suppliers of cheap labor, such as smugglers and immigrants, while ignoring the consumers of cheap labor, such as their corporate and individual employers, is like making heroin illegal and prosecuting the pushers, but giving the junies a free pass. Only a comprehensive approach to the pernicious influence of illegal immigration will cure those employers addicted to the use of inexpensive and exploitable laborers.

Drastically altering federal immigration and employment statutes by granting legal status to "temporary workers", as President Bush proposed in January of 2004, won't necessarily inhibit the growth of illegal immigration either, and it could make matters worse. Such a program would not only reward employers and employees who have violated existing federal law flagrantly; it would legitimize exploitative employment practices. Moreover, it would induce millions of temporary legal workers to remain in the United States after their work visas have expired, thereby becoming permanent illegal workers. Most perniciously, a temporary worker program will merely legitimize the perpetual degradation of a replaceable underclass of alien workers.

Although open immigration may have depressed the value of American labor in the early Twentieth Century, it enhanced the value of American culture. Millions of the most intrepid, confident and diligent people from virtually every nation on Earth have migrated to the United States, not to simply earn a better wage but to build a better life. They were not stigmatized legally as fit to work here, but somehow unfit to live here. Throughout history, amoral employers have exploited immigrants egregiously, but not since the abolition of human slavery has United States government sanctioned this exploitation by creating a permanent and legal subclass of American workers. It cannot be permitted to do so again.

When he proposed his temporary worker program, President Bush said,

"There must be strong workplace enforcement with tough penalties for anyone, for any employer violating these laws."

What are you waiting for Mr. President? Isn't it about time you got serious about illegal immigration? Isn't it about time that you demanded that your agencies begin enforcing the federal laws already on the books?

If you start throwing some illegal employers into federal penitentiaries, maybe the rest of them will stop hiring illegal workers. I think it's a pretty safe bet that fewer people will sneak into our country if none of them can find any work here. You already have all the laws you need to reduce illegal immigration significantly or eliminate it permanently. All you lack is the political will to enforce the law against your corporate cronies.

The Top Ten Reasons We Should Assassinate Pat Robertson

2005-08-23T14:56:00.000-04:00

I see where Pat Robertson is at it again.

Well, much like Swift's solution to Irish overcrowding, I have an idea about how we can prevent any future outbreaks of his obviously chronic case of "foot-in-mouth" disease:

The Top Ten Reasons We Should Assassinate Pat Robertson

10 - It'll show the world the true meaning of Christianity.

9 - Unlike Hugo Chavez, he wasn't elected to anything.

8 - It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war against the Christian Coalition, and I don't think any religious services will stop.

7 - It will prove that "pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, lesbians, the ACLU, and the People for the American Way" weren't responsible for 9/11.

6 - Who does Chavez think he is anyway, Salvador Allende?

5 - His TV show can change its name to The 699 Club.

4 - It will help to resurrect the careers of Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart.

3 - We should take out everybody whose first name is "Marion".

2 - He'll never run for President again.

1 - Cheaper Venezuelan oil!

Taxation and the Artifical Aristocracy

2005-08-18T16:26:00.000-04:00

Since the objective of every market is the creation of wealth and since the power to increase or decrease taxes implies the power to either encourage or discourage economic behavior, tax policies must reward those behaviors that tend to enhance its creation. Conversely, these policies should also prohibit those economic activities that do not facilitate the creation of wealth. In other words, the most logical and effective tax policy would be to tax the most productive economic activities the least, and the least productive economic activities the most. Thus, because income is not homogeneous, our federal income tax policy must consider the nature of that income and adjust the rate of taxation placed upon it according to its relative economic value.
In general terms, people and organizations receive income legally from three disparate sources: earned income from work and labor; earned income from the investment of capital and property; and unearned income from gifts and inheritance. The first activity is the most productive economically, and should be taxed the least. Although it does yield economic benefits, the second activity is less productive than the first, and therefore, should be taxed at a higher rate than the first. The third activity generates no economic productivity whatsoever and should be taxed at a confiscatory rate.

Congress must revise our nation’s tax laws to send a clear signal to its individual and corporate constituents: that the United States values progress over plutocracy and efficiency over inertia. Or, in the words of Alexis de Tocqueville,

"What is important for democracies is not that great fortunes should not exist, but that great fortunes should not remain in the same hands. In that way, there are rich men, but they do not form a class."

Thus, Congress must place a lifetime tax-free limit on the amount of unearned income that any person or group can receive from any other person or group at $100,000 and tax any amount in excess of this limit at the rate of 100%. Two exceptions to this policy should be adopted simultaneously, however. First, reasonable child rearing expenses such as food, clothing, shelter, education and healthcare must not qualify as gifts or inheritance. Second, that portion of the deceased's estate that was acquired during a marriage must be transferable to a surviving spouse tax-free. Nevertheless, perpetual cross-generational transfers of massive amounts of unearned wealth are the antitheses of the American dream and must be eliminated.

Because the ownership of massive amounts of property denotes economic power, excessive gifts and inheritance are inherently aristocratic. In a nation where all people are created equal in the eyes of the law, those who possess social, spiritual, political, and military power must acquire that power themselves. Why is economic power exempted from this democratic process? If it is aristocratic to transfer social or political power to one's progeny perpetually through the inheritance of titles of nobility, why is it not equally aristocratic to transfer economic nobility to one's progeny perpetually through the inheritance of massive wealth? If children are not entitled to inherit their parents’ vocations, why are they entitled to inherit the proceeds from those vocations?

In order to prevent the perpetuation of an elite genetic class of citizens based upon the superfluous criteria of familial relationships, the United States Constitution in Article I specifically prevents both the federal government in Section 9 and individual state governments in Section 10 from conferring "Title[s] of Nobility". The transfer of massive amounts of wealth within families is simply the perpetuation of economic titles of nobility based upon genetic criteria.

Forbes magazine publishes a list of the wealthiest people in the world annually. In 2004, twenty-seven of the fifty wealthiest people in the world were Americans and possessed aggregate personal fortunes worth more than $400 billion. Most significantly, fourteen of these twenty-seven richest Americans had acquired their phenomenal wealth simply by inheriting it. Forbes estimated the worth of these fourteen inherited family fortunes at $174 billion, or nearly $12.5 billion per person. Yes, you read that right: that's billion with a "b". Not only does this transfer of massive unearned income perpetuate an economic aristocracy within a society that was intended to prevent the passive genetic transfer of cultural power, it is logical to presume that this tendency will increase as the current owners of self-made fortunes pass their wealth onto their progeny. If the United States is to remain true to raison d'etre as a society in which "all men are created equal" and if each of us possesses an inalienable right to pursue "happiness" equitably, then we must abolish aristocracy in all of its pernicious forms: political, social and economic.

Earning wealth requires activity and effort; receiving it engenders idleness and stagnation. This is why the liberal anti-poverty programs of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society in the 1960s failed: gifts yield inertia. If providing the indigent with modest amounts of unearned capital (such as welfare payments) and unearned property (such as public housing) is economically counter-productive, isn't it equally counter-productive for the affluent to receive massive amounts of unearned capital and unearned property in the form of gifts and inheritance? If welfare and public housing engender sloth and indolence, why don't gifts and inheritance? Does the source of the unearned property alter its affect upon the recipient? Gifts have less value than earnings because people value that which they have earned much more highly than that which they have been given intrinsically.

Racist and sexist societies classify groups of individuals based upon irrelevant genetic criteria such as race or gender and then inhibit any realistic possibility of economic success for that class of individuals. Massive wealth transfers based upon the equally superfluous genetic criterion of familial lineage are simply the flip side of the same economically inefficient and morally reprehensible coin. Instead of precluding economic success, massive gifts and inheritance ensure it.

Although they disagreed about virtually every issue affecting the nascent United States during their careers, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, began a remarkable correspondence after they had retired from public life. As these two former presidents discussed and reflected upon the world in which they lived and the nation they had helped to create, the question of the existence of a "natural aristocracy" within a society arose. In 1813, Jefferson wrote,

"I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talent. . . . There is also an artificial aristocracy, founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents. . . ."

In his subsequent letter Adams replied,

"We are now explicitly agreed, in one important point, vizt. That 'there is a natural Aristocracy among men; the grounds of which are Virtue and Talents'. . . .

When I consider the weakness, the folly, the Pride, the Vanity, the Selfishness, the Artifice, the low craft and meaning cunning, the want of Principle, the Avarice, the unbounded Ambition, the unfeeling Cruelty of a majority of those (in all Nations) who are allowed an aristocratical [sic] influence; and on the other hand, the Stupidity with which the more numerous multitude, not only become their Dupes, but even love to be Taken in by their Tricks: I feel a stronger disposition to weep at their destiny, than to laugh at their Folly."

Although Jefferson, Adams and their fellow revolutionaries were largely successful in precluding the aristocratic transfer of social and political power within the United States, they were less fortuitous in doing so economically. The United States Congress must complete their journey. Virtue and talent must supercede wealth and birth within every segment of our society. Genetic discrimination, regardless of whether it bestows the economic advantages of aristocracy or the disadvantages of peasantry upon its recipients, is diametrically opposed to America’s cultural maxims of autonomy and the equality of opportunity. It is the antonym of Americanism.

Because the primary economic goal of federal taxation must be to increase the nation’s economic productivity, excessive unearned income in the form of gifts and inheritance must be proscribed. Quite simply, the tax policies of the United States must be predicated upon the principle that Americans deserve to retain as much of the property that they earned through the dint of their labors as possible. Nevertheless, if the principle of deserving to keep what you earn is both economically effective and socially just, then the converse must be equally effective and just: you don’t deserve to keep what you didn't earn.

Is George Bush a War Criminal?

2005-08-08T21:21:00.000-04:00

It's easy to understand why the American public is confused about the torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison. This is because Abu Ghraib was the end result of a long line of policy decisions and treaty violations. In short, we got the end of the story first, and we're just now beginning to see the beginning.

Abu Ghraib didn't start in 2004 when those horrific photographs came to light; it started with the fall of Kabul in Afghanistan at the end of 2001. So perhaps, a brief chronology might add some perspective.
At the end or 2001, America was still reeling from the barbarous attacks of September 11th. The Bush Administration was seething and, perhaps legitimately, it feared of another terrorist attack upon the United States. Simultaneously, it was trying to figure out what to do with all of the Taliban fighters it had just captured. In short, the question quickly became whether or not the Taliban or al-Qeada or both were covered under the Geneva Conventions on the Treatment of Prisoners of War.

On the face of it, it seemed quite clear. Al-Qeada was a non-governmental terrorist organization, and its members should be treated as captured criminals. The Taliban militia was a military organization, and its members should be treated as POWs. If there was some confusion between the two, Article Five of the Geneva Convention was quite explicit:

"Should any doubt arise as to whether persons, having committed a belligerent act and having fallen into the hands of the enemy, belong to any of the categories enumerated in Article 4, such persons shall enjoy the protection of the present Convention until such time as their status has been determined by a competent tribunal."

This raised some problems for the Bush Administration, however. We were fighting "a new kind of war" apparently. Under our treaties and protocols, criminals and POWs have rights, such as humane treatment and repatriation after the end of hostilities, and the Bush Administration didn't want to honor those commitments. They wanted the "flexibility" to hold captured belligerents in perpetuity and treat them in any manner the Armed Forces believed to be appropriate.

So the Department of Defense (DoD) asked the Department of Justice (DoJ) if the Geneva Conventions applied to captured Taliban militia. On January 9, 2002, they got their answer from John Yoo and Robert Delahunty: No. Al-Qeada was obviously not covered under the Conventions. The Taliban, however, was a little trickier.

"Whether the Geneva Conventions apply to the detention and trial of members of the Taliban militia presents a more difficult legal question. Afghanistan has been party to all four Geneva Conventions since 1956. Some might argue that this require application of the Geneva Conventions to the present conflict with respect to the Taliban militia, which would then trigger the WCA [War Crimes Act]. This argument depends, however, on the assumptions that during the period in which the Taliban militia was ascendant in Afghanistan, the Taliban was the de facto government of that nation, that Afghanistan continued to have the essential attributes of statehood, and that Afghanistan continued in good standing as a party to the treaties that its previous governments had signed.

We think that all of these assumptions are disputable, and indeed false. The weight of informed opinion strongly supports the conclusion that, for the period in question, Afghanistan was a 'failed State' whose territory had been largely overrun and held by violence by a militia of faction rather than a government. Accordingly, Afghanistan was without the attributes of statehood necessary to continue as a party to the Geneva Conventions . . . ."

So "informed opinion" said that Afghanistan was a "failed State". This made its government illegitimate, even though the United States was instrumental in helping it to acquire power during its war with the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, and supporters of governments that we deem to be illegitimate unilaterally and arbitrarily aren't protected by our international treaties. In other words, our treaties aren't binding; they're only applicable when the Executive branch of the government says they are.

As a result, President Bush proclaimed that the Taliban was not protected Geneva, and Secretary Rumsfeld issued an order to the Joint Chiefs of Staff the next day.

But not so fast, said Secretary of State Colin Powell. He wrote a memo to the DoJ refuting many of the contentions made in its memo of January 9th. Specifically, Powell stated,

"The Memorandum [from the DoJ] should note that any determination that Afghanistan is a failed state would be contrary to the official U.S. government position. The United States and the international community have consistently held Afghanistan to its treaty obligations and identified it as a party to the Geneva Conventions."

Well, apparently the DoJ considered the Secretary Powell and the State Department to be excluded from "informed opinion" about the diplomatic status of Afghanistan. Notwithstanding the question of whether the Departments of State or Justice were better informed about the international status of Afghanistan, President Bush called upon is top lawyer, Alberto Gonzales, to sort things out. So, in the best tradition of bureaucratic Washington, he sent the President a memo on January 25th.

Gonzales's memo gave the President of the option of applying the Geneva Conventions to the Taliban in clear violation of Article 5. How could he do so? Why because, despite the statements of his Secretary of State to the contrary,

"Afghanistan was a failed state because the Taliban did not exercise full control over the territory and people . . . .

The Taliban and its forces were, in fact, not a government, but a militant, terrorist-like group."

Apparently President Bush decided to rely on Justice instead of State to determine foreign policy.

But Gonzales didn't want to appear as if he was making foreign policy. After all, that's the President's job; he could only recommend. So his memo included the pluses and minuses of excluding al-Qeada and the Taliban from the Geneva Conventions. He indicated that only two positives could be associated with the suspension of the treaty. First, he listed "flexibility", which would provide the Armed Forces with "the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists" without having to worry about incidentals such as repatriation and humane treatment.

Secondly, and more ominously, he discussed the reduced "threat of domestic prosecution under the War Crimes Act"! Yes, you heard me right. The Office of the Legal Counsel of the Department of Justice told the President of the United States that, if he wants to institute a policy of prisoner abuse, he should, contrary to the opinion of his State Department, simply declare the nation a "failed state" and stipulate that the Geneva Conventions are inapplicable. Why? So that the President of our nation could avoid future domestic prosecution as a WAR CIMINAL:

"Third, it is difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges based upon Section 2441 [the War Crimes Act]. Your determination [that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to the Taliban] would create a reasonable basis in law that Section 2441 does not apply, which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution."

Did I read that right? For the President to escape prosecution as a war criminal, all he needs to do is say that the Geneva Conventions, and hence the War Crimes Act, do not apply. Shades of Louis XVII, "L'etat, c'est moi!" (I am the state!) Federal law doesn't apply to me. Why? BECAUSE I'M THE PRESIDENT AND I SAID SO!

Well, needless to say, George II liked this opinion, overrode the opinion of his Secretary of State, and on February 7th signed an order validating Rumsfeld's January 19th order to the Joint Chiefs.

"Based on the facts supplied by the Department of Defense and the recommendation of the Department of Justice, I determine that the Taliban detainees are unlawful combatants and, therefore, do not qualify as prisoners of war under Article 4 of Geneva. I note that, because Geneva does not apply to our conflict with al-Qaida [sic], al-Qaida detainees also do not qualify as prisoners of war."

Let the games begin. And begin they did. Not at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, but at Bagram in Afghanistan. At some point during 2002 our troops began to torture their prisoners, and in December of that year they eventually beat two of them to death. One was the brother a reputed Taliban commander and the other was a taxicab driver. Their crimes? They had resisted having hoods placed over their heads. Was placing a hood over a prisoner humane treatment? It didn't matter because the President said so. Was beating them in order to force compliance humane? Ditto.

So who' s going to jail? Why the grunts, of course. Is it fair? Is it right? Is it just? Well, maybe it is, but the guys who are up on charges don't think so.

"In the first interview granted by any of the accused soldiers, a former guard charged with maiming and assault said that he and other reservist military policemen were specifically instructed at Bagram how to deliver the type of blows that killed the two detainees, and that the strikes were commonly used when prisoners resisted being hooded or shackled.

'I just don't understand how, if we were given training to do this, you can say that we were wrong and should have known better,' said the soldier, Pvt. Willie V. Brand, 26"

Six months later, the Bagram policies found their way to Abu Ghraib. By the end of 2003, our soldiers were, in the words ofMajor General Antonio M. Taguba, engaged in,

"egregious acts and grave breaches of international law"

at Abu Ghraib.

So who's really to blame? I don't know and neither does anybody else. Why? Because I don't have subpoena power and both Bagram and Abu Ghraib have been Army investigations.

That's why the Congress has to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the commission of war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. We need to know if our President is a war criminal, notwithstanding the opinion of his legal counsel. We need to know if any of his staff are war criminals. We need to know if the DoD employed any war criminals. After all, as the War Crimes Act clearly states:

(c) Definition.--As used in this section the term 'war crime' means any conduct--

(1) defined as a grave breach in any of the international conventions signed at Geneva 12 August 1949, or any protocol to such convention to which the United States is a party;

All I do know is that no one, not even our President, is above the law simply because he says so.

2005-08-04T18:25:00.000-04:00

The Illegitimate Birth of Political Correctness

In the aftermath of World War I, Supreme Court Justices Holmes and Brandeis realized that speech could be used to express ideas that are loathsome to the vast majority of American citizens. However, they subscribed to the belief that loathsome speech merits the same constitutional protections as admired speech. Their beliefs were put to the test again during the Cold War, only instead of prohibiting "seditious" speech on the street corner, as they did during World War I, state and federal governments banned it from the workplace.

In the anti-Communist hysteria after World War II, the Smith Act, the McCarren Act, the Communist Control Act, and various state and federal programs that mandated loyalty oaths all proscribed the employment of individuals who advocated the violent overthrow of the United States government. Among the most controversial of these legislative enactments was New York's Feinberg Law of 1949. This law barred any person who advocated or taught the overthrow of the United States government by force or violence or belonged to an organization that did so, either currently or previously, from employment as a teacher in the New York public school system. At first, the Supreme Court upheld most of these laws. As the Communist panic waned throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, however, they were all overturned. Finally, in 1967, the Supreme Court even invalidated the Feinberg Law with Justice William Brennan calling it "a highly efficient in terrorem mechanism".

Today, the freedom of expression within the workplace is under attack again, this time by the sexual and racial McCarthyites of the political left. Much like the original McCarthyites who demanded fealty to the economic and political dogmas of capitalism and democracy and sought to stifle all civic dissent, today's tyrannical federal bureaucrats who espouse the dogmas of social decorum and equality seek to stifle sexual and racial dissent within corporate America. Rather than repressing the freedom of American Communists and anarchists to express their opinions within the workplace, they repress the freedom of expression for American racists, misogynists, ethnic chauvinists and homophobes. Instead of enacting a Feinberg law to protect New York's schoolchildren, these neo-McCarthyites have subverted a landmark of federal civil rights legislation in order to suppress contrary opinion and ostensibly protect American workers from ideas and opinions that they find to be either repugnant or dangerous.

Ironically, the “highly efficient in terrorem mechanism” they have expropriated is Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a law that was a legislative victory for every American opposed to bigotry within the workplace. The doctrinaire zealots of anti-discrimination in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), however, have usurped this law and imposed federal censorship within the workplace by misconstruing the original intent of one small section of the statute. The clause they misinterpret intentionally pertains to hiring and firing practices and states,

"It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin."

The EEOC has altered the meaning and intent of the law by redefining the obvious intent of the phrase "conditions … of employment" from its more common and logical definition of "hiring practices" to include the nature of the workplace environment itself. In so doing, they discovered a device that they could employ to impose a prior restraint against discriminatory speech and thereby obtrude their rigid social credo into the workplace environment. Presumably, if Congress had intended to pass a law that prohibited some form of speech within a specific environment, such as the workplace, in 1964 or at any time thereafter, it would have done so. It is absolutely certain, however, that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, neither in its original purpose nor in its intended effect, was such a law.

By intentionally subverting this phrase, the EEOC has expanded the authority granted to it by Title VII and rewritten the law from one that prohibits discriminatory employment practices to one that proscribes the expression of discriminatory opinions within the workplace. Even its name belies this usurpation: it is the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, not the Equal Employment Environment Commission.

The puritans of the EEOC began their a priori censorship of discriminatory speech in the workplace in 1980 by defining sexual harassment as:

"Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature . . . ."[emphasis added]

Obviously, unwelcome sexual advances, as forms of assault, and requests for sexual favors, as forms of extortion, are clearly examples of pernicious and illegal harassment. As it pertains to the freedom of speech, however, the key issue concerns the final clause of this definition. Specifically, it pertains to the EEOC's distinction between verbal and physical conduct. If “verbal conduct” is speech, as it must be, then the EEOC’s 1980 definition of sexual harassment must be a prima facie violation of the First Amendment.

Racism, sexism, homophobia and ethnocentricity and religious intolerance may be particularly abhorrent social philosophies, but regardless of the emotional distress their espousal might cause an employee, and notwithstanding the opinions of leftist ideologues imbued with legal power, their expression cannot be made illegitimate within a free society. Derogatory verbal conduct of a religious, ethnic, sexual or racial nature that substantiates or even advocates an illegal action, such as either direct or tacit discrimination within the workplace, serves an illegitimate purpose and must be proscribed. Derogatory verbal conduct that merely expresses offensive or repulsive personal opinions, regardless of the nature of those opinions, the hostility of the environment they engender, or the emotional distress they may inflict upon their audience, does not and cannot. Hence, the EEOC's definition of sexual harassment as verbal conduct of a sexual nature contains a prior restraint against free speech that is unconstitutionally indiscriminant.

By including "verbal . . . conduct of a sexual nature" in its definition of harassment, the EEOC has defined the term too broadly and transformed Title VII of the Civil Rights Act into a modern version of the Feinberg Law. As New York schoolteachers could not embrace or espouse the principles of an aberrant political philosophy during the Cold War, so too contemporary workers cannot embrace or espouse the principles of an aberrant social philosophy today. In the prescient words of Justice Hugo Black in his famous dissent in Alder v. Board of Education, the EEOC has transmuted a law intended to promulgate civil rights throughout the United States into another of:

". . . those rapidly multiplying legislative enactments that make it dangerous . . . to think or say anything except what a transient majority thinks at the moment. . . . [P]ublic officials cannot be constitutionally vested with powers to select the ideas people can think about, censor the public views they can express, or choose the persons or groups people can associate with. Public officials with such powers are not public servants; they are public masters."

Surely in this instance, therefore, the Supreme Court would recognize the EEOC's unconstitutional incursion into the American workplace. Surely it would rule that prohibiting "verbal . . . conduct of a sexual nature" was an unconstitutional restraint of free speech. After all, as Justice Brennan had written in 1963:

"Any system of prior restraints of expression comes to this Court bearing a heavy presumption against its constitutional validity."

In a remarkable piece of judicial legislation, however, an activist Supreme Court allowed the EEOC to transform the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into the Anti-Discriminatory Speech in the Workplace Act of 1986. In the case of Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, it affirmed the EEOC's authority to proscribe speech within the workplace. In so doing, it fabricated a lower threshold of unconstitutionality in the restraint of socially repugnant speech than in the restraint of politically repugnant speech and opened the Orwellian specter of thought control within the workplace.

Ironically, the author of this repressive opinion was none other than William Rehnquist, an alleged paragon of judicial restraint. In his remarkable opinion, he first ignored the intent of Congress when it enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as the language of the Act itself, and permitted the EEOC to regulate the workplace environment. Then he discovered a new right for employees; one that superseded the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment and had not been present in the Constitution heretofore. In an amazing example of judicial activism, he granted

". . . employees the right to work in an environment free from discriminatory intimidation, ridicule, and insult."

He did not address from whence this novel right had originated, however, nor where it exists within the Constitution. Apparently, the EEOC simply made it up, and that was good enough for him. Then, as a pièce de résistance, Justice Rehnquist wrote that he wasn't defining the word "free" in its most common and absolute sense of totally unencumbered but rather in some vague and undefined relative sense. For example, the

". . . 'mere utterance of an ethnic or racial epithet which engenders offensive feelings in an employee' would not affect the conditions of employment to [a] sufficiently significant degree to violate Title VII."

We were left to ourselves to wonder who would determine the arbitrary and subjective standard of the "sufficiently significant degree" of utterances that would constitute harassment and, hence, permit the censorship of opinion within the American workplace. We were left to ourselves to presume that the phrase "except for speech that creates a hostile workplace environment" had been inserted into Rehnquist's copy of the First Amendment surreptitiously. We were left to ourselves to speculate as to the quality and quantity of the epithets that would justify a prior restraint against speech and the suspension of the First Amendment within the workplace. And we have been wondering, presuming and speculating ever since.

In 1919, Justice Holmes wrote,

“Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly logical. If you have no doubt of your premises or your power and want a certain result with all your heart, you naturally express your wishes in law and sweep away all opposition. . . . But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe . . . that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas - that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.”

It is sadly ironic that the same Court from which these words were written now sanctions a de facto witch-hunt for racists, misogynists, homophobes, and ethnocentric and religious chauvinists within the marketplace itself. The vast majority of Americans rejects these social philosophies as patently ridiculous and finds their espousal to be idiotic, offensive and repulsive. Nevertheless, our government cannot forbid discriminatory intimidation, ridicule and insult anywhere within a free society because we fear an offense to our sensibilities and yet remain free.

Reform Campaign Finance Reform

2005-07-27T15:21:00.000-04:00

"Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first."

Ronald Reagan - 1977

The free choice of private individuals and organizations to support candidates for public office is intrinsic to the very nature of representative democracy. Any private entity must be permitted to donate its time, labor and capital to the candidate of its choice. While no one who believes in democracy would advocate limiting the amount of time or effort private individuals or organizations may contribute to political candidates or their parties, well intentioned but erroneous reformers have made strenuous efforts to severely limit their monetary contributions.

These attempts have proven to be extremely problematic for two reasons. First, they have been largely ineffectual. In the spirit of the post-Watergate reforms, Congress amended the Federal Election Campaign Act in 1974 by limiting the amount of money individuals and organizations could donate to candidates for federal office. By employing unregulated "soft money" and bundled campaign contributions, however, candidates, their parties, and a myriad of special interest groups have circumvented these and subsequent restrictions. As a result, the Congress passed the McCain-Feingold/Shays-Meehan Campaign Finance Reform Bill and President Bush signed it into law on March 27, 2002. Although this law limits the amount of soft money individuals and organizations may contribute and increases the transparency of issue advertising, it actually doubles the amount of "hard money" contributions that may be bundled into purchasing influence.

Second, restrictions on political donations raise important constitutional issues by inhibiting the freedom of political expression within the public arena. Although most of the provisions of the Campaign Reform Act were upheld by the Supreme Court by a majority vote of five to four, as Justice Scalia wrote succinctly in his dissent in McConnell vs. FEC,

"… an attack upon the funding of speech is an attack upon speech itself."

Thus, both practice and theory compel opposition to recent congressional efforts to promulgate these futile and unconstitutional limitations upon the ability of individuals and organizations to express their political opinions by contributing their time, effort, or property to candidates for public office.

Because it plays a vital role in campaigns for public office, private capital has been, is and will be an essential element of the democratic process. Nevertheless, massive political contributions may be accompanied by an actual or tacit quid pro quo. In so doing they transmute from the expression of political opinion, which is protected by the First Amendment, to bribery, which is not.

The Supreme Court recognized the difference between protected speech and bribery in its 1976 decision, Buckley v. Valeo. In this decision, it held that although portions of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1974 were unconstitutional, Congress could place restrictions upon most political donations because doing so is one of the,

"… primary weapons against the reality or appearance of improper influence stemming from the dependence of candidates on large campaign contributions."

Simply put, in attempting to differentiate between a donation and a bribe, the Court distinguished between political contributions that do not purchase influence and those that do. It then maintained that that former is protected speech, and that the latter is not. Thus, the Court permitted reformers of campaign financing to reduce the corrupting influence of large campaign contributions by limiting their size. Conversely, their opponents contend that these limitations place unreasonable and unconstitutional restrictions upon the freedom of donors to express their political opinions financially. Unfortunately, both sides in this dispute have missed the crux of the issue: they are arguing about the money when the real problem is not the money but the influence it purchases.

The proper resolution of this issue can be found in the famous standard espoused by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in his opinion in Schenck v. United States in 1919. This standard permits a prior restraint against free speech, such as political contributions, when they exhibit a "clear and present danger" to bring about "substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent". Bribery and improper influence clearly meet this standard. As Justice Holmes observed crucially, however,

"It is always a case of proximity and degree."

Thus, when the proximity of the private donor to the public candidate is high and the degree of the donation is large, corrupting influence is likely to ensue: political favors will be bought and sold. When either the proximity or the degree is reduced so that improper influence is eliminated, political donations become a benign form of free speech.

Campaign finance reformers have focused their efforts upon reducing the degree of political contributions by limiting their size. Rather than restricting improper political influence by limiting the degree of the donation, Congress must reduce the proximity of the donor to the recipient instead. By doing so the size of political contributions may be increased significantly without incurring the de facto bribery of corrupting influence. To appropriate Justice Holmes's famous example of pernicious speech, campaign finance reformers have sought to silence the man shouting "Fire!" in a crowed theatre. Instead, they should remove him from the theatre so that he can shout "Fire!" to his heart's content.

Nevertheless, this fire-shouting man, even if he was standing outside the theatre, could amplify his voice loud enough to panic the patrons within, and in so doing speak in a manner that causes a substantive evil that Congress has a right to prevent. Hence, Congress must determine that point at which the degree of this incendiary speech itself is sufficiently loud so as to necessitate a prior restraint against its expression, notwithstanding its reduced proximity. As this theory pertains to private political donations, if the proximity of the donor to an individual candidate is diminished significantly or eliminated completely, at what point, if any, does the mere amount of the contribution itself transform it from the financial expression of political opinion, which must be protected, into an inherently corrupting bribe, which must be proscribed? It is at this point that a prior restraint against this form of political expression becomes both desirable and permissible because the size of the contribution does not simply corrupt any individual candidate for public office; it corrupts the democratic process itself.

Therefore, in restricting the size of political donations, Congress must adopt the following seven regulations:

1) A maximum amount of $100,000 per election cycle, either given or received, must be established regardless of the public or private nature of either the recipient or the donor.

2) Candidates for federal office and advocacy organizations must be prohibited from soliciting or accepting contributions of any kind directly or indirectly with a value in excess of $100 from any individual or organization within any thirty-day period.

3) Offering, accepting, soliciting or disclosing political contributions in excess of $100 per month must constitute the felony of bribery, pursuant to Title 18 of the United States Code.

4) Individuals and organizations that wish to contribute between $101 and $100,000 to any candidate for federal office or any political advocacy organization must do so through an independent third party, the Federal Election Commission (FEC), which shall guarantee their anonymity.

5) Donors must be permitted to direct the FEC to disburse their contributions to the specific individuals or organizations of their choice, and the FEC must deposit these donations into a general advocacy account that distributes these assets weekly.

6) The FEC must create and maintain a comprehensive database of donors and recipients, thereby ensuring that the $100,000 maximum limit for political contributions is not exceeded.

7) As the legal advocate for the electorate at large, the FEC must be prevented from releasing any information about the identity of a donor or a recipient or the amount donated for at least twenty years after the death of the individual or dissolution of the organizational recipients or donors. Notwithstanding a specific warrant from a court of appropriate jurisdiction, violating the public's right of attorney/client privilege must constitute a felony commensurate with the disclosure of information that has been classified as secret for national security purposes.

Charitable political donations are a form of protected speech, but the use of private financial assets to purchase actual or tacit political obligations is a form of bribery, regardless of whether it is an individual candidate or the public at large that is being influenced monetarily. Treating political influence as a commodity to be bought and sold in an open market is antithetical to the principles of democracy and cannot be allowed to continue unabated for three reasons. First, it inhibits the free flow of information into the political marketplace of ideas, thereby creating a self-perpetuating status quo. Second, it induces our public officials to act as little more than articulate and telegenic prostitutes. Finally, it exacerbates the cynicism of a disaffected electorate.

As Sophocles wrote in Antigone, Americans must embrace the sentiments of Creon when he said,

"For me, whoe'er is called to guide a state and . . . as worthier than his country counts his friend, I utterly despise him."

Using money to purchase the "friendship" of public servants is reprehensible. Private money cannot and should not be excluded from politics, but the private influence it purchases can and must be.

Curse of the Second Term

2005-07-13T11:04:00.000-04:00

I think we might want to seriously consider rescinding the Twenty Second Amendment.

Personally, I would support replacing this amendment with one that creates a single presidential term of six years. Why? Because second term presidents seem to have worse luck than the Chicago Cubs.

But isn't luck is just really destiny for the superstitious?

Is Karl Rove guilty? Is he innocent? What did he say and when did he say it? Who are Novak's sources? What did Rove tell Bush and when did he tell him? Was Bush just kidding when he said he'd fire the person responsible for outing Plame?

Who knows? Who cares? If recent history any the guide, Rove is going to go from the White House to the big house for lying to either the grand jury or the FBI or both, not for planting a vindictive story in the newspapers.

Most importantly, however, am I the only one to notice how incredibly similar this incipient scandal is to all of the other second term scandals since the Amendment was adopted? (Notwithstanding Eisenhower, of course, who was one of the least partisan Presidents in American history.)

Don't they all seem to go something like this?

1) President is up for re-election.

2) President does something that would hurt his chances for re-election. He:

A) Authorizes a "dirty tricks" campaign against his opponents and bugs their headquarters
B) Cuts a deal with terrorists to trade spare military parts for hostages & then uses the profits from those sales to fund an illegal insurgency.
C) Screws around with an intern
D) Wants to finish a job his dad started, so he invents some phony reasons to start a war.

3) Opponents get suspicious and sic a special prosecutor on him or his key aides

4) President and/or key aides lie their asses off to cover up the peccadillo

5) President gets re-elected

6) President and/or key aides accused of obstruction of justice and/or perjury

7) Opponents act like the Claude Raines character in Casablanca by being "Shocked! Shocked!" that the President and/or his aides would stoop to lying about something they didn't want the voters to know.

8) The President and/or his aides are indicted or convicted or impeached or forced to resign.

9) The public's attention is distracted from the important issues confronting the nation; President's second term falls apart; and the country suffers by

A) Losing the war in Vietnam
B) Supporting Saddam Hussein after he uses nerves gas against his own people
C) Ignoring the threat posed by Osama bin Laden and thinking that lobbing a couple of cruise missiles at him will intimidate him
D) TBD

Well, I for one am beginning to get the hint, and recall words of George Santayana:

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

When it comes to re-elected Presidents, that old Skeptic Santayana certainly nailed it.

All right, enough already. The Twenty Second Amendment is turning into the worst example of The Law of Unforeseen Consequences since the Volstead Act created the Mafia. Well, we repealed the Eighteenth Amendment, and I say that it's high time that we do the same thing with the Twenty Second. We've had five two-term Presidents since it was adopted. We're 1 for 5 and 0 for the last 4. How many of these consecutive scandals is it going to take for us to realize that they aren't coincidental?

My personal preference would be for one six-year term. Six years and out. Go write your memoirs, jump out of airplanes, build your library, or help your wife get elected President. (My God, does Hilary Clinton really want to become the Lurleen Wallace of the new millenium?) This way the President (and/or his/her overzealous aides) would be less tempted to use the vast powers of the executive branch of the federal government for partisan political purposes or to act as if he/she was above the law in order to maintain political power.

In short, I think that the stakes are so high (or at least they're perceived as such) and the temptations are so great that mere mortals cannot resist the expediency of lying to retain the office of the Presidency. And, like other mere mortals, they always think that they can get away with it. And because the office is so powerful, they're always right, at least until after the election. Although the wheels of justice may grind slowly, they do grind and (notwithstanding Ronald Reagan's senility) the truth will out eventually. That's why God invented special prosecutors in the first place.

So fasten your seat belts, boys and girls, here we go again. If history is any guide, it's going to get a lot uglier before it gets any better. My question is, after September 11th can we really afford it this time? Is a weakened and distracted presidency in our nation's best interest? Does our implacable rancor really know no bounds? And most importantly, do we really want to see how much worse George Bush governs the United States without his brains?

London: Dress Rehearsal for a Dirty Bomb?

2005-07-08T19:56:00.000-04:00

Although the horrors and agonies endured by the victims of Thursday's bombings in London were tragically heart rending, the British should be thankful that al-Qaeda's butcher's bill wasn't bloodier. Al-Qaeda murdered thousands of innocent people on September 11th, more than 200 in Bali and nearly as many in Madrid. In Baghdad, a bomb attack that kills 50+ civilians and injure hundreds of others is just another bad day - front-page news, but below the fold.

So what's Osama up to? Is he getting soft in his old age? At the risk of being stigmatized as an alarmist, I don't think so.

I'm afraid that London might have been a dress rehearsal for detonating one or more dirty bombs in the US. With the cooperation of Pakistani or Iranian sympathizers, there may be a very good chance that al-Qaeda operatives could get their hands on a significant amount of radioactive isotopes and smuggle this material into the US. If those responsible for detonating the devices in London get over here as well, I think we could be in real trouble. Does the name Jose Padilla ring any bells?

Because of its relatively low level of lethality, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission calls a dirty bomb a "Weapon of Mass Disruption" that would cause more emotional and economic damage (from the mandatory clean-up), than human carnage.

Thus, I would prioritize al-Qaeda's three top targets for a dirty bomb attack, in order, as:

1) Wall Street - If at first you don't succeed . . .
2) The Capitol - "This Tuesday's committee meeting will be at Senator Lugar's house. BYOB."
3) A major international airport - probably JFK, Newark, LAX, or Dulles.

(Actually, Hartsfield or O'Hare would probably cause more economic damage to the US, but al-Qaeda's attacks are intended to rally their troops as much as dishearten their opponents. How many mujahideen could find Chicago on a map or have even heard of Atlanta?)

The bottom line is that we can't afford to wait around for the second catastrophic shoe to drop on George Bush's watch. Moreover, short of putting bomb-sniffing dogs on every street corner in lower Manhattan, spending more money on domestic security isn't likely to make our civic institutions or us any safer. That's Congress's knee-jerk reaction to every problem: throw money at it to make it go away.

What we need instead is a coherent anti-terrorist campaign. In short, we need a plan, not platitudes; we need to act instead of react.

Iraq is a problem, but solving it won't end domestic terrorism. (I'm sure that the families of the victims of the London attacks are grateful to Bush and Blair for taking their "war against terrorism" to Iraq so that we didn't end up fighting the terrorists here at home.) Let's face facts, Saddam wasn't the problem, al-Qaeda was and is. Bush's reaction to 9/11 was as if a co-worker had shot him in the leg, so he punched the guy in the nose but then went home and burned down his neighbor's house because he was still pissed off. That may make you feel good and look tough, but you've still got a dangerous nut job with a grudge out there looking for you.

So what should we do? How about the three "I"s?

Isolation

Terrorist organizations are highly motivated cadres that use extreme and extralegal methods to express their philosophic ideals and accomplish their destabilizing objectives. Much like sociopathic criminals, these true believers hew to a moral or ethical imperative that transcends the codified parameters of acceptable social behavior. Unlike sociopathic criminals, however, they are not demons or monsters. They have civic objectives that transcend mere butchery. Thus, we must use every means at our disposal to dispute, discredit and co-opt their claims of a transcendent moral authority.

Conversely, the ethic upon which we base acceptable civilized behavior must be explained cogently and promulgated vigorously among the organization's potential adherents. It must be conveyed by word and deed; mere simplistic slogans will not sway the skeptical. With significant social support, a terrorist organization is mythologized as a vanguard of warriors and martyrs. Without that support, the organization becomes alienated from those elements of society from which it derives its succor. This is the difference between the Red Brigades and the IRA, and why John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry sparked a civil war while the rampages of the Manson "family" in California didn't. Without social approbation, terrorist organizations deteriorate eventually into ineffectual collections of deranged individuals who are perceived as delusional criminals by their former benefactors. Al-Qaeda's ability to conduct coherent operations must be precluded by eliminating its moral authority, thereby isolating it from its bases of social, economic and political support.

Infiltration

Knowledge is power and ignorance is impotence. The prevention of future acts of terror against the United States cannot depend upon either serendipity or clairvoyance. Human and technological assets must be employed to anticipate the terrorists as well as impede their operational effectiveness. Surfing the web for "chatter" will not suffice. Clandestine methods of disinformation and infiltration are essential ingredients of effective counterintelligence.

This makes the repressive and xenophobic elements of the USA Patriot Act and the torture of captured belligerents especially counterproductive. At precisely the time that our military and law enforcement agencies should be recruiting spies and provocateurs they are persecuting and alienating them. The solicitation of intelligence agents must take precedence over a presumption of guilt by association. Without the penetration of terroristic organizations by human and technological intelligence, the domestic efforts of our police organizations and the foreign efforts of our military organizations are stopgap measures; they cannot prevent, they can only punish. As the attacks on September 11th demonstrated, to the degree that the United States is oblivious, it is insecure. Ignorance is not bliss; it's vulnerability.

Interdiction

Finally, the federal government must exercise its military and police powers against this pernicious form of criminality vigorously and decisively. The United States must assert its intrinsic right of national self-defense and exert international jurisdiction over those individuals and organizations that have committed acts of terror as well as those who facilitate them, regardless of their geographic location. After the moral imperatives of the terrorists have been discredited and their methods of operation disrupted, the due process of the law must be employed to capture and punish the guilty parties. For example, those who were responsible for the attacks of September 11th bear a historical social stigma similar to the Japanese and Nazi war criminals of World War II. Like them, when they are captured they must be tried in impartial and international courts of law, not held in perpetual limbo as enemy combatants or executed summarily in the field. Regardless of the horrendous nature of their crimes or the depravity of the criminals themselves, the due process of law must become an essential tool in the war on terrorism. It is essential not merely because it protects the legal rights of individuals who disdain their reciprocal validity, but because it distinguishes civilization from barbarism. It not only facilitates a civic catharsis for an aggrieved democracy; it demythologizes the perpetrators.

As it pertains to global terrorism, due process is a deterrent against future attacks because it subverts the terrorists' claims of oppression and precludes their aspirations of martyrdom. Without due process, prosecution can be stigmatized as persecution and as the expression of might, not right. With it, due process becomes the physical manifestation of the right of a just society to protect itself from malevolent sociopaths. Among the people of the United States, the perception of prosecutorial fairness and honesty is important; among the sympathizers and supporters of terroristic organizations, its reality is mandatory.

In conclusion, we've become like homeowners buying high-tech burglar alarms and door locks because they provide us with the illusion but not the reality of security. We already have enough locks on our doors; we got to start trying to make our neighborhood a safer place in which to live by reducing the causes of crime, keeping an eye on the bad guys and getting them off the street when they break the law. Our war against terror won't be won until our government decides to focus its efforts on eliminating the rationale for the existence of al-Qaeda and neutralizing its adherents instead of increasing the amount of money it expends on Homeland Security and trying to make Iraq safe for democracy.

Until then, you might want to think about stocking up on potassium iodide.

Peace in the Middle East

2005-06-29T17:41:00.000-04:00

While watching the President's speech last night, I must admit that I kept remembering a personality profile I had read recently that describes our Commander-in-Chief perfectly. So this morning I wandered around on the web until I found it:

"His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it."

Sounds like that nailed it to me. Fits George Bush like a glove. Only one problem though: it was prepared by the OSS (the predecessor of today's CIA) to describe Adolph Hitler.

Who does Bush think he's kidding? Is Al Qaeda participating in the Iraqi insurgency? Absolutely. Is Al Qaeda leading or controlling it? Absolutely NOT.

If you're looking for a historical parallel you don't have to go back to Vietnam. Contemporary Iraq should remind us of the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland in the 1970's and 1980's. We get to play the part of the British and torture our prisoners; the Shiites and Kurds get to play the Protestants and repress minority rights; and the Sunnis get to play the Catholics and blow things up. In other words, batten down the hatches; we're in for a long and bumpy ride.

Everybody who thinks that a functional Iraqi (nee Kurd/Shiite) Army will solve everything and quell the insurgency probably also thinks that Saddam hired Osama to fly the planes into the World Trade Center. The bottom line is we should be prepared for years if not decades of sectarian Iraqi violence (even Secretary Rumsfeld is beginning to realize this) and for living with the continued threat of religious terrorism from the jihadists.

How can we get out of this mess?

Permanent peace in the Middle East will require two admittedly difficult but nevertheless achievable endeavors:

1. Bring Me the Head of Osama bin Laden

Forget the skyrocketing budget deficits. Forget lying about Saddam's WMDs. Forget the tax breaks for wealthy heirs and affluent corporations. Forget the staggering ineptitude of not preventing the attacks of September 11th. One inescapable fact remains: How could George Bush get re-elected while Osama bin Laden is still running around loose?!?

Didn't he stand on the rubble of Ground Zero and promise the rescue workers that those responsible would pay for their acts of barbarous cruelty? Karl Rove may criticize the Democrats (justifiably in my opinion) for an excessively legalistic reaction to horrors of 9/11, but at least they wanted to catch the guys who did it, not let them waltz around the mountains of Western Pakistan and sneer at us!

If you had asked me on 9/12/01, I wouldn't have given Osama four more weeks of freedom instead of the four years he's enjoyed under the Bush Administration. This guy is the worst mass murderer in American history and he's still on the lam. If you don't think Osama's freedom heartens Al Qaeda and exacerbates terrorism, especially in Iraq, you're crazy. (Or President.)

So step #1 in quelling the Iraqi insurgency: destroy the operational capacity of Al Qaeda and capture, if possible, or kill, if necessary, Osama bin Laden.

2. Theocracy Ain't Democracy

Imagine for a moment that you're a young patriotic Iraqi Sunni watching soldiers from the other side of the world with a carte blanche to capture or kill you patrol your streets in armored vehicles. They say that they came to your country to liberate you from a ruthless dictator. On the other hand, some of your friends tell you that the soldiers are lying - that they are conquerors, not liberators, determined to control the country through a permanent military presence and a Shiite/Kurdish puppet government. Who do you believe? Thankfully, the vast majority believes us. Unfortunately, a significant minority doesn't.

So how can we persuade that violent minority that we're on the level? After all, the United States has never conquered another country (except for the Philippines, Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Ri - oh well, never mind). And we always bring our troops home when the war is over (except for Germany, Japan, Cuba, South Kor - damn, 0 for 2). Well, at least we never cut and run or let terrorism scare us out of honoring a commitment (except in South Vietnam, Beruit, Somalia, - hmmm, this isn't going as well as I expected).

The bottom line is that, if I were that young Iraqi patriot, I'd want some proof of the beneficent intentions of the United States.

What would it take? How about this:

If we're willing impose secular democracy upon our enemies, are we willing to induce our friends to adopt it? If American values and principles are universal, as we contend, then perhaps we should begin down the road to peace in the Middle East by exporting them to our closest ally in the region first. Maybe this might convince our young Iraqi patriot that the fight in his country is not between two different forms of intolerance, but against intolerance itself. And who's our closest ally in the Middle East? Israel.

But wait a minute, isn't Israel already a democracy? Well, not quite. For example, Israel's Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty begins by defining,

"... the values of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state."

Jewish AND democratic? Isn't that a bit of an oxymoron? Jews, regardless of nationality, have the ability to immigrate to Israel, but Palestinians who've lived there for generations or centuries don't? The Israeli government has an official Ministry of Religious Affairs? The judicial system of Israel includes religious courts? Israel has a religious symbol displayed on its flag prominently? If it looks like a theocracy and walks like a theocracy and talks like a theocracy, my guess is that it is a theocracy.

Let's face it, a country can't be Jewish and democratic any more than it can be Christian, Hindu, Moslem or Shinto and democratic. The ultimate sovereignty of the state is either temporal or spiritual; it cannot be both.

In 1948, Israel declared its independence and issued its Israeli Declaration of Establishment that authorized the creation of a provisional government,

"... until the establishment of the elected, regular authorities of the State in accordance with the Constitution which shall be adopted by the Elected Constituent Assembly not later than the 1st October 1948."

Well, needless to say, that never happened. The religious leaders contended that man's laws couldn't supplant God's laws. So they agreed to disagree with the secularists, adopted a handful of "Basic Laws" eventually and called it an "informal constitution". It's nearly sixty years later Israel still doesn't have a written constitution. Perhaps it's time for the Israelis to honor their own founding document, follow Iraq's lead and adopt a permanent written constitution. (We shouldn't be too hard on the Israelis though. After all, it took us the better part of 200 years to honor the phrase "all men are created equal" written in our own founding document.)

Moreover, according to the Declaration of Establishment, the founders of Israel,

"APPEAL - to the Arab inhabitants ... to participate in the upbuilding [sic] of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship."

In order to confer civic legitimacy upon the resultant government, it seems obvious that the State of Israel (gotta do something about that name - how about Canaan?) must include all of the areas under governmental control, including the West Bank and Gaza. The US must abandon its philosophically absurd and geographically impossible "road map". A Jewish Israel and an Islamic Palestine cannot co-exist peacefully on the same land in perpetuity. Their mutual antipathy and distrust will preclude it.

So instead of creating two bitter theocratic and ethnocentric rivals, we must use our influence to incorporate the Jewish and Moslem residents of Israel and Palestine (as well as the Christians and the Druze) into one secular nation that embraces all of the human rights we espouse as universal, especially Thomas Jefferson's wall of separation between church [or mosque or synagogue] and state.

If the Israelis and Palestinians (Canaanites?) adopt a constitution that guarantees fundamental human and civil rights and that delineates between governmental and religious authority assiduously, they must receive the approbation of the United States and the rest of the industrialized world. Most importantly, however, they would prove to the nations of the Middle East in general and Iraq in particular that disparate peoples can write a formal constitution that creates a society that accommodates a variety of ethnic groups and religions equitably, impartially and peacefully. And ultimately, isn't this what we're fighting for in Iraq?

In short, the road to a permanent peace in the Middle East may end in Baghdad. Or it may end in Cairo or Mecca or Tehran or Damascus. But it must begin in Jerusalem.

Why not a meaningful Amendment to the Constitution?

2005-06-24T09:36:00.000-04:00

On Wednesday, 286 Congressional Representatives engaged in their annual act of craven demagoguery by adopting an amendment to the Constitution that would prohibit the desecration of the American flag. At the vanguard of this initiative are public officials, especially those on the right wing of the political spectrum, who purport to esteem personal freedom and resent the pervasive influence of the federal government into the private lives of individuals ostensibly. Yet they propose to amend our most fundamental legal document to achieve an objective that contravenes these ideals diametrically. Apparently these putative patriots are either unaware of their profound hypocrisy or sufficiently depraved to be imperious to it.

To them, American freedom must be defined as the freedom to act as they do and believe as they do exclusively. To them, the American flag is not merely a physical symbol of the United States; it is a quasi-religious icon imbued with a sacred significance. To them, those who disagree with them cannot be confronted by argumentation; they must be silenced by force. To them, dissent is heresy and the infidels must be punished. In short, I'm surprised that they haven't blamed the California wildfires on irresponsible flag burners (but it's early yet, and they may get around to it).

Yet, the "loyal opposition", bereft of proactive ideas, merely responds with its conventional and politically unpopular obstinacy: "Just Say No". Instead of opposing an amendment to the Constitution that limits personal freedom, they could counteract the demagogues by advocating an amendment that is not only necessary but liberating, as well.

In 1972, the US Congress adopted an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) that would have prohibited sexual discrimination and more than 90% of the Senators and Representatives who voted on the measure did so in support of it. It was promptly signed by President Nixon and ratified by thirty-five of the fifty sates. Since the Constitution requires ratification by a three-fourths majority, it fell three states short of adoption and has languished in Congress ever since.

Perhaps our esteemed representative on the political left could eradicate this legislative inertia by changing the name of the ERA and expanding its purview beyond merely gender. They could propose a HUMAN Rights Amendment, which might be written as follows:

"Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States of any state on account of religious creed, ethnicity or any permanent physical characteristic determined by genetic factors exclusively."

Our intrinsic human and civil rights must be protected against legal discrimination equitably, not merely on the basis of race or sex, but against all forms of religious, ethnic and genetic discrimination. If our Declaration of Independence stipulates that the raison d'être of the United States is predicated upon the principle that "all Men are created equal", shouldn't our Constitution compel the enforcement of that principle? A Human Rights Amendment will ensure that one of our most fundamental rights, the right to be treated as an individual rather than as the representative of a subclass, is protected by our most fundamental legal document.

Twenty states have some kind of prohibitions against religious, ethnic or genetic discrimination written into their constitutions currently. The Constitution of New Hampshire is somewhat typical:

"Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by this state on account of race, creed, color, sex or national origin."

Although the passage of a Human Rights Amendment to the US Constitution might not succeed easily, it is necessary to begin the process. Not only could it displace the insipid and venal debate about flag desecration from national political discourse, it would demonstrate that the United States has political leaders who not only oppose totalitarian encroachments upon civil liberties but who support the expansion of civic egalitarianism. Regardless of its ultimate success, it would be fascinating to watch its opponents argue against granting every American the same rights as those who live in that a bastion of political liberalism like New Hampshire.

PS: In those states that have anti-discrimination clauses in their constitutions, it is difficult to see how any statues that prohibit same-sex marriage could be constitutional. For example, if marriage is a "right" in New Hampshire, then every person must have the ability to marry any other person regardless of their partner's "race, creed, color, sex or national origin." It's hard to read this clause of their constitution in any other way.

Omniarchy and Stem Cell Research

2005-06-16T14:32:00.000-04:00

Examining the abortion/stem cell/in vitro issue, it seems to me that both sides tend to forget that the creation of human life is a process rather than an event. It doesn't occur at either conception or birth; it occurs when a fetus is capable of sustaining its own life ex utero: viability.

Any reasonable person has to recognize that the difference between a zygote moments after conception and a fetus moments before birth is a difference of kind, not degree. Any other conclusion yields a host of contradictions.

For those who believe that human life begins at conception, how can the nature of that act effect the nature of the life it creates? Doesn't the embryo created by rape and/or incest merit the same protection of the law as the embryo created by loving parents? If the Fourteenth Amendment is to be revised from "all persons born" to "all persons conceived", the equal protection clause would mandate that any law that denied a fetus due process on the grounds of its conception would be grossly unconstitutional. The syllogism is inescapable: if human life begins at conception, then every fetus is a person, and if every person merits the equal protection of the law, then every abortion must be murder.

Furthermore, those that believe that human life begins at conception would have to resolve at least three less serious but nevertheless interesting enigmas:

Why doesn't any society in the world (or throughout recorded history, to the best of my knowledge) hold funerals for miscarriages?
Should America revise its citizenship laws to include all persons conceived in the United States?
When will President Bush begin celebrating his "Conception Day" instead of his "Birth Day"? (I'm sure H.W. and Barbara would get a big kick out of that one.)

Conversely, pro-choice advocates must understand that the point at which viability occurs is the point at which the fetus assumes a right to life (and health) that supercedes the mother's right to privacy and hence choice. They must spearhead legislation that would punish anyone, including the mother, that intentionally or recklessly kills or injures a healthy human fetus during the last trimester of gestation. As Supreme Court Justice Blackmun wrote in Roe v. Wade,

" ... state regulation protective of fetal life after viability ... has both logical and biological justifications."

Once they do so, perhaps they would gain a sufficient degree of moral capital to induce the more lucid "pro-life" proponents to join with them to compel the federal government to support stem-cell research.

From gamete to zygote to embryo to fetus, the laws of society must reflect the laws of nature to retain their moral validity. Equating fertilized eggs with human beings is to equate possible and existing human life. To delay or obstruct stem-cell research and in so doing deny suffering and dying Americans the results of its potentially miraculous cures in order to sustain the dogmatic orthodoxy of an archaic, erroneous and unnatural definition of human life is unconscionably cruel.

The Sickening Cost of American Healthcare

2005-06-06T16:58:00.000-04:00

I knew that the United States spent more of its GNP on healthcare goods and services than any other nation on Earth, but I was amazed to discover the degree of that difference and how little we get in return.

According to the OECD, in 1960 the per capita cost of healthcare in America was only $144; by 2002 it had risen more than six times faster than the Consumer Price Index to $5,267. Most impressively, however, we have the most expensive healthcare system in the world, by far. The United States spent 52% more per capita than the country with the second most expensive healthcare system on earth, Switzerland; 80% more than Canada; and 144% more than the United Kingdom.

Those are depressing numbers certainly, but they're justifiable because everyone knows that high quality healthcare is expensive. After all, the best healthcare system in the world should be the most expensive, shouldn't it? Imagine my chagrin when I stumbled upon the World Health Organization's World Health Report - 2000, however, and searched it's national rankings for the land of the free and the home of the brave. OK, so we weren't number one. We weren't number two or even number three. We weren't in the top five or the top ten either. I really started to get worried though when we didn't make the top twenty or the top thirty. Where did we end up? Thirty-seventh! I was amazed. The WHO had ranked the quality of healthcare in the United States as on par the quality of healthcare in Costa Rica and Slovenia!

Ironically and shamefully, insult was added to injury when I discovered that the nation with the world's best healthcare system was France. Sacre bleu! How was it possible for the French to spend less than $2,800 per person and receive the highest quality healthcare in the world when we spend nearly twice as much per person as they do and end up ranked thirty-seventh? Digging a little deeper, I noticed that per capita public expenditures in France ($2,080) were only slightly less than they were here ($2,364). It was in the private spending for healthcare that America really showed its stuff to the rest of the world. In 2002 per capita private expenditures for healthcare amounted to $656 in France, $883 in Canada and $359 in the UK. In the good old US of A, however, every man woman and child spent nearly three thousand dollars ($2,903) out of their own pockets, an impressive margin of victory by any standard. Each of us spent nearly four and a half times more than the French, nearly three and a half times more than the Canadians and eight times more than the British. What did we get in return for all of our hard-earned dollars? We got the worst possible result: developing world healthcare at industrialized world prices. By any measure, the privatization of healthcare must be considered to be a colossal failure both quantitatively and qualitatively.

But why? Why is the most common medical procedure in the United States a walletectomy? The competitive forces of the marketplace succeed marvelously in providing high quality goods and services at efficient prices in so many other industries. Why did they flop so resoundingly in this one? In other words, why did Reaganomics succeed so well in the airline and telecommunications industries, for example, but fail so abysmally in the healthcare industry?

The answer lies in the illusive quality of free choice. In a fair marketplace, both buyers and sellers possess variable degrees of choice. As the consumer's desire to buy and the producer's desire to sell change, prices fluctuate accordingly. When need replaces want in the pricing equation, however, the dynamics of supply and demand become moot. Marketplace conditions are immaterial when the choice is between sickness and health or between life and death. A hungry person may pay more for a sandwich than a sated one, but a staving person will pay anything.

Notwithstanding elective procedures, the provision of medical goods and services differs profoundly from most other human endeavors, such as air travel and telecommunications, because the buyer's choice is effectively eliminated from the purchasing decision. People may say, "It looks like a slow weekend. I think I'll call Aunt Martha. Better yet, I think I'll fly out to see her," but nobody says, "It looks like a slow weekend. I think I'll go get an appendectomy." The consumption of medical goods and sevices is based upon need, not desire, which eliminates the efficiencies inherent in fair market capitalism.

So what's Uncle Sam to do? Perhaps our elected representatives should hearken back to our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, for a clue. According to Jefferson, the only valid rationale for the very existence of government is to protect the "inalienable rights" of its citizenry, and that among these rights, are life, liberty and the pusuit of happiness. As the first of Jefferson's enumerated rights, life and health are the most fundamental of our natural rights. Contemporary civilized societies may choose to help educate the ignorant, clothe the naked or feed the hungry, but they must help cure the sick. It is the ultimate human entitlement.

Imagine for a moment that the federal government treated the second of Jefferson's "inalienable rights", the right to liberty, as cavalierly as it treats the first. Our armed forces protect our collective liberty from foreign conquest and our police forces protect our individual liberty from criminal exploitation. Why shouldn't the federal government disband our military and police forces and rely on the private marketplace to provide these services for us? After all, a large standing army and a federal police force are relatively recent developments in American history, and they're very expensive. Why don't the acolytes of Reaganomics contend that we should be as free to choose our own soldiers and policemen as we are to choose our own doctors and pharmacists? We could go back to receiving our collective protection from the armies of feudal lords and our individual protection from roving bands of gunslingers. What price would we be willing to pay these private providers to protect our liberties when foreign conquerors or local criminals threatened them? We would pay them pretty much the same amount as when injury or disease threatens our lives or the lives of our loved ones: anything they ask.

The days of pharmaceutical drug pushers and samurai surgeons selling their goods and services only to those who can afford to pay their exorbitant and collusive prices must end. Our elected representatives must honor their most fundamental obigation: to protect the lives of their constituents, not the bank accounts of their contributors.

The next time you're at the pharmacy or your doctor's office and peel off a hundred to pay the tab, it might help to ease your financial pain a bit to look down at the picture of the man whose face adorns the bill and recall the words he wrote 270 years ago:

"Necessity never made a good bargain."

Omniarchy and the European Constitution

2005-06-02T16:09:00.000-04:00

Well, to paraphrase Mark Twain, the rumors of the birth of the "United States of Europe" have been greatly exaggerated.

As if the French rejection of the European Constitution wasn't bad enough, its overwhelming rejection by the Dutch seems to have sealed its doom.

The negative majorities in Europe last week affirmed a hoary American political principle: pandering paranoia pays political dividends. From the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 to the repressive slave laws of the ante-bellum South to the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 and 1918 to the internment of Japanese Americans in 1942 to the McCarran Act of 1954 to Cointelpro in the 1960's to the USA Patriot Act of 2001, the history of the United States abounds with examples of demagogic fearmongering.

Today, a majority of Western European voters appears to be afraid of social, political and economic change and would prefer to dip their nations in aspic than confront the future dynamically. Moreover, the proposed constitution gave the demagogues plenty of ammunition. They could whip up the masses with a plethora of terrors: increased immigration, fewer social welfare benefits, cultural amalgamation, the political tyranny of a centralized bureaucracy and the economic tyranny of unbridled corporate power to name but a few. In short, the citizens of France and the Netherlands voted to affirm the status quo.

Contemporary Americans cannot engage in any sanctimonious criticisms of the craven Europeans, however, because nations that live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Examples of status quo worship abound here, as well. Afraid of economic competition? Lobby Congress to extend patent protections or grant your company sweetheart tax breaks, tariffs and subsidies. Afraid of privatizing Social Security? Simply ignore the actuaries and eschew offering any constructive alternatives. Afraid of "big government" controlling the administration of healthcare? Pass a bill that prevents the federal government from negotiating lower prices for pharmaceutical drugs. Afraid of having to earn your own money? Rescind estate taxes. Afraid that internationalism will inhibit American vigilantism? Support the nomination of a dogmatic unilateralist to become the Ambassodor to the United Nations. Afraid of religious terorrism? Support a massive increase in the defense budget, discretionary wars and boondoggle weapons programs such as Star Wars.

Both Americans and Europeans must find leaders that are able to convince their respective electorates that hope must transcend fear for cultural progress to occur. Change may discomfit the comfortable, but cultures must either advance or perish. Stagnation yields entropy inexorably. When risk-adverse nations face the future with more fear than hope, they ensure the realization of a self-fulfilling prophesy: the quality of life they provide to their citizens is certain to deteriorate.

Equitable opportunity, the opportunity to succeed as well as fail, must reign supreme on both sides of the Atlantic if the industrialized nations of the world hope to maintain or expand their cultural hegemonies. Americans must take the initiative in this regard and remember that only when ownership is a by-product of opportunity does it have any societal significance. The acts of achieving and acquiring are sacrosanct natural rights, but the achievements and acquisitions they yield are not. After all, it is our Declaration of Independence that stipulates that the ultimate rationale for the existence of government is to safeguard mankind's three most fundamental rights: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, not the possession of it.

We must show the demagogues, both at home and abroad, that equitable opportunity within fair markets and a free society is the possession we prize most highly and that complacency, not change, is our greatest fear. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America:

"The prospect really does frighten me that they [the Americans] may finally become so engrossed in a cowardly love of immediate pleasures that their interest in their own future and in that of their descendants may vanish, and that they will prefer tamely to follow the course of their destiny rather than make a sudden energetic effort necessary to set things right."

The primary lesson of the failure of the European Constitution is clear: America does not have a monopoly on myopia.

Welcome to the Omniarchy Blog

2005-06-02T12:20:00.000-04:00

Please feel free to post your comments concerning contemporary political issues or comment upon any of the topics discused in Omniarchy on this site.