The Greatest Threat to World Peace

Re: Bangladesh Arrests Over 3,000 to Halt Attacks

I've said it before and I'll say it again. The greatest threat to civilization and world peace in 2016 is not totalitarianism. It is ineffective governance, official corruption and a breakdown of civil society. We see it in anarchic Pakistan, awash in firearms. We see it in Mexico, with its corrupt police and thousands of unsolved murders. Venezuela. Guatemala. The kleptocracies of the former USSR. This nightmare in Bangladesh.

Since 2013, bloggers, freethinkers, religious minorities, foreigners, gay activists, followers of more liberal strains of Islam and others have been killed in attacks carried out mostly by groups of young men wielding machetes.

We see it here today in the U.S., in desert precincts where militiamen and Libertarians take shots (literally) at underfunded federales, and strut their stuff under the protection of Leviathan, whom they rely on every day to protect their families, their jobs and their health.

If you are an American who teds to hate secularists, religious minorities, gay activists and "followers of more liberal strains," you are of this ilk.

Princeton Professors Get Intellectually Mushy Over Abortion, Hillary

In an article this week in the Princetonian, “Key issues of the 2016 presidential election: Faculty members' perspectives,” two political scholars at the Ivy League university reveal themselves as anti-choice extremists.

Robert George, an American legal scholar, political philosopher and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, shared that “[Hillary] Clinton has never, to my knowledge, been able to think of a circumstance in which she believes that the right to life of a child in the womb should meaningfully be protected.”

Similarly, Bradford Wilson, executive Director of the James Madison Program in the Department of Politics, told the paper that “Secretary Clinton has declared in favor of an unlimited right to abort, presumably up until the day before birth.”

In fact, by expressing support for Roe v Wade, Hillary Clinton has affirmed her belief in circumstances when the life of a child in the womb should be protected. Roe v Wade’s “trimester framework” codifies the right of the state to protect a fetus later in a pregnancy (with exceptions for the life and health of the mother).

These two legal scholars seem to understand Roe v Wade less well than one might expect.

Hillary Clinton said in 2008, “I think abortion should remain legal, but it needs to be safe and rare. And I have spent many years now, as a private citizen, as first lady, and now as senator, trying to make it rare, trying to create the conditions where women had other choices.

“I have supported adoption, foster care. I helped to create the campaign against teenage pregnancy, which fulfilled our original goal 10 years ago of reducing teenage pregnancies by about a third. And I am committed to do even more.”

West’s Weird Words

A raspberry also goes to fellow Princetonian Cornel West, who according to George, believes Hillary is not “a candidate who meets the threshold to be acceptable as the leader of our nation.”

Really? Because she was Secretary of State when four people died in Benghazi? Because she used a private email server? Because she is a lawyer? What is Mr. West’s criteria for placing an individual outside the range of acceptability for high office?

Perhaps he prefers individuals who, before running for president, had not dirtied themselves in the international political arena. Who were never subject to Congressional scrutiny or investigation before seeking office. Someone with a faith-centered political approach and a pro-life stance. Someone outside the Washington bubble.

Well, based on these criteria, I have the perfect candidate for him: George W. Bush in 2000.

The Breitbart Filter

I was curious how two stories in the news this week are being reported on Breitbart.Com, so I hopped on over to the alt-right romper room where news categories range from "big government" to "big journalism" (no "big religion" as yet).

Breitbart's chairman, Stephen K. Bannon, also runs Donald Trump's campaign. 

First I searched for Scott M. Greene, accused of assassinating two police officers in Des Moines and Urbandale, Ill.

Nothing on the home page. A search for "Greene" turned up a cursory article with very little text and two embedded videos, as well as a (broken) link to a story in a local paper. Nowhere was it mentioned that he was a Trump supporter thrown out of a football game a few days ago for waving a Confederate flag around in front of a bunch of black students. 

I then searched for news about the Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church in Jackson, Miss., which was nearly burned to the ground Tuesday by arsonists who wrote "Vote Trump" on an outside wall.

Nothing on the home page. A search for "Jackson" turned up articles about Andrew Jackson and the $20 bill. A search for "Hopewell" brings up news about vandals breaking the window of a home flying a Confederate flag in Hopewell, Va.

There is nothing on the site about the destruction of the church.

Trickledown Fallout and Keynesian Economics

Re: More Wealth, More Jobs, but Not for Everyone: What Fuels the Backlash on Trade from the Sept. 28 New York Times. 

"Years of investment manias and financial machinations that powered the job market have lost potency, exposing longstanding downsides of trade that had previously been masked by illusive prosperity."

I've been thinking about this “illusive prosperity” for many years, since I heard Robert Reich on NPR—I want to say in the mid 2000s—talking about the fragility of economic growth built on 1) Real Estate 2) Consumer Debt and 3) Lower costs for goods, masking the lack of real wage growth since 1980. I would add to this the explosion of two-income households in the '80s and '90s, allowing for household income growth to rise even as individual wages stagnated.

John Maynard Keynes

Well now we're tapped out. The housing bubble burst and no one can get any more credit. Financial tricks and schemes have collapsed. Prices are as low as they can go (because of free trade) and there are no more adults to go to work in most American households.

So what do we do? Protectionism is not the answer as the domestic jobs lost to trade no longer exist. Tax cuts are a ridiculous fallacy exposed by the nonsense of Trumponomics (bolster the military, fix infrastructure and fund massive border projects... all while cutting taxes and balancing the budget!). Plus there's the matter of global warming, which, as seas rise, could create a national public investment need on par with the interstate highway system.

What worked before was​:​​ 1) Real investment by private industry in worker salaries and 2)​ a massive infusion of government cash into the national economy powered by World War II, the Cold War and all its indirect offshoots (NASA, widely dispersed military bases, the TVA and other energy projects, the ​highway system justified as a national security measure, etc). This is Keynesian economics—​public and private ​entities working in tandem.

Added 10/14/16:

Dante Chinni has been working on assignment for NBC news, reporting for months on economic decline in rural Monroe County, Ohio. As he said on The Diane Rehm Show on Oct. 12, "My thought about a lot of this is the private sector just can't save a place like this. It's going to have to be something else, just because there's not a lot of reason to invest if you’re a private sector company. But something, maybe, where the public sector could work to build institutions in the area that could help sustain the community again."

Is the Terence Crutcher Shooting Primarily About Race?

A friend shared a powerful essay in Salon about the shooting of Terence Crutcher, which the author compares to a lynching and to the perils suffered by African-Americans traveling in the Jim Crow South.

Maybe I am being ignorant here, but comparisons of contemporary police shootings of black men to the Jim Crow era don't sit right with me. I would argue that painting these incidents solely as matters of race ignores a good deal of relevant context, and makes it more difficult to get at the root causes of police-involved shootings.

According to the Washington Post, of the 706 people killed by police so far this year, 172 are African-American, or about 25 percent. This is much higher than the percentage of African-Americans in the population, and that is deplorable, but it does not change the fact that three-fourths of people killed by cops are of other races.

If the percentages of police-involved shootings can be shown to correlate with arrest rates (normally triggered by 911 calls), then it is harder to make the argument that cops are institutionally racist. In a gun-saturated society, anyone more likely to come in contact with law enforcement is more likely to be shot by law enforcement. Police deal on a daily basis with armed people in chaotic situations, and are themselves shot all the time.

In the Terence Crutcher case, the officer who fired her weapon, Betty Shelby, said she was “terrified.” Anyone who has watched the video of the Philando Castile shooting will notice the near-hysterical state of the officer after the shooting; one of the most chilling things about that video is the contrast between the officer and the calm, collected manner of Castile’s girlfriend.

This is not Bull Connor stuff. This is not, on the street level, white supremacist oppression in the way Southern apartheid was. Obviously, there are truly bad cops (witness the horrific shooting—execution, really—of Walter Scott in North Charleston), but what I frequently see are cops fearing for their own lives.

The core problem is firearms. Because any police encounter can, and sometimes does, quickly escalate into a gun battle, it is inevitable that at least a small percentage of encounters will end tragically. (Law enforcement made an estimated 12,196,959 arrests in 2012. Of these arrests, 521,196 were for violent crimes.)

The best we can do is reduce the likelihood of shootings. Better police training, gun control measures, and a major overhaul of drug laws thrown in for good measure would go a long way to accomplishing this.

Radicalized Anti-Police Rhetoric

I understand that many will disagree with this view. An essay recently posted on Facebook by another friend reads, "The police exist to protect white people and respond to white fear. That is their core function. That is what white supremacy means in practical terms."

The most cogent rebuttal to what I have written above that immediately comes to mind is that one cannot simply look at overall statistics of police killings, but must examine the psychology of law enforcement-minority interactions and the likelihood of minor or even trivial situations escalating into lethal violence compared to when police encounter white people.

I do not wish to minimize the problem of systemic racism among police or society at large, nor deny that the lives of black people have been and still are undervalued, but do hope to introduce a parallel narrative to the one principally put forth in the wake of these shootings. 

The Problem With 'Blue Lives Matter'

Recently, in a dramatic display of political theater, black students at Dartmouth College tore down a Blue Lives Matter display set up by campus Republicans and "reclaimed" the space for the Black Lives Matter movement.

The knee-jerk reaction to this story is to scream about censorship and the death of classical liberalism on the college campus, and I get that. But I can also sympathize with these black students in a big way.

The “Blue Lives Matter” reaction to Black Lives Matter is more than just a political response to some of the overblown anti-police rhetoric we’ve heard lately. It is, as these students realize, an attempt to co-opt and obfuscate the message of Black Lives Matter, which is that the gunning down of unarmed teenagers in city streets is an occasion for outrage and a national conversation about police tactics and the value we place on the lives of young black men.

“Blue Lives Matter” steers the narrative away from this and plays into conservative notions of Black Lives Matter “really” being about justifying criminality, breaking down police, law & order and, ultimately, the safety of white people. (See the recent right-wing media—Breitbart, etc.—reactions to the Section 8 policies of Julian Castro, framed as an attempt to flood the suburbs with poor nonwhites.)

The Dartmouth students’ need to “reclaim space” and the belief that Blue Lives Matter “facilitates the erasure of black lives” can be understood in the context of a whole host of passive-aggressive narratives circulating today that seek to minimize, trivialize or turn the conversation away from the historical concerns of black people. Replace “slavery” with “state’s rights.” Replace “protest” with “political correctness.” Replace “black” with any of several once-disadvantaged European ethnic groups (ignoring the historical reality of white privilege and white economic mobility). Replace “black” with “blue.”

Mass Murder: Comparing Orlando and Paris

To commit mass murder in France, you train abroad, establish complex criminal networks across borders, set up smuggling rings and safe houses and coordinate attacks among multiple individuals.

To commit mass murder in the U.S., you go down to your local gun store and buy an assault rifle.

France’s weakness is geographic. America’s weakness is political. Unlike France, we will never be undone by external forces. We will do it to ourselves, by allowing our country to turn into something we no longer recognize.

Case in point: there was an armed “good guy” at the Orlando nightclub. He could not stop the slaughter. Is the NRA’s solution to match threat for threat, and post military-style guards with assault rifles outside of nightclubs, movie theaters, stores and schools?

As Obama said, we need to decide what kind of America we want. It’s entirely up to us.

More on the fallacy of the 'Good Guy With a Gun' doctrine »

Why is Abortion a Conservative Cause?

This is a serious question. In 1972, Gallup reported 69 percent of Republicans agreed that “the decision to have an abortion should be made solely by a woman and her physician.” At the time, this was a higher percentage than among Democrats. *

According to political scientist Greg Adams, among voters, “Republicans were more pro-choice than Democrats up until the late 1980s.” *

A lot of water under the bridge since then, as the abortion issue was so effectively hijacked as a political and cultural shibboleth by the Right. This began with Nixon and his political strategist, Pat Buchanan, as a way to win the Catholic vote, and took off in the ‘80s with evangelical fervor.

Republicans have traditionally always been in favor of “hands off” government policies, of which abortion restrictions and bans are, literally, the opposite, when they dictate mandatory ultrasounds and the like.

Minority Rules

Of course the answer to the privacy and women’s rights argument has always been that a fertilized egg should be considered a human being with the same rights as a born person.

But there is no scientific, ethical, moral, or religious consensus on this. Even the Bible contradicts the idea that a fetus is a person, in Exodus 21:22-25. Abortion opponents are basically trying to impose a factional religious belief on society as a whole, something we would never tolerate if it were Hindus and beef, Muslims and pork, or any other of a number of faith-based injunctions.

Why should some be able to force the rest of us to follow their worldview, at the risk of imprisonment if we behave differently?

Again, why is abortion a conservative cause?

* See Jill Lepore, "Birthright," the New Yorker, 11/14/11