Krugman spells it out

Paul Krugman (I’ll make an exception for him, since word is he has been nominated for sainthood by the progblogosphere) has an entry in the recent string of op-eds and articles that have pointed out how intent the GOP is to shoot itself in the foot with regard to the Latino vote.

One of the truly remarkable things about the contest for the Republican nomination is the way the contenders have snubbed not just blacks — who, given the G.O.P.’s modern history, probably won’t vote for a Republican in significant numbers no matter what — but Hispanics. In July, all the major contenders refused invitations to address the National Council of La Raza, which Mr. Bush addressed in 2000. Univision, the Spanish-language TV network, had to cancel a debate scheduled for Sept. 16 because only John McCain was willing to come.

If this sounds like a good way to ensure defeat in future elections, that’s because it is: Hispanics are a rapidly growing force in the electorate.

But to get the Republican nomination, a candidate must appeal to the base — and the base consists, in large part, of Southern whites who carry over to immigrants the same racial attitudes that brought them into the Republican fold to begin with. As a result, you have the spectacle of Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, pragmatists on immigration issues when they actually had to govern in diverse states, trying to reinvent themselves as defenders of Fortress America.

And both Hispanics and Asians, another growing force in the electorate, are getting the message. Last year they voted overwhelmingly Democratic, by 69 percent and 62 percent respectively.

In other words, it looks as if the Republican Party is about to start paying a price for its history of exploiting racial antagonism. If that happens, it will be deeply ironic. But it will also be poetic justice.

This meme is crystallizing into CW—but whether it will it have any measurable impact on the immigration debate remains to be seen.

(Via J. Bradford DeLong)

asylum process still highly arbitrary

Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) has published a study of large persistent differences in asylum grant rates of judges in immigration courts across the country. The disparities hold when controlled for a number of factors, including nationality of the applicant.

In city after city and for national group after national group, newly available data from the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) document extensive hard-to-explain disparities in how the nation's immigration judges decide the thousands requests for asylum that come before them each year, according to an analysis by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).

The unusual persistence of these disparities — no matter how the asylum cases are examined — indicates that the identity of the judge who handles a particular matter often is more important than the underlying facts. Because equal justice under the law is a fundamental goal of American jurisprudence, the new findings about the day-to-day operations of the immigration courts are disturbing.

. . .

This report . . . focuses on the work of 224 immigration judges, each of whom had decided 100 or more asylum matters from FY 2001 to 2006 where the applicants were represented by counsel.

Some courts are more problematic than others, with Miami being the worst.

New York. The variation among the decisions of New York's immigration judges is quite extreme. Of the 36 such judges, two denied asylum requests less than 10% of the time and another denied requests more than 90% of the time. See Figure 1.

Those with the largest proportion of denials included Judge William F. Jankun. He turned down 91.6% of the 665 requests that he considered. Then there was Judge Sandy K. Hom who declined 89.7% of 1,533 matters and Judge John Opaciuch who rejected 87.5% of 879 requests.

At the other end of the scale in New York were three judges who presumably had dealt with broadly similar kinds of applicants. Among them was Judge Terry A. Bain who only denied 9.5% of her 1,946 cases. Then there was Judge Margaret McManus who denied 9.9% of the 1,859 cases she heard. And William P. Vanwyke — with 1,181 cases — and a denial rate of 14.7%.

The use of the word "presumably" here needs a bit of explication. Since cases are assigned randomly, all the judges deal with broadly similar kinds of applicants.

Within each court, however, the Executive Office for Immigration Review has automated procedures to assign the incoming requests on a random basis. Therefore, the individual judges within a given district are thought to be dealing with the same broad mix of asylum seekers as their colleagues sitting in the same court. As a result — in each immigration court — the average grant and denial rate for the judges deciding asylum matters should be roughly similar.

. . .

Miami. With 26 judges who had handled more than 100 cases, Miami was the second busiest in the nation in terms of asylum matters decided. In that city, Judge Sandra A. Coleman's denial rate was 21.8% while Judge Mahlon Hanson's rate was 97.6%. . . . Setting aside the two judges with the lowest denial rates, the remaining 24 Miami judges' asylum denial rates still varied between 63% and 98%.

A comparison to other immigration courts around the country shows that Miami’s denial rates are significantly higher than average. This wasn't because Miami had the most cases to handle--New York had 1240 asylum cases per judge to Miami's 1131 during the period studied.

Disparities remained regardless of such factors as hearing location, type of application (affirmative or defensive), and whether or not the applicant was in custody.

Large disparities exist in denial rates within nationalities, as well:

Nationally the judge-to-judge differences in asylum rates for Chinese applicants range from a denial rate of 7% up to a denial rate of 95%.

Some judges in New York and Miami denied 99% of Haitian applications for asylum. If you are Haitian and have the misfortune to have one of these judges assigned to your case, you might as well pack your bags and skip the proceedings, because they are sending you back regardless of the facts of your case.

The study concludes:

The wide range of disparities in how asylum matters are decided — regardless of the perspective from which they are examined – points strongly to a dysfunctional system where the law is not the law. As TRAC previously documented, these disparities have existed for many years and have outlived the tenure of any number of individual judges. This strongly suggests that when it comes to decision disparity, individual judges do not appear to be the primary source of the problem. An attempt to deal with this failure by focusing only on individual judges — even those judges whose asylum decisions fall at either extreme — will in the long run do little to guarantee a fairer and more effective system without wider systemic reforms.

That is exactly right.

safer roads in New York

Chung-Wa Hong, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, writes about New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s new policy to permit out-of-status immigrants apply for driver’s licenses:

However critics of the plan may try to spin it, the governor is taking a tough stance. By expanding access to driver's licenses, he's ensuring that our roads are safe. A study by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety found that unlicensed drivers are almost five times more likely to be in a fatal crash than drivers with a valid license. And he's also helping law enforcement by making it easier to locate those individuals who may pose a real threat.

Spitzer's new policy will bring much-needed change. It shows the governor is brave enough to admit that tying license eligibility to immigration status has undermined the state's compelling interest in ensuring public safety.

The plan requires stringent documentation criteria for obtaining a driver's license. While more people will be able to apply for licenses, the security standards they must meet are now set higher - making a New York State driver's license one of the most secure, verifiable and tamper-proof licenses in the nation.

I wonder when drastically differing state and local immigration policies will begin to impact migration flows within the country. We’re starting to see real policy divergence, and an overstretched DHS can’t smooth over all the wrinkles.

called to serve

I’m not quite sure what’s going on with this Mormon missionary pin-up calendar. It’s often hard to tell these days (see, e.g., Donnie Davies). But it seems genuine—as in produced and distributed by active LDS, although certainly with no official church support. From the info page:

The general public is largely unaware of the selflessness and sacrifice of these missionaries. They have helped the poor, fed the hungry, built schools and homes, and provided service to many people in need.

Also, as the casual reader might miss, they proselytized ceaselessly. Selflessness and a sacrifice, yes, but let’s not forget the “missionary” part of the two-year religious mission.

the nuclear threat

Mushroom cloud
Originally uploaded by Octoferret

The U.S. has enough nuclear firepower to destroy any potential enemy many times over. This is enough to make even neighbors and allies nervous. Apparently the prospect of some of those nukes being transported across our own soil is enough to make Americans uneasy. Imagine how the rest of the world feels!

national security implications of state IDs for immigrants

Nina Bernstein of the NY Times reports on a happy development for immigrants:

New York State, home to more than 500,000 illegal immigrants, will issue driver’s licenses without regard to immigration status under a policy change announced yesterday by Gov. Eliot Spitzer.

The change rolls back rules adopted four years ago under the Pataki administration that made it difficult, if not impossible, for tens of thousands of immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses because they could not prove legal status. Under the new rules, the Department of Motor Vehicles will accept a current foreign passport as proof of identity without also requiring a valid yearlong visa or other evidence of legal immigration.

This is good news for many out-of-status immigrants who have established lives here in New York but can’t drive and have difficulty opening bank accounts, getting credit cards, or doing any number of things incidental to daily life which require a state-issued ID. The article continues:

But the new policy drew immediate fire from groups that had welcomed the Pataki administration rules as a needed crackdown on license fraud and as the kind of national security measure demanded by the Sept. 11 attacks.

Peter Gadiel, the president of 9/11 Families for a Secure America, whose son died in the World Trade Center, released a scathing statement even before the official announcement yesterday.

“Governor Spitzer will demonstrate abject stupidity and breathtaking disregard for the victims of 9/11 if he hands these powerful ID’s to people who sneak across our borders,” he wrote. “Terrorists here illegally used licenses to kill my son and thousands of others in the World Trade Center; if they do it again using New York licenses issued by this governor, the blood of the victims will be on Mr. Spitzer’s hands.”

Curious on this point, I looked and found this fact sheet (pdf) from the 9/11 Public Discourse Project, a nationwide public education campaign created by the ten members of the 9/11 Commission:

What happened in the 9/11 plot:

• The hijackers obtained 13 driver’s licenses (two of which were duplicates) and 21 USA or state-issued identification cards (usually used for showing residence in the U.S. or a state).

• The driver’s licenses themselves were all legal, that is, they were not forged. But they were not all legally obtained. Seven hijackers used fraudulent means (false statements of residency) to acquire legitimate identifications in Virginia.

• Their fraud in obtaining driver’s licenses did not arise from them being undocumented aliens. All the hijackers entered the United States with proper immigration documents, but several had committed fraudulent acts to get them.

• One hijacker who obtained a driver’s license when he was in status was out of status on 9/11. Another hijacker whose documents clearly showed that he was out of status and had overstayed his 30-day visitor’s visa did not seek or obtain a driver’s license. He used his passport to prove identification and board the aircraft.

In the fact sheet, the Commission went on say that it had recommended “strong federal standards for the issuance of birth certificates and other sources of identification, such as driver’s licenses,” but pointedly

did not make any recommendations to state governments about which individuals should or should not be issued a driver’s license. . . . Specifically, we did not make any recommendation about licenses for undocumented aliens. That issue did not arise in our investigation, as all hijackers entered the United States with documentation (often fraudulent) that appeared lawful to immigration inspectors. They were therefore “legal immigrants” at the time they received their driver’s licenses.

So the 9/11 Commission disagreed with Mr. Gadiel's position. The National Immigration Law Center, an immigrants’ rights group, has this to add (from a 2005 fact sheet—pdf):

National security experts make clear that imposing immigration status–based restrictions on who can obtain a driver’s license actually undermines national security.1

a. Immigration status–based restrictions will create a larger “haystack” in which terrorists can hide. Effective counterterrorism strategy is based on sorting potential terrorists out from the general population so that security resources can be focused on this smaller pool of suspects. The fewer the people who are identified through the licensing process, the larger the population of unidentified people that law enforcement must sort through.

b. Immigration status–based restrictions will increase the incentive for noncitizens to buy fraudulent documents on the black market.

1. See statement released by the Center for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology Policy on Dec. 17, 2004, at http://releases.usnewswire.com/printing.asp?id=40902 [Ed. note: here is the correct link: http://www.alien-id.info/]

. . .

As stated in a fact sheet created by the 9/11 Public Discourse Project, which is a public education campaign created by members of the 9/11 Commission, immigration status–based driver’s license restrictions would not have prevented the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. All of the hijackers who committed the attacks were in the United States lawfully when they were issued the driver’s licenses they were found to have obtained.2

♦ The fraud the 9/11 hijackers committed in obtaining their licenses did not arise from the fact that they were undocumented immigrants. Some of them obtained licenses by submitting false affidavits stating that they were residents of the state that issued the licenses, or on their applications they provided a hotel address as their residence address.

♦ In fact, state driver’s license records provided critical information about where the hijackers had traveled and stayed in the U.S.

♦ Unlike the majority of immigrants who work hard at low-wage jobs, sophisticated terrorists have the resources to travel. They aren’t deterred by lawful presence restrictions but can use their foreign passports to prove identity for almost any purpose, and they have access to technology to produce fake identity documents.

2 For a copy of the fact sheet, see www.nilc.org/immspbs/DLs/PDPfactsheet_DLs_9-11&intel_reform.pdf.

Much of the anti-immigrant position rests on purported national security grounds, but upon closer inspection, the real targets are usually low-income Latin American immigrants like this Peruvian quoted in the Times article:

One member of the group, who would identify himself only as Cesar, an immigrant from Peru, said he had been afraid of driving without authorization and had had to depend on friends to drive him to work. “Now, thank God, I won’t have this difficulty in my life,” he said.

work, save, build a house

Henry at Crooked Timber quotes Patrick Deneen:

[T]he combination of local economies, nearby productive farmland outside every town, viable public transportation and widespread use of alternative energies points to a culture that has never abandoned sustainable communities in the way that America willfully and woefully has done over the past fifty years. You can also get some sense why there is even resentment here toward America’s wastefulness: the Europeans pay higher prices for everything in an effort to use less, and whatever “give” there is in the worldwide production of resources is a kind of unintended sacrificial gift that many Europeans are making so that America can continue its energy gluttony. That said, the last laugh will be theirs, I think, when our civilization corrodes with increasingly worthless suburban housing tracts, our incalculable debt, and our inability to finance the American way of life. … Here’s something funny: my German father-in-law – no friend of big government, and about as anti-60s one could find – describes this way of life (including the solar panels, etc.) as conservative. And what could be more conservative than the Swabian motto – “schafe, spare, Häusle baue” (work, save, build a house)?

I’m reminded of my skinflint landlord in Rome, who drank $2/bottle wine, recycled diligently, and told me I ate spaghetti like a dog. I remember the horror in his eyes when I brought Chef-Boyardee ravioli from the embassy commissary into the apartment. He wasn’t particularly religious. But traditional, conservative? Certainly.

there's no crying in court!

Nina Bernstein at the NY Times reports today:

A New York immigration judge who rebuked a Chinese man for weeping during his asylum hearing has been rebuked herself by a federal appeals court that took the rare step of ordering her off the case.

In a decision issued on Friday, a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Manhattan, ruled that the judge, Noel A. Ferris, had mischaracterized the evidence and the demeanor of the asylum seeker when she ruled his testimony not credible.

The man, Jian Zhong Sun, testified at his asylum hearing in 2004 that the authorities in China had forced his wife to get an abortion in her first pregnancy, and that he had been beaten and threatened with sterilization during her second pregnancy in 1993, causing him to flee to the United States before his daughter was born.

The court found that Judge Ferris’s decision to deny Mr. Sun’s claim for asylum was “not supported by substantial evidence.”

The court also found “most troubling” Judge Ferris’s “note for the record” that the petitioner’s emotional reaction to questions about his daughter was “way out of proportion.”

Asked about his tears at the asylum hearing, Mr. Sun, a restaurant worker, had said, “I’m crying because I have not seen my daughter after 11 years.”

A little later, when Mr. Sun wept again as he answered questions about the forced abortion, Judge Ferris interrupted the hearing, complaining on the record of “the respondent’s disproportionate behavior in this courtroom.”

The Second Circuit vacated the lower Board of Immigration Appeals’ affirmation of the immigration judge’s decision and remanded the case to a different IJ. The court was not kind in its description (pdf) of the IJ’s mistakes:

The IJ’s decision, which was speculative and conjectural, was not supported by substantial evidence. Without any basis in the record for doing so, the IJ hypothesized an economic motive for Sun’s departure from China and grounded her conclusion on conjecture. The IJ’s findings are a product of the IJ’s own beliefs about what is and is not plausible in China, without any record support for these conclusions. These findings are based on improper assumptions. For example, the IJ determined that it was implausible that Sun’s wife would be allowed to give birth while her husband was a fugitive from justice, despite being in possession of the requisite approval of the family planning office. Also, the IJ believed, on no basis other than her personal views, that the letter from Sun’s wife failed to demonstrate sufficient concern for his well-being, in a manner that allegedly undermined his claims of having been beaten in China. This is not substantial evidence that provides adequate support for an adverse credibility determination.

The rest of the decision reads in a similar vein, challenging the judge’s inappropriately strict importation of the Federal Rules of Evidence into the asylum process when “asylum applicants can not always reasonably be expected to have an authenticated document from an alleged persecutor.” In other words, police officers who beat, threaten, and torture an asylum applicant are sometimes reluctant to provide the victim with a signed affidavit describing their actions.

The Times article continues:

The appeals court generally defers to an immigration judge’s assessment of a petitioner’s demeanor, the three-judge panel noted.

But in this case, it said, “a credibility finding rooted in flawed reasoning cannot stand.” Besides rejecting the judge’s decision as “speculative and conjectural,” and faulting her exclusion of important documents in the case, it said her comments and her conduct raised doubts about the fairness and reliability of the record, requiring that another immigration judge hear Mr. Sun’s case.

Immigration lawyers in New York said they could recall no other case of such a decision except for Jeffrey S. Chase, another immigration judge in New York City, who was relieved of court duties in March and assigned to a desk job after he was repeatedly rebuked by federal appeals judges for his hostile questioning of asylum seekers.

Judge Ferris, 56, an immigration judge since 1994, has a distinguished legal background.

She has a track record of granting asylum in nearly half the cases she handles, but she is also known among courtroom veterans for displays of anger and impatience. Theodore N. Cox, Mr. Sun’s appeals lawyer, said several more appeals seeking review of Judge Ferris’s hostile commentary from the bench were “in the pipeline.”

. . .

A transcript of Mr. Sun’s hearing shows that Judge Ferris repeatedly faulted him for responding “Sorry,” “O.K.” and “Yeah” in English rather than speaking only in Chinese, and threatened that he would lose his case if he hesitated in his answers.

. . .

Even Judge Ferris’s supporters in New York acknowledge that she has been known for reducing people in her court to tears — not only petitioners, but lawyers, translators and clerks. But they say her anger is often directed at lawyers who are not prepared or interpreters who fail to translate properly, and that she has become more civil in the last year or two.

It would be nice if immigration judges were more civil to immigrants and their representatives. But the real problem is not the rudeness of judges—in any field, lawyers can be brash and judges can be bullies. The real problem is the atmosphere of impunity which allows both abusive behavior from judges and near-complete discretion in determining outcomes.

As the Times article explains:

The appeals courts have been overwhelmed with asylum cases since the Bush administration curtailed an internal immigration appeals process. The federal judges have complained of a pattern of biased and incoherent decisions and bullying conduct by immigration judges, who are Justice Department employees, not part of the independent federal judiciary.

As I wrote earlier this year when Judge Chase received a similar rebuke from the Second Circuit:

As I noted here, the difference between the highest and lowest asylum denial rates among New York judges from 2000-2005 was 86 percentage points. Some asylum claims, no matter how strong on the merits, have virtually no chance of approval simply because of the judge who happens to be assigned to the case. And advocates of a stricter asylum system can’t be happy with the immigration judges who approve 80 or 90 percent of their cases. Pinning the blame on Judge Chase for acting uncivilly in his courtroom only distracts from the greater obscenity of a system with these outcomes.

The same could be said of Judge Ferris. The immigration courts are underfunded and overstretched. In an asylum proceeding I once observed in New York, the judge dryly commented that he would have his “crack legal staff” draft a decision in the case. There are over 200 immigration judges in the country, and only 45 law clerks to assist them all. This judge knew he was basically on his own to work through an average of 1,400 cases per year—at least he has a sense of humor about his work.

The Board of Immigration Review, normally the first line of appeal of an IJ’s decision, is even more swamped as a result of John Ashcroft’s purge of its liberal members, cutting the BIA’s size in half, a sort of Court-packing Scheme in reverse.

Predictably, the purge drastically reduced BIA asylum approval rates from 43% in 2001 to 13% in 2005. As a result of the vacuum created by the reductions at the BIA, along with more vigorous enforcement in the past 10-15 years, the federal courts have been swamped by immigration cases and have trouble managing their normal caseloads. Knowing that they are unlikely to be challenged either by the BIA or by federal courts, IJs operate with impunity in an area of the law which already allows great discretion.

I repeat: the immigration courts are broken and this administration is incapable of fixing them.

an appropriate degree of uncertainty

In the course of arguing that the next time we invade Iraq, we should make sure to do it right, James Dobbins writes (behind a subscription wall):

Over more than two centuries, the United States has conducted dozens of military campaigns, only two of which were in response to attacks on U.S. soil. This record should leave few in doubt that the United States will employ force to protect itself, its friends, and its interests without necessarily waiting to be struck first. To enshrine this principle in publicly proclaimed national doctrine, however, only makes any subsequent resort to force more controversial and hinders the process of attracting allies and securing international sanction for such actions; other nations will never be prepared to exempt the United States from the internationally recognized restraints on the unprovoked use of force. This international resistance to declared U.S. policy was clearly on display when the decision was made to attack Iraq soon after the Bush administration formally adopted preemption as the cornerstone of its new national security strategy. Washington therefore needs to drop “preemption” from the lexicon of its declared national security policy (as the Bush administration has already begun to do) while leaving an appropriate degree of uncertainty in the minds of any potential foes about how the United States might respond to a mounting threat.

Shorter James Dobbins: Do it, just don’t talk about it. Ix-nay on the ee-emption-pray. Shhh, I told her if she is quiet until after Jeopardy is over, she can have a C-O-O-K-I-E.

This plan is foolproof.

the company you keep

nicolawells blogs about a restrictionist event planned in Alabama:

A Ku Klux Klan chapter in Athens, Alabama is planning an anti-immigration rally in front of the Athens townhall this Saturday.

The Klan is not marching side-by-side with Mexican lettuce pickers and Guatemalan housekeepers. They have picked sides in the immigration debate, and it’s the “illegal means illegal” side. This should tell us something.

thank you, New York Times . . .

. . . for breaking my daily habit of reading your opinion columnists by putting them behind the paywall two years ago. I missed them at first—especially Nick Kristoff’s reliably internationalist views—but got over that quickly. Now I’m glad to be untethered from the narrow foreign policy spectrum of establishment, exceptionalist sycophancy exhibited in the short distance from Brooks to Friedman.

Don’t worry, I won’t be back now that I can read them for free again. Going cold turkey can be the most effective way to kick a nasty habit—it was for me.

keeping count

Over the weekend, the Times reported:

Pima County, which includes the Tucson area, is one of the busiest areas for illegal crossings along the 2,000-mile border. The medical examiner’s office handled 177 deaths of border crossers in the first eight months of this year, compared with 139 over the same period last year and 157 in 2005, the year the most such deaths were registered.

The death of Ms. Martínez in July illustrates a primary reason that immigration scholars, the Border Patrol and government officials in the United States and Mexico believe people continue dying at such high rates: As they increasingly avoid heavily patrolled urban areas, they cross with little or no knowledge of the desert, whose heat, insects, wildlife and rugged terrain make it some of the most inhospitable terrain on the planet.

. . .

The Government Accountability Office, in a report last year that analyzed Border Patrol statistics, said the annual number of reported deaths of border crossers doubled to 472 between 1995 and 2005, with the majority of those deaths in the desert near Tucson.

The report suggested the agency has undercounted deaths because of inconsistent classification.

That sounds familiar. One might suspect that the U.S. government doesn't consider all life as being of equal value, if one didn't know that the U.S. is always a force for good in the world. Undercounting (or simply not counting) deaths is how this government promotes a culture of life--if the government doesn't report a death, it may or may not have really happened. The GAO needs to get on board with the administration line if we're going to keep Mexican terrorists from bringing down American democracy and keep our troops in Iraq for the next 20 years.

what the kids are reading these days

My niece is a bookworm.

girl you know it's true

Unparodiable.

don't get personal

In a post today discussing HRC and OHB's relative foreign policy strength, Kevin Drum wrote:

Judgment and temperament are the most important attributes in foreign affairs, not experience

This seems wrongheaded. Sound policy views derived from solid principles are the most important attributes in foreign affairs, just as they are in domestic policy. When discussing the positions of the candidates on the health care plans they have or haven’t put forward, the analysts worth listening to don’t talk about whether or not Clinton has enough experience, whether her experience in this area is a liability or an asset, or whether her judgment and temperament will produce a sound health care plan or a flawed one. They talk about whether the actual policies she proposes are likely to succeed or likely to fail, who will benefit from those policies and who will pay for them, and how they stack up against concrete policies announced by other candidates. They evaluate the candidates’ stated policies in terms of principles: utility, rights, and values. To a large extent, the policies are divorced from the person, and the best candidate is only the sum total of the best policies.

This is often not how the media evaluates candidates, and critics of media political coverage like Atrios and Eric Boehlert have argued persuasively that this has harmed American democracy.

But even otherwise sensible people like Kevin Drum treat foreign policy differently for some reason. When it comes to foreign policy, suddenly the watchwords are “experience,” “judgment,” and “character.” Reagan and Truman had “it,” whatever “it” is; Carter and Nixon didn’t.

As it turns out, “it” usually means “unwarranted belligerence towards outsiders and unquestioning nationalistic fervor.”

Reagan’s policies led directly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in Central America. Truman used nuclear weapons against innocent civilians and embroiled the country in the Korean quagmire.

Carter helped mainstream human rights and signed the Camp David Accords. Nixon defused needless hostility between the U.S. and China, further isolating the Soviet Union and laying the groundwork for China to become a major trading partner with the U.S.

Carter and Nixon had their screw-ups as well, especially Nixon, but the idea that Reagan and Truman were foreign policy maestros and Carter and Nixon masters of disaster is largely a product of this mindless, personality-based evaluation of foreign policy. This approach is problematic. Good policies deserve support. Bad policies deserve condemnation. If particular leaders (George-cough-cough Bush-cough-cough) espouse a large number of bad policies (invading Iraq, building up the military, running roughshod over international trade rules, dissing foreign leaders, denying global warming) and only a few good policies (liberalizing immigration, increasing aid to Africa), then they should not be entrusted with managing foreign policy. Choosing leaders based on foreign policy should be an inductive process, not a deductive one. If candidates don’t have actual foreign policy experience, they should be judged based on what they have said about policies others have enacted and what actions they propose to take if elected. The existing narrative frame for evaluating candidates is flawed and counterproductive, and leads to unhelpful adjectives like “Reaganesque” or “Trumanesque.”

This is typically because foreign policy is complicated and most people don’t know much about it. But the same could be said of tax policy or health care policy, yet debates on those issues are normally less retarded than what we’re treated to on foreign policy.

immigration after 9/11

Immigration policy has been impacted in far-reaching ways by the 9/11 attacks. Here is one, from Raha Jorjani of UC Davis:

I received a disturbing call from an ICE detainee in Florence, Arizona this afternoon, September 7, 2007. He informed me, and I’ve confirmed, that approximately two days ago, roughly 60 men were transferred from Florence Service Processing Center to the Pinal County Jail facility with which ICE holds a new contract for detainee bed space. Over half of those men are on hunger strike as a result of the conditions they have been subject to as a result of the transfer.

According to the individual I spoke to, the detainees were promised that their transfer to the Pinal County Jail facility would not result in any loss of rights or privileges, however they encountered a thoroughly different reality upon arrival. The account has been that the new transferees have been on 23 hour lock down in 2-man cells, and that there is no outside recreation area. There have also been very serious complaints about food and water quality. Additionally, Pinal County Jail carries out family visitation in the form of video conferencing. Some who had been ordered deported had planned family visits during which they believed they would have contact visits for the last time with their loved ones. That is no longer an option as a result of this transfer. Detainees were woken up in the early hours of the morning and many were not allowed to gather their personal property. Many were forced to leave behind legal documents relating to their ongoing cases.

Many seem to feel that as a result of their detention by ICE in a non-ICE facility, they are neither subject to compliance with the ICE standards nor to privileges available to county inmates. This appears to leave detainees in a peculiar legal limbo with regards to conditions of their confinement.

This isn’t viewed as news by the media since treatment of noncitizen prisoners is routinely abusive and of little concern to most Americans. Immigrant detainees are not covered by many due process rights that Americans take for granted and may be moved from facility to facility around the country without notice in order to make legal representation as difficult as possible.

This is the face of post-September 11 America.

just in time for your mid-September family vacation . . .

From ImmigrationProf Blog:

Before the summer, a passport crunch had U.S. citizens in a tizzy as summer vacations were put at risk. A Congress unable to pass immigration reform passed the Passport Backlog Reduction Act. The Department of State recently issued a media note that the DOS has restored passport service to the standard six to eight week processing time for routine passport applications, and no more than three weeks for expedited service.

three makes a trend

Going to John Cole again, I find the heartwrenching story of a member of a Navy SEAL team in Afghanistan in 2005 who came across some Afghan goatherders, let them go instead of killing them on the spot, and then were ambushed by the Taliban, presumably because of a tip-off by the goatherders. In retrospect, he wishes his team had murdered the goatherders, and is angry at the American left for forcing his hand at the crucial moment.

“Look at me right now in my story,” Mr. Luttrell writes. “Helpless, tortured, shot, blown up, my best buddies all dead, and all because we were afraid of the liberals back home, afraid to do what was necessary to save our own lives. Afraid of American civilian lawyers. I have only one piece of advice for what it’s worth: If you don’t want to get into a war where things go wrong, where the wrong people sometimes get killed, where innocent people sometimes have to die, then stay the hell out of it in the first place.”

Mr. Luttrell is correct. There was no good reason for us to go there in the first place. We should have stayed the hell out, then many innocent people would not have died and he would not have been tortured, shot, and blown up.

in which I link to John Cole a second time

It appears now that the real issue for the New Haven officials is money:

The cost of the public safety response to Thursday’s “white powder” scare that closed the Ikea store on Sargent Drive for four hours was more than $50,000, a city spokeswoman said Monday.

The incident drew dozens of New Haven and state police officers, firefighters, health department workers, FBI agents and other personnel from New Haven and neighboring communities, as well as special equipment from the U.S. Postal Service’s Wallingford processing center, which authorities say is the only place in the state that has such equipment.

It prompted the evacuation of Ikea at about 5 p.m. and kept it closed until the next morning — but the “white powder” turned out to be flour used to mark a running trail by local members of the international Hash House Harriers running club.

The group holds runs with similar trails all over the world, including New York City, Washington, D.C., and Baghdad.

“There’s not an exact number yet” for the total cost of the response “but we’re looking at upwards of $50,000,” said Jessica Mayorga, spokeswoman for the Police Department and Mayor John DeStefano Jr.

On Friday, Mayorga said officials were inclined to seek restitution from the two “hashers” who were charged with a felony in the case. She said after a meeting Monday on the case that no determination was made on whether to seek restitution.

The article goes on to point out that the felony the two are charged with requires someone to intentionally place something hazardous in a public place, and since this is clearly not the case, it is hard to conclude anything other than that the two were charged with felonies to help shake them down for cash to “recoup” the losses of the government.

It is disgusting. Taxpayers fund the government, fund all of these activities and officials, and then, when they misuse them, they charge folks with a felony to try to get more money. The mafia has more shame.

And much less power.

Link.

a jury of your peeps

Phew, I am glad we are finally done with that nasty Abu Ghraib business. It looks as though every responsible officer in the case has been let off the hook. Hurrah!

A military jury acquitted an Army officer on Tuesday of charges that he failed to properly train and supervise enlisted soldiers involved in detainee interrogations in 2003 at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where prisoners were subjected to brutal treatment.

In the court-martial at Fort Meade, Md., the jury of nine Army colonels and a brigadier general found the officer, Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, guilty of only one lesser offense, that of disobeying an order to refrain from discussing the case.

Colonel Jordan, 51, was the only officer to stand trial on charges related to the detainee-abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, which led to prolonged investigations and charges against several soldiers.

Colonel Jordan’s acquittal on most charges means that no officers have been found criminally responsible for the abuses at the prison.

. . .

John Sifton, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, said the verdict was “a disappointment but not a surprise,” given the meager case he said prosecutors presented to the jury of senior officers. Mr. Sifton said prosecutors completely failed to muster evidence, including military case law, to show that Colonel Jordan, even if he did not participate in or know about abuses, was, as a senior officer at Abu Ghraib, responsible for abuses that occurred there.

“The prosecutors did not seem to understand the concept of command responsibility as a legal issue,” Mr. Sifton said, adding that other military officers, not just Colonel Jordan, should have been brought to trial for their roles in commanding detention operations in which detainees were abused.

In other news, a jury composed of Hank Greenberg, Bernie Ebbers, Dick Grasso, and Dennis Kozlowski agreed to grant Jeff Skilling early parole for good behavior and time served. Justice is served! Sweet, tasty justice . . .

partisan accelerator

Henry from Crooked Timber blogs about how partisan divergence in opinion on global warming is accelerating:

One bit of the Snyder, Shapiro and Bloch-Elkon paper that I linked to last week was overshadowed by the discussion of the Iraq war. They report survey evidence saying that:

Since September 11, there is not only a wider gap between Republicans and Democrats across a broad range of foreign policy issues, but their views have moved in opposite directions in response to new information. In 1998, 31 percent of Republicans believed that the planet was warming, but by 2006 only 26% did, whereas Democrats increased from 39 to 46% and Independents from 31 to 45%.

To my mind this suggests some interesting connections between new information, the dynamics of opinion change and partisanship. This same period saw an unmistakable convergence of scientific opinion, as many scientists who had previously been agnostic or skeptical came to accept mounting evidence that climate change was occurring. It also saw a clear convergence between Democratic voters and independents. But Republicans, if anything, would appear to have become less likely to believe strongly that climate change was happening during the same period. Either they weren’t getting the same information as scientists, Democrats and independents, or they were interpreting this information in different ways. My best guess (and I am not a public opinion specialist by any stretch of the imagination) is that two things are going on here. First, some Republicans are being exposed to different information than other voters, through talk radio, targeted mailings, frothing-at-the-mouth blogs and other media. Second, even those Republicans who aren’t (or who are only minimally exposed to this information) are increasingly coming to treat global warming as a partisan issue, where conceding that it is happening is in some sense giving ground to ‘the other side.’ [footnotes omitted]

I don’t think these can be treated as separate issues. Someone with a particular perspective shaped by unique surroundings, upbringing, life experiences, and choices will process a given bit of information differently than someone else with an entirely different perspective. People prioritize sources of information based on their existing perspectives. Sources of news and commentary don’t provide facts so much as narratives. So Republicans are both being exposed to different information than other voters and treating global warming as a partisan issue. So are Democrats; so am I, so are you. The process is circular and self-perpetuating. The filtered information and biased processor are two sides of the same coin. This is far from revolutionary.

But Republican intransigence on global warming is as the mewing of a small kitten compared to this:

[The Sunni insurgents] begin from a deep belief that they are the ones who defeated the United States (and they do believe that they are winning), and that they are a majority in Iraq (a few weeks ago I think I wrote about a statement by the head of the Islamic Army of Iraq which claimed that Sunnis made up 60% of Iraq's population). They also believe that the current Iraqi state and government are thoroughly controlled by Iran, and that the Shia are determined to ethnically cleanse them from (at least) Baghdad.

[Mark Lynch via Eric Martin]

One interesting question is: How do certain groups of people get so out of whack with broader society? Another is: What normally keeps groups from collectively going off the deep end like this? How are holdout narratives such as these (e.g., apartheid, anti-Semitism, divine right of kings) finally deconstructed and invalidated?

my first link to John Cole

How many Americans have died due to terrorist attacks in this country in the last ten years?

Two thousand, seven hundred and forty-five. All related to 9/11, save five people that were killed in the anthrax mailings. There simply have been no other attacks- nothing. Nada. Zero. Zilch. The only other thing I can think of that comes close is the DC Sniper, and I can’t even remember his cause, so I am hesistant to call him a terrorist.

Again. 2745 dead. That is it. What is the US population?

According to the census, 302,703,731.

So 2745 out of 302,703,731 in the past ten years have died in terrorist attacks, and we are getting our knickers in a twist about an arrow made of flour in the IKEA parking lot?

It is absurd. You are safe. I am safe. This nation is safe. Quit being such a damned pussy. All of you.

Link.

regular joes

Jim Henley ponders the persistent attraction of war:

War is beguiling. Even those of us who have spent years opposing this war, and the next one, are testament to this. We could be writing every day about tax policy or drug laws or health care policy or Lindsay Lohan. We write about war because it’s important, but also because it’s fascinating. Even as we abhor it we are mesmerized.

I'm reading now A Peace to End All Peace by David Fromkin. British commanders and politicians in WWI were at least as clueless, ineffectual, and bloodthirsty as Bush and Co. have been, and hundreds of thousands of troops died needlessly as a result of their stupidity. Contemporary public perception of who was competent and who to blame for wartime screwups was almost entirely wrong. Most striking was the unquestioned view, shared by 99% of the people in charge, that it would be in the Arabs' best interest to be ruled by Britain and that, in fact, this was what the Arabs wanted. There was never any evidence to support this view, and there’s little evidence American troops are welcome in Iraq today.

A good portion of the problems of Britain in the Middle East in WWI and of our problems today can be attributed to troop worship and the free hand given the military. Service in the military doesn't endow regular people with exceptional intelligence and judgment—perhaps the reverse is more true.

War gets disproportionate attention in part because people feel war is world-changing and historically important, so they view it and those who carry it out with a sort of sacred awe. Yes, when countries fight wars, governments are overthrown, borders redrawn, and lots of people die. But the pervasive sense one gets in discussion about the Iraq War is that each action, each decision taken in wartime is weightier and more meaningful than routine peacetime decisions. Politicians and generals use this public feeling to circumvent normal decision-making processes and insulate themselves from criticism. Not subject to normal constraints on power and often blind to inconvenient facts or contrary narratives, they make predictable errors and overestimate their capabilities. Also, they often view human beings as just so many Risk pieces on their global gameboard, to be shuffled around and sacrificed as contingencies of the moment require. Consequently, incompetence and meaningless destruction are the rule in wartime, not the exception. War, then, fills me not with a sense of awe and import, but with disgust and sadness.

Treating members of the military like regular human beings subject to the same temptations, aspirations, and obligations as the rest of us would help deflate the false religion of war and show it for what it invariably is: a bloody mess.

the ambiguity of sensation

This caught my eye today:

Using virtual reality goggles, a camera and a stick, scientists have induced out-of-body experiences — the sensation of drifting outside of one’s own body — - in healthy people, according to experiments being published in the journal Science.

When people gaze at an illusory image of themselves through the goggles and are prodded in just the right way with the stick, they feel as if they have left their bodies.

The research reveals that “the sense of having a body, of being in a bodily self,” is actually constructed from multiple sensory streams, said Matthew Botvinick, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Princeton University, an expert on body and mind who was not involved in the experiments.

Usually these sensory streams, which include vision, touch, balance and the sense of where one’s body is positioned in space, work together seamlessly, Prof. Botvinick said. But when the information coming from the sensory sources does not match up, when they are thrown out of synchrony, the sense of being embodied as a whole comes apart.

The brain, which abhors ambiguity, then forces a decision that can, as the new experiments show, involve the sense of being in a different body.

The research provides a physical explanation for phenomena usually ascribed to other-worldly influences, said Peter Brugger, a neurologist at University Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland. After severe and sudden injuries, people often report the sensation of floating over their body, looking down, hearing what is said, and then, just as suddenly, find themselves back inside their body. Out-of-body experiences have also been reported to occur during sleep paralysis, the exertion of extreme sports and intense meditation practices.

I remember one sunny afternoon as a preteen sitting in Sunday school listening rapt to my teacher recount a near death experience he’d had as a young man. He had been in some kind of accident and described in vivid detail how, while lying in the hospital bed, he left his body and temporarily entered another place, a beautiful place that must have been heaven. He was an amiable guy in his thirties, and though only 5’8” or so, could dunk the basketball, which meant that to us, he was God. Or at least God’s right hand man. We had a basketball court inside the church, that’s how seriously we took the sport. So the man had our respect.

Over the years of my indoctrination, I heard similar stories, always offered and received with a reverence and awe reserved for the most sacred topics. I always sensed, when these testimony-strengthening experiences were brought out, the familiar phrases lovingly retraced like a pencil scratching the lines of a name on the back of a pew, that we were getting to the core of faith, to the real nub of things. What set us apart, what gave us the hope and optimism that others lacked, was our knowledge of the hereafter. Knowledge that the future was good, that it stretched out like the ocean away from the limited scope of our present sight, and that each of us would be there in person to see it unfold.

The out-of-body stories were a source of comfort to me; they suggested that I, ever resistant to change, could continue on the path upon which I had been set. They suggested that all I had been taught, the ancient stories and the rules around which I structured my life, cohered into something powerful, real, and essential.

I remember in high school my mother, a clinical psychologist, talking about unwelcome doubts that had intruded on her faith, doubts spawned by her neuropsych studies. Questions about things I took for granted like consciousness, emotion, and agency. What if fundamentals like love or faith were dependent on chemical reactions in our brains, wholly contingent on the vagaries of our impermanent bodies? I thought her weak and immature at the time. She must have lacked discipline to have entertained those misgivings, or her mental clarity must have temporarily failed.

A couple years afterwards, I left the church. It’s been many years since then. Still I find that articles like the one excerpted above exert a pull on me; I feel the same fascination that I felt in Sunday school years ago. I feel this time, though, not as if routine things have been enshrouded with mystery, but as if previously obscure matters have become clearer.

I am reminded of the words of LDS authority Bruce McConkie in a different context:

We spoke with a limited understanding and without the light and knowledge that now has come into the world.

your daily imponderable

This deserves to be more widely disseminated:

An article in the Post asks if the War on Drugs has undermined the War on Terror. This question seems to me to be as fully engaged with reality as the question of whether or not a man who has self-amputated both arms with a band saw has undermined his ability to fly by flapping them.

Chew on that for awhile and see if you have any teeth left!

GiuliRomney Attacks!

Rudy has the spine of a mollusk and the consistency of warm jello salad, improbably tempered by a Chihuahuan streak of toothless viciousness. Romney is a robotic opportunist who promises to leave no voting bloc unpandered. Together, they are: GiuliRomney, cybernetic frontrunner in the race for the GOP nomination!
(I credit my wife with this disturbing formulation.)

ImmigrationProf Blog watches with cynical amusement as each tries to out-hate the other:

On August 9, we reported that Republican Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney had accused fellow Republican Rudy Guiliani of being "soft" on immigration when he was mayor of New York, a cruelly ironic accusation given that Romney stands accused of employing undocumented workers at his home in Massachusetts. As they say, for every action, there is a reaction. CNN now reports that Giuliani promised today to stop the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States by closely tracking visitors to the country and beefing up border security.

This is one of the most egregious of Rudy’s many flipperoos. I haven’t paid much attention to Rudy, since it’s been hard to take him seriously as a potential Republican candidate, given his lengthy, well-documented leadership of one of the most liberal cities in the country. I stand by that assessment, but he’s still there in the race, acting crazy and walking back, one by one, each policy stance he once held in public office.

When Giuliani was attacked by Romney a week or two ago about his history of support for out-of-status immigrants in New York City, his campaign avoided the issue entirely, instead trying for a NYPost headline with a snarky takedown:

Campaign communications director Katie Levinson said, "I am not even sure we should weigh in on this, given Mitt Romney may change his mind later today about it. Mitt Romney is as wrong about Mayor Giuliani's position on illegal immigration as he was when he last mischaracterized the mayor's record and later had to apologize. New York is the safest large city in America since Mayor Giuliani turned it around -- it is not a haven for illegality of any kind. The mayor's record speaks for itself."

Elsewhere in the article, ABC gave the following bit of context:

In 1996, Giuliani compared "the anti-immigration issue that's now sweeping the country" to "the Chinese Exclusionary Act, or the Know-Nothing movement -- these were movements that encouraged Americans to fear foreigners, to fear something that is different and to stop immigration."

That same year he sued the federal government for new provisions in federal immigration laws that would encourage government employees to turn in illegal immigrants seeking benefits from the city.

Romney has the knives out on this issue since it’s one he’s vulnerable on himself:

For 10 years, Romney used the services of a landscaping company for his Belmont, Mass., estate that hired illegal workers from Guatemala, workers who told the Boston Globe that Romney never inquired about their legal status.

While Romney was governor, the commonwealth of Massachusetts became one of the six states with the largest growth in unauthorized migrant population, from 2002 to 2004, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, with somewhere between 200,000-250,000 new illegal immigrants. Romney was governor from January 2003 until 2007.

Romney in the past voiced support for immigration reform bills far more liberal than the 2007 bill.

The maddening beauty of our primary system is that, even as public opinion moves decisively to the left (or at least as decisively as a herd of black angus moves in response to a few border collies snapping at their tails), the leading candidates for the Republican nomination are driven to renounce previously-held reasonable positions and aspire to new heights of frenzied conservatism by an increasingly isolated “crazy 27%” , thereby ensuring their eventual defeat in the general election. But that still won't necessarily give us a sane, humane immigration bill.

what, nauseous?

Obama wants to remind Democrats of the feeling they get when they're at a ball game and the national anthem is played . . .

Link.

charity and the market

I’d rather give my money to CARE than to the government, which would rather give taxpayer money to corporate farmers than to poor people:

CARE, one of the world’s biggest charities, is walking away from some $45 million a year in federal financing, saying American food aid is not only plagued with inefficiencies, but also may hurt some of the very poor people it aims to help.

CARE’s decision is focused on the practice of selling tons of often heavily subsidized American farm products in African countries that in some cases, it says, compete with the crops of struggling local farmers.

The charity says it will phase out its use of the practice by 2009. But it has already deeply divided the world of food aid and has spurred growing criticism of the practice as Congress considers a new farm bill.

Here we see the crucial text: the farm bill. As with the perennial energy bill, these words should alert the careful reader that the con is on.

. . . Peter J. Matlon, a Nairobi-based agricultural economist and a managing director of the Rockefeller Foundation, said in an interview that converting American commodities into cash for development was a case of “the tail wagging the dog,” with domestic farm policies in the United States shaping hunger-fighting methods abroad.

. . .

The Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan, investigative arm of Congress, also concluded this year that the system was “inherently inefficient.” CARE and Catholic Relief Services — who rank first and second in money raised through the current system — say they recover only 70 to 80 percent of what the United States paid for the commodities and shipping.

CARE thinks traditional forms of charity are unsustainable, and works to promote development instead. This is better for everyone involved. Teaching a man to fish and all that.

One of those programs could be seen in action one recent afternoon in the Kenyan village of Poche. CARE has helped local women bypass local middlemen to sell pineapples at better prices in Nairobi’s big supermarkets, 10 hours away by road.

. . .

CARE’s idea is that a profitable business is more likely than a charitable venture to survive when foreign aid runs out.

“What’s happened to humanitarian organizations over the years is that a lot of us have become contractors on behalf of the government,” said Mr. Odo of CARE. “That’s sad but true. It compromised our ability to speak up when things went wrong.”

This story exposes the falseness of the “free market” story the U.S. likes to tell about itself. Rather than funding sustainable ventures with equals, the government would prefer to shovel money at its corporate farmers to provide handouts to poor nations that may do more harm than good. The spigot from U.S. taxpayers to corporations is always open full, even when the government tells us we are giving to the needy. This corporate giveaway is shrouded in the following lie: this is the market at its finest, allowing us to live well enough to give freely. Everyone wins.

Running our foreign policy on the dual principles of militarism and charity poisons our country and those we interact with. It is reminiscent of a feudal lord tossing a few alms to his peasants every Christmas, then exploiting/ignoring them the rest of the year. This approach is unsustainable in a world where people in rising nations are not content to live second-best lives.

hands off Zimbabwe!

mugabe mansion
Originally uploaded by tos1010

By all accounts, Mugabe has run Zimbabwe into the ground. Anyone who could leave the country has already done so—the rest are left to suffer and wait for something better.

Which is why it pisses me off to periodically see my corner of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, plastered with posters of Mugabe’s ugly mug and slogans like “Hands Off, Bush and Blair” or “Mugabe is Right!” I don’t know if this misguided mini-movement is the result of stubborn, head-in-the-sand racial politics or if it’s actually sponsored by the government of Zimbabwe.

A bit of Googling leads me to this:

“Mugabe is right!” and “Bush and Blair are wrong!” were two slogans chanted repeatedly during a march in Harlem, N.Y., on April 14 to commemorate the 27th anniversary of the liberation of the southern Africa country of Zimbabwe from British colonialism in 1980. The Brooklyn-based December 12th Movement and Friends of Zimbabwe initiated the march, which was supported by other groups.

The demonstration was more than just a celebration of independence. It also served as an occasion to defend Zimbabwe’s sovereignty and its president, Robert Mugabe, from ongoing threats by U.S. and British imperialism.

Now that’s just retarded. And this made me chuckle:

March organizers also linked the land issue in Zimbabwe to the ongoing crisis of massive gentrification in Harlem caused by big real estate developers who want to turn what was once referred to as the “capital of Black America” into a haven for affluent whites.

So in this analogy, Mugabe’s forcible land redistribution equals the developers putting up fancy condos in poor areas? Or do the affluent white gentrifiers correspond to Mugabe razing the shantytowns and displacing an already impoverished people while he lives in luxury? I need someone to spell this out for me, ‘cause I don’t get it.

As the resident gentrifier on my block, next time I see those posters on the corner, it’s my duty to tear that shit down. Or at least sharpie a Hitler mustache on Mugabe.

chocolate cheese!

The Times has been flogging the evils of farm subsidies as long as I’ve been reading the paper, for at least the last ten years. This has had no measurable effect on farm policy. But they keep trying—the latest installment explores the success New Zealand, an agriculture-based economy, has had by eliminating its farm subsidies.

“They went cold turkey and in the process it was very rough on their farming economy,” said Ray Goldberg, a retired professor of agriculture and business at Harvard Business School. “But they came out healthier and stronger. They proved it could be done.”

. . .

Traditional subsidies, economists contend, generally encourage inefficient farmers to grow unprofitable crops far beyond what consumers actually need, secure in the knowledge that the government will help protect them from loss. And they make it much harder for farmers in poor countries to compete on a level playing field against coddled farmers in the West. Removing subsidies, the argument goes, liberates the best farmers anywhere in the world to produce what people really want.

“When you’re not going to get paid for what the market doesn’t want, you have to get off your backside and find out what they want,” said Charlie Pedersen, who, when he is not raising sheep and beef cattle on his farm north of the capital, Wellington, is president of Federated Farmers of New Zealand.

So by eliminating subsidies, you save consumers money and make your farmers more efficient and competitive. What's not to like? Why don't we do something similar? Well, because of the farm lobby.

If the United States were to pursue a New Zealand-type strategy, [farm lobbyist] Mr. Buis argued, large corporate entities would end up controlling most farms as smaller farmers went into bankruptcy. “Those people are going to get financially ruined,” he said.

A favorite trick of corporate farmers is to use small farmers as poster children to keep the subsidies flowing, while most of the subsidies end up going to the mega-farms. And New Zealand's approach could never work here, farm lobbyists are eager to point out.

“There’s a lot of differences between New Zealand and the United States," Tom Buis, president of the National Farmers Union in Washington, said in a telephone interview. “They are almost completely export oriented, and that’s quite the reverse of the U.S.”

For the life of me, I can't figure out what he is saying here.

Perhaps the reason subsidies are essential in the U.S. is because farming is such a crucial part of the overall economy? Well, not exactly . . .

[F]arming [in New Zealand] is not a small part of the economy as it is in the United States; it is the nation’s largest, most important sector.

“It was wacko,” said John Yeabsley, a former trade official who is now an economist at the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research in Wellington. “Who’s going to pay for the subsidies?”

Farmers eventually realized that it was them. They responded to their higher tax burden by maximizing their subsidies. “The whole thing,” Mr. Wooding said, “was a game to try to get as much government money as possible.”

By the early 1980s, the cost of this system had created a balance of payments crisis for the nation.

For New Zealand, the subsidies meant inevitable bankruptcy and poverty. For us, it just means we pay extra for milk and eggs to ensure that the teenage children of corporate agriculture executives can drive Hummers to high school. Farm subsidies put the lie to the myth of the Western farmer as a ruggedly independent character who takes handouts from nobody. The system is set up so that small farmers have to line up, cap in hand, for the federal alms. Small farmers can run their farms with ruthless efficiency, but even with federal subsidies, they may only barely break even. Without subsidies, many would run at a loss and end up selling out to subdivision developers. Who ever heard of a wealthy family farmer? They are rare birds, at least in Utah.

The story concludes:

Without government aid, New Zealand farmers have found other ways to deal with the vicissitudes of commodity markets. In 2001, dairy farmers merged two rival cooperatives to form their own purchasing and exporting cooperative, Fonterra, which also gives New Zealand pricing heft in international markets.

“I’m very happy with Fonterra,” Mr. Lumsden said. “They’ve taken the peaks and troughs out of the price in the world market.”

Fonterra also drives innovation and product development: New Zealand’s dairy farmers have ventured into new lines like antibody-rich milk for the health food and pharmaceutical markets, kosher milk and even chocolate cheese.

“What’s happened since the reforms is that you have a new type of farm emerging — a business farm,” Mr. Lumsden said. Giving up subsidies made farming harder, he conceded, but introduced the pride that comes of entrepreneurship. “It made it more enjoyable,” he said.

But the U.S. interest-group driven political model and national bias towards rural areas will ensure that no such innovations come our way. Instead, corporate megafarms will continue to suckle at Congress’s munificent teat.

thieving Times

There's a thief about. Somebody alert the authorities. Josh Marshall writes:

The Murkowski land deal story just appeared in Wednesday's Times as though by Virgin Birth. They don't seem to realize that TPMmuckraker broke this story about two weeks ago.

What's weird is that the Times reporters were apparently listening to the same Anchorage talk radio station interview Laura McGann was listening to in which Murkowski's husband, Verne Martell, admitted that Lisa Murkowski thought the deal might "come back to bite us."

Ms. Murkowski, who was appointed to the Senate in 2002 by her father, Frank Murkowski, a former senator who was then governor, was apparently aware that the land deal might draw unwelcome scrutiny. Her husband, Verne Martell, said two weeks ago in a radio interview in Alaska that “when we signed the loan, Lisa signed on it and said, ‘This might come back to bite us.’ ”

That's uncanny because that's the passage of the interview Laura transcribed in this July 23rd post.

To the folks at the Grey Lady, all we can say is, We're Glad We Could Be of Assistance.

"the press is on your side"

Bill O'Reilly is a tool. This we knew. Most lately he's been--out of ignorance or malice, or some combination of the two--spreading misinformation about the state of immigration law as it relates to gay couples. Again, nothing unexpected about this. He says that American citizens can't sponsor their foreign gay partners for a green card, but that it is no big deal since then those people can just get a green card through the "normal channels," by showing ties to the community, getting a good job, relying on professional skills, or some other horse puckey like that.

First of all, many foreign spouses have overstayed their visas and are here illegally. Normally, overstaying a visa or working without authorization from the government will prevent you from obtaining a green card down the line. However, there is an exception for spouses of U.S. citizens. A gay spouse who has overstayed his or her visa or worked without authorization receives no such protection. Our immigration laws reflect the collective decision that, if the spouse of a U.S. citizen slips up along the line, doesn't file the correct form when he should, or waits too long to renew his work permit, we are not going to ship that person off to Pakistan, Mali, Thailand, or from whencever he came. That would be heartless and cause much suffering to citizens who had the misfortune to fall in love with foreigners. But gay couples get no such treatment.

Secondly, Bill's understanding of immigration law falls far short of the level someone who holds forth about it on television to millions of viewers should have attained. Rachel Tiven, executive director of Immigration Equality, gives the example of a gay couple from Pennsylvania she knows who have been together 17 years and are raising two children together. When the foreign partner's visa expires, he's out on his ass. No problem, says Bill, he can just show "ties to the community" and other fluffandstuff that any decent hardworking immigrant can manage if they have a mind to, and presto chango, abracadabra, viola--green card!

No, Bill, no. It doesn't work that way. You can't just show that you have been here a long time and you're a hardworking individual and that people in the community will vouch for you. If it were that easy, we wouldn't have 12 million or more people in this country who the government says shouldn't be here. Immigrants who have been here for many years and find themselves in removal proceedings can sometimes apply for "cancellation of removal" based on potential hardship to a qualifying U.S. citizen relative, but if your relationship to a U.S. citizen is not recognized by the U.S. government, then that relief is not available to you.

Bill's point is doubly disingenuous, since he and others like him are working hard to make sure it is not easy for just anyone to get legal status through "the normal channels," whatever those are.

In short, what he's saying makes no sense and I have a hard time believing he doesn't know he's misleading people. That is his stock in trade.

My favorite line of his to Tiven: "The press is on your side." Such modesty--he has the number one cable news commentary show by a good margin, but he's still not managed to reach the hallowed ranks of the press. O'Reilly the underdog, always fighting for the little guy. It warms my heart.

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

married

I've not been posting much at all lately on account of me getting married last weekend. So now I am wed to a truly stellar woman. Cool!

red scare

Matt reports on the crazies:

James Fallows, reports that according to Gary Hart and Lee Hamilton, Lynn Cheney wanted to start a war with China back in the pre-9/11 era. According to Francis Fukuyama among Bill Kristol and his circle in the 90s "There was actually a deliberate search for an enemy because they felt that the Republican Party didn't do as well" in the absence of a pressing foreign threat, and the consensus was that the enemy should be China.

These are crazy people.

The “silver lining” to 9/11, if there is such a thing, is that we didn’t end up at war with China, which would have killed exponentially more people than the current war on terra. Our government was going to have a war one way or another, so better a low-level, intermittent pseudo-war (excluding Iraq, which is utterly fucked) than a major confrontation between two populous, ambitious nuclear powers.

looking over your shoulder

Andrew Sullivan puts it concisely:

Any non-citizen in this country is at risk of government detention at any time. If they can do it to citizens, they sure can to aliens.

Without citizenship, they can throw you into jail and leave you there indefinitely with no legal recourse. It happens frequently to people who’ve fled violence in their home countries, overstayed a visa, or crossed the border to work. But since, as it turns out, the reason we have a legal system that allows things like this is because most citizens are A-ok with these outcomes, it’s unlikely to change anytime soon.

more cowbell!

My neighbors decided to celebrate the fourth earlier today with a BBQ with 4 foot speakers and nonstop reggae. Somebody at the BBQ decided to grace the neighborhood for an hour or two with his improvised percussive accompaniment on a kitchen pot. It was excruciating, and I had to wonder whether Bruce Dickinson was down there egging him on ...



It's after 11:30 p.m. now, and firecrackers are still going off intermittently. Summers tend to be noisy here.

the refugee problem

There is a simple explanation for why we’ve not admitted more Iraqi refugees to the U.S., but it hadn’t even occurred to me until Jim Henley pointed it out. Letting in Iraqi refugees would seem to be a no-brainer—we liberated them from Saddam so some must be nominally pro-American, we want to win hearts and minds in Iraq, and there’s a humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Iraq for which we are largely responsible. Letting in large numbers of refugees is tantamount to admitting we’ve failed to stabilize Iraq, and so I see why the U.S. government has resisted it. Otherwise, though, this seems to be an issue both left and right could agree on, much like Darfur.

But as much as the pro-war crowd likes to draw distinctions between “good” Middle Eastern Muslims (non-Hezbollah Lebanese, Iraqi Shi’ites and Kurds, Iranian protesters, sometimes Abbas) and “bad” ones (everyone else), the fact is, they’re still Middle Eastern Muslims and for that reason not fully trusted by most Americans. Not only that, but we are collectively responsible for turning their country into a charnel house. What if some small fraction of the thousands of Iraqi refugees we allow in later become the next 9/11 hijackers? It’s a risk our government isn’t willing to take. So instead we’ll let the staunch Ameri-philes in Syria and Iran welcome with open arms Iraqi refugees with a serious grudge against the U.S. I’m sure that will work out splendidly.