Prejudice, Bigotry, and “Reasonable” Racism

As the national argument about the killing of Trayvon Martin continues, the people who sympathize with Martin’s killer keep bringing up this point: Yes, it’s racist to be suspicious of young black men for no reason beyond their youth, blackness, and manhood – but given the crime statistics, isn’t that reasonable?

Before I start addressing that question, I need to tell you that I spent nearly six years as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, which at the time (the Eighties) was an oasis of middle-to-upper class, integrated-but-mostly-white America, surrounded by a predominantly black ghetto. (Since then, the siege has been lifted by an army of gentrifiers marching south down Michigan Avenue from the Magnificent Mile.) Just about everybody I knew had been a crime victim at some time or other. Personally, I was never threatened with bodily harm, but I had a car stolen once, and my bike was stolen out of my girlfriend’s car.

Like just about all my classmates, I developed a special awareness of young black men (despite the fact that one of them was a fellow grad student whose office was just down the hall from mine). I spotted them at a great distance, and might cross the street if I couldn’t figure out what they were up to.

Sometimes, my wariness turned out to be so ridiculous I had to laugh at myself. Once, I remember, closer inspection showed that the “young men” were more like 12, and the mysterious objects they were carrying were musical instruments. What they had done to raise my suspicion was mill around on the sidewalk waiting for someone to unlock the door to their recital.

Clearly I had been just minutes from death.

Prejudice. During those years I came to understand that there is a difference between prejudice and bigotry. Prejudice is exactly what it sounds like: a pre-judgment, an opinion that you have before you learn any specific facts about the situation. Your prejudices may be justified or unjustified, they may save your life or create dangerous confrontations out of nothing. But you can’t help having some, because the human mind constantly creates expectations of the near future. A well-trained mind will base those expectations on facts if it has some, but if it doesn’t it will expect something anyway.

So anybody who tells you that they’re not prejudiced is blowing smoke. Everybody is prejudiced. Your prejudices may or may not be racial (though if you grew up in America they probably are), but if you’re dropped into a situation you know nothing about, you’ll react to it somehow, based on some pre-judgment.

Bigotry. Prejudice is universal, but bigotry is more sinister; it’s an attachment to your prejudices. Sometimes people fall in love with their prejudices to the point that they don’t want to know the facts. If confronted with facts that conflict with their prejudices, they will ignore them and make up new facts.

So imagine that you’re a white admissions officer at an Ivy League college. Your mail today includes two applications, one from a white student at an upscale suburban high school, the other from a black student at a ghetto school. If your snap expectation is that the white kid will have higher SAT scores than the black kid, that’s prejudice.

But what you do next determines whether or not you’re a bigot. When the test scores become available, do you look? If it turns out that the ghetto kid’s scores are higher, do you accept them or do you assume something funny must have happened? Do you scour the application looking for evidence that he’s not really that smart?

If you’re not a bigot, you look at the scores and change your opinion accordingly. And the next time you get an applicant from the same ghetto high school, your prejudice will be a little less sure of itself.

Everybody has prejudices. But reasonable people hold those prejudices lightly, re-judge a situation when facts become available, and continually re-train their prejudices to be more accurate.

Zimmerman and Martin. OK, now imagine you’re George Zimmerman doing your Neighborhood Watch thing. You spot a black teen you’ve never seen before, and it sets your alarm bells ringing. That’s prejudice, but so what? Maybe it’s got some reasonable basis.

When I listen to Zimmerman’s 911 call, though, I hear bigotry. He can’t point to a single suspicious thing Martin is doing, but he’s trying hard to interpret anything he sees so that it will confirm his prejudice. Mostly, he reports judgments rather than facts. Martin is “up to no good”, he “looks like he’s on drugs” and so on. (Actually, we know, Martin is staying with someone in the neighborhood, has been to the store and is on his way back. He’s talking to his girlfriend on the phone, which might be why he’s in no hurry.) “They” always get away with it. And so on, right up to the much-debated “fucking coons” comment.

So anyway, I’m willing to cut Zimmerman some slack for his original suspicions. Who knows, maybe I’d have been suspicious too. But what should he have done then?

How about this: No gun, no 911 call. You just walk up to Martin with a smile and say, “Hi, I’m with the Neighborhood Watch. I didn’t recognize you so I thought I’d introduce myself. I’m George Zimmerman and I live over on XYZ Street. Do you live around here or are you visiting someone?” Maybe you get an answer and go on your way. Maybe Martin tells you to go fuck yourself. Maybe he runs. Maybe (for all you know before you ask) he really is the thug you’re afraid of, and he pulls a handgun out of his hoody and starts blasting.

I think that’s the chance you have to take. If you’re not brave enough to take it, you’ve got no business being out there in the first place. Stay home, lock your door, and let somebody else watch the neighborhood.

When is racism reasonable? Finally, we come to the question of whether suspicion of blacks is a reasonable prejudice in the first place. After my Trayvon Martin post last week, a reader emailed me a link to FBI crime statistics broken down by race. If that’s where your analysis ends, being suspicious of black men looks reasonable.

But chaunceydevega on Daily Kos went a little further and challenged the basis of those statistics. How much black crime do police find simply because they are looking for it?

As compared to white neighborhoods, black and brown communities are also subject to more severe surveillance and aggressive police tactics.

And how often is a white let off with a warning where a black might be charged? (It seems particularly ironic to quote crime statistics when discussing Martin and Zimmerman. So far, Zimmerman killing Martin doesn’t register as a crime. How many similar cases don’t draw national attention and so never show up in crime statistics?)

Sometimes when illegal drug use is measured in ways unrelated to the criminal justice system, whites turn out to be at least as guilty as blacks and Hispanics. Yet, they are arrested, charged, convicted, and jailed far less often. Maybe that’s true of other crimes as well.

So where does that leave us? In my Chicago days, I doubt chaunceydevega’s arguments would have convinced me. (Even though I never actually saw the people who stole my car. For all I know, Saul Bellow and Bruno Bettelheim took it for a midnight joy ride. Their alibis were never checked.) I thought I knew what I thought I knew, so young black men scared me.

As any white-knuckle flier can testify, telling scared people not to be scared usually doesn’t work very well, even if you have statistics. Or reason to challenge the prevailing statistics.

Here’s my hope: Maybe encouraging scared people to be brave works a little better. Whether you think your prejudices are justified or not, keep your eyes open and try not to give in to fear too quickly. Hold your prejudices lightly. Watch carefully for evidence that contradicts them.

Otherwise you might end up running from 12-year-old musicians. Or shooting Trayvon Martin.

April 2, 2012 – 9:43 am Categories: Articles | Comments (11)

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Student Debt: The New Involuntary Servitude

From colonial times, enterprising Americans have used a tried-and-true method to enslave immigrants: You find desperate people in some other country and offer to pay their passage. When they get here, they owe you and they have no jobs. But that’s OK because they can work off their debt in your mines or sweatshops or brothels. Naturally, you set the wages in those places, you control the cost of living, you keep track of the interest on the debt. And somehow (no matter how long or hard they work) the debt never clears.

Now picture the professional class as a destination and college as the way lower-class young people immigrate into it. See the resemblance?

IOU $1 trillion. In March the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau reported that student debt now tops $1 trillion. This happened because (through a decades-long process) the Powers That Be decided things should be this way.

Half a century ago, in-state tuition was zero in the University of California system and negligible at most other state universities, but the Powers pushed the state legislatures to cut university support and raise tuition. At the federal level, the agreement that ended last summer’s budget showdown significantly cut Pell grants, and here’s the latest idea:

The plan proposed by Ryan (R-Wis.), who chairs the House Budget Committee, would chop away at Pell grant eligibility, thereby reducing total Pell grants by about $200 billion over the next decade; allow the interest rate for federally subsidized Stafford loans to double; end student loan interest subsidies for those still in school; and make Pell spending discretionary — instead of mandatory — allowing further cuts down the line.

Put it all together, and even a student who works part-time and attends a second-rate state university can easily graduate owing over $100,000.

Welcome to the professional class, kid. Just don’t expect to keep any of the money you make. And I almost forgot to mention: We’ve let public transportation go to hell, so you’ll need to buy a car. (Here’s another loan.) We’re letting public schools fail, so if you have kids and want them to stay in the professional class, you’ll need to send them to private schools (Here’s another loan.) And we’re going to toss that national-health-care idea out on its ear, but don’t worry, if you get sick you can put it on your Visa.

Oh, and since you’re so far in debt, you can’t be choosy about what you do. I know you had thoughts about making the world a better place and yadda, yadda, yadda, but you’re in debt. So screw all that stuff about ideals and morals. You need money, so you have to do whatever Corporate America wants and thank them for letting you do it.

The justifying half-truths. Anyone who objects to this new form of involuntary servitude is bound to hear the usual collection of half-truths: Nobody’s forcing you to borrow that money. Nobody owes you a living. And (David Graeber wrote a whole book about this one): People have to pay their debts.

All these statements are true in some other context, and that’s what makes them so dangerous.

It’s not just the rich who say these things. They’ve pounded those ideas into everyone’s head for so long that the indebted young grads even repeat them to each other. A few weeks ago I participated in a Facebook conversation about the proposed Student Loan Forgiveness Act. A recent graduate made what sounded like a very common-sense comment:

we all agreed to the terms of these contracts, and now we have to pay back what we borrowed. You can’t just have free money. We all knew what we were signing up for, nobody forced us to borrow $100,000 and go to college.

Half-truth 1: Choices. Here’s the thing about choices: The you-made-your-choice argument doesn’t have any moral force if all your options were bad.

Say you’re a bright kid whose parents have no money. You can do what exactly? Take your chances in the unskilled job market, where wages will always be low and jobs disappear at the whim of the 1%? Join the Army and hope you don’t have to kill anybody who’s innocent or die in a war you don’t believe in? Or you can try college and start your life massively in debt, with no guarantee that the skill you bought will still be marketable by the time you have it.

Did I miss the good choice? What were today’s debt-to-the-eyeballs 20-somethings supposed to do?

Half-truth 2: Owing a living. But of course, that’s not something Society needs to worry about, because “Society doesn’t owe anybody a living.”

Yes it does. Not in the peel-me-a-grape sense, but in the sense that everybody has a right to what Pope John Paul II called “a seat at the Great Workbench”. (Don’t tell anybody, but Karl Marx had the same idea and called it “access to the means of production.”)

I’ve explained this at length elsewhere, but let me summarize here: The private property system is a tremendously efficient way to organize production, but it’s based on a fundamental injustice (in religous terms, an original sin). We’ve all grown up with that injustice, so we take it as the natural state. It isn’t.

Morally, every child comes into the world with an equal claim to the world’s natural riches and to the intellectual legacy of the human race. For many, being born with a special claim to a small portion of the Earth instead of a vague claim to a share in all of it is a good deal. But if you’re born without property, it’s not a good deal.

It also was not a deal you consented to. Other people seized title to the Earth before you were born. Fait accompli. Tough luck.

The way modern society repays a child for the usurpation of its inheritance is to give it access to the means of production in other ways: by maintaining a broad-based economy with many opportunities, and by providing education to allow it to take its place in that economy. With that repayment, a private-property system once again becomes a good deal. “We may have stolen your inheritance, but we have no practical way to give it back, so we offer you something we think you’ll like better.”

That’s the deal we’re reneging on when we make education an expensive luxury. Instead, property owners usurp the inheritance of the unborn, then bind them into the servitude of debt.

Half-truth 3: Debt. No matter how we got here, though, we can’t let the students off the hook because “People have to pay their debts.” The book-length answer to that half-truth is David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years.

The quote from that book that sums it up best:

There is no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt — above all, because it makes it seem that it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong.

Think the reference to “violence” is over the top? Then go claim your share of the world and see how long it takes the police to show up.

Summing up. Working-class kids who borrowed money to go to college should be let off the hook. They had no good alternatives, and Society put them in that situation by usurping their equal claim to the World. Now they’re in debt slavery.

We need to free them. And stop the process that enslaved them.

April 2, 2012 – 9:09 am Categories: Articles | Comments (9)

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Supreme Panic and other short notes

Should ObamaCare supporters panic? That was the big debate on the legal blogs after the Supreme Court’s five conservative judges asked a bunch of skeptical questions during oral arguments. Jeffrey Toobin says panic, Steve Kornacki says not to.

So far I’m siding with Kornacki. For years legal specialists have been writing that you can’t predict how judges will vote by listening to their questions, so I’m surprised so many of them think they can this time.

Asssuming that the pessimists are right, though, the Court could be headed for a Brown v Board of Education-scale ruling: If they limit the Commerce Clause, all kinds of previous rulings (including ones written by the five conservative judges) come up for review. If they decide that the Medicaid expansion is an illegal coercion of the states by the federal government, the whole federal/state relationship changes.

Two points are worth making here: First, a partisan Supreme Court is a dubious asset politically, and striking down ObamaCare would seal the impression that this Court is Republican. If ObamaCare is struck down, we’re back to worrying about the 50 million uninsured, and Republicans continue to have no plan for covering them.

Second, this is another reminder that institutions are neither good nor bad, liberal or conservative, they’re just institutional. For decades, liberals relied on the Supreme Court to limit the damage done by conservative state legislatures, and many of us got it into our heads that a powerful Supreme Court was good. On the flip side, many of us have it in our heads that global institutions like the WTO are bad because they are dominated by corporate interests. Well, maybe the WTO is also just an institution. We need to figure out how to make it work for us rather than against us, the way conservatives have done with the Court.

While we’re talking about the Court and ObamaCare, a number of liberals are making their usual mistake when they answer what has become known as the Broccoli Argument: If Congress can make us buy health insurance, can it make us buy broccoli?

There are literal legal answers to this question – BTW, the literal answer is “no” – involving the limitations of the Commerce Clause, but they miss the point. Don’t make them unless you’re trying to convince a lawyer. Politically, Akhil Reed Amar has the better answer:

The broccoli argument is like something they said when we were debating the income tax: If they can tax me, they can tax me at 100 percent! And yes, they can. But they won’t. Because you could vote them out of office. They have the power to do all sorts of ridiculous things that they won’t do because you’d vote them out of office.

I think that’s called “democracy”.

About that Santorum “bullshit” incident. I don’t really care what words the guy uses, but imagine the outcry if Obama lost his composure like that. Think of all the lies that have been told about Obama – about his citizenship, his religion, his loyalty to the United States, and a hundred other issues that Rick Santorum never has to worry about. And yet he never snaps.

While we’re on that theme: Imagine the outcry if it’s 2007 and Nancy Pelosi says the Bush generals are lying about what they need. But Paul Ryan apologizes and its all OK now.

In an April Fools’ Day op-ed, David Javerbaum introduces the “quantum theory of Mitt Romney“.

Before Mitt Romney, those seeking the presidency operated under the laws of so-called classical politics, laws still followed by traditional campaigners like Newt Gingrich. Under these Newtonian principles, a candidate’s position on an issue tends to stay at rest until an outside force — the Tea Party, say, or a six-figure credit line at Tiffany — compels him to alter his stance

But Mitt is the first “quantum candidate”, and is governed by different rules.

In much the same way that light is both a particle and a wave, Mitt Romney is both a moderate and a conservative … The act of observing cannot be separated from the outcome of the observation. By asking Mitt Romney how he feels about an issue, you unavoidably affect how he feels about it. More precisely, Mitt Romney will feel every possible way about an issue until the moment he is asked about it, at which point the many feelings decohere into the single answer most likely to please the asker.

There’s more.

Salon’s Michael Lind explains how the rich took over airport security, getting their own faster lines. He then makes this modest proposal:

Why don’t we just make the new class-based discrimination official? Instead of leaving it to airlines and other corporations to construct the new apartheid piecemeal and informally, let the government issue a Premium Elite Citizen Card, valid for multiple purposes. For the right price, a price carefully calculated to be unaffordable by the majority of Americans, those willing and able to pay would be allowed to cut in line, not only at airports, but everywhere: at taxi stands, movie theaters, restaurants. All they would have to do is flash their Premium Elite Citizen Card to force the rabble to step aside and make way.

David Wong of Cracked.com follows up his viral 6 Things Rich People Need to Stop Saying with an almost equally worthy 5 Ways Modern Men are Trained to Hate Women.

It amazes me how misunderstood hate crime laws are, even by people who ought to know better — like NYT editor Bill Keller:

In most cases, hate crime laws take offenses that would carry more modest sentences — assault, vandalism — and ratchet up the penalty two or three times because we know, or think we know, what evil disposition lurked in the offender’s mind. Then we pat ourselves on the back. As if none of us, pure and righteous citizens, ever entertained a racist thought or laughed at a homophobic slur.

Bill: It doesn’t take a genius to understand that painting “Bob loves Mary” on an underpass is a less serious crime than painting swastikas on a Jewish elementary school.

One additional point I left out of my summary of Glenn Greenwald’s With Liberty and Justice for Some: With all the discussion of ways to cut government spending, how come nobody ever proposes that we stop locking up non-violent criminals for long prison terms? Other countries don’t, and it seems to work for them.

April 2, 2012 – 8:08 am Categories: Short Notes | Comments (4)

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Transcending Ideology

By protecting the lawbreaking license for other powerful individuals, [the political and media classes] strengthen a custom of which they might avail themselves if they too break the law and get caught. It is a class-based, self-interested advocacy. That is why belief in this prerogative and the devotion to protecting it transcend political ideology, partisan affiliation, the supposed wall between political and media figures, and every other pretense of division within elite classes. — Glenn Greenwald, With Liberty and Justice For Some

In this week’s sift:

March 26, 2012 – 1:44 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Post a comment

Trayvon Martin: the Racism Whites Don’t Want to See

I tend to filter out crime stories, because so often they get more coverage than they deserve, like O. J. Simpson. So I’ve been slow to catch on to the significance of the Trayvon Martin story. But lately this has turned into a meta-story: reactions to the killing say even more about our country than the killing itself did.

The basic facts are simple: A white-Hispanic neighborhood-watch volunteer (George Zimmerman) got suspicious of a 140-pound black teen-ager (Trayvon Martin) for no apparent reason. He called 911, and the dispatcher told him not to follow the kid. Zimmerman followed anyway. Some kind of confrontation ensued and he shot Martin dead. Martin was unarmed and had nothing easily mistaken for a weapon, but the police accepted Zimmerman’s self-defense claim (in spite of at least one witness who denied it) and let him walk away. That all happened back on February 26, there’s still been no arrest, and the local African-American community is getting pretty upset about it.

The story points out the continuing presence of racism in America. To some segment of the population, being black raises suspicion all by itself. Probably Zimmerman is not the kind of racist who would go out hunting black teens at random. Probably he really believed that Martin was planning some kind of mischief, and that Martin must be armed, so that he had to shoot first once the confrontation started. But why did he think that? Why did he frame the situation in such a way that shoot-to-kill seemed sensible?

And why did the police find his story credible and his actions excusable? You’re an armed white adult chasing an unarmed black teen-ager you outweigh by about 100 pounds. Naturally, you would feel threatened.

That’s the kind of racism that is still endemic in every nook and cranny of America. We’re almost entirely past the “I don’t hire niggers” phase, but still in a phase of “he just doesn’t look trustworthy to me”. What would look like a well-deserved break for a white employee is goofing off when a black does it. An ordinary mental glitch becomes evidence of low intelligence, and so on.

Being black is no longer three strikes against you, but it’s still one or two.

By and large, White America doesn’t want to believe that. Last year a poll found that 51% of whites (also 60% of Republicans and 68% of people who name Fox as their most trusted news source) say that reverse discrimination against whites is at least as big a problem as discrimination against minorities.

You can see just how badly White America doesn’t want to believe in its continuing racism by how it has reacted to the Martin story. Fox News did its best to ignore the whole thing. ThinkProgress totaled up how much attention each cable news network gave the Martin story during its first three weeks:

Compare this to Fox’s obsessive coverage of a series of scary-black-people stories. For example, it devoted 95 segments totaling 8 hours of air time to the trumped-up voter-intimidation charges against the New Black Panther Party.

Or check out how the Glenn-Beck-founded blog The Blaze has covered Martin’s death. Searching on the word “Trayvon” got me 15 stories, five of which were about the scary ways black people are reacting to the incident — the New Black Panther Party (of course), Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton, Barack Obama, and the New Black Liberation Militia. The Sharpton post ends by raising more suspicion about Martin. (He was on a 10-day suspension from school, and “Sources sympathetic to Martin say he was suspended for ‘excessive tardiness’.” But the Blaze makes sure we know all the more serious stuff that a 10-day suspension could be about.)

A sixth Blaze post quotes Beck himself, who is worried not about white vigilantes, but about black extremists “winding everybody up”:

“We have this extremist African-American militia group that says they’re just going to come in and handle it. You’re got Al Sharpton winding everybody up. You’ve got Color For Change winding everybody up.” … Beck ceded that the man who shot Trayvon could indeed be a racist, but that many of his detractors are driven by a racial agenda too, and thus are everything they claim to stand against.

Got that? You should focus not on what actually happened to an innocent black teen, but on what “extremist” black groups might do. Zimmerman could be a racist, but blacks and liberals upset by the Martin story are racists.

So the beat goes on: For the part of the media that panders to I-am-not-a-racist whites, the Martin story is just one more example of racism against whites and one more reason for white people to be afraid of black people.

Among the presidential candidates, only Newt Gingrich directly pandered to white racists by turning the incident into a reverse-racism story. President Obama had reached out to Martin’s parents, saying “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

Gingrich’s response:

Is the president suggesting that if it had been a white who had been shot, that would be OK because it didn’t look like him? That’s just nonsense dividing this country up. … When things go wrong to an American, it is sad for all Americans. Trying to turn it into a racial issue is fundamentally wrong. I really find it appalling.

Gingrich glossed over the whole walking-while-black angle that makes the story important: If Trayvon Martin had been white, he might not have been shot at all. George Zimmerman “turned it into a racial issue”, not President Obama.

While researching this case, I learned something interesting about the law: Self defense falls into a class known as affirmative defenses. In other words, at your trial you’re not just looking at the state and saying “Prove I did it”, you’re making assertions about facts that are supposed to exonerate you. When you do that, part of the burden of proof shifts to you.

So the state does not have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Zimmerman did not act in self defense. In making a self-defense plea, Zimmerman would be conceding that he killed Martin, and he would then need to convince the jury of his self-defense claim by a preponderance of evidence (not beyond reasonable doubt).

Want some background music to read this piece by? Try Eminem’s “White America“:

Look at these eyes:
Baby blue, baby, just like yaself.
If they were brown, Shady lose,
Shady sits on the shelf.

March 26, 2012 – 1:38 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (28)

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Glenn Greenwald Lays Out the History of “Elite Immunity”

If you’ve been reading Glenn Greenwald’s columns at Salon (or reading a Greenwald-influenced blog like the Weekly Sift) you won’t be surprised by anything you find in his recent book With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the law is used to destroy equality and protect the powerful.

Still, I found it striking to see so many individual issues laid out together and presented as a progression. It’s easy to get outraged at any one of them — say, that banks are foreclosing homes illegally and yet no bankers are going to jail — and miss the overall point: We are losing the rule of law.

If you are rich enough or powerful enough, you can break American law — either with complete impunity (like, say, Dick Cheney) or maybe paying wrist-slap fines that are a reasonable cost-of-doing-business (like Bank of America). What’s more, if anybody thinks you should be punished the way ordinary people are when they break the law, media pundits from the Right and Left alike will set them straight: Leona Helmsley was right; like taxes, the law is for “little people”.

It’s tempting to think things were always this way, but they really weren’t. This has all happened in living memory. Yes, the rich and powerful have always had better lawyers than the rest of us, and they’ve always gotten a little extra benefit of the doubt from judges and police. But never before has American society so completely accepted in principle that different rules should apply to the elite.

Glenn Greenwald traces this back to a single epochal event: President Ford pardoning Richard Nixon after the Watergate scandal forced him to resign. Nixon had resigned before the Senate could hold an impeachment trial, so Ford’s pardon meant that no Nixon trial would ever be held.

At the time the pardon was hugely unpopular, and is probably why Ford lost his re-election bid to Jimmy Carter in 1976. But looking back, the whole affair is kind of quaint. People at every level of the administration below Nixon went to jail, including Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman and Attorney General John Mitchell. What’s more, the pardon itself was completely above board: Ford announced it in a national speech, and the presidential power to pardon is explicitly listed in the Constitution. The political price Ford paid in 1976 is exactly how the Founders envisioned keeping the pardoning power under control.

It’s hard to imagine anything like that happening now. The Bush administration broke a long list of laws: torture, spying without warrants, lying to Congress, and many others. No one has even been charged with these crimes, much less tried or punished. Like President Ford, President Obama has covered for his predecessor. But he hasn’t issued explicit pardons on national TV. Instead, he has just quietly let the whole thing drop, and occasionally claimed some dubious version of the state-secrets privilege to shut down court cases. Beyond occasional statements that we must “look forward, not backward”, President Obama has never even attempted to justify this policy to the American people.

And the outcry from the mainstream media has been … non-existent, unless you count the mainstream pundits who periodically scoff at the idea that the law should be enforced.

This didn’t happen all at once, and the successive chapters of Greenwald’s book present the gradual drift away from the rule of law. Watergate was followed by Iran-Contra, where once again pardons were issued. This time, though, it wasn’t just the president (Reagan) who was protected. President Bush the First pardoned high-ranking officials a level or two down from the president (like Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger). In this way, Bush guaranteed that the accusations would never reach the president (or himself, in his previous role as vice-president).

In the Bush II administration, the pardon was issued by the very president whose administration was under suspicion. Scooter Libby was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in the CIA leak scandal, but never served time — and so was never tempted to flip on his boss, Vice President Cheney. (Greenwald points out this important fact about the Plame Affair: It only reached the point it did because another powerful institution — the CIA — insisted on pursuing the matter.)

Today, President Obama’s justification for drone strikes like the one that killed American citizen Anwar Awlaki is still secret, but seems unlikely to stand up to scrutiny. (Read the Wikipedia article on targeted killing and see if the line separating it from assassination makes any sense to you.) Obama is undoubtedly counting on his successor to continue the tradition of letting things drop.

Elite immunity entered the private sector with the telecom immunity bill. Telecom giants like AT&T illegally cooperated with warrantless spying of the Bush administration. Lawsuits against the government had already been closed off by state-secrets claims, which denied victims standing to sue. (If you couldn’t prove you’d been tapped, you couldn’t file suit.) But customer lawsuits against the telecoms were still possible and could have cost the companies billions if they lost — which they would have, because they clearly broke the law. But in 2008 a Democratic Congress passed a bill granting them retroactive immunity.

From there, not prosecuting Wall Street for laws broken during the housing bubble or the banks for foreclosure fraud seemed almost reasonable.

During this whole progression, the arguments have built on the one President Ford made: Whatever has happened, it’s time to put it all behind us. (Greenwald suggests trying that argument the next time you’re pulled over for speeding.) Powerful people let other powerful people off the hook, not for their benefit, but for ours, so that we don’t have to go through the ordeal of watching them be tried and punished. (That would be a good argument to try if your spouse catches you in an affair. Uncovering the truth would be too much of an ordeal for her and the kids. Best to let it all drop.)

But since no one is punished, the problem never gets behind us: Elite disrespect for the law only grows, guaranteeing that more laws will be broken in the future.

By pulling all these issues together, Greenwald is making an important point: Each example by itself is a partisan issue, but elite immunity is bipartisan. The powerful in government, industry, and the media are all coming to see themselves as members of a single privileged class. More and more, they close ranks against any attempt to punish crimes committed by one of their own.

March 26, 2012 – 1:20 pm Categories: The Sifted Bookshelf | Comments (4)

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Covering Climate Change Seriously and other short notes

Buried deep in an insight-filled exchange between Grist‘s David Roberts and The Roost‘s Wen Stephenson about media coverage of climate change is this brilliant analogy:

It’s quite instructive to compare coverage of climate with coverage of the deficit.

Both are long-term threats whose short-term symptoms don’t seem that serious. But they’re covered very differently.

Mainstream journalists routinely tell us that a trillion-dollar-a-year deficit will lead to disaster. They don’t worry about sounding like activists or alarmists. When a newsmaker warns about the consequences of the deficit, journalists don’t hunt up some fringe economist to give an opposing view. Further, journalists will bring the deficit into a story even when the sources don’t. If a politician is proposing something related to taxing or spending, a common question is “What would that do to the deficit?”

None of that happens when mainstream journalists cover climate change. Roberts sums up:

the deficit is mentioned not just in stories about the deficit but in almost every story about economics or government, period! You can recommend economic austerity measures that are absurd to professional economists and never, ever get your reputation dinged. There is no social risk to over-worrying or talking too much about the deficit; there’s only upside, reputation- and career-wise. It is the paradigmatic Very Serious issue, divorced from the facts but reinforced by herd behavior.

Climate is the mirror image. The facts support a far more alarmist case, but not only can objective journalists not take that for granted — they’re barely allowed to take the existence of climate change for granted. Even the mildest of carbon-pricing schemes is deemed radical, unrealistic, bad politics. “Everybody knows” we’re going to keep accelerating through oil, gas, and coal until they’re gone. To say otherwise is to be un-savvy

When action on climate change is blocked, it’s typically reported as a defeat for “environmentalists” — a special interest group. But when action to cut the deficit fails, it’s a blow to our grandchildren.

Roberts’ analogy provides a very simple way to explain what we should be demanding from the media: Cover climate change the way you cover the deficit. It’s not impossible or impractical or a violation of journalistic ethics. They’re already doing it on a different issue.

Today’s wishful thinking: Maybe outright lying by politicians will become less acceptable. I’m not talking about the lies everybody tells about their inner process (like “I don’t pay attention to the polls”), I mean checkable black-is-white lies about history and the state of the world. Maybe the media will start calling attention to these lies and make them counterproductive.

This pollyanna-ish thought is motivated by NPR’s new journalistic ethics handbook, which emphasizes truth over balance.

At all times, we report for our readers and listeners, not our sources. So our primary consideration when presenting the news is that we are fair to the truth. If our sources try to mislead us or put a false spin on the information they give us, we tell our audience. If the balance of evidence in a matter of controversy weighs heavily on one side, we acknowledge it in our reports.

Journalism critic Jay Rosen sees this as a rejection of he-said/she-said coverage, where opposing true and false statements are presented without comment.

AlterNet’s Sarah Jaffe thinks she has found an example of the new policy: On February 27, NPR ran a Mitt Romney quote and then corrected the part of it that was false. Maybe that practice will catch on with other journalists.

Correcting lies is a good first step. Ultimately, I’d like to hear journalists objectively report “That guy just lied to us” as Rachel Maddow does here:

The Romney Etch-a-Sketch gaffe just underlines what I wrote about him last week:

his general-election strategy depends on voters doubting his honesty: Come fall, he’ll need to convince independents that he didn’t mean any of the stuff he’s saying now.

Lauren Zuniga’s poem for the Oklahoma legislators is painful to listen to, but that’s what’s so good about it.

Oklahoma is one of many states passing laws whose main purpose seems to be to humiliate and cause anguish to women who want an abortion. Zuniga strips away all the facades and reacts to the spiteful intention behind the law.

While we’re talking about transvaginal ultrasounds, have you ever wondered how doctors feel about the state using them as tools of humiliation against their patients? This one doesn’t like it, and even thinks some civil disobedience is in order:

When the community has failed a patient by voting an ideologue into office…When the ideologue has failed the patient by writing legislation in his own interest instead of in the patient’s…When the legislative system has failed the patient by allowing the legislation to be considered… When the government has failed the patient by allowing something like this to be signed into law… We as physicians cannot and must not fail our patients by ducking our heads and meekly doing as we’re told.

Zuninga’s poem is an example of the Left getting more aggressive on social issues, a trend I hope catches on. For the longest time we’ve been passive. Unless “family values” types took crystal meth with gay prostitutes, we’ve mostly not challenged their claims to be well-intentioned moral people, motivated by conscience and authentic religious conviction.

It’s time for that to stop. That’s why Fred Clark’s recent article The ‘biblical view’ that’s younger than the Happy Meal is so important: He points out the suspicious timing of the evangelical revelation that a newly-fertilized ovum has a soul.

They haven’t always believed that. They started believing it after Roe v Wade, and it became undebatable in evangelical circles after abortion became the center of a right-wing political movement.

In other words, this isn’t a political view motivated by theological conviction. The theology was invented to support a political movement already in progress.

Two weeks ago (in the weekly challenge) I proposed that the Left go on offense on women’s issues by pushing the Equal Rights Amendment again. I wasn’t the only one to think of that.

The American public has basically the same view on abortions that it has on guns: There are too many of them, but if my family ever decides that we need one, I don’t want the government telling us we can’t have it.

So whether the public is pro or anti depends on how the question is phrased. This poll bears that out on abortion: In every religious group, large numbers of people who disapprove of abortion still want it to be available.

abortion poll

If you’re not watching Cara Santa Maria’s videos on Huffington Post, you’re not just missing good coverage of science and society, you’re missing a hot chick with glasses whose tag line is “Talk nerdy to me.” I mean, I like Bill Nye the Science Guy, but …

Here she tells us about a new state law to return Tennessee to the days of the Scopes Monkey Trial.

If you’ve ever wondered about those “Proof Jesus Never Existed” ads that show up in the back of magazines or pop up on the internet, Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman has a new book out. I don’t think this is too much of a spoiler: He concludes Jesus existed.

I don’t expect President Obama to raise the Romney dog-on-the-roof issue explicitly. I just think we’ll see a lot of pictures like this:

If a prospective employer asks you to give them your Facebook password, what other morally dubious demands will they make?

And why would an employer trust applicants who are willing to violate FaceBook’s rules and compromise their friends’ privacy like that?

A week ago Friday, the Daily Show had one of its best episodes ever. The opening monologue was funny as usual, but the next two segments were John Oliver’s amazing take-down of our defunding of UNESCO. It culminates with Oliver in Africa (really — not via green-screen) explaining to cute African children why Israel-Palestine politics means they can’t have an education.

March 26, 2012 – 1:00 pm Categories: Short Notes | Comments (1)

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Perfectly Tragic

A perfect tragedy should … not be the spectacle of a virtuous man brought from prosperity to adversity: for this moves neither pity nor fear; it merely shocks us. … Nor, again, should the downfall of the utter villain be exhibited. A plot of this kind would, doubtless, satisfy the moral sense, but it would inspire neither pity nor fear; for pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune, fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves. Such an event, therefore, will be neither pitiful nor terrible. There remains, then, the character between these two extremes — that of a man who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty.

— Aristotle, Poetics 

In this week’s sift:

  • The Tragedy of Mitt Romney. There was a good case to be made for electing Mitt Romney president, until he started running. Now he wants to be president so badly that he’ll say anything, even it means turning his back on his own greatest accomplishments. That’s a tragic flaw of Shakespearian proportions.
  • Jim Crow Returns. When did use of the term voter fraud start to ramp up? In 1965, precisely when the Voting Rights Act banned the previous ways of disenfranchising minorities. Now Texas is trying to get the VRA declared unconstitutional.
  • Walking Back Mr. Daisey and other short notes. This American Life did a whole episode on how it was conned by Mike Daisey. (I linked the original episode, so I’d better tell you about this one too.) It’s an interesting lesson in truth and journalism. Oklahoma doctors can lie to prevent an abortion. Pat Robertson is anti-family. Baseless rumors about ObamaCare. Did Goldman Sachs have a moral compass to lose? Public vs. private morality. A skypunch. And more.
  • Book recommendation of the week: Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham. Not the similarly-named book from the Hunger Games series, but a fascinating work of speculative anthropology. It turns out that with our current biology, humans can’t survive in the wild without cooking. So humans could not have discovered cooking. Some apes must have discovered it, and then evolved into humans.
  • Last weeks’ most popular post. Where Are We on Citizens United? got 135 views. The most-clicked link was 6 Things Rich People Need to Stop Saying.
  • This week’s challenge. Good challenges are hard to come up with. Help me out. Suggest some in the comments.
March 19, 2012 – 12:30 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (2)

The Tragedy of Mitt Romney

The most frustrating Republican candidate for me to watch this year is Mitt Romney. Rick Santorum is who he is: a small-minded theocrat. Ron Paul is the same old coot with funny ideas that he’s been for years. Newt Gingrich (like Herman Cain and Sarah Palin before him) is a huckster who wants to sell books and get on TV. If those jokers want to run for president and Republicans want to vote for them, that’s their problem.

But here’s the thing about Mitt Romney: At one time, there was a good argument for electing him president. Then he lost faith in himself or in the American people or both. So rather than take his legitimate case to the voters and try to convince them to do the right thing, he decided to pander to the crazies.

I think that mistake is tragic, in the original Sophocles/Shakespeare sense of the word.

President Romney? Seriously? Most Sift readers are liberals, so I imagine you are asking “A good argument for making Romney president? What?”

Here’s the argument: The #1 problem in America today — worse than income inequality or unemployment or racism or the deficit or climate change — is our inability to marshall our forces and even attempt to solve those problems.

That’s why “Yes We Can” was such an appealing slogan four years ago. At some visceral level, voters didn’t even care what the new president was going to do. We just wanted to believe that he would do something. We wanted to believe that we didn’t have to sit here and watch the oceans rise, soldiers die in pointless wars, college become an unaffordable luxury, debts of all kinds skyrocket, and jobs run away to China.

We were sick of arguing about which party got us lost in this wilderness. Just lead us in some direction that has a chance of getting us home. We’ll follow. That’s all we want.

That’s still what we want, because we haven’t gotten it yet. That’s why President Obama is vulnerable. He accomplished a few noteworthy things during the half-year when he had 60 senators (from the delayed swearing-in of Al Franken in July, 2009 to the out-of-cycle election of Scott Brown in January, 2010), but anybody who was starting to regain faith in the American government lost it again during the debt-limit fiasco last summer.

You can argue (as I often have) that the problem is the intransigence of the Republicans in Congress. But you can’t argue that government is working.

If I were a Romney speechwriter. Mitt could have laid it out to the voters like this:

When I became governor of Massachusetts, I took on the toughest problem the state had: health care. I didn’t hide behind the excuse that the other party controlled the legislature. I started with the best ideas of the conservative Heritage Foundation, I listened to smart people of all political persuasions, and I appealed to both parties’ desire to make life better for the people of our state.

And we did. Today, Massachusetts leads the nation in access to health care. That system is not perfect, but it is working and it is popular. Today, neither party can win a statewide election by opposing it.

Our plan’s success gave the current administration the courage and the model to attack the healthcare problem nationwide. That system also is not perfect and I have many ideas for improving it. But again, it got passed and is being implemented. The framework is there to fix and upgrade.

In areas where the Obama administration did not have a Romney example to build on, they have spun their wheels. The economy continues to sputter. Debts continue to rise. The environment continues to degrade. We are no closer to solving our immigration problem. Our educational system falls further and further behind our competitors in other countries. Every day, it gets more and more difficult for young Americans to start at the bottom and rise to the top.

These are not Democratic issues or Republican issues. They are not problems for the government to solve by decree, or for the market to solve without government, or for individuals to solve without any help at all. These are American challenges, challenges that we must meet together, using every tool at our command.

Government, business, private charities and foundations, parents, teachers, farmers, scientists, factory workers, inventors, consumers, religious leaders, students, entrepreneurs — we all have a role to play. We all have to step up and take action if America is going to continue to lead the world.

What kind of president does America need at this crucial point in its history? Not an inspiring orator, not a mere cheerleader or a symbol or a figurehead. America needs a problem-solver, someone who can engage people of all philosophies, all religions, and all walks of life in the project of making our country great for generations to come.

America needs a president who takes pride in tackling the hard problems and finding real solutions — as I did in government in Massachusetts, in business at Bain Capital, and in the non-profit sector when I organized the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

I’m pretty liberal, so I’m not saying I definitely would have voted for that Mitt Romney. (The Bain Capital part would have been particularly hard for me to swallow.) But I would have had to think hard about it. A lot of people, even a lot of Democrats, would have had to think hard about it. Romney might have become another Eisenhower, blandly pulling together coalitions to do big things like build the interstate highway system.

But Mitt Romney turned his back on that guy. He turned his back on himself and his record. Instead of running as a leader who will listen to anybody, he has become a panderer who will say anything.

What else could he do? I understand why he did it: The Tea Party wave of 2010 should have thrown a scare into any reality-based politician, especially one hoping to win Republican primaries. But there’s more than one way to handle that situation.

  • You can fight it. Say in no uncertain terms that facts are facts, science is science, and economics is economics. You can finesse the social issues. (Traditionally in this country they have been state issues; defend each state’s right to handle marriage and guns and abortion as it sees fit.) But on health care, the economy, and the environment, stand up tall and try to hold your head above the rising tide. Call out bizarre lies like Birtherism and Obama’s Muslimhood. Stand up to the Rush Limbaughs when they become inexcusable. Even if you don’t win, you’ll become the-guy-we-should-have-listened-to. In 2016, you’ll be 69 — still young enough.
  • You can wait it out. That’s what Nixon did during the Goldwater disaster of 1964 and Jeb Bush is doing now. Express your Republican loyalty in vague terms, but don’t let the Party’s descent into the pit get you dirty. Again: 69 is not that old these days. Hillary Clinton is the same age you are — think she’s giving up?
  • You can do something else with your life. Lots of people don’t get to be president. Enjoy your quarter-billion and your beautiful family. Be Commerce Secretary in some future administration, find another Olympics to save, or chair a bipartisan commission to chart Medicare’s future. Herbert Hoover continued a respectable career of public service to age 80. You could too.

Instead, Mitt sold out to the insanity. You can tell he doesn’t believe what he’s saying, and so can the crazies. That’s how a nobody like Santorum can get so many votes, even though he and Romney are running on almost identical platforms.

The result. Not only will Mitt Romney lose this year, either at a brokered convention in the summer or to Obama in the fall, but he has trashed his brand. No one — not even most of the people voting for him — believes or trusts Romney any more. In fact, his general-election strategy depends on voters doubting his honesty: Come fall, he’ll need to convince independents that he didn’t mean any of the stuff he’s saying now.

Mitt Romney is a man of considerable ability. He could have served this country well — possibly as president or possibly some other way. Now he never will, because he wanted to be president more than he wanted to serve his country, and he tried to take a short cut to the White House rather than walk the long and winding road this era laid out for him.

Great promise undone by a single character flaw — that’s the stuff tragedy is made of.

March 19, 2012 – 12:25 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (10)

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Jim Crow Returns

A fascinating new analysis technique has added weight to the claim that voter-ID laws are functioning as “Jim Crow 2.0“.

In state after state, the Republican governors elected in 2010 have been pushing voter-ID laws that follow the ALEC template. The Brennan Center for Justice has been on this issue for a long time, pointing out how these laws erect unfair barriers to voting by the young, the old, minorities, and many women (particularly those recently married or divorced, who might not have ID in their current names) — all constituencies that tend to vote Democratic.

Ostensibly, these laws are intended to prevent the voter fraud that allegedly alters elections through the high-risk/low-reward process pictured below:

Lately, judges and the Justice Department have been agreeing with the Brennan Center that disenfranchising marginal voters is not just an unfortunate side-effect, but is the true intention behind these laws.

Prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, blacks had been virtually disenfranchised in many southern states. The Act dismantled the Jim Crow laws that enforced that disenfranchisement, and gave the Justice Department veto-power over any new laws in Jim Crow states that would affect the voting rights of minorities (rather than letting the laws take effect and requiring disenfranchised voters to sue). The Justice Department has used that power to invalidate voter-ID laws in South Carolina and Texas.

The Texas law is particularly egregious. ColorLines reports:

Texas has no driver’s license offices in almost a third of the state’s counties. Meanwhile, close to 15 percent of Hispanic Texans living in counties without driver’s license offices don’t have ID. A little less than a quarter of driver’s license offices have extended hours, which would make it tough for many working voters to find a place and time to acquire the IDs.

Now Texas has struck back: Its lawsuit claims the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional, because southern states aren’t being treated the same as northern states. The Supreme Court is probably going to have to decide this.

When they do, I hope they take a hard look at the work of LeoT on Daily Kos. LeoT examines the historical frequency-of-use of terms like election fraud, vote fraud, and voter fraud. (Don’t you just love the Google tools that make this possible?)

All the terms have similar usage patterns except voter fraud. The term was virtually unknown until around 1960, then mysteriously in 1965 its usage began a steady increase, uncorrelated with the other election-fraud terms, until now it gets more usage that vote fraud.

LeoT interprets:

“voter fraud” … increased in usage 15,000% (150x) between 1965 and 2008, while “election fraud” increased 250% (2.5x) in the same period. Apparently, “voter fraud” didn’t matter until you weren’t allowed to disenfranchise minority voters.

Conclusion: The voter fraud issue has been manufactured to justify Jim Crow 2.0.

March 19, 2012 – 12:13 pm Categories: Short Notes | Comments (4)

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