Why Torture is Evil
posted by Josiah Garber on July 15, 2009
in Politics
by Will Van Wagenen, July 09, 2009
Most defenders of torture rely on the argument that torture saves (American) lives, and that torture is therefore justified and moral. Such defenders often cite fantastic scenarios similar to the following: Imagine a terrorist group is planning to detonate a nuclear bomb in the middle of a major US city. Now imagine that one of the terrorists is captured by the CIA. The terrorist won’t reveal the information needed to stop the attack so he must be tortured until he gives up the information, allowing the CIA to stop the attack and save hundreds of thousands of lives. Such defenders then pose the question, “How could it be wrong to torture one evil person in order to save hundreds of thousands of lives?”
In other words such defenders cite as their “proof” that torture is moral an imaginary scenario which has never occurred and which has no basis in reality. In fact, US Supreme court justice Antonin Scalia defended the use of torture at a legal conference in Canada in this way by specifically referencing the popular television drama 24, in which the fictional US special agent Jack Bauer routinely tortures terror suspects to save American lives in situations similar to that described above. Scalia stated:
Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles… . He saved hundreds of thousands of lives… Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?… Say that criminal law is against him? “You have the right to a jury trial?” Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don’t think so.
Recently, former Vice President Dick Cheney used essentially this rationale to defend the Bush administration’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, and exposure to extreme temperatures, which the International Committee of the Red Cross says constitute torture. Cheney stated that, “I am convinced, absolutely convinced, that we saved thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of lives,” by using such techniques and called the federal government’s efforts to prevent terror attacks since 2001 “one of the greatest success stories of American intelligence.”
Sadly, Cheney’s claim about the virtues of torture is more no connected to reality than is Scalia’s. Cheney’s defense of torture rests on three false and/or highly questionable assumptions: Firstly, that saving lives was the Bush administration’s primary purpose for introducing the use of torture; secondly that the intelligence gained by torture actually prevented attacks on the American homeland; thirdly, that torture actually saved American lives generally.
Is Texas Harboring Torture Decider?
posted by Josiah Garber on July 14, 2009
in Politics
by Ray McGovern, July 09, 2009
Editor’s Note: Prior to giving some talks in Texas later this week, the author offered the following op-ed to the Dallas Morning News and the Fort-Worth Star-Telegram. Both newspapers in George W. Bush’s home state turned it down.
Seldom does a crime scene have so clear a smoking gun. A two-page presidential memorandum of Feb. 7, 2002, leaves no room for uncertainty regarding the “decider” on torture. His broad-stroke signature made torture official policy.
This should come as no surprise. You see, the Feb. 7, 2002, memorandum has been posted on the Web since June 22, 2004, when then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales mistakenly released it, along with other White House memoranda.
The title seemed innocent enough – “Humane Treatment of al-Qaeda and Taliban Detainees” – but in the body of the memo President George W. Bush authorized his senior aides to withhold Geneva Convention protections from suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees.
Like Shakespeare, the media seem harshest on the lawyers, including Texans Gonzales and William J. Haynes II (Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s lawyer), who later outdid themselves trying to make torture legal.
When Stimulus Does Not Stimulate
posted by Josiah Garber on July 13, 2009
in Economics, Politics
A majority of Americans now give President Obama’s handling of the economy a negative rating and many economists and city officials are concerned that Obama’s gargantuan stimulus effort has not given the expected quick boost to the economy. Some argue this is because funds have been slow in coming due to bureaucratic red tape meant to ensure that the money spent will not be wasted. Jared Bernstein, chief economist for the office of Vice President Joe Biden (who knew that the Vice President needed a chief economist?), is quoted as saying “We’re hitting the right balance between speed and oversight.” Unfortunately for the American public, sound economics teaches that, regardless of how fast the money is spent or how much oversight is provided by bureaucrats, the money doled out by the stimulus plan will be wasted and will have a detrimental impact on the economy in the long term, because that is the nature of profligate government spending.
From an economic perspective, Obama’s stimulus plan is equivalent to a giant welfare scheme. Instead of the money going to lower income Americans, however, it is meant to go to municipal bureaucrats of various stripes. Instead of productive American citizens determining what to do with their own scarce resources, the state is stepping in and dictating how they will be used. Consequently, such spending is essentially government consumption, which is what vulgar Keynesians think we need now more than ever. Such economists are shocked — shocked! — to find out that Americans are now saving any increases in income instead of blowing it on even more consumer goods. Not to worry, however. If private citizens do not consume enough for official tastes, the government always can.
The EPA Silences a Climate Skeptic
posted by Josiah Garber on July 12, 2009
in Politics
The professional penalty for offering a contrary view to elites like Al Gore is a smear campaign.
Wherever Jim Hansen is right now — whatever speech the “censored” NASA scientist is giving — perhaps he’ll find time to mention the plight of Alan Carlin. Though don’t count on it.
Mr. Hansen, as everyone in this solar system knows, is the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Starting in 2004, he launched a campaign against the Bush administration, claiming it was censoring his global-warming thoughts and fiddling with the science. It was all a bit of a hoot, given Mr. Hansen was already a world-famous devotee of the theory of man-made global warming, a reputation earned with some 1,400 speeches he’d given, many while working for Mr. Bush. But it gave Democrats a fun talking point, one the Obama team later picked up.
So much so that one of President Barack Obama’s first acts was a memo to agencies demanding new transparency in government, and science. The nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Lisa Jackson, joined in, exclaiming, “As administrator, I will ensure EPA’s efforts to address the environmental crises of today are rooted in three fundamental values: science-based policies and program, adherence to the rule of law, and overwhelming transparency.” In case anyone missed the point, Mr. Obama took another shot at his predecessors in April, vowing that “the days of science taking a backseat to ideology are over.”
Should the Church Wave the Flag?
posted by Josiah Garber on July 11, 2009
in Church, Politics
The Catholic Church in America in the 19th century would have never featured an American flag anywhere in sight. This trend began in World War I: the German parishes were pressured to show their loyalty to the state and its war.
The trend picked up steam in World War II, when the Italians too were suspected and so had to declare their loyalty. The flag issue became universal during the Cold War when everyone was expected to rally around the nation in its fight against its foreign adversaries.
But looking in back in time to the 18th century and before, to say nothing of the European middle ages and back before the invention of the very idea of the nation state, this entire project would have been completely unknown: the Church nowhere swears allegiance to the state and Christians are citizens first of a universal kingdom with a ruler chosen from all eternity.
Their vows are made unto the Lord, which is precisely why intellectuals like Rousseau said that the Christians make such bad citizens. He was right about that, if by citizens you mean a person whose loyalties are first owed to the civic collective.
Today, however, people think nothing about singing hymns of praise to the state in the very hallowed halls of the Church: America the Beautiful, The Star Spangled Banner, and more. A house of worship in my own town enjoys unfurling the largest American flag I’ve ever seen and pasting it on the side of the building, oblivious the reality of the intellectual and theological dangers here.
In recent times, very recent times, the Catholic Church in the U.S. has been singled out for special pressure from courts and judges, and this has changed many aspects of parish management in ways that truly do represent an intrusion of politics and state issues in a sacred space. This is a tragedy that is gravely regrettable, even deeply threatening, and one that should not go unnoticed.
Inflation: What You See and What You Don’t See
posted by Josiah Garber on July 10, 2009
in Economics
Mises Daily by Thorsten Polleit
In an attempt to fight the international credit market turmoil and its effects on economic activity and overall prices, the US Federal Reserve (Fed) keeps increasing the supply of base money — which is cash in circulation and commercial banks’ money balances held with the Fed.
From August 2008 to May 2009, the monetary base in the United States more than doubled. The bulk of the expansion reflects an unprecedented rise in banks’ excess reserves — that is, banks’ base money which is available for additional credit and money creation.
The Next Bubble Is Here. Have You Bought In?
posted by Josiah Garber on July 9, 2009
in Economics
by Gary North
I have identified the next bubble. It has already begun. It is in full swing.
Investors want to identify the next big bubble. Some investors want to buy in now, maybe using borrowed money (margin loans) to make a killing. They are confident that they will sell out near the top. They won’t. Other investors just want to avoid getting trapped. They prefer to let the first group bear the uncertainty of profiting from a bubble sector.
The trouble with investment bubbles is that nobody seems to recognize them when they are making investors rich. Alan Greenspan denied that it is possible for central bankers to identify a bubble. He gave a speech in 2002, before his easy money policies had created the final stage of the worldwide housing bubble. He insisted on the following:
We at the Federal Reserve considered a number of issues related to asset bubbles – that is, surges in prices of assets to unsustainable levels. As events evolved, we recognized that, despite our suspicions, it was very difficult to definitively identify a bubble until after the fact – that is, when its bursting confirmed its existence.
Moreover, it was far from obvious that bubbles, even if identified early, could be preempted short of the central bank inducing a substantial contraction in economic activity – the very outcome we would be seeking to avoid.
First, he was blind to what the FED’s policies had done in the second half of the 1990′s to create the dot-com bubble. Second, he was equally blind to what these same expansionist policies were doing to the housing market – policies adopted in mid-2000, in response to the bursting of the dot-com bubble.
He was incorrect. Some of us did see that the dot-com bubble was a bubble. I told my subscribers in February and March of 2000 that the NASDAQ was a bubble at a price-earnings ratio of 206. The NASDAQ burst the week my second warning arrived in the mail.
With respect to the housing bubble, in late 2005, I wrote an article on “Surreal Estate on the San Andreas Fault,” which warned against the coming bursting of the real estate bubble. It was clear to me what Greenspan had done to the economy.
If you remember the S&L crisis of the mid-1980s, you have some indication of what is coming. The S&L crisis in Texas put a squeeze on the economy in Texas. Banks got nasty. They stopped making new loans. Yet the S&Ls were legally not banks. They were a second capital market. Today, the banks have become S&Ls. They have tied their loan portfolios to the housing market.
I think a squeeze is coming that will affect the entire banking system. The madness of bankers has become unprecedented. They have forgotten about loan diversification. They have been caught up in Greenspan’s counter-cyclical policy of lowering the federal funds rate. Now this policy is being reversed. Rates are climbing. This will contract the loan market. Banks will wind up sitting on top of bad loans of all kinds because the American economy is now housing-sale driven.
You may think that you are shielded. But your banker is not shielded. You may not deal with bankers. But your employer does.
War: The More We Spend on It, the More We Get
posted by Josiah Garber on July 8, 2009
in Economics, Politics
by Ryan McCarl, June 15, 2009
President Obama and Defense Secretary Gates’ $534 billion defense budget proposal is aimed at building a “21st-century military,” that is, a military designed to fight asymmetrical “small wars,” conduct anti-terrorism operations, and battle insurgencies. It shuffles a significant number of pieces around the chessboard, to be sure, but like its predecessors, it is an enormous waste of resources and wealth.
If we took a radically different, need-based approach to defense funding, and asked ourselves about the legitimate, just, and necessary aims of American power, and how much money we must allocate to defense to accomplish those aims, it is unlikely that we would wind up where we are now, with 20 percent of our national budget allocated to defense and accounting for a shameful 45 percent of the world’s spending on war and preparation for war.
In fact, the amount of money our government pours into “defense” is so large that it must be disguised even from a public perpetually eager to spend more to “keep America safe”; the actual defense budget does not include the development and maintenance of nuclear warheads (which is funded by the Department of Energy) or the funding of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Defense funding is not, as it stands, based on our national security needs, and Obama’s budget does little to change that basic fact. By need I mean real necessity, necessity related to actual (not imagined or invented) national security interests, rather than the political need to appease the defense industry and its dependents.
We can best understand this idea of necessity by looking closely at the opportunity costs of defense spending: for every dollar we spend on defense, other needs go unmet. And perhaps these needs, the needs of the impoverished and the jobless, the need of children for good schools and of communities for infrastructure, are more real than the “needs” invented to rationalize our spending on the latest technologies of war.
Obama’s changes to the defense budget make sense in many ways; the budget is, relative to its predecessors, pragmatic and forward-looking. It is one more example of how Obama’s strategy of putting some of America’s best academics and thinkers in the same room as its best politicians can lead to improvements in policy. But these improvements are too often on the margins of policy; they do not strike at the heart of the issue, which is: why must the U.S. spend 20 percent of its public wealth on war? Are we really so insecure, so endangered?
Shame: The ‘Antiwar’ Democrats Who Sold Out
posted by Josiah Garber on July 7, 2009
in Politics
by Jeremy Scahill, June 18, 2009
In a vote that should go down in recent histories as a day of shame for the Democrats, on Tuesday the House voted to approve another $106 billion dollars for the bloody wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and increasingly Pakistan). To put a fine point on the interconnection of the iron fist of U.S. militarism and the hidden hand of free market neoliberal economics, the bill included a massive initiative to give the International Monetary Fund billions more in U.S. taxpayer funds.
What once Democrats could argue was “Bush’s war,” they now officially own. In fact, only five Republicans voted for the supplemental (though overwhelmingly not on the issue of the war funding). Ron Paul, who made clear he was voting against the war, was a notable exception.
This vote has revealed a sobering statistic for the anti-war movement in this country and brought to the surface a broader issue that should give die-hard partisan Democrats who purport to be anti-war reason for serious pause about the actual state of their party. Only 30 Democrats voted against the war funding when it mattered. And these 30 did so in the face of significant threats to their political future from the White House and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. That means that only 30 out of 256 Democrats are willing to stand up to the war and the current president presiding over it. Their names are listed below; I would encourage people to call them and thank them for standing up and voting no when it counted.
Two other Democrats, not expected to vote against the war funding, joined the anti-war Democrats. Brad Sherman and Pete Stark brought the total number of Democratic votes against the supplemental to 32.
International Bailout Brings Us Closer to Economic Collapse
posted by Josiah Garber on July 6, 2009
in Economics, Politics
by Rep. Ron Paul, June 25, 2009
Last week Congress passed the war supplemental appropriations bill. In an affront to all those who thought they voted for a peace candidate, the current president will be sending another $106 billion we don’t have to continue the bloodshed in Afghanistan and Iraq, without a hint of a plan to bring our troops home.
Many of my colleagues who voted with me as I opposed every war supplemental request under the previous administration seem to have changed their tune. I maintain that a vote to fund the war is a vote in favor of the war. Congress exercises its constitutional prerogatives through the power of the purse, and as long as Congress continues to enable these dangerous interventions abroad, there is no end in sight, that is until we face total economic collapse.
From their spending habits, an economic collapse seems to be the goal of Congress and this administration. Washington spends with impunity domestically, bailing out and nationalizing everything they can get their hands on, and the foreign aid and IMF funding in this bill can rightly be called an international bailout!