I Swear

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The Westchester County (New York) Courthouse was built in 1973. When the Dumbest Trial of the Century ended I googled for this information. I had guessed the courtrooms, at least, dated from the 1960s or 1970s. The courtrooms are all in blond wood — cold, blocky, and graceless — and back then when people talked about “modern” decor there was nearly always blond wood involved.

In the front of the “dumbest trial” courtroom, high on the wall above the judges’ chair, the words IN GOD WE TRUST were carved in capital letters in the blond wood. And a Bible was kept on the witness stand for the swearing-in of witnesses. All the witnesses were asked by the clerk to put their left hands on the Bible and raise their right hands. (These directions confounded some of the witnesses, who needed reminding which hand was which. That was often the best part of their testimony.)

I realize that to many citizens religion is a primitive and irrational cult. And, of course, lots of religion is a primitive and irrational cult. The inscription didn’t bother me, but if I’d had anything to say about it I would have chosen something else out of consideration for non-believing citizens. Maybe “Justice is the set and constant purpose which gives every man his due” (Cicero) or “Justice in the life and conduct of the State is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens” (unknown) or, my favorite, “The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be” (Raymond Chandler). Hey, it’s a big wall. But then, I would have stipulated oak paneling and furniture in a Mission or Shaker style, with bright red and blue cushions and carpeting. That courtroom was just too … beige.

But the swearing on a Bible thing concerns me a little. I don’t know if all judges still expect people to swear on Bibles, but the “dumbest trial” judge, apparently, did. I wonder what happens if a witness doesn’t want to swear on a Bible? This might be OK with the judge, but wouldn’t it be prejudicial to some jurors?

As far as church-state issues go, this one hardly belongs at the top of the list. I’d like to hear other opinions, though.

Inalienable Rights

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Two hundred and seven six years ago, three members of the Danbury Baptists Association composed a letter to President Thomas Jefferson regarding religious discrimination in the state of Connecticut. Connecticut had established Congregationalism as the official state religion, and the Congregational Church was supported by state taxes. Connecticut law provided that people of other faiths could file exemptions to have their religious taxes routed to their own churches, but the exemptions often were not approved.

Some background: In 1801 Connecticut had not yet adopted a written state constitution, but instead was operating under a government derived from its old colonial charter, received from King Charles II in 1662. Charles’s policies were more tolerant of religious diversity than was often the case in those days, but religious establishment, politics, and government were tightly knotted together in Britain, as illustrated by the history of the Puritans. Charles’s charter assumed the colonists would work diligently to convert the “Natives of the Country to the Knowledge and Obedience of the only true GOD, and He Saviour of Mankind, and the Christian Faith, which in Our Royal Intentions, and the adventurers free Possession, is the only and principal End of this Plantation.”

The Bill of Rights had been adopted in 1791, but the First Amendment prohibited only the Congress of the United States from establishing religion. It would be many years before the Fourteenth Amendment extended this prohibition to the states.

Anyway, the Danbury Baptists were pretty fed up with religious discrimination in Connecticut, so they wrote to President Jefferson:

Our sentiments are uniformly on the side of religious liberty–that religion is at all times and places a matter between God and individuals–that no man ought to suffer in name, person, or effects on account of his religious opinions–that the legitimate power of civil government extends no further than to punish the man who works ill to his neighbors;

“The legitimate power of civil government extends no further than to punish the man who works ill to his neighbors.” That’s a point we might want to discuss sometime.

But, sir, our constitution of government is not specific. Our ancient charter together with the law made coincident therewith, were adopted as the basis of our government, at the time of our revolution; and such had been our laws and usages, and such still are; that religion is considered as the first object of legislation; and therefore what religious privileges we enjoy (as a minor part of the state) we enjoy as favors granted, and not as inalienable rights; and these favors we receive at the expense of such degrading acknowledgements as are inconsistent with the rights of freemen.

I included the historical background about the charter because some right-wing religious historical revisionists have claimed that the “ancient charter” the Danbury Baptists referred to was the U.S. Constitution, even though the Constitution was hardly ancient at the time and had not even been written, much less “adopted as the basis of our government, at the time of our revolution.” The revisionists try to claim that the Baptists were OK with government getting entangled with religion as long as it did so in a non-preferential way.

But that’s bogus. The Baptists continued,

It is not to be wondered at therefore; if those who seek after power and gain under the pretense of government and religion should reproach their fellow men–should reproach their order magistrate, as a enemy of religion, law, and good order, because he will not, dare not, assume the prerogatives of Jehovah and make laws to govern the kingdom of Christ.

Jefferson famously wrote back in 1802:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.

What this exchange amounted to was that the Danbury Baptists wrote Jefferson complaining about legislators in Connecticut who “assume the prerogatives of Jehovah and make laws to govern the kingdom of Christ,” and asking for his assurance that the feds wouldn’t do the same thing. And Jefferson wrote back saying, damn straight we won’t, because the First Amendment doesn’t allow it.

So now it’s more than two centuries later, and some Americans are still struggling to wrap their heads around the idea that government may not be used to enforce or coerce religious beliefs and practices, and that a person’s religion ain’t none of the Gubmint’s damn business. Such a person is U.S. Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA) who sent a letter to constituents

… warning that unless there is an immigration crackdown “many more Muslims” will be elected to public office. And these Muslims, Goode noted, would take the oath of office with a hand resting on the Koran. In a December 7 letter, a copy of which you’ll find below, the Republican congressman warned that if “American citizens don’t wake up” and adopt the “Virgil Goode position on immigration,” there will “likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran.”

The Congressman actually wrote,

I fear that in the next century there will be many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped.

Alan Dershowitz writes about a Jew, Jacob Henry, who was elected to the North Carolina state legislature in 1808 but was blocked from taking his seat because of a state law that required legislators to accept the divinity of Christ. And now almost two centuries later another Jew, Dennis Prager, is leading a campaign to keep a Muslim elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from being sworn in on a Koran.

As they say — the more things change, the more they stay the same.

I already wrote about Dennis Prager and how he hates America, here. Since then I’ve heard from a number of people that U.S. Representatives don’t put their hands on anything when they are being officially sworn in, but sometimes pose with Bibles at photo-op swearings-in at another time. So this whole swearing-in controversy is bogus on several levels.

(However, during my recent detention at the Westchester County Supreme Court as a jurist for the Dumbest Trial of the Century, I observed a whole lot of swearing-in of witnesses on the Bible, and I have some thoughts about that I want to put into another post soon. And since two of our new congress critters are Buddhists, I want to explain why the practice of swearing on sacred books of any sort is problematic for Buddhists.)

I’m pleased to report that not everyone on the Right agrees with Rep. Goode’s letter. For example, blogger Rick Moran of Right Wing Nut House wrote,

But beyond the shameless, shallow pandering by Goode is a revealed truth; that too often Republican politicians are using this “traditional values” theme to capitalize on some unimagined fear as in the case of Goode and his phantom Muslims. We also see other individual groups like gays targeted as somehow being in conflict with traditional American values – as if these values are practiced by people solely as a result of their religion, sexual orientation, ethnic heritage, or any other qualifier that a politician seeks to use to drive a wedge between us….

…I’m all for controlling our borders. I’m all for enforcing the law. But I am also in favor of increasing legal immigration. If someone wishes to go through the bureaucratic rigmarole that it takes to get here legally and then work toward citizenship, that alone should denote a person’s interest in the “traditional values” of America. There are plenty of Muslims here today – second and third generation Muslims – who embrace the same values you and I do and are no more a threat to those values than my pet cat Snowball.

For Goode to posit the notion that Muslims are incapable of adopting and embracing traditional values not only flies in the face of history and everything we know about immigrants but also bespeaks a shallow and corrupt mind, incapable of grasping the shining truth about America as a melting pot that embraces all cultures and ethnic groups.

And that may be the most traditional of all American values.

Probably the last thing Mr. Moran wants is praise from me, but I’ll say it, anyway … Amen.

On the other hand, there are plenty of righties who live down to our expectations. The blogger of Riehl World View writes,

Founded, to a degree by Deists, or not – American tradition and the root of her social values is Judeo-Christian belief. That is a fact and no amount of protestation is going to change it. Though certainly a large influx of, say a Muslim or Hindu population most certainly would.

Which takes us back to Mr. Jefferson, who wrote in his autobiography of the adoption of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom:

The bill for establishing religious freedom, the principles of which had, to a certain degree, been enacted before, I had drawn in all the latitude of reason & right. It still met with opposition; but, with some mutilations in the preamble, it was finally passed; and a singular proposition proved that it’s protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word “Jesus Christ,” so that it should read “a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion.” The insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of it’s protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.

Heh. But blogger Riehl is less worried about religious liberty and inalienable rights than he is about preserving our “social values.” The fact is that our “social values” have already changed enormously since Jefferson’s time — slaves were freed, women got the vote, the Irish became respectable, etc. If we could go fetch Mr. Jefferson in a time machine and bring him here, he’d be shocked out of his stockings. So many of the social values of Jefferson’s time have disappeared that the nation would be as alien to Mr. Jefferson as Mars. And social values will continue to change whether large numbers of Muslims move to America or not, because that’s the nature of human society.

That said, I would insist that Muslims or anyone else who move here be advised of the Wall of Separation and warned not to try to tear it down. It protects us all from the likes of Rep. Goode.

Censored

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Today the New York Times is running a “redacted” version of Flynt Leverett’s op-ed, discussed here. The column, headlined “Redacted Version of Original Op-Ed,” was published with black bars over the parts redacted.

As egalia of the Tennessee Guerilla Women says, “Take a look at the graphic here, and tell me you are not living in a state similar to the USSR.”

According to an accompanying editorial, parts of the original text were

… blacked out by the Central Intelligence Agency’s Publication Review Board after the White House intervened in the normal prepublication review process and demanded substantial deletions. Agency officials told us that they had concluded on their own that the original draft included no classified material, but that they had to bow to the White House.

Indeed, the deleted portions of the original draft reveal no classified material. These passages go into aspects of American-Iranian relations during the Bush administration’s first term that have been publicly discussed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; former Secretary of State Colin Powell; former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage; a former State Department policy planning director, Richard Haass; and a former special envoy to Afghanistan, James Dobbins.

Not only that, the editorial says, all information censored by the White House has been published before. With the editorial are the citations the NY Times provided the censors

… to demonstrate that all of the material the White House objected to is already in the public domain. Unfortunately, to make sense of much of our Op-Ed article, readers will have to read the citations for themselves.

Even weirder, the NY Times op-ed is a condensed version of an already published paper by Leverett that is freely available for download in PDF format from the Century Foundation (per SusanUnPC at No Quarter).

The only logical conclusion one can draw from this is that the op ed was censored because the White House disagreed with Leverett’s opinion.

Looks like Bubble Boy is fixin’ to expand the bubble.

Apparatchiks With Shovels

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Here’s a seriously disturbing story from TPM Café. Vali Nasr writes,

It now looks like the administration has adopted the surge strategy as its mantra. Simply put it means no new political road map for Iraq in place of the “national unity government” formula that has so far failed (has not delivered on the insurgency but has managed to alienated the Shias, and has actually caused more rather than less sectarian violence since the U.S. adopted it); going it alone (ignoring ISG’s recommendation to talk to the neighbors); and putting more boots on the ground. This last item deserves special attention. The language of the administration suggests that the surge will be used to fight radical groups and sectarian militias—Sunni ones and especially Shia militias and death squads associated with Muqtada al-Sadr. But listen closely; what they mean is that surge is in fact meant to finish off Sadr. And there lies the danger.

This is stunning. This means that the war will escalate, and our troops will be taking on multiple sides of a civil war at the same time. And by taking on Shia militias, Nasr says, we run the risk of inciting a Shia insurgency, which is about the only sort of violence Iraq hadn’t seen already.

The generals (who, we’ve been told until now, were making “decisions on the ground”) are opposed to the surge. But as if on cue, today several news outlets have reported that soldiers in Iraq support the surge. David Cloud of the New York Times writes,

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, talking to enlisted soldiers on his second day in Iraq, heard broad support today for a proposal to send more American forces to Iraq, an idea that has emerged as a leading option as the Bush administration considers a strategy shift.

“I really think we need more troops here,” said Specialist Jason T. Glenn, one of several soldiers at a breakfast meeting with Mr. Gates who backed the idea. “With more presence here,” he said, security might improve to a point that “we can get the Iraqi Army trained up.”

You can read essentially the same story from the Associated Press. Thomas E. Ricks and Howard Schneider report for the Washington Post,

Bush said this week he is waiting to hear from Gates after the new defense secretary returns from Iraq before making a final decision on the issue.

In a breakfast earlier in the day with more than a dozen enlisted soldiers, however, Gates got an earful about the need for more personnel.

“I really think we need more troops here, with more presence on the ground. More troops might hold [the insurgents] off long enough to where we can get the Iraq army trained up,” said Spec. Jason Glenn, a member of an intelligence unit in the first infantry division.

“I think we do need more troops over here,” agreed PFC Cassandra Wallace, a support soldier in the Tenth Mountain Division. “More troops would help us integrate the Iraqi army into patrols here.”

You don’t have to wait for the White House speechwriters to put this together for you, do you? You know that sometime soon President Bush is going to announce that soldiers are asking for more troops in Iraq, so we have to send them.

I guess now we’re bypassing the generals and are asking the soldiers to make decisions on the ground.

Secretary Gates is, in fact, doing a heck of a job hearing what Bush wants to hear. According to Ricks and Schneider, not only is Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki declaring stoutly that Iraq will “take the lead role in solving the country’s security problems,” (translation: See? Iraqification is working!) but Gates is saying that both Iran and Syria are playing “a very negative role” in Iraq. Iran especially (translation: Just forget about discussions with Syria and Iran).

You know that Bush has already decided what the Great Leap Forward to Victory will be, and that it will look remarkably like the old plan on meth. What we’re seeing now is just the pre-leap ceremony.

It’s a Joke

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one:

There was an old man in France who used to get up at the crack of dawn every day and sprinkle white powder all around his house. When his neighbor asked him what he was sprinkling, he replied that it was elephant repellant. The neighbor exclaimed “There are no elephants in France!” to which he answered “I guess it must be working then!”

It’s an old joke. I’ve heard it told better. But now there’s an updated version, as reported by Melinda Henneberger:

I like dreamers, so I was really trying to follow what Bill Kristol had to say on the Daily Show last night. The gist of it was that though the war in Iraq had been mismanaged, yes, it had also kept us from being attacked here at home since 9/11, so Bush should get some credit for that.

I didn’t see this segment, so I can’t judge how well Kristol told the joke. I’m guessing it went something like this:

    STEWART: The Iraq War isn’t going so well. What are we trying to accomplish?

    KRISTOL: It’s to keep away al Qaeda.

    STEWART: How is it keeping away al Qaeda?

    KRISTOL: Have there been any al Qaeda attacks in America lately?

    STEWART: No.

    KRISTOL: See? It must be working.

I like the elephant version better.

Update: C&L has the video.

Republic or Empire?

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This morning I read the first paragraph of this article by Peter Baker in today’s Washington Post:

President Bush acknowledged for the first time yesterday that the United States is not winning the war in Iraq and said he plans to expand the overall size of the “stressed” U.S. armed forces to meet the challenges of a long-term global struggle against terrorists.

After which enough alarm bells went off in my head to wake the dead.

The January 2007 issue of Harper’s (the cover art is a photograph of a rubber duckie) has an article by Chalmers Johnson titled “Republic or Empire: A National Intelligence Estimate on the United States.” It’s not online and won’t be for awhile (once again, Harper’s policy about not putting articles online until they’re a couple of months old makes me crazy), but reading the article in light of Baker’s news story is guaranteed to scare the living bleep out of you.

In the article, Chalmers discusses “military Keynesianism,” in which “the flow of the nation’s wealth — from taxpayers and (increasingly) foreign lenders through the government to military contractors and (decreasingly) back to the taxpayers.” As a result, “the domestic economy requires sustained military ambition in order to avoid recession or collapse.” Then, he ties military Keynesianism to the “unitary executive” theory and Bush’s increasingly unchecked power. Meanwhile, citizens and media dutifully “abet their government in maintaining a facade of constitutional democracy until the nation drifts into bankruptcy.”

Note that Chalmers is a serious guy with sterling Establishment credentials. Among other things, from 1967 until 1973, Chalmers was was a consultant to the Office of National Estimates (O.N.E.) within the CIA. In that capacity he mostly dealt with issues involving communist China and Maoism. There’s more about Chalmers and his work here.

In 2004 Chalmers told an interviewer he wasn’t always so concerned about military adventurism:

Johnson thought antiwar demonstrators during the Vietnam were naive. He voted for Ronald Reagan. In retrospect, Johnson told John Wilkens of the San Diego Union-Tribune, he was “a spear carrier for the empire.” …

… “I fear that we will lose our country,” Johnson writes in his latest book, “The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic.”

Bush and the Pentagon are bankrupting the nation, dismantling the Constitution, and leading us down the path to endless war. America is afflicted with the same “economic sclerosis of the former USSR,” Chalmers explains in a ZNet interview. But at least Mikhail Gorbachev tried to reform the Soviet Union before it imploded. No such luck with Bush and the neocons. “The United States is not even trying to reform, but it is certain that vested interests here would be as great or greater an obstacle. It is nowhere written that the United States, in its guise as an empire dominating the world, must go on forever. The blowback from the second half of the twentieth century has only just begun.”

In this TomDispatch interview, Chalmers explains how he evolved from being a loyal, spear carrying Cold Warrior to a being a prophet of doom howling in the wilderness. Max B. Sawicky of MaxSpeak wrote of Chalmers,

Johnson remains a conservative, staunchly pro-capitalist, limited government. No goofy Buchanan-type xenophobia. There’s a fair amount of overlap with Chomsky. People type the latter as “left” but I would argue that both of their approaches to U.S. foreign policy are empiricist and Madisonian. I’m no expert, but neither are the loons running this government.

The Johnson analytical framework harkens back to New Left treatments of “Pentagonal capitalism” and “military Keynesianism.” It emphasizes the brute fact of U.S. military outposts around the world, the breadth of resources devoted to imperial overstretch, and the impacts on the locals. I tend to discount the money aspect — what’s $450 billion in a $13 trillion economy? To me the ideology — the thirst for influence, control, and dominance — is most important.

The part about “limited government” sets some alarm belts off, too, but I respect anyone who’s actually thinking. Unlike some of our recent libertarian commenters.

Marc Cooper interviewed Chalmers in 2004 (emphasis added):

So where does that leave today’s authentic patriots?

The role of the citizen now is to be ever better informed. When Benjamin Franklin was asked, “What have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” he replied: “A republic if you can keep it.” We’ve not been paying attention to what we need to do to keep it. I think we made a disastrous error in the classic strategic sense when in 1991 we concluded that we “had won the Cold War.” No. We simply didn’t lose it as badly as the Soviets did. We were both caught up in imperial overreach, in weapons industries that came to dominate our societies. We allowed ideologues to capture our Department of Defense and lead us off — in a phrase they like — into a New Rome. We are no longer a status quo power respectful of international law. We became a revisionist power, one fundamentally opposed to the world as it is organized, much like Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, Bolshevik Russia or Maoist China.

Indeed, your thesis is that since September 11, the U.S. ceased to be a republic and has become an empire.

It’s an extremely open question if we have crossed our Rubicon and there is no going back. Easily the most important right in our Constitution, according to James Madison, who wrote much of the document, is the one giving the right to go to war exclusively to the elected representatives of the people, to the Congress. Never, Madison continued, should that right be given to a single man. But in October 2002, our Congress gave that power to a single man, to exercise whenever he wanted, and with nuclear weapons if he so chose. And the following March, without any international consultation or legitimacy, he exercised that power by staging a unilateral attack on Iraq.

The Bill of Rights — articles 4 and 6 — are now open to question. Do people really have the right to habeas corpus? Are they still secure in their homes from illegal seizures? The answer for the moment is no. We have to wait and see what the Supreme Court will rule as to the powers of this government that it appointed.

Going back to the Harper’s article — Chalmers writes,

Military Keynesianism … creates a feedback loop: American presidents know that military Keynesianism tends to concentrate power in the executive branch, and so presidents who seek greater power have a natural inducement to encourage further growth of the military-industrial complex. As the phenomena feed on each other, the usual outcome is a real war, based not on the needs of national defense but rather on the domestic political logic of military Keynesianism …

… George W. Bush has taken this natural political phenomenon to an extreme never before experienced by the American electorate. Every president has sought greater authority, but Bush … appears to believe that increasing presidential authority is both a birthright and a central component of his historical legacy. …

… John Yoo, Bush’s deputy assistant attorney general from 2001 to 2003, writes in his book War By Other Means, “We are used to a peacetime system in which Congress enacts laws, the President enforces them, and the courts interpret them. In wartime, the gravity shifts to the executive branch.”

Let’s go back to Peter Baker’s article for a moment:

A substantial military expansion will take years and would not immediately affect the war in Iraq. But it would begin to address the growing alarm among commanders about the state of the armed forces. Although the president offered no specifics, other U.S. officials said the administration is preparing plans to bolster the nation’s permanent active-duty military with as many as 70,000 additional troops.

A force structure expansion would accelerate the already-rising costs of war. The administration is drafting a supplemental request for more than $100 billion in additional funds for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, on top of the $70 billion already approved for this fiscal year, according to U.S. officials. That would be over 50 percent more than originally projected for fiscal 2007, making it by far the costliest year since the 2003 invasion.

Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Congress has approved more than $500 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as for terrorism-related operations elsewhere. An additional $100 billion would bring overall expenditures to $600 billion, exceeding those for the Vietnam War, which, adjusted for inflation, cost $549 billion, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Now, what will Bush not do to pay for all this expansion? Raise taxes, that’s what. Instead, he’s going to borrow more money from China and Japan and who knows who else. In other words, this is a major expansion of military Keynesianism. Which, once again, is what happens when “the flow of the nation’s wealth — from taxpayers and (increasingly) foreign lenders through the government to military contractors and (decreasingly) back to the taxpayers.” As a result, “the domestic economy requires sustained military ambition in order to avoid recession or collapse.”

And I think Chalmers is right about not losing the Cold War as badly as the Soviets did. We could still lose, however. Although a great many factors contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union, my understanding is that the collapse came about primarily because the Soviet economy just plain couldn’t support the cost of their military, their secret police, and their subsidies to client states like Cuba. Soviet citizens increasingly depended on a black market economy to survive, and Gorbachev’s reforms came way too late to do any good. Eventually the whole business fell like a house of cards.

Now, our economy might be able to pay for all the stuff Bush wants to spend money on — I honestly don’t know — but the plain fact is that it is not paying for those things because of Bush’s tax cuts. Instead, we are borrowing money from foreign countries and going deeper into debt every time we breathe.

And, frankly, this scares the bleep out of me.

It’s probably the case that the military does need the expansion because of the strain Bush’s War has put upon it. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that we must haul our asses out of Iraq to save ourselves. Yes, that will leave a nasty mess behind, and that’s too damn bad. But Bush’s War is itself the greater danger.

See also: Digby, Robert Scheer, and xan at Corrente.

Update: Via Digby — the Associated Press reports —

The Pentagon is still struggling to get a handle on the unprecedented number of contractors now helping run the nation’s wars, losing millions of dollars because it is unable to monitor industry workers stationed in far-flung locations, according to a congressional report.

The investigation by the Government Accountability Office, which released the report Tuesday, found that the Defense Department’s inability to manage contractors effectively has hurt military operations and unit morale and cost the Pentagon money.

“With limited visibility over contractors, military commanders and other senior leaders cannot develop a complete picture of the extent to which they rely on contractors as an asset to support their operations,” said the GAO, the investigative arm of Congress.

Oh Be Joyful

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E.J. Dionne’s column should give you some holiday cheer.

In 1984 three exit polls pegged Ronald Reagan’s share of the ballots cast by Americans under 30 at between 57 and 60 percent. Reagan-style conservatism seemed fresh, optimistic and innovative. In 2006 voters under 30 gave 60 percent of their votes to Democratic House candidates, according to the shared media exit poll. Conservatism now looks old, tired and ineffectual.

I noticed years ago that the rank-and-file “movement conservative” is younger than I am. Well, OK, most people are younger than I am. But surely you’ve noticed that a disproportionate number of True Believers are people who reached their late teens / early twenties during the Carter or Reagan years at the earliest. They came of age at the same time the right-wing media / think tank infrastructure began to dominate national political discourse, and all their adult lives their brains have been pickled in rightie propaganda.

But now it seems much of the new crop o’ young’uns are looking at the freak show that movement conservatism has become, and saying, holy bleep.

When the right seemed headed to dominance in the early 1990s, the hot political media trend was talk radio and the star was Rush Limbaugh, a smart entrepreneur who spawned imitators around the country and all across the AM dial.

Is it me, or has rightie talk radio become a tad déclassée?

Now the chic medium is televised political comedy and the cool commentators are Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Their brilliant ridicule of the Bush administration and conservative bloviators satisfies a political craving at least as great as the one Limbaugh once fed. Stewart and Colbert speak especially to young Americans who rely on their sensible take on the madness that surrounds us. The young helped drive their popularity, and the Droll Duo in turn shaped a new, anti-conservative skepticism.

I like to think that the liberal blogosphere made Stewart and Colbert possible. I remember when the old Media Whores Online site seemed deliciously seditious. Then sedition bloomed on thousands of blogs, broke out of the Internets and into mass media, and became The Daily Show.

Of course, just because the young folks are waking up to the sham of contemporary American conservatism doesn’t mean they’re ready to embrace liberalism. And that may be just as well; it’s not healthy to bounce from one ‘ism” to another. Be skeptical, young folks. Think for yourselves. No one ideology has all the answers. Resist being programmed by anybody.

Since the 1970s, supply-side conservatives have been brilliantly successful in redefining economic thinking. They shifted the popular focus from workers to entrepreneurs, from incomes to wealth, from job creation to share-price increases, and from government policy innovation to private-sector autonomy.

Suddenly economic inequality is a problem even conservatives are taking seriously. Corporate America is looked upon, let us say, in less heroic terms. Economic security is no longer a dirty phrase, and staunch capitalists aren’t quite so eager to preach the virtues of “creative destruction” to displaced industrial workers. Government — with some wariness, to be sure — is being invited back into the economic story to redress grievances and to right imbalances.

Government isn’t the solution to all problems, but it’s actually quite good at addressing some problems. I’m tired of talking heads on television preaching that government can’t be used for anything but making war and protecting embryos.

I mean, all the other industrialized countries have national health care; why can’t we?

At this point I wouldn’t mind placing a moratorium on all ideologies. We need to re-think basic questions, like Why is there government? A smart commenter named Patrick wrote, “A particular kind of libertarian ideology has permeated virtually all levels of public discourse in the US: the notion that Capitalism rather than representative self-government is our founding principle.” I agree. And in recent years I’ve been stunned by the number of people I run into in political forums and on blogs who don’t understand what “representative self-government” means.

The comment thread of a previous post became infested (before I closed it) with libertarians who worship the Constitution as Holy Writ yet dismiss representative self-government as blasphemy. To claim that the Constitution was not created to be an instrument for representative self-government is like claiming a piano isn’t an instrument for playing music. In fact, that’s the point of it.

I hope the young folks are growing weary of being told what they can’t do and what they can’t have because movement conservatism (or libertarianism, or some other ism) says so. Maybe in the years to come they’ll be willing to consider what we can do — for ourselves, and our posterity — if we choose.

And Another Thing

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This sorta kinda ties in to the last couple of posts — “Why Limited Government?” and “Another Rightie Who Can’t Read.”

John Hawkins of Right Wing News objects to something he read at Smirking Chimp.

“American Capitalism is a malignancy that permeates our economic, social, and political systems and institutions. This untreated cancer ravaging the body of civilization is spreading like an unchecked conflagration in a munitions factory. Feudalism didn’t die; it simply evolved. Corporatism, Consumerism, wage slavery, debt slavery, free trade agreements, deregulation, and privatization condemn most of the global population to varying degrees of slavery, serfdom or indentured servitude.” — Jason Miller at the popular liberal blog, The Smirking Chimp

For the record, I don’t think capitalism in itself is to blame for the bad stuff Jason Miller attributes to it. I think any way you choose to run an economy can lead to “slavery, serfdom or indentured servitude” if ordinary people have no protections from powerful people. Sooner or later the wealthy and powerful will find a way to game the system, whatever it is, to their advantage. Capitalism may be a little easier to game than some other systems, but none are foolproof. Certainly communism, which is capitalism’s polar opposite in most respects, has been found to lead to “slavery, serfdom or indentured servitude” wherever it’s been tried.

Anyway, Mr. Hawkins comments,

Because Mr. Miller and his many comrades in the Democratic Party don’t understand human nature, they don’t understand capitalism.

First off, Mr. Miller didn’t say anything about being a comrade of the Democratic Party, and Smirking Chimp (which is not a blog, but which contains many blogs, including Jason Miller’s) is not an instrument of the Democratic Party. Greens and Naderites are free to blog there also, I believe. I’ve met the proprietor of Smirking Chimp, and he doesn’t strike me as the sort who demands loyalty oaths. Hawkins needs to relieve his knee from its tendency to jerk.

Capitalism is designed to take advantage of one of the most basic truths about human beings: people are selfish.

People will work very hard for themselves and their families, but, they are not automations and very few of them are going to work hard to line someone else’s pocket or for “society,” if they don’t think their efforts are being properly rewarded.

With capitalism, that selfishness leads businessmen to hire more workers to increase their profits, to earn more money which they pay taxes on, and to create products and services that the rest of society can use — not out of the goodness of their heart, but because they benefit from it. Take away the benefits that people can earn from themselves, then they won’t go the extra mile and society won’t be able to profit from their efforts.

Let’s take a look back at the Golden Age of Laissez Faire in the United States —

1820-1880: The Seamstress Impoverished

Seamstresses were familiar figures in early 19th-century American cities, filling the needs of an expanding garment industry. Working at home, they stitched bundles of pre-cut fabric into clothing worn by Southern slaves, Western miners, and New England gentlemen. Dressmakers were responsible for producing an entire garment and could earn a decent wage. Seamstresses, however, were poorly compensated for work that was both physically demanding and unpredictable. Paid by the piece, seamstresses worked 16 hours a day during the busiest seasons, but their income rarely exceeding bare subsistence. Making matters worse was, shop owners were notorious for finding fault with the finished garments and withholding payment. Consequently, seamstresses often relied on charity for their own and their families’ survival.

Yeah, capitalism worked like a charm for those women. Oh, wait …

Here’s another little blast from the past:

History In 1888, New York state factory inspectors provided the following description of sweat-shops: “In New York city, in the tenement house districts where clothing is manufactured, there exists a system of labor which is nearly akin to slavery as it is possible to get. The work is done under the eyes of task-masters, who rent a small room or two in the rear part of an upper floor of a high building, put in a few sewing machines, a stove suitable for heating irons, and then hire a number of men and women to work for them.” Explicit in the inspectors’ definition of a sweatshop is the exploitation of garment workers by contractors, who forced their workers to labor for long hours only to be paid insufficient wages. In addition to physically sweating as a result of their toil, workers were also “sweated” in the same manner an animal would be milked or bled.

By the 1880s, for the most part, seamstresses no longer negotiated work on an individual basis but were subsumed into a system of contracting. Contractors received components of garments that they in turn assembled according to designs. These finished products were returned to the manufacturers and marketed under the company’s label. As a result, manufacturers distanced themselves from the hiring and equipping of a labor force, which became the responsibility of the contractor. Manufacturers paid a set price for each finished garment they received from the contractor, which was considerably lower then they would then charge retail. Consequently, contractors, in order to make any profit, forced longer hours and lower wages on their workers.

Capitalism didn’t put a stop to these practices. Free markets didn’t put a stop to these practices. It was government regulation and labor laws that, finally, provided some protection for workers.

The notion that unfettered selfishness and deregulation benefits everybody has been disproved by history time and time again, yet ideologues refuse to learn that lesson. Capitalism needs watchdogs to keep it honest, or it corrupts into plutocracy and, eventually, corporatism. That’s a plain fact. Selfishness may inspire people to better their lives, but it also inspires people to lie, cheat, steal, hoard, and exploit.

One of the biggest atrocities of human history — the death by starvation of more than one million Irish during the Famine — was made worse by “free market” ideology. Free markets didn’t cause the blight, but the ideology prevented the English from providing relief when it easily could have.

In deciding their course of action during the Famine, British government officials and administrators rigidly adhered to the popular theory of the day, known as laissez-faire (meaning let it be), which advocated a hands-off policy in the belief that all problems would eventually be solved on their own through ‘natural means.’

Great efforts were thus made to sidestep social problems and avoid any interference with private enterprise or the rights of property owners. Throughout the entire Famine period, the British government would never provide massive food aid to Ireland under the assumption that English landowners and private businesses would have been unfairly harmed by resulting food price fluctuations.

In adhering to laissez-faire, the British government also did not interfere with the English-controlled export business in Irish-grown grains. Throughout the Famine years, large quantities of native-grown wheat, barley, oats and oatmeal sailed out of places such as Limerick and Waterford for England, even though local Irish were dying of starvation. Irish farmers, desperate for cash, routinely sold the grain to the British in order to pay the rent on their farms and thus avoid eviction.

In the first year of the Hunger, the British Prime Minister arranged for some shipments of corn to Ireland that helped a little. But then the government changed hands, and a new Prime Minister took over.

Once he had firmly taken control, Trevelyan ordered the closing of the food depots in Ireland that had been selling Peel’s Indian corn. He also rejected another boatload of Indian corn already headed for Ireland. His reasoning, as he explained in a letter, was to prevent the Irish from becoming “habitually dependent” on the British government. His openly stated desire was to make “Irish property support Irish poverty.”

As a devout advocate of laissez-faire, Trevelyan also claimed that aiding the Irish brought “the risk of paralyzing all private enterprise.” Thus he ruled out providing any more government food, despite early reports the potato blight had already been spotted amid the next harvest in the west of Ireland. Trevelyan believed Peel’s policy of providing cheap Indian corn meal to the Irish had been a mistake because it undercut market prices and had discouraged private food dealers from importing the needed food. This year, the British government would do nothing. The food depots would be closed on schedule and the Irish fed via the free market, reducing their dependence on the government while at the same time maintaining the rights of private enterprise.

And at least a million Irish starved, and about another million left Ireland on “coffin ships” in which many more died of disease. This is the nonsense that the “free market” devotees want to go back to. Like it worked so well the first time.

Almost a century ago Theodore Roosevelt quoted Abraham Lincoln:

“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

“If that remark was original with me, I should be even more strongly denounced as a communist agitator than I shall be anyhow. It is Lincoln’s. I am only quoting it; and that is one side; that is the side the capitalist should hear. Now, let the workingman hear his side.

“Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights… Nor should this lead to a war upon the owners of property. Property is the fruit of labor;… property is desirable; is a positive good in the world.”

And then comes a thoroughly Lincolnlike sentence: —

“Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.”

It seems to me that, in these words, Lincoln took substantially the attitude that we ought to take; he showed the proper sense of proportion in his relative estimates of capital and labor, of human rights and property rights. Above all, in this speech, as in many others, he taught a lesson in wise kindliness and charity; an indispensable lesson to us of today. … The issue is joined, and we must fight or fail.

Do read the whole speech, if you haven’t already. TR laid out the essential foundations of modern American liberalism in this speech and gives “deregulation” of business a resounding bitch slap. “The right to regulate the use of wealth in the public interest is universally admitted,” he said. He said that in 1910. We need to do some universal re-admitting.