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Javier E

It's Time to Stop Rationalizing and Enabling Evangelical Vaccine Rejection - by David F... - 0 views

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vaccine rejection moral foundation Christian morality framework liberty libertinism rights

shared by Javier E on 29 Aug 21 - No Cached
  • As we approach nine months of vaccine availability and nine months of flood-the-zone coverage of vaccine safety and efficacy, it is clear that much (though certainly not all) of our remaining refusal problem is not one of information but one of moral formation itself. The very moral framework of millions of our fellow citizens—the way in which they understand the balance between liberty and responsibility—is gravely skewed. 
  • To understand the skew, it’s first necessary to understand the proper balance, and while we have vaccine endorsements from Christian leaders from across the Catholic/Protestant spectrum, we also have guidance from church fathers—individuals who no one can claim have caved to some “establishment” or are motivated by supposed invites to mythical beltway “cocktail parties.” For example, read these famous words from Martin Luther, written during a plague in his own time:
  • Therefore I shall ask God mercifully to protect us. Then I shall fumigate, help purify the air, administer medicine, and take it. I shall avoid places and persons where my presence is not needed in order not to become contaminated and thus perchance infect and pollute others, and so cause their death as a result of my negligence. If God should wish to take me, he will surely find me and I have done what he has expected of me and so I am not responsible for either my own death or the death of others. If my neighbor needs me, however, I shall not avoid place or person but will go freely, as stated above. See, this is such a God-fearing faith because it is neither brash nor foolhardy and does not tempt God.
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  • Christian vaccine refusal not only rejects self-care, it enhances risks to innocent and vulnerable neighbors. Even vaccinated people can catch relatively rare breakthrough cases. And every person—regardless of vaccination status—is vulnerable to the strains placed on a region’s hospitals when COVID runs rampant. 
  • As a person created in the image of God, taking care of yourself is an independent good. Taking care of yourself so that you can care for others is an even nobler good. 
  • The balance is clear. It is incumbent on the Christian to take care of themselves, including by taking medicine “in order not to become contaminated” (a nice definition of a vaccine before vaccines were invented). To the extent that he or she takes risks, those risks should be on behalf of others
  • In addition, my liberty doesn’t extend to materially impairing your ability to pursue happiness.
  • The idea that liberty has limits is inherent in the American social compact
  • Through more than two centuries of controversy and progress, our classical liberal legal system is learning to harmonize these three unalienable rights.
  • I have liberty, yes, but my liberty does not extend to taking or endangering your life
  • I also fear that the relentless right-wing political focus on religious liberty has obscured two realities—that our liberties have limits when they collide with the rights of others, and that the exercise of our liberty carries with it profound moral responsibility. 
  • In March I wrote to warn that Christian vaccine hesitancy was a looming national problem. That which we have feared has come to pass. Indeed, as both the geographic concentrations of unvaxxed Americans and the survey data demonstrate, Christian vaccine refusal is helping sustain this pandemic:
  • Foremost among them are protections for life and health.
  • By contrast, what does the anti-vax Christian seek? The liberty to risk both the lives of others (through the physical danger of COVID and/or the danger of swamped medical facilities) and their pursuit of happiness (through the continued physical, economic, and social strains of a pandemic extended in part but the choices of anti-vax citizens). 
  • let’s be honest and clear. The majority of Christians seeking religious exemptions are using religion as a mere pretext for their real concern—be it fear of the shot or the simple desire to do what they want.
  • I’m quite concerned that long-standing, justified Christian concerns for religious liberty have inadvertently created a sense of religious entitlement that obscures the desperate need for religious responsibility.
  • For the Christian believer, the pursuit of freedom is inseparable from the pursuit of virtue. We do not seek liberty simply to satisfy our desires or to appease our fears. In fact, when we pursue the freedom to make our neighbors sick, we violate the social compact and undermine our moral standing in politics, law, and culture. Christian libertinism becomes a long-term threat to religious liberty itself. 
  • Our founders recognized the threat of libertinism to liberty. “Our Constitution,” John Adams wrote, “was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the governance of any other.” In fact, a sufficient degree of vice would, Adams argued, “break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net.”
  • it is increasingly clear that many of the remaining holdouts need their hearts to change before their minds will change. It’s their moral framework that’s broken, and when that framework is broken, reason and virtue have difficulty penetrating a hardened heart.
  • The proper framework is easy to articulate, yet hard to create. Take prudent measures to protect yourself. When you choose to take risks, take risks for others. And always recognize that liberty isn’t license. Believers should seek freedom to pursue virtue, not to indulge their desires or appease their fears. 
  • In more prosaic legal terms, the state is able to regulate even the strongest of liberties when it possesses a “compelling governmental interest” and places those regulations in proper limits
  • Now is the time to take a clear stand. Not in a way that mocks or condescends, but one can be firm while also being respectful. As the Apostle Paul told Timothy, “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but one of power, love, and sound judgment.” The power is not political power, but the power of God over the fears of man. The love is for God and for our neighbor. And sound judgment should help us separate lies from truth and tell us that no argument for liberty should trump our responsibility to spare our nation and our neighbors and finally take the vaccine. 
Javier E

How 9/11 changed us - Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...911-books-american-values

war terror bush obama trump politics history crisis Culture policy biden foreign policy

shared by Javier E on 04 Sep 21 - No Cached
  • “The U.S. government must define what the message is, what it stands for,” the report asserts. “We should offer an example of moral leadership in the world, committed to treat people humanely, abide by the rule of law, and be generous and caring to our neighbors. . . . We need to defend our ideals abroad vigorously. America does stand up for its values.”
  • the authors pause to make a rousing case for the power of the nation’s character.
  • Rather than exemplify the nation’s highest values, the official response to 9/11 unleashed some of its worst qualities: deception, brutality, arrogance, ignorance, delusion, overreach and carelessness.
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  • Reading or rereading a collection of such books today is like watching an old movie that feels more anguishing and frustrating than you remember. The anguish comes from knowing how the tale will unfold; the frustration from realizing that this was hardly the only possible outcome.
  • This conclusion is laid bare in the sprawling literature to emerge from 9/11 over the past two decades
  • Whatever individual stories the 9/11 books tell, too many describe the repudiation of U.S. values, not by extremist outsiders but by our own hand.
  • In these works, indifference to the growing terrorist threat gives way to bloodlust and vengeance after the attacks. Official dissembling justifies wars, then prolongs them. In the name of counterterrorism, security is politicized, savagery legalized and patriotism weaponized.
  • that state of exception became our new American exceptionalism.
  • The latest works on the legacy of 9/11 show how war-on-terror tactics were turned on religious groups, immigrants and protesters in the United States. The war on terror came home, and it walked in like it owned the place.
  • It happened fast. By 2004, when the 9/11 Commission urged America to “engage the struggle of ideas,” it was already too late; the Justice Department’s initial torture memos were already signed, the Abu Ghraib images had already eviscerated U.S. claims to moral authority.
  • “It is for now far easier for a researcher to explain how and why September 11 happened than it is to explain the aftermath,” Steve Coll writes in “Ghost Wars,” his 2004 account of the CIA’s pre-9/11 involvement in Afghanistan. Throughout that aftermath, Washington fantasized about remaking the world in its image, only to reveal an ugly image of itself to the world.
  • “We anticipate a black future for America,” bin Laden told ABC News more than three years before the 9/11 attacks. “Instead of remaining United States, it shall end up separated states and shall have to carry the bodies of its sons back to America.”
  • bin Laden also came to grasp, perhaps self-servingly, the benefits of luring Washington into imperial overreach, of “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy,” as he put it in 2004, through endless military expansionism, thus beating back its global sway and undermining its internal unity.
  • To an unnerving degree, the United States moved toward the enemy’s fantasies of what it might become — a nation divided in its sense of itself, exposed in its moral and political compromises, conflicted over wars it did not want but would not end.
  • “The most frightening aspect of this new threat . . . was the fact that almost no one took it seriously. It was too bizarre, too primitive and exotic.” That is how Lawrence Wright depicts the early impressions of bin Laden and his terrorist network among U.S. officials
  • The books traveling that road to 9/11 have an inexorable, almost suffocating feel to them, as though every turn invariably leads to the first crush of steel and glass.
  • With the system “blinking red,” as CIA Director George Tenet later told the 9/11 Commission, why were all these warnings not enough? Wright lingers on bureaucratic failings
  • Clarke’s conclusion is simple, and it highlights America’s we-know-better swagger, a national trait that often masquerades as courage or wisdom. “America, alas, seems only to respond well to disasters, to be undistracted by warnings,” he writes. “Our country seems unable to do all that must be done until there has been some awful calamity.”
  • The problem with responding only to calamity is that underestimation is usually replaced by overreaction. And we tell ourselves it is the right thing, maybe the only thing, to do.
  • A last-minute flight change. A new job at the Pentagon. A retirement from the fire station. The final tilt of a plane’s wings before impact. If the books about the lead-up to 9/11 are packed with unbearable inevitability, the volumes on the day itself highlight how randomness separated survival from death.
  • Had the World Trade Center, built in the late 1960s and early 1970s, been erected according to the city building code in effect since 1938, Dwyer and Flynn explain, “it is likely that a very different world trade center would have been built.
  • Instead, it was constructed according to a new code that the real estate industry had avidly promoted, a code that made it cheaper and more lucrative to build and own skyscrapers. “It increased the floor space available for rent . . . by cutting back on the areas that had been devoted, under the earlier law, to evacuation and exit,” the authors write. The result: Getting everybody out on 9/11 was virtually impossible.
  • The towers embodied the power of American capitalism, but their design embodied the folly of American greed. On that day, both conditions proved fatal.
  • Garrett Graff quotes Defense Department officials marveling at how American Airlines Flight 77 struck a part of the Pentagon that, because of new anti-terrorism standards, had recently been reinforced and renovated
  • “In any other wedge of the Pentagon, there would have been 5,000 people, and the plane would have flown right through the middle of the building.” Instead, fewer than 200 people were killed in the attack on the Pentagon, including the passengers on the hijacked jet. Chance and preparedness came together.
  • The bravery of police and firefighters is the subject of countless 9/11 retrospectives, but these books also emphasize the selflessness of civilians who morphed into first responders
  • The passengers had made phone calls when the hijacking began and had learned the fate of other aircraft that day. “According to one call, they voted on whether to rush the terrorists in an attempt to retake the plane,” the commission report states. “They decided, and acted.”
  • The civilians aboard United Airlines Flight 93, whose resistance forced the plane to crash into a Pennsylvania field rather than the U.S. Capitol, were later lionized as emblems of swashbuckling Americana
  • Such episodes, led by ordinary civilians, embodied values that the 9/11 Commission called on the nation to display. Except those values would soon be dismantled, in the name of security, by those entrusted to uphold them.
  • Lawyering to death.The phrase appears in multiple 9/11 volumes, usually uttered by top officials adamant that they were going to get things done, laws and rules be damned
  • “I had to show the American people the resolve of a commander in chief that was going to do whatever it took to win,” Bush explains. “No yielding. No equivocation. No, you know, lawyering this thing to death.” In “Against All Enemies,” Clarke recalls the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, when Bush snapped at an official who suggested that international law looked askance at military force as a tool of revenge. “I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass,” the president retorted.
  • The message was unmistakable: The law is an obstacle to effective counterterrorism
  • Except, they did lawyer this thing to death. Instead of disregarding the law, the Bush administration enlisted it. “Beginning almost immediately after September 11, 2001, [Vice President Dick] Cheney saw to it that some of the sharpest and best-trained lawyers in the country, working in secret in the White House and the United States Department of Justice, came up with legal justifications for a vast expansion of the government’s power in waging war on terror,
  • Through public declarations and secret memos, the administration sought to remove limits on the president’s conduct of warfare and to deny terrorism suspects the protections of the Geneva Conventions by redefining them as unlawful enemy combatants. Nothing, Mayer argues of the latter effort, “more directly cleared the way for torture than this.”
  • Tactics such as cramped confinement, sleep deprivation and waterboarding were rebranded as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” legally and linguistically contorted to avoid the label of torture. Though the techniques could be cruel and inhuman, the OLC acknowledged in an August 2002 memo, they would constitute torture only if they produced pain equivalent to organ failure or death, and if the individual inflicting such pain really really meant to do so: “Even if the defendant knows that severe pain will result from his actions, if causing such harm is not his objective, he lacks the requisite specific intent.” It’s quite the sleight of hand, with torture moving from the body of the interrogated to the mind of the interrogator.
  • the memo concludes that none of it actually matters. Even if a particular interrogation method would cross some legal line, the relevant statute would be considered unconstitutional because it “impermissibly encroached” on the commander in chief’s authority to conduct warfare
  • You have informed us. Experts you have consulted. Based on your research. You do not anticipate. Such hand-washing words appear throughout the memos. The Justice Department relies on information provided by the CIA to reach its conclusions; the CIA then has the cover of the Justice Department to proceed with its interrogations. It’s a perfect circle of trust.
  • In these documents, lawyers enable lawlessness. Another May 2005 memo concludes that, because the Convention Against Torture applies only to actions occurring under U.S. jurisdiction, the CIA’s creation of detention sites in other countries renders the convention “inapplicable.”
  • avid Cole describes the documents as “bad-faith lawyering,” which might be generous. It is another kind of lawyering to death, one in which the rule of law that the 9/11 Commission urged us to abide by becomes the victim.
  • Similarly, because the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment is meant to protect people convicted of crimes, it should not apply to terrorism detainees — because they have not been officially convicted of anything. The lack of due process conveniently eliminates constitutional protections
  • Years later, the Senate Intelligence Committee would investigate the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation program. Its massive report — the executive summary of which appeared as a 549-page book in 2014 — found that torture did not produce useful intelligence, that the interrogations were more brutal than the CIA let on, that the Justice Department did not independently verify the CIA’s information, and that the spy agency impeded oversight by Congress and the CIA inspector general.
  • “The CIA’s effectiveness representations were almost entirely inaccurate,” the Senate report concluded. It is one of the few lies of the war on terror unmasked by an official government investigation and public report, but just one of the many documented in the 9/11 literature.
  • Officials in the war on terror didn’t deceive or dissemble just with lawmakers or the public. In the recurring tragedy of war, they lied just as often to themselves.
  • “The decision to invade Iraq was one made, finally and exclusively, by the president of the United States, George W. Bush,” he writes.
  • n Woodward’s “Bush at War,” the president admitted that before 9/11, “I didn’t feel that sense of urgency [about al-Qaeda], and my blood was not nearly as boiling.”
  • A president initially concerned about defending and preserving the nation’s moral goodness against terrorism found himself driven by darker impulses. “I’m having difficulty controlling my bloodlust,” Bush confessed to religious leaders in the Oval Office on Sept. 20, 2001,
  • Bloodlust, moral certainty and sudden vulnerability make a dangerous combination. The belief that you are defending good against evil can lead to the belief that whatever you do to that end is good, too.
  • Draper distills Bush’s worldview: “The terrorists’ primary objective was to destroy America’s freedom. Saddam hated America. Therefore, he hated freedom. Therefore, Saddam was himself a terrorist, bent on destroying America and its freedom.”
  • The president assumed the worst about what Hussein had done or might do, yet embraced best-case scenarios of how an American invasion would proceed.
  • “Iraqis would rejoice at the sight of their Western liberators,” Draper recaps. “Their newly shared sense of national purpose would overcome any sectarian allegiances. Their native cleverness would make up for their inexperience with self-government. They would welcome the stewardship of Iraqi expatriates who had not set foot in Baghdad in decades. And their oil would pay for everything.”
  • It did not seem to occur to Bush and his advisers that Iraqis could simultaneously hate Hussein and resent the Americans — feelings that could have been discovered by speaking to Iraqis and hearing their concerns.
  • few books on the war that gets deep inside Iraqis’ aversion to the Americans in their midst. “What gives them the right to change something that’s not theirs in the first place?” a woman in a middle-class Baghdad neighborhood asks him. “I don’t like your house, so I’m going to bomb it and you can rebuild it again the way I want it, with your money?
  • The occupation did not dissuade such impressions when it turned the former dictator’s seat of government into its own luxurious Green Zone, or when it retrofitted the Abu Ghraib prison (“the worst of Saddam’s hellholes,” Shadid calls it) into its own chamber of horrors.
  • Shadid hears early talk of the Americans as “kuffar” (heathens), a 51-year-old former teacher complains that “we’ve exchanged a tyrant for an occupier.”
  • Shadid understood that governmental legitimacy — who gets to rule, and by what right — was a matter of overriding importance for Iraqis. “The Americans never understood the question,” he writes; “Iraqis never agreed on the answer.
  • When the United States so quickly shifted from liberation to occupation, it lost whatever legitimacy it enjoyed. “Bush handed that enemy precisely what it wanted and needed, proof that America was at war with Islam, that we were the new Crusaders come to occupy Muslim land,” Clarke writes. “It was as if Usama bin Laden, hidden in some high mountain redoubt, were engaging in long-range mind control of George Bush, chanting ‘invade Iraq, you must invade Iraq.’ ”
  • The foolishness and arrogance of the American occupation didn’t help. In “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone,” Rajiv Chandrasekaran explains how, even as daily security was Iraqis’ overwhelming concern, viceroy L. Paul Bremer, Bush’s man in Baghdad, was determined to turn the country into a model free-market economy, complete with new investment laws, bankruptcy courts and a state-of-the-art stock exchange.
  • a U.S. Army general, when asked by local journalists why American helicopters must fly so low at night, thus scaring Iraqi children, replied that the kids were simply hearing “the sound of freedom.”Message: Freedom sounds terrifying.
  • For some Americans, inflicting that terror became part of the job, one more tool in the arsenal. In “The Forever War” by Dexter Filkins, a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel in Iraq assures the author that “with a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them.”
  • Chandrasekaran recalls the response of a top communications official under Bremer, when reporters asked about waves of violence hitting Baghdad in the spring of 2004. “Off the record: Paris is burning,” the official told the journalists. “On the record: Security and stability are returning to Iraq.”
  • the Iraq War, conjured in part on the false connections between Iraq and al-Qaeda, ended up helping the terrorist network: It pulled resources from the war in Afghanistan, gave space for bin Laden’s men to regroup and spurred a new generation of terrorists in the Middle East. “A bigger gift to bin Laden was hard to imagine,” Bergen writes.
  • “U.S. officials had no need to lie or spin to justify the war,” Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock writes in “The Afghanistan Papers,” a damning contrast of the war’s reality vs. its rhetoric. “Yet leaders at the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department soon began to make false assurances and to paper over setbacks on the battlefield.” As the years passed, the deceit became entrenched, what Whitlock calls “an unspoken conspiracy” to hide the truth.
  • Afghanistan was where al-Qaeda, supported by the Taliban, had made its base — it was supposed to be the good war, the right war, the war of necessity and not choice, the war endorsed at home and abroad.
  • If Iraq was the war born of lies, Afghanistan was the one nurtured by them
  • Whitlock finds commanding generals privately admitting that they long fought the war “without a functional strategy.” That, two years into the conflict, Rumsfeld complained that he had “no visibility into who the bad guys are.”
  • That Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, a former coordinator of Iraq and Afghanistan policy, acknowledged that “we didn’t have the foggiest idea of what we were undertaking.”
  • That U.S. officials long wanted to withdraw American forces but feared — correctly so, it turns out — that the Afghan government might collapse. “Bin Laden had hoped for this exact scenario,” Whitlock observes. “To lure the U.S. superpower into an unwinnable guerrilla conflict that would deplete its national treasury and diminish its global influence.”
  • All along, top officials publicly contradicted these internal views, issuing favorable accounts of steady progress
  • Bad news was twisted into good: Rising suicide attacks in Kabul meant the Taliban was too weak for direct combat, for instance, while increased U.S. casualties meant America was taking the fight to the enemy.
  • deceptions transpired across U.S. presidents, but the Obama administration, eager to show that its first-term troop surge was working, “took it to a new level, hyping figures that were misleading, spurious or downright false,” Whitlock writes. And then under President Donald Trump, he adds, the generals felt pressure to “speak more forcefully and boast that his war strategy was destined to succeed.”
  • in public, almost no senior government officials had the courage to admit that the United States was slowly losing,” Whitlock writes. “With their complicit silence, military and political leaders avoided accountability and dodged reappraisals that could have changed the outcome or shortened the conflict.”
  • Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage traveled to Moscow shortly after 9/11 to give officials a heads up about the coming hostilities in Afghanistan. The Russians, recent visitors to the graveyard of empires, cautioned that Afghanistan was an “ambush heaven” and that, in the words of one of them, “you’re really going to get the hell kicked out of you.”
  • a war should not be measured only by the timing and the competence of its end. We still face an equally consequential appraisal: How good was this good war if it could be sustained only by lies?
  • In the two decades since the 9/11 attacks, the United States has often attempted to reconsider its response
  • They are written as though intending to solve problems. But they can be read as proof that the problems have no realistic solution, or that the only solution is to never have created them.
  • the report sets the bar for staying so high that an exit strategy appears to be its primary purpose.
  • he counterinsurgency manual is an extraordinary document. Implicitly repudiating notions such as “shock and awe” and “overwhelming force,” it argues that the key to battling an insurgency in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan is to provide security for the local population and to win its support through effective governance
  • It also attempts to grasp the nature of America’s foes. “Most enemies either do not try to defeat the United States with conventional operations or do not limit themselves to purely military means,” the manual states. “They know that they cannot compete with U.S. forces on those terms. Instead, they try to exhaust U.S. national will.” Exhausting America’s will is an objective that al-Qaeda understood well.
  • “Counterinsurgents should prepare for a long-term commitment,” the manual states. Yet, just a few pages later, it admits that “eventually all foreign armies are seen as interlopers or occupiers.” How to accomplish the former without descending into the latter? No wonder so many of the historical examples of counterinsurgency that the manual highlights, including accounts from the Vietnam War, are stories of failure.
  • “Soldiers and Marines are expected to be nation builders as well as warriors,” the manual proclaims, but the arduous tasks involved — reestablishing government institutions, rebuilding infrastructure, strengthening local security forces, enforcing the rule of law — reveal the tension at the heart of the new doctrine
  • In his foreword, Army Lt. Col. John Nagl writes that the document’s most lasting impact may be as a catalyst not for remaking Iraq or Afghanistan, but for transforming the Army and Marine Corps into “more effective learning organizations,” better able to adapt to changing warfare. And in her introduction, Sarah Sewall, then director of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, concludes that its “ultimate value” may be in warning civilian officials to think hard before engaging in a counterinsurgency campaign.
  • “The thing that got to everyone,” Finkel explains in the latter book, “was not having a defined front line. It was a war in 360 degrees, no front to advance toward, no enemy in uniform, no predictable patterns, no relief.” It’s a powerful summation of battling an insurgency.
  • Hitting the wrong house is what counterinsurgency doctrine is supposed to avoid. Even successfully capturing or killing a high-value target can be counterproductive if in the process you terrorize a community and create more enemies. In Iraq, the whole country was the wrong house. America’s leaders knew it was the wrong house. They hit it anyway.
  • Another returning soldier, Nic DeNinno, struggles to tell his wife about the time he and his fellow soldiers burst into an Iraqi home in search of a high-value target. He threw a man down the stairs and held another by the throat. After they left, the lieutenant told him it was the wrong house. “The wrong f---ing house,” Nic says to his wife. “One of the things I want to remember is how many times we hit the wrong house.”
  • “As time passes, more documents become available, and the bare facts of what happened become still clearer,” the report states. “Yet the picture of how those things happened becomes harder to reimagine, as that past world, with its preoccupations and uncertainty, recedes.” Before making definitive judgments, then, they ask themselves “whether the insights that seem apparent now would really have been meaningful at the time.”
  • Two of the latest additions to the canon, “Reign of Terror” by Spencer Ackerman and “Subtle Tools” by Karen Greenberg, draw straight, stark lines between the earliest days of the war on terror and its mutations in our current time, between conflicts abroad and divisions at home. These works show how 9/11 remains with us, and how we are still living in the ruins.
  • When Trump declared that “we don’t have victories anymore” in his 2015 speech announcing his presidential candidacy, he was both belittling the legacy of 9/11 and harnessing it to his ends. “His great insight was that the jingoistic politics of the War on Terror did not have to be tied to the War on Terror itself,” Ackerman writes. “That enabled him to tell a tale of lost greatness.” And if greatness is lost, someone must have taken it.
  • “Trump had learned the foremost lesson of 9/11,” Ackerman writes, “that the terrorists were whomever you said they were.”
  • The backlash against Muslims, against immigrants crossing the southern border and against protesters rallying for racial justice was strengthened by the open-ended nature of the global war on terror.
  • the war is not just far away in Iraq or Afghanistan, in Yemen or Syria, but it’s happening here, with mass surveillance, militarized law enforcement and the rebranding of immigration as a threat to the nation’s security rather than a cornerstone of its identity
  • the Authorization for Use of Military Force, drafted by administration lawyers and approved by Congress just days after the attacks, as the moment when America’s response began to go awry. The brief joint resolution allowed the president to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against any nation, organization or person who committed the attacks, and to prevent any future ones.
  • It was the “Ur document in the war on terror and its legacy,” Greenberg writes. “Riddled with imprecision, its terminology was geared to codify expansive powers.” Where the battlefield, the enemy and the definition of victory all remain vague, war becomes endlessly expansive, “with neither temporal nor geographical boundaries.”
  • This was the moment the war on terror was “conceptually doomed,” Ackerman concludes. This is how you get a forever war.
  • There were moments when an off-ramp was visible. The killing of bin Laden in 2011 was one such instance, Ackerman argues, but “Obama squandered the best chance anyone could ever have to end the 9/11 era.”
  • The author assails Obama for making the war on terror more “sustainable” through a veneer of legality — banning torture yet failing to close the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay and relying on drone strikes that “perversely incentivized the military and the CIA to kill instead of capture.”
  • There would always be more targets, more battlefields, regardless of president or party. Failures became the reason to double down, never wind down.
  • The longer the war went on, the more that what Ackerman calls its “grotesque subtext” of nativism and racism would move to the foreground of American politics
  • Absent the war on terror, it is harder to imagine a presidential candidate decrying a sitting commander in chief as foreign, Muslim, illegitimate — and using that lie as a successful political platform.
  • Absent the war on terror, it is harder to imagine a travel ban against people from Muslim-majority countries. Absent the war on terror, it is harder to imagine American protesters labeled terrorists, or a secretary of defense describing the nation’s urban streets as a “battle space” to be dominated
  • In his latest book on bin Laden, Bergen argues that 9/11 was a major tactical success but a long-term strategic failure for the terrorist leader. Yes, he struck a vicious blow against “the head of the snake,” as he called the United States, but “rather than ending American influence in the Muslim world, the 9/11 attacks greatly amplified it,” with two lengthy, large-scale invasions and new bases established throughout the region.
  • “A vastly different America has taken root” in the two decades since 9/11, Greenberg writes. “In the name of retaliation, ‘justice,’ and prevention, fundamental values have been cast aside.”
  • the legacy of the 9/11 era is found not just in Afghanistan or Iraq, but also in an America that drew out and heightened some of its ugliest impulses — a nation that is deeply divided (like those “separated states” bin Laden imagined); that bypasses inconvenient facts and embraces conspiracy theories; that demonizes outsiders; and that, after failing to spread freedom and democracy around the world, seems less inclined to uphold them here
  • Seventeen years after the 9/11 Commission called on the United States to offer moral leadership to the world and to be generous and caring to our neighbors, our moral leadership is in question, and we can barely be generous and caring to ourselves.
  • Still reeling from an attack that dropped out of a blue sky, America is suffering from a sort of post-traumatic stress democracy. It remains in recovery, still a good country, even if a broken good country.
  • 9/11 was a test. Thebooks of the lasttwo decades showhow America failed.
  • Deep within the catalogue of regrets that is the 9/11 Commission report
Javier E

Opinion | The Limits of Moralism in Israel and Gaza - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oreign-policy-israel-gaza.html

israel gaza moral clarity tragedy dilemma freedom tolerance lesser of two evils balance absolutism

shared by Javier E on 12 May 24 - No Cached
  • Foreign policy can make a mockery of moral certitude. You’re trying to master a landscape of anarchy policed by violence, where ideological differences make American polarization look like genial neighborliness, where even a superpower’s ability to impose its will dissolves with distance, where any grand project requires alliances with tyranny and worse.
  • This seems clear when you consider the dilemmas of the past
  • It’s why the “good war” of World War II involved a partnership with a monster in Moscow and the subjection of half of Europe to totalitarian oppression.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • It’s why the “bad war” of Vietnam was only escaped at the cost of betraying the South Vietnamese and making a deal with yet another monster in Beijing.
  • The alternative is a form of argument in which essential aspects of the world, being inconvenient to moral absolutism, simply disappear.
  • A “realist” foreign policy can slide from describing power to excusing depredations.
  • But seeing statecraft as a tragic balancing of evils is still essential, especially amid the kind of moral fervor that attends a conflict like Israel’s war in Gaza.
  • But in active controversies the tragic vision can seem like a cold way of looking at the world. Lean into it too hard, and you get accused of ignoring injustice or recapitulating the indifference that gave cover to past atrocities.
  • The difficulty is that liberal “freedom” is on offer almost nowhere in the Middle East, certainly not in Gaza under Hamas’s rule, and the most challenging “otherness of beliefs” in this situation are the beliefs that motivated the massacres of Oct. 7.
  • a hype around Israeli moral failures — it's not enough for a war that yields so many casualties to be unjust, if it’s wrong it must be genocide — that ends up suppressing the harsh implications of a simple call for peace.
  • A representative passage, from Pankaj Mishra in The London Review of Books, describes many protesters as “motivated by the simple wish to uphold the ideals that seemed so universally desirable after 1945: respect for freedom, tolerance for the otherness of beliefs and ways of life; solidarity with human suffering; and a sense of moral responsibility for the weak and persecuted.”
  • No doubt many campus protesters have these motivations.
  • The alternative articulated by, for instance, Mitt Romney — “We stand by allies, we don’t second-guess them” — is not a serious policy for a hegemon balancing its global obligations
  • For example, reading the apologia for pro-Palestinian protests from certain left-wing intellectuals, you have a sense of both elision and exaggeration
  • seem untroubled by this fact, and perfectly comfortable with supporting not just peaceful negotiation but a revolutionary struggle led by Islamist fanatics.
  • Which yields the moral dilemma the protests don’t acknowledge: Ending the war on the terms they want could grant a major strategic victory to the regional alliance dedicated to the murder of Israelis and their expulsion from the Middle East.
  • Maybe the Gaza war is unjust enough, and Israeli goals unachievable enough, that there’s no alternative to vindicating Hamas’s blood-soaked strategy
  • you have to be honest about what you’re endorsing: a brutal weighing-out of evils, not any sort of triumph for “universally desirable” ideals.
  • Then a similar point applies to supporters of the Israeli war, for whom moral considerations — the evil of Hamas, the historical suffering of the Jewish people, the special American relationship with Israel — are invoked as an argument-ender in an inflexible way
  • We are constantly urged to “stand with Israel” when it’s unclear if Israel knows what it’s doing.
  • Joe Biden’s administration is chastised for betrayal when it tries to influence Israel’s warmaking, even though the Israeli government’s decisions before and since Oct. 7 do not inspire great confidence.
  • Biden’s specific attempts to micromanage the conflict may be misguided or hamfisted
  • But it’s not misguided for America, an imperium dealing with multiplying threats, to decline to write a blank check for a war being waged without a clear plan for victory or for peace.
  • Another difficulty is that some instigators of the protests
  • In each case, you have a desire that mirrors the impulse of the left-wing intellectuals — to make foreign policy easy by condensing everything to a single moral judgment. But the problems of the world cannot be so easily reduced.
  • Being cold-eyed and tragic-minded does not mean abandoning morality. But it means recognizing that often nobody is simply right, no single approach is morally obvious, and no strategy is clean.
Javier E

E-Notes: Nightmares of an I.R. Professor - FPRI - 0 views

www.fpri.org/...1209.mcdougall.nightmares.html

US history foreign policy neoconservatism crusade intervention

shared by Javier E on 23 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • the British, during their late Victorian heyday, believed theirs was the exceptional Land of Hope and Glory, a vanguard of progress and model for all nations.[3] Can it be—O scary thought—that the same faith in Special Providence that inspires energy, ingenuity, resilience, and civic virtue in a nation, may also tempt a people into complacency, arrogance, self-indulgence, and civic vice?
  • what Americans believe about their past is always a powerful influence on their present behavior and future prospects. No wonder we have “culture wars” in which the representation of history is a principal stake.
  • my study of European international relations naturally inclined me to think about foreign policy in terms of Realpolitik, balance of power, geography, contingency, tragedy, irony, folly, unintended consequences, and systemic interaction—all of which are foreign if not repugnant to Americans.
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  • Times were certainly very good in the decade after the 1991 Soviet collapse ended the fifty year emergency that began with Pearl Harbor. So if one accepts my definition of a conservative as “someone who knows things could be worse than they are-period,” then conservatism was never more apt
  • the “third age” neoconservatives ensconced at The Weekly Standard, Commentary, and various think tanks thought Promised Land, Crusader State decidedly inconvenient. They wanted Americans to believe that the United States has always possessed the mission and duty to redeem the whole world by exertion as well as example, and that any American who shirks from that betrays the Founders themselves.[13] They were loudly decrying cuts in defense spending as unilateral disarmament, likening U.S. policies to Britain’s lethargy in the 1930s, and warning of new existential threats on the horizon.
  • what national assets must the United States husband, augment if possible, and take care not to squander? My list was as follows: (1) a strong economy susceptible only to mild recession; (2) robust armed forces boasting technical superiority and high morale designed for winning wars; (3) presidential leadership that is prudent, patriotic, and persuasive; (4) a bipartisan, internationalist consensus in Congress; (5) sturdy regional alliances; (6) engagement to promote balance of power in Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East; (7) strong Pan-American ties to secure of our southern border.
  • t the shock of the 9/11 attacks and the imperative duty to prevent their repetition caused the Bush administration to launch two wars for regime change that eventuated in costly, bloody occupations belatedly devoted to democratizing the whole Middle East. Thus did the United States squander in only five years all seven of the precious assets listed in my 1999 speech.
  • When the other shoe dropped—not another Al Qaeda attack but the 2008 sub-prime mortgage collapse—Americans wrestled anew with an inconvenient truth. Foreign enemies cannot harm the United States more than Americans harm themselves, over and over again, through strategic malpractice and financial malfeasance.
  • Unfortunately, in an era of interdependent globalization vexed by failed states, rogue regimes, ethnic cleansing, sectarian violence, famines, epidemics, transnational terrorism, and what William S. Lind dubbed asymmetrical “Fourth Generation Warfare,” the answer to questions about humanitarian or strategic interventions abroad can’t be “just say no!” For however often Americans rediscover how institutionally, culturally, and temperamentally ill-equipped they are to do nation-building, the United States will likely remain what I (and now Robert Merry) dubbed a Crusader State.
  • the urgent tasks for civilian and military planners are those of the penitent sinner called to confess, repent, and amend his ways. The tasks include refining procedures to coordinate planning for national security so that bureaucratic and interest-group rivalries do not produce “worst of both worlds” outcomes.[22] They include interpreting past counter-insurgencies and postwar occupations in light of their historical particularities lest facile overemphasis on their social scientific commonalities yield “one size fits all” field manuals
  • they include persuading politicians to cease playing the demagogue on national security and citizens to cease imagining every intervention a “crusade” or a “quagmire”
Javier E

Why the Economy Doesn't Roar Anymore - WSJ - 1 views

www.wsj.com/...doesnt-roar-anymore-1476458742

economic Policy history theory productivity golden age

shared by Javier E on 16 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • The U.S. presidential candidates have made the usual pile of promises, none more predictable than their pledge to make the U.S. economy grow faster. With the economy struggling to expand at 2% a year, they would have us believe that 3%, 4% or even 5% growth is within reach.
  • But of all the promises uttered by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton over the course of this disheartening campaign, none will be tougher to keep. Whoever sits in the Oval Office next year will swiftly find that faster productivity growth—the key to faster economic growth—isn’t something a president can decree.
  • It might be wiser to accept the truth: The U.S. economy isn’t behaving badly. It is just being ordinary.
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  • Historically, boom times are the exception, not the norm.
  • Over the past two centuries, per capita incomes in all advanced economies, from Sweden to Japan, have grown at compound rates of around 1.5% to 2% a year
  • these distinctly non-euphoric averages mean that most of the time, over the long sweep of history, people’s incomes typically take about 40 years to double.
  • looking from one year to the next, the improvements in living standards that come from higher incomes are glacial. The data may show that life is getting better, but average families feel no reason to break out the champagne.
  • that is no longer good enough. Americans expect the economy to be buoyant, not boring. Yet this expectation is shaped not by prosaic economic realities but by a most unusual period in history: the quarter-century that began in the ashes of World War II, when the world economy performed better than at any time before or since.
  • The Golden Age was the first sustained period of economic growth in most countries since the 1920s. But it was built on far more than just pent-up demand and the stimulus of the postwar baby boom. Unprecedented productivity growth around the world made the Golden Age possible. In the 25 years that ended in 1973, the amount produced in an hour of work roughly doubled in the U.S. and Canada, tripled in Europe and quintupled in Japan.
  • Many factors played a role in this achievement.
  • The workforce everywhere became vastly more educated.
  • As millions of laborers shifted from tending sheep and hoeing potatoes to working in factories and construction sites, they could create far more economic value.
  • New motorways boosted productivity in the transportation sector by letting truck drivers cover longer distances with larger vehicles. Faster ground transportation made it practical, in turn, for farms and factories to expand to sell not just locally but regionally or nationally, abandoning craft methods in favor of machinery that could produce more goods at lower cost.
  • Six rounds of tariff reductions brought a massive increase in cross-border trade, putting even stronger competitive pressure on manufacturers to become more efficient.
  • Above all, technological innovation helped to create new products and offered better ways for workers to do their jobs.
  • The 1973 oil crisis meant more than just gasoline lines and lowered thermostats. It shocked the world economy.
  • But it wasn’t the price of gasoline that brought the long run of global prosperity to an end. It just diverted attention from a more fundamental problem: Productivity growth had slowed sharply.
  • The consequences of the productivity bust were severe. Full employment vanished. It would be 24 years before the U.S. unemployment rate would again reach the low levels of late 1973
  • and the infinitesimal unemployment rates in France, Germany and Japan would never be reached again. Through the rest of the 20th century, the jobless rate in 28 wealthy economies would average nearly 7%.
  • the world’s overall economic growth rate dropped from 4.9% a year from 1951 through 1973 to an average of just 3.1% for the balance of the century.
  • With economic planners and central bankers unable to steady their economies, voters turned sharply to the right
  • Conservative politicians such as Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., Ronald Reagan in the U.S. and Helmut Kohl in West Germany swept into power, promising that freer markets and smaller government would reverse the decline, spur productivity and restore rapid growth.
  • But these leaders’ policies—deregulation, privatization, lower tax rates, balanced budgets and rigid rules for monetary policy—proved no more successful at boosting productivity than the statist policies that had preceded them
  • Some insist that the conservative revolution stimulated an economic renaissance, but the facts say otherwise: Great Britain’s productivity grew far more slowly under Thatcher’s rule than during the miserable 1970s, and Reagan’s supply-side tax cuts brought no productivity improvement at all.
  • It is tempting to think that we know how to do better, that there is some secret sauce that governments can ladle out to make economies grow faster than the norm. But despite glib talk about “pro-growth” economic policies, productivity growth is something over which governments have very little control
Javier E

Thoughts on the Taiwan Call - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...thoughts-on-the-taiwan-call

foreign policy trump china taiwan

shared by Javier E on 06 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Not every taboo or shibboleth has to be respected forever. Indeed, they should be inspected with some regularity
  • One of the nice things about being a great power is that you have a lot of choices
  • But in each of these choices the question is not really can we do it, or do we want to do it or do our values dictate we do it so much as 1) have we accurately thought through the potential costs and 2) are the costs sustainable in the face of the benefits we're trying to achieve?
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  • In the late Clinton administration we had an arrangement with North Korea in which they had shuttered their nuclear weapons program in exchange for regular shipments of fuel oil, assistance with nuclear energy technology which could not be used for nuclear weapons and various other inducements. This arguably also involved a continuous cat and mouse game with the North Koreans, periodic shakedowns for more assistance, various care and feeding, etc. The incoming Bush administration viewed this deal as appeasement and an example of American weakness and set about a cycle of confrontation that eventually cratered the deal. North Korean quickly proceeded to become a nuclear state. What was termed the 'Agreed Framework' was unlovely and unsatisfactory in a number of ways; the alternative we got was considerably worse.
  • The key was that the Bush administration saw the Agreed Framework as appeasement but they were not - though they sometimes suggested they would be - willing to adopt the likely alternative of military confrontation. (We could soon see a similar set of events unfolded with Iran.) Thus the Bush White House was able to stand strong against appeasement (with all the psychological self-affirmation and self-satisfaction that entails) at the cost of allowing North Korea to become a nuclear state, which it has now been for more than a decade.
  • It is not as though any of this emerges against a backdrop of harmonious US relations with China. In addition to the long-simmering friction over trade, the US and China are currently engaged in a complex and increasingly perilous struggle over which country will be the dominant power in the maritime waterways of East Asia, through which a huge amount of the world's trade flows.
  • The key predicate to wise action is understanding the range of potential outcomes and costs of different choices and whether you are ready and able to sustain them. One of the things I noticed early with the hawks in the Bush administration was a frequent willingness to commit leaders to future costs they may not fully understand secure in the knowledge that once the actions are taken the leader will have to pay those costs whether they like it or not.
  • Some people think Trump has no actual foreign policy. This is not true. He is extremely ignorant. But he has an instinctive and longstanding way of thinking about and approaching foreign policy questions which goes back decades before he ran for President
  • It is one that sees international relations in zero-sum terms (for me to win, you have to lose), sees the US as being taken advantage of by allies (either through advantageous trade deals or expenditures on defense). This is why you see economic nationalism going back decades with Trump and either skepticism or hostility toward international treaty organizations like NATO.
  • What you also have in Trump is someone who is impulsive and aggressive by nature - you see these qualities in primary colors in everything he does. These are highly dangerous qualities in a President.
  • They become magnified when such a person is being advised by people who provide an ideological purpose and justification to such impulsiveness and aggression.
  • That is where I fear and believe we are with Trump. Not everything in foreign policy is sacred. But here we have an impulsive and ignorant man whose comfort zone is aggression surrounded by advisors with dangerous ideas
  • Even President Bush had a coterie of more Realist-minded and cautious advisors to balance out the hotheads. They lost most of the key debates - especially in the first term. But they provided a restraining counter-balance in numerous debates. At present there is no one like that around Trump at all.
ecfruchtman

The U.N. Can Find Balance in the Middle East - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-in-the-middle-east-1484265458

shared by ecfruchtman on 16 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • ecfruchtman on 16 Jan 17
     
    The United Nations Security Council last month passed Resolution 2334, which states that Israeli settlements have "no legal basis." The resolution made the mistake of only looking at one side of the map. To complete the job, the U.N.
Javier E

Phony Oppositions and Score Settling - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...oppositions-and-score-settling

politics Democratic party policy history trump

shared by Javier E on 16 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • I believe there is a good likelihood, probably even a probability, that if the Russian subversion campaign had never happened and James Comey had never released his letter, Hillary Clinton would be prepping to become our new President. My own guess is that Comey's letter had the bigger impact. These were both profoundly damaging events in the race and Clinton lost by very tight margins in most of the newly (hopefully temporarily) red states. I see little way to challenge this assertion.
  • But the tiny margins are only one side of the story. Let's take Wisconsin. The final tally puts Trump ahead by .8%, or 22,748 votes. That's a tiny margin. Any number of things could have shifted the balance. Spending the final week of the campaign talking about a new investigation of Clinton's emails was more than enough to tip the balance. Spending not just a single trip but more concerted time in the state could have too.
  • But now look at the shift from 2012. The shift in the direction of the GOP was 7.7%. That is a huge shift over four years. Huge. There's no getting around that. If you step back from Wisconsin to the larger Upper Midwest region and indeed the United States you see something more fundamental. Donald Trump did what we all remember Barack Obama doing in 2008: He changed the shape of the electorate.
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  • What all of this comes down to is that something very big happened in this election that was quite separate from Comey and Putin
  • If you believe in the integrity of our elections, American sovereignty and - yes, let's say it - the importance of the legitimacy of the Trump presidency, the Russian sabotage and influence campaign is hugely important. But if you can't distinguish between let's say the 1 or 2 percentage point shift caused by Russia and Comey, from the 5 or 6 or 7 percentage point shift that made that small shift so consequential, I really don't know how to help you. They're both extremely important, but for very different reasons.
  • My own sense is that this is mainly internecine score settling.
  • The truth is it shouldn't have been close enough for these outside interventions to have allowed Trump to win. But it was.
  • Was that because Clinton was a terrible candidate and Sanders should have been the nominee? Maybe. But I doubt it. At a minimum I don't think it is so clear as to be treated as a given
  • While I believe Democrats have many good economic policies, I don't believe they have an adequate and overarching theory of the problem of wage stagnation or ever-increasing economic insecurity (a interlocked series of economic and political problems) or a set of policies and a politics to address it. That doesn't mean they're ignoring it. That doesn't mean anyone else has a better set. But what Democrats have is not enough
  • Holding the presidency for eight years combined with a still accurate belief that their constituencies are growing while the other party's is shrinking has led to a deep deficit of political organizing in all fifty states. Democrats had this as recently as a decade ago. But it atrophied. As much as anything there is a revolt against the increasingly urban and non-white America symbolized by the 'Obama coalition', one that combines racial backlash, economic decline and cultural marginalization. There is something there that goes far beyond anything that can be addressed by a more class based politics alone.
  • My point here isn't to offer that critique or to pose a solution. My aim here is simply to highlight that fact that multiple things produced the November 8th result. Some are enduring and will be there in 2018 and 2020. Some are contingent events that will likely never happen again or at least not in any predictable way. They all happened. They're all important. They get addressed, dealt with in different ways. But standing them up against each other, shouting one down in favor of the other has far more to do with the self-destructive score settling which the bitterness of defeat brings in its wake than anything that is productive of building a different, better future.
  • I don't have any unified theory of the problem. I also see no point in exaggerating the problems. But I can also see a list of 4 or 5 things that need working on right now. Getting to work on those seems more important than any grand unified theory.
Javier E

Trump, no ordinary president, requires an extraordinary response | Brookings Institution - 0 views

www.brookings.edu/...trump-no-ordinary-president

trump checks & balances rule of law resistance politics

shared by Javier E on 24 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Trump’s election as president is an existential moment in American history. His candidacy, campaign, victory and actions halfway through the transition to governing, heretofore unimaginable, pose a genuine threat to the well-being of our country and the sustainability of our democracy.
  • our constitutional system provides an elaborate set of checks and balances designed to frustrate any would-be autocrat. The critical question is whether they and the essential norms that have in the past worked to make them effective, will be up to the challenge of a Trump presidency
  • Here I discuss briefly several key elements: the rule of law, a free press, an institutionally responsible Congress, a vigorous federal system, and a vibrant civil society.
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  • A free press was in Thomas Jefferson’s mind the single most important protector of individual freedom. Yet vast changes in the media and digital communications, and in the broader social and political environment in which they operate, have facilitated a post-truth world: fake news, no common set of facts, routine lies in public discourse, echo chambers reinforcing preexisting identities and views, an establishment media ever fearful of and compensating for charges of partisan bias.
  • Trump adds to this toxic brew an apparent belief that the only accurate news coverage is that which is favorable to him. His continuing efforts to intimidate or ignore news organizations or reporters he disfavors is becoming the new normal in American politics.
  • History offers up numerous examples of the first branch of government stepping up to its responsibilities in times of institutional threats or crises. That makes the silence of Republican congressional leaders to the frequent abuses of democratic norms during the general election campaign and transition deafening. The risk of party loyalty trumping institutional responsibility naturally arises with unified party government during a time of extreme polarization. A devil’s bargain of accepting illiberal politics in return for radical policies appears to have been struck.
  • The federal system has long offered solace to those fearful of a runaway government in Washington
  • Will state, metropolitan and local governments act to contain the gathering authoritarian strains in the federal government?
  • the nationalization of elections and with it the rise of party-line voting has led to a majority of strong, unified Republican governments in the states, some of which have demonstrated little sympathy for the democratic rules of the game. For starters, think Kansas, Wisconsin, and North Carolina.
  • The final wall of defense against the erosion of democracy in America rests with civil society, the feature of our country Tocqueville was most impressed with. Community organizations, businesses, nonprofit organizations of all types, including think tanks that engage in fact-based policy analysis and embrace the democratic norms essential to the preservation of our way of life.
  • Passivity will not do. Vigilance against every threat to the fundamental nature of the republic is the order of the day.
Javier E

The Struggle Inside The Wall Street Journal - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-the-wall-street-journal.html

wsj partisan trump

shared by Javier E on 14 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Many staff members believe that the paper’s top editor, Gerard Baker, previously a feisty conservative commentator, is trying to Murdoch-ize the paper. “There is a systemic issue,” one reporter told me. The dissatisfaction went public last week, with stories in Politico and the Huffington Post.
  • As a longtime reader, admirer and competitor of The Journal, I think the internal critics are right. You can see the news pages becoming more politicized. You can also see The Journal’s staff pushing back, through both great journalism (including exposes on the Trump administration) and quiet insubordination.
  • One way to understand the fight is through the lens of Fox News. Its former leader, Roger Ailes, knew that the country had become more polarized and that many viewers didn’t want sober objectivity. He also knew that most reporters leaned left, and their beliefs sometimes seeped into coverage.
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  • So Ailes came up with a brilliantly cynical strategy. He created a conservative news channel that dispensed with objectivity, and sometimes with facts, while claiming it was more objective — “Fair and Balanced” — than the competition.
  • Baker believes that most media is hopelessly biased, Journal staffers say. He views his critics as liberal whiners, and his approach as the fair and balanced one.
  • I happen to agree that liberal bias can be a media problem. On important issues — abortion, education, parenting and religion, to name a few — left-leaning beliefs too often distort coverage. The Journal, and every newspaper, should indeed fight that problem.
  • But that’s very different from saying reporters protect any political party. They don’t. Journalists’ incentives and instincts all point the other way. Which is why the media reported so aggressively on Hillary Clinton’s emails, damaging her badly.
  • has there ever been a more important time for sophisticated and fearless financial journalism?
Javier E

Romney's Former Bain Partner Makes a Case for Inequality - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...kes-a-case-for-inequality.html

economics wealth innovation incentives inequality

shared by Javier E on 09 May 12 - Cached
  • He has spent the last four years writing a book that he hopes will forever change the way we view the superrich’s role in our society. “Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong,” to be published in hardcover next month by Portfolio, aggressively argues that the enormous and growing income inequality in the United States is not a sign that the system is rigged. On the contrary, Conard writes, it is a sign that our economy is working. And if we had a little more of it, then everyone, particularly the 99 percent, would be better off.
  • most Americans don’t know how the economy really works — that the superrich spend only a small portion of their wealth on personal comforts; most of their money is invested in productive businesses that make life better for everyone. “Most citizens are consumers, not investors,” he told me during one of our long, occasionally contentious conversations. “They don’t recognize the benefits to consumers that come from investment.”
  • Dean Baker, a prominent progressive economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, says that most economists believe society often benefits from investments by the wealthy. Baker estimates the ratio is 5 to 1, meaning that for every dollar an investor earns, the public receives the equivalent of $5 of value
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  • Conard said Baker was undercounting the social benefits of investment. He looks, in particular, at agriculture, where, since the 1940s, the cost of food has steadily fallen because of a constant stream of innovations. While the businesses that profit from that innovation — like seed companies and fast-food restaurants — have made their owners rich, the average U.S. consumer has benefited far more. Conard concludes that for every dollar an investor gets, the public reaps up to $20 in value. This is crucial to his argument: he thinks it proves that we should all appreciate the vast wealth of others more, because we’re benefiting, proportionally, from it.
  • What about investment banks, with their complicated financial derivatives and overleveraged balance sheets? Conard argues that they make the economy more efficient, too. The financial crisis, he writes, was not the result of corrupt bankers selling dodgy financial products. It was a simple, old-fashioned run on the banks, which, he says, were just doing their job
  • He argues that collateralized-debt obligations, credit-default swaps, mortgage-backed securities and other (now deemed toxic) financial products were fundamentally sound. They were new tools that served a market need for the world’s most sophisticated investors,
  • “A lot of people don’t realize that what happened in 2008 was nearly identical to what happened in 1929,” he says. “Depositors ran to the bank to withdraw their money only to discover, like the citizens of Bedford Falls” — referring to the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” — “that there was no money in the vault. All that money had been lent.”
  • In 2008 it was large pension funds, insurance companies and other huge institutional investors that withdrew in panic. Conard argues in retrospect that it was these withdrawals that led to the crisis — not, as so many others have argued, an orgy of irresponsible lending
  • Conard concedes that the banks made some mistakes, but the important thing now, he says, is to provide them even stronger government support. He advocates creating a new government program that guarantees to bail out the banks if they ever face another run.
  • the central role of banks, Conard says, is to turn the short-term assets of nervous savers into risky long-term loans that help the economy grow.
  • A central problem with the U.S. economy, he told me, is finding a way to get more people to look for solutions despite these terrible odds of success. Conard’s solution is simple. Society benefits if the successful risk takers get a lot of money
  • As Conard told me, one of the crucial lessons he learned at Bain is that it makes no sense to look for easy solutions. In a competitive market, all that’s left are the truly hard puzzles. And they require extraordinary resources. While we often hear about the greatest successes — penicillin, the iPhone — we rarely hear about the countless failures and the people and companies who financed them.
  • we live longer, healthier and richer lives because of countless microimprovements like that one. The people looking for them, Conard likes to point out, are not only computer programmers, engineers and scientists. They are also wealthy investors like him
  • He said the only way to persuade these “art-history majors” to join the fiercely competitive economic mechanism is to tempt them with extraordinary payoffs.
  • When I look around, I see a world of unrealized opportunities for improvements, an abundance of talented people able to take the risks necessary to make improvements but a shortage of people and investors willing to take those risks. That doesn’t indicate to me that risk takers, as a whole, are overpaid. Quite the opposite.” The wealth concentrated at the top should be twice as large, he said. That way, the art-history majors would feel compelled to try to join them.
  • Rather than simply serving as an invitation for everybody to engage in potentially beneficial risk-taking, inequality can allow those with wealth to crush new ideas.
  • Unlike Romney, Conard rejects the notion that America has “some monopoly on hard work or entrepreneurship.” “I think it’s simple economics,” he said. “If the payoff for risk-taking is better, people will take more risks
  • Conard sees the success of the U.S. economy as, in part, the result of a series of historic accidents. Most recently, the coincidence of Roe v. Wade and the late 1970s economic malaise allowed Ronald Reagan to unify social conservatives and free-market advocates and set the country on a pro-investment path for decades. Europeans, he says, made all the wrong decisions. Concern about promoting equality and protecting favored industries have led to onerous work rules, higher taxes and all sorts of social programs that keep them poorer than Americans.
  • Now we’re at a particularly crucial moment, he writes. Technology and global competition have made it more important than ever that the United States remain the world’s most productive, risk-taking, success-rewarding society. Obama, Conard says, is “going to dampen the incentives.” Even worse, Conard says, “he’s slowing the accumulation of equity” by fighting income inequality.
  • Conard’s book addresses what is perhaps the most important question in economics, the one Adam Smith set out to answer in “The Wealth of Nations”: Why do some countries grow so rich and others stay poor? Where you come down on the answer has as much to do with your politics as your economic worldview (two things that can often be the same)
  • Nearly every economist I spoke with said that Conard has too much faith in the market’s ability to reward only those who create real value. Conard, for instance, insists that even the dodgiest financial products must have been beneficial or else nobody would have bought them in the first place. If a Wall Street trader or a corporate chief executive is filthy rich, Conard says that the merciless process of economic selection has assured that they have somehow benefited society. Even pro-market Romney supporters take issue with this. “Ed ought to be more concerned about crony capitalism,” Hubbard told me.
  • “Unintended Consequences” ignores some of the most important economic work of the past few decades, about how power and politics influence economic growth. In technical language, this field is the study of “rent seeking,” in which people or companies get rich because of their power, not because of their ideas.
  • wealthy individuals and corporations are able to influence politicians and regulators to make seemingly insignificant changes to regulations that benefit themselves. In other words, to rig the game
  • Conard’s version of the financial crisis ignores much reporting and analysis — including work I’ve done with NPR’s “Planet Money” team — that shows that some of the nation’s largest banks actively manipulated customers and regulators and, sometimes, their own stockholders to profit from dangerous risk
  • he expressed anger over the praise that Warren Buffett has received for pledging billions of his fortune to charity. It was no sacrifice, Conard argued; Buffett still has plenty left over to lead his normal quality of life. By taking billions out of productive investment, he was depriving the middle class of the potential of its 20-to-1 benefits. If anyone was sacrificing, it was those people. “Quit taking a victory lap,” he said, referring to Buffett. “That money was for the middle class.”
  • Perhaps concentrated wealth will inspire a nation of innovative problem-solvers. But if the view of many economists is right — that it sometimes discourages innovation — then we should worry
  • on this one he resorted to anecdotes and gut feelings. During his work at Bain, he said, he saw that successful companies had to battle against one another. Nobody was just given a free ride because of their power. “Was a person, like me, excluded from opportunity?” he asked rhetorically. “If so, I wasn’t aware!”
  • both could be true. The rich could earn a great deal of wealth through their own hard work, skill and luck. They could also use their subsequent influence to make themselves even richer
  • One of the great political and economic challenges of our time is figuring out the balance between wealth that benefits society and wealth that distorts.
  • Glenn Hubbard said only that at a broad level, Romney and Conard share “beliefs about innovation and growth and responsible risk-taking.”
  • Conard and Romney certainly share views on numerous policy matters. Like many Republicans, they promote lower taxes and less regulation for those who achieve financial succes
Javier E

Nonfiction Curriculum Enhanced Reading Skills in New York City Schools - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-in-new-york-city-schools.html

reading curriculum education K-12 core

shared by Javier E on 12 Mar 12 - Cached
  • For three years, a pilot program tracked the reading ability of approximately 1,000 students at 20 New York City schools, following them from kindergarten through second grade. Half of the schools adopted a curriculum designed by the education theorist E. D. Hirsch Jr.’s Core Knowledge Foundation. The other 10 used a variety of methods, but most fell under the definition of “balanced literacy,”
  • The study found that second graders who were taught to read using the Core Knowledge program scored significantly higher on reading comprehension tests than did those in the comparison schools. It also tested children on their social studies and science knowledge, and again found that the Core Knowledge pupils came out ahead.
  • The study found that for each of the three years, students in the Core Knowledge program had greater one-year gains on a brief reading test than their peers in the comparison schools.
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  • Under the balanced literacy approach, which was used by seven of the comparison schools and remains the most popular method of teaching reading in the city’s schools, children are encouraged to develop a love of reading by choosing books that are of interest to them.
  • Reading nonfiction writing is the key component of the Core Knowledge curriculum, which is based on the theory that children raised reading storybooks will lack the necessary background and vocabulary to understand history and science texts. While the curriculum allows children to read fiction, it also calls on them to knowledgeably discuss weather patterns, the solar system, and how ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia compare.
  • The curriculum may have a particular appeal for city schools beginning to adopt the Common Core standards, which emphasize nonfiction reading and will go into effect in 2014.
  • anonymous on 23 Mar 12
     
    Though the Core Knowledge approach seems to have its merits when it comes to standardized test scores, there are certainly disadvantages. Students in the Core program are receiving higher scores on the test because they have been "trained" in that specific field. Now, as a junior, I have recently taken my first SAT. The SAT tests three areas of study (critical reading, writing, and mathematics). If my entire school experience had been based solely upon these three areas, I would be lacking much vital information. Sure, in this alternate universe, I might be a 2400 scoring genius debating between Yale, Brown, and Princeton, but does that mean I am at all prepared for such colleges? By these standards, we might as well just toss out History class (Not on standardized testing? Get rid of it!). I am not suggesting that preparation for standardized testing should be completely overlooked in school curriculum; I just think that it should not be the main objective. In the long run, reading "Ramona Quimby, Age 8" in 1st grade may not have made my scores as high as those reading Malcolm Gladwell's latest work, but it did something just as important. It, along with numerous other books of my choosing, cultivated my love for reading. This love for reading will stay with me long after standardized test scores even matter, and I might just get to that Gladwell book after all.
Javier E

The problem with Mitt - POLITICO.com Print View - 0 views

dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm

Republicans conservatism Romney

shared by Javier E on 28 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Mitt Romney is in trouble. Not because of a boring convention or a bloodless speech or a grossly inappropriate press conference, but rather because the man refuses to stick his neck out and take a stand on the critical issues of our time.
  • Mitt Romney refuses to lay out a plan to balance the budget before 2040. He doesn’t specify cuts, he doesn’t propose eliminating agencies and he doesn’t explain how his tax cuts will be offset. When it comes to balancing the budget, Mr. Romney has no plan.
  • Medicare benefits have to be cut over the next generation. Anyone who says otherwise is lying.
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  • The U.S. military-industrial complex is bloated beyond belief, and yet all Mitt Romney can do is promise bigger budgets and longer wars.
  • Craven calculation, on the other hand, does not pay off for conservatives. Romney needed to decide long ago who he was: the last of the Rockefeller Republicans (and thus somebody who probably wouldn’t have gotten through Iowa) or a genuine movement conservative with detailed ideas about how to right the country.
  • I would remind you of the warnings I began giving my fellow Republicans during the Bush era. My predictions beginning in 2003 that Big Government Republicanism would eventually cripple the economy and crush the conservative movement enraged party hacks and set off Washington sycophants.
  • If we want to win the battle of ideas in the long term, we should be willing to face the fact that Mitt Romney is likely to lose — and should, given that he’s neither a true conservative nor a courageous moderate. He’s just an ambitious man.
  • Romney’s penchant for one-upmanship on seemingly every foreign policy issue that arises would stretch our military thin and limit our ability to neutralize real threats coming from countries like Iran.
  • A guest columnist for POLITICO, Joe Scarborough hosts “Morning Joe” on MSNBC and represented Florida’s 1st Congressional District in the House of Representatives from 1995 to 2001.
B Mannke

Where Free Speech Collides With Abortion Rights - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ides-with-abortion-rights.html

shared by B Mannke on 13 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • But she has to watch her step. If she crosses a painted yellow semicircle outside the clinic’s entrance, she commits a crime under a 2007 Massachusetts law.
  • The Supreme Court will hear arguments on Wednesday in her challenge to the law.
  • The Supreme Court’s 2000 decision upheld a complicated law that established 100-foot buffer zones outside all health care facilities, not just abortion clinics. Inside those larger zones, the law banned approaching others within eight feet for protest, education or counseling without their consent.
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  • “This law is access balanced with speech balanced with public safety,” Ms. Coakley said. “It has worked extremely well.”
  • “The government does not have the ability to decide,” he said, “that its public sidewalks are open for speakers on one side but not speakers on the other side.”
  • The buffer zone is small, she said. (It is the length of two parking spaces and takes just seconds to traverse.) “The only thing that’s before the court,” she said, “is the last seven seconds of a patient’s or a staff member’s walk to the door.”
  • “When you make people stand behind a line and make them shout,” he said, “that can diminish them in the eyes of the audience.”
  • “The protections of the First Amendment do not evaporate the closer one comes to an abortion clinic,” he wrote in an email. “Access must be protected; so must speech.”
  • “a law which bars a private citizen from passing a message, in a peaceful manner and on a profound moral issue, to a fellow citizen on a public sidewalk.”
Thomas Rhodes

Balancing Private and Public Needs - 0 views

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US politics policy economic uruguay newdelhi

shared by Thomas Rhodes on 21 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Thomas Rhodes on 21 Jan 14
     
    ". In many developing countries, there is more confidence in the raw fish than the tap water."
Javier E

The Dark Power of Fraternities - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...357580

fraternity university

shared by Javier E on 22 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • College fraternities—by which term of art I refer to the formerly all-white, now nominally integrated men’s “general” or “social” fraternities, and not the several other types of fraternities on American campuses (religious, ethnic, academic)—are as old, almost, as the republic.
  • While the system has produced its share of poets, aesthetes, and Henry James scholars, it is far more famous for its success in the powerhouse fraternity fields of business, law, and politics. An astonishing number of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, congressmen and male senators, and American presidents have belonged to fraternities
  • They also have a long, dark history of violence against their own members and visitors to their houses, which makes them in many respects at odds with the core mission of college itself.
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  • A recent series of articles on fraternities by Bloomberg News’s David Glovin and John Hechinger notes that since 2005, more than 60 people—the majority of them students—have died in incidents linked to fraternities, a sobering number in itself, but one that is dwarfed by the numbers of serious injuries, assaults, and sexual crimes that regularly take place in these houses.
  • I have spent most of the past year looking deeply into the questions posed by these lawsuits, and more generally into the particular nature of fraternity life on the modern American campus
  • to answer the vexing question “why don’t colleges just get rid of their bad fraternities?”—the system, and its individual frats, have only grown in power and influence. Indeed, in many substantive ways, fraternities are now mightier than the colleges and universities that host them.
  • The entire multibillion-dollar, 2,000-campus American college system
  • the Kappa Alpha Society. Word of the group spread, and a new kind of college institution was founded, and with it a brand-new notion: that going to college could include some pleasure. It was the American age of societies, and this new type fit right in.
  • every moment of the experience is sweetened by the general understanding that with each kegger and rager, each lazy afternoon spent snoozing on the quad (a forgotten highlighter slowly drying out on the open pages of Introduction to Economics, a Coke Zero sweating beside it), they are actively engaged in the most significant act of self-improvement available to an American young person: college!
  • There are many thousands of American undergraduates whose economic futures (and those of their parents) would be far brighter if they knocked off some of their general-education requirements online, or at the local community college—for pennies on the dollar—before entering the Weimar Republic of traditional-college pricing. But college education, like weddings and funerals, tends to prompt irrational financial decision making,
  • depends overwhelmingly for its very existence on one resource: an ever-renewing supply of fee-paying undergraduates. It could never attract hundreds of thousands of them each year—many of them woefully unprepared for the experience, a staggering number (some 40 percent) destined never to get a degree, more than 60 percent of them saddled with student loans that they very well may carry with them to their deathbeds—if the experience were not accurately marketed as a blast.
  • When colleges tried to shut them down, fraternities asserted that any threat to men’s membership in the clubs constituted an infringement of their right to freedom of association. It was, at best, a legally delicate argument, but it was a symbolically potent one, and it has withstood through the years. The powerful and well-funded political-action committee that represents fraternities in Washington has fought successfully to ensure that freedom-of-association language is included in all higher-education reauthorization legislation, thus “disallowing public Universities the ability to ban fraternities.”
  • While the fraternities continued to exert their independence from the colleges with which they were affiliated, these same colleges started to develop an increasingly bedeviling kind of interdependence with the accursed societies
  • the fraternities involved themselves very deeply in the business of student housing, which provided tremendous financial savings to their host institutions, and allowed them to expand the number of students they could admit. Today, one in eight American students at four-year colleges lives in a Greek house
  • fraternities tie alumni to their colleges in a powerful and lucrative way. At least one study has affirmed what had long been assumed: that fraternity men tend to be generous to their alma maters. Furthermore, fraternities provide colleges with unlimited social programming of a kind that is highly attractive to legions of potential students
  • It is true that fraternity lawsuits tend to involve at least one, and often more, of the four horsemen of the student-life apocalypse, a set of factors that exist far beyond frat row
  • the binge-drinking epidemic, which anyone outside the problem has a hard time grasping as serious (everyone drinks in college!) and which anyone with knowledge of the current situation understands as a lurid and complicated disaster
  • The second is the issue of sexual assault of female undergraduates by their male peers, a subject of urgent importance but one that remains stubbornly difficult even to quantify
  • The third is the growing pervasiveness of violent hazing on campus
  • But it’s impossible to examine particular types of campus calamity and not find that a large number of them cluster at fraternity houses
  • the fourth is the fact that Boomers, who in their own days destroyed the doctrine of in loco parentis so that they could party in blissful, unsupervised freedom, have grown up into the helicopter parents of today
  • during the period of time under consideration, serious falls from fraternity houses on the two Palouse campuses far outnumbered those from other types of student residences, including privately owned apartments occupied by students. I began to view Amanda Andaverde’s situation in a new light.
  • Why are so many colleges allowing students to live and party in such unsafe locations? And why do the lawsuits against fraternities for this kind of serious injury and death—so predictable and so preventable—have such a hard time getting traction? The answers lie in the recent history of fraternities and the colleges and universities that host them.
  • This question is perhaps most elegantly expressed in the subtitle of Robert D. Bickel and Peter F. Lake’s authoritative 1999 book on the subject, The Rights and Responsibilities of the Modern University: Who Assumes the Risks of College Life?
  • The answer to this question has been steadily evolving ever since the 1960s, when dramatic changes took place on American campuses, changes that affected both a university’s ability to control student behavior and the status of fraternities in the undergraduate firmament. During this period of student unrest, the fraternities—long the unquestioned leaders in the area of sabotaging or ignoring the patriarchal control of school administrators—became the exact opposite: representatives of the very status quo the new activists sought to overthrow. Suddenly their beer bashes and sorority mixers, their panty raids and obsession with the big game, seemed impossibly reactionary when compared with the mind-altering drugs being sampled in off-campus apartments where sexual liberation was being born and the Little Red Book proved, if nothing else, a fantastic coaster for a leaky bong.
  • American colleges began to regard their students not as dependents whose private lives they must shape and monitor, but as adult consumers whose contract was solely for an education, not an upbringing. The doctrine of in loco parentis was abolished at school after school.
  • Through it all, fraternities—for so long the repositories of the most outrageous behavior—moldered, all but forgotten.
  • Animal House, released in 1978, at once predicted and to no small extent occasioned the roaring return of fraternity life that began in the early ’80s and that gave birth to today’s vital Greek scene
  • In this newly forming culture, the drugs and personal liberation of the ’60s would be paired with the self-serving materialism of the ’80s, all of which made partying for its own sake—and not as a philosophical adjunct to solving some complicated problem in Southeast Asia—a righteous activity for the pampered young collegian. Fraternity life was reborn with a vengeance.
  • These new members and their countless guests brought with them hard drugs, new and ever-developing sexual attitudes, and a stunningly high tolerance for squalor
  • Adult supervision was nowhere to be found. Colleges had little authority to intervene in what took place in the personal lives of its students visiting private property. Fraternities, eager to provide their members with the independence that is at the heart of the system—and responsive to members’ wish for the same level of freedom that non-Greek students enjoyed—had largely gotten rid of the live-in resident advisers who had once provided some sort of check on the brothers
  • , in 1984 Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, with the ultimate result of raising the legal drinking age to 21 in all 50 states. This change moved college partying away from bars and college-sponsored events and toward private houses—an ideal situation for fraternities
  • lawsuits began to pour in.
  • Liability insurance became both ruinously expensive and increasingly difficult to obtain. The insurance industry ranked American fraternities as the sixth-worst insurance risk in the country—just ahead of toxic-waste-removal companies.
  • For fraternities to survive, they needed to do four separate but related things: take the task of acquiring insurance out of the hands of the local chapters and place it in the hands of the vast national organizations; develop procedures and policies that would transfer as much of their liability as possible to outside parties; find new and creative means of protecting their massive assets from juries; and—perhaps most important of all—find a way of indemnifying the national and local organizations from the dangerous and illegal behavior of some of their undergraduate members.
  • comprising a set of realities you should absolutely understand in detail if your son ever decides to join a fraternity.
  • you may think you belong to Tau Kappa Epsilon or Sigma Nu or Delta Tau Delta—but if you find yourself a part of life-changing litigation involving one of those outfits, what you really belong to is FIPG, because its risk-management policy (and your adherence to or violation of it) will determine your fate far more than the vows you made during your initiation ritual
  • the need to manage or transfer risk presented by alcohol is perhaps the most important factor in protecting the system’s longevity. Any plaintiff’s attorney worth his salt knows how to use relevant social-host and dramshop laws against a fraternity; to avoid this kind of liability, the fraternity needs to establish that the young men being charged were not acting within the scope of their status as fraternity members. Once they violated their frat’s alcohol policy, they parted company with the frat.
  • there are actually only two FIPG-approved means of serving drinks at a frat party. The first is to hire a third-party vendor who will sell drinks and to whom some liability—most significant, that of checking whether drinkers are of legal age—will be transferred. The second and far more common is to have a BYO event, in which the liability for each bottle of alcohol resides solely in the person who brought it.
  • these policies make it possible for fraternities to be the one industry in the country in which every aspect of serving alcohol can be monitored and managed by people who are legally too young to drink it.
  • But when the inevitable catastrophes do happen, that policy can come to seem more like a cynical hoax than a real-world solution to a serious problem.
  • Thanks in part to the guest/witness list, Larry can be cut loose, both from the expensive insurance he was required to help pay for (by dint of his dues) as a precondition of membership, and from any legal defense paid for by the organization. What will happen to Larry now?
  • “I’ve recovered millions and millions of dollars from homeowners’ policies,” a top fraternal plaintiff’s attorney told me. For that is how many of the claims against boys who violate the strict policies are paid: from their parents’ homeowners’ insurance
  • , the Fraternal Information and Programming Group’s chillingly comprehensive crisis-management plan was included in its manual for many years
  • the plan serves a dual purpose, at once benevolent and mercenary. The benevolent part is accomplished by the clear directive that injured parties are to receive immediate medical attention, and that all fraternity brothers who come into contact with the relevant emergency workers are to be completely forthright
  • “Until proven otherwise,” Fierberg told me in April of fraternities, “they all are very risky organizations for young people to be involved in.” He maintains that fraternities “are part of an industry that has tremendous risk and a tremendous history of rape, serious injury, and death, and the vast majority share common risk-management policies that are fundamentally flawed. Most of them are awash in alcohol. And most if not all of them are bereft of any meaningful adult supervision.”
  • the interests of the national organization and the individual members cleave sharply as this crisis-management plan is followed. Those questionnaires and honest accounts—submitted gratefully to the grown-ups who have arrived, the brothers believe, to help them—may return to haunt many of the brothers, providing possible cause for separating them from the fraternity, dropping them from the fraternity’s insurance, laying the blame on them as individuals and not on the fraternity as the sponsoring organization.
  • So here is the essential question: In the matter of these disasters, are fraternities acting in an ethical manner, requiring good behavior from their members and punishing them soundly for bad or even horrific decisions? Or are they keeping a cool distance from the mayhem, knowing full well that misbehavior occurs with regularity (“most events take place at night”) and doing nothing about it until the inevitable tragedy occurs, at which point they cajole members into incriminating themselves via a crisis-management plan presented as being in their favor?
  • I have had long and wide-ranging conversations with both men, in which each put forth his perspective on the situation.
  • the young men who typically rush so gratefully into the open arms of the representatives from their beloved national—an outfit to which they have pledged eternal allegiance—would be far better served by not talking to them at all, by walking away from the chapter house as quickly as possible and calling a lawyer.
  • The fraternity system, he argues, is “the largest industry in this country directly involved in the provision of alcohol to underage people.” The crisis-management plans reveal that in “the foreseeable future” there may be “the death or serious injury” of a healthy young person at a fraternity function.
  • His belief is that what’s tarnishing the reputation of the fraternities is the bad behavior of a very few members, who ignore all the risk-management training that is requisite for membership, who flout policies that could not be any more clear, and who are shocked when the response from the home office is not to help them cover their asses but to ensure that—perhaps for the first time in their lives—they are held 100 percent accountable for their actions.
  • The fraternity system, he argues, is “the largest industry in this country directly involved in the provision of alcohol to underage people.” The crisis-management plans reveal that in “the foreseeable future” there may be “the death or serious injury” of a healthy young person at a fraternity function.
  • His belief is that what’s tarnishing the reputation of the fraternities is the bad behavior of a very few members, who ignore all the risk-management training that is requisite for membership, who flout policies that could not be any more clear, and who are shocked when the response from the home office is not to help them cover their asses but to ensure that—perhaps for the first time in their lives—they are held 100 percent accountable for their actions.
  • Unspoken but inherent in this larger philosophy is the idea that it is in a young man’s nature to court danger and to behave in a foolhardy manner; the fraternity experience is intended to help tame the baser passions, to channel protean energies into productive endeavors such as service, sport, and career preparation.
  • In a sense, Fierberg, Smithhisler, and the powerful forces they each represent operate as a check and balance on the system. Personal-injury lawsuits bring the hated media attention and potential financial losses that motivate fraternities to improve. It would be a neat, almost a perfect, system, if the people wandering into it were not young, healthy college students with everything to lose.
  • In a sense, Fierberg, Smithhisler, and the powerful forces they each represent operate as a check and balance on the system. Personal-injury lawsuits bring the hated media attention and potential financial losses that motivate fraternities to improve. It would be a neat, almost a perfect, system, if the people wandering into it were not young, healthy college students with everything to lose.
  • Wesleyan is one of those places that has by now become so hard to get into that the mere fact of attendance is testament, in most cases, to a level of high-school preparation—combined with sheer academic ability—that exists among students at only a handful of top colleges in this country and that is almost without historical precedent.
  • Wesleyan is one of those places that has by now become so hard to get into that the mere fact of attendance is testament, in most cases, to a level of high-school preparation—combined with sheer academic ability—that exists among students at only a handful of top colleges in this country and that is almost without historical precedent.
  • This January, after publishing a withering series of reports on fraternity malfeasance, the editors of Bloomberg.com published an editorial with a surprising headline: “Abolish Fraternities.” It compared colleges and universities to companies, and fraternities to units that “don’t fit into their business model, fail to yield an adequate return or cause reputational harm.”
  • A college or university can choose, as Wesleyan did, to end its formal relationship with a troublesome fraternity, but—if that fiasco proves anything—keeping a fraternity at arm’s length can be more devastating to a university and its students than keeping it in the fold.
  • A college or university can choose, as Wesleyan did, to end its formal relationship with a troublesome fraternity, but—if that fiasco proves anything—keeping a fraternity at arm’s length can be more devastating to a university and its students than keeping it in the fold.
  • there is a Grand Canyon–size chasm between the official risk-management policies of the fraternities and the way life is actually lived in countless dangerous chapters.
  • When there is a common denominator among hundreds of such injuries and deaths, one that exists across all kinds of campuses, from private to public, prestigious to obscure, then it is more than newsworthy: it begins to approach a national scandal.
  • When there is a common denominator among hundreds of such injuries and deaths, one that exists across all kinds of campuses, from private to public, prestigious to obscure, then it is more than newsworthy: it begins to approach a national scandal.
Javier E

In No One We Trust - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...in-no-one-we-trust

trust inequality banking economics history

shared by Javier E on 25 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • that doesn’t mean we should stop striving for a bit more trust in our society and our economy. Trust is what makes contracts, plans and everyday transactions possible; it facilitates the democratic process, from voting to law creation, and is necessary for social stability. It is essential for our lives. It is trust, more than money, that makes the world go round.
  • , as more and more people lose faith in a system that seems inexorably stacked against them, and the 1 percent ascend to ever more distant heights, this vital element of our institutions and our way of life is eroding.
  • But events — and economic research — over the past 30 years have shown not only that we cannot rely on self-interest, but also that no economy, not even a modern, market-based economy like America’s, can function well without a modicum of trust — and that unmitigated selfishness inevitably diminishes trust.
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  • Adam Smith argued forcefully that we would do better to trust in the pursuit of self-interest than in the good intentions of those who pursue the general interest. If everyone looked out for just himself, we would reach an equilibrium that was not just comfortable but also productive, in which the economy was fully efficient. To the morally uninspired, it’s an appealing idea: selfishness as the ultimate form of selflessness. (Elsewhere, in particular in his “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” Smith took a much more balanced view, though most of his latter-day adherents have not followed suit.)
  • Things didn’t turn out well for our economy or our society. As millions lost their homes during and after the crisis, median wealth declined nearly 40 percent in three years. Banks would have done badly, too, were it not for the Bush-Obama mega-bailouts.
  • This cascade of trust destruction was unrelenting. One of the reasons that the bubble’s bursting in 2007 led to such an enormous crisis was that no bank could trust another. Each bank knew the shenanigans it had been engaged in — the movement of liabilities off its balance sheets, the predatory and reckless lending — and so knew that it could not trust any other bank
  • bankers used their political influence to eviscerate regulations and install regulators who didn’t believe in them. Officials and academics assured lawmakers and the public that banks could self-regulate. But it all turned out to be a scam. We had created a system of rewards that encouraged shortsighted behavior and excessive risk-taking. In fact, we had entered an era in which moral values were given short shrift and trust itself was discounted.
  • THE banking industry is only one example of what amounts to a broad agenda, promoted by some politicians and theoreticians on the right, to undermine the role of trust in our economy. This movement promotes policies based on the view that trust should never be relied on as motivation, for any kind of behavior, in any context. Incentives, in this scheme, are all that matter.
  • So C.E.O.’s must be given stock options to induce them to work hard. I find this puzzling: If a firm pays someone $10 million to run a company, he should give his all to ensure its success. He shouldn’t do so only if he is promised a big chunk of any increase in the company’s stock market value
  • Similarly, teachers must be given incentive pay to induce them to exert themselves. But teachers already work hard for low wages because they are dedicated to improving the lives of their students. Do we really believe that giving them $50 more, or even $500 more, as incentive pay will induce them to work harder? What we should do is increase teacher salaries generally because we recognize the value of their contributions and trust in their professionalism. According to the advocates of an incentive-based culture, though, this would be akin to giving something for nothing.
  • Of course, incentives are an important component of human behavior. But the incentive movement has made them into a sort of religion, blind to all the other factors — social ties, moral impulses, compassion — that influence our conduct.
  • This is not just a coldhearted vision of human nature. It is also implausible. It is simply impossible to pay for trust every time it is required. Without trust, life would be absurdly expensive; good information would be nearly unobtainable; fraud would be even more rampant than it is; and transaction and litigation costs would soar.
  • When 1 percent of the population takes home more than 22 percent of the country’s income — and 95 percent of the increase in income in the post-crisis recovery — some pretty basic things are at stake. Reasonable people, even those ignorant of the maze of unfair policies that created this reality, can look at this absurd distribution and be pretty certain that the game is rigged.
  • Trust between individuals is usually reciprocal. But if I think that you are cheating me, it is more likely that I will retaliate, and try to cheat you. (These notions have been well developed in a branch of economics called the “theory of repeated games.”) When Americans see a tax system that taxes the wealthiest at a fraction of what they pay, they feel that they are fools to play along.
  • a deeper rot takes hold: Attitudes and norms begin to change. When no one is trustworthy, it will be only fools who trust. The concept of fairness itself is eroded. A study published last year by the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the upper classes are more likely to engage in what has traditionally been considered unethical behavior. Perhaps this is the only way for some to reconcile their worldview with their outlandish financial success, often achieved through actions that reveal a kind of moral deprivation.
  • As always, it is the poor and the unconnected who suffer most from this, and who are the most repeatedly deceived. Nowhere was this more evident than in the foreclosure crisis.
  • The banks figured out how to get court affidavits signed by the thousands (in what came to be called robo-signing), certifying that they had examined their records and that these particular individuals owed money — and so should be booted out of their homes. The banks were lying on a grand scale, but they knew that if they didn’t get caught, they would walk off with huge profits, their officials’ pockets stuffed with bonuses. And if they did get caught, their shareholders would be left paying the tab
  • But perhaps even more than opportunity, Americans cherish equality before the law. Here, inequality has infected the heart of our ideals.
  • I suspect there is only one way to really get trust back. We need to pass strong regulations, embodying norms of good behavior, and appoint bold regulators to enforce them.
Javier E

Home Economics: The Link Between Work-Life Balance and Income Equality - Stephen Marche... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...2

work life gender power inequality income patriachy balance

shared by Javier E on 11 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • the debates about gender, particularly the debate that has emerged in a thousand blog posts surrounding “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” and Lean In, retain the earlier framework. These discussions tend to recognize the residual patriarchy, but they do not see its hollowness, or the processes hollowing it out.
  • Gender attitudes do not affect economic reality, but rather the other way around. The rise of women is not the result of any ideology or political movement; it is a result of the widespread realization, sometime after the Second World War, that families in which women work are families that prosper. And countries in which women work are countries that prosper.
  • The solution to the work-life conundrum is not “enlisting men” (as Slaughter puts it) in the domestic sphere. The solution is establishing social supports that allow families to function. The fact is, men can’t have it all, for the same reason women can’t: whether or not the load is being shared 50-50 doesn’t matter if the load is still unbearable.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • It will become bearable when decidedly more quotidian things become commonplace—like paid parental leave and affordable, quality day care
julia rhodes

A Plea for Caution From Russia - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tion-from-russia-on-syria.html

russia nytimes US history politics crisis economic policy economics obama putin syria intervention america

shared by julia rhodes on 12 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • By VLADIMIR V. PUTIN
  • The universal international organization — the United Nations — was then established to prevent such devastation from ever happening again.
  • The United Nations’ founders understood that decisions affecting war and peace should happen only by consensus, and with America’s consent the veto by Security Council permanent members was enshrined in the United Nations Charter. The profound wisdom of this has underpinned the stability of international relations for decades.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • ential strike by the United States against Syria, despite strong opposition from many countries and major political and religious leaders, including the pope, will result in more innocent victims and escalation, potentially spreading the conflict far beyond Syria’s borders. A strike would increase violence and unleash a new wave of terrorism. It could undermine multilateral efforts to resolve the Iranian nuclear problem and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and further destabilize the Middle East and North Africa. It could throw the entire system of international law and order out of balance.
  • A strike would increase violence and unleash a new wave of terrorism. It could undermine multilateral efforts to resolve the Iranian nuclear problem and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and further destabilize the Middle East and North Africa. It could throw the entire system of international law and order out of balance.
  • Syria is not witnessing a battle for democracy, but an armed conflict between government and opposition in a multireligious country.
  • We must stop using the language of force and return to the path of civilized diplomatic and political settlement.
  • From the outset, Russia has advocated peaceful dialogue enabling Syrians to develop a compromise plan for their own future. We are not protecting the Syrian government, but international law.
  • The law is still the law, and we must follow it whether we like it or not.
  • No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there is every reason to believe it was used not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists.
  • But force has proved ineffective and pointless. Afghanistan is reeling, and no one can say what will happen after international forces withdraw. Libya is divided into tribes and clans. In Iraq the civil war continues, with dozens killed each day. In the United States, many draw an analogy between Iraq and Syria, and ask why their government would want to repeat recent mistakes.
  • Might they not return to our countries with experience acquired in Syria? After all, after fighting in Libya, extremists moved on to Mali. This threatens us all.
  • I welcome the president’s interest in continuing the dialogue with Russia on Syria.
  • If we can avoid force against Syria, this will improve the atmosphere in international affairs and strengthen mutual trust. It will be our shared success and open the door to cooperation on other critical issues.
  • And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is “what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.”
  • t is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptiona
  • julia rhodes on 12 Sep 13
     
    Written by Vladimir Putin
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