Tuesday, April 14, 2015

The Last Casualty of the Civil War-- was it Lincoln?

A century and a half ago, this very night, Abraham Lincoln was martyred.  John Wilkes Booth, a leading actor of his day, had shot the leader of the United States as he sat in his booth watching a play, "My American Cousin."  The act shocked the nation, just five days after Lee's surrender at Appomattox courthouse had signaled the end of the Civil War.

For this reason, Lincoln has sometimes been called "the last casualty of the Civil War,"  a label perhaps immortalized the most strongly by Rod Serling, the creator of the "Twilight Zone."  In one of its most famous episodes, called 'the Passerby' a widow first meets a young soldier walking on the road and learns he has died in the Civil war, then meets Lincoln and learns he has also died.

It is certainly symbolically appropriate to call him the last casualty of the Civil War, but is it accurate?

No, it is not, except that Lincoln perhaps has as much claim as many others, for there are many ways to define who was the last casualty of the war that perhaps it can be argued, the United States itself is to this day still a casualty of.

On May 13, 1865, the battle of Palmito Ranch was fought, between small groups of soldiers who had yet to lay down their arms, in South Texas. Most of the dead died quickly, but Indiana Private John J. Williams was only mortally wounded and died hours later on the battlefield. So some historians consider Williams the last casualty of that war.
Six days later however, on May 19, 1865, there was a small skirmish between former confederate soldiers who were described as ‘unrepentant rebels’ and a union force lead by Lt. Joseph Carroll, at a place called Hobdy’s bridge in Alabama. One member of the force, Corporal John W. Skinner was killed in that fight and can also lay claim to being the last casualty of the Civil War. However, three of Skinner’s comrades who were wounded in the same fight, were later denied pensions on the basis of a claim by the government that the war was over and they were not eligible for pensions for injuries received during ‘peacetime.’
Was it confederate Major Henry Wirz, the commander of the notorious Andersonville prisoner camp, who was hanged on November 10, 1865 after being found guilty of what we would today refer to as atrocities? You could make that case.
In fact, if we consider hangings, a case could be made in relation to the notorious family feud between the Hatfields of West Virginia and the McCoys of Kentucky. Asa Harmon McCoy (in contrast to some other members of his family) joined the Union army. When he was injured in the war he returned home, but as a returning union soldier was murdered by pro-confederate members of the Hatfield family. The feud sprang directly from the civil war, so a case could be made that the last casualty of that war was Ellison Mounts (a Hatfield,) who was hanged on February 18, 1890 for the murder of Alifair McCoy.
Or, was it Sam White of Chesterfield, Virginia, who died on February 18, 2008 (118 years to the day after the hanging of Mounts) while trying to restore an unexploded Civil War cannonball? There are still to this day hundreds or perhaps even thousands of unexploded shells from that long ago conflict buried in the eastern U.S. And there is no guarantee that White is the last casualty if you count him as one, either.

And so perhaps that brings us back to the present day. It is sometimes difficult to separate fact from fiction, but especially in learning our history, we must try as hard as possible to do so.

Friday, March 27, 2015

The real questions about Jeb Bush are about what he's been doing since leaving office.

Lately all the speculation about Jeb Bush has focused on his last name,  asking whether as a ‘Bush’ he can win following his father and his brother. Both left the Presidency in the midst of recessions and his brother is also associated with unpopular and ruinous adventures abroad.

In so doing, the focus has not been sufficiently on Jeb himself.  Occasionally stories do come out—for example when the Clinton email flap surfaced, it was pointed out that  JebBush used his own private email server while he was Governor  but in fact that is something of a non issue since apparently it’s the norm among potential presidential candidates.

But the big story regarding Jeb Bush is not what he did WHILE he was Governor, it’s what he did after leaving office.  His first job was as a paid consultant to Lehman Brothers bank.  In case you forgot, Lehman Brothers was the touchstone for the economic collapse. During the 2000’s, rampant speculation in the housing market and the quick money to be turned as a result led a number of banks, including Lehman Brothers, to invest their money in risky investments tied to home mortgages that quickly turned bad when the housing market tanked. And what did Jeb do for Lehman Brothers?  Well, he was assigned a special mission (while his brother was still in the White House.)  Jeb was asked to go to Mexico and try to persuade billionaire Carlos Slim to bail out the company.

Slim, the world’s second richest man, patiently listened to Jeb’s plea, but could see where Lehman Brothers was headed and wanted no part of propping it up to stave off the inevitable collapse.  It is hard to imagine that Jeb, who is supposed to be brainy, didn’t see it as well. So as a consultant, one has to question either his judgment in trying to get people to invest in a bank that was sinking like the Titanic if he was one of the few in the company who didn’t see that, or his ethics if he did see what was happening.

So after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, did Jeb leave the banking business? Not at all.  In fact, he moved on to a position as a consultant with of the British banking giant Barclay’s (a position he kept until very recently when he resigned all of his board positions and other positions in order to begin putting together a run for President.) So how did Barclay’s do with Jeb Bush advising them?

He stepped into Barclay’s as the company was actively working to manipulate LIBOR,  officially the “London Interbank Offered Rate,” which is a key rate used to set fixed interest rates.  Barclay’s continued with the collusion of several other large banks including the Royal Bank of Scotland, JP Morgan-Chase, Deutsche Bank and Citibank  (which it is hard to imagine a financial consultant would be unaware of) to manipulate the rates until in 2011 when it was reported that the banks were under investigation and then in February 2012 when the scheme unraveled.  Eventually Barclay’s agreed to fines of nearly half a billion dollars to several different international regulatory agencies. As part of their agreement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Barclay’s agreed that some fixed interest rates may have changed as a result of the manipulation.
   This is not a small thing.  One memo between a trader and Barclay’s revealed that  for each basis point (0.01%) that Libor was moved, those involved could net, "about a couple of million dollars."

After Barclay’s got out of the business of manipulating interest rates (or at least we would hope) they moved on to currency.  Some of the same banks Barclay’s colluded with on LIBOR, discovered a new way to gamble with the economy in order to skim some money off the top.  They all colluded on foreign currency exchange rates. In theory international currency is supposed to ‘float,’ so that people who want to, for example, trade in their Euros for dollars can do so at a rate that is set purely by the international markets;  high demand for a currency makes it more expensive and lower demand reduces the price.  However, the banks discovered they could move the price around the edges, and as a result make a lot of money by investing in currency that they could then move the exchange rate just enough to make a profit.  Never mind of course that the profit they made means someone else lost money,  they found they could make money, and a lot of it. After being burned by the LIBOR fine, Barclays’ this time became the ‘snitch’ in the group and essentially ratted out the others ; in exchange for a smaller fine.  Because of their cooperation, Barclays was subject to a fine but got a ‘deferred prosecution agreement’ which in effect means they don’t actually have to pay the fine.  All they have to do is keep their nose clean.

That can’t be too hard, can it? Apparently, it is pretty hard, for big banks anyway.   Like a hungry swarm of locusts, the same clique of megabanks (including Barclay’s) that had such a big role in manipulating interest rates and currency exchanges,  moved on to manipulating the price of metals.   As before, the banks raked in big profits while small investors were left holding the bag for the losses on one side of an equation where the other side turned into big bucks for banks.  The investigation into price fixing in the metals markets is ongoing, but suffice it to say that I suspect a lot of ‘gold bugs’ will be furious that instead of the free market determining the price of their favorite metal, it was instead a small group of deeply pocketed bankers who decided what it would be.  And again, any consultant on any bank that was unaware of the metal price manipulation (especially after having gone through the LIBOR and FOREX,  or foreign currency exchange manipulation scandals)  would have been completely absent in their duties to pay attention to who they were working for. Maybe that's why the establishment wants Jeb so much.  Some apologists for his brother claim George W. was 'out to lunch' and could be manipulated by a Praetorian Guard who could pull his strings.  Jeb's work for Barclays when they were involved in financial scandal after financial scandal after financial scandal seems to suggest that that might be the case.

It is true that there is more that could be said about Jeb Bush and the record of corporations he has worked for been on the board of both in and outside of the banking industry since leaving office, but the most important thing that can be pointed out is this, because it speaks to the entire outlook of the organization he was advising at Barclay’s:  The year (2013-2014) when profits fell 22% (largely because of fines) and the bank was caught up in three major scandals  (in other words a bad year for Barclay’s)  the bank   laid off 19,000 people  followed by an announcement they would   lay off another 12,000 people    because of an abysmal earnings report.

BUT what did Barclay's do after the abysmal performance and layoffs of thousands of people?  What the boards of large companies often do these days (too often):   paid 481 people at the top enormous bonuses of over a million pounds (meaning substantially over a million dollars) apiece.  This reward voted by the members of the board of the bank that Jeb Bush was advising is a depressingly familiar narrative.  The members of the Board (millionaires themselves)  apparently at least understand and do not hold responsible the millionaires who work for them at the top of the company (including those Jeb was working with,) and understand them well enough to give them massive bonuses even when they do a poor job or harm the company by exposing it to unwarranted risk. So what did Jeb Bush do?  Simple. Continued advising Barclay's.

So to summarize, after sustaining losses but rewarding the people in charge (likely the only ones the Board Members see very often)  the bank Jeb was advising balanced the books by cutting the jobs of secretaries, data analysts and computer techs, and perhaps also others who take orders from the people who actually were in charge and caused the poor performance in the first place.

That kind of thinking,  making the poor pay for the sins of the rich while rewarding the rich for sinning is standard fare for modern conservatives.  But a letdown if you were optimistic that somehow this Bush would be different.


Friday, March 06, 2015

Why I Support Capital Punishment (Almost) Never

Over the past twenty-four hours I've had a couple of events that have caused me to contemplate the death penalty and clarify how I feel about it.

One of them is that a friend of mine posted a link from the U.S. conference of Catholic bishops opposing it.  Of course I am not Catholic,  but I understand the concerns of the bishops.  However I had to disagree with the premise of her post, though in fact in most cases I would agree with her (and the bishops.)

The second of course, living here in Arizona, was the Jodi Arias sentencing case.  As many may know, a single holdout juror refused to vote for the death penalty, and as per state law that means that Arias, convicted of killing her boyfriend Travis Alexander will not be sentenced to death, but instead will spend the rest of her life in prison.

Let me state a summary, and then go on and clarify as to why I do not support capital punishment today, but if some specific problems were fixed then I could support it:

1. I believe that there are cases where capital punishment is warranted.  However, these cases are exceedingly rare, and I do not believe that Jodi Arias, as brutal as her crime was, qualifies.
2. I believe that the system is broken, both in terms of the number of proven errors that have been made, and in terms of the basic inequality of the justice system in which race, class and ability to pay are correlated with likelihood of being sentenced to death when convicted of the same crime, when in fact if the system was working properly these factors should have no such correlation.
3. Until the system is fixed, I do not support any further executions.  In other words, I favor a moratorium, and then perhaps a resumption only after these problems have been addressed.
4.  While it may be warranted in extreme cases, I do not buy the argument that it is any kind of a deterrent, will address prison overcrowding, or will save money (though 'saving money' would be a terrible justification for executions, even if that were true.)

First, when is it justified?  I believe that taking a person's life (assuming we are absolutely certain of guilt, which I will get to later) is only justified if the particular crime is so heinous as to completely be beyond the bounds of civilization, and further that it rises beyond ordinary human expressions of rage, violence, jealousy, passion or other kinds of reasons why murders happen, but maybe are not characteristics of a person who is a cold blooded killer.  In other words, premeditation must be a part of the murder.  Someone who gets angry and kills may need to spend the rest of his or her life in prison, but I don't believe that is a good enough reason to kill them. People can of course argue this point, but I do not believe a person who kills in a fit of anger but may regret it later is on a par with someone who coldly calculates what they are going to do and then does it.  

Between this sort of premeditation and the heinousness of the crime, I can name a couple of people who I believe should get or should have gotten the death penalty.  I would have given it to Charles Manson (but not to his followers, who were after all followers.)  Timothy McVeigh was executed for his crime, and rightly so.  The one case that really haunts me however happened in 1999.  My daughters were just about the age of Shawn Ryan Grell's daughter, Kristen Salem.  I still can hear a two year old child's terrified scream, 'No, daddy NO!!!' when she realized what he was about to do.  I don't want to say anymore about that here, other than the case was so horrible that it at one point caused a judge who had sat on the bench for 30 years to impose the one and only death sentence she ever imposed. Later it was thrown out on the technicality that the law had changed and required a jury to consent to a death sentence, but in 2009 it was reinstated when he was in fact sentenced by a jury.  The details if you have a strong enough stomach  to read them are here .  Grell's crime was so awful that a judge who sat on the bench for thirty years only handed down one death sentence in all that time:  his.   Put it this way:  I agree with the judge.  The death penalty is assessed far too frequently and it should be very rare.  But his is the rare case where I can agree with it.  Sitting on the bench for thirty years and ONLY opting for the death penalty for Grell?  That's about where I am on this.  Only very rare, and horrendously evil cases.

Beyond the requirement that a crime must be unthinkably heinous,  I also do not think the death penalty should be imposed if there is clear evidence that it is what the defendant wants. A good case in point is that of Major Nidal Hassan, who murdered thirteen people at Fort Hood in his pursuit of martyrdom on behalf of Allah.  Only an odd thing happened to Major Hassan. Instead of dying a martyr's death as he had planned, he was cut down by a policewoman whose bullet severed his spine, stopping his rampage and leaving him permanently paralyzed and in a wheelchair.  During the trial, it became very clear that Major Hassan and prosecutors were on the same page.  He wanted to be a martyr and die, and they wanted him to die.  His defense attorneys were in the ridiculous position of arguing a position that is based on the presumption that the defendant seeks to avoid the death penalty, even though in that case it wasn't true. The prosecution, much to the joy of the defendant, prevailed. He will be executed, rather than spending decades in that wheelchair having the daily reminder of what he did.  He thinks he will get 72 virgins when he is executed.  Whether he is right or wrong becomes a matter of blind faith.

The second point is that the system is broken, as evidenced by the number of innocent people sentenced to death. Quite a few years ago a man named Ray Krone, who had been on death row here in Arizona, was exonerated after DNA evidence proved he had nothing to do with the crime. His case was remarkable only in that he was the 100th person who had been sentenced to death, to be exonerated since the death penalty was reinstated in 1977 after a moratorium. Dozens more across the country have since been cleared.  By some estimates as many as 5% (or one out of twenty) people on death row may actually be innocent.  Even if it is lower than that, the number who have been proven to be innocent after being convicted and sentenced to die is far too high for comfort. It is true that there is no proof that an innocent person has actually been executed since the reinstatement of the penalty but there are cases such as Joseph O'Dell in Virginia and Cameron Todd Willingham in Texas in which it seems quite likely.  Of course prosecutors have vigorously fought any attempt to reopen cases of people who have already been executed.  But given the number of people who have been sentenced to death and later released after being exonerated it is statistically very likely that at least a few innocent people may well have been executed.  If we ever agree that this is 'acceptable' then we really are a morally bankrupt society, as death penalty opponents claim.

This leads directly into the third point, that the justice system is not an even playing field. The amount of money a defendant can spend on legal representation dictates the quality of defense he or she is likely to receive.  We all remember the O.J. Simpson murder trial.  Simpson, at the time a deep pocketed millionaire, was able to hire a virtual Who's Who of the nation's best lawyers.  The limited resources available to the L.A. County prosecutor's office just weren't enough to keep up with the demands of the case.  Simpson got off, as we may recall the words, "If the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit."  Further, even a moderately wealthy defendant can afford a good enough lawyer to probably avoid the death penalty (there are lawyers who specialize in just such cases and have a very good track record of helping their clients dodge the executioner's table even when found guilty.)  A good example is Judy Clarke, who is just now representing Boston bombing suspect Dzokhar Tsarnaev;  in the past she has represented Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, South Carolina mother Susan Smith (who drowned her sons,) Olympic Park bomber Eric Robert Rudolph and Tucson shooter Jared Loughner;  all were found guilty, as the defense is already conceding about Tsarnaev, but she helped all four of them avoid the death penalty.  If a suspect is convicted and sentenced to death, they can further appeal the sentence, to the point where strained county prosecutor's budgets just aren't there to play the game out. Even going for a death sentence is very expensive, and in an era of budget cuts for prosecutor's offices that may well explain why so many fewer prosecutors are even trying for it anymore than the number of cases where they used to.

However, the unequal playing field in which a very wealthy (or in the case of Tsarnaev, very notorious, who can bring out a lawyer like Clarke) defendant against a state with limited taxpayer supplied funds to spread around, is reversed when the resources of the state are pitted against an indigent or very poor defendant.  Often these people are represented by a public defender.  Now, don't get me wrong.  There are some very good public defenders (in fact Clarke herself is a former public defender, which is how she got the Kaczynski case.)  Some public defenders are true professionals who take their jobs very seriously. At the same time however, there are also some who are the opposite. There are some lawyers who are just too inept to be hired by any reputable law firm, and often end up as public defenders.  In 2000 the Dallas Morning news found that nearly one out of four death row inmates in Texas had been represented by public defenders who in the past had been disciplined for professional misconduct.  Often this involved things like sleeping or drinking on the job. Some public defenders haven't won a case in years.

Further, even if a public defender is committed to the job, he or she has a heavy workload (so not much time to spend on each defendant) and a budget that is even more limited than the prosecutor's budget.  It takes money to do things like run a DNA test or go interview a witness, and often the money just isn't there in a public defender's budget.  This may be one reason why for example, 95% of death row inmates in Alabama are indigent (page 8 of the link)  but no one would suggest that anywhere near 95% of the murders in Alabama are committed by indigent people.  The obvious next question is how many of them may in fact be innocent, but we are unlikely to know because public defenders typically don't handle appeals and none of them has the money for an appeal, even if they could prove incompetent representation at the outset.  Until COMPETENT legal representation WITH ENOUGH RESOURCES to do the job properly can be provided for everyone who can't otherwise pay, I can't with good conscience support a system where whether one is convicted and receives a death sentence may depend as much on income level as on actual guilt or innocence, or the details of the crime.

There is also a well-documented by now correlation between race and application of the death penalty, even when factors such as the specific nature of the crime, number of victims, aggravating factors, etc. are taken in to account.  In other words, in cases with comparable crimes. blacks are more likely than whites to receive the death penalty. While this study only compares blacks and whites, there are other studies that show that for comparable crimes minority perpetrators are more likely to get a harsher sentence (whether jail for jaywalking or death for murder) than the identical crimes perpetrated by whites.  How much of this is already explained by the previously noted correlation between income level and sentencing outcome is an open debate;  but it is unlikely that 100% of this difference is only due to that factor; so in other words conscious or subconscious racism could also play a role.

Beyond that, there are some arguments in favor of the death penalty that I find specious.  One is that it is a deterrent. However, most murderers, especially those who premeditate murder, expect to get away with it.  I've heard that from many people who would be in a position to know, including police officers. People who plan murder think they are smarter or shrewder and in most cases just don't expect to be caught. So the penalty is of little concern to them if they think they have a plan to get away with it.  Secondly, in many cases people who have for example, shot at people are later killed in shootouts with police. Now, there are probably faster ways to guarantee your instant death than pointing a gun at a police officer, but right now I can't think of one.  Clearly these folks don't care if they live or die, if they can just seize on the smallest chance of escape. And finally we have evidence it is not a deterrent;  states without the death penalty actually have a LOWER homicide rates than states that do have it.  I've even heard the counter argument, that in states with the death penalty the state makes life 'cheaper' so people are more likely to take it themselves.  I don't actually believe that, but there is a stronger statistical case to be made for that point of view than there is to be made for the argument that it's a deterrent.

Another of the what I consider specious arguments has to do with the well-documented problem of prison overcrowding. However, at least as of a couple of years ago the prison population was growing so fast that if you lined everyone on death row up against a wall and shot them tomorrow, in less than two weeks the prisons would be just as full  as they are today.  In other words, death row is an insignificant part of the problem.  I fully support prison reform, but that has to begin with non-violent offenders (especially drug addicts) who are in prison rather than in a treatment facility where they belong, as well as mental health patients who also should be getting treatment, not a prison cell.  But worrying about the vanishingly small number on death row in the face of a sizeable segment of the population that is behind bars is at best a diversion from what is a real problem of mass incarceration in America today.

This does however bring up the question of money.  Even though death row is a tiny part of the prison system, most states are in fact struggling under the burden of keeping this many people locked up. So the argument has been made that executing a prisoner frees up a bed and should reduce costs.  However, largely owing to the cost of appeals and obtaining experimental drugs, in fact it is more expensive to execute an inmate than it is to keep them in prison for life.  So still not a good argument for the death penalty, even if you think cost is a good basis for making this decision.

So for me to support the death penalty I'd have to see these problems addressed in a way that would make being subject to the death penalty applied in a manner that is fair and equitable. If it is applied in a capricious manner as it is now then I can't support it.  AND once the system is fixed, I would still only support it for very specific and unspeakably monstrous crimes, such as Grell ruminating on the idea while he drove around for nearly an hour and then burning his two year old to death. Which brings me back to Jodi Arias.  Apparently eleven of the twelve jurors supported the death penalty for Arias, but the twelfth refused to go along with them.  Well, I'm with the twelfth juror.  There is no question that Arias' crime, stabbing Alexander as many as 29 times plus a gunshot wound to the head, was as brutal as it was bloody.  It can be argued that she could have premeditated the crime, but there is also evidence that the two of them had sex shortly before the murder.  So do we know for sure everything that happened? Not absolutely. The jury that heard the evidence did convict her of capital murder. And I believe they were right to convict her.  But I do not believe that we can be sure that she didn't in fact, 'snap' (as she said at one point, though she certainly damaged her own credibility by changing her story several times.)  So I'm not sure that Arias' crime meets my own standards for when I could support the death penalty (see above: almost never, just not absolutely never.)  Her spending the rest of her years wishing she hadn't done it, is good enough.

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

All Hat, no Cattle









Friday, June 27, 2014

100 years ago today

One hundred years ago today, we lived in a different world.

Colonialism was in full swing. European powers justified it with notions of 'bringing civilization to the savages.'  If a revolt did occur, the colonial powers would brutally but efficiently put it down. The United States had a few small colonies too, spoils of the Spanish-American war, but with 'gunboat diplomacy' the U.S. could claim that Latin American countries were 'independent republics,' while making sure their leaders would run the country to U.S. specifications.

It was an age of optimism.  Just within recent memory, amazing new inventions had changed life forever, or had the potential to do so in the very near future: the telegraph and then the telephone, that allowed instantaneous communication (at least within a continent, though the first transatlantic telegraph cable had been in operation since 1858, allowing messages to be transmitted between North America and Europe within a matter of minutes);  the radio, allowing everything from vital information to entertainment to be instantly transmitted to the masses.  Between the radio and the phonograph, boredom seemed a thing of the past as endless entertainment was but a click of the 'on' switch away. Other recent inventions were still the exclusive domain of the wealthy but might not remain so for long as entrepreneurs looked for ways to make them more affordable: the home telephone, the horseless carriage (automobile) or for the really exciting new invention, the aeroplane.  Advances in science and medicine (especially the discovery of germs and sanitation-- remember that the water closet, or flush toilet, was another invention that was becoming widely available) were improving the health and lifespan of people by leaps and bounds. As for household goods, everything from clothes to tablewares to furniture, what had been handmade for thousands of years was now being spun out by the whir of machines in thousands of \factories (as for the undiluted soot that they belched out and made it necessary to turn on streetlights at noon in places like Pittsburgh, that too was considered a sign of 'progress.')

It was an age of monarchy.  There had been no serious wars in Europe since the days of Bismarck, and most nations were led by kings, kaisers, czars and with a royal lineage that in most cases was intermixed (which many people gave credit for the lack of warfare, thinking that somehow the fact that the fact that Kaiser Wilhelm was the grandson of the recently departed Queen Victoria meant that Germany would never fight England.)  For perhaps the last time in history, monarchs in Europe not only led their nations, but exercised real (though except perhaps for the Czar, not absolute) power over them.

It was an age when the world was explored (so globes, if still drawn without the benefit of aerial photography, were still very accurate) but still held vast stretches of unexplored wilderness; when telescopes were learning much more about neighboring planets but they still held their mystery; so Jules Verne's or Edgar Rice Burroughs' fantasy science fiction still could have been real, because we didn't know otherwise.

One can certainly point fingers at the racism, sexism and self-indulgence of the 'gilded age' which was drawing to a twilight that no one imagined it could be, but in many ways it was a wonderful time to dream, an illusion of a better world completely oblivious of the yawning chasms about to open in the world or of the horror it was about to fall into....

One hundred years ago tomorrow, as the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne was visiting Serbia, a bomb went off. It missed the Archduke in his car, but killed and wounded others who were behind him in the procession.  Later on, the Archduke (a member of the nobility and therefore attempting to be noble) insisted on visiting the hospital where the bombing victims had been taken.  He and his wife Sofia in their car passed in front of another would be assassin, a young Serb nationalist named Gavrilo Princip.  Unlike the assassin with the bomb, Princip did not miss. He fired two shots, one into the Archduke and one into his wife, and they both killed their target.  And the sun set on the world of the gilded age.

Friday, May 30, 2014

An Epiphany I had About Early American Government and the Welfare they Gave to the Poor.

While away from a computer for several days, I did have an epiphany, one of those things that ties a lot of things together.

The Tea Party keeps waxing nostalgic about the America of small government that in one form or another lasted from the founding days of the Republic into the early twentieth century.

They like to point out that the Government at this time did not provide welfare, and people who had no job and no food had to somehow 'make it on their own.'

Only that's not quite right. They gave them welfare, in a different form. Via the Northwest Ordinance of 1789 and later the Homestead Act of 1862, they would (after clearing the Native Americans off the land and mostly stuffing them onto small tracts of undesireable land or packing them off to Oklahoma) offer them land (160 acres, in plots all tracted out into ranges and townships) on which they could establish a farm and feed themselves and their family. Eventually, they even opened up Oklahoma, which had been set aside for the Native Americans who they had driven off their land elsewhere, but even that ended by 1907, when Oklahoma became a state.  But for the first century and a quarter of the time that the nation was in existence, the phrase 'go west, young man' was a part of the lexicon, and the government had land in abundance to give away as 'government welfare' to anyone who would move there and work it  (though they did so very reluctantly, it should be noted, for African Americans, for whom the promise of 'forty acres and a mule' never materialized and forced most of them to work as sharecroppers, especially in the South, but that's a different discussion.)

Now I also can anticipate what some Tea Party supporters will say. They won't disagree with me (since history records that this is exactly what happened) but will instead pull out the 'Cliven Bundy' card and complain about how much land the government still owns, especially in the West (after all, the Northwest Ordinance gave out parcels of land in what is now the eastern third of the U.S. and the Homestead Act more or less focused in the same way on what is now the middle third, but no similar act was every passed, at least on a significant scale, for the West.)  And it is true that even today the majority of the land in the West is owned by the Federal Government (though anyone who argues that the Federal Government somehow doesn't legally own it is wrong, since the Federal Government paid for most of it for $20 million (the combined purchase price of the Mexican Cession and Gadsden Purchase) and obtained the rest by an international treaty with Britain over the Oregon territory in 1845.)

But, they will argue, if in fact the Federal Government owns the land, why not just give it away in a similar manner to what was done before?

First, it's because a lot of it is not land you could farm on. The places you could farm on, have virtually all been transferred to private ownership already, but most of the rest doesn't make good farm land.  Around here, and around a lot of the rest of the southwest, it is too hot, too dry and the land too unsustainable to be able to farm, except perhaps in small areas that have consistent water like river valleys.  We are already outstripping our water supply, and it's hard to see how thousands more farmers would (if we had them) do anything beyond drain the scarce resource faster.  In fact, as the jet stream moves northward, we have already seen reports that precipitation in the Colorado River basin could decrease by 15-20% annually.  Yeah, I know, some skeptics of government welfare probably don't believe that either, but the science is sound and denying that a hungry lion is coming towards you won't prevent it from eating you when it gets there.  But even without it, we are losing the water battle in the southwest, and most of the land the federal government does own is either marginally useful as grazing land (which they already allow ranchers to graze on it for $1.35/cow per month, a fraction of what private grazing rights run)  or it is part of a national park, national forest or national monument. Cattle ranches (and I know several ranchers) will always be an activity that at least in the west requires thousands of acres, so even making people on welfare into cattle ranchers would result in a relatively small number of them being given this land, because ranches in general are so large and the cowhands who work on it now, would still be working on it then.

 Keep in mind regarding national parks, forests and monuments, that we do allow some kinds of economic activity in these areas (such as logging in national forests) but these are areas that are preserved for all of us to share. Do you really want the government to throw open Yellowstone  or Yosemite to people who would come in and just turn it into a bunch of farms?

But beyond that, even if they did do that, DO YOU REALLY BELIEVE that the people that they would want to get the land would be a bunch of welfare recipients from New York or Chicago?  Of course not. They expect it to be some kind of  'patriotic Americans' (probably meaning them) though in reality it would likely be a bunch of multinational corporations.   And frankly, compared to the value of the kind of land needed to farm or ranch on, the value of public assistance is much less.

So in conclusion, the people who argue that the small, federalist government in the days of the founding fathers didn't give welfare to people who needed to feed themselves is false. They did understand the need to do so and that it was the duty of the government to help provide for people, they just used a different kind of currency.

Friday, April 25, 2014

Duck, Dodge and Weave

I’ve been following the recent controversy over Cliven Bundy, and there is one politician in particular who has completely unimpressed me, and it’s hardly the first time:  Arizona House Speaker Andy Tobin.

Speaker Tobin just two weeks ago issued a strong statement of support for Bundy, a deadbeat rancher who has not paid grazing fees for twenty years, in his standoff with the BLM.   He left no doubt that he supported Bundy,  in the process working hard to appeal to the militia extremists who advocate armed resistance to the federal government.

But the past two days, Bundy’s racist comments have drawn a lot of criticism, and across the political spectrum.  As has been widely reported, Bundy, who apparently has been enjoying his fifteen minutes of fame so much that he’s attempted to drag it out with daily news conferences since the standoff ended, finally revealed himself during one of them when he said that blacks (who he referred to by the obsolete and offensive name, ‘negroes’) should be ‘picking cotton’ and were better off as slaves because then they had a ‘family life’  (well if you consider being selectively bred with whoever the slaveowner decided, or having yourself or members of your family sold out from under you ‘family life,’ I guess. ) And Bundy, when asked to clarify his remarks, instead doubled down on them, when he repeated essentially the same quotes  as what he thinks about when he drives by houses with open doors in Las Vegas.  Since he said the same thing twice, it is clearly no minor slip of the tongue, but rather it is who he is.

So what did Speaker Tobin do? Did he condemn Bundy’s remarks or try to distance himself from them?

No, he did not.   In fact, he has said nothing. CONSIDER, that even right wing flamethrowers Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity condemned Bundy’s remarks over the past couple of days on their shows!  It speaks volumes about Tobin’s lack of either judgment or decency when he has to be schooled by Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity about why what Bundy said is offensive and wrong!

So is this the only time Tobin has exhibited poor judgement and then instead of condemning what ought to be condemned, just clammed up and tried to fade into the background (despite being one of the most powerful politicians in the state) and hope nobody will notice his silence?

Sadly, no.  Recently Andy Tobin brought SB 1062 to the floor of the House for a vote, and  supported it.  SB 1062 you may recall, was the divisive bill that would have allowed businesses to discriminate against anyone they saw fit to discriminate against by claiming a ‘religious exemption’ to both state and federal anti-discrimination laws. In practice, this law would have allowed businesses to discriminate in particular against gay couples.   Again, Andy Tobin didn’t see why this was a bad thing. First, he brought it to the floor of the house.   Then he voted for the bill.

Of course SB 1062 immediately engendered a torrent of criticism, not only from those targeted by the bill, but by many others and in particular the business community.   Businesses in Arizona remembered very well the damage to the economy and reputation of the state from SB 1070 several years ago and did not want a repeat (especially with the obvious economic target and a threat by the NFL to move the Super Bowl next year out of Arizona.) Three members of the legislature admitted that they had made a mistake in supporting the bill and urged Governor Brewer to veto it, which she did.

Andy Tobin, however? Nowhere to be found. He said nothing about SB 1062 when it became controversial, either supporting his own vote, or joining the members who said their votes had been a mistake.  He was quiet as a mouse.

This willingness to take the most extreme positions and then say nothing when others who have taken them get into trouble would be bad enough in a Speaker (a position that exerts leadership.)   But now Tobin wants to go to Washington.  No, he is not running for Congress in his district. Tobin is a resident of CD-4, but he has decided to run in a district he does not live in, CD-1.  Of course carpetbagging is nothing new to Republicans in the district; For years rural Arizona was represented by Rick Renzi, a Virginia resident who bought (but  only stayed in during infrequent campaign trips) a home in Flagstaff. Renzi was later convicted of a number of felonies and sentenced to three years in prison, but it hasn’t stopped the GOP from nominating Phoenix resident who owned land in Munds Park Sydney Hay and Tucson resident who moved to Marana Jonathan Paton in previous years. I guess they think to represent rural northeastern Arizona you don’t  actually have to live in rural northeastern Arizona.

This relates to the Bundy situation as well, I might add. I know a number of cattle ranchers. They certainly do have their issues at times with the federal  government, but all of them pay the grazing fee. Mr. Bundy is nothing but a deadbeat who does not pay his taxes, and most ranchers do appreciate that. But apparently living in the more urban enclave of Prescott, Tobin doesn’t realize this. He might if he lived in the real CD-1.

It gets worse though.  As a candidate for Congress, Tobin was asked about the Paul Ryan budget that a lot of Republicans in Congress are on record as supporting.  The budget makes big changes and ultimately big cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security,  trying in particular to replace Medicare with a privatized system of partially subsidized health care, where the government would help seniors pay part of the cost of private insurance from an exchange. 

Yeah, I know.  If you follow GOP Congressional logic, private exchanges with partial government subsidies are better  than Medicare.  But, private exchanges with partial government subsidies (the heart of the Affordable Care Act) are worse than having no insurance.  So put those together and you have to wonder how long it will be before they just say that having no insurance is better than Medicare.

So as a potential member of Congress, Tobin was asked about the Ryan budget.  You can listen to his response here:  Andy Tobin not answering the question. 

I suppose you might argue that he’s a politician and politicians are always cagey.  But that is not so. Ann Kirkpatrick, the congresswoman Tobin seeks to replace, has been quite clear that she opposes the Ryan budget. Further, she also took on a President of her own party when she said she would oppose any cuts to the Medicare Advantage program,  which helps seniors who need or want it to purchase higher quality medical insurance than just what they would get directly from Medicare.   Based on his failures so far to take a position when things get tough, are you optimistic that Andy Tobin would have the backbone to confront his own President or house leadership if his own President or house leadership was wrong?   That’s why we need Ann back—she’s not afraid to make the tough call and reach across the aisle sometimes if she sees it’s in the best interest of CD-1.

Maybe the most telling example of why Andy Tobin is unfit to lead the district is found in  the budget he helped negotiate .  It does two things that harm rural counties a lot. The first is to include a tax cut that takes money away from counties.  We know that counties are already understaffed.  As I alluded to in my blog post about serving on a Grand Jury,  some of the court cases we got were years old. Hard to see how laying off more people will make that kind of backlog anything besides worse.   The second is to CUT funds from rural highways and divert them to urban districts.   So much for somebody who seeks to represent you. He apparently doesn’t know how bad some of the highways here can get, or doesn’t care. Do you really want a CONGRESSMAN who shows a similar disregard for the needs of a district he doesn’t live in? 
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