Is the US a police state?

Some of this blog’s readers may be old enough to recall what used to happen in brutal Latin American dictatorships in the second half of the 20th century, when opponents of the government were picked up by the secret police and never heard from again, except when their mutilated dead bodies occasionally turned up. A whole network of state-sponsored secret prisons, systematic torture, and murder was put into place and paramilitary groups and so-called ‘death squads’, operating under the auspices and protection of the governments and usually consisting of security forces in plain clothes, used to carry out all manner of atrocities, leaving the public in a state of permanent fear.
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Book review: Zeitoun by Dave Eggers

This is an extraordinary book about one family’s experience with Hurricane Katrina.

As long time readers of this blog may recall, I was furious at the way that the poor people of New Orleans were treated like scum during and after Katrina But Zeitoun is on the short list of ten books that are competing to be selected as the choice for my university’s common reading program for next year. Since I am on the selection committee, I feel obliged to read all of them. Once I started it, however, I could barely put it down, it is so well-written. It is written in a documentary style, using language that is spare and understated, yet extraordinarily compelling.

Dave Eggers tells the true story through the eyes of a devout Muslim couple in New Orleans caught up in the chaos that followed Hurricane Katrina. The husband Abdulrahman Zeitoun (known to everyone by just his last name which is pronounced ‘zay-toon’) was born in Syria but is now a long-time resident of the US. He is the co-owner with his American-born wife Kathy (who had converted to Islam before she met him) of a prosperous construction and renovation business.
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Be nice to hospitality workers

By now everyone in the US must have heard about the JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater who got so fed up by the way he was treated by a passenger that he used the intercom to curse her out and left the plane. Grabbing a beer and using the emergency chute to make his dramatic exit was an inspired touch. Slater has become something of a folk hero for his take-this-job-and-shove-it action and I would not be surprised to see a made-for-TV movie about disgruntled flights attendants soon. Slater even became Stephen Colbert’s Alpha Dog of the Week.

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Slater was arrested and is now out on bail, facing charges of reckless endangerment and criminal mischief that could put him in prison for up to seven years, which seems excessive to me. His lawyer has provided more details of what happened.

Flight attendants in general have expressed great sympathy for him, saying that he did what many of them have only fantasized about. My niece worked as a flight attendant for a few years and has her own share of stories about rude and obnoxious people on planes. The following apocryphal story describes the kind of pettiness and self-indulgence that airline workers have to routinely deal with:

In my youth, I was friends with a TWA flight attendant who used to tell this tale: A fellow attendant had just finished serving dinner (so you know how long ago this was), and a woman rang her call button. “This potato,” she said to the attendant, pointing to a small baker on the tray, “is bad.”

He calmly picked up the potato, placed it in the palm of his left hand and shook his right index finger at it, saying in a scolding tone, “Bad potato. Bad, bad potato.” His attempt at humor won him a suspension, my friend said.

Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether Slater should have done what he did and deserves the adulation he has received from some quarters, the whole episode illustrates the inequality and tension that exists between workers in the hospitality industry and the customers.

A couple of years ago my flight was cancelled due to bad weather and there was chaos at the check-in counter as a large number of people tried to find alternative flights. There was only one person to serve all the coach passengers and naturally there were long lines and delays and tempers became frayed, and some people started berating this poor woman although she was not responsible for the mess. Things got so bad that a policeman had to come in to keep some order. I was there for over six hours because I was trying to make an international connection and so was able to observe the fact that this woman did not leave her position even to get food or go to the bathroom but kept a pleasant and smiling face throughout the ordeal, never raising her voice, and standing all the time. It was only late in the evening, after everyone had left and I was the only person remaining that she confided in me that a co-worker had called in sick that day, which was why she was alone, and that she was totally exhausted. I asked her if tough days happened to her often and she ruefully said yes.

One reporter worked as a flight attendant for two days to see what it was like and wrote about her experiences. Her co-workers told her that working first class was harder than coach and that did not surprise me. Airlines themselves are partly responsible for this. In order to get people to fork out extra money for these more profitable upgrades, they have pandered to them that they are so special, giving them all manner of little perks, including laughably ridiculous ones like the little carpet near the boarding gate that ordinary coach passengers are not supposed to step on. It always cracks me up when the person at the gate announces that the proletariat is forbidden to step on that rug. Should we be surprised that some of the pampered people treat flight attendants as their personal servants?

You can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat those who they perceive as subordinate to them. As Dave Barry once wrote, “A person who is nice to you but not nice to the waiter is not a nice person.” The notorious John Bolton, hysterical warmonger and George W. Bush’s choice to be US ambassador to the United Nations, was known to berate his staff while being ingratiating to those he felt were his superiors. He was described by an observer as the “quintessential kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy”, adding, “I’ve never seen anyone quite like Secretary Bolton in terms of the way he abuses his power and authority with little people… The fact is that he stands out, that he’s got a bigger kick and it gets bigger and stronger the further down the bureaucracy he’s kicking.”

It is true that modern airline travel is frustrating for passengers. But that does not excuse being nasty to the people who are the public face of that industry because they are not responsible for this state of affairs. In fact, they are as much victims as we are because airlines have cut back on personnel to the minimum, requiring those remaining to work much harder and longer. I have a great deal of sympathy for people who work in the hospitality industry like waiters, flight attendants, hotel employees, and the like. These people are on their feet almost all the time, for pay that is not that great, and are required by their employers to be smiling and friendly and obsequious to everyone. And while most people are polite and considerate, because these workers deal with so many people every day, the odds are that they encounter a fair number of jerks in the course of their work day, people seeking an outlet for their own personal frustrations and demons, who take advantage of them by being abusive and rude, knowing that they have to take it and still keep smiling.

Ideally, we should treat everyone equally and well but that is hard to do in practice. But a good rule-of-thumb is that the less power that people have, the greater effort we should put in to swallow our own irritation and annoyance and be nice to them and show consideration and respect, because they have likely had a much harder day than we did.

POST SCRIPT: Anthem for Steven Slater

I remember when this song was released in 1978 that it struck the same chord with fed up workers that Slater’s actions did.

More on red light and speed cameras

The previous post on this topic resulted in such interesting discussions that I want to expand on this topic in a new post.

I actually agree with some of the criticisms that were made about a camera-based system to enforce traffic laws on speeding and running red lights. But my point is that while the police-based system is fundamentally flawed and cannot be made fair and consistent and widespread because of the enormous costs that would need be incurred, the camera-based system as currently implemented is only technically flawed. It should be easy to improve it by purely technical fixes that can also be easily monitored to ensure that the devices work accurately and provide reasonable opportunities for compliance.
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The same sex marriage verdict

Needless to say, I was very pleased with the ruling last week by US District Court judge Vaughn Walker in California overturning the ban on same sex marriage. The case arose because of a challenge to Proposition 8 that was passed by referendum in November 2008 and required the state constitution to add a clause that stated, “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”

The judge said that Proposition 8 violated the ‘due process’ and ‘equal protection’ clauses of the 14th amendment to the federal constitution. The due process clause states that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” while the equal protection clause states that no state shall “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” (The 14th amendment is getting quite a workout these days, with some talking about amending it to prevent children born in the US of illegal immigrants from getting automatic citizenship under the opening sentence that states, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”)
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The puzzling opposition to red light and speed cameras

I am often taken by surprise at the kinds of things that people get really upset about. For example, many cities and states have recently taken to placing cameras strategically at various points to catch speeders and people who run red lights. The camera takes a photo of an offender and you get the citation in the mail. I didn’t think too much about this innovation and when I did it seemed to me to make a lot of sense. At the very least, it releases police to do more important work like catching criminals. It seems like such a waste to have police spend huge amounts of time lurking just to catch the occasional speeder.

Furthermore, the camera system seems to have the advantage of complete impartiality. It does not care what kind of car committed the offense, whether it is a dull old minivan or a flashy red sports car. More importantly, it does not discriminate among drivers either. The camera does not know or care if you are old or young, rich or poor, black or white, attractive or homely, well-spoken or inarticulate. It does not care if you are a person of influence or a nobody. Cameras do not profile people.

In other words, these cameras allow us to actually practice the ideals of justice, completely blind to everything except whether one has committed the offense or not. And yet, these cameras are generating huge amounts of controversy with citizen petitions and referenda demanding their removal and state legislature passing laws banning them. And since the people leading this charge tend to be those who belong to the middle and upper classes, their voices are, of course, heeded. What explains this fervor against something so reasonable?

Some people object to the red light cameras by claiming that they are designed to trap people, because the duration of the yellow lights is made too short to allow one to stop safely without being rear-ended. But this seems to me to be a technical issue that can be resolved easily with proper guidelines and standards. Also, drivers are supposed to keep a safe distance behind the car in front to allow for such sudden stops.

Others argue against the cameras on the grounds that they were installed as revenue generators rather than to encourage safer driving. So what if they are? I do not understand this objection. After all, the laws and fines were already there. No one seemed to have any problem with them being enacted. It is strange that what people are objecting to is them being enforced more vigorously and efficiently. The fact is that these camera are catching people who are violating the law. If people want to defy their municipality’s cunning plan to increase revenues, all they have to do is obey existing traffic laws.

And the laws that are being violated are hardly unreasonable laws. No one will deny that people who speed and run red lights are placing other people at risk. Nor are the laws so secret and subtle that one does not know one is violating them. All drivers know what they should do when approaching a traffic light. In the US especially, speed limit signs are ubiquitous and one has little excuse for not knowing what it is on any given stretch of road.

I was really puzzled by this opposition to traffic cameras until I read an article by George Monbiot in the London Guardian discussing similar puzzling opposition in England.

In every other sector, Conservatives insist that it is daft for human beings to do the work machines could do. In every other instance they demand that police officers be freed from mindless tasks to spend more time preventing serious crime. In all other cases they urge more rigorous enforcement of the law. On every other occasion they insist that local authorities should raise revenue and make their schemes pay for themselves. But it all goes into reverse when they are exposed to the beams of a fiendish instrument of mind control.

The moment they pass through its rays, Conservatives turn from penny-pinching authoritarians into spendthrift hoodie-huggers. They demand that a job now performed consistently and cheaply by machines should be handed back to human beings, who will do it patchily and at great expense. They urge that police officers be diverted from preventing serious crime to stand in for lumps of metal. They insist that those who break the law should not be punished or even caught. They clamour for councils to abandon a scheme that almost pays for itself, and replace it with one that requires constant subsidies.

Monbiot has a convincing theory as to why traffic cameras cause people to reverse almost every principle they claim to uphold, despite the fact that such cameras lead to reductions in traffic accidents and mortality rates. Monbiot argues that it is the very impartiality of the cameras that, rather than being seen as the good thing it undoubtedly is, is causing the opposition. Most people think that they somehow have an edge that they can use to escape paying the fine if they are caught by real live traffic police. They think they are important enough or look respectable or influential or attractive enough, or that they can manufacture some plausible excuse, that will get them off the hook. It is just the young and poor and people of color who tend to be out of luck when it comes to finding ways to escape.

In other words, traffic cameras commit the worst offense: they do not respect class privilege. I have to agree with Monbiot’s conclusion, though in the US I would expand his group from ‘conservatives’ to all members of the better-off classes: “The real reason why Conservatives hate the enforcement of speed limits is that this is one of the few laws which is as likely to catch the rich as the poor: newspaper editors and council leaders are as vulnerable as anyone else. The Conservative reaction to speed cameras suggests that they love laws, except those which apply to them.”

POST SCRIPT: Threatening the 14th amendment

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Film review: No Country for Old Men and the Coen brothers’ oeuvre

You have to grant writers-directors-producers Joel and Ethan Coen one thing: they make interesting films. Not for them the formulaic, genre-tailored approach to filmmaking. Not for them endless sequels to hits or even to follow up a hit film with one similar in style. Each film seems to go off in a different direction from the previous one and stands alone. They take risks and for that quality alone one has to respect them.

Having said all that, the results are a mixed bag and I cannot say that I have enjoyed all the films that I have seen of their oeuvre: Raising Arizona (1987), The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), Fargo (1996), The Big Lebowski (1998), O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), No Country for Old Men (2007), Burn After Reading (2008), and A Serious Man (2009).
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Greedy old people

I recently turned 60. I don’t pay much attention to my birthdays but this one is a little special because it signifies that by almost any measure I am now officially an old person, a member of a group a subset of whom has been annoying the hell out of me for a long time: greedy old people.

Let me make it quite clear whom this rant is targeting. It is not aimed at old people who after many decades of hard work are even now struggling to make ends meet on their meager savings and social security checks, some of whom have to continue working well past normal retirement age at dead-end and physically demanding jobs which take a toll on their bodies, in order to obtain the basic necessities of life, such as food and shelter. Those people can leave the room because my words are not aimed at them. [Read more…]

What is gained by cooking the books?

In the previous two posts (here and here) I discussed how the government cooks the books, particularly with regard to unemployment, inflation, economic growth, and budget deficits, to give people a much rosier picture of the state of the economy than is the case. What is to be gained by this and who benefits?

In his article titled NUMBERS RACKET: Why the economy is worse than we know in the May 2008 issue of Harper’s magazine, Kevin Phillips says:

[S]ince the 1960s, Washington has been forced to gull its citizens and creditors by debasing official statistics: the vital instruments with which the vigor and muscle of the American economy are measured. The effect, over the past twenty five years, has been to create a false sense of economic achievement and rectitude, allowing us to maintain artificially low interest rates, massive government borrowing, and a dangerous reliance on mortgage and financial debt even as real economic growth has been slower than claimed… the use of deceptive statistics has played its own vital role in convincing many Americans that the U.S. economy is stronger, fairer, more productive, more dominant, and richer with opportunity than it actually is.

What is the reality? Phillips says that “Based on the criteria in place a quarter century ago, today’s U.S. unemployment rate is somewhere between 9 percent and 12 percent; the inflation rate is as high as 7 or even 10 percent; economic growth since the recession of 2001 has been mediocre, despite a huge surge in the wealth and incomes of the superrich, and we are falling back into recession.” (Note that Phillips was writing this in early 2008 just at the onset of the current recession when the ‘official’ unemployment rate was around 5% or half the current value. The real unemployment rate now is probably around 20%.)

Cooking the books to make things appear rosier is not done just for psychological reasons, to make people feel good about the state of the economy. While it does help the government politically if the public thinks that the economy is growing, inflation is low, and the government is living within its means, the main reason for cooking the books is that these numbers carry with them serious financial and budgetary implications.

Of them, the most important is the inflation rate. For one thing, social security benefits increases are tied to inflation rates. By making CPI rates seem low, the government can pay seniors less. Philips quotes economic analyst John Williams who says that “if you were to peel back changes that were made in the CPI going back to the Carter years, you’d see that the CPI would now be 3.5 percent to 4 percent higher”- meaning that, because of lost CPI increases, Social Security checks would be 70 percent greater than they currently are.” So by keeping CPI numbers artificially low, the government saves money (which it then spends on wars and tax cuts for the rich) at the expense of poor seniors who are being gradually squeezed into greater poverty but may not understand why that is happening since their benefit payouts are supposed to be rising along with with the cost of living.

But in addition to that, inflation rates are closely tied to interest rates. By keeping interest rates low, the government and business can borrow money cheaply. Borrowing is the only way that American government can finance its operating deficits, continue to fund its endless expensive wars, and maintain the oligarchic looting that has enriched a few while impoverishing the many. Low interest rates were also the basis of the housing bubble. If official inflation rates rise to their real value, the edifice comes crashing down. The collapse of the subprime market was an indicator of the underlying fear that the inflation rate, and along with it interest rates, was going to rise. As Phillips says:

Undermeasurement of inflation, in particular, hangs over our heads like a guillotine. To acknowledge it would send interest rates climbing, and thereby would endanger the viability of the massive buildup of public and private debt (from less than $11 trillion in 1987 to $49 trillion last year) that props up the American economy. Moreover, the rising cost of pensions, benefits, barrowing, and interest payments-all indexed or related to inflation-could join with the cost of financial bailouts to overwhelm the federal budget. As inflation and interest rates have been kept artificially suppressed, the United States has been indentured to its volatile financial sector, with its predilection for leverage and risky buccaneering. Arguably, the unraveling has already begun.

As Robert Hardaway, a professor at the University of Denver, pointed out last September, the subprime lending crisis “can be directly traced back to the [1983] BLS decision to exclude the price of housing from the CPI… With the illusion of low inflation inducing lenders to offer 6 percent loans, not only has speculation run rampant on the expectations of ever-rising home prices, but home buyers by the millions have been tricked into buying homes even though they only qualified for the teaser rates.”

The only way that the US government can continue on its reckless path is if other entities are willing to loan it money by buying its securities. While it can use the social security trust fund to do so (because it controls it), it needs other nations and their sovereign funds to also buy them. In this, the US currently benefits from the dollar still being the world’s reserve currency. If other countries start to hold back from buying US treasury bonds, the government might have to lure them with higher interest rates. That would make budget deficits even worse and rapidly create problems with the ability to repay.

So where are we headed? Paul Craig Roberts, a former editor of the Wall Street Journal and an assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury during the Reagan administration, says that the outlook is gloomy.

With the US bankrupting itself in wars, America’s largest creditor, China, has taken issue with America’s credit rating. The head of China’s largest credit rating agency declared: “The US is insolvent and faces bankruptcy as a pure debtor nation.”

On July 12, Niall Ferguson, an historian of empire, warned that the American empire could collapse suddenly from weakness brought on by its massive debts and that such a collapse could be closer than we think.

The sense of foreboding is widespread, spanning the ideological spectrum. David Stockman, budget director during the time that Ronald Reagan was indulging his supply-side fantasies, thinks the day of reckoning is nigh and that the present Republican leadership is captive to “the delusion that the economy will outgrow the deficit if plied with enough tax cuts… It is not surprising, then, that during the last bubble (from 2002 to 2006) the top 1 percent of Americans — paid mainly from the Wall Street casino — received two-thirds of the gain in national income, while the bottom 90 percent — mainly dependent on Main Street’s shrinking economy — got only 12 percent.”

Paul Krugman also sees disaster looming, saying, “I’m starting to have a sick feeling about prospects for American workers — but not, or not entirely, for the reasons you might think. Yes, growth is slowing, and the odds are that unemployment will rise, not fall, in the months ahead. That’s bad. But what’s worse is the growing evidence that our governing elite just doesn’t care — that a once-unthinkable level of economic distress is in the process of becoming the new normal.” (my italics)

With the oligarchy having its hands in the national till and looting it for their own benefit, I think collapse is inevitable. You can postpone the say of reckoning by cooking the books, but reality will eventually catch up with you. It is for all these reasons that I think the US is in serious trouble unless it changes course.

POST SCRIPT: The oligarchy’s solution to every problem

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Yet more fiddling of economic numbers

While the unemployment and CPI figures have been fiddled with to make them appear smaller (as I discussed in yesterday’s post), the number that measures the size of the economy called the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has also been fiddled with to make it appear larger than it is and thus appearing to show robust growth.

Kevin Philips, in an article titled NUMBERS RACKET: Why the economy is worse than we know in the May 2008 issue of Harper’s magazine describes the fiddles done with the GDP, which itself was adopted in 1991 when the previous measure of the economy the Gross National Product (GNP) became unpalatable due to rising international debt costs. One of the changes that made the GDP larger consisted of adding to it what is known as ‘imputed’ income to people’s actual income. Imputed income is what one is perceived to get because one is not directly paying for something. This includes “the imputed income from living in one’s own home, or the benefit one receives from a free checking account, or the value of employer-paid health- and life-insurance premiums.” In 2007, this phantom income added as much as 15% to the GDP.

One other major finagle occurred with Lyndon Johnson who was the first to create the ‘unified budget’ that added the surpluses in the social security account to the deficits in the government’s operating budget to make the latter seem smaller than they really were. That practice continues today. It was this disguise that enabled Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush and the Congresses of their time, aided and abetted by then Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan, to enact huge tax cuts for the rich.

The scam went like this. By creating a phony scare in the early 1980s (similar to the one we are seeing again now) that social security was going broke, they raised payroll taxes. Since there is a cap on the income that is subject to these taxes (in 2009 the cap was $106,800) most of the money in this trust fund comes from the poor and middle class, making it a regressive tax. This increase in payroll taxes resulted in huge surpluses in the social security current account that, because of the ‘unified’ budget, gave people the impression that there was plenty of money in the public treasury and hid the fact that the country was actually operating in the red. The government then rammed through tax cuts for the rich that used up this bogus ‘surplus’. So basically, the money that middle class and poor people were putting into their social security retirement trust fund was being used to provide huge tax cuts for the rich. This has to be one of the biggest swindles in American history. (See David Cay Johnson, Perfectly Legal: The covert system to rig our tax system to benefit the super rich – and cheat everybody else (2003), p. 123 for an excellent analysis on how this racket was perpetrated.)

This was a clear swindle knowingly perpetrated by the oligarchy. When it comes to fiddling the numbers on unemployment, CPI, and GDP, Phillips says, “Let me stipulate: the deception arose gradually, at no stage stemming from any concerted or cynical scheme. There was no grand conspiracy, just accumulating opportunisms. As we will see, the political blame for the slow, piecemeal distortion is bipartisan-both Democratic and Republican administrations had a hand in the abetting of political dishonesty, reckless debt, and a casino-like financial sector.” I am not as charitable as he in dismissing knowing cynical motives.

Phillips makes the correct point that the people who prepare government statistics are professionals who are careful, in their actual reports, to accurately explain what they are doing, at least in the footnotes, so that the reality is there for anyone willing to read carefully. But governments have realized that most reporters in the mainstream media are too lazy or stupid or ignorant or stressed for time to do this kind of careful reading and analysis and instead simply swallow the summaries, abstracts, and press releases put out by high-level government officials, thus allowing themselves to be manipulated. Reporters would do a much better job if they stopped trying to curry favor with high-level people and instead focused their efforts on reading official documents carefully and cultivating low and mid-level officials and whistle-blowers who can tell them exactly what is going on. The latter have less of an ideological or political ax to grind and thus are more likely to tell the unvarnished truth.

Public ignorance of the true state of the economy benefits the government. Phillips adds:

Readers should ask themselves how much angrier the electorate might be if the media, over the past five years, had been citing 8 percent unemployment (instead of 5 percent), 5 percent inflation (instead of 2 percent) and average annual growth in the I percent range (instead of the 3-4 percent range). We might ponder as well who profits from a low-growth U.S. economy hidden under statistical camouflage. Might it be Washington politicos and affluent elites, anxious to mislead voters, coddle the financial markers, and tamp down expensive cost-of-living increases for wages and pensions?

Phillips has to be given credit for warning us in early 2008, before the total collapse of the housing market, of the danger of mortgage debt. He was, however, wrong in predicting that official unemployment figures of 8 percent might make the electorate angry. We are now close to 10 percent with little signs of widespread outrage. This might change with time because the current recession has resulted in unemployment staying high for much longer than previous recessions. I am sure that all of us personally know people who have been laid off and are finding it hard to get work comparable to what they did before.

Next: What is gained by cooking the books?

POST SCRIPT: The Big Brother state

A truly disturbing post from Glenn Greenwald on the assault on our privacy by a government-private sector collaboration, done in order to circumvent laws. I will not excerpt it because you should really read the whole thing.

[UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald has posted an update that the claims of Project Vigilant are highly exaggerated and they may just be publicity seekers.]