As what seems today like a lifetime ago, I once lived in Wichita and had the pleasure to meet Dr. Tiller on several occasions. He was then and will always be remembered as a fine and compassionate person.
Headline writers will abbreviate a long medical career spent in service to others to two words: abortion doctor. That does a great disservice to the man, his family, his friends, his patients, his church and his community. He was far more than that.
To say the news of his murder was heartbreaking or gutwrenching doesn't come close to expressing the devastating feeling.
Political grandstanding in the coming days will overshadow the real legacy of a very kind man with a very big heart.
]]>October 23, 1989 - In Boston, MA, Charles Stuart blames "a black gunman with a raspy voice" for carjacking, robbing and shooting Stuart and his pregnant wife Carol. After his wife and baby son died -- she on the night of the incident and the infant 17 days later -- Stuart continued his lie that there was an unknown black assailant. Stuart concocted a description of the alleged assailant and on December 28, he picked Willie Bennett out of a lineup. Bennett had nothing to do with the crime. Stuart's brother Matthew confessed to being part of Stuart's insurance fraud scheme a few days after Bennett's arrest and implicated Stuart in the murders. Charles Stuart jumped to his death off the Tobin Bridge on January 4, 1990.
October 25, 1994 - Susan Smith tells the police in Union, SC that an unknown black man carjacked her and sped away with her two young sons, Michael and Alexander, still strapped in their car seats. After appearing tearfully begging for her children to be returned to her on every morning news show, notably saying, "your mama loves you..." and keeping the story going for nine days, she finally confessed that there was no black man, no carjacking at gunpoint, that she had actually rolled her car into a local lake. The apparent motive was to facilitate a relationship with wealthy local businessman who didn't want her children from a previous marriage.
April 23, 1994 -- Six Yonkers, NY police officers got into a fight over which of the officers would have to do the paperwork necessary to report a burning car. The fight spilled over from teh scene of the burning car to the precinct house. One of the officers was beaten so badly he had to go to the hospital for treatment of his injuries. To cover their tracks, the officers claimed that a tall black man in a blue jacket had assaulted the white officer. There was no black man in a blue jacket.
May 29, 2005 -- While on an unofficial school graduation trip to Aruba with 124 other seniors from her high school in Birmingham, Alabama in Natalee Holloway disappeared after a night of partying. She was last seen with Joran van der Sloot and brothers Deepak and Satish Kalpoe. As the investigation unfolded, van der Sloot and the Kalpoe brothers blamed, "a dark man in a dark shirt" similar to the uniforms worn by hotel security guards. The police arrested two dark-skinned Arubans former security guards apparently on the basis of an identification by van der Sloot and the Kalpoe brothers. The men were released and all charges dropped. Holloway has never been found. Van der Sloot remains the primary person of interest in the case.
April 26, 2005 - Jennifer Carol Wilbanks ran away from her fiance, looming nuptials and her home and family in Duluth, GA. A nationwide search for the 'runaway bride" ensued with tearful family and finace pleading for the safe return of Jennifer, who turned up days later in Albuquerque, NM claiming she had been kidnapped and sexually assaulted by a Hispanic man and his white woman accomplice. No such persons existed. One supposes had she been in a community with a larger black population she wouldn't have strayed from the script.
October 22, 2008 -- Ashley Todd, a campaign volunteer for Republican presidential candidate John McCain, told Pittsburgh, PA police investigators that a 6 foot 4 inch black man assaulted her as she was withdrawing money from an ATM. Todd claimed that when the man saw her McCain bumpersticker he knocked her to the ground, punching her and then carving a "B" for Barack into her cheek. Two days later, Todd admitted she carved the "B" into her own face, and that there was no black assailant.
May 29, 2009 - Bonnie Sweeten dials 911 to report she and her 9 year old daughter were carjacked and stuffed into the trunk of a black Cadillac driven by two black men. Several days later, she turns up in Disneyland. She was never carjacked or kidnapped or held against her will. There were no mystery black men who tried to boost her vehicle. She went to Disneyland. On someone else's dime. To the tune of between $300,000 and $700,000. Of money she had allegedly embezzled from a local Bucks County, PA charity.
These are just a few in the long list of fictitious black assailant stories where the accuser's lies are discovered early. We also know that there are hundreds of cases where the falsely accused black "assailant" ended up in prison, convicted on the basis so-called "eye witnesses" or by false testimony offered by the victim. Just this morning, catching a rerun of a Law & Order episode where the victim/perp blames his gunshot wound on the unknown black assailant to hide his actual involvement in the rest of the crime. (I know someone will bring up the infamous Tawana Brawley case. Fine. It's one example of the reverse "blame game.")
The question we must ask ourselves is: What does it say about our society that one group of people routinely finds it acceptable to blame persons of another race for their crimes? To get to the heart of question I'd like you to consider -- how we feel about one another -- we must set aside from this discussion the standard worn and tired arguments of which race commits more crime, and who is in prison and true inequities in our justice system, and return to something much more basic.
How do we really feel about each other? When, where, why and how did you learn that initial response -- when in trouble, when you want to get away with something -- blame the other race? How is this something that is so entrenched in being "an acceptable ruse" that it is not just the stuff of television scripts, but real life repeated again and again? Where did you learn that response? Is it racist behavior? Is that gut reaction counter-balanced by "white guilt?" What assumptions do you carry with you that you are unaware of? Have centuries and generations of racism become so second nature that you don't even realize you're doing it? How did we get here?
]]>
A comment made elsewhere in the ongoing "Southern" battle deserves further examination and refutation because it shows, in my opinion, a lack of understanding with regard to the Supreme Court -- something that we are seeing with the overheated Republican reaction to the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the high court. The comment suggests that "northern" justices were responsible and deserve derision for one decision and "southern" justices have been overlooked and deserve credit for another. (That is the argument boiled down to its essence.)
Recently, we've read a similarly structured argument about slavery: that "the north" started it. (FACT: Jamestown, Virginia was the first US colony to accept 20 slaves as payment for repair supplies from a slave ship damaged off the shores of Jamestown. That started this country's long and painful history with slavery.) [AUTHOR'S NOTE: See sidebar, below.]
Although some would point to the distinction of "legalizing" slavery came first in the North as justification for its continuance in the south. I would retort that in the game of "geographic who's more guilty," Virginia once again upped the ante by changing the initial "legalization" from what amounted to "indentured servitude" from which descendents of slaves could be born free, into enslavement into perpetuity, for not only the slaves but all of their descendents for always and forever. (Even those determined to have just one drop of Negro blood.)
But (if you want to go there) the point is not who started it, but rather, who ended it.
The eleven states that chose to forcibly secede from the nation (and had to be forcibly returned), in part at least to preserve their "heritage" of slavery, will always be remembered for that. Just as Arizona will always be remembered as the last state to approve the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday.
(This argument reminds me of pleading with my parents that I was not as culpable as a sibling when we were bickering over this or that, because he or she "started it." An argument that got no traction then, and gets none now.)
The variation on the "he started it" argument now comes with the suggestion that Plessy v. Ferguson (the "separate but equal case later overturned by Brown v. Topeka B.O.E., which is included in this variation on a theme) was decided by a majority of justices from "the north," and that Brown was decided by justices from the South.
Let me state that this represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the judicial system -- particularly the appellate court system -- in this country. Trial courts are the finders of fact. To the extent that geographic location might play a part in the outcome of a case, it would be at the trial level.
From US Courts.gov: "The federal courts often are called the guardians of the Constitution because their rulings protect rights and liberties guaranteed by it. Through fair and impartial judgments, the federal courts interpret and apply the law to resolve disputes. The courts do not make the laws. That is the responsibility of Congress. Nor do the courts have the power to enforce the laws. That is the role of the President and the many executive branch departments and agencies."
At the appellate level, particularly the federal appeals system, the facts of the case have already been determined, and the case is within the juridiction of the appeals court if the matter is a:
"State courts are the final arbiters of state laws and constitutions. Their interpretation of federal law or the U.S. Constitution may be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court may choose to hear or not to hear such cases." (Also from US Courts.gov.)
"For example, in the United States, both state and federal appellate courts are usually restricted to examining whether the court below made the correct legal determinations, rather than hearing direct evidence and determining what the facts of the case were. Furthermore, U.S. appellate courts are usually restricted to hearing appeals based on matters that were originally brought up before the trial court. Hence, such an appellate court will not consider an appellant's argument if it is based on a theory that is raised for the first time in the appeal." (From Wikipedia/)
From US Courts.gov: The Founding Fathers of the nation considered an independent federal judiciary essential to ensure fairness and equal justice for all citizens of the United States. The Constitution they drafted promotes judicial independence in two major ways. First, federal judges are appointed for life, and they can be removed from office only through impeachment and conviction by Congress of "Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."
Second, the Constitution provides that the compensation of federal judges "shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office," which means that neither the President nor Congress can reduce the salary of a federal judge. These two protections help an independent judiciary to decide cases free from popular passions and political influence."
So the decisions handed down by the appellate courts, as well as the Supreme Court, are not dictated by the home state of the judges or justices presiding. That is because the judges and justices are responsible for the interpretation of a range of laws and at the US Circuit Court of Appeals, each of the 13 districts may hear cases from a number of states.
Now, could we, by some stretch of the imagination arrive at the conclusion that "home state" influence plays a part in the role of impartial judgement of the constitutionality of a ruling or (without being circumlogical) equal protection under the law? No. Although judges and justices on both the federal appeals bench and the Supreme Court may come from various geographic locations, and their alliances may morph into stranger configurations than an amoeba, the fact that they are limited in the scope of what may be considered to render a decision prevents this geographic alignment.
In short, we cannot come to some conclusion that our country's tawdry racist past is the fault of one region over another. We can argue -- and history supports -- that the eleven states which opted to secede from the union did come from one section of the country. We can argue that the de jure segregation which plagued this nation for the century after Emancipation was centered in one region of the country. We can categorically state that although de facto segregation was pervasive throughout this country, north and south, its most despicable displays were in one particular region of the country.
This is not a question of who started it. It continues to be a question of who ends it. And when.
SIDEBAR
From the Washington Post, by Courtland Millow, September 6, 2006:
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/05/AR2006090501288.html)
"There came . . . a Dutch man-of-warre that sold us 20 negars."
-- from the diary of John Rolfe, a tobacco farmer in
Jamestown, Va., in 1619
And so began slavery in America -- with the first 20 Africans being referred to with a word that retains its sting some 400 years and 30 million African Americans later.
As Jamestown begins a commemoration of its founding in 1607, this less-than-cheery subject poses a special challenge for party planners. Jamestown is distinguished as the first permanent English settlement in what would become the United States; but it was also the first to achieve what historian Paul Johnson called "self-sufficiency through the sweat and pain of an enslaved race." [...]
The museum exhibit, on the other hand, may not offer such an easy out. A group of transatlantic researchers has finally put a face on those anonymous 20. And as more is learned about how their stories began, there will be no escaping the pain of their tragic end. The slaves were from Angola, in Southwest Africa. Their homelands were the kingdoms of Ndongo and Kongo, regions of modern-day Angola and coastal areas of Congo. They were entrepreneurs, a literate and morally upright people who held family in the highest regard. They were renowned for preparing their children for adulthood -- and the tradition persisted even after the slave ships began to arrive.
Thanks to the researchers, what had been a central feature of slavery -- the dehumanization of the black slave -- has finally been personalized for the first of the millions who would follow.
]]>Desidero's post -- judging from its opening sentence -- seeks to encourage a more intelligent discourse about the South and civility and the potential for the Democratic party to regain a foothold in the area of the country south of the Mason-Dixon line. Desidero states categorically that those who take issue with "the South" have long-standing historical ignorance and consider southerners "traitorous, genocidal freaks." Desidero suggests it's hard to sustain much less begin a conversation when one's heritage and breeding is so attacked.
That much I will grant Desidero: wild accusations are not good for starting a conversation.
Neither is relitigating the Civil War for the umpteenth time. The ending remains the same: the south loses and is returned to the fold. But Desidero takes us there, so let us see if we can return to a real discussion of why certain parts of America -- or more specifically -- certain Americans take issue with certain aspects of "southern" history and certain "southerners."
]]> Desidero makes the critical mistake of painting all of us on the "other" side with a very broad brush. (Granted, we, at times, have painted southerners with that same wide swath of critique. Two wrongs, however, do not make a right.)Although I hestitate to do so, let's take Desidero's post point by point -- so at least complaints of taking statements out of context will be minimized.) Desidero's original is in italics.
If you imagine the South as Chechnya and the North as Russia, or more germane, the North continuing the British' traditional repression of the South's rural Scottish and Irish, perhaps you can expand your worldview to acknowledge that those who think they're on a mission from God are often the most blinded and misguided and cruelest, and engender the least respect.
The "Old South" and even the "New South" are not Chechnya repressed by Russia (or the Soviet Union), nor were/are they Scotland or Ireland repressed by the British. But those who most frequently invoke "God" as their "wingman" or "mighty and righteous warrior" tend to be of the Southern persuasion.
Item #1 from recent blog - "The South had horrible slavery, so everything Sherman did was justified." Okay. How exactly do you justify the fire bombing of Dresden? Obviously the Germans were in the moral wrong, so we could do anything we wanted to its citizens, correct? The Algerians tried to secede from France - and lost something like 1.5 million for their "treason", considering Algeria was an integral part of France. Hussein at one time invaded Kuwait and had weapons of mass destruction, so obviously we were justified in invading Iraq and having Hussein hanged. I love it when GOP and Democrat talking points segue so easily!!!
If we're speaking of Chechnya and Scotland and Ireland, as part of our expanded worldview, why bring Dresden and World War II into it? (Classic misdirection.) The original poster Desidero quotes conflates the ravages of slavery with Sherman's march through the south and the "Burning of Atlanta." Desidero, seeking to escalate the discussion overreaches. Atlanta, it seems, was burned by the men who had been assigned to protect it.
From Wikipedia: "On September 1, 1864, Confederate General John Bell Hood evacuated Atlanta, after a four-month siege mounted by Union General William Sherman and ordered all public buildings and possible Union assets destroyed. " (Emphasis mine.)
With regard to Dresden, a city I have toured, this is where history has us today (and worthy of its own discussion and comparison not to Atlanta, but Beirut or Baghdad, perhaps): "
The Bombing of Dresden by the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and United States Army Air Force (USAAF) between 13 February and 15 February 1945, twelve weeks before the surrender of the Armed Forces (Wehrmacht) of Nazi Germany, remains one of the most controversial Allied actions of the Second World War. In four raids, 1,300 heavy bombers dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city, the baroque capital of the German state of Saxony. The resulting firestorm destroyed 13 square miles (34 km2) of the city centre.[2] Estimates of civilian casualties vary greatly, but recent publications place the figure between 24,000 and 40,000.[3]"
We can argue over whether the bombing of Dresden was justified, was or was not a war crime. But Dresden and Atlanta would only be comparable if Hitler had turned his Blitzkrieg on his own city.
Desidero also includes a gross misstatement: "Algeria was an integral part of France." No, Algeria was (and remains) an integral part of ALGERIA. The French had colonized Algeria in the same way the British colonized India, the Spanish colonized the Philippines and the Portugese colonized Brazil. (The remainder of the paragraph is a bundle of nonsense not worth untangling.) It appears that it is the writer's and not the reader's worldview which must be expanded.
"Item #2: I don't know the figures, but I imagine that most Southerners accept slavery as the major issue for the Civil War - just not always the *ONLY* one. Which seems to be beyond the pale for some - that instead the South should grovel, accept slavery as the only reason, acknowledge that they're evil and genetically stupid, and continue in prostration until Jesus returns or Universal Health Care, whichever comes second. It should be noted that it was the northern states that started this practice in the first place."
Desidero seeks to discuss the reasons for the Civil War, but succeeds in some self-flagellation about being genetically stupid, Jesus and Universal Healthcare. None of which advances the original thesis of "southern hatred." And once again, history fails to support Desidero's assertion that "the north" started it. We can dispel that "misstatement" with one sentence from the online resource known as Wikipedia: "Slavery in the United States began soon after English colonists first settled in Virginia in 1607 and lasted as a legal institution until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1865."
I'm giving myself a headache wading through the next paragraph, so for the sake of my own sanity, let's just skip it. (Already, we've seen Desidero's grasp of the historical facts are slim.) Next he mentions something about "lynching."
#4 Using the higher Tuskeegee estimates on black repression (about 50% over other ones), some 5000 blacks and 2000 whites were lynched over 70 years, with perhaps 20% outside of the South.
Here are the numbers from Wikipedia for a very specific timeframe: "Between 1882 and 1968 the Tuskegee Institute recorded 3,437 lynchings of African Americans and 1,293 lynchings of whites." (Emphasis mine.) We must remember however, that we have established that slavery started in this country in 1607 and thus these numbers do not reflect the whole 361 years marking slavery and Jim Crow laws. These numbers do not reflect the number of persons lynched whose deaths were not recorded because like cattle or horses or chickens or mules, they were considered private property to be used and disposed of as one desired. The historical record fails Desidero once more.
Desidero continues with more thrashing about Lincoln, Obama, the Emancipation Proclamation and freaks. But never do we really get to the heart of the matter: why do some people still have strong, angry feelings about "the south" and are those feelings justified?
Desidero -- if I read the post accurately and since it is an oozing mishmash of conflicting ideas, I sincerely doubt that I did so completely -- suggests that the south just wanted to secede from the union peaceably, that Lincoln had other motives for freeing blacks and something about George Bush.
But here are the (Wikipedia) facts: "The importation of African slaves was banned in the British colonies in 1807, and in the United States in 1808. In the British West Indies, slavery was abolished in 1833 and in the French possessions 15 years later."
But let us be clear: there is a difference between abolishing slavery and abolishing the trade or sale of slaves.
[Continuing from Wikipedia ...]
The last form of enforced servitude of adults (villeinage) had disappeared in Britain with the beginning of the seventeenth century. But by the eighteenth century, African and Indian and East Asian slaves began to be brought into London and Edinburgh as personal servants.[2] They were not bought or sold, and their legal status was unclear until 1772, when the case of a runaway slave named James Somersett forced a legal decision. The owner, Charles Steuart, had attempted to abduct him and send him to Jamaica to work on the sugar plantations. While in London, Somersett had been baptised and his godparents issued a writ of habeas corpus. As a result Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of the Court of the King's Bench, had to judge whether the abduction was legal or not under English Common Law as there was no legislation for slavery in England.
In his judgment of 22 June 1772, Mansfield declared: "Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from a decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged." Although the exact legal implications of the judgement are actually unclear when analysed by lawyers, it was generally taken at the time to have decided that the condition of slavery did not exist under English law in England itself. [...] It also laid down the principle that slavery contracted in other jurisdictions (such as the American colonies) could not be enforced in England.[3]
After reading of the Somersett case, an African slave in Scotland, Joseph Knight, left his master, John Wedderburn. A similar case to Steuart's was brought by Wedderburn in 1776, with the same result: chattel slavery was ruled not to exist under the law of Scotland. Nonetheless, there were native-born Scottish serfs until 1799, when coal miners previously kept in serfdom gained emancipation. [...]
Despite the disappearance of slavery in Great Britain, slavery was a way of life in the southern colonies of America and the West Indian colonies of the British Empire.
By 1783, an anti-slavery movement was beginning among the British public. [...] The African Association also had close ties with William Wilberforce, perhaps the most important political figure in the battle for abolition in the British Empire.
Black people played an important part in the movement for abolition. In Britain, Olaudah Equiano, whose autobiography was published in nine editions in his lifetime, campaigned tirelessly against the slave trade.
Now, do pay attention to the dates included in the passages above. And remember that during this time, although communication was not instant, as it is today, and travel was arduous although not impossible, American notables such as Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams traveled to England and France and lived there. Jefferson lived in France from 1785 to 1789. France first abolished slavery in 1794 and Haiti became the first former African slave colony to revolt and gain its freedom in 1804. So the seeds of abolition were taking root, and taking root in this hemisphere not far off the tip of Florida.
But that does not really address "southern hate." It merely raises the question of why, with the tide turning against the trafficking and holding in bondage humans, why did it take the US -- particularly the eleven southern states -- so long to find an alternative to its "labor shortage?"
And when it comes to southern hate, I have yet to hear anyone explain why those white southerners pursued the Black Codes and Jim Crow laws -- a policy that was so clearly outside their own self interests.
Jim Crow laws are routinely described in terms of enforcing racial segregation. But in the south struggling to recover from the devastation of civil war, wouldn't it have made more sense for southerners to work with their former employees -- er, slaves -- to rebuild their economy?
In simplest terms, wasn't Jim Crow (like the cries of reverse discrimination today) a kind of "sore loser shoots self in own foot" scenario? Screwing themselves and extending the recovery from war and its attendant poverty to pursue misguided white superiority? And to that end, the relentless violence against blacks (who had the audacity to get themselves freed) just proof of the south's dependence on slavery and the only issue for secession and civil war? It was not "states' rights," but "slavery now, slavery forever."
I am wandering way off the well-trod path, lost in the woods trying to chase the rabbit Desidero let loose. Let me find a way home by making this personal:
I don't "hate" southerners nor the south. But I do find this constant wallowing in the might-have-beens of "if only we had won the war of northern aggression," tiresome. I don't hate southerners any more than southerners hate Yankees. But I do hate people who having lost the war -- decisively, not on points, mind you -- calculated another way to take out their hostilities. Not against the northerners who kicked their asses, but against the people who birthed their snot-nosed children, cooked their meals, washed their nasty BVDs, cleaned their stained sheets, planted their damn crops, and harvested the same, and built their beloved, but motherfucking antebellum mansions and got shit in return. And I hate the southerners who 144 years later haven't gotten over the fact that they lost.
Desidero's orignal post can be found at: http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/desidero/2009/05/southern-hatred-and-ignorance.php
]]>Here are a few of the iconic, defining sentences that come to mind for assorted politicians. Add your own, please! Especially for the members of the Bush administration.
Bill Clinton: "It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is."
Don Rumsfeld: "We have known knowns, unknown knowns, known unknowns..." (or however the hell it goes.)
Rudy Giuliani: "(Subject) (Verb) 9-11." (Joe Biden actually defined Giuliani for us)
Ronald Reagan: "I paid for this microphone!"
Spiro T. Agnew: "...the nattering nabobs of negativitism."
Lyndon Johnson: "My fellow Americans..."
John F. Kennedy: "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for yoru country."
Franklin D. Roosevelt: "The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself."
George C. Wallace: "Segregation now, segregation forever."
You get the idea... add your favorites. Tag the Bush administration.
]]>
We have never met. Our paths highly likely would never cross. Though we may be proximate in age, and share the same gender, we are two very different women. I am not a Republican and you are not a Democrat. But with Father's Day approaching, as one daughter to another, I must say, on behalf of all the fathers who are not here because of your father, it is time for you stop promoting the myth that your father kept us safe, and that it was okay for him to sanction torture and wage an unnecessary war to do it.
My father served his country in uniform during times of war and times of peace. He grew up in times of economic hardship and racial segregation, but lived through to see prosperity and integration. Your father -- by his own words -- sought deferment from military service not just once, but five separate times because he had "better things to do." My father had better things to do also. Like raise his own family, love his wife, care for the mother and aunts and uncle that raised him.
He had better things to do like pursue a degree in pharmacy. But he set that aside to serve his country. He had better things to do like many young men of college age who would rather sit on the quad and watch the girls go by, their pleated plaid skirts swishing to and fro, their saddle shoes and bobby sox scuffling leaves in the crisp fall air. That pastime beats the hell out of basic training in the sweltering heat of sprawling air base in southern Texas town with segregated black men of his unit. Yes, my dad had better things to do, but he put them aside for his country. Your father didn't.
In 1962 and 1963, for example, while my father was leaving home at 3 and 4 o'clock in the morning to strap himself into a B-52 and take off for points classified, leaving behind his wife and 5 young children, you father was arrested twice for driving while intoxicated. 1966, when your mom was 10 weeks pregnant with you or your sister, you dad applied for the last of his "hardship" deferments. In contrast, my father and my family endured the hardship of moving to one more foreign country, one more basing housing unit, one more military school system, and one more classified job assignment.
Now, you might argue that your dad worked for presidents and that should count for something. I will grant you that. Your father interned in the Nixon administration, served in Congress where he found a way to be on the wrong side of history numerous times, voting against the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr national holiday, voting to sustain President Reagan's veto of the bill to impose economic sanctions against South Africa for its continuation of apartheid. Your father -- surprising for one who went to such great lengths to avoid military service -- was the architect of three sizable wars: Gulf War I, the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq.
Your father used his office to encourage -- some would say "coerce" -- the nation's intelligence agencies to produce and promote and promulgate false intelligence about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, a connection between Saddam Hussein (whose ascension to power your father at one point supported) and Osama Bin Laden. Your father encouraged those same intelligence agencies to swoop in and take men (and apparently women, too) to secret destinations in foreign countries where he knew torture was a common practice and would be used without restraint on people.
That fomenting and prosecuting another war in Iraq was on your father's agenda from well before George W. Bush took office is common knowledge. He was not happy with the ending of the first war. It has been clear that his objective was the Iraqi oilfields and their revenue for his one-time company, Halliburton.
But Liz, this is the sticking point: your defense of your father for supposedly keeping the country safe after September 11, 2001 forces us to question just exactly what he was doing to keep the country safe before September 11, 2001. Your outsized defense of your father for his post 9/11 behaviors -- outing a CIA agent, manufacturing lies about weapons of mass destruction (or is that weapons of mass destruction development systems?) or whatever other obfuscation or construction he chooses -- misses the point on a host of issues, but most importantly misses on torture.
The laws banning the use of torture do not contain a qualifier -- "we got good information!" The laws are direct: no torture. Your father used torture to cover his tracks. He wanted a war in Iraq. He used torture on at least one person 189 times to try to make a link between Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. He forced otherwise law abiding US citizens to torture other humans so Dick Cheney's war was more palatable. He used intelligent men and women as foils to concoct lies about yellowcake uranium and fuel rods, chemical weapons and dirty bombs. He used torture to "prove" those lies.
Liz Cheney, I know you must love your father with all your heart. Otherwise, you would not be making such a strenuous argument for him. Both of you point to the more than 3000 people who died on 9/11. But neither of you are willing to answer for the more than 4500 men and women killed by an unnecessary war -- your father's war -- in Iraq. A war based, let me repeat, on the lies that Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were colluding together pre- and post- 9/11, the lies that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction ready to be used on us or Israel or elsewhere. Lies that he wanted "evidence" of, "proof" that came through torture.
So confident is your father in his lies that he promotes Iran as his next war of choice. Thank goodness -- no, I thank God -- he is no longer in office to wage that war.
Liz, whatever you want to tell your father in comfort of your own homes, at celebratory meals around the family table, at picnics and barbecues in your friends' backyards, you are free to say. But do not use the nation's airwaves and mass media to promote these lies anymore.
It is painfully unfair to the daughters and the sons whose fathers died fighting Dick Cheney's personal war. No amount of torture will make them say otherwise.
]]>If you watched Hardball with Chris Matthews over the last couple of days, you might have heard something about about the "New Haven Firefighters" reverse discrimination case. Unfortunately, if you have depended on the media coverage of the case, you're not getting the full story.
Over the last couple of days, Matthews and Pat Buchanan have engaged in heated, and very ill-informed "discussion" of the firefighters' case. Joan Walsh of Salon.com was the flak target day one. Today, Matthews hosted Frank Ricci and his attorney Karen Torre to present the plaintiffs side. and John Payton of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which filed an "amicus curiae" (friend of the court") brief on behalf of the City of New Haven.
Perhaps this essay will give you to details you need to understand the case.
Bear in mind the City of New Haven won a summary judgement on all counts. In other words, the firefighters case was thrown out of court. It never made it to trial. Neither the district court judge nor the appellate court found anything compelling enough in the lawsuit that needed to go before a jury.
This case has been described as the "perfect storm" of discrimination law.
While most of the coverage has centered on Firefighter Frank Ricci -- the dyslexic fireman who studied hard, who paid $1000 for a friend to turn his textbooks into audio books, who ranked 6th on his exam -- as compelling a story as his is -- he is not the center of the story.
]]>The New Haven Fire Department, like many around the country, uses both entry-level and promotional testing to help fill their ranks. Entry-level testing is used to screen potential employees and typically measures general knowledge, math skills, reading and writing skills, and where necessary specific job knowledge. For example, a department store might test cashiers on their ability to make change (math skills), read and follow directions.
Promotional testing measures acquired job skills and knoweldge of information necessary for future performance. The military uses promotional testing to acquire a pool of candidates for promotion. Promotional testing might require the test-taker to demonstrate knowledge of regulations and rules, the proper application of those rules, policies and procedures.
In 2003, the City of New Haven's Fire Department conducted promotional testing for Lieutenants and Captains. At issue before the Supreme Court is a reverse discrimination case brought by 17 men who claim the City discriminated against them (disparate treatment) by throwing out the results of a test the City deemed to have a "disparate impact" on the minorities -- black and Hispanic -- who took the exams. Although we do not have the figures for women who took the test, no women have joined the plaintiffs, suggesting that if any women took the exam none of them passed. None of the named plaintiffs are women.
"Under the contract between the City and the New Haven firefighters' union," the district court wrote, "the written exam result counted for 60% of an applicant's score and the oral exam for 40%. Those with a total score above 70% on the exam would pass. Certified promotional lists remain valid for two years. Forty-one applicants took the Captain exam, of whom 25 were white, 8 black, and 8 Hispanic. Twenty-two of those applicants passed, of whom 16 were white, 3 black, and 3 Hispanic. (Hispanics ranked 7, 8 and 13; blacks ranked 16, 19 and 22.) Given that there were 7 Captain vacancies in the department when the tests were administered, and that the "Rule of Three" in the City Charter mandates that a civil service position be filled from among the three individuals with the highest scores on the exam, it appeared at that time that no blacks and at most two Hispanics would be eligible for promotion, as the top 9 scorers included 7 whites and 2 Hispanics."
"Seventy-seven applicants took the Lieutenant exam, of whom 43 were white, 19 black, and 15 Hispanic. Thirty-four passed, of whom 25 were white, 6 black and 3 Hispanic. There were 8 vacancies, but because all of the top 10 scorers were white, it appeared that no blacks or Hispanics would be promoted. Hispanics ranked 27, 28 and 31; blacks ranked 14, 15, 16,20, 22, and 24."
Between January and March 2004 the New Haven Civil Service Board held five hearings on the issue of whether to certify the test results.
The most important thing to remember is that passing the test is no guarantee of promotion. For every job opening, the City's "Rule of Three" mandates that the top three scorers of the candidates on the promotion list are considered for any opening. Thus it is possible for the top scorer on a given test to not be promoted. Passing the test does not equal automatic promotion.
According to the district court ruling, "During the Civil Service Board hearings, the tests results were not released by name, and therefore none of the firefighters knew where they had placed. The only information provided to the CSB and the public, including plaintiffs, was the scores by race and gender. Nonetheless, several firefighters, although they did not know where they had placed, spoke in favor of certifying the results."
New Haven contracted with a test development firm, I/O Solutions, to create an entry-level test and the promotional tests for the fire department. I/O had created the entry exams before, with apparently no problems. However in 2003, this was the first time I/O had won the request for proposal to create the promotional tests. I/O followed the RFP in the development of the tests, but according to the decision from the Federal District court, there were some issues regarding the methodology of the test design which came to light when the completed test was delivered to the city. However, I/O is not on trial here.
The City of New Haven is mandated -- as are most employers with more than 15 employees -- to follow the law according to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, specifically Title VII. The two critical prongs of Title VII require the city to refrain from discriminating against its employees by means of disparate treatment and disparate impact.
Disparate treatment means that there is a deliberate act or actions which create a discriminatory workplace. If a company purposefully constructs a means or methodology to bar minorities or others included the Act's protected classes (and that includes women, veterans, ethnic groups or nationalities, religious affiliation for example) that is disparate treatment. If the City were to make minorities take a promotional exam different or unique from the one required of its majority employees, that would be disparate treatment. If the City required one group to perform a certain set of tests or measures and score at one level, but not require another group to have to perform the same tests or measures, or scored those tests on a different scale, that is disparate treatment. If the City allows a hostile work environment to exist for one group where the intention is to drive them out of the place of employment, that is disparate treatment.
Disparate impact means that although a workplace may have neutral standards or policies in place, the unintended result is that they discriminate or impact one group more than others. For example, if a workplace has a height requirement of 5'8" for a particular job, that require may have disparate impact on women, as fewer women would be able to meet the height requirement. Disparate impact is designed to combat neutral, but discriminatory practices.
Disparate impact may also occur if an employer uses a written test which results in fewer minorities passing than four-fifths (or 80%) of the rate of the highest scoring group who pass the test.
The court wrote, "Here, the evidence shows that on the 2003 Lieutenant's exam the pass rate for whites was 60.5%, for African-Americans 31.6% and Hispanics 20%. The four-fifths score would be 48%. In other words, African-Americans had a pass rate that was about half the pass rate for Caucasians, yielding an adverse impact ratio ("AIR") of 0.59, significantly below the AIR of 0.80 that is presumed to not evidence adverse impact under the EEOC Guidelines. While the parties dispute the Captain's exam pass rate for African-Americans and Hispanics (see supra note 7), the pass rate for Caucasians was 88%, which is more than double that of minorities and thus by either party's statistic an AIR far below the four-fifths guideline is yielded. However, it is also undisputed that, because of the Rule of Three, the pass rate is not synonymous with the promotion rate, because only the top three scorers may be considered for each vacant position. Thus, the rank of the minority applicants is also a key factor. In 2003, given the number of vacancies, it appeared that at most two Hispanics and no African-Americans would have the opportunity to be promoted to Captain, and no minorities would have the opportunity to be promoted to Lieutenant."
In 1996 and 1999, New Haven gave promotional exams for Lieutenant and Captain to white, black and Hispanic firefighters. This sequence of tests was produced by a different vendor than I/O Solutions. Although those tests did not meet the EEOC's four-fifths rule, the test results of the minorities who took the test were distributed throughout the results of all the test takers -- in other words, they were not clustered at the bottom of the results, and minorities would be respresented in the promotional pool. The EEOC four-fifths rule results for the 2003 test were also well below the results from the promotional tests in 1999 and 1996.
The City's Corporation Counsel upon reviewing the results found New Haven in a no-win situation: certifying the 2003 test results left them vulnerable to a "disparate impact by examination" discrimination claim, or fight the "reverse discrimination" disparate treatment claim. The question is which takes precedence?
Reading the EEOC guidelines -- along with the findings of both the federal district court and the appellate court -- suggest New Haven's first responsibility was to do no harm by not certifying the test results and compounding the disparate impact. The lower court denied every claim of the plaintiffs: there was no disparate treatment because no one's test was certified, no one received a promotion based on either of test, the city was acting within the federal law and guidelines to not certify the test, the plaintiff's claim of "political pressure" was unfounded, the plaintiff's claim that the city was pretexting -- "making up" -- reasons not certifiy the test were unfounded, the claim for punitive damages denied. The appellate court agreed with the district court.
Frank Ricci studied hard for his exam and to do it in spite of his dyslexia. However, making him the emotional center of this case runs counter to the basic fact that according to the EEOC rules and guidelines, and federal law, the test he was administered was flawed. It would be wrong to suggest that the other test taker did not study as hard as Ricci. There is no evidence of that. One cannot draw the conclusion that the other test takers were not as smart as Ricci or the 17 who joined the lawsuit.
Ricci and the other claim that because of their test performance, and because New Haven threw out those tests, they were denied promotions. The district court disagreed: "
Plaintiffs' analogy is faulty because performing well on the exam does not create an entitlement to promotion, whereas working entitles an employee to be paid. Second, a presumptively flawed test result may not be a proper measure for determining whether anyone should be promoted."That is the situation that Ricci and his fellow plaintiffs find themselves in. He might have passed this test only because it was flawed and he wasn't the 6th most "best and brightest" after all. He was never guaranteed a promotion, just entrance into the promotion pool of considerees if he passed a certifiable test.
As for Ricci claim of "intentional infliction of emotional distress," well one could ask if a Captain or Lieutenant who gets emotionally distressed over a test is management caliber in the first place, but I won't. Question withdrawn. Here is what the court said: "Having granted defendants summary judgment on all of plaintiffs' federal claims, the Court declines pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1367(c) to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over plaintiffs' state law claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress."
As for the appellate court (which includes Judge Sonia Sotomayor), they were short and sweet. Here, in its entirety is their ruling:
PER CURIAM:
We withdraw our Summary Order of February 15, 2008. Ricci v. DeStefano, 2008 U.S.App. LEXIS 3293, 2008 WL 410436 (2d Cir. Feb. 15, 2008).
Plaintiffs appeal from a judgment of the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut (Arterton, J.) granting the defendants' motion for summary judgment on all counts.
We affirm, for the reasons stated in the thorough, thoughtful, and well-reasoned opinion of the court below. Ricci v. DeStefano, 2006 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 73277, 2006 WL 2828419 (D. Conn., Sept. 28, 2006). In this case, the Civil Service Board found itself in the unfortunate position of having no good alternatives. We are not unsympathetic to the plaintiffs' expression of frustration. Mr. Ricci, for example, who is dyslexic, made intensive efforts that appear to have resulted in his scoring highly on one of the exams, only to have it invalidated. But it simply does not follow that he has a viable Title VII claim. To the contrary, because the Board, in refusing to validate the exams, was simply trying to fulfill its obligations under Title VII when confronted with test results that had a disproportionate racial impact, its actions were protected.
CONCLUSION
The judgment of the district court is AFFIRMED.
The Supreme Court should do the same as the two lower courts. New Haven did not discriminate against Ricci or the other plaintiffs, and were obligated to not certify what is by federal standards two flawed examinations. No discrimination is not reverse discrimination.
]]>Empathy means "activist judge." Real-world experience means "legislating from the bench." Respect the Constitution means "you're not a 'strict constructionist.' ("Strict constructionist" as far as I can tell means "you need to believe in the parts of the Constitution I believe in and that's the part that protects my rights and not yours. In other words, working for civil rights and equality for all is not strict construction. Amending the Constitution to prevent gay marriage is strict construction. The "founding fathers" were against gay marriage, you know. I read it in the Strict Constructionist's Constitution.)
]]>
In fact, it took Valerie Jarrett, senior White House advisor to reel in Rachel just a bit. (But not for long, because she swam back to the deeper end of the pool before the end of her show, with a tow from Prof. Jonathan Turley.)
]]> It is the Jake Tapper "torture" question: Did the previous administration commit a crime by sanctioning torture.Obama carefully -- and wisely -- did not answer that question directly. Last week, you all will recall, you were saying the President (specifically, his administration, more specifically Attorney General Eric Holder) had to pursue criminal investigations because the "torture memos" revealed that torture (or "torture") had been committed. Mr. Holder is starting that process.
The President said the "Bush torture program," (using Maddow's language) yielded some information. But please note: the President did not say it yielded "good" information or "factual information" or "valuable" information. The "information" in question went uncharacterized.
The President used the phrase "short cut," as in, "some governments have used torture as a 'shortcut.'" He did not say he supported that idea. He said (essentially) these governments, instead of doing what is right, took a short cut -- bypassing legal means to interrogate -- to jump to using torture because it is an easy short cut. He did not say taking that short cut was okay. In fact, the whole point of the Winston Churchill anecdote was to illustrate that taking that short cut is not what everyone does -- even in far more dire circumstances than 9/11, circumstances like a world war.
With regard to saying the prior administration sanctioned torture, it is akin to claiming that a person is "guilty" before he has been charged with the crime. And if the person pointing the finger of guilt is the head of the country, one can make a reasoned argument about the prejudicial nature of the claim. A cooler head would let the Justice Department determine the crime, identify the responsible parties and charge them, try them (with benefit of legal counsel to make an effective defense) and allow a jury or judge to determine their guilt or innocence.
And finally, there is one other part of this sticky wicket we find ourselves holding: Do not forget the gyrations the Bush administration went through to create a new "class" of prisoner, er, detainee. These enemy combatants we were told, were specifically NOT prisoners of war. (That, they said, would make them subject to --- wait for it -- the Geneva Conventions.) These "enemy combatants" wore no uniforms, were not beholding to any country, were not fighting as part of a recognized standing army. They were separate "rogue, evil-doers." Since they did not take up arms to fight on behalf of a country, they were not entitled to the protections accorded to war prisoners (even though we were fighting the "Global War on Terror.") They could be yanked off the battlefield, taken to who knows where, super-secretly, held indefinitely, without charges being brought, tried in "war tribunals without benefit of counsel.
That is what AG Holder has to wade through. What if... what if, in spite of all their other F***-Ups, the Bush administration came up -- invented, found, concocted -- some crazy-ass loophole that provides those war criminals with legal cover?
Just my take...
]]>16 months "surveyed." From January 2008 to April 2009
Five different sections, excluding "news" pages written by TPM staff and contributors to "All Readers' Posts"
Persons in the following sections are "invited" to participate.
Twenty-one (21) total posts by
Eight (8) different writers, including
One (1) "member" of the Coffee House "regulars" from May 14 to July 14, 2008
]]> Four of the five sections, which break down as follows:Special Guests section
:Kia Franklin
Glenn Loury:
Ta-Nehisi Coates:
Both Mr. Loury's and Mr. Coates' posts were made in the wake of Barack Obama's speech on race in America.
Special Features section:
Peniel Joseph:
Orlando Patterson:
Olati Johnson:
"Integration's Future," Jan 20, 2009
These posts were part of the Obama inaugural special section
Table for One section: 0 posts by 0 authors for as far back as the archive went
Coffee House Regulars
section: Seven (7) posts by 1 authorTa-Nehisi Coates: (cross posting from his regular blog)
TPM Book Club
-- Five (5) posts by 3 authorsMia Carter:
A Wilkins:
Peniel Joseph:
Books featured in the TPM Book Club listed in the archive written by black authors, 0
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When I commented on the lack of diversity and the need for more black voices here at TPM -- especially in sections like the Book Club and the "regulars," I had not done a hard count of authors and posts. I had a notion, bolstered by what I thought was a pattern, but not put to any test. I was reacting based on "feel" and not fully on fact. And I was disappointed that my comments when responded to by TPM staff were not taken as seriously as I hoped. Part of the purpose of this post is to back up my claim with the numbers. Numbers. they say, don't lie. (Unless you're talking about statistics and then there are "lies, damn lies, and statistics.") I'm just talking numbers.
So today, I decided to satisfy my curiosity. I guess one says her "feelings" were confirmed.
But the good news. In the "All Readers' Posts" section, we have to be proud of ourselves for creating a wildly diverse community (and after the outpouring of concern and help for DickDay and his ailing computerm community is the right word!). Our passion for politics -- okay, the need to either have our views confirmed or the need to argue with strangers -- has brought us together. We post when we feel the urge, comment, commiserate, conglomerate and at time conflagrate. We make everyone feel welcome (okay, most of the time.) But new faces of all hues come, hang out, stay, go and return.
The "All Readers'" section of TPM is hands down my favorite part. It's the part I look over first. It's the part I linger over longest. It's the part that makes me laugh out loud. It makes me fume. It makes me pound the keyboard, talk to my computer. It fries my brain. I read your stuff even if we are sworn mortal "cyber-enemies." Heck, I read the spam.
The rest of TPM -- judging by the numbers -- is a bit of a different story. That has to change. and not with just more black writers. I didn't do a tally for other ethnicities, but it did stand out that I didn't see any Latino/a authors or issues, or Native Americans and just a few (less than five?) Asians. Something is terribly wrong with that in country that's supposed to be "post-," you know, "post-racial," "post-ethnic," et cetera.We are all affected by the economy, by war, by the lack of healthcare, by our foreign policy, by education and other domestic policy issues. To not have a wider variety of ideas and opinions represented is disappointing. And whether TPM's editors want to admit it or not, it does affect their editorial coverage. It's hard to be "fair and balanced," so to speak, when there is no one to speak for those who are, well, overlooked.
Thankfully, all of us "All Readers" bring our own diversity with the posts we write and the opinions we share. I will continue to press for TPM to expand and diversity its staff, its invitations to authors, its choice of books and other features. In the meantime, thanks to you all for being so different, for being so diverse.
]]>The focus of this week's TPM Book Club discussion is Liaquat Ahamed's riveting book, "The Lords of Finance."
John Lanchester of The New Yorker magazine writes:
]]> The answer to that question is no, and we know this because the system was in effect for years and--to borrow a phrase from the subtitle of Liaquat Ahamed's new book, "Lords of Finance" (Penguin; $32.95)--it "broke the world." The system was the gold standard, and it involved the world's major currencies being pegged against gold in a way that was, in theory, redeemable: that is, you could go to the bank and exchange your currency for a specified amount of gold. In the United States, it was 23.22 grains of gold to the dollar; in the United Kingdom, it was 113 grains to the pound sterling. (A grain is based on the notional weight of a grain of wheat: 1/7,000 of a pound.) By fixing currencies to gold, the gold standard also fixed them to each other. In addition, the central banks, which had a monopoly on printing and distributing money, were obliged by law to keep the amount of money in circulation linked to the amount of gold in their reserves. This was not just a local issue but a planetary one. Even the most vertigo-prone of us, those who are least comfortable with the abstractness of modern money, can begin to spot a problem here: what if the world needs more money? What if all the gold is in the wrong place, or there isn't enough of it?""The sheer frictionlessness with which money moves around the world is frightening; it can induce a kind of vertigo. This can happen when you are reading the financial news and suddenly feel that you have no grip on what the numbers actually mean--what those millions and billions and trillions actually represent, how to get hold of them in your mind. (Try the following thought experiment, suggested by the mathematician John Allen Paulos, in his book "Innumeracy": Without doing the calculation, guess how long a million seconds is. Now try to guess the same for a billion seconds. Ready? A million seconds is less than twelve days; a billion is almost thirty-two years.) Or it can happen when you look at a bank statement and contemplate the terrible potency of those strings of digits, their ability to dictate everything from what you eat to where you live--the abstract numerals whose consequences are the least abstract thing in the world. Or it can happen when the global flow of capital suddenly hits you personally--when your apparently thriving employer goes out of business owing to a problem with credit, or your mortgage payments jump unpayably upward--and you think, Just what is this money stuff, anyway? I can see its effects--I can thumb a banknote, flip a coin--but what is it, actually? What do these abstract numbers stand for? What is the thing that's being represented? Wouldn't it be reassuring if it was more like a physical thing, and less like an idea? Wouldn't the global financial system be less vertiginous, less bizarre, if your money actually stood for something?
Michael M. Thomas of Forbes compared Ahamed's book to a much earlier volume with a similar subject and name:
On and off, over the past couple of weeks, I have been dipping into Liaquat Ahamed's Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World. It is a book that has received high praise, and in my opinion rightly so; its narrative pull, its elegant writing, the deft and thorough research that underpins it and its strength of characterization delineate a fascinating dramatis personae.
All of these, however, support a thesis I subsequently wonder about, which is that the Crash and Great Depression of 1929-40 were mainly rooted in the actions taken over the previous dozen years by a quartet of central bankers: Benjamin Strong of the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England's Montagu Norman, Emile Moreau of the Banque de France and the Reichsbank's Hjalmar Schacht.
When I first heard of Ahamed's book, I was immediately struck by the similarity of the title he had chosen to Frederick Lewis Allen's Lords of Creation, a book I had taken considerable pains to acquire, finally hunting down a copy in a Connecticut bookshop (this was long before the book business went online), a decade after I started searching. It reposed on my shelves some dozen years, scarcely read. I thought it might make an interesting pendant to Ahamed's work, so I got it down.
The jacket copy describes Allen's Lords as "a history of the evolution of financial power in the United States since 1900." It was published in 1935, when the Great Depression was well settled on the nation and the world, which meant that Allen, a diligent and perceptive reporter who had made his fame only four years earlier with Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s, was in the later chapters of his book reporting first-hand from the trenches.
One thing his work was bound to honestly reflect was the understanding of his day and age as to what in tarnation had happened in 1929, thereafter and why. So I turned at once to the index to see what Allen might have to say about the causal part played by Ahamed's "Fearsome Foursome" in making the Western World vulnerable to the all-devouring slump.
To my astonishment, three of the four (Norman, Schacht and Moreau) don't even appear! Benjamin Strong does, briefly, but only much, much earlier as a gofer for Pierpont Morgan. Clearly then, the 1930s financial world's grasp of itself and the mess it had made did not attribute any significant role to the failings of its central banks and central bankers according to Frederick Lewis Allen.
Does this invalidate Ahamed's thesis? Not in the least. All it tells us is how commodious history can be, how many threads make up the figure in the carpet. Many years ago, in his account of the Penn Square-Continental Illinois banking collapse of 1982, New Yorker writer Mark Singer made the wise observation that a really first-rate financial crisis requires a perfect conjunction of folly, like four cars driven simultaneously at top speed through four stop signs into an intersection.
What Ahamed and Allen show us is how it takes two--probably more--to tango. Central banks would not loom large on the American radar until Marriner Eccles took over the Fed in 1934 and whole-heartedly put his new dispensation in the service of the economy as opposed to its historical practice of protecting the price of Fort Knox gold, thereby launching a line of succession that would culminate in the monstrous ego of Alan Greenspan. Yet, even as our own busy bees on change were up to their mischief with margin loans and pyramid schemes, so too--below our self-centered horizon--were Strong, Norman etc. so that when the end came, it really was rather like that verse from "The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay," a poem I memorized in sixth grade: "All at once, and nothing first, just as bubbles do when they burst."
Janet Maslin of the New York Times' "Books of the Times" wrote:
Liaquat Ahamed's "Lords of Finance" is supposed to be a history book about the economics of World War I and the Great Depression. But there is terrific prescience to be found in its portrait of times past. Mr. Ahamed, an investment manager who proves to be a writer of great verve and erudition, easily connects the dots between the economic crises that rocked the world during the years his book covers and the fiscal emergencies that beset us today. He does this winningly enough to make his book about an international monetary horror story seem like a labor of love.
The reader who might not expect to be enthralled by the dangerous mutability of the gold standard, for example, will find it a subject of real fascination. And Mr. Ahamed does a superlative job of explaining the ever-germane way the problems of one shyster, one bank, one treasury or one economy can set off repercussions all around the globe.
Although "Lords of Finance" is much more than a personality-driven book, it has personalities to spare. The four men and their distinctive strategies are wonderfully drawn. If only by virtue of the velvet-collared cape and fan-backed oriental chair he used as accoutrements at a top-secret 1927 meeting on Long Island, Montagu Norman of the Bank of England emerges as this book's most exotic figure. The meeting led the Federal Reserve System of the United States to cut interest rates by half a percentage point to prop up the British pound. That it might have been "the pivotal moment, the turning point that set in train the fateful sequence of events that would eventually lead the world into depression," is in no way trivialized by Mr. Ahamed's emphasis on Norman's peculiar personal style.
Liaquat Ahamed (according to his author profile at his publisher, Penguin Books USA,) "has been a professional investment manager for 25 years. He has worked at the World Bank in Washington D.C. and the New York based partnership of Fischer Francis Trees and Watts, where he served as Chief Executive. He is currently an adviser to several hedge fund groups, including the Rock Creek Group and the Rohatyn Group, is a compensated director of Aspen Insurance Co. (details available at Forbes.com) and is on the board of Trustees of the Brookings Institution. He has degrees in economics from Harvard and Cambridge Universities."
Maslin's review continues:
"Lords of Finance" has the flair and wisdom to find a wide readership on the strength of its main ideas. Even better, the book has added assets. It is written by a man so conversant with his material that he appreciates all its nuances, large and small. Among the minor highlights of this eminently readable story are some of the shadier scam artists whom history has all but forgotten (like Marthe Hanau, a spendthrift French divorcee who in the 1920s swindled hundreds of thousands of thrifty, small-town French investors by promoting flimsy stocks, and who always traveled with two limousines, in case one broke down). Then there are the aristocrats: when Mr. Ahamed has the chance to drop a name as memorable as Vere Brabazon Ponsonby, ninth Earl of Bessborough, he most assuredly will.
This book's culture clashes are every bit as memorable as its eerie prefigurings of the present financial meltdowns. It is in a spirit of true affection, rather than in an effort to leaven the mysteries of global economic synergy, that Mr. Ahamed cites one American politician particularly ill suited for a visit to Windsor Castle.
"King, I'm glad to meet you," declared Senator Key Pittman of Nevada, who was nominally in England to discuss the remonetization of silver. As if this were not reason enough for him to have stayed home, "one night he was discovered by floor waiters at Claridges sitting stark naked in the sink of the hotel pantry, pretending to be a statue in a fountain."
Also participating in this discussion are:
James K. Galbraith, Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations and Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin;
Galbraith is the author of six books and several hundred scholarly and policy articles. His most recent book, "Unbearable Cost: Bush, Greenspan and the Economics of Empire, was published by Palgrave-MacMillan in late 2006. His next book will be "The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too," forthcoming from The Free Press. Inequality and Industrial Change: A Global View (Cambridge University Press, 2001), is coedited with Maureen Berner and features contributions from six LBJ School Ph.D. students. Created Unequal: The Crisis in American Pay, was published by the Free Press in August 1998.
Galbraith maintains several outside connections, including serving as a Senior Scholar of the Levy Economics Institute (www.levy.org) and as chair of Economists for Peace and Security (www.epsusa.org). He also writes a column on economic and political issues for Mother Jones, and contributes occasionally to The American Prospect, The Nation, the Texas Observer and to the op-ed pages of the major newspapers.
Galbraith teaches economics and a variety of other subjects at the LBJ School and UT Austin's Department of Government. He holds degrees from Harvard and Yale (Ph.D. in Economics, 1981). He studied economics as a Marshall Scholar at King's College, Cambridge, and later served on the staff of the U.S. Congress, including as Executive Director of the Joint Economic Committee, before joining the faculty of the University of Texas. He held a Fulbright Distinguished Visiting Lectureship in China in the summer of 2001, and was named a Carnegie Scholar in 2003. His recent research has focused on the measurement and understanding of inequality in the world economy, while his policy writing ranges from monetary policy to the economics of warfare, with forays into politics and history. Visit the web-site of the University of Texas Inequality Project (UTIP) for current research and an archive of published writings.
Sidney Blumenthal, former aide to President Clinton and Senior Fellow for the New York University Center on Law and Security. he is a widely published journalist, especially on American politics and foreign policy.
Born in Chicago, he earned a BA in sociology from Brandeis University in 1969 and started his career in Boston as a journalist who wrote for The New Republic. Over a career of twenty years, he became editor of several departments and wrote for several publications including Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. In recent publications he has been critical of the Republican administration under George W Bush
Following the end of the Clinton presidency, Blumenthal subsequently wrote a book titled The Clinton Wars published in 2003. The book includes a small biography of Blumenthal, but focuses on his years with the Clintons and in the White House. Other books by Blumenthal include The Permanent Campaign, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment, Pledging Allegiance: The Last Campaign of the Cold War, and How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime.
Blumenthal was recently the Washington bureau chief for Salon.com, for which he has written over 1800 pieces online. He is also a regular contributor to openDemocracy.net, as well as being a regular columnist for the UK newspaper, The Guardian. Blumenthal joined the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign as a "senior advisor" in November 2007. He lives in Washington, D.C.
Julian E. Zelizer is Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Zelizer, who grew up in Metuchen, N.J., received his B.A. at Brandeis University and Ph.D. at The Johns Hopkins University. He is one of the leading figures in the field of American political history and a well known public intellectual. Professor Zelizer is the author and editor of numerous books that examine U.S. political leaders, policies, and institutions since the New Deal. He is currently finishing work on four books: a history of national security politics since WWII, a history of the Jimmy Carter presidency, a history of the Reagan Revolution, and an edited volume about the George W. Bush presidency. Professor Zelizer is a well-known commentator in the national and international television, radio, and print media. He was featured on a show by the History Channel, Great Moments on the Campaign Trail, which was awarded an Emmy in 2008. He is a regular contributor to CNN.Com, Politico, The Huffington Post, and the Washington Independent. He has also published in Newsweek, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and The American Prospect. Professor Zelizer lives in Princeton, N.J.
L. Randall Wray is a Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City as well as Research Director, the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability (at UMKC), and Senior Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, NY. He is a past president of the Association for Institutionalist Thought (AFIT) and served on the board of directors of the Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE). A student of Hyman P. Minsky while at Washington University in St. Louis, Wray has focused on monetary theory and policy, macroeconomics, financial instability, and employment policy. He has published widely in journals and is the author of Understanding Modern Money: The Key to Full Employment and Price Stability (Elgar, 1998) and Money and Credit in Capitalist Economies (Elgar 1990). He is the editor of Credit and State Theories of Money (Edward Elgar 2004) and the co-editor of Contemporary Post Keynesian Analysis (Edward Elgar 2005) and Money, Financial Instability and Stabilization Policy (Edward Elgar 2006). Wray is also the author of numerous scholarly articles in edited books and academic journals, including the Journal of Economic Issues, Cambridge Journal of Economics, Review of Political Economy, Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, Economic and Labour Relations Review, Economie Appliquée, and the Eastern Economic Journal. He was the Bernardin-Haskell Professor, UMKC, Fall 1996, and joined the UMKC faculty as Professor of Economics, August 1999. Wray received a B.A. from the University of the Pacific and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis.
Mark Thoma, Professor of Economics at the University of Oregon; and author of the popular blog "Economist's View". Thoma received his Ph.D. from Washington State University in 1985 focusing on macroeconomic theory and applied econometrics. He is the author of numerous academic papers and has also written for a variety publications including, "How Much Do Election Shakeups Affect the Nation's Economy?" for the Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2006, "Is Income Inequality Rising?" for Cato Unbound, the Cato Institute, February 2007, and "Financial Market Variables Do Not Predict Real Activity, for Economic Inquiry, Vol. 36, No.4, October 1998, (coauthored with Jo Anna Gray).
Nathan Newman is Policy Director for the Progressive Legislative Action Network, and a regular columnist for The Progressive Populist and author of the book, NET LOSS: Internet Prophets, Private Profits and the Costs to Communitypublished by Penn State Press in 2002. I've also managed to pick up a Ph.D. in Sociology at Berkeley and a law degree from Yale along the way. He currently lives in Harlem in New York City.
He has written numerous articles and reports on the economy, politics and technology, with minor media celebrity at points, from being quoted in the New York Times, WiredNews and The Nation to appearing on C-SPAN and WebTV. His book Net Loss, based on his Ph.D. research, details the role of government policy in shaping the Internet and regional economies and how the rise of the networked economy has increased inequality in our society.
His labor experience dates back to working as a staff organizer in Las Vegas for the Hotel Employees & Restaurant Employees (HERE) International Union starting in 1988, then serving on the Executive Board of UC-Berkeley's Association of Graduate Student Employees (AGSE/UAW) in the early 90s, serving as an appointee to the Berkeley City Labor Commission for a number of years, organizing a labor-environmental network (the California Network for a New Economy), organizing community support for labor struggles in Northern California, and serving in the national legal department of the Communication Workers of America. This past year he worked in a union-side labor firm in New York City. He now works as a policy analyst and lawyer in a non-profit here in New York.
]]>After reading Sailer's bio, and challenging him for the "context" he claimed was absent from Schwartz's assessment of him, I, too came away wholly convinced that yes, indeed, Mr. Sailer is a racist. (And never one to shy away, I told him so.)
But all day, what I first read about him and his covert participation at TPM was nagging at me for two reasons:
]]> 1. Is the Site Editor (Lila Shapiro) of the TPM Book Club that clueless as to who Mr. Sailer really is and views he espouses?And also nagging at my conscience is a question festering over the last few weeks with her invitations to panelists to discuss other books which focused on more specifically race-related. The lack of prominent black voices to speak out on those books was disturbing enough. The participation of people with decidedly "conservative views" and their connections to very conservative think tanks, websites was questionable. Had there been adequate balance, their participation would not have been an issue, but there was little to counter-balance their comments. I tried to put that in perspective: perhaps invitations were sent, but people didn't respond in time, were busy, or as well may be the case, they just didn't give a damn.
But this week, with a book ostensibly about why people vote they way they do, I hardly would have expected a bona fide racist in our midst.
2. Did I have a greater responsibility to pull the lily-white sheet off of Sailer to expose him to the TPM community? After all, in the age of Obama, some of you believe we have trascended race and that the racism of old -- and its racists purveyors -- have disappeared from our midst.
Let me answer the second question first: YES! I do have that responsibility. First, as member of one of the groups Sailer assails on a regular basis, I think I know a genuine racist when I see one. Second, although we may want to debate what to level of bigotry must one rise to be classified as a racist, Sailer provides us with a clinician's opportunity to dissect and diagnose. Sailer defends himself classically: "I am not a racist," he claims. Yet the facts as you will see are otherwise.
And to question one, I will give Ms. Shapiro just the tiniest benefit of doubt -- this time. As you will see, I have found evidence that she is not the only one being fooled. That said, we all must hold Ms. Shapiro and TPM management -- top to bottom -- accountable for the persons they invite to participate in their forums. Balance of ideas and full disclosure of affiliations, beliefs and publications must now be demanded. "Free speech" is fine, but you deserve to know who you are reading.
Now to focus on the man I and many others have identified as a racist.
In introducing this week's book discussion, Ms. Shapiro wrote the following:
Joining Gelman in the discussion are co-author Jeronimo Cortina; Nathan Newman, Policy Director for the Progressive Legislative Action Network; Matt Yglesias, Fellow at the Center for American Progress; Will Wilkinson, Research Fellow at the Cato Institute; Aaron Swartz, activist, blogger, and board member of Change Congress; Eric Rauchway, Professor of History at the University of California-Davis; Steve Sailer, journalist and critic at The American Conservative; and Nolan McCarty, Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. [Boldface mine.]
Except that is not who Steve Sailer is.
This is what Media Matters for America had to say about Sailer following his participation in television special at CNN:
On July 22, as part of its "Black in America" project, CNN posted an article on its website headlined, "Could an Obama presidency hurt black Americans?" The article, by correspondent John Blake, quoted from a 2007 column by Steve Sailer, a writer CNN identified simply as "a columnist for The American Conservative magazine." But as the Southern Poverty Law Center reported on its Hatewatch blog, there is much more to Sailer's background, none of which CNN noted. In fact, in blog posts on VDARE.com and on his own website, [iSteve.com] Sailer routinely denigrates minorities. Nor did Blake note the origin of the quotes he included in his article: a January 2, 2007, VDARE.com article in which Sailer called Sen. Barack Obama a "wigger" and mocked him as "a remarkably exotic variety of the faux African-American."
Sailer's column linked to a Wikipedia entry on the word "wigger," which, at the time, read: "Wigger (alternatively spelled wigga or whigger or whigga) is a slang term that refers to a white person who emulates mannerisms, slangs and fashions stereotypically associated with urban African Americans; especially in relation to hip hop culture."
From Blake's July 22 CNN.com article:
Steve Sailer, a columnist for The American Conservative magazine, wrote last year that some whites who support Obama aren't driven primarily by a desire for change.
They want something else Obama offers them: "White Guilt Repellent," he wrote.
"So many whites want to be able to say, 'I'm not one of them, those bad whites. ... Hey, I voted for a black guy for president,'" Sailer wrote.
Sailer cited another reason why many whites want Obama as president:
"They hope that when a black finally moves into the White House, it will prove to African-Americans, once and for all, that white animus isn't the cause of their troubles. All blacks have to do is to act like President Obama -- and their problems will be over."
As Media Matters for America has noted, VDARE.com is a far-right anti-immigrant web magazine named for Virginia Dare, the first child of English descent born in the New World in the 16th century. In 2003, SPLC [Southern Poverty Law Center] added VDARE.com to its list of hate websites. Peter Brimelow, who operates VDARE.com through his nonprofit organization, the Center for American Unity, has insisted that "VDARE.COM is obviously not a 'White Supremacist' site, if for no other reason than that it publishes non-whites. We do publish writers who could fairly be described as 'white nationalists,' in that they explicitly defend the interests of American whites."
Media Matters has also noted that Sailer has written in defense of the Pioneer Fund, an organization designated a "hate group" by the SPLC for its support of the work of white supremacists, eugenicists, and others dedicated to proving the genetic superiority of certain races. Sailer additionally describes himself on his website as "founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute," which claims it "promotes the study of biological differences among humans and their impact on society."
After the Hurricane Katrina disaster, Sailer wrote in a September 3, 2005, VDARE.com column that the "unofficial state motto" of Louisiana, "Let the good times roll," is "an especially risky message for African-Americans." He continued: "The plain fact is that they [African-Americans] tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus they need stricter moral guidance from society." Sailer then declared that "there was only minimal looting after the horrendous 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan -- because, when you get down to it, Japanese aren't blacks." Later, he stated: "Poor black people seldom cooperate well with each other because they don't trust other blacks much, for the perfectly rational reason that they commit large numbers of crimes against each other."
In a September 5, 2005, post on National Review Online's The Corner, New York Post columnist John Podhoretz condemned Sailer's "shockingly racist" column on Katrina as containing "the most disgusting sentence yet written about Katrina." Podhoretz added: "Nobody with the unspeakable gall and tastelessness to write such sentences should be suggesting that any other person on earth requires 'stricter moral guidance.' "
From Sailer's January 2, 2007, column, titled, "White Guilt, Obamania, And The Reality Of Race":
Obama is constantly compared to Tiger Woods. But he differs in two ways. First, his list of accomplishments in his chosen profession is a lot shorter than the golfer's. And, second, Woods rejected Nike's suggestion that he identify himself as solely black to maximize his marketability in America because he did not want to reject his mother and more distant non-black ancestors. Woods declared himself "Caublinasian," his childhood term for his Caucasian, black, American Indian, and Asian ancestry.
In contrast, like Oscar-winner Halle Berry, Obama identifies as black although that requires symbolically disowning his white mother and maternal grandparents -- despite the fact that they did far more for him than the Kenyan father who abandoned him when he was two.
[...]
The brutal truth: Obama is a "wigger". He's a remarkably exotic variety of the faux African-American, but a wigger nonetheless. He has no ancestors who were slaves in the U.S. Moreover, his upbringing by his white mother and Indonesian stepfather in Indonesia and by his white grandparents in Hawaii, where mixed-race children are close to the norm, was almost wholly divorced from African-American life ... except for what he could see and aspire to on TV.
Even genetically, Obama, whose East African descent is apparent in his unusual features, has only a distant relationship to the West Africans who are the ancestors of almost all African-Americans. (Here are photos of Obama with Jesse Jackson and with the rapper Ludacris, both of whom have conventional West African features.)
But details like these just seem to make this nominal African-American that much more attractive to whites.
So why are so many whites, especially in the media, excited about promoting Obama for President in 2008?
[...]
Supporting Obama for President, like supporting Powell a decade ago, is seen by many whites as the ultimate in White Guilt Repellent.
It's important to understand, however, that White Guilt is very different from, say, Catholic Guilt, which consists of straightforward feelings of personal moral failure.
In comparison, I don't recall ever meeting any white person who personally felt guilty for the troubles of African-Americans. But I've known many whites who want to loudly blame other whites for black difficulties.
Some whites at least heap guilt upon their own ancestors, but many who publicly proclaim the reality of White Guilt aren't averse to noting that their own forefathers arrived at Ellis Island long after slavery was over.
In other words, White Guilt is just another ploy in the Great American White Status Struggle. Minorities are merely props for asserting moral superiority over other whites.
Finding and punishing Guilty Whites has become a national obsession. One notorious current example: the framing of the Duke lacrosse players by Durham district attorney Mike Nifong (with the enthusiastic assistance of the New York Times) in the endless hunt for what Tom Wolfe called "the Great White Defendant."
So, many whites want to be able to say, "I'm not one of them, those bad whites, like that guy on Seinfeld. Hey, I voted for a black guy for President!"
Plus, I suspect there's an even more hidden reason many whites wish Obama is elected President: They hope that when a black finally moves into the White House, it will prove to African-Americans, once and for all, that white animus isn't the cause of their troubles. All blacks have to do is to act like President Obama -- and their problems will be over!
--M.B.
Please note the CNN fell for the brief bio of Sailer, too. And since Media Matters pointed us to the Southern Poverty Law Center's Hatewatch blog, it's only fair to include what the SPLC had to say:
As part of its ongoing "Black in America" project, CNN posted a story to its website earlier this week titled "Could an Obama presidency hurt black Americans?" Credited to CNN correspondent John Blake, the piece quotes the wit and wisdom of Steve Sailer, identified only as "a columnist for The American Conservative magazine."
Specifically, the CNN story quotes a column by Sailer first published last year in which he opined that Obama offers voters "White guilt repellent."
"So many whites want to be able to say, 'I'm not one of them, those bad whites. ... Hey, I voted for a black guy for president,'" Sailer wrote.
What the CNN article fails to note is that in addition to writing columns and movie reviews for The American Conservative, Sailer is the founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute, a neo-eugenics online discussion forum where right-wing journalists and race scientists have promoted selective breeding of the human species. He also writes frequently for the anti-immigrant hate site Vdare.com, named for the first white child born in America, and runs a website, isteve.com.
Sailer's website is rife with primitive stereotypes. On it, Sailer mocks professional golfer Annika Sorenstam for having well-developed muscles and claims that Asian men have a hard time finding dates because they look "less masculine" than other men.Last January, on the hate site vdare.com, Sailer labeled Obama a "wigger."
"He's a remarkably exotic variety of the faux African-American, but a wigger nonetheless," Sailer wrote. "Even genetically, Obama, whose East African descent is apparent in his unusual features, has only a distant relationship to the West Africans who are the ancestors of almost all African-Americans." To illustrate his point, Sailer used photos of Obama side-by-side with Jesse Jackson and the rapper Ludacris, "both of whom have conventional West African features."
Assessing the tragic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in September 2005, Sailer wrote, "The plain fact is that they [black Americans] tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus they need stricter moral guidance from society."
Now blacks are not the only target of Sailer's venom. He is, as both the SPLC and Media Matters note, the founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute. How about his support for "Queer Science," by J. Michael Bailey, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, as the SPLC reports:
Queer Science
On a book tour last spring and summer, Northwestern University psychology professor J. Michael Bailey gave his audiences a sampling of recent scientific thinking about sexual and gender identity.
After playing audio recordings of four men's voices, Bailey asked: Which is gay? The crowds inevitably picked out the voice with exact articulation and lispy "S" sounds. Precisely! Bailey cheered.
His point: Determining somebody's sexual orientation is just that easy, just that obvious.
Needless to say, Bailey's brand of "queer science" has not met with cheers from GLBT (gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender) activists -- nor from many fellow scholars, who see his studies as attempts to lend scientific credence to age-old stereotypes.
But Bailey does have company. Many of those who praised his recent book, The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism, belong to a private cyber-discussion group of a neo-eugenics outfit, the Human Biodiversity Institute (HBI).
This exclusive group of academics, race scientists and right-wing journalists -- along with a reported handful of liberals -- exchanges thoughts about "differences in race, sex and sexual orientation" for a chilling purpose: promoting and studying "artificial [genetic] selection."
Among some of Bailey's reported HBI cohorts, that racist science of old is still just as alive and well as their current sex research. The Institute's main activity appears to be an "invitation-only" online discussion list for "a small, elite and eclectic mix of experts."
According to a list posted on HBI's Web site until last summer, this "elite" includes:
Jean-Phillippe Rushton, a prominent researcher on black genetic inferiority who is president of a pro-eugenics hate group, the Pioneer Fund;
Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, which purported to show black and Latino intellectual inferiority;
Kevin MacDonald, a professor at California State University at Long Beach who has written several books about supposed Jewish strategies to subvert "Euro-American" culture; and
Gregory Cochrane, a physicist who has suggested the existence of a genetic "gay germ."
These ideas about race and sex have not been limited to the world of academia. The HBI also includes several right-wing journalists who help popularize their theories -- and promote their books.
The most prominent cheerleader for Bailey and the other HBI researchers is the man who started the HBI: Steve Sailer, a United Press International reporter and frequent contributor to the anti-immigration Web site, VDARE.com. [Emphasis mine.]
Like Bailey, Sailer refused to respond to questions, telling the Intelligence Report "tough noogies." Also like Bailey, he has pushed the idea that there's a genetic basis for homosexuality -- making it a "disease" that could eventually be eradicated.
"It's radically unfashionable to call homosexuality a disease," Sailer noted this August on VDARE.com (see Keeping America White). But that doesn't stop Sailer, who fashions himself a bold thinker willing to confront taboo subjects.
The personal Web site maintained by the man behind the Human Biodiversity Institute, www.isteve.com, provides a different window into Sailer's way of thinking.
The site is dominated by crude racial and gender stereotypes as Sailer mocks professional golfer Annika Sorenstam for her muscles, claims that Asian men have a hard time finding dates because they look "less masculine" than other men.
Sailer also invokes the spirit of his friend Bailey when he claims to have found the real reason Al Gore lost the 2000 presidential election. He chalks it all up to a lisp that makes the former vice president "sound prim, even homosexual."
Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (www.fair.org) weighs as well, noting that the racists among us have found more "stealthy" ways to worm themselves into mainstream media where their full credentials are not always checked or challenged. (Lila Shapiro is not alone in being fooled.)
''If the black man wins,'' warned a New York Times editorial on the eve of the historic 1910 fight between Jack Johnson and ''Great White Hope'' Jim Jeffries, ''thousands and thousands of his ignorant brothers will misinterpret his victory as justifying claims to much more than mere physical equality with their white neighbors'' (New York Times, 7/3/1910--as cited on PBS's Unforgivable Blackness, 1/17/05). In an earlier editorial (11/1/1909), the editors worried over the fight while revealing what passed for discretion at the Times of nearly a hundred years ago: ''[We] will wait in open anxiety at the news that he has licked the--well, since it must be in print, let us say the Negro, even though it is not the first word that comes to the tongue's tip.''
Of course, great strides have been made by American media and society since that editorial, and many others like it, were published. But progress seems to come in fits and starts. It doesn't help that journalists often fail to recognize and challenge racism, even when--or perhaps especially when--it involves their own institutions.
Racism, in fact, may be gaining a firmer foothold in American media institutions as its promoters adopt more stealthy and sophisticated ways of presenting it. Consider two recent episodes in which David Brooks and John Tierney, both conservative New York Times writers, touted the work of Steve Sailer, a well-known promoter of racist and anti-immigrant theories.''Ghetto hellions''
Following the November elections, David Brooks used his column (12/7/04) to celebrate something he called the ''natalist'' movement. Natalists, said Brooks, defy Western trends toward declining birth rates by having lots of children and leaving behind the ''disorder, vulgarity and danger'' of cities to move to ''clean, orderly'' suburban and exurban settings where they can ''protect their children from bad influences.'' According to Brooks, natalists are more churchgoing and conservative than their less wholesome neighbors in more liberal urban areas, and are an increasingly important political force.
Though the movement sounds a bit like the post-World War II demographic trend dubbed ''white flight,'' Brooks makes no reference to ethnicity until halfway through the column, when he cites Sailer on white fertility:As Steve Sailer pointed out in the American Conservative, George Bush carried the 19 states with the highest white fertility rates, and 25 of the top 26. John Kerry won the 16 states with the lowest rates.
Brooks is well-known for lightly documented demographic analysis (Philadelphia, 4/04), but he never explains why he believes white fertility is more important than that of other groups.
Did Brooks understand his source's views? A look at the American Conservative article (12/20/04) that Brooks presumably read, since he cited it, ought to have raised the suspicions of an engaged columnist. In it, Sailer describes the undesirable urban traits he says white people are trying to escape: ''illegal immigrants and other poor minorities,'' ''ghetto hellions'' and ''public schools.'' Are these the things Brooks meant when he alluded to ''disorder, vulgarity and danger'' and ''bad influences'' in his Times column?
As American Prospect Online found (12/7/04), a little research reveals Sailer as a leading promoter of racist pseudoscience. As a principal columnist on the white nationalist website VDare.com, named for Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the ''New World,'' Sailer (e.g., 2/23/03; 12/12/01) extols the work of academic racists who say Africans as a group are innately less intelligent than whites or Asians. He is also a staunch defender of the Pioneer Fund, a primary funder for such racist research (as well as of VDare.com).
On the rare occasion Sailer gives race a rest, it's usually to make some other mock-Darwinian argument, as when he ruled out the possibility of a gay gene, suggesting instead that homosexuality is a disease, possibly caused by a germ (VDare.com, 8/17/03): ''An infectious disease itself could cause homosexuality. It's probably not a venereal germ, but maybe an intestinal or respiratory germ.''
A New York Daily News column (12/13/04) rebuked Brooks for plugging Sailer, suggesting that the Times columnist ''might want to do a background check on the next 'expert' he quotes,'' pointing out that "Sailer also writes for VDare.com, which the KKK-fighting Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled a 'hate group.''' According to the News, the Times failed to respond to inquiries about the matter. No other mainstream outlets seem to have commented on the affair.
Conservative "bona fides"
In addition to writing for VDare.com and American Conservative, Sailer has contributed to the National Review and National Review Online. He also maintains a private email discussion group called the ''Human Biodiversity Group'' that includes many leading white supremacist intellectuals and ''scientific'' racists.
Sailer's job as a national correspondent for United Press International (UPI) may seem surprising to those unaware the old mainstream wire service has drifted far rightward since its purchase by Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church in 2000.
A lucid writer with an accessible style, Sailer is a smooth propagandist operating in a community of increasingly sophisticated nativists and racists. Neither a researcher nor a scientist, Sailer's value to the movement is as a popularizer of its ideas and theories.
Weeks before the Brooks column, Times reporter John Tierney (10/24/04) quoted Sailer, describing him as ''a conservative columnist at the Web magazine VDare.com and a veteran student of presidential IQs.'' Tierney cited Sailer's claim that George W. Bush's IQ was likely greater than John Kerry's, information Sailer extrapolated from the results of different tests the two had taken--tests that were not intended to measure IQ.
Were Brooks and Tierney aware of Sailer's racist work? Were they sucked in by Sailer's sophistication, his academic sounding arguments? Or was it his bona fides with ''mainstream'' conservative outfits like the National Review and American Conservative?
''Civilized standards''
American Conservative was co-founded by Pat Buchanan, Peter ''Taki'' Theodoracopulos and Scott McConnell, who serves as editor. When McConnell was a New York Post columnist in the mid-'90s he suggested a brand of apartheid might be the solution to U.S. race problems (10/11/95):I do believe that American race relations would not be the worse for acknowledging that blacks and whites have between them the power to develop alternatives to living together. Indeed, it seems to me possible that the very act of considering seriously such alternatives would, in and of itself, bring a rapid halt to some of the more flamboyant rhetorical and behavioral excesses now flourishing in the black community.
McConnell would later be named the Post's editorial page editor, before being fired in 1997 for writing a series of anti-Puerto Rican columns--but only because they reportedly threatened Post owner Rupert Murdoch's business prospects (New York Daily News, 9/17/97). Sailer is just one of the racist writers McConnell has published in American Conservative (see, e.g., Robert Stacy McCain, 5/19/03; Sam Francis, 6/7/04).
The National Review's support for racism traces back to its founding in the mid-'50s. A 1957 editorial titled ''Why the South Must Prevail'' (8/24/57) asked ''whether the white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically?'' Citing the ''cultural superiority of white over Negro'' and ''civilized standards'' National Review editors answered, ''Yes--the white community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.''
Similarly, the magazine supported apartheid South Africa's white minority rule (4/23/60): ''The whites are entitled, we believe, to preeminence in South Africa.'' When Nelson Mandela and other ANC leaders were sentenced to life in prison in South Africa, National Review editors mocked critics of the verdicts (6/30/64): ''The South African courts have sentenced a batch of admitted terrorists to life in the penitentiary, and you would think the court had just finished barbecuing St. Joan, to hear the howls from the liberal press.''
Over the years many leading eugenicists and ''scientific'' racists have been warmly received by National Review. In a positive review of Race, Evolution, and Behavior, a 1994 book by Philippe Rushton, the current Pioneer Fund president, reviewer Mark Snyderman eagerly recounted the book's ''ambitious'' and ''fearless'' thesis (9/12/94): ''Orientals are more intelligent, have larger brains for their body size, have smaller genitalia, have less sex drive, are less fecund, work harder and are more readily socialized than Caucasians; and Caucasians on average bear the same relationship to blacks.'' (To be fair, this kooky book also got a thumbs-up from New York Times science writer Malcolm Browne--10/16/94. See Extra! Update, 12/94).
National Review tapped Rushton to write a review of a new edition of The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould's critique of eugenics--resulting in a predictable pan (9/15/97). And when Gould died in 2002, the magazine called on Steve Sailer (5/22/02) to do some grave-spitting.
''War against the white race''
Until his death on February 15, the award-winning writer Sam Francis was another member of this tightly knit circle of sophisticated racists. Francis had come far since his 1995 firing by the Unification Church-owned Washington Times for a speech he gave at the white supremacist American Renaissance conference.* Francis (Washington Post, 9/24/95) had told the gathering that a ''war against the white race'' was underway, and insisted that fellow whites "reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites . . . . The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people."
Francis was also a contributor to VDare.com, and since 1999 he had been the editor of the Citizens Informer, the publication of the Council of Conservative Citizens, the racist offspring of the old white citizens' councils of the Jim Crow era.
Francis also wrote a twice-weekly column for the mainstream Creators Syndicate. According to Creators, the column was distributed to 22 of its newspaper clients. The column also ran on right-wing and racist websites such as Townhall.com and Amren.com.
I have quoted at length from a few highly respected sources to make my point. Better to go to any of Sailer's other websites, publications or blogs to read the man in his own unadulterated language. There you will get his highly prized "context."
If you needed to know what a contemporary racist, anti-immigrant, misogynist, homophobe, looks like and sounds like, here you have it. Sailer does not walk the streets of his hometown in a sheet and pointed hat. Wait, I cannot say that for a fact as I do not know what he wears in the "halls" of the "cyber-institute" of Human Biodiversity or when he's just strolling through his local mall. I don't know if he prefers a flaming cross or a regular old bonfire.
But what you do need to know is that they, Sailer and his friends, pretend to be something that they are not, reasonable, thinking human beings. He attempts to hide his racist ways by claiming to be "defending" blacks in New Orleans, or using "science" to reveal "truths" about minorities, women, gays, immigrants and anyone else he hates.
Steve Sailer is a racist. Make no mistake about that.
]]>As long as they were considering "Jack Bauer" scenarios, why not just use Sodium Thiopental... Truth Serum.
Sodium thiopental, better known as Sodium Pentothal (a trademark of Abbott Laboratories), thiopental, thiopentone sodium, or trapanal, is a rapid-onset short-acting barbiturate general anaesthetic. It is an intravenous ultra-short-acting barbiturate. Sodium thiopental is a depressant and is sometimes used during interrogations--not to cause pain (in fact, it may have just the opposite effect), but to weaken the resolve of the subject and make him or her more compliant to pressure.[citation needed] Thiopental is a core medicine in the World Health Organization's "Essential Drugs List", which is a list of minimum medical needs for a basic health care system.[3]
Truth serumThiopental is still used in some places as a truth serum.[8] The barbiturates as a class decrease higher cortical brain functioning. Some psychiatrists hypothesize that because lying is more complex than telling the truth, suppression of the higher cortical functions may lead to the uncovering of the "truth". However, the reliability of confessions made under thiopental is dubious; the drug tends to make subjects chatty and cooperative with interrogators, but a practiced liar or someone who has a false story firmly established would still be quite able to lie while under the influence of the drug.[9]
Surely, it's efficacy is no more dubious than beating the hell out of someone, or nearly drowning him. And certainly it's more "humane." After all, it's one of the drugs used for administering the death penalty via lethal injection.
Maybe instead of lawyers, they needed a "script doctor."
]]>There are two things which need to be explored: the track record of the United States in prosecuting, or even investigating those accused of war crimes. And second, if you are to bring about that prosecution, how might you do it effectively. Perhaps if you employ some of the lessons learned in the civil rights movement to further your cause, you might make significant progress with what will be a near impossible task.
Many of us are disgusted, appalled, outraged, angered by the content of the released torture memos written by Bush's Office of Legal Counsel. It is the content -- the black and white letters on the pages -- that delineated in gruesome detail exactly what was done to Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheik Muhammed. Done to them by operatives of the United States government. Many of you are taking your outrage out on the blogosphere, railing against the Obama administration, because -- at least for now -- a decision has been made (not etched in stone, mind you) that the administration is not likely to pursue prosecution against those who conducted the torturing, and possibly (again, not etched in stone) against those who crafted this policy. The critical problem is your outrage is seen as limited to the "liberal bloggers." Although the story has some traction in the mainstream media, they are not actively pursuing the goal you seek: the prosecution of George Bush and key members of his administration responsible for constructing and implementing this policy.
On a personal note. (which is neither here nor there just my need to vent a little). my feeling is your anger is a bit misdirected at the present time, BUT-- and this is the critical part -- there is something more effective you can do rather than sitting on your patoots pounding away at your keyboards or signing petition after petition. What you lack is an effective game plan to achieve your goal: the prosecution and or impeachment of somebody who was involved in the criminal activity. To achieve that, you have to get over your righteous outrage and get righteously ACTIVE.
In other words, since you are the ones you've been waiting for, stop waiting, start doing.
]]>There was an ocassion when the idea of the government restoring to black Americans their full measure of civil rights was not a given. Although whites were congnizant of the incongruities of black and white existence. knew that segregation existed in their own neighborhoods, they were by and large comfortable with it, because it was not something they saw on a daily basis, nor did it affect them directly, Because the grossest violations of civil rights (in their minds) occurred in the South, northerners were more or less convinced it was a "remote, Southern problem." Never mind that it was in their backyards. And front yards.
Similarly, the torture memos provide us with a similar disconnect: Some -- that's YOU -- are extremely disturbed by what you've read (and you've read the torture memos). Others are more apathetic. The don't want the country involved in torture, but believe "the bad guys" got what they deserved, that it was just an isolated event that will not happen again. Still others wholeheartedly and enthusiastically support torture -- that would be most Republicans (your Joe Scarboroughs, your Joe the Plumbers, your Newt Gingriches, etc.)
So to achieve what you what, you need to move that apathetic group to your side. And if you can move one of the more "dedicated" torture proponents to your side, even better.
First, let's take a look back at what has happened over the years to provide a sense of history and context. If you want to do something historic, you need to know what the precedents are that you will need to overturn:
Members of the Executive Branch
Let's understand first just how difficult this undertaking will be. In the entire history of the United States, only two Presidents (Johnson and Clinton) have ever been impeached, one investigated to the point he resigned (Richard Nixon). Of the vice-Presidents, only two have ever resigned from office -- John C. Calhoun to become a Senator and Spiro T. Agnew because of criminal charges against him. Only two (Aaron Burr and John C. Brecknridge) were ever indicted after leaving office -- for treason. Although the Attorney General is subject to impeachment, there is no record of an AG being impeached or indicted for a crime.
With regard to Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, although accused of heinous deeds was never prosecuted. However, student activism had its effect, as reported on Wikipedia:
Shortly after Kissinger left office, he was offered an endowed chair at Columbia University (in 1977). The position came with considerable funding and would have given Kissinger his first platform for rehabilitating his then shattered reputation. When news of the proposed chair leaked out, a small group of students immediately began collecting signatures for a petition opposing his appointment. The petition charged Kissinger with illegal actions in Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, and in ordering domestic wiretaps of National Security Council staff.
The petition effort sparked wider organizing and the quickly formed "Ad Hoc Committee to Oppose Kissinger's Appointment" offered detailed substantiation of each of the charges in flyers widely distributed on campus. Kissinger's initial classes and meetings held on campus were dogged by protesters at every step.
The spectacle of the former secretary hounded and humiliated by his students was picked up in the popular comic strip Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau. The continuing strips detailed students attempt to challenge Kissinger in the street and in the classroom.
Columnists such as Anthony Lewisof the New York Times and Nat HentoffVillage Voice chimed in with opinions that denying Kissinger the chair would not be a violation of academic freedom and within weeks the story had become national news, breaking in NewsweekWashington Post Many of the news stories included a litany of the offenses Kissinger was alleged to have committed. Rather than a stepping stone toward rehabilitation, the appointment was spreading knowledge about Kissinger's actual record and rekindling student activism on the Columbia campus. After several months of pressure, the University and Kissinger mutually agreed that it was not the time to undertake such an appointment. Kissinger went to Georgetown University, where the students were less confrontational, to take a less prestigious and less permanent teaching and researching assignment.
And when the students finished with Kissinger, writer/author Christopher Hitchens of Vanity Fair took up the charge:
A revival of interest in Henry Kissinger came in 2001, when journalist Christopher Hitchens wrote The Trial of Henry Kissinger, a scathing critique of Kissinger's policy that accused him of war crimes, particularly for his policy toward Vietnam Cyprus Cambodia, Chile, East Pakistan (present day Bangladesh). Kissinger became a focal point of criticism from the political left and certain human rights NGOs. According to the book, his foreign policy was chiefly concerned with attaining allies that had valuable geographical and strategic locations, such as Turkey and Pakistan, and turned a blind eye when these allies attacked democracies and murdered countless innocent people.
The book was later adapted into a documentary entitled The Trials of Henry Kissinger. The film focused on Kissinger's policies towards Vietnam, Cambodia, East Timor, and Chile. (From Wikipedia.)
It will be an uphill climb.
Prosecution of War Crimes (World War II to present)
World War II-- Although there were a few Allied personnel courts-martialed for war crimes during or following World War II, other instances that were alleged by historians to be war crimes were not prosecuted or investigated.
Vietnam -- The Vietnam War Crimes Working Group, established in the wake of the disclosure to the media the My Lai massacre, compiled over 9,000 pages of materials and determining that some 320 alleged incidents did have a factual basis. Seven previously unacknowledged massacres from 1967 through 1971 in which at least 137 civilians died.
Seventy-eight other attacks on noncombatants in which at least 57 were killed, 56 wounded and 15 sexually assaulted.
One hundred forty-one instances in which U.S. soldiers tortured civilian detainees or prisoners of war with fists, sticks, bats, water or electric shock.
Two hundred and three soldiers accused of harming Vietnamese civilians or prisoners were found to warrant formal charges after investigation, and were subsequently referred to the soldiers' superiors for official action. Of the 203 cases, 57 of them stood a court martial. Only 23 were convicted, of whom 14 received prison sentences ranging from six months to 20 years; most received significant reductions on appeal. Many substantiated cases were closed with a letter of reprimand, a fine or, in more than half the cases, no action at all.
The stiffest sentence went to a military intelligence interrogator convicted of committing indecent acts on a 13-year-old girl in an interrogation hut in 1967. The records show that he served seven months of a 20-year term.
(The above taken from the Vietnam Working Group Files, Wikipedia)
Iraq War I -- During the first Gulf War (again from Wikipedia), the two most widely reported incidents were:
HIghway of Death -- On the night of February 26 and February 27 1991, defeated Iraqi forces began leaving Kuwait on the main highway north of in a column of some 1400 vehicles. US Air Force and US Navy jets pursued and destroyed the convoy, subjecting it to sustained bombing for several hours. The Iraqi troops were not given any opportunities to surrender.
Bulldozer assault -- Another incident during the war highlighted the question of large-scale Iraqi combat deaths. This was the "bulldozer assault", wherein two brigades from the 1st Infantry Division (Mechanized) used anti-mine plows mounted on tanks and combat earthmovers to bury Iraqi soldiers defending the fortified "Saddam Line." One newspaper story reported that the US commanders estimated thousands of Iraqi soldiers surrendered, escaping burial during the two-day assault February 24-25, 1991. However, like all other troop estimates made during the war, the estimated 8,000 Iraqi defenders was probably greatly inflated. After the war, the Iraqi government claimed to have found 44 bodies. In his book 'The Wars Against Saddam,' John Simpson, alleges that the US forces attempted to cover up this incident.
Kosovo -- Slobodan Milosevic is the most notable person tried for war crimes in this conflict. Although NATO forces were accused of bombing civilian targets, no crimes (as yet) have been claimed against US or NATO forces against civilians.
Which brings us to Iraq War II. As you can see, even when there are clear-cut cases of atrocities, war crimes including torture, have rarely been prosecuted against US citizens. Of those who have been convicted, they tend to be US military personnel, are often characterized as "rogue" elements or units, and prosecutions never involve high-ranking officers William Calley of the My Lai massacre was a Lieutenant, Abu Ghraib's Lynndie England a Private First Class and Charles Graner a Sergeant. None of the other persons either court-martialed or dishonorably discharged from duty were in the commissioned officer ranks.
Lessons From the Movement
This is where the lessons from the civil rights movement can be helpful.
Create compelling political capital: Let us distinguish between "political cover" and "political capital." Cover, in its simplest form, is exactly that -- a blanket, an excuse, behind which one can hide. You do not want to create cover. Capital, on the other hand, is "currency" which can be spent to pursue what are often unpopular decisions. Creating a groundswell of overwhelming public opinion creates capital.
Create a compelling visual image. Reading memos, briefing papers, legal briefs does not a compelling visual make. And your visual is the most effective tool to create political capital.
During the civil rights movement, although administration after administration knew full well that segregation was wrong, did nothing until they were confronted with the imagery of children being turned away from schoolhouse doors, young men and women having police dogs turned on them, firehoses turned on them, billyclubs and axe handles used on them as the peaceably marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Your most compelling image is a re-enactment of torture and waterboarding and abuses described in the memos and shown in the pictures from Abu Ghraib. Imagine:
In front of federal courthouses all across the country, in front of the Newseum, in city plazas, in New York's Central Park and similar prominent locations, there is a full size mock-up of one of the interrogation rooms at Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib (the same abuses occurred there). Every day for 30 days and nights, 6 times a day, every 4 hours, like clockwork, the torture and waterboarding of Khalid Sheik Muhammed is re-enacted. And 83 times during that 30 day period, the torture and waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah is re-enacted. The shackled prisoner, his captors methodically doing their "business." The cramped boxes, the stress positions, the head into wall slamming. Where there are transcripts, they should be read aloud. You should have Bush, Cheney, Bybee, Gonzales, et al from the Bush administration re-enactors portraying the principals involved.
This should not be a David Blaine-like stunt. Take it seriously, present it seriously,
Create a convert to the cause. This should be someone who was a vocal and visible supporter of torture, who has been convinced to change his or her mind. Frankly, it should be a him. And although Joe Scarborough would be my desired convert -- by way of enjoying a pleasant waterboarding session or a few hours in a stress position covered in insects -- Michael Smerconish, the Philadelphia talk radio host might be a better prospect. (No, he needn't be waterboarded, but perhaps seeing it occur in real time, up close and personal might change his mind.) You need a high profile convert to lend credence to your message. (Although Christopher Hitchens has changed his position, his personal demeanor makes him a less than effective messenger.
Avoid Code Pink. This is not the time for antics. This should be a serious and deliberate undertaking. Your goal is to change what is discussed as some abstraction into something real and powerful.
Avoid mixed messages. Your one and only goal is to create political capital. You want to shift the tide of public opinion so that support pushes your opponents into an impossible, unsustainable position. Your opponent is not the current administration. You need them. What you don't need is Republican pushback. (The Republicans are the Dixiecrats and segregationists.) What you want to create is environment where this unprecedented action you want can be taken. This is a single message protest which should lead to the punishment of those involved.
Now, the mission ahead of you is daunting. But, like those who fought (and continue to fight) the good fight for civil rights in this country, it can be done.
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