Archive for May, 2009
End the Drug War. Just Do It.
Obama’s new drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, says it is time to move away from the “war” rhetoric surrounding federal drug policy. Since Kerlikowske has just assumed office, this is exactly the right thing to do — set a whole new tone from the militarized approach we have seen over the past 20-30 years.
Drug abuse is a problem that must be dealt with, but we don’t need to send troops to Latin America, we don’t need former generals like Barry McCaffrey to oversee drug policy, and we don’t need police officers conducting raids on American homes with machine guns and flash bang grenades.
The political climate on drug policy is shifting. Republican governors like Arnold Schwarzenegger are calling for an open debate on legalizing marijuana. New York is finally discarding its Rockefeller drug laws. And Latin American leaders are urging the U.S. to reverse course. Obama seems interested in a new direction but the appointment of a sensible law enforcement official like Kerlikowske and talk of “more treatment” is not enough. We need more decisive action away from the criminalized approach to drug policy. The time is right to just do it.
For Cato research on this subject, go here.
Haass: Defining ‘Success’ Down
Richard Haass’s op ed in today’s Post is worth a read. Sure, it amounts to a well-placed advertisement for his new book, War of Necessity, War of Choice. And it’s not like Haass, current president of the Council of Foreign Relations, and former director of policy planning at the State Department, lacks for exposure. But while I would quibble with his characterization of the first Gulf War as “necessary”, it is refreshing for a man so firmly fixed in the foreign policy establishment to focus not on the United States’ supposed capacity for refashioning the global order, but rather on the limits of our power.
He urges President Obama to resist the impulse to expand our objectives in Afghanistan, and should not dedicate far more resources to the effort if we appear to be falling short of a few modest goals. He wisely counsels that the United States is unlikely to convince Iran to forego nuclear enrichment or North Korea to give up its weapons, and we should therefore focus on the more essential and achievable tasks of intrusive inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities and pressure on North Korea (in concert with China) to prevent material and technology from being diverted to others.
He concludes:
Some will argue that defining success down is defeatist. And certainly, one can imagine an Afghanistan or an Iraq that becomes a Jeffersonian democracy and an Iran or a North Korea that gets out of the nuclear business. But such outcomes are improbable at best and more likely fantasy. Moreover, far greater involvement and investment would still fail to bring them about.
The alternatives are outcomes that are good enough and commensurate with interests and costs. The moment calls for defining success down. The United States is stretched economically and militarily. Better partial success we can afford than expensive failures we cannot.
Les Gelb, CFR’s former president, makes similar arguments in his latest book, Power Rules.
Few people in Washington rise through the ranks by talking about what we can’t or shouldn’t do, which partly explains why the voices of restraint are almost always drowned out by the vocal few calling for action. (For more on this point, see Steve Walt’s recent commentary at FP.com and Justin Logan’s observations on this blog.)
White House Czar Calls for End to ‘War on Drugs’
This morning in The Wall Street Journal:
The Obama administration’s new drug czar says he wants to banish the idea that the U.S. is fighting “a war on drugs,” a move that would underscore a shift favoring treatment over incarceration in trying to reduce illicit drug use.
…Gil Kerlikowske, the new White House drug czar, signaled Wednesday his openness to rethinking the government’s approach to fighting drug use.
Mr. Kerlikowske’s comments are a signal that the Obama administration is set to follow a more moderate — and likely more controversial — stance on the nation’s drug problems.
…The Obama administration is likely to deal with drugs as a matter of public health rather than criminal justice alone, with treatment’s role growing relative to incarceration, Mr. Kerlikowske said.
Well, that’s at least a modest step in the right direction. However, I want to see how policies change (if they do) under the Obama administration. A change in terminology won’t mean much if the authorities still routinely throw people in jail for violating drug laws.
As for the international war on drugs, everyone in the Washington area is welcome to join us this Friday on Capitol Hill to discuss the consequences of the war on drugs abroad.
Toles on Obama/Health-Care-Lobbyist Media Stunt
Today’s Washington Post has a terrific editorial cartoon about this week’s announcement by President Obama and health care industry lobbyists that they’re all willing to reduce health care spending growth by 1.5 percentage points.
Of Course, It Is the Banks’ Fault!
Congress is off on another crusade, to save Americans from credit cards. People get into debt, run up big fees, generally feel abused, and complain to their elected officials. Never mind the obvious convenience, which is why credit cards have become an indispensable part of American commerce. Legislators plan on micro-managing the credit terms which may be offered across America.
“We like credit cards — they are valuable vehicles for many people,” said Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, the chairman of the Senate banking committee and author of the measure now being considered by the Senate. “It’s when these vehicles are being abused by the card issuers at the expense of the consumers that we must step in and change the rules.”
“Abused by the card issuers.” Of course. The very same card issuers who kidnapped people, forced consumers to apply for cards at gunpoint, and convinced merchants to refuse to accept checks or cash in order to force everyone to pull out “plastic.” The poor helpless consumers who had nothing to do with the fact that they wandered amidst America’s cathedrals of consumption buying wiz-bang electronic goods, furniture, CDs, clothes, and more. The stuff just magically showed up in their homes, with a charge being entered against them against their will. It’s all the card issuers’ fault!
But then, Sen. Dodd’s assumption that consumers are not responsible for their actions fits his legislative style: no one is ever responsible for anything. Least of all the residents of Capitol Hill.
$1,000 per U.S. Family in War Spending up for a Vote in the House Today
WashingtonWatch.com has done the math.
Drop the Soda, or Else!
Government is busy trying to protect us from ourselves. It tosses nearly a million people in jail every year for marijuana offenses. City councils, state legislators, and Congress all add ever more restrictions on cigarette smoking. Legislators demand action to stop steroid use by athletes. And the Senate Finance Committee is considering a “fat tax” on sugared drinks.
This isn’t the first time legislators have considered trying to squeeze a little money out of us while micro-managing our lives. Editorializes the Boston Herald:
Earlier this year Gov. Deval Patrick proposed a 5 percent tax (more if the sales tax is raised) on sweetened drinks and candy bars under the pretext of battling obesity (while thinning out our wallets). Happily we haven’t heard much about it lately. But yesterday on Capitol Hill the Senate Finance Committee heard testimony about helping to fund President Barack Obama’s massive health care expansion in part with a similar tax.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that a 3-cent tax per 12-ounce sweetened drink – including sports drinks and iced teas – would bring in $24 billion over four years.
“Soda is one of the most harmful products in the food supply,” said Michael Jacobson, head of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which gives you some idea of the mindset here. Jacobson would also like to raise taxes on alcoholic beverages.
If the American people don’t start saying no, there won’t be much liberty left to preserve.
National ID Mission Creep
It’s a given that, once in place, a national ID would be used for additional purposes.
In case you needed proof, on Wednesday, Senator David Vitter (R-LA) offered an amendment to H.R. 627, the Credit Cardholders’ Bill of Rights Act of 2009, requiring the Federal Reserve to impose federal identification standards on the opening of new credit accounts. Among the limited forms of ID credit issuers could accept are REAL ID cards, produced under the moribund national ID law. (Vitter may not realize that REAL ID is in collapse.)
To compound things, his amendment would require credit issuers to run new credit card applicants past terrorist watch-lists. The sense of normalcy, efficiency, and common sense that makes airports so pleasurable to visit today would infect our financial services system. Oh joy.
“Gangster Government” at Work
With the Obama administration preferring to rely on politics rather than the law to “fix” the auto industry, bondholders have discovered that the new politics of this administration is quite a bit more brutal than the old politics practiced by the Bush administration.
Henry Payne and Richard Burr write of “gangster government” using not just demagogic public attacks on greedy bondholders but apparent threats of regulatory sanction to get its way in bankruptcy court. They explain:
The holdout debtholders sought the refuge of the courts, where decades of bankruptcy law promised that secured lenders would receive just compensation for their investment. But then Obama called in his fixers.
In his April 30 news conference, Obama singled out Chrysler’s self-described “non TARP lenders” as “speculators” who sought to imperil Chrysler’s future for their own benefit. “I do not stand with them,” Obama thundered. “I stand with Chrysler’s employees and their families and communities. . . . (not) those who held out when everybody else is making sacrifices.” Michigan Democratic allies like Sen. Debbie Stabenow and Rep. John Dingell piled on, calling the lenders “vultures.”
Then, on Detroit radio host Frank Beckmann’s show May 1, a lawyer for the lenders, Tom Lauria, chillingly revealed how “one of my clients was directly threatened by the White House and in essence compelled to withdraw its opposition to the deal under threat that the full force of the White House press corps would destroy its reputation if it continued to fight.”
Lauria later confirmed the threats came from Rattner and that the target was Perella Weinberg, which had suddenly withdrawn its opposition after the president’s April 30 press conference.
The White House denied the threats, but Business Insider subsequently reported that “sources familiar with the matter say that other firms felt they were threatened as well. None of the sources would agree to speak except on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of political repercussions.”
“The sources, who represent creditors to Chrysler,” continued the Insider story, “say they were taken aback by the hardball tactics that the Obama administration employed to cajole them into acquiescing to plans to restructure Chrysler. One person described the administration as the most shocking ‘end justifies the means’ group they have ever encountered. . . . Both were voters for Obama in the last election.”
The idea of the White House–with the IRS and SEC at its disposal–threatening investment firms should have sent off alarm bells in America’s newsrooms. Inexcusably, the media establishment largely ignored the hardball tactics. This is the same media that has doggedly reported on President Bush’s U.S. attorney firings and the post-9/11 interrogations of terrorist suspects.
I have no opinion on who should get what as part of Chrysler’s bankruptcy — other than that the taxpayers shouldn’t be paying for America’s version of lemon socialism so common around the world. But crude political interference by the political authorities in Washington in a bankruptcy case erode the rule of law and administration of justice. If Obama and company believe that the end justifies the end when it comes to handing the auto companies over to favored interests, who among us is safe from similar action by this or another administration in the future?
Two Terrible Tastes That Taste Even Worse Together
Few things irk me more than human-interest anecdotes parading as objective journalism, or college students/graduates complaining about how much money they owe – and think someone else should pay – for their educations.
Perhaps in a bid to break some sort of irritation record, yesterday the USA Today combined these two odious phenomena into one wretch-inducing article about how just cruelly difficult it can be to rid oneself of the student debt one freely entered into.
I won’t go into a detailed dismantling of the piece. Read it for yourself and you’ll see that it really is nothing but a long series of anecdotes delivered with way too little information to have any idea why the debtors shouldn’t, you know, take responsibility for debt they freely incurred. I’m just going to highlight one vignette that sickly typifies just how rationally and morally bankrupt (pardon the pun) both the sentiments of some debtors, and the article, are:
Lenders often fail to offer relief to the neediest borrowers, says a report issued last month by the National Consumer Law Center.
“I feel like it’s a real shame that people like me are coming out of college, weighed down by all this debt,” says Austin Light, 24, a journalist for The Mecklenburg Times in Charlotte. He and his wife have $100,000 in student loans. “My dream is to be a full-time children’s book author and illustrator, and if I wasn’t shackled with this debt, I would be pursuing that.”
In how many ways is this galling?
- We don’t know anything about why Mr. and Mrs. Light have $100,000 in student debt, but we are supposed to become morally indignant just because they feel “weighed down” by it? Did they go to very expensive schools? Did it take them each seven beer-soaked years to graduate? Who knows, but since average student debt for graduates who have any debt is only about $20,000, the rational conclusion must be that they did nothing to control their costs.
- We don’t know what these two studied, but we do know that Mr. Light really wants to be a children’s book author and illustrator. Well, you don’t need to go to college for that, especially one so expensive you incur a debt that even Stephen King — much less a neophyte kiddie lit author — might have trouble paying back.
- Given the overall context of the article, readers are presumably supposed to feel that it should be easier for the Lights to discharge their debts in bankruptcy. But why should people who lent them the money, especially taxpayers who have no choice but to back federal loans, have to take losses on loans that these two freely agreed to pay back when they took them? Isn’t the word for that “stealing”?
Unfortunately, this seems all-too representative of the growing sense of entitlement exuded by many student interest groups. Students should get all the benefits of an education, but someone else should pay for it! And their will is being done in Washington, with several pieces of aid-enhancing, loan-forgiving legislation (which I sketch out here) having been passed in the last couple of years; the Serve America Act – which includes taxpayer-funded education stipends for qualifying “volunteers” – enacted in April; and Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), according to the USA Today article, planning to re-introduce legislation that would allow private student loans to be discharged under bankruptcy.
And we wonder why higher ed costs, among other things, seem to be out of control…
Former FBI Agent: Torture Sucks. Don’t Do It.
The Senate Judiciary Committee hearings produced an ugly picture of the role torture played in interrogating Al Qaeda leaders. The testimony of former FBI agent Ali Soufan shows how traditional intelligence techniques worked on Abu Zubaydah and “enhanced” techniques did nothing to advance national security interests:
Immediately after Abu Zubaydah was captured, a fellow FBI agent and I were flown to meet him at an undisclosed location. We were both very familiar with Abu Zubaydah and have successfully interrogated al-Qaeda terrorists. We started interrogating him, supported by CIA officials who were stationed at the location, and within the first hour of the interrogation, using the Informed Interrogation Approach, we gained important actionable intelligence.
We were once again very successful and elicited information regarding the role of KSM as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and lots of other information that remains classified. (It is important to remember that before this we had no idea of KSM’s role in 9/11 or his importance in the al Qaeda leadership structure.)
Soufan then recounts a tug-of-war between the interrogators and the contractors brought in to apply the third degree. The intelligence and law enforcement professionals struggled to reestablish rapport with Zubaydah after each iteration of harsh interrogation tactics.
The new techniques did not produce results as Abu Zubaydah shut down and stopped talking. At that time nudity and low-level sleep deprivation (between 24 and 48 hours) was being used. After a few days of getting no information, and after repeated inquiries from DC asking why all of sudden no information was being transmitted (when before there had been a steady stream), we again were given control of the interrogation.
We then returned to using the Informed Interrogation Approach. Within a few hours, Abu Zubaydah again started talking and gave us important actionable intelligence.
The enhanced interrogation techniques were not only inferior to traditional interrogation techniques, they proved counterproductive. The use of illegal techniques resurrected the “wall” between the CIA and the FBI with regard to these detainees. This prevented FBI experts who knew more about Al Qaeda than anyone else in the government from questioning them. Plus, as Soufan recounts, coercive techniques make detainees tell you what you want to hear, whether it is true or not. As Jesse Ventura says, “you give me a waterboard, Dick Cheney, and one hour, and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.”
Torture did not advance the work of picking apart Al Qaeda, it disrupted it.
New at Cato
For the newest Cato articles, papers and television appearances, subscribe to Cato Today.
- In The Washington Times, Richard Rahn explains how the current tax crackdown could deepen the country’s economic woes.
- In the Washington Examiner, Gene Healy discusses Wanda Sykes’ speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and the lost pastime of making fun of the president.
- Nat Hentoff cries foul on the new “hate crimes” legislation that is currently advancing through Congress.
- On NPR.org, Michael Cannon explains why 2009 will not be a good year for health care reform.
- At National Review online, Jerry Taylor contends that Jack Kemp’s political career ultimately did the cause of limited government more harm than good.
- In Wednesday’s Cato Daily Podcast, Mark A. Calabria discusses the president’s plan for regulating credit card companies.
- Watch Chris Edwards on CNN discussing why the pay gap between government and private workers is rapidly growing wider.
Cato on Facebook
Cato on Twitter
Cato on Google+
Cato on YouTube
