Archive for June, 2009
Bierfeldt v. Napolitano Roundup
Back on March 29th, Campaign for Liberty employee Steven Bierfeldt was leaving the Campaign’s regional conference in St. Louis, Missouri. He was carrying $4700 in cash donations and Campaign for Liberty and Ron Paul literature. TSA personnel at the St. Louis airport felt that carrying this amount of cash was “suspicious” and detained him for interrogation. The TSA personnel intended to take Bierfeldt to the local police station for further questioning after he refused to answer the questions associated with their fishing expedition. Luckily, a plainclothes officer arrived and spoke briefly with one of the TSA officers, who told Bierfeldt that he was free to go.
Bierfeldt is now filing suit against Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano. The ACLU Blog of Rights has more on the suit, including a digital copy of the complaint. Filing suit to prove that “[c]arrying $4700 in cash poses no conceivable threat to flight safety” is a sign that airport screening is going too far.
Bierfeldt was right to be wary of airport screening while carrying Ron Paul and Campaign for Liberty literature. The Missouri Information Analysis Center, one of 70+ “fusion centers” in the nation, had just released its report on domestic terrorism and the militia movement. Libertarians are expressly targeted as potential domestic terrorists:
Cato recently held a forum on this phenomenon, Fusion Centers: Domestic Spying or Sensible Surveillance? My colleague Tim Lynch hosted, and panelists included Bruce Fein, Constitutional Attorney, The Lichfield Group; Harvey Eisenberg, Chief, National Security Section, Office of United States Attorney, District of Maryland; and Michael German, Policy Counsel, American Civil Liberties Union. Audio and video are available at the link.
Mike German has written extensively on this topic. Read his November 2007 report, What’s Wrong with Fusion Centers and July 2008 update. Mike is a former FBI agent and author of the excellent book, Thinking Like a Terrorist.
You can watch Mr. Bierfeldt giving his side of the story to Judge Andrew Napolitano (no relation to Homeland Secretary Janet Napolitano) on Fox’s Freedom Watch.
Judge Napolitano recently spoke at the Cato book forum, Dred Scott’s Revenge: A Legal History of Race and Freedom in America. Co-panelists included my colleague Jason Kuznicki and Reason‘s Damon Root.
“It’s a Lot Easier to Promise to Change Washington Than It Is to Actually Change It”
The New York Times has an interesting story on President Obama’s continuing failure to follow through on his “Sunlight Before Signing” promise. On the campaign trail, he said he would post bills online for five days before signing them. Two dozen bills now have his signature, and only one has been posted for five days before signing.
The article (and accompanying video) fixes on a couple of reasons why the president might be excused from carrying out the promise. One is the technical difficulty of managing potentially hundreds of thousands of comments. The promise did not include a promise to publish comments, though — much less to read them (though it would be politically astute to appear to do so). In my view, the difficulty of administering a public comment system — which was not part of the promise — does not excuse the failure to post the bills Congress presents to the president for five days before he signs them.
A second excuse is that posting bills online would be ineffectual. Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation is quoted saying, “There isn’t anybody in this town who doesn’t know that commenting after a bill has been passed is meaningless.”
I have done my level-best to illustrate how a five-day hold at the White House would have good effects on reducing earmarks, parochial amendments, and other shenanigans — such as congressional approval of bonuses to AIG executives.
Miller’s preferred approach — placing a similar hold on bills before they leave Congress — would have a similar effect — but nothing dramatically more open. Just as under a presidential hold, members of Congress and Senators would be more reticent to introduce potentially controversial amendments. Just as under a presidential hold, they would carefully avoid a blossoming of debate about their pet projects at the end of the legislative process. A congressional hold would change the upstream behavior of the politicians — just like a presidential hold would.
A presidential hold and a congressional hold are both good ideas, and they are not mutually exclusive. The presidential hold has a key advantage: The president has already promised it — to the cheers of American voters.
The New York Times story reports a small step toward meeting the actual terms of President Obama’s pledge:
“In order to continue providing the American people more transparency in government, once it is clear that a bill will be coming to the president’s desk, the White House will post the bill online,” said Nick Shapiro, a White House spokesman. “This will give the American people a greater ability to review the bill, often many more than five days before the president signs it into law.”
If this means posting links to bills on the Thomas legislative system from Whitehouse.gov, this is something the White House has done sporadically, and it would increase transparency by a small margin if it were regularized. The administration should establish a uniform URL where bills are posted so that every American can easily find every bill the president signs. But, in terms of fulfilling President Obama’s promise, “posting a link from WhiteHouse.gov to THOMAS of a conference report that is expected to pass doesn’t cut it.”
I think this is grudging progress toward implementation of President Obama’s “Sunlight Before Signing” promise. In the video, the author of the Times article has the best line illustrating why the White House deserves modest congratulations for taking this step: “It’s a lot easier to promise to change Washington than it is to actually change it.”
Uncle Sam a Generous Boss
Federal unions, government officials, and the Washington Post’s “Federal Diary” column frequently suggest that federal civilian workers are underpaid. They suffer from a large “pay gap” compared to private sector workers, or so the story goes.
But in the Post’s “Jobs” section yesterday, human resources specialist Lily Garcia argues that “Uncle Sam Is a Boss You Can Rely On.” For job seekers, Garcia points to the many advantages of federal work:
- “Generous benefits, solid pay, and relative job security — a combination that is challenging to find in the private sector, even in the best of times.”
- The “widest selection of health-care plans of any U.S. employer.”
- “Liberal amounts of paid time off.”
- Very lucrative retirement benefits.
- Family-friendly policies such as “first priority and subsidies at a number of top-notch day-care facilities.”
- “Federal employees are paid relatively well . . . [and] practically guaranteed periodic within-grade pay raises.”
- Finally, “federal employees cannot be unceremoniously fired.” I’ve found that only about 1 in 5,000 federal civilian workers are fired each year due to poor performance.
Is the lack of firing a result of the superb quality of the federal workforce and superior management practices? Hardly. Garcia notes that the downside of working for Uncle Sam is that the government “has its fair share of bullies, sycophants and incompetents who pick on employees, display favoritism, mismanage operations and find creative ways to manipulate the rules to their advantage.” I’d guess more than its fair share. Since federal workers are rarely fired, the ranks of non-performing managers and workers grows over time, contributing to the bureaucratic ineptitude we are all familiar with in the federal government.
To improve workforce efficiency, I’ve suggested privatizing as many federal activities as possible, include postal services, air traffic control, and passenger rail. To cut costs, I’ve suggested a federal wage freeze and a cut in federal benefits as part of a plan to reduce federal budget deficits.
For more from Lily Garcia, see here. For more from me, see here.
The White House as Animal Farm
As George Orwell’s Animal Farm closes, the revolutionary pigs have been transformed into oppressive humans. It took some time to occur on the Animal Farm. It’s taken just a few months in the Obama White House.
President Barack Obama is morphing into George W. Bush, as administration attorneys repeatedly adopt the executive-authority and national-security rationales that their Republican predecessors preferred.
In courtroom battles and freedom-of-information fights from Washington, D.C., to California, Obama’s legal arguments repeatedly mirror Bush’s: White House turf is to be protected, secrets must be retained and dire warnings are wielded as weapons.
“It’s putting up a veritable wall around the White House, and it’s so at odds with Obama’s campaign commitment to more open government,” said Anne Weismann, chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a legal watchdog group.
Certainly, some differences exist.
The Obama administration, for instance, has released documents on global warming from the Council on Environmental Quality that the Bush administration sought to suppress. Some questions, such as access to White House visitor logs, remain a work in progress.
On policies that are at the heart of presidential power and prerogatives, however, this administration’s legal arguments have blended into the other. The persistence can reflect everything from institutional momentum and a quest for continuity to the clout of career employees.
“There is no question that there are (durable) cultures and mindsets in agencies,” Weismann acknowledged.
Conservatives once opposed executive aggrandizement. Then with George W. Bush in office, they embraced the idea of the presidency as a kind of elective monarchy. With President Barack Obama now pushing the executive power grab, will conservatives rediscover their inner-Constitution and again join the barricades for liberty?
New Technology Charts Old Repression
The fact that North Korea is a monstrous tyranny is well-known. Google Earth is helping map that tyranny in extraordinary detail, from the opulent palaces of the elite to the horrid labor camps for the victims.
US researchers are using the internet to reveal what life is really like behind the closed borders of the world’s last Stalinist dictatorship
The most comprehensive picture of what goes on inside the secret state of North Korea has emerged from an innovative US project. The location of extraordinary palaces, labour camps and the mass graves of famine victims have all been identified. The online operation that has penetrated the world’s last remaining iron curtain is called North Korea Uncovered. Founded by Curtis Melvin, a postgraduate student at George Mason University, Virginia, it uses Google Earth, photographs, academic and specialist reports and a global network of contributors who have visited or studied the country. Mr Melvin says the collaborative project is an example of “democratised intelligence”. He is the first to emphasise that the picture is far from complete, but it is, until the country opens up, the best we have.
Palaces
The palatial residences of the political elite are easy to identify as they are in sharp contrast to the majority of housing in the deeply impoverished state. Though details about many palaces’ names, occupants and uses are hard to verify, it is known that such buildings are the exclusive domain of Kim Jong-Il, his family and his top political aides. Kim Jong-Il is believed to have between 10 and 17 palaces, many of which have been spotted on Google Earth:
1) Mansion complex near Pyongyang
This may be Kim Jong-Il’s main residence. His father lived here surrounded by the huge, ornate gardens and carefully designed network of lakes. Tree-lined paths lead to a swimming pool with a huge water slide, and next to the complex there is a full-size racetrack with a viewing stand and arena. There is a cluster of other large houses around the mansion, forming an enclosed, elite community. It appears to be reached via an underground station on a private railway which branches off from the main line.
The new technology is creating a new variant to the old saying: you can run, but you can’t hide. Tyrants can run their countries but they can’t hide their abuses.
We still have yet to figure out how to toss thugs like Kim Jong-il into history’s trashcan. But better understanding their crimes is an important part of the process.
A Tree Grows in Washington
The front-page of the Washington Post’s latest Outlook section features a review of James Tooley’s wonderful book The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves. From the review:
The officials Tooley encountered in his travels often denied the existence (much less the superiority) of private schools for low-income children. “There are no private schools for the poor,” a bureaucrat in China’s Gansu province told Tooley, “because the People’s Republic has provided all the poor with public schools. So what you propose to research does not only not exist, it is also a logical impossibility.”
Undeterred, Tooley spent years surveying private schools across the developing world. He found that, on average, they had smaller class sizes, higher test scores and more motivated teachers, all while spending less than public schools…. Tooley blasts development experts for recognizing the problems with public education and still insisting that more investment in public schools is the way to go. “Why wasn’t anyone else thinking that private schools might be part of a quicker, easier, more effective solution?” he asks.
… Tooley, meanwhile, with a Rough Guide in one pocket and an endless supply of exclamation points in the other, drowns readers in local color, detailing every “bright-eyed” school child and every “thin drifting smog” above a shantytown.
Still, Tooley’s passion comes off as genuine.
The UN and Human Rights: Never Shall the Twain Meet
The U.S. has rejoined the Human Rights Council, expressing hopes for positive cooperation in the future. Reports the Associated Press:
The United States joined the U.N. Human Rights Council on Friday, a body widely criticized for failing to confront abuses around the world and for acting primarily to condemn Israel, one of Washington’s closest allies.
U.S. officials pledged to work constructively in the 47-member council, which has frequently been hampered by ideological differences between rich and poor countries.
“The United States assumes its seat on the council with gratitude, with humility, and in the spirit of cooperation,” said Mark C. Storella, who is for the moment the top diplomat at the U.S. Mission to U.N. organizations in Geneva.
The decision in May to seek a seat on the Geneva-based body after three years of giving it the cold shoulder represented a major shift in line with President Barack Obama’s aim of showing that “a new era of engagement has begun.”
Council members, U.N. officials and independent pressure groups applauded the move as a sign the only remaining superpower is prepared to debate human rights with the rest of the world.
Alas, it’s a forlorn hope. The Council is dominated by human rights abusers and their enablers. The recent case of Cuba, as Cato’s Juan Carlos Hidalgo pointed out, is instructive.
I wrote up the story for American Spectator online. The debate over Cuba’s record was particularly revealing:
Pakistan wished Cuba well in realizing “all human rights for all citizens.” Venezuela (you don’t have to be a member to comment) lauded “the iron will” of Cuba’s government. Russia said, “Cuba had taken a serious and responsible approach.” Uzbekistan “stressed Cuba’s work in the promotion of human rights.” China declared that “Cuba had made important contributions to the international human rights cause.” Egypt opined that “Cuba’s efforts were commendable.” And so it went.
Why should American taxpayers pay for such a farce? Not only is it a waste of money, but it sets back the cause of human rights. In general, the Obama administration’s emphasis on engagement is appropriate. In this case, however, “engagement” is a mistake.
Bad News For North Korea’s Dear Leader?
It’s hard to know what to believe about the misnamed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. But reports are circulating that North Korean officials are attempting to purchase medical equipment for treating “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-il. That in turn suggests that his condition might be worsening.
A South Korean newspaper has said the health of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il is rapidly worsening and Pyongyang is trying to import expensive medical equipment through China.
The North is also seeking to bring in an emergency helicopter, the South’s largest-selling daily Chosun Ilbo reported on Friday.
Kim is widely believed to have suffered a stroke last August but there was no confirmation of the latest report. The National Intelligence Service declined to comment.
Chosun said Pyongyang’s Ponghwa Hospital is treating the 67-year-old.
It said officials of the hospital who are based in Beijing are trying to buy medical equipment which has been banned under an embargo imposed in 2006 to punish the North’s first nuclear test.
The UN resolution does not ban the import of medical equipment, only items which could be related to weapons programmes.
“Kim’s illness appears to be serious,” a North Korean source in Beijing told the newspaper.
The 67-year-old had a stroke last year and both his rotund figure and bouffant hair have thinned of late. The world, and especially North Korea, would be a better place without him, but no one knows what would follow.
Kim apparently has annointed his 26-year-old son to succeed him, but it will take years to switch the levers of power in favor of the “Cute Leader,” as he has been nicknamed by Westerners. (In North Korea he apparently is being referred to as “Brilliant Comrade.”)
More likely would be a collective leadership, perhaps led by Kim’s brother-in-law, with increased influence for the military. That would probably make a negotiated settlement eliminating the North’s nuclear program even less likely. But no one really knows.
We can only look forward to the day when this humanitarian horror of a country disappears and North Koreans are allowed to again live as normal human beings.
Exciting! But Not True . . .
The Center for a New American Security is hosting an event on cybersecurity next week. Some fear-mongering in the text of the invite caught my eye:
[A] cyberattack on the United States’ telecommunications, electrical grid, or banking system could pose as serious a threat to U.S. security as an attack carried out by conventional forces.
As a statement of theoretical extremes, it’s true: The inconvenience and modest harms posed by a successful crack of our communications or data infrastructure would be more serious than an invasion by the Duchy of Grand Fenwick. But as a serious assertion about real threats, an attack by conventional forces (however unlikely) would be entirely more serious than any “cyberattack.”
This is not meant to knock the Center for a New American Security specifically, or their event, but breathless overstatement has become boilerplate in the “cybersecurity” area, and it’s driving the United States toward imbalanced responses that are likely to sacrifice our wealth, progress, and privacy.
Who Said “No Comment”?
In this morning’s Washington Post, former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz has some advice for the Obama administration regarding the protests in Iran:
[T]he reform the Iranian demonstrators seek is something that we should be supporting. In such a situation, the United States does not have a “no comment” option. Coming from America, silence is itself a comment — a comment in support of those holding power and against those protesting the status quo.
I just did a quick search on www.WhiteHouse.gov, and I did not find the words “no comment” as it pertains to the Iranian elections. I did, however, find two statements on the protests by President Obama:
- Speaking to reporters following a meeting with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on June 15th, President Obama said:
I am deeply troubled by the violence that I’ve been seeing on television. I think that the democratic process — free speech, the ability of people to peacefully dissent — all those are universal values and need to be respected. And whenever I see violence perpetrated on people who are peacefully dissenting, and whenever the American people see that, I think they’re, rightfully, troubled.
and
I think it would be wrong for me to be silent about what we’ve seen on the television over the last few days. And what I would say to those people who put so much hope and energy and optimism into the political process, I would say to them that the world is watching and inspired by their participation…
and
[P]articularly to the youth of Iran, I want them to know that we in the United States do not want to make any decisions for the Iranians, but we do believe that the Iranian people and their voices should be heard and respected.
- The following day, the president hosted South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak. Despite the fact that they had a number of very urgent topics to discuss, President Obama took time to state that while it was “not productive, given the history of U.S.-Iranian relations,” for the U.S. president to be “meddling in Iranian elections,” he wished to repeat his remarks from the previous day:
[W]hen I see violence directed at peaceful protestors, when I see peaceful dissent being suppressed, wherever that takes place, it is of concern to me and it’s of concern to the American people. That is not how governments should interact with their people.
and
I do believe that something has happened in Iran where there is a questioning of the kinds of antagonistic postures towards the international community that have taken place in the past, and that there are people who want to see greater openness and greater debate and want to see greater democracy. How that plays out over the next several days and several weeks is something ultimately for the Iranian people to decide. But I stand strongly with the universal principle that people’s voices should be heard and not suppressed.
So, President Obama has not been silent, and he has never said “no comment.”
The Biggest Leeches Always Live
By proposing to eliminate the Federal Family Education Loan Program, President Obama has raised a pretty big ruckus in the relatively staid world of higher education policy. For the uninitiated, FFELP uses taxpayer dollars to essentially guarantee profits to participating financial institutions, and to keep student loans cheap and abundant.
Since neither corporate welfare nor rampant tuition inflation are really good things, getting rid of this beast would be a welcome move. Unfortunately, the president wants to replace FFELP with direct-from-Washington lending and to plow the savings into Pell Grants, so there’ll be no savings for taxpayers and probably very little beneficial effect on college prices.
As I wrote on NewMajority.com in May, no one should expect big lenders to get kicked off the federal gravy train:
[T]he Obama administration is saying they’d keep private companies as servicers of loans to maintain quality customer service. Of course, this could very well be worse than the status quo: It will likely keep at least the biggest current lenders (read: Sallie Mae) at the political trough, but Washington will be THE lender for all students.
Right I was! Or, at least, signs of my prescience keep getting brighter: Despite Obama promising to go to war against an ”army” of lenders’ lobbyists, the U.S. Department of Education just awarded Sallie Mae and three other big lenders lucrative contracts to service federal loans. So while smaller leeches could very well be removed from their supply of taxpayer blood, the biggest will keep on sucking!
Turning Transportation Funding Upside-Down
House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chair James Oberstar (D-MN) has released more than 100 pages of documents describing how he wants to run federal transportation programs over the next six years. He proposes to spend $500 billion on highways and transit, which is a huge increase over the $338 billion authorized for the last six years.
Congress authorizes federal transportation spending in six-year cycles. In 1956, when Congress created the Interstate Highway System, it dedicated gas taxes and other highway user fees exclusively to highways. But in the 1982 reauthorization, it began diverting a small amount of gas taxes to transit.
Today, about 20 percent of the federal gas taxes you pay go to subsidize transit, while the other 80 percent supposedly go for highways — though much of that is wasted in planning and earmarks. Nationally, highway subsidies — mostly at the local level — average about a penny per passenger mile, while transit subsidies — much from your federal gas tax — average more than 60 cents per passenger mile.
Since 1982, transit has received hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies from highway users. Yet in 2008 — supposedly a boom year for transit because of high gas prices — per-capita transit ridership was lower than it was in 1990, though higher than in 2000.
Oberstar considers this to be a great success. Building on that “success,” he effectively wants to turn the formula around: 20 percent for highways and 80 percent for transit. The executive summary of his plan supposedly “provides $337.4 billion for highways.” But, in fact, only $100 billion of this is dedicated to highways; most of the rest is in “flexible funds” that states and cities can spend on either highways or transit. Nearly $100 billion goes for transit, and $50 billion goes for high-speed rail. The remaining $12.4 billion goes for safety programs.
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