Terrorism is Not the Greatest Threat to Liberty

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. -James Madison, fourth US president, known as "Father of the Constitution" for drafting the that document and authoring the Bill of Rights.

When the Bush administration declared a "Global War on Terror," Madison's words should've echoed from every corner of Washington and from every voice in the media. If there was ever a case of Madison's "continual warfare," the GWoT was it. Other Presidents had declared wars on concepts -- a war on crime, war on poverty, war on drugs, etc. -- and those wars did not go (or have not gone) well. When the goal is the complete eradication of a problem, failure becomes extremely easy. The goal should always be to mitigate the problem to as close to nonexistence as reality will allow. This is not the definition of war.

Of course, these other "wars" launched by other presidents were mostly metaphorical. They weren't actually launching a war, but announcing an increased focus on a problem and an increased effort to eliminate it. Bush's War on Terror was quite different. He meant it as a literal war. "Americans are asking, how will we fight and win this war?" Bush explained to a joint session of congress. "We will direct every resource at our command, every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war, to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network."

This wasn't "war" as a rhetorical device, this was actual, people-are-going-to-die war.

And Madison's warning has proven true through every stage of this thing. The forces of liberty don't torture, they don't build concentration camps. The debt and deficits created by this War on Terror have been tremendous and bog us down to this day. To make things worse, Bush decided to cut taxes during a time of increased wartime spending -- an unprecedented and tremendously irresponsible act of fiscal malpractice.

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Reality-Based Economics

It's obviously largely coincidental, but it seems like reality is trying to punctuate a point Bill Clinton made last night -- that Democratic presidents vastly outperform Republicans in terms of job creation. "Since 1961, for 52 years now, the Republicans have held the White House 28 years, the Democrats 24," Clinton said. "In those 52 years, our private economy has produced 66 million private-sector jobs. So what's the jobs score? Republicans 24 million, Democrats 42 [million]." PolitiFact rates the statement as true.

And today, the Department of Labor reports that "First-time claims for state unemployment benefits declined by the largest amount in more than a month in the latest week."

"The number of initial claims in the week ending Sept. 1 fell 12,000 to 365,000," MarketWatch reports. "The consensus forecast of Wall Street economists was for claims to fall a slight 1,000 to 373,000."

Steve Benen explains, "In terms of metrics, when jobless claims fall below the 400,000 threshold, it's considered evidence of an improving jobs landscape, and when the number drops below 370,000, it suggests jobs are being created rather quickly. We've only managed to dip below the 370,000 threshold seven times in the last 22 weeks, but the more encouraging news is that we've been below 370,000 in six of the last nine weeks."

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Corporate Parasites and the Failure of 'Trickle Down Economics'

If you want one clear message coming from the Occupy Wall Street crowd and the 99-percenters, you can boil all they're saying down into one argument; Reaganomics has failed and should die. After decades of bending over backwards to make sure that helped the wealthy become as wealthy as humanly possible, we see no real positive results. "Trickle down" economics is really the economics of scavenging -- if the wealthy have a big feast, they'll leave a lot of crumbs. And, as we shift the role of government away from helping people to helping business, even the holes left by cutting spending benefit corporations. Remember that after Bill Clinton ended Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the only real positive impact the reforms had were for the financial industry. A whole new market opened up and payday loan outfits sprouted up all over the nation like mushrooms, charging usurious rates to people with nowhere else to go. And of course, poverty is at an all-time high.

If this is a successful economic model, I think I'd prefer the old "failures" of New Deal liberals, thanks.

Still, all that wealth is sitting up there, just waiting to trickle down. We've sent pots and pots of money up the economic ladder all these years with pretty much nothing to show for it -- except this:


Chart courtesy of Mother Jones

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Welfare Reform's Failure

In 1996, Bill Clinton signed a bill ending Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and replaced it with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). "Today, we are ending welfare as we know it," Clinton said. "But I hope this day will be remembered not for what it ended, but for what it began."

What this began was a change in the way the United States looked at welfare and the poor. Recipients were capped at five years in the program. After that, you couldn't collect anymore benefits, no matter what your situation. There was a "welfare to work" requirement, which put people into job training programs -- regardless of what education they already had. TANF would be funded through block grants, which states would administer and spend as they saw fit.

What had happened was that Clinton caved to pressure created by decades of Republican propaganda. Welfare recipients were lazy, Republicans said, they had kids just to get benefits, they made a lifestyle of AFDC. When it came to slinging BS about welfare and the poor, then-presidential candidate Ronald Reagan set the standard in his stump speech:

There’s a woman in Chicago. She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veterans benefits on four nonexisting deceased husbands. And she’s collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000.

Reagan called this woman a "welfare queen" and claimed she -- along with many like her -- were draining America's resources at public expense. Of course, it wasn't true. There was no woman in Chicago. It was all lies.





But this became the public perception of the AFDC recipient. At the time that Clinton signed Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, ending AFDC, researchers with Public Eye ran the numbers and found that just about everything that people had been told about welfare recipients was wrong; the average recipient was in the program for less than a year, had statistically fewer children than the rest of the population, and the vast majority of the children of welfare recipients weren't becoming recipients themselves. What the right had called a "culture of dependency" was their own invention -- it didn't actually exist. Republicans had simply found a new scapegoat to attack and, cowardly as they always are, the group they chose to attack for political gain was relatively powerless. A problem was invented, complete with a fix -- end AFDC.

Later, in looking for signs of success to the new program, people were hard-pressed to find any. Payday loan and rent-to-own stores, both of which charge usurious interest rates for short-term loans, sprung up all over the nation like mushrooms. Despite the rhetoric predicting that forcing people off AFDC would decrease poverty, there was no decrease. In fact, it increased. But this was an ideology-based program, not a reality-based program. No matter how badly it failed, it had to be portrayed as a great success.

"How We Ended Welfare, Together," Bill Clinton, New York Times, 2006:

In the past decade, welfare rolls have dropped substantially, from 12.2 million in 1996 to 4.5 million today. At the same time, caseloads declined by 54 percent. Sixty percent of mothers who left welfare found work, far surpassing predictions of experts. Through the Welfare to Work Partnership, which my administration started to speed the transition to employment, more than 20,000 businesses hired 1.1 million former welfare recipients. Welfare reform has proved a great success, and I am grateful to the Democrats and Republicans who had the courage to work together to take bold action.

So, a program that required states to kick people off welfare rolls succeeded in reducing welfare rolls. Success! This is like saying a law aimed at clearing streets for ambulances succeeded because it resulted in a lot of traffic tickets. If 60% of mothers leaving TANF found work, what happened to the 40% who didn't? Are we supposed to forget about those families?

"Clinton masterfully blurred [reducing welfare rolls with reducing poverty] in a recent New York Times opinion column, as did most others on the 10th anniversary of the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, writing as if getting mothers and their children off the welfare rolls is the same as getting them out of poverty," wrote Robert Sheer for The Nation. "In the absence of any evidence that poverty is tamed, he celebrates a 'bipartisan' victory, which was good for his image but not necessarily for those it claimed to help."

It's only now that the economy's in the tank that the real consequence of welfare reform is being seen. The New York Times reports that, as the economy sinks, welfare aid isn't growing.

Despite soaring unemployment and the worst economic crisis in decades, 18 states cut their welfare rolls last year, and nationally the number of people receiving cash assistance remained at or near the lowest in more than 40 years.

The trends, based on an analysis of new state data collected by the New York Times, raise questions about how well a revamped welfare system with great state discretion is responding to growing hardships.

Michigan cut its welfare rolls 13 percent, though it was one of two states whose October unemployment rate topped 9 percent. Rhode Island, the other, had the nation’s largest welfare decline, 17 percent.

"Of the 12 states where joblessness grew most rapidly, eight reduced or kept constant the number of people receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the main cash welfare program for families with children," we're told. "Nationally, for the 12 months ending October 2008, the rolls inched up a fraction of 1 percent."

The problem? TANF moved the responsibility for dealing with poverty from the feds to the states. And the states are broke. TANF isn't bringing in new recipients because the states can't afford to pay any more. In fact, as the economy continues to slide and state budgets become more and more pinched, they're cutting assistance.

What are the odds that a program that was based on phony assumptions and political scapegoating would fail so badly? As any critic could've told you at the time Clinton signed it into existence, pretty damned good. Clinton claimed the program would be tweaked as time went on, that obvious problems with the bill he signed would later be fixed. Instead, the bill was signed and forgotten.

"What crystal ball does he have that he knows he can fix it," said Deborah Weinstein, an official at the Children's Defense Fund, at the time. "What powerful constituency would be treated that way? If he knew there were problems, why did he sign it?"

To win an election, that's why. It was Clinton's "triangulation" strategy of taking Republican issues away from them by solving them -- or pretending to solve them -- himself. Welfare reform would've been a big issue in 1996, but Clinton knocked that stool out from under Bob Dole. The consequences of this political maneuver continue to reverberate today. The New York Times again:

“There is ample reason to be concerned here,” said Ron Haskins, a former Republican Congressional aide who helped write the 1996 law overhauling the welfare system. “The overall structure is not working the way it was designed to work. We would expect, just on the face it, that when a deep recession happens, people could go back on welfare.”

“When we started this, Democratic and Republican governors alike said, ‘We know what’s best for our state; we’re not going to let people starve,’ ” said Mr. Haskins, who is now a researcher at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “And now that the chips are down, and unemployment is going up, most states are not doing enough to help families get back on the rolls.”

In fact, it's probably hurting our economy not to increase welfare rolls at this time. Retail sales are down and the best way to get people to spend money is to get money to people who absolutely need it; these are the only people who are guaranteed to spend. This is the reasoning behind extending unemployment benefits.

But we can't, because we've given up control of one of our economic tools. The states can't use it, because they can't afford to, and the feds can't use it, because they don't have it anymore.

The moral of this story is beware Democrats trying to appease Republicans. When you pass laws that don't have a rational basis and instead are based in ideology, demagoguery, and false information, the results can't possibly be good. Welfare reform, widely claimed as a success story, is a failure. It failed because it had no logical or factual basis, only emotional appeal.

That failure should've been as obvious in 1996 as it is today.

-Wisco

A Ban in Search of a Reason for Being

In March 2007, Stephen Benjamin was discharged from the Navy. An Arabic language translator, Benjamin fell prey to Bill Clinton's absurd 1993 compromise policy of "don't ask, don't tell." Under that rule, gays are allowed to serve in the military, but only so long as it's a big secret. If you tell anyone about your sexual orientation, for any reason, you're out. In Benjamin's case, it was text messages -- intercepted by military censors -- that made it clear that he and a former roommate stationed in Iraq were gay. They were fired.

"My supervisors did not want to lose me," he wrote in the New York Times in June of that same year. "Most of my peers knew I was gay, and that didn’t bother them. I was always accepted as a member of the team. And my experience was not anomalous: polls of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan show an overwhelming majority are comfortable with gays. Many were aware of at least one gay person in their unit and had no problem with it."

Despite a "desperate shortage of linguists," the Navy thought it was more important that intercepted intelligence pile up untranslated than to let some gay guy translate them. This is supposed to serve our national interests, because allowing gays to serve would somehow harm "unit cohesion." Seems to me that breaking up units to preserve their "cohesion" is astonishingly ludicrous -- it's like arguing you have to get divorced to save your marriage.





So it's hard to act surprised when you learn it's been a disaster. A 2006 study by the University of California on the effectiveness of "don't ask, don't tell" found it didn't really do much except fire good people and cost big ol' pile of money. And, for the purpose of this post, we'll define "big ol' pile of money" as $363.8 million in the less than ten years it had been since it was instituted. This was a fuller accounting of the entire cost than a previous study by the Government Accountability Office, which found that "the federal government spent at least $95.4 million to recruit and $95.1 million to train replacements" between 1994 and 2003 to make up for the personnel lost under the policy. Some, like Benjamin, have proved hard to replace. You can't really train people to speak a language without a common root to your own. Learning Arabic -- like Chinese or Hindi -- takes the average English speaker about a decade to reach fluency. Seems to me we don't have that kind of time. Especially when you consider that there would be a very real danger of these recruits deciding not to re-enlist during this time.

And many of the replacements we're spending so much to train and recruit aren't anywhere near as good as the people we've fired. The latest Harper's Index tells us that the Bush administration has "loosened" 9 restrictions on Army recruits since 2003, allowing 245% more felons to be recruited between 2004 and 2007. Good thing they aren't gay, though. You can sure trust a felon with a fully automatic rifle more than you can a gay, right?

Some politicians see the stupidity, absurdity, and just plain idiocy of the policy of "don't ask, don't tell."

Barack Obama, interviewed by The Advocate:

[I]think there’s increasing recognition within the Armed Forces that ["don't ask, don't tell"] is a counterproductive strategy -- ya know, we’re spending large sums of money to kick highly qualified gays or lesbians out of our military, some of whom possess specialties like Arab-language capabilities that we desperately need. That doesn’t make us more safe, and what I want are members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who are making decisions based on what strengthens our military and what is going to make us safer, not ideology.

Toward that end, Obama has said he'd work to repeal "don't ask, don't tell" within his first term. Yet, despite every logical reason why it should be done immediately, some are warning that we shouldn't get our hopes up. Yes, it's stupid. Yes, it's discriminatory. Yes, it's a waste of money that puts America's defense at risk no real reason and without benefit.

But it's not all that important.

Roll Call, via Queerty:

Key Democrats — even openly gay lawmakers — are quietly conceding to letting another two years go by before trying to overturn "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," the controversial 1993 law banning openly gay people from serving in the military. Most fear that moving too quickly on such a divisive issue could backfire, and most would rather tread lightly, at least in the early months of President-elect Barack Obama's administration.

[...]

Democratic lawmakers regularly beg off questions about the contentious policy, arguing that other issues are far more important — such as winding down the war in Iraq or bolstering the economy. They also remember the political uproar when then-President Bill Clinton used the beginning of his presidency to try to overturn an outright ban on gays serving in the military. That effort tied his administration in knots in his first months in office, and Democrats fear a repeat performance.

But that "political uproar" was fifteen years ago. Why assume that everyone's stayed crazy? In July, a Washington Post-ABC News poll showed that three out of four people believed that gays should be able to serve openly in the military. When "don't ask, don't tell" was instituted in 1993, that number was 44%. The political landscape doesn't look anything like it did back then. In fact, even a majority of Republican voters disagree with the ban, with 64% saying it's a bad idea. I really don't see how caution is called for here; this seems safe as Nerf. "Don't ask, don't tell" is almost literally as unpopular as George W. Bush. Are they waiting for 100%?

After the loss of Proposition 8 in California, after choosing the awful and divisive Rick Warren to bless his first term, Obama needs to recognize that gays not only deserve a win, but need one. But the new Democratic-led congress seems committed to being just as lousy and useless as the last Democratic-led congress. Presidential leadership on the issue is going to be called for, since the reliably cowardly congressional leadership seems to want to brush the issue under the rug and hope everyone forgets about it.

There is no good reason to avoid dealing with the ban. It serves no legitimate purpose, it hurts our military readiness, it's expensive, it's discriminatory, it's backwards, and I could make a real good argument that it harms our culture by giving homophobia an institutional status. And, on top of everything else, getting rid of it is a gimme.

Yes, getting out of Iraq is extremely important. Yes, the economy should be a priority. During the election, Barack Obama said he could walk and chew gum at the same time, in response to John McCain's suggestion that the presidential campaign be suspended so they could deal with the market crash. I haven't seen any evidence that that's stopped being true. Barack Obama can still walk and chew gum; he can deal with these other issues while also dealing with this no-risk political task. In that big long list of difficult problems facing our nation, "don't ask, don't tell" isn't on it. It's a problem, but fixing it doesn't seem all that difficult.

Difficult is reading more stories like Stephen Benjamin's and knowing it puts our country at risk for no real reason.

-Wisco