Lions and Lambs; or, My How Times Have Changed

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Wow. I mean, just wow. It’s not exactly the lamb lying down with the lion, but still . . . .

Everyone knows that the Nazis set out to eliminate the Jews from Europe, and that at the Wannsee Conference they decided, in great formality, that the “final solution to the Jewish problem in Europe” entailed the industrialized slaughter of them all. What sometimes gets a bit lost in that pile of 6,000,000 corpses is the fact that the Jews were not the only minority ethnic group which the Germans decided to rid Europe of along the way. Foremost among those were what English-speakers know as “Gypsies,” and which the Europeans commonly know by their two principal sub-groups: the Roma and the Sinti. 

Even more so than the Jews, the Gypsies were perennially the outsiders wherever they lived. They eschewed fixed abodes, moving forever back and forth, as opportunity or oppression pulled or pushed them. With no places of regular employment, no established trades, no towns, no shtetls, no ghettos, no financial relationships to wherever they happened to be encamped, they had limited contact with the societies among whom they moved. In truth they weren’t always the best of neighbors, earning a reputation for having more than a little difficulty with the intricacies of meum and tuum. They were spread over most of Europe (James Herriot describes in one of his books treating a horse for a family of Gypsies in north Yorkshire in the 1930s) but the Roma were principally concentrated in the southeast, in Bulgaria and Romania, with the Sinti concentrated in the central areas, mostly Germany and Austria. 

According to Wikipedia, anywhere up to 1,500,000 Gypsies were killed off during the war, frequently being shot on sight by the Einsatzgruppen. Their exact status took some determining; it wasn’t until later on that the Nazis decided that they too needed to be slaughtered; Eichmann plumped for resolving the Gypsy “problem” contemporaneously with (and in identical fashion to) the Jewish “problem.” Eventually the determination was made that the Gypsies were of so different a sort of human that they were dispensable. Were it not so grim and so real, and were it not for the fact that these deliberations in fact resulted in the murders of thousands upon thousands of real live people, one could almost chuckle at the notion of some pettifogging German bureaucrat screwing up his brow and laboring mightily to decide just what sort of being a Gypsy was. The mental image has something of the farcical element of Monty Python to it . . . except for the fact that it wasn’t farce at all, but rather in deadly earnest. 

Again, according to Wikipedia, there now live several million Gypsies of the various groups, concentrated mostly in their traditional host countries. They remain largely outsiders there, forever among the poorest, with the highest rates of all manner of social pathologies, and exciting the same antipathies they always have. Of course, the communist tyrannies of that part of Europe did their level best to destroy the traditional Gypsy nomadic life (it’s much harder to bugger around someone who’s perfectly fine packing up and living out of a horse-drawn wagon), herding them into concrete warrens of housing projects. They also subjected their populations to coerced sterilizations. With the fall of communism the money to provide/enforce a sedentary lifestyle for a people for whom a sedentary life is utterly foreign to their culture went away, but of course their traditional forms of existence had long since been disrupted, first by the war and its slaughters and then by 45 years of communist tyranny. And being outsiders they have found themselves once more convenient scapegoats in societies the fabric of which was itself rent and frayed, almost beyond recovery. 

As something of an aside, Americans – in fact Westerners in general – don’t seem to realize just how fragile, how frangible, their civil existence actually is. The ability to have a house full of relatively nice stuff, out in full view through windows over which no bars are installed, and through which any reasonably enterprising burglar could smash a brick, climb in, and annihilate in a matter of an hour or two the accumulated tangible wealth of decades of toil, but not having to entertain an expectation that such will happen if vigilance is relaxed for a moment, is a precious gift. We forget what so easily happens when the bonds of family, culture, and religion are forcibly sundered by organized violence.  So we don’t always understand well what happened in Eastern Europe from 1914 through 1990, and how the aftershocks of those awful decades continue to crumble, undermine, and sweep away human dignity. 

Now, what’s left of the societies where the Roma have lived for centuries are slowly collapsing into poverty and chaos. What is there left for the Roma in those places? The worse things get there, the more likely becomes renewed repression. They’re not ethnically kin to their host societies and needn’t expect any successful degree of assimilation. The degree of prosperity and security – modest as it was, and however precarious in comparison to Western Europe – that enabled them to support their traditional existence is dead nearly these 70 years. 

But there remains one place in Europe where there is relative prosperity, where there is relative stability, where there is money to be had, in some cases for the asking: Germany. And so, as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports, thousands upon thousands of Roma (and other desperately poor from that area of Europe) are coming to the land that within living memory sent the Einsatzgruppen their way. The Germans are begging the source countries please to do more to integrate them into their own societies so they won’t keep coming and draining the coffers. That’s cute, really: We want you to assimilate these people we don’t want to assimilate. The Germans are even willing to use EU funds to promote the integration of the Roma into their “home” populations (have to love the notion that they think it’s so important that they’re willing to spend someone else’s money to do the trick). 

But you have to savor the irony of a people flooding to the country that made a good start at slaughtering them.  Who would have thought it, in May, 1945?

And There You Have it, in One Line

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Ever since John McCain started running for president, well over twelve years ago (and to be up-front, I voted for McCain in the 2000 primary; I resented Geo. W. Bush’s coronation by party insiders as The Nominee), the knock on him has been that he is at bottom part of the systemic problem and not part of the solution.  By that I mean that he’s seen as someone who’s willing to abandon a position in order to be seen as Doing Something, even when that Something will foreseeably have catastrophic consequences over the long term.  He’s someone for whom the expression “gridlock” is the most damning accusation that can hurled within the universe of Congress.  He’s someone for whom “moving forward” is a cardinal virtue, even when “moving forward” turns out to be, and can be seen to be, “moving forward downstream towards the cataract.”  He’s seen as someone who craves praise as being “bi-partisan” in spirit, praise doled out by an information industry that is more or less openly a cheerleading section for the left wing of the opposite party.

Many years ago, my mother, a good Midwestern German girl, observed to me that after a point you have the reputation you earn.  Just as stereotypes do not arise in a vacuum, unless a person is a recluse or pathologically withdrawn, there is going to be a core of truth at the center of his reputation.  For a public person, particularly a person who’s been public at high levels and for decades, the assumption of underlying reality not being all that far away from reputation is about as ironclad reliable as anything is likely to be.

That McCain has managed to earn the reputation he has for that sort of behavior at the same time that he has also earned a reputation as one of the more cantankerous senators around strikes one at first blush as incongruous.  At least it does until one remembers his background.  He’s the first eldest son for three generations in his family not to have risen to fleet-level command.  His grandfather, John S. “Slew” McCain, was one of our more renowned carrier admirals, so highly regarded that, having died almost exactly at the moment of victory in 1945, he was promoted to a full, four-star admiral posthumously.  His father wore four stars as commander of the Pacific Fleet while John III languished in a Hanoi prison for years on end, enduring tortures which leave his body shattered to this day.  [Aside:  I still feel like puking when I contemplate that America chose, over McCain, a fellow whose political mentor was and remains an unrepentant domestic terrorist, one who met with the people who were smashing McCain’s teeth out, wrenching his shoulders out of the sockets, and beating him senseless.  This mentor is, by the way, one of the very few associates from his past whom Dear Leader has pointedly never disavowed.  And we elected that piece of dripping scum, twice now.]  But you see the navy cultivates bad tempers like certain other sub-cultures do fashion statements such as zoot suits, bling, or the emaciated Kate Moss look.  A daughter of Fleet Admiral King once allowed that her father, a man whom FDR described as “shaving with a blow torch,” was the most even-tempered man in the navy, “always in a rage.”

Over the years I’ve come to understand that the most critical attribute in a leader, public or private, is character.  It trumps all.  It’s more indispensable than intelligence, than “experience,” than competence, than connections.  With a fundamentally sound character all other deficiencies can be supplied; with a fundamentally corrupt nature — such as enjoyed by Dear Leader and his cronies — no other attributes will serve any purpose other than furthering that essential corruption.  It is the same thought which Churchill alluded to in his peroration to his speech upon the French defeat in 1940.  “But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.'”  What makes the doings of Dear Leader and his cronies so utterly repulsive is that in their relentless efforts to destroy the position and power of the United States, in their tender solicitude for every group of bloodthirsty tyrants bent on imposing the brutality of the Religion of Peace across the face of the globe, they are perverting the natural gifts which a generous God gave them to use for man’s betterment.  Undoubted abilities which might with great, astounding, even, success be harnessed to the cause of human liberty are instead made the servants of corruption, oppression, tyranny, violence, and the negation of the moral agency which alone separates man from the beasts of the forest.

I have the highest respect for John McCain’s fundamental character.  He endured, without flinching, without selling out, a degree of physical and mental suffering that must — blessedly, by the way — remain incomprehensible to those of us who never experienced it.  To read Adm. Stockdale’s book or Alexander Dolgun’s is to see that there will forever remain a gulf between the survivors of such horrors — such as McCain — and the rest of us.  What must we look like to him?  What shadows in our moral make-up are immediately apparent to someone who looks across that gulf at us, yet remain hidden from those of us across whom those shadows fall?  What beams in our eyes does he see as we carp and bitch about the mote in his?

And yet.

On “Meet the Press,” reported here, we see both sides of McCain.  On the one hand, he calls Benghazi as it is: a “massive cover-up.”  When his host attempts to pooh-pooh McCain’s characterization, McCain offers to send him a detailed list of the material questions which, over five months later, still have not been answered by the administration which looked on — in real-time video feed — as an American ambassador and three others were slaughtered.  This is the McCain we like to see, the guy who won’t toe the line, the guy who was forever getting the snot beat out of him by his captors for exactly such behavior.  It’s why I voted for him.

And then McCain offers up that, while he thinks Chuck Hagel is “qualified” to be Secretary of Defense, and he doesn’t intend to vote for him, “But I don’t believe that we should hold up his nomination any further.”  What???  This isn’t a question of whether Hagel is “qualified” or not.  We’re not interviewing for some mid-level regional supervisor of making sure your local McDonald’s has sufficient hamburger buns on hand for the Memorial Day weekend.  This is the Secretary of Defense, who will be in charge of superintending the military’s ability to project America’s remaining power abroad in support of its interests and those of its allies.  And this particular nominee has a richly-documented history of antipathy towards the single United States ally in what is and will remain for the foreseeable future a highly critical area of the world . . . and a highly unstable and extremely violent one at that.  He has a documented history of statements and political positions taken in support of regimes which are confessedly and actively opposed to the United States, and which themselves support those groups which have sought us out to attack us.  Recall that as of September 11, 2001, we had invaded no country in the Middle East; we occupied no one’s territory; we had no presence there which was not by express invitation of the sovereign ruler of the soil on which our soldiers’ boots stood.  And still they came for us.  Chuck Hagel, for whatever reason, has taken sides with the regimes which support those folks.

So no, Sen. McCain, I’m not interested in whether Hagel is “not qualified” so much as I am in whether he is actively disqualified.  And the two statements are not at all logical or moral equivalents of each other.  The senate’s confirmation power does not exist for the purpose of imposing the senate’s own preferences upon a president.  It exists for precisely such situations as Chuck Hagel’s nomination.  Confirming this man to one of the key posts in the administration will send an unambiguous signal to those who hate us, to those who are pouring out vast amounts of wealth and blood to destroy us and our allies.  It will tell them not to lose hope, not to compromise, not to reconsider their positions.  Because with Chuck Hagel they’ve got another friend on the inside.  They’ve got someone to run interference for their biggest friend, the president himself.  It will also send an equally unambiguous signal to our few friends in that part of the world.  It will tell those within the Irans, the Afghanistans, the Saudi Arabias, the Lebanons, the North Koreas, that they are alone in their struggle to be something other than what their countries presently are.  They need expect no assistance, overt or otherwise, from the one country which might lend them a hand, even indirectly.  They may as well make their arrangements.

Recall what happened when in summer, 1939 the British dispatched — by ship, no less — Adm. Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax to Moscow.  He was sent by sea, taking days to arrive, and when he did he had no authority to enter into any sort of agreement.  This was a time at which events were developing by the day, and the set of tide was unmistakably towards a general war on the European continent within a matter of weeks or less.  The Poles, to whom Britain and France had unilaterally extended a guaranty against Germany, were adamant in their refusal to allow Soviet troops to cross their territory in the direction of Germany.  Britain and France refused to make their guaranty conditional on Polish cooperation with the Soviet Union.  Stalin, no fool, could see that the Western allies were broken reeds, fundamentally unserious about holding Hitler in check.  So he made his arrangements with Hitler, when Ribbentrop was sent with full plenipotentiary powers and by air.  In what respects, pray tell, will the calculus of our few potential friends in the Middle East differ from those of Stalin, with a Secretary of Defense Hagel installed in Washington?

But John McCain doesn’t think we should further delay voting on this man, knowing that a vote will proceed on purely party lines.  To prevent this man’s installation in power would require upsetting the comity of the Senate.  It wouldn’t be good form.  It would transgress upon the vaunted “civility” of that body.  That it would also remove the last vestige of a consequence from Dear Leader’s suppression of the truth of Benghazi, that it would prove once and for all that there is no dereliction of duty, no subverting of America, that the press and the administration cannot jointly paper over with a pall of silence, obfuscation, and outright lies — this does not matter to John McCain.  Or at least it does not matter enough to him that he is willing to act.  To speak?  Of course, his words are courage itself, and from a man who understands from the scars on his body the essence of courage. 

Sharp words are not enough, not any more, not in the struggle against someone who crows about doing things “the Chicago way.”  Once upon a time, when an ambassador handed a note to the foreign ministry to which accredited, that the consequences of this-that-or-the-other course of action being pursued by the minister’s government “could not be foretold,” that was taken as an explicit threat of war.  No more.  Saying that Chuck Hagel is “not qualified,” when in fact his appointment would be a spit in the face of every friend and ally we have, to say nothing of all the grieving widows and children of those who have died, or the faces of the maimed in mind or body, is monstrously insufficient.  Meekly to acquiesce in his appointment is an abdication of the power vested by the Constitution in the Senate precisely for the purpose of thwarting such abominations.

And there you have the knock on McCain, encapsulated and justified in one line.

What if Everything You Thought About Yourself is Wrong?

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So there is yet another book about the Watergate break-in, cover-up, and leak of same.  Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat, by Max Holland, hit the shelves last March.  In it he explores the intriguing question of the title:  Why does a high-level official — No. 2 at the FBI, in fact — set out to destroy a president?

I haven’t read the book, I’ll admit, but the premise of the book matches with what came out several years ago when Felt was finally outed as Deep Throat, Woodward’s and Bernstein’s anonymous source.  More to the point, it seems that Felt, so far from being some sort of quasi-mole for civil rights within the FBI, courageously sacrificing all to put a stop to a presidential administration gone rogue at the very highest levels, was actually an ambition-soaked bureaucrat looking to advance his own career and destroy those of his competitors.  In other words, just a human like everyone else.  The nasty monkey-shines he exposed — break-ins, unauthorized wiretaps, and the like — were in fact nothing more than what he’d personally green-lighted himself in other cases.  Destroying a president and grievously wounding the presidency itself was just collateral damage for Mark Felt.

 What interests me more than the question of why Felt did it is the little matter of how Woodward and Bernstein fit into Felt’s plans.  In plain English, they got used in an attempted palace coup.  Did they know they were being used?  It’s hard to think they wouldn’t have.  You can’t work as a reporter in Washington for any length of time and not understand that nothing at all is entirely what it seems.

Generations of would-be “journalists” have grown up since the 1970s, and for them W & B have been lodestars.  Everyone is looking for the next Watergate story, every source is to be the next Deep Throat.  The image of the crusading journalist bringing down not just the high and the mighty — by, say, exposing a corrupt paving contract down at the street department — but crashing the highest and the mightiest in the world, is part of the mental landscape which today’s journalists carry with them.  The Fourth Estate is to be the guardian of all our liberties, reining in the megalomaniacal entrenched power elites, and so forth and so on.  Those are the stars which today’s budding J-schoolers bring with them in their eyes.

What if that’s not how it is at all?  What if reporters willingly make themselves tools of power factions?  What if they’re nothing more morally exalted than the same tribe who set up a flagrantly partisan — and almost comically fact-divorced — press from the days of Jefferson’s war against Adams, or Jackson’s wars against his sundry opponents?  What if the “truth” they peddle is no more than what is deigned to be shared with them by the hand of the chess-master who is moving them about a board, his board?  What if, in other words, the press has become no more than rent-seekers, attempting to glean a living — and power and influence to go with it — from the chips that fall when the powerful clash? 

Yes, there was a “story” in what Mark Felt had to tell Woodward and Bernstein.  But it was a “story” that was, in all truth, about as penny-ante as they get.  A politician’s aides had a shadowy group of operatives try to get the dirt on his opponents.  They decided to accomplish this by breaking in to someone’s office and sifting through files.  Woo-hoo!!  And it’s not like the fruits of the break-in did or would have influenced the drubbing that Nixon administered to McGovern in 1972 in any event.  There was no way, unless Nixon had been caught with the live boy or dead girl of the proverbs, that we would ever have had a President McGovern.  Or to put it in context, Harry Truman (as related in David McCullough’s biography) was petrified that someone would insinuate a female into his presence and then a photographer would pop out from behind a potted plant to snap a picture to wreck Truman.  And in fact on at least one occasion related in the book it appears that such very nearly happened.  That was how politics was practiced at that level.  In other words, the Watergate break-in, and even the subsequent cover-up, just weren’t in and of themselves big stories.  They were made Big Stories in a collaborative effort by two reporters and an ambitious careerist, working together in the fertile soil of one of the most cordially despised politicians (even before he got caught up in it) in American history.

The fact is that dragging out into broad daylight what high-stakes politicians have doubtless been engaged in since time immemorial (it was scarcely precedent-setting when that boob went sifting through Sarah Palin’s garbage and rented a house looking over into the family’s back yard) has forever damaged the institution of the American presidency.  Everyone who has been hopelessly smitten with love must know that, as a purely physiological proposition, there are some things which the Adored must periodically attend to.  We don’t need, in other words, Jonathan Swift to remind us that Celia shits.  Woodward and Bernstein rubbed our collective noses in that fact, though, and they did it as the subservient creatures of Mark Felt.

 The recent devolution of the American press into a more-or-less open cheerleading section for a particular faction of a specific party is all of a piece with the history of Woodward, Bernstein, and Felt.  And it’s not just domestic coverage (or increasingly, non-coverage), either.  It’s things like CNN admitting — after the fact, of course — that it went soft on Saddam Hussein in order not to jeopardize its “access” to his murderous regime.  The present White House now demands review and approval authority for quotations.  And today’s press meekly grants it.  JournoList gets together behind the scenes and coordinates what will and will not be covered, and how the stories that are covered will be.  The modern news industry is quite simply thoroughly corrupt, whether out of ideological grounds or the simple desire for fame, wealth, and power.

Whenever the point is made of the corruption of the modern press, the Watergate Story is trotted out as the Reason We Need a Free Press.  That’s the narrative.  A couple of intrepid reporters stand athwart the path of the government juggernaut.  That’s why we need to await breathlessly the next Film at 11 from whatever talking head flickers across our screens.  That’s why we need to wade through the 75% of the NYT that’s advertising.  That’s why we ought not make up our minds until we’ve been told how to make them up.  Remember Watergate!

Except it turns out the narrative is bogus.

Buenos Aires on the Potomac

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Three data points, not directly related to each other, but all illuminative of the same movements and currents, and all betraying precisely the same cast of mind among the governing:

The Argentine government some time ago fired all the real economists who were tracking their country’s slide into chaos. Since then they’ve been diligently cooking the books in the form of, among other tricks, under-reporting the inflation that’s already hitting 25% by some estimates. Now what they’ve done is impose a price freeze on groceries. Other than emptying the grocery store shelves (everyone will rush to buy before the freeze is lifted, and the stores will be unable to re-stock because no one is going to sell to them at a price they can recoup), the big question is what happens when the freeze’s initially announced term expires? Will it be lifted or extended? In either event look for absolute chaos; the current 25% inflation rate will soon appear tame in comparison. 

And in North Argentina, along the Potomac River, Eric Holder’s Dept. of Justice and Vote Creativity has announced a billion-dollar lawsuit against the ratings agencies . . . for opinions they expressed four and five years ago. Why now? Why so long? Wasn’t it readily apparent by late 2007 that their rosy ratings of, among others, Fannie and Freddie paper were wildly off the mark? Has it truly taken this long to subpoena all their records to determine exactly how it was they got it so comically incorrect? Exactly how many issues were rated that later tanked? 

Can it have anything to do with the fact that those same ratings agencies have already down-graded U.S. Treasury paper once, and have promised to do so again, just in recent weeks? The initial report admitted that the DOJ had threatened criminal prosecution if the ratings agencies didn’t agree to fork over massive amounts of money (the NYT website scrubbed the report of the extortion from its post . . . better living through screen capture, however). So where is the criminal prosecution? Oh yeah, that’s right: The DOJ knew going into it they didn’t have a criminal case. They just thought they’d practice a little extortion. 

These claims are of course likely to be settled short of trial. What will be interesting to see is where the settlement funds get steered. When Bank of America got to pony up $25 million to settle a Community Reinvestment Act enforcement action – on the basis that it had made insufficient loans to people unlikely to be able to repay them, at a time when they were also being accused of “predatory lending,” which is the making of loans to people who aren’t likely to be able to repay them – several million of the settlement was steered to “community organizing”-style outfits no small number of which had ties to former or current ACORN spin-offs. In other words, Dear Leader’s DOJ used the power of the federal government to extort money from its mountebank whipping boys for the direct use and benefit of its political supporters. 

Back in the 1930s, the Soviet Union conducted a census. This was a few years after the Holodomor, when Stalin set out to, and did, starve some seven million Ukrainians to death in the space of less than two years. The census takers showed several million fewer Soviets than Stalin thought he should have. So he had the entire census bureau senior staff and management shot, and appointed new ones. Told them to go run him a census and mirabile dictu! all those millions of missing Soviets magically reappeared. 

Moscow, Buenos Aires, Washington: What’s the difference (to quote a renowned former Sec’y of State) any more?

 

Profits? O! the Humanity! or, High School Journalism Comes to the ACLU

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So a Facebook friend of mine threw up a link to this article at the ACLU’s website, written in commemoration if not in honor of the 30th anniversary of Corrections Corporation of America. At the risk of understatement, the ACLU is not a fan of CCA or what it and its competitors do.

For those who don’t know, CCA is a corporation which runs prisons and jails, together with ancillary services. They’re a publicly traded corporation now, but they were founded by a couple of West Point grads and a few others. They’ve done rather well for themselves over the past decades. They’ve had their share of black eyes and stubbed toes – hardly surprising, given the industry they’re in and the nature of the players in it – but I’m not aware that the facilities they operate are predictably or measurably more brutally or cruelly or poorly run than those by any governmental entity or agency. Interestingly, the ACLU article doesn’t even allege that they’re measurably less properly operated than government facilities. Since the ACLU holds itself out as representing the Constitution and no other client, you’d think that systematic violation of prisoners’ rights under any provision of federal or state constitutions or statutes would not merely be mentioned but would be harped upon. 

What the ACLU does find objectionable, and goes into in considerable detail, is that horrors! CCA turns a profit and tries to do so. They quote from the corporation’s most recent Form 10-K, “filed with the Securities Exchange Commission” – ooooohhhhh!! capitalisssssstsssss! you can almost hear the author hiss, almost see the waves of fear and revulsion sweep over the author’s face – in which CCA points out, entirely correctly, that their business model relies for its continued viability upon relatively high levels of incarceration of criminals and that their continued profitability could be adversely affected by any governmental measure which changes that, from early release to general relaxing of sentencing practices to changes in prosecution patterns to underlying substantive changes in criminal law. 

The ACLU presents this statement in an SEC filing as if it were a business plan to crank up the incarceration of poor defenseless citizens. For starts the SEC is not the Trilateral Commission, or the Illuminati, or any other crypto-dictatorial operation. It enforces and administers those laws and regulations which relate to public transactions in securities, the operations of the exchanges where those securities are traded, and the companies whose securities are traded on them. That’s it. If your company’s securities are publicly traded you are required to file with the SEC certain periodic disclosures in which you describe specific things about your company, its operations, it finances, and the risks to which investors in its securities are exposed. That would necessarily include, to the extent knowable, a description of those things which could undermine the company’s viability. By way of example, Bobby Kennedy’s boy runs some “green” operation which has already lost well over a billion dollars, with no end in sight. Their most recent Form 10-K recites that their continued viability relies principally on keeping the government hand-out spigot wide open. Seriously, that’s their game plan. Well, of course. I haven’t read them, but I’d wager that Northrop Grumman’s filings will mention somewhere that any widely adopted program of disarmament would have disastrous consequences for their profitability. A corporation which is in the business of providing, for example, heating oil to a region of the country will be smacked hard by an unusually warm winter. A municipal water system’s revenue will be adversely affected by a wet summer. And so forth. All of which is to say that the observation that gives the ACLU such a delightful frisson of disgust merits a great big bowl of steaming “so what?” 

The ACLU then begins its entirely predictable screed about how we’ve been locking up so great a proportion of our population, in fact an increasing proportion of our population, blah blah blah. Notice the article traces this trend back to the 1970s . . . which the ordinary mathematician will pick up on was well before CCA was formed, and even longer before it became a major player. The author fails to mention that “get tough on Crime X” has been wildly popular as a policy position since the late 1960s. In fact it was precisely the opposite trend in penology – the pat ‘em on the hand and help them get in touch with their inner child school of criminal justice – which produced the enormous surge in crime and specifically violent crime during those years, and which sparked the lock ‘em up ‘til they rot school of thought. The ACLU also overlooks mentioning that at the same time we’ve been locking up criminals (and yes, Dorothy, illegal aliens are criminals by definition) at ever-increasing numbers the rates of almost all violent crime have plummeted. 

The not-quite-unspoken position of the author is that a great deal of the incarceration for drug-related offenses is a morally reprehensible thing. Maybe it is; maybe it’s not. I certainly can see a great deal of merit on both sides of that particular argument. But what is not at all subject to dispute is that it was precisely the draconian mandatory drug sentencing laws which allowed the federal government to break open the Italian organized criminal empires. The mafia goon who was looking at a seven-year hitch for extortion or arson or beating the living snot out of some shopkeeper was willing to sit that one out and tell the prosecutor to do his worst. Explain to him that he’s looking at 25-40 to be served at 85% for the pound of coke in his trunk and suddenly he begins to study really hard on whether omerta maybe doesn’t have its limits. I freely admit that the mandatory minimum sentencing wasn’t adopted to achieve that particular effect, but that’s lagniappe, so far as I’m concerned. And were the mandatory minimum sentences really so unreasonable at the time they were first adopted? Recall that inner cities were the fora for extraordinarily violent gang wars related precisely to drug dealings. What precisely were legislators supposed to do in the face of feel-good judges who took the position that it was all Just a Big Misunderstanding? You can’t “treat” someone who will line up an apartment full of people, including the neighbor kid who just happened to have stopped by to borrow his buddy’s new cassette of music, and blow 9mm holes in the base of their skulls. You can’t counsel someone like that into any condition fit for human society. 

The ACLU author points out that CCA spends a great deal of money on lobbying and supporting political candidates. Well, yes it does. So do those groups which oppose them for making a profit off of prison and jail operations. So do the prison workers unions. If what CCA were doing were uncontroversial and unopposed there would be no reason to try to convince anyone to let them have a crack at it. They’re no longer the only company in that business any more, either. Just by way of compare-and-contrast, Boeing spent monstrous sums of money pushing its aircraft as the replacement for the KC-135 tanker. They even had the competition re-opened when they initially lost out to Airbus. George Soros spends vast amounts of money to benefit his operations. Like when he poured millions into shutting down off-shore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico at the same time he was putting eye-popping bucks into the newly-discovered Petrobras offshore field in the South Atlantic, a field the economic viability of which will be much accelerated if competing deep-water operations are strangled.

 All of which is to say nothing more than that any large government contract or large government initiative is going to generate corresponding effort by those seeking to obtain or deny that contract for or to any particular operation or group, or to steer that initiative to its own benefit. It’s just in the nature of the beast, so long as the beast of government continues to look and act like the beast we currently have. 

In the end the ACLU article really can’t muster up much more against CCA than . . . well, ick! and how dare they take away our Government Jobs for the Boys. Mind you, I don’t carry a brief for CCA. Either they can do the job more cheaply than Brand X or the government itself, or they can’t. Either they can do the job in conformity within applicable constitutional and statutory constraints, or they cannot. If the answers to those are yes and yes, well big fat hairy deal, says I. If not, let someone else have a go at it. If no one can I suppose we’ll just have to bite the bullet and have the government in the business of warehousing people we’ve decided we don’t want among us, for whatever reasons. 

My Facebook friend, whom I’ve known for 24 years now, was just outraged at the thought of CCA making a profit off of jails. Why? I wanted to know. The very idea of making a profit from running a jail was “unacceptable, period.” That’s a pretty strong (and bald) statement, so I pushed back a little bit. Is it outrageous that civilian contractors make a profit from running military mess facilities overseas? Apparently it was; the military trains military cooks, after all. I wanted to point out that every training dollar diverted from training some guy to over-cook your bacon and under-cook your eggs, and instead put towards training the guy who’s going to provide you fire support as you clear a block house is a dollar better spent than it had been.  I decided to explore some other situations in which the government takes some task which is more or less intrinsically “governmental” and engages a civilian contractor to do it. Like transporting military stores, supplies, or personnel on civilian ships or aircraft. Or hiring a private contractor to do the landscaping around city hall, or a private company to pave the city streets. I cited him to the Princes of Turn und Taxis, who for generations ran – for their own profit – the postal system of the Holy Roman Empire. Closer to our own day, take a look at all those private contractors trucking the U.S. mail around; even the guy who stuffs the mailbox in front of your house with glossy coupon booklets is not a government worker, not outside the city limits. I pointed out to my buddy that in many countries the land line telephone systems are and have always been government-owned and operated, while ours never has been. Are those other countries inherently morally superior in that respect, and we irredeemably damned? Or how about other utilities: Is it inherently morally superior that the TVA belongs to the federal government and ConEd or Duke Power does not? If those arrangements are not morally reprehensible, what is so magic about administering a system of confinement, where it is the confinement itself which is the punishment? In other words, we no longer sentence people to the treadmill, or to hard labor busting rocks. You go to prison and that’s your punishment: you’re in prison as opposed to being on the street. End of story. 

More to the point, where is the constitutional defect in any of the above arrangements? Is getting locked up in a twelve-by-twenty cell with three other guys, a stainless steel toilet, and one’s own thoughts somehow more or less “cruel and unusual” depending on who signs the paycheck of the guy who toddles around to make sure the door’s locked tight? What due process right does a prisoner have to be superintended by some guy who’s in the state retirement system versus having a 401(k)? Is it a denial of equal protection of the laws that some prisoners are herded into and out of the showers by a guy who’s civil service and others by some guy who’s an at-will employee? I’m just not seeing it. 

My Facebook friend allowed that it was just . . . well, “unethical” for some company to “make a profit off human misery.” Errrmmmm . . . no one works for free; if you don’t believe me try cutting the wages of the government-employee prison guards. But to engage my friend more closely on his own argument’s terms, I’m not so sure he’s not looking at the horse from the wrong end. CCA is not “making a profit from human misery”; they’re making a profit providing me a profound relief from human oppression, in fact for promoting my own freedom. Those countries in which criminals run rampant and unpunished, or where the prison system – for them at least – is just a home-away-from-home, a place for them to continue plying their trades while someone else provides them three hots and a cot until they’re ready to go back out, are all uniformly miserable and poverty-ridden places. Read the descriptions of the blatnye in Solzhenitsyn or Dolgun or Bardach or Shalamov. Among the many, many oppressions of the ordinary Soviet citizen was the fact that the entire country was over-run with violent criminals who if anything received preferential treatment in the prison and camp systems. Since the Soviet Union’s collapse the same dynamic has played out as well. Among the many reasons why Sicily has always been poor as Job’s turkey is because it is so thoroughly dominated by the criminal clan system. Ditto the Balkan countries; the ordinary citizenry for centuries has been prey to well-organized and deeply-rooted criminal exploitation. In dear ol’ tolerant, drug-legalized Holland casual street crime is rampant. Oh sure, they might not knife you outright or just for fun, the way some of our street thugs will, but you’ve still lost your wallet and all its contents, and even if your mugger is caught, he’ll be back on the street and most likely have taken his next victim before you can even replace your driver’s license. Excuse me if I object to living in that sort of a society, and if I’m tickled pink that someone will come along and for a reasonable price stack these people behind stout walls and bars so I don’t have to worry about meeting up with them. The free-range criminal is the scourge of his fellow-men. Any system for removing them from our society for prolonged periods is not a system for inflicting human misery but rather a system to free the law-abiding from a pervasive system of terror. Moving that same argument one further step back, how about companies that specialize in disaster recovery? They don’t work for free. Aren’t they “profiting from human misery,” since without massive disaster there’s no work for them? I don’t, in short, think my friend’s “profiting from human misery” objection holds up to scrutiny. 

Well . . . so my buddy says, CCA is “not accountable”? To whom? Those contracts are extraordinarily detailed. The private operators are subject to state supervision and to state inspection, and last but not least they’re amenable to suit in federal or state court for neither more nor less the same causes of action as a governmental defendant would be. More to the point, who’s likely to be more sensitive to making sure his job is done right? Think it will be the guy who can get his entire company’s contract pulled, and maybe not just at that facility, if he screws up, or who can be fired at the drop of a hat and have to wonder how he’s going to make next month’s house payment? Or do we think it will be the guy protected by civil service rules and has to fear at most getting shuffled to some more out-of-the-way, even-scuzzier facility than the one he’s at? You can’t fire the government; you can’t even non-renew its contract. You can fire CCA; you can tell them that it was a nice experiment but you don’t really think it’s worked out as well as you had hoped. When was the last time a government got busted for not doing what it promised its people it would do? When do you think the last time CCA or some other private operator got sued for not doing what it promised? 

As mentioned, I am no advocate for CCA or anyone else. I’m also not thoroughly convinced that the core objection of the linked ACLU article – we lock up way too many people for way too penny-ante reasons – is not founded on some pretty compelling arguments. But none of those arguments have anything at all to do with whether it’s a good idea, a bad one, or indifferent, whether prisons are privately operated. The ACLU’s weighing in on this subject is indistinguishable from the ABA’s plumping for a frontal assault on the Second Amendment.

 

Wait, I Thought Marxism was “Scientific”

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Die Linke, the German party also known as the Party That Dare Not Speak Its Name (or Its Antecedents . . . Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, anyone?) has announced among its other platform planks in the coming national elections its position that managers’ pay ought to be limited — capped, in fact — to €480,000 per year.  At $1.37/Euro that works out to be $657,600, which by any reasonable standard is a boat-load of money.

Yet to ask the obvious question:  Who the hell are the former DDR-functionaries, fellow-travellers, and mourners for the Stasi to determine what any person’s services are worth?  I freely admit that some folks have absolutely absurd compensation packages.  Some folks have so far Fallen Into It that the standard of living they enjoy is utterly uncoupled from any measurable usefulness they bring to their fellow humans (which would include me, of course, and Gentle Reader as well).  But what do I know about what someone else’s efforts, talent, and time are worth?  What do I know about what they have or have not sacrificed to obtain their current levels of compensation?  According to the Stasi Party, it doesn’t matter whether it’s Daddy’s Company and he’s hired you as his successor and you’ve got 15 employees or whether you’re CEO of Exxon or Siemens or Oracle or Mannesman, and your decisions can make or break the fortunes (by which I mean neither less nor more than their ability to make next month’s house payment, or keep their daughter in college one more semester) of tens of thousands of people:  You and what you bring to the table aren’t worth more than €480,000 per year.

The assertion that any politician is sufficiently informed as to stick a maximum value on human enterprise and talent is so comically asinine as to be self-refuting.  Of course, the party hacks who have cooked up this silly number most likely fall into that category of People Who Have Never Held a Goddam Job, in which respect they mirror exactly the current president of the U.S.  They’ve never made payroll from their own pockets; they’ve never had to worry whether if they make a mistake and blow Decision X, their children will or will not lose the only house they’ve ever known as home; they’ve never been in the position of having to look in the eye the 30 or so people who were hired by their grandfather back when the company was itsy-bitsy, and decide which seven are going to have to be let go so that the remaining 23 can continue to have a job, any job at all (while you as the owner haven’t had a “paycheck” in nine months).  There are in fact so many inputs into the answer to the (deceptively complicated) question, “What is Person X worth to this enterprise?” that there is no possible way to gather that information into one place.  Even the person who actually has to make that decision and hire or not hire, at this, that or any other price, any particular person cannot know all the relevant information.  The importance of the market is that it matches the risk of the incorrect answer with the reward of the correct answer.  Politicized decisions, such as the communists (and Die Linke aren’t just leftists; they’re commies and don’t believe any different: the only difference is they’re ashamed to admit they’re commies) propose, sever the connection and so produce routinely and predictably incorrect decisions.

Die Linke’s position is worrisome for a bigger reason, though.  Once I concede that managers’ pay ought to be capped, which is to say once I agree that politicians may determine the maximum value of any particular manager to any particular enterprise, irrespective of the size and nature of the enterprise, the challenges facing it, the opportunities it finds before it, and the consequences of the decisions this hypothetical manager will be making . . . once I do that, where is the limiting principle?  If I can say that Jack Welch is worth no more than $657,600 per year to General Electric, what is there to keep me from saying that Joe Bloggs the Shelf Stocker is worth no more than $2.73 per hour to Bill’s Widgets on Main Street? 

Some weeks ago there was an article — I think it was on the Puffington Host — about what a Wonderful Dude the CEO of Costco was, because with his customer base of soccer moms and yuppies, and his business model of shit stacked on pallets by forklifts, he paid his hourly drudges an average of $17.00 or so per hour, versus Wal-Mart’s whatever-it-was.  OK, maybe he in fact does walk on water and part it for those who can’t.  But if you admit that I can cap Costco’s CEO’s pay at $657,600 per annum in order to reduce “social injustice” (excuse me while I wipe the snot off my face from laughing), then you also necessarily admit that I can cram down all those Costco workers’ $17.00/hour pay to whatever Wal-Mart pays its people . . . and by the way, the folks working at Wal-Mart do a helluva lot more in terms of serving the store’s customers than Costco’s do.

And there you have the whole fallacy of the lefty world vision.  They assume that they’re always going to be the ones in charge, and so all decisions of course will all be made according to truth, justice, and light, and the truly deserving will always be made better by what the government decides.  And so forth.  The market supporter, however, assumes that more often than not the guys running the show will be knaves, charlatans, and cretins.  The only way you protect yourself in that situation is by chopping down (with a broadaxe, if necessary) the scope of the decisions the People in Charge are permitted to make.  And you arm everyone else to make damned good and sure the People in Charge don’t get above themselves.

How about this, for capping compensation packages?  Everyone holding any elective office, of any nature whatsoever, or having any non-clerical position in any political party, PAC, or affiliate of either may not receive more than, say, $35,000 annually in income from all sources.  None at all.  Because given what a lousy job our elected officials and political party operatives have done, I can tell you right now that’s well in excess of anything they’re worth.  And in fact let’s just go ahead and cap their lifetime incomes at $35,000 per year, for as long as they live, because we have to live for generations with the consequences of their bad decisions.  Unfair, you say?  I have no earthly idea whereof I speak?  Well coach, you’re exactly right.  On all counts.  But I have no less an idea about those peoples’ worth than they do about mine.  In fact, given the public nature of their screw-ups, I’m going to go right ahead and say I have more of a notion of their intrinsic worthlessness than they ever can have of mine.

Sauce for the gander, anyone?

 

Unfortunately, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was Unavailable for Comment

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The Boston Globe has a piece inspired by the recent suicide of Aaron Swartz, the chap who gave us RSS and Reddit.  He had tapped (literally, he plugged into the system itself, as opposing to hacking his way in remotely) into a database — JSTOR — owned by MIT and which contains millions of academic journal articles.  Hardly surprisingly, MIT does not make that database available to the general public for free (although I understand that free access is granted to some subset of its faculty and/or students; I can’t say I’m certain of the details).  Swartz’s laptop downloaded something like 4.8 million of them before he was caught.  He was charged with 13 federal felonies carrying up to 35 years in Club Fed.  The prosecutor offered him a plea bargain:  he’d cop a plea to all 13 charges, serve six months, and presumably some further period on probation.  He hanged himself instead.

I don’t carry a brief for thieves.  In fact, I don’t even practice criminal law.  In truth, our firm represents, among other clients, lenders.  From time to time those lenders will make construction loans to borrowers who then take the money and use it for everything from their other projects to chasing women to paying off their own credit cards.  Our state legislature defines those sorts of monkey-shines as “theft,” and stipulates that it they are criminally punishable as such.  Over the years we’ve got used to our local district attorney’s office staring blandly at us and informing us, “That’s a civil matter.”  So my initial reaction to the specifics of the Aaron Swartz story is that someone that brilliant should have asked himself, up front, whether and if so to what extent he was willing to accept the risks of what he was doing.  He sure as hell could have afforded a lawyer to ask what were some of the consequences; he was anything but indigent.

On the other hand, we do have the disturbing question of how it was that the prosecutor was willing to take six months when she’d cobbled together a 13-count indictment.  I mean, any act that merits 13 felony counts ought to carry a stiffer tariff than six months, and any act which is adequately expiated by six months in Club Fed (and he’d have got credit for any time served, by the way) ought not merit 13 separate felony charges.  On a more prosaic level, either this prosecutor feels confident enough of her 13 felony counts and her ability to make them stick that she thinks 35 years is within the realm of the possible, or she’s really concerned that she’s going to come away with little to nothing of that and so is willing to take less than the 11/29 that some drunk driver gets for his second offense.  No matter whether you look at it from the perspective of morality or competence there is a yawning chasm in this story which requires explaining, and which suggests many of the questions raised by the Globe article.

For purposes of this post, I’m less interested in the nostrums examined by the article than I am in the dynamic exposed by Swartz’s story, and its alarming resemblance to a system of “justice” which just about everyone outside Dear Leader’s administration would condemn.  The article quotes the Blogfather Glenn Reynolds from his article (linked to previously), “Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime“:  “What we really have is a plea bargain system with a thin froth of showy trials floating on top.”

You know what that system resembles uncomfortably closely?  The system described by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago.  Under the Stalinist system, the best evidence of wrong-doing was the confession.  Thus the entire system was designed to elicit the most confessions, and the interrogators were ranked, promoted, demoted, or run through the system themselves based upon how many confessions they extracted and how quickly.  It was part of prison lore when one should confess, and to what, and in what order, and how.  If one wished to avoid being shot, when/how/to what should one confess?  Whom else should one implicate?  Was there any difference in sentence based upon one’s confession?  [Zek joke:  Two prisoners are discussing their convictions and sentences.  One allows that he’s been sentenced to a “quarter,” i.e. 25 years.  The other asks him for what.  He answers, “Nothing at all.”  Response:  “You lie!! The sentence for nothing at all is ten years!”]  If one deprived one’s interrogator of a proper confession, one got cycled upward through the system.  One got a more senior, more experienced interrogator.  One got shifted to a punishment cell.  One got moved to Sukhanovka, whence only one person is known to have emerged both alive and sane (proud to say he was a 20 year-old American boy, Alexander Dolgun).

And what, exactly, is the plea bargain system other than a system for the extraction of confessions?  How do the motivations of the NKVD officers who beat Alexander Dolgun on his genitals, or who beat him until his pants legs stuck to his body from the dried blood, differ from those of your typical ink-seeking missile a.k.a. the American prosecutor?  Stalin rewarded his most prolific interrogators with promotion and privilege (at least if he did not have them shot; the NKVD itself was purged in 1937-38).  American prosecutors who most visibly show themselves “tough on” crime X are rewarded with job tenure, advancement, and political influence.  I will admit that there is the not-unimportant distinction that the “crimes” the NKVD was “investigating” were entirely made-up except in the rarest of cases, even on their own terms.  For example, pointing out how crappy a Soviet-made article was, especially in contrast to a Western counterpart, was a crime (Alexander Dolgun called out his interrogator for speaking highly of an American-made Parker pen . . . and was beaten nearly unconscious for it).  But the NKVD even dispensed with the fact of whether the prisoner had in fact done it.  On the other hand, how many people here have pleaded to a crime which they either did not do at all, or to which they have a valid defense, only because they’re looking at 29 years in hard-time if the jury doesn’t believe them or credit their evidence?  In our system the down-side risk of taking a position that one doesn’t believe in good faith is all, all on one side.

It’s that mis-match between the defendant’s calculus and the prosecutor’s which is at the heart of America’s systemic problem.  Acknowledging that the suggestions mentioned in the Globe article may somewhat mitigate the objectionable portions of the dynamic, I don’t think genuine reform is possible without giving the prosecutor’s office some substantive down-side risk.  I mean, who hears about the acquittals, except in the very prominent defendant’s case?  The prosecutor really doesn’t care how many cases are tried and lost outright, or how many times a charge of Really Bad/Serious/Awful Felony X is tried and what the jury comes back with is a conviction for Slap on the Wrist Misdemeanor Y.  What gets the ink, and the votes, and therefore the prosecutor’s attention, are the convictions.

What will get the prosecutors’ attention is losing money.  Which suggests that (i) some portion or all of the defense costs on an acquittal, or a conviction only of a lesser included offense, should be paid by the prosecution, and (ii) the funds to pay those should come from and out of the specific prosecutor’s office.  You could implement all sorts of sliding scales, from number of counts charged versus counts convicted, to whether a Class A felony is charged but only a Class C felony is convicted, or whatever.  The scale could even be adjusted so that the more times a specific prosecutor’s office gets popped, the greater the percentage of the defense costs they have to absorb.  It doesn’t have to be black-and-white, all-or-nothing.  But the prosecutor needs to have a powerful incentive, an incentive to ask himself each time he decides to charge someone, whether his decision is or is not going to affect his ability to put food in front of his children.  Because that’s sure as hell the kind of questions the defendant faces when he’s figuring out whether and to what he is going to plead guilty.

The Politics of “It’s Gonna Happen”

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I don’t know how many times I’ve been told that by people with a great deal more political savvy than I have.  Not infrequently the folks I hear that from are people who in fact make their lives in politics, and more particularly the politics that plays out beyond the klieg lights, which is to say where the bulk of the sausage is made.  So-and-so is going to happen, so you may as well get the best bargain you can and wait to chip away at the more obnoxious aspects of whatever It is.

That point is valid for many issues at many levels.  I mean, other than to the guy who runs the local liquor store, does it really matter that they’re selling wine down at the local big-box grocery store?  As nearly as I can tell from the sidelines, a great deal of legislation introduced is driven by grandstanding or someone getting in a particular legislator’s ear.  Harry Reid and sundry others are trying, depending on which side one listens to, to ban online gambling except for poker, or to ban all forms of online gambling, or whatever.  Does it really matter a damned bit, except to the gambling addicts?  Yes, it’s a needless constraint on the inherent human right to do stupid things with one’s money, and any needless constraint on liberty is a precedent for other, future such constraints on liberty, constraints which actually do harm to ordinary people.  By making part of the socio-political background noise the assumption that anything which some subset of the legislature doesn’t like can be banned for no reason other than they think it’s (i) good for us, or (ii) good for their pet constituencies, we increase, at some marginal level, the likelihood of future passive acceptance of genuinely egregious intrusions on liberty.  Can’t recall off the top of my head who first made the point, but it is in fact correct that it is only seldom that a society loses all its freedom all at once.

However, it’s precisely these drip-drip-drip erosions of liberty that Are Going to Happen, because enough of the unthinking can be mobilized in their support.  Yes, you can fight them tooth and nail, every time.  But fighting them tooth and nail will burn bridges, use up political capital, and perhaps make the forces of freedom less able in the future to resist something that really is a die-in-the-last-ditch issue.  And of course other It’s Going to Happen issues don’t implicate liberty interests at all, like how the governing board of a local water utility district is selected, or whether the local school superintendent is popularly elected or appointed by a board of education.  Whether a particular interstate spur is built on one side of a hill versus the other just is not going to make much in the nature of permanent impact beyond the people immediately affected.

Other issues, Big Issues, that Are Going to Happen are different.  There are certain measures that once adopted become bells which cannot be un-rung.  I’m quite comfortable that not a few votes in Congress for that monstrosity of a health care “reform” act were cast on the assumption of let’s just get it on the books so we can say we supported “fixing the broken system,” and then later we’ll come back and fix all the potholes.  Except it’s not going to work that way.  Individual mandate or no, the inevitable consequence of requiring insurance companies to insure everyone for everything at any time, and at the same time prohibiting them from pricing adequately for it, will be to destroy the private health insurance industry.  Oh sure, the companies may survive, but if they do it will be as de facto public utilities, in which the operations and expenses of government are off-loaded onto non-governmental actors, but the policies and preferences are selected by people inside government.  Once you destroy the structures for the private payment of health care insurance you will never re-create them. 

Outright nationalization of industries also seems to work very similarly.  Once you take them over and run them as branches of the government it’s extraordinarily difficult to reconstitute them as private enterprises.  They never seem to regain the ground lost.

And of course we sometimes have the Truly Important occasions on which giving in to what someone else describes as inevitable is nothing short of disastrous.  I’d argue that Dear Leader’s take-over of the health care industry was one of those occasions, if only because it will wreck no less than 20% of the national economy, and maybe more.  But he’s really not the Exhibit A I was thinking about today.

You see, 80 years ago today, Paul von Hindenburg bowed to the “It’s Gonna Happen” of the National Socialists taking over the Germany government.  Oh, to be true there were others in the cabinet as well, non-Nazis, people who could be counted on to contain Adolf Hitler as chancellor, people who could show him how politics worked, how to go along to get along, how not to Upset the Apple Carts of People Who Mattered.  The Nazis didn’t have a majority (they never were voted an outright majority in any arguably free election) but they were the largest party, and certainly the loudest.  They were unstoppable; they were inevitable; the hour for the redemption of Germany had struck, and this funny-acting Austrian corporal was Going to Happen.  The Schleichers, the Papens, the Neuraths, the Brauchitschs, the Schachts . . . they all figured they’d go ahead and work with the man because he was Going to Be Appointed, and anyway once they had him penned up in the Chancellory they could draw his sharpest teeth.

What they didn’t appreciate until it was too late, way too late, was that they weren’t even playing in the same ballpark as Hitler.  Silly people, they thought they would absorb and digest him, and spit back out a nice, conforming, squishy-edged politician.  So why not go along with something that was Going to Happen?  Hitler had no interest at all in becoming a powerful chancellor of the German Republic; wasn’t even mildly curious about it.  He wanted to — had announced, years before, his intention to — seize the republic by the throat and strangle it, then erect himself and his movement astride its corpse.

Which is exactly what Hitler went out and did.  And all those people, the political sages, the Deep Thinkers, the nudge-nudge insiders, the people who — carefully preserving their airs of jaded weariness at the tumults of the masses and those ignorant sods’ belief that Their Boy was going to be any more than one more pebble in the pond — had assured each other that since it was Going to Happen Anyway, they may as well make the best of it and ride it for what it was worth.  Run a Wikipedia search on Kurt von Schleicher (who was instrumental in engineering Hitler’s appointment in the first place) and see how he fared.  Or the same on Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, and see where he ended the war (and what he was doing in November, 1946).

Whenever I hear my friends and acquaintances who Know Better allowing that, well, so-and-so Is Going to Happen, so you may just as well get used to the idea, I want to beat my head against the wall.  Because nothing in politics is inevitable.  Tyranny is a choice, as is decline, as is prosperity, as is freedom.  In the end, nothing at all Is Going to Happen unless it is permitted to happen.

And sometimes, Letting It Happen, or not, makes all the difference in the world, as it did 80 years ago today.

Update (02 Feb 13):  Ilya Somin over at the Volokh Conspiracy has a spot-on post on What Happens When Illiberal, Anti-Democratic Forces Take Power Through the Democratic Process.  It’s about Egypt, which went to the polls and elected the Muslim Brotherhood to replace Hosni Mubarak, an outcome at which Dear Leader expressed “relief.”  Somin excerpts and links to some commentary in Bloomberg by Noah Feldman, identified as a Harvard Law School professor (which alone should alert Gentle Reader to the weight to be attached to it).  The money quote:

“If Egypt’s democrats want to avoid becoming another Pakistan, in which democracy is never more than a few shots from military dictatorship, they have just one path available to them: take a deep breath, go home, and let the democratically elected government try to do its job. Mursi and his government may do well or badly. But as long as they are up for re-election in a few years, they will have laid the groundwork for democratic transition.

Patriots of Tahrir, ask yourselves: You may not like Mursi. But would you really rather have the army?

You have to figure that some fellow who landed a job at HLS is pretty keen as a legal mind.  Feldman seems to fall on his face pretty hard as an historian, though.  Mursi simply decreed himself effectively unlimited power some time ago.  Oh sure, he’s promised to surrender it when the time comes.  And learned folks like Feldman bite down hook, line, and sinker on that promise.  I would point out to the Learned Professor Feldman that the Ermächtigungsgesetz — the Enabling Law — of 1933 was passed by a majority of the Reichstag and came with a built-in sunset clause of 01 April 1937.  Maybe the good professor could remind us how that worked out, again?

Feldman’s error is to assume that legitimacy of government has nothing at all to do with what that government does.  Over at Instapundit, Reynolds points out, “But those rights [life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness] are unalienable — incapable of being alienated, that is, bought, sold, or given away — which means that even if you live in a democracy, you haven’t surrendered them to the majority. A majority that wants to take away your unalienable rights isn’t a legitimate government. I’m gratified by how many Egyptians seem to grasp that; it’s more than I expected, though perhaps not as many as it needs to be. It’s clearly more than the Muslim Brotherhood expected, too.”

By the way, Feldman also tips his hand when he presents the Egyptian military as being the worst of all possible outcomes, even measured against the Brotherhood.  Is it, one asks, because of the Egyptian military’s actual track record, or is it because it is a military, and in Feldman’s world and lexicon “military” is co-extensive with “the most unspeakably brutal, oppressive, murderous thugs you could possibly imagine to yourself”?  He hints at the answer to that question when he starts his article by observing that he hates to agree with “an Egyptian general about anything.”  Is it the Egyptian he doesn’t want to agree with, or the general?  He obviously has no problem agreeing with the Egyptian members of the Muslim Brotherhood that they ought to be running the joint according to their own visions (see the quoted langauge above; ought the SPD in February, 1933 have taken a deep breath, gone home, and let the new Reichskanzler try to do his job?), so what is the source of the repugnance of this Egyptian general’s opinions?

Feldman must be a perfect fit over at Harvard.

A Thought Experiment

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Now that the U.S. has officially lifted the ban on women in combat roles, it seems that some people are willing to take another look at other sacred cows as well.  Specifically, Rep. Charles Rangel, tax cheat representative from New York, has come out and is plumping for not only a co-educational combat force, but a co-ed draft as well.  He makes half his point very well, but left out the other half of it.  Specifically, he points out that with an all-volunteer force, the flesh-and-blood burden of defending the U.S. falls on an incredibly thin slice of our population, less than 1%.  True enough; the other part of his point is that the 1% that serves is not randomly-selected.  It is, after all, a volunteer force and volunteerism in anything is never randomly-selected, whether it’s Delta Force (where a high school classmate served), or the 82d Airborne (where a law partner served), or the SEALs (where a cousin serves still), or the combat fleet (where I served), or helping out down at the local humane society.

Both parts Rangel’s point are entirely true and an acknowledgment of that truth must underlie any intelligent, morally defensible discussion of the issue of whom do we ask to give what Lincoln called “the last full measure of devotion.”  Where Rangel may go off the reservation a bit (or a lot, as some have argued, q.v.) is in the implications he draws from that.  Chief among them is his statement that, “Since we replaced the compulsory military draft with an all-volunteer force in 1973, our nation has been making decisions about wars without worry over who fights them.”  I would suggest that to the extent that by “our nation” he means “people inside the Beltway, the socio-economic elite inside the Northeast Corridor, and the same bunch in coastal California,” he’s probably pretty much correct.  To the extent that “our nation” can be read to include us out here in fly-over country, or those who do not work for “non-profits,” or in upper-level government positions, or in academia, or on Wall Street, I submit his statement is pretty demonstrably false.  We’re the ones who staff up the armed forces, after all, by a widely disproportionate margin.  When hell-holes like Iraq, or Somalia, or Mali heat up, we’re the ones who can tick off a half-dozen or more people within our families and close acquaintances who may or may not come back from it in one piece.

 Rangel’s suggestions have not met with universal approval.  Over at Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin has a principled objection to the notion of a draft of any kind under any conditions but those in extremis.  They’re by and large of a libertarian bent over at the Conspiracy, which means that I sympathize if not outright agree with them the vast majority of the time.  And when I don’t it’s usually because I think they weigh and balance things other than I think they should.  This is one of those times.

Somin’s right about the nature of the intrusion onto personal liberty which a military draft represents.  It’s coerced labor, plain and simple.  In terms of how it stacks up against other forms of governmental intrusion upon what you are pleased to think of as your personal liberty, if you think requiring a 24-hour waiting period before getting a third-trimester abortion is a monstrous intrusion of the state into the sanctity of your uterus, then you ought to try a 7.62mm round through the reproductive system, or a sizzling shell splinter through ditto.  Just sayin’.

Somin’s also entirely correct that all else being equal you’re not likely to get as high-quality a military through conscription as you would if you relied on an all volunteer force, at least not in American society.  For the counter-argument, I refer Gentle Reader to the examples of the Kaiser’s army and the Old Contemptibles in World War I.  The Kaiser’s was an enormous conscript army, and put huge numbers of reservists into front-line units right out of the gate (in fact, it was the Allies’ belief that you couldn’t feasibly do that which lead them woefully to underestimate the manpower which Germany was able to pour into Belgium in August, 1914).  The BEF was all-volunteer and, thanks to years of colonial warfare (not least the Boer War) had extensive combat experience; it also continued the British military tradition of being able to withstand incredible pounding without breaking (a point Wellington understood very well at Waterloo, but which Napoleon didn’t grasp until he saw it, by which time he was screwed).  No one who saw the oceans of feldgrau underway that summer would suggest that the conscripts gave anything away to the volunteers.  I will say this much, though:  There were (and are) important cultural differences between Anglo-American and German society which might well impeach the validity of my comparison.  On the other hand, I would suggest that different experience levels will dwarf other sources of qualitative difference, such that a conscript army with prolonged combat and related experience is going to be vastly better than a volunteer but little-used force.  In that connection it’s important to realize that right now and for the foreseeable future, the U.S. armed forces, however constituted, are predictably going to be the most experienced forces on the field, no matter against whom measured.

In any event, where I depart from Somin is not in his objections to the draft as an intrusion on personal liberty, or even in his concerns with what quality military we’d get from the exercise.  What I don’t think he’s adequately confronted is the speed at which modern war unfolds.  The only reason that the Old Contemptibles weren’t ground to mud before 1916 was because the French could field a massive (conscripted) army of their own and hold the overwhelming portion of the Western Front, and because until 1917 Germany had significant forces tied down in the East.  The only reason that the British Army was able to reconstitute itself after June, 1940 was because there was an English Channel between Hitler’s divisions and them, and because of Göring’s fatal abandonment of the assault against Fighter Command, right at the point he was about to win it, and so win air control over the Channel.  The only reason that Japan didn’t conquer even more of the Pacific than they did was the iron law of time and distance.  The only reason that Stalin was able to re-build the Red Army was because Germany ran out of steam literally at the gates of Moscow, and even then Russia damned near didn’t pull it off.

With all possible respect to Brer Somin, no future general war is going to grant us the kind of time Britain had in 1914-16, or in 1939-42, or we had in 1942-43.  With modern transportation and logistics there’s a decent chance that ol’ Graf Schlieffen’s vision of a war over in six weeks is going to be borne out in the event.  If the key to military victory is concentration of forces at the critical points in the decisive theater, then I’m going to state that there is no way the United States can with an all-volunteer force achieve that level of concentration sufficiently quickly as to stave off strategic set-backs if not defeat.  In 1990 we were able to suppress Iraq while we built up our attack forces in Saudi Arabia, but what if Saddam had been able to contest the C3 battle?  What if he’d been able to keep us from controlling the air?  Would we have been permitted the several months’ build-up?  With a peacetime draft we can cycle vastly more people though the training system, keeping them as reserves (as did Wilhelmine Germany), and recalling them to the colors as needed.  It would entail re-structuring the permanent, regular forces, as we diverted resources to increasing the reserve, but then that’s a cost I’d be willing to bear.

But none of that really has to do with my thought experiment.  Some time ago I announced (to thin air) on this blog that in future I would run all of my political thinking through the filter of which policy choices and candidates would minimize the likelihood of my sons having to fight to fix the balls-ups that Dear Leader and his fellow anti-Americans are preparing for us.  By the time my boys start hitting the age for military service I am quite convinced there will have been at least one nuclear exchange in the Middle East.  Someone has to clean that mess up, and the folks who get to enjoy that task are by and large the P.B.I., as the English used to call them — the Poor Bloody Infantry.  So let’s ask the question whether formally lifting a ban on females in combat positions will or will not increase that likelihood.

For starts, nothing about lifting the ban will make any such war more or less likely, so that criterion is a wash.  By increasing the theoretically potential numbers of combat troops relative to overall force size, it would dilute my boys’ statistical probability of finding themselves in a combat unit, in a combat role.  So that criterion argues in favor of lifting the ban.  On the other hand, if you assume that if my boys do end up in those units, and those roles, but with X% of their unit made up of females, will the females’ presence increase or decrease the likelihood of my boy stopping a round instead of one of them?  Here I’m afraid the answer relies on knowing how the males and females in those units are going to react.  This has little to do with hypothetical gender-norming of roles or whatever the hell you want to call it.  The males will take care of the females.  The males will end up shouldering increased burdens, either because they decide to, or because the females in fact cannot keep up.  The males will end up accepting the greater risks the unit faces.   In a specific combat situation, is it more likely to be the males or the females who get sent out to close with the enemy, as opposed to providing covering fire, or communications with the rear, or simply to provide the reserve (in World War I it was not unusual for units slated to go over the top to leave a certain percentage of the troops behind to reconstitute the unit if the attack waves were annihilated . . . as not seldom happened)?  I know, I know in my heart, that it will be the females who are left back, which means that my boys’ statistical likelihood of not being among the guys who have to cross the open field, or clear out the block of houses, or cross the canal, or whatever, will go down.  I’m not just making all that stuff up, sitting here at my desk.  Others with far greater knowledge and experience — close-quarters combat experience — seem to have the same reactions.

Thus I conclude that with females in combat positions I am more rather than less likely to get that folded flag, saluted, and thanked by the honor guard captain for my boy’s service to his country.  I am, therefore, opposed to females in combat roles, notwithstanding my visceral desire that all those women who dutifully trooped down and voted for Dear Leader because of what some MSNBC operative told them what Mitt Romney really in secret wanted to do to their uterus and their daughter’s as well — notwithstanding Romney had said nothing of the kind — ought to enjoy the spectacle of their daughter’s flag-draped coffin (assuming there’s enough left of her to fill a coffin; artillery fire will work hell on your mascara).  I realize that increasing the hypothetical possibility for that happening will actually in fact increase the likelihood of my own boys’ deaths, and so I must forego that pleasure.

If You’re Not Terrified, You’re Not Paying Attention

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It really didn’t surprise me when last year the EU parliament voted to prevent ratings agencies from explaining exactly how lousy a credit risk it and its constituent governments are.  You sort of expect that kind of thing from an outfit that has elevated ramming things down ordinary citizens’ throats to an art form.

Dear Leader’s SEC has now gone down the same road.  Point out that, as Instapundit has observed in numerous contexts, things that can’t go on won’t; that promises that can’t be kept won’t be; and that debts that cannot be paid won’t be either, and they drop on you like a ton of bricks, and in exchange for a promise not to destroy your business they extort a vow of silence.  “Nice business you’ve got here.  Be a pity if it were litigated into oblivion, wouldn’t it?”

 As a side effect of what Prof. Reynolds describes in “Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime,” every last one of us is absolutely exposed to this kind of treatment.  In a world in which pretty much every person is committing something like, as the title of a book phrases it, Three Felonies a Day, then any of us can be prosecuted for any of them, more or less at the whim of the DOJ (the same outfit which brought you Operation Fast and Furious, the illegal gun-running scheme into Mexico).  As a precondition of not destroying your life through the cost of defending yourself — even assuming you win — the government may extort from you surrender of rights you otherwise would hold inviolate.

In the ratings agency case described at Zero Hedge, you would think that the company, Egan-Jones, which is in the business of reporting the financial condition of the U.S. as expressed through its debt issues, and expressing opinions based upon that news, would enjoy the same measure of press freedom that, say the NYT enjoys when it commits crimes like disclosing national security secrets which have been provided to it, and which it knows have been provided to it, in violation of numerous valid criminal statutes.  I mean, what is the meaningful distinction between Paul Krugman’s solemnly assuring us that infinite government borrowing to finance infinitely growing governmental spending is just wonderful . . . and Egan-Jones pointing out that you’d be something of a fool to believe that the U.S. will actually be able to pay the stuff back in dollars that haven’t been devalued to the vanishing point?  Perhaps they do.  On the other hand, I’m quite comfortable that if you press any company hard enough you will find something, somewhere, in some part of its operations, that is in violation of some obscure regulation.  It appears they found such a regulatory violation at Egan-Jones.  The federal government offered them a bargain:  You surrender your rights of press freedom and we won’t destroy your livelihoods.

Now, does anyone pay much attention to what Egan-Jones says about federal government debt?  Honestly, I’d never heard of them before I read the linked article.  But as the Chinese say, kill the chicken and make the monkey watch.  Does anyone think that S&P, or Fitch, or Moody’s weren’t paying attention to what happened to their smaller colleague?