Walls

I just read that a group out of the University of Texas recently petitioned the Organizatin of American States to condemn the wall between the U.S. and Mexico. It of course has already been condemned by Mexico and most of Latin America. While the wall can’t help but deter immigration, it’s overall utility is debatable. No one believes that the petition to the OAS will affect the building of the wall. Human rights considerations, and international law and opinion have not played a significant role in determining U.S. policy recently.

Our wall is to be 2000 miles long, as long as the low estimates of the length of the Great Wall of China. (Some estimate the other wall to be three times this length.)

Whatever your position is with respect to the wall, people agree that it is certainly symbolic of our era. It is a metaphor, a symbol, which for many replaces the Statue of Liberty. The welcoming beacon of freedom is replaced in the minds of many people with the blank expanse of the wall, like an extended palm signaling “halt.” For many people outside the United States our country is seen, not as a sanctuary, and champion, for the oppressed, but as a garrison, walled like a Medieval city-state.

Looking back, Bill Clinton’s euphoric descriptions of globalization (one of his favorite terms) seem naive and distant. The purpose of bridging cultures and identifying common interest has been replaced by phrases like “If you are not for us, you are against us,” “bring ‘em on,” “we are on a crusade,” and the like. We have turned a blind eye to international opinion, like the balnk stare of the wall.

We have not just invested in walling our country, but in creating a honeycomb of walls within it. Political forces have converted the world’s melting pot into a fragmented society in which cultural identity is preserved in part for defensive purposes. We are becoming a society of gated communities which look out at others with distrust and fear.

Our government has a growing list of citizens identified a suspected terrorists. The number of people on the list has apparently passed one million. That’s about 5 for each thousand adults. If you go to BellSquare on a busy day, there should be maybe ten or twenty “suspected terrorists” among your fellow shoppers. We have built walls around airports, public buildings and public gathering places, access permitted by guards only after inspection.

These walls of course are not just metaphorical. We have by far the biggest prison population in the world. More people are in prison than there are in Phoenix, Arizona. A staggering number of our fellow citizens have been through the criminal justice system in one way or another.  Prison construction and management has been privatized to a large degree and has become a booming industry. It could become a college major in some schools like hotel and motel management.

These are the costs of security, as we see it. The cry of “security!” seems to be in the ascendancy. It’s good though to keep it in context.

Merit System in Washington Chopped Off

As you know, if you’ve been reading this a while, there was a bill last session of Washington’s legislature to adopt the merit system for the selection of judges to the Court of Appeals and the State Supreme Court. This is the system advocated diligently by Sandra Day O’Connor to eliminate the influence of deep pockets on judges’ decisions and to assure that the most qualified people are appointed to the bench.

The bill was sponsored by Jay Rodue, a Republican from the 5th District, Sherry Appleton, a Democrat from the 23rd District, Helen Sommers, from the 36th District. Here is a copy of the final form of the bill. The house report explained generally how it would work.

The bill made it to Frank Chopp’s Rules Committee, a death chamber for bills that do not advance the interests of the most powerful lobbies. He predictably killed the bill.

The people who sponsored the bill deserve accolades for wanting to improve our judicial system for the sake of the people here and not any special interest. The members of the House Rules Committee are listed here.

Our legislators need to know that we care about having the best court system that we can muster. I’ll write more when the legislature is in session.

FISA, Immunity, Pardons, and Luthor Collins

The recent discussions about immunity in the context of the FISA bill have stirred up a great deal of frustration among people who have been shocked or disapproving of the Bush administration’s apparent cavalier attitude to complying with the law. This resentment no doubt provides some of the fuel for the populist movement that seems to be carrying Obama along. Both Republicans and Democrats have expressed to me frustration that there is not even any meaningful investigation of the charges. The administration does not have immunity but it does seem to operate with impunity.

Part of the public’s outrage about FISA relates to the appearance of hypocrisy. The same law-and-order people who advocate strong criminal sentencing standards advocate immunity for the corporate officials whose conduct apparently involved violation of constitutional rights on a massive scale. The sense of hypocrisy is heightened by the color and class distinctions between the criminal justice defendants and the corporate miscreants.

This frustration is very deep and involves what appears to be a failure of our system of checks and balances. The Republican Congress during the first six years of the Bush administration is widely seen as having allegiance to party over country or over the citizens of the country. During this time effort seemed to be directed to covering up the regularly occurring scandals. The two years of Democratic control of Congress have not been signifiantly different in terms of rendering people in the executive branch accountable for their transgressions. The FISA bill in granting immunity for illegal domestic surveillance was profoundly disillusioning for many. It went beyond disregarding disreputable behavior to condoning it.

FISA’s defender’s chant “national security” and to my knowledge there is nothing more than this rather empty slogan to support the position, a slogan that I had thought was used so much by the Nixon administration that it would not be heard again in connection with domestic activity. This slogan has also been used to justify the treatment of detainees and has been gradually rejected by the courts. Without anything to back it up it is just a slogan famously used around the world throughout the twentieth century. People need more substance to the claim for it to have traction outside of Congress.

The defenders of FISA point out that the guilty can still be prosecuted for crimes that were committed but few doubt that Bush will pardon everyone before leaving office. He, however, can only pardon for federal crimes and at least in theory any enterprising attorney general could investigate and prosecute under state law for crimes committed against its citizens. I doubt that anyone believes this will happen.

Bush is likely to pardon everyone in his administration, making the investigations promised by Obama unlikely. If McCain is elected he would not conduct investigations at all, at least as far as I know. The only way the Bush could be prevented from pardoning everyone would be for him to be impeached. If he were impeached, he could not grant pardons during the process. There appears to be no chance that this might happen.

Thus it appears that this itch to see criminal conduct exposed, or at least investigated, and punished will go unscratched regardless of the party favored in the next election. This rather sorry state of affairs is not without local precedent.

Civilization came to the Seattle area in the middle of the nineteenth century. Settlers first arrives on Alki, then some came to what is now the downtown area. A few located near the mouth of the Duwamish River between the two camps. Civilization, as everyone knows, requires government and the settlers were quick to elect a commissioner: Luthor Collins, our first governmental official. Two years after his arrival he was arrested for lynching a Native American. His civic leadership may have contributed to the dismissal of the charge. Later, having rooted himself in the administration of local affairs, he lynched two Native Americans and presumably it was his his august stature that prevented charges from being made.

Rob McKenna; I think I figured it out (Part 2)

I puzzled overnight how Rob McKenna could within a very short period of time issue apparently wildly contradictory statements. He says the courts are out of control with damages and the legislature needs to step in and impose limits. He also argues that courts should be able to disregard legislative limits on damages and he supports enormous punitive damages.

My problem in trying to figure this out was that I presumed that there was an over arching doctrine that somehow melded these two opposing positions.

No, the answer lies in the reason for espousing them. Tort reform, however unsupported by actual evidence, is a Republican campaign cornerstone. As a Republican candidate for Attorney General, Rob McKenna embraced the issue. The issue still has currency and Mr. McKenna uses the issue to gain publicity.

The Exxon Valdez case is internationally known and public sentiment lies almost entirely on the side of the victims of this environmental disaster. Mr. McKenna claims to have inserted himself into this case to rally other states into participating as advocates of the victims.

He took the politically popular position of advocating for exactly the opposite result from the one he had campaigned on. Governor Gregoire’s signature, high profile case was the suit against the tobacco companies. The tide of approval for this effort washed her up on the shores of the governor’s office. The Exxon Valdez case has the same sort of <i>cache</i> as the tobacco cases and could perhaps advance McKenna’s career in the same way.

McKenna, trying to have it both ways, publicly continued to speak out for tort reform while while using his office to seek the opposite result in the Exxon Valdez case.

He is trying to appear to be a big business tort reformer (the only real benefactors of this position are insurance companies and big businesses) and at the same time appear to be a hero to tort victims. The the notoriety of the Exxon Valdez case promised enough political advantage to compensate for whatever losses their might be from his big business base.

That’s the only coherent answer I could find. The principle that one derives from this is that Rob McKenna will say and do anything to advance his career.

Environmentalism and the Nazis

In the 1950’s communists were said to be infiltrating the government and the entertainment industry, as well as operating under several fronts. The McCarthy era ended when the demagoguery was challenged and the true charlatans were identified. While it lasted, though, it was a ticket to political prominence.

In the last few years some people have taken to identifying environmentalists as Nazis. This is actually done on national television and similar venues; we have almost grown to expect it in political campaigns. Such fear and hate mongering seems to be efficacious. You would think that it would backfire, but there must be more people swayed by it than repulsed.

On national media in 2006 Al Gore was compared to Nazi propagandist Goebbels and to Hitler for his success in publicising global warming. (It is a bit ironic that the people who diminish the Holocaust in this way tend to be Israel’s most zealous supporters.) On CNN Senator Inhofe actually described Gore’s testimony to the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Utilities in that manner with the concurrence of Glenn Beck, the host.

In 2007 Fox News Radio continued the Gore/Hitler diatribe. CNN continued to transmit unbelievable comparisons to Hitler and Nazis. Glenn Beck recently said that Gore’s global warming campaign is like Hitler’s use of eugenics to justify exterminating 6 million European Jews.

With the new report on global warming just out, a report subscribed to about a dozen scientific groups associated with our government, doesn’t this treatment of science remind you of earlier, more primitive, periods of history?  Imagine: A world wide scientific conspiracy.  Really?

The hate and fear mongering diatribes are uniformly nothing more than name calling. There is no real rebuttal. Scientists picked “An Inconvenient Truth” apart pretty thoroughly finding some questionable facts and theatrics that suggested an unsupported conclusion. A UK judge found nine factual errors in the film.

But scientists and the British judiciary (one member anyway) agree that the film is rooted in good science and its overall message is supported by sound scientific theory and belief. This was known in 2007 and then Gore got a Nobel Peace Prize along with a U.N. panel of scientists investigating global warming. This, if anything, seemed to fan the flames of hate mongers.

This very odd discourse about environmentalism is probably the progeny of a pseudo-intellectual eddy in revisionist history. People are actually positing that environmentalism is a Nazi program, sort of like “Boys from Brazil.” This theory has been debunked by legitimate historians and even the people who are credited with originating this view disclaim any association with it.

A couple of years ago Jonah Goldberg’s book “Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning” appeared. This book seemed to revitalize the “environmentalism is fascism” diatribe, although Goldberg claimed to have written nothing that was intended to suggest such a thing. The book sold well to mixed reviews. It was celebrated by conservative reviewers and panned by others.

The book’s thesis, behind all the pseudo-intellectual blather, is essentially Libertarian: Fascism means governmental regulation and liberalism means governmental regulation; therefore liberalism is fascist. Environmentalists want governmental regulation therefore they are fascists too. For proof just look at Nazi Germany where environmentalism was born. Nazis called themselves the national socialist party therefore socialists are fascists. Socialists are liberals. Very simple-minded stuff hiding in a lot of jargon.

This silly word parsing though unhinges people like those at the Building Industry Association of Washington who have made a habit of labeling anyone opposing their views as Nazis. In March their newsletter, in addition to more conventional name calling, called the Washington State Department of Ecology Nazis and lumped all environmentalists under that moniker.

This set off a local firestorm culminating in and Anti Defamation League demand for a retraction or apology. The B.I.A.W. of course refuses claiming the article (written by its storm drain columnist) is academically grounded. The B.I.A.W. is widely regarded as the Washington State Republican Party’s attack dog and neither the party nor any of its candidates has attempted to separate from this absurd propaganda machine.

Illegals In Washington

Some folks feel that people who reside in the U.S. without immigration papers should not have the rights and privileges of enjoyed by citizens. That seems easy enough.Here’s a little background. The Christian Science Monitor reported two years ago that there are between 7 million and 20 million, or more, illegal immigrants here. These people typically take up the bottom strata of jobs, filling the least desirable jobs, often for wages lower than would be acceptable for citizens. In the 1990’s this supply of cheap labor was viewed as a key component in avoiding inflation. For that reason and because many key businesses (and industries) relied on this cheap labor supply, the nation turned it’s back on this “problem.”

Paul Krugman, the liberal economist who writes for the New York Times, wrote some time ago that this situation was not a partisan issue. His analysis suggested that illegal immigration was a net economic loss for the country. While many businesses were profiting off this labor source, the country as a whole was paying a significant amount of money for public education, and health care. While many illegal immigrants were paying taxes, often through false social security numbers, many others were not paying taxes. These people accepted cash under the table from employers who were able to pay substandard wages and on top of that avoid paying withholding taxes. As we know, many politicians were found to have employed illegals this way as domestic help.

I don’t think that anyone disagrees that the deportation of illegals in mass would have a substantially disruptive effect on business here and a sharply inflationary effect. This seems to be the main reason that the “law and order” arm of the Republican Party cannot get anything done about the influx of undocumented immigrants, even with a Republican dominated legislative branch (until a couple of years ago), a Republican president and a Republican-heavy judicial branch. Our economy is rather delicately balanced in a presently mild recession and the disruption caused by massive deportation could have a strong negative effect.

Because we have only made largely token efforts to enforce our immigration laws and at least certain sectors of the economy have profited by the exploitation of illegals as cheap labor, you could very well say that the illegals are here at our sufferance — with a nod and a wink from business.

The economy has always played a role in attitudes toward immigrants, both legal and illegal. Chinese people were shipped here in mass to provide labor for the construction of the railroads in the nineteenth century. The transcontinental line reached Tacoma mid-century, then lines were built to Seattle from the south and from the east and between Seattle and Newcastle where there were extensive mining interests. When this was done hundreds of Chinese were left in the Seattle area. They found jobs in town and what would now be called a Chinese ghetto developed here. There was a regional economic downturn here in the 1860’s and vigilantes rounded up almost all the Chinese in town and marched them to the end of a pier where they waited for several days for a ship bound for San Francisco. Some were put on the first ship to arrive and the remainder went on the next one. The impetus for this was the view that the Chinese were taking jobs that whites should have in hard times.

In the 1880’s “exclusion laws” were passed by the federal government which rendered it illegal for anyone to come here from China. A federal law passed in 1882 limited U.S. citizenship “to aliens being free white persons and to aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent.” The Chinese who were already here were undocumented, denied any hope of citizenship and the subject of a great deal of abuse.

The Alaska gold rush and a disastrous fire in Tokyo created a local lumber boom which led to the importation of large numbers of Japanese laborers at the end of the nineteenth century. Many lived in company towns in Eastern King County, such as Sellick. The Japanese suffered much the same fate as the Chinese who were left stranded here. In fact the first graduating class from the University of Washington Law School (the class of 1902) included an immigrant from Japan, Takuji Yamashita. He was denied citizenship and denied admission to the bar after graduation. He was forced to work in restaurants until his internment forty years later. It wasn’t until 1968 that immigration laws that banned Asians or barred them from citizenship were entirely eliminated. Washington’s Senator Warren Magnuson led this fight on the national level.

Other controversial immigration policies include our refusal to allow Jews admission from Germany in the 1930’s and early 1940’s. Many of those who came here were illegals. Our current refusal to admit displaced people from Iraq has caused mild controversy.

The division between people on the question of illegal immigrants is many faceted, but some people have a more sympathetic attitude because they see the illegal immigrants in a light something like the Chinese in the mid-nineteenth century and the Japanese in the late nineteenth century as being admitted here for the purpose of performing labor, then rebuked because of their status. For these sympathizers the purposefully lax enforcement of immigration laws and eager employment of people coming here without papers is a form of admission that carries with it responsibility.

Discussing the State Budget

Are you as confused as me by discussions about the state budget?  This year’s budget seems to be the lightning rod in the gubernatorial race.  The Seattle Times checked in saying the budget was too fat, pointing to the legislature’s lunatic desire to bring teachers’ salaries closer to the national average.  The Tacoma News Tribune called the house budget a “doozy” and portrayed state representatives as irresponsibly disregarding economic forecasts.  Bill Hinkle, a Republican from Cle Ellum, encapsulated the views of these dailies when he found biblical precedent and foresaw seven years of fiscal pestulence.

I find it difficult to assess these dire warnings and calls of alarm.  First how on earth can I evaluate economic forecasts?  I know that the Seattle Times called Gregoire’s previous budgets crazy and irresponsible because of economic forecasts but these budgets worked out wonderfully by all accounts.  The Times — obviously inspired by a sense of dignity and humility — called the success of Gregoire’s budgets blind luck, so the Times is right even when its wrong.

I’ve never been able to make heads or tails of of the state budget.  It’s numbingly long, loaded with indecipherable jargon and altogether daunting.  This has made me reticent about entering into discussions about the budget; I do not have any sort of picture of what it is.

Perhaps tiring of being pilloried by platitudes, the legislature is (I think) about to pass a bill which should make the budget more accessible to everyone.  SB 6816 passed the senate without a dissenting vote and on Thursday  was unanimously approved by the House Appropriations Committee.  This bill would create an accessible, searchable website containing the budget.  Eight states already have such a thing and several others are moving toward it.  The Washington Policy Center has a great article about this.

Immunity to the Department of Corrections

I have talked about how the legislature grants immunity to special interests, so that they cannot be reached by consumers. When is was discovered that defective materials were commonly employed in the construction of condominiums, the legislature’s response was to pass a law saying that condominium owners had no recourse against anyone in the construction industry if the damage did not appear within four years of the time the condominium got its final permit, thereby eliminating numerous claims for massive repair bills. The major beneficiary of this was the insurance industry which would have had to pay, as the insurer of the builders and suppliers, but which does not have to pay as the insurer of the condominium owners because condominium policies have an exclusion that gets them out.

State Senator Mike Carrell has introduced a bill to grant virtual immunity to the Department of Correstions because of the Department’s liability for negligently releasing felons into the community. This is rather ironic given the publicity given to legislative efforts to provide financial assistance to victims of crimes. The bill is SB6401.

Restitution and the Statute of Repose

HB 3235 was introduced this week by no fewer than 17 state representatives. It requires that a criminal court in a sentencing hearing provide for appropriate restitution to the crime victim. This is now discretionary. This I think is appropriate but its utility is limited by the defendant’s ability to pay and there may be a conflict between the defendants ability to pay restitution and sentencing the defendant to incarceration.

What interests me particularly though is when our legislature feels it appropriate that victims ought to get restitution. If a condominium falls on someone four years after it was built, the legislature believes there should be no restitution. If a school or bridge collapses 6 years after completion, our legislature believes the the victims should not receive any restitution. These are the results of the legislature’s granting of immunity to absolutely everyone in the construction industry through the statute of repose.

In Washington, I guess, you’d be better off if you were shot than if you were hurt in a collapsing buiding, bridge or any other constructed thing. You’d have a better chance of the responsible person covering your medical bills if that person were in prison than you would have if the person was a member of the construction industry.

February 9th

Isn’t it more fun to have our caucus in early February instead of May? Edwards’ departure seems to have had the effect of stirring up speculation, rather than toning things down. Why exactly did he withdraw less than a week before Super Tuesday? One thing for sure, it was not to consolidate the “anti-Hillary” vote. The idea that attitude toward Hillary Clinton defines this nomination process is silly; it belittles the candidates for the nomination, as well as the electorate. My sense is that on balance Edward’s (as well as Kucinich’s) withdrawal will favor Obama, shortening whatever popular lead Clinton may have, if any.

I think that the local press has greatly exaggerated the significance of Washington’s role in this process. If the candidates battle to a standoff next Tuesday, our caucus may fleetingly impart a sense of momentum to someone.

I don’t get the same sense of excitement on the Republican side of things. McCain has dropped his “bee in a jar” frenzy where he would seemingly trip over himself to embrace everything “Republican” no matter how inconsistent with previous statements. I was struck by his pious statements about opposing any form of torture, then you could almost see his head swivel around like a cartoon character when he saw that his party was standing off there somewhere to the right. Like a cartoon character, in one giant step he disappeared back into the crowd. It was fun to be astonished at Romney’s political self discovery as he tried to, not just distance himself from prior positions, but piously advocate the opposite position. But that’s old now and our only amusement is his corporate-style efforts to seem like a regular guy. Huckabe strikes me as the most authentic guy of the pack. Even his blunders when away from the teleprompter are kind of charming. Exactly how would president Huckabe mold the Constitution to conform with Christian principles? (Has anyone told him that the constitution isn’t presidential dictation?) Christians are increasingly coming out in favor of concepts actually advocated by Jesus, such as feeding the poor, helping the sick, and what was that about the accumulation of wealth? I looked and couldn’t find the Biblical part on preemptive strikes, but I’m sure there’s something supportive of causing hundreds of thousands of deaths as collateral damage in a war that seems to be sustained by nothing more than the fear of losing it. It would be interesting to see how president Huckabe’s Christian principles are defined, then how he would implement them as constitutional amendments while we are fighting against theocracy elsewhere. It’s funny to think that the “conservative” candidate Huckabe is actually by far the most radical in proposing to cast off the cornerstone of our democracy, the separation of church and state. Unless of course he meant something else . . . .

Nonetheless, isn’t it a lot more fun to prepare for the caucus now?