Jts5665

PAPER: Vets died as VA obsessed over renewable 'green' energy...


(Third column, 12th story, link)

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Last week I wrote about the fine article in the Washington Post featuring people who had decided to opt-out of Obamacare, with a focus on those who had joined health sharing ministries. I also noted that many of the comments on the article revealed a great deal of confusion, ignorance, and even hostility to the whole idea of individuals choosing to voluntarily share medical bills amongst themselves.

Here’s one of the more lucid, less offensive (but still almost completely wrong) comments:

…if you actually go read [Christian Healthcare Ministries’] site, even the “Gold” level of protection is WORSE THAN the ACA-defined “Bronze” level, for anything excepting a person who has very little healthcare needs. 
 
CHM has [lousy] catastrophic coverage (even with their Brothers’ Keeper’s add-on). Given the immense costs of any chronic disease or accident, you’ll burn through their coverage almost instantly. A single fairly-serious car accident will bankrupt you quickly even with CHM.  
 
And, of course, ongoing drug costs (if you’re in “maintenance”, which most chronic conditions are) are going to NOT be covered.  
 
Lastly, you pay all bills up front, then seek reimbursement from CHM, with a 2-3 month lag time AFTER you’ve submitted the paperwork. 
 
Sounds like a real winner to me. The $150/unit cost isn’t a good deal either – with subsidies, most families of 4 will get better coverage under the ACA policies. I.e. family of 4, $60k income, you get a nice “enhanced Silver” package for $400/month, which is less than the CHM’s $450/month bill and provides FAR superior coverage. 

To just run through the biggest mistakes here:

1. Christian Health Ministries’ ‘Gold’ level plan has a ‘personal responsibility’ amount of $500, compared to most ‘bronze’ level insurance plans with a deductible in the $5,000 – $6,000 range.
2. The catastrophic coverage with the Brother’s Keeper add-on is unlimited for members of the ‘Gold’ plan, and even for the other plans is pretty generous too, ranging between $125,000 and $1 million.
3. Ongoing drug costs are in fact covered.
4. You don’t have to pay the bills up front for major illnesses and injuries
5. The subsidies on an ACA exchange are generous for some, less generous or nonexistent for others. A couple with no kids earning $65,000 gets no subsidy for example.

This particular commenter targeted Christian Healthcare Ministries so I focused on them in my response here, but a quick review of the other ministries will find pretty much the same thing. Samaritan Ministries, for example, has a program called Save to Share to pay medical bills beyond their $250,000 basic cap, and Christian Care Ministry (also known as Medishare) has no annual or lifetime limit at all. Both Liberty Healthshare and Altrua HealthShare also offer up to $1 million in benefits.

(One quick note – the average medical expense for someone in the top 1% of all healthcare consumers  was about $87,000 in 2010. You have to have an epically bad year or decade to even come close to the limits set by some of the ministries.)

But rather than go through each comment or complaint about health sharing ministries offered on the Washington Post article, I thought it might be more helpful just to provide some of the real stories of individuals who are members of the ministries and have had their medical bills paid by fellow members. I’ve picked one from each of the five.

Samaritan members have come through for us each time we had medical needs in our family. One medical need of my wife’s required an MRI and lumbar puncture procedure, as well as follow-up doctor visits. The bills totaled $9,566.00, but the medical providers gladly offered us discounts, simply because we asked kindly, eliminating $5,464.16 off our balance due. That left us a balance of only $4,101.84, which we were shared in full via personal checks from other members through the Samaritan Ministries International’s very organized system for assigning every medical… Additionally, our personal responsibility was $0 for this medical need, because of discount we negotiated. Our monthly share never exceeded our set amount, and our share hasn’t increased due to having a medical need.

The second medical need my wife had was for ingrown toe nail surgery in two toes. This surgery would have cost us $675 without help, but the final amount we’re out of pocket is $121, because like the previous medical need we asked for discounts from the doctor’s office and received shares from members.
Dustin & Melisa Cheatham

 
Our family joined Christian Healthcare Ministries in 1993… Since then we’ve experienced various medical incidents, including hemorrhoids; appendicitis; broken bones; accidents; gallbladder issues; Angelman syndrome; kidney stones; and my pregnancies with our five daughters—Olivia, Julia, Arianna, Victoria and Sophia.. We’re grateful to CHM members for sharing nearly $90,000 to help us with these many expenses.

Two of our daughters—Arianna and Victoria—at age six were each diagnosed with scoliosis… We knew that our daughters would need surgery in order to live longer. (Severe scoliosis can shorten lifespan by up to 20 percent because it affects internal organs and rib cage rotation.)

We found a remarkable surgeon who practices medicine about two hours away from where we live. Arianna underwent spinal fusion surgery in June 2012 and spent three weeks in the hospital…

Arianna’s medical bills totaled $345,504; the hospital bill alone was more than $300,000. Thankfully, with a lot of help from CHM, the hospital bill was reduced by 77 percent. Overall we received $251,948 in discounts and the remaining balance ($93,556) was shared by CHM members!
Kenneth & Debbie Seigal


While ice-skating at her granddaughter’s 7th birthday party, [Peggy] Sofran took a tumble face first onto the ice.  The fall caused her arm from her shoulder to her elbow to turn black and blue..

After a visit to her doctor, he confirmed that she had fractured her shoulder. After years of using traditional insurance, she was nervous the first time she handed her Liberty HealthShare card to her doctor’s receptionist.

“I was wondering what would happen once I used the card. I had explained to the nurse how it worked and then she took down the information on the card”, said Sofran.

Although the function of a health share plan was new to the nurse, she sent it to the billing department for processing without any hesitation. 

“They didn’t have a problem taking it at all; I thought ‘Oh wow, this is nice’!”, she said.  After Sofran’s second visit, her experience was even better. She went in for another x-ray, handed the card to the nurse who took it and gave her everything she needed for her procedure, without any questions.

Sofran exclaimed, “It was so easy, and the perfect experience. I couldn’t have asked for things to have gone smoother! My bills have been shared by the members and the doctors are paid…
Peggy Sofran


I have been a member of Altrua HealthShare since early 2002. I can say Altrua HealthShare has truly blessed my family over the years of being there in times of medical needs. In late 2004 my wife had a second round of cancer that created over 160k of medical bills after being clean of cancer for 12 years. In mid-2010 I had major neck surgery which created 80k of medical bills and Altrua HealthShare was there to provide for my family’s financial needs… I also would have been financially crippled without Altrua HealthShares assistance. A very special connection to Altrua HealthShare is Altrua Ministries… [which] assists the members of Altrua HealthShare in dealing with financial hardship and works with medical providers in lowering and finding discounts plans to lower the out of pocket expense…
Mr.  Jacobs

 Last but by no means least, here is an amazing video detailing the experience of Bobby and Sandra, Christian Care Ministry/Medishare members who faced over $1 million in medical bills following what was indeed an epically bad year medically speaking – 43 days in intensive care, pancreatitis, stroke, coma, and pulmonary failure, and those are just the highlights. Their ministry paid the entire bill.

As I’ve often said, health sharing ministries are not the right solution for everyone looking for alternatives to conventional health insurance or just for a way to save money on health care. But for those who do their homework and look at what each ministry really offers, as opposed to how they’re described by uninformed and hostile people, there’s a good chance they’ll find something that’s a match.

YOUTUBE to pull plug on indie stars...


(Second column, 17th story, link)

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The IRS is currently being investigated by Congress for some possibly politically-motivated "attention" it directed towards "Tea Party" and other conservative groups that operated as tax-exempt entities. Along the way, IRS official Lois Lerner, who was the first to publicly disclose the inappropriate targeting, was also one of the first government officials to plead the Fifth (twice) in government hearings.

The Congressional investigation demanded copies of Lois Lerner's emails from the IRS. Some were turned over to the House Ways and Means Committee, but not everything it sought. Now, the IRS is telling the committee that it's not going to get everything it asked for.

The IRS has told Congress that it lost more than two years’ worth of emails involving former IRS official Lois Lerner, due to a computer crash.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) on Friday said it was “unacceptable” that he was just learning of this problem now, after a lengthy investigation into Lerner’s involvement in the IRS targeting scandal.

Camp points out that the IRS withheld these emails for over a year before suddenly "discovering" they were unavailable. The IRS says it can find everything Lerner sent to and received from other IRS employees but nothing containing correspondence with those outside the agency.

Obviously, this convenient "computer crash" has generated a lot of skepticism. For one thing, a "computer crash" doesn't really have the power to destroy electronic communications. Email is always almost stored somewhere else other than the local user's computer. And even if the IRS meant a "server crash" instead of a "computer crash," any decent server system contains multiple levels of redundancy.

The Blaze sought input from Norman Cillo, a former Microsoft project manager, who presented six reasons why he believes the IRS is lying about its inability to recover these emails. Number one on the list seems to be the most applicable.

I believe the government uses Microsoft Exchange for their email servers. They have built-in exchange mail database redundancy. So, unless they did not follow Microsoft's recommendations they are telling a falsehood.

The IRS's own policies on email state that its employees use both Microsoft Outlook and Exchange, which means it should have some form of backup available.

Secure Messaging enrollment is an automated process for all LAN accounts with an Exchange mailbox in IRS. You can find the instructions for configuring the Outlook client to use the certificates at the Secure Enterprise Messaging Systems (SEMS) web site: http://documentation.sems.enterprise.irs.gov/.

According to Cillo, the only other explanation for the IRS's inability to recover these emails is that the agency is "totally mismanaged and has the worst IT department ever." Unfortunately, the government seems to have a lot of mismanaged and terrible IT departments, so this may be closer to the truth than anyone would really like to admit. Perhaps the general ineptitude of large government agencies is behind the Treasury Department's policy that all email sent to or from IRS employees be "archived" via hard copy printouts.

If you create or receive email messages during the course of your daily work, you are responsible for ensuring that you manage them properly. The Treasury Department’s current email policy requires emails and attachments that meet the definition of a federal record be added to the organization’s files by printing them (including the essential transmission data) and filing them with related paper records. If transmission and receipt data are not printed by the email system, annotate the paper copy.

There's more information here, citing the IRS's own internal guidelines on tape backups, etc., that suggest further levels of redundancy, as well as the commissioner of the IRS testifying that the agency stores its emails on servers.

Critics believe the IRS has simply "vanished" the crucial emails in order to cut Lerner adrift and make it appear she acted alone. Any evidence that would tie outside government agencies (including the administration itself) into this situation has been deemed unrecoverable. Supposedly, there should be paper copies of the missing emails, but no one in Congress has requested these and the IRS certainly isn't offering to look.

But one Congressman thinks he has a solution to the missing email dilemma. Steve Stockman (last seen here threatening to bring a defamation lawsuit against someone who uttered true facts about his criminal past) knows some people who have a whole lot of email data just laying around.

“I have asked NSA Director Rogers to send me all metadata his agency has collected on Lois Lerner’s email accounts for the period which the House sought records,” said Stockman. “The metadata will establish who Lerner contacted and when, which helps investigators determine the extent of illegal activity by the IRS.”

Yeah, let me know how that works out for you, Steve. The NSA can't even confirm or deny its monthly water usage at its Utah data site, much less that it has metadata pertaining to Americans' communications.

[Sidebar: I do really love the fact that this sort of thing is becoming increasingly common -- the use of the NSA as the backup-of-last-resort for phone/email/internet communications data. If anyone claims it can't find email X or phone record Y, someone's going to say, "Hey, I'll bet the NSA has a copy!" Hilarious. The NSA will never again be allowed to pretend it doesn't harvest data on American citizens.]

The whole letter, which begins with some light ass-kissing of new NSA director Michael Rogers ("thank you for your 33 years of, and continued service to, our country...") and closes with a bit of grandstanding, surreally asking "the Agency" to send all relevant metadata on the missing Lerner emails to "Donny@mail.house.gov." All in all, probably one of the most incongruous demands the NSA has ever received, a letter which conjures up the image of a late-night meeting in an underground parking garage, with sunglassed NSA liaisons handing over a briefcase full of metadata to a 19-year-old intern dressed in his dad's suit.

It's pretty hard to shake the impression that this is a coverup. As always, the specter of pure ineptitude lurks in the background, as it often does when large bureaucracies tangle with technology. But until the IRS presents further evidence detailing how exactly these emails went missing, it's safe to assume there's been an active effort made to cover up government impropriety.

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Overturning centuries of English Common Law, false representation is now legal in the United States.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) won dismissal of a suit over $450 million in residential mortgage-backed securities, with a New York judge saying that the firms that bought the bonds should have done more research beforehand.

State Supreme Court Justice Charles Ramos dismissed the claims against Goldman Sachs today, saying the investors only reviewed data presented in offering documents for the securities and never asked to review files for the underlying loans.

“The true nature of the risk being assumed could, admittedly, have been ascertained from reviewing these loan files and plaintiffs never asked for them,” Ramos wrote.

In other words, it's perfectly legal to present someone with a fraudulent document claiming to be selling them a pig in the poke, because if they don't actually look in the sack to see that there is a dead rat, and not a live pig in there, it's their own fault. This is another sign of the continued collapse of the rule of law in the USA.

Congratulations, Justice Ramos. You may have just destroyed the securitization market. Who in their right minds will ever purchase a loan security again? If you were going to review each and every loan and ascertain the risks involved, you would already be a mortgage bank.

Fortunately for Goldman Sachs, there should be enough con artists out there for the apex con artist to continue preying upon. But what sane and honest individual would ever choose to do business with them in light of their behavior here? And can you imagine if this standard were applied across the board? No one would ever dare to buy something in a box or order anything off the Internet ever again.

Paul C. "Chip" Knappenberger and Patrick J. Michaels

Global Science Report is a feature from the Center for the Study of Science, where we highlight one or two important new items in the scientific literature or the popular media. For broader and more technical perspectives, consult our monthly “Current Wisdom.”

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A week ago, the White House released a report on the health consequences of global warming that was meant to supplement and reinforce the heath benefit claims made during the roll-out of new Environmental Protection Agency regulations aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants.

Those claims, which border on the bizarre, were met with a great deal of pushback—and deservingly so. 

The supplemental White House report didn’t make things better. Take for example, how they handle extreme heat events and heat-related mortality.

To say that we are disappointed with how the White House/EPA presents the data on heat-related mortality is an understatement. No matter how many times we point out—through official means, op-eds, blogs posts, etc.—that they are mishandling the data to such an extent that they present the opposite conclusion from that reached in the scientific literature, it never gets better.

In fact, it seems to be getting worse.

Below the jump, in its entirety, is the section on heat waves from the new White House report, The Health Impacts of Climate Change on Americans:

 

Figure 1. Observed U.S. temperature change (source: White House report).

Notice that there is not a single study cited that links changes in heat waves to changes in heat-related mortality. Instead, it is strongly implied that increasing heat will lead to increasing deaths. We can’t think that any reader would reach the opposite conclusion given the White House discussion and presentation. And yet, that is precisely the case that scientific study after scientific study finds. Despite rising heat, fewer American’s die from heat-related causes (when properly adjusted, of course, for population increases and changes in age stricture).

But such information is nowhere to be found in the White House report. Instead, the section on extreme heat events shows a map of temperature trends across the United States and then goes on to say that extreme heat causes death, leading the readers to a false conclusion.

Here is a similar but more complete presentation from a scientific study looking at trends in temperature and trends in heat-related mortality across the United States.

Figure 2. Annual heat-related mortality rates (excess deaths per standard million population on days in which the decadal-varying threshold apparent temperature (AT) is equaled or exceeded) by city and decade, and long-term trend in summer afternoon AT. Each histogram bar indicates a different decade: from left to right, 1960s–1970s, 1980–1989, and 1990–1998. Decades without histogram bars exhibit no threshold ATs and no heat-related mortality. Decades with gray bars have mortality rates that are statistically significantly different from the decades indicated by black bars. The average excess deaths across all 28 cities is shown at the lower left. AT trends are indicated beneath each city abbreviation (from Davis et al., 2003).

The map in Figure 2 shows trends in summer time apparent temperature (AT)—a combination of heat and humidity—indicated by the small symbol under each city and explained by the right-hand legend. It indicates basically the same thing as the White House map—that summer temperatures are on the rise across the country. But this map also superimposes the trends in heat-related mortality on the trends in temperature (the bar charts for each city).

What it shows is that annual heat-related mortality was on the decline across the United States from the mid-1960s through the late 1990s (the end of the data used in this study). More recent studies confirm that the downward trend in heat-related mortality has continued even in the face of rising temperature (can you say “adaptation”?).

This more complete presentation of the data tells the exact opposite story than the one that the White House (mis)leads you to believe.

You have to ask yourself why the White House finds it necessary to lead you away from the best science in order to drum up support for its energy policies (another example here).

References:

Bobb, J.F., R.D. Peng, M.L. Bell, and F. Dominici. “Heat-Related Mortality and Adaptation in the United States.” Environmental Health Perspectives, 2014. Online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1289/ehp.1307392.

Davis, R.E., P.C. Knappenbergre, P.J. Michaels, and W.M. Novicoff. “Changing Heat-Related Mortality in the United States.” Environmental Health Perspectives 111: 1712–18 (2003).

Kalkstein, L.S., Greene, S., Mills, D.M., and Samenow, J. “An Evaluation of the Progress in Reducing Heat-Related Human Mortality in Major U.S. Cities.” Natural Hazards 56(1): 113-29 (2011).

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg donated $250,000 to the pro-Thad Cochran super PAC “Mississippi Conservatives” in late May, Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings the organization provided show.

Bloomberg’s donation to the Super PAC supporting Cochran could end up becoming a kiss of death for Cochran in the heated runoff against conservative state Sen. Chris McDaniel, who bested Cochran in the popular vote in the primary a little over a week ago, forcing a runoff a week from Tuesday.

Bloomberg supports gun control—something Cochran says he’s against.

“This is not a battle of dollars, this is a battle for the hearts and minds of America so that we can protect our children, protect innocent people,” Bloomberg said in a recent television interview about his renewed fight against the National Rifle Association.

“We’re the only civilized country in the world that has this problem,” Bloomberg added, while highlighting gun-related deaths in the country.

While the NRA has interestingly enough also thrown its weight—with Bloomberg—behind Cochran, pro-2nd Amendment groups like National Association of Gun Rights and Gun Owners of America have endorsed McDaniel.

But at the recent NRA convention in April, NRA chief lobbyist Chris Cox attacked Bloomberg as if speaking directly to him: “Stay out of our homes, stay out of our gun cabinets... because this freedom is not for sale.”

“Mr. Bloomberg, you are an arrogant hypocrite,” Cox said.

Another of Bloomberg’s lobbying outfits—the Partnership for a New American Economy—is pushing comprehensive immigration reform. Support for amnesty was the driving force behind the crumbling of another GOP establishment titan, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, this week—where conservative challenger Dave Brat hammered Cantor on the issue day in and day out.

Cochran has cast several votes in Congress in favor of amnesty, weakened border security, and a massive increase in legal immigration. And while he voted against the “Gang of Eight” immigration bill last year at final passage, he didn’t say anything about it until months after it was introduced.

McDaniel, on the other hand, has come out swinging against amnesty—signing the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) pledge against it and against a massive increase in legal immigration. McDaniel has also called out Cochran for remaining silent on the efforts by Senate Democrats and President Obama’s administration to use America’s military as a tool to grant amnesty to illegal alien minors. After plans—pushed heavily by Cantor—to use the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to grant amnesty to illegal alien minors, or DREAMers, who enlist in the military fell apart, Sen. Dick Durbin sought to enact similar plans through the Senate Appropriations Defense subcommittee. Cochran is the ranking member of that Committee but hasn’t said anything to respond to or fight back against Durbin’s push—which includes a call from Durbin on Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to administratively implement such a plan without Congress’ approval if conservatives successfully block the effort again.

Bloomberg is also pro-abortion, something that could swing many Mississippi voters McDaniel’s way as Mississippi is a very pro-life state working to shutter its only functioning abortion clinic. “The two parties’ nominees for president offer different visions of where they want to lead America,” Bloomberg said when he endorsed Barack Obama’s re-election campaign. “One believes a woman’s right to choose should be protected for future generations; one does not. That difference, given the likelihood of Supreme Court vacancies, weighs heavily on my decision.”

Bloomberg is so pro-abortion that he actually criticized Sen. Chuck Schumer for not being pro-choice enough when Schumer backed pro-life Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) in order to beat the strongly pro-life now former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA). Santorum—a 2012 GOP presidential candidate whose conservative views led him to win Mississippi in the primary over Mitt Romney—has endorsed McDaniel over his former colleague Cochran.

While the National Right-to-Life Committee has endorsed Cochran, McDaniel serves as pro bono counsel for Pro Life Mississippi—a state-based pro-life group.

To top it off, Bloomberg also supports Common Core—something Cochran now claims he’s against but in 2010 offered public support for in a letter to Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

“We have to make sure that we give our kids constantly the opportunity to move towards the major leagues,” Bloomberg said in comments in which he praised Common Core.

Bloomberg’s money for Cochran is going into the Super PAC that high-profile conservative attorney Cleta Mitchell—of the American Conservative Union and Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund—says received an illegal bank loan from Trustmark National Bank. Mitchell has filed an FEC complaint against Mississippi Conservatives, which is run by former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s nephew, Henry Barbour.

Ironically enough, Henry and Haley Barbour—and many other Cochran supporters—argued that Tea Party and conservative groups which have spent millions backing McDaniel’s candidacy but are now taking money from one of the most liberal elites in America to push for Cochran in the primary and now runoff.

Obama Admin Forbids Lawmakers From Taking Photos Of Facility...


(Second column, 5th story, link)

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Following the BEA release yesterday of US state GDP data for 2013, I was able to update the map above, which appeared on CD in February using 2012 data.

The map above was created by matching economic output in US states in 2013 to foreign countries with comparable GDPs, using BEA data for GDP by US state and GDP by country from the International Monetary Fund, via Wikipedia here. For each US state (and the District of Columbia), I tried to find the country closest in economic size in 2013 (measured by GDP), and for each state there was a country with a pretty close match – those countries are displayed in the map above and in the table below. Obviously, in some cases the closest match was a country that produced slightly more, or slightly less, economic output in 2013 than a given US state.

It’s pretty amazing how ridiculously large the US economy is, and the map above helps put America’s GDP of $16.8 trillion in 2013 (and more than $17 trillion in Q4 2013 and Q1 in 2014) into perspective by comparing the GDP of US states to other country’s entire national GDP. For example:

1. America’s largest state economy is California, which produced $2.2 trillion of economic output in 2013, just slightly below Brazil’s GDP in the same year of $2.24 trillion. In 2013, California as a separate country would have been the 8th largest economy in the world, ahead of Russia ($2.1 trillion) and Italy ($2.07 trillion). And California’s population is only 38 million compared to Brazil’s population of almost 200 million, which means California produces the same economic output as Brazil with about 80% fewer people. That’s a testament to the superior, world-class productivity of the American worker.

2. America’s second largest state economy – Texas – produced $1.53 trillion of economic output in 2013, placing it just slightly ahead of the world’s 12th largest country by GDP – Australia – with $1.50 trillion of economic output.

3. Even with all of its oil wealth, Saudi Arabia’s GDP in 2013 at $711 billion was less than the state GDP of Illinois ($720 billion).

4. America’s third largest state – New York with a GDP in 2013 of $1.3 trillion – produced slightly less economic output than Spain’s GDP of $1.35 trillion, even though Spain’s population of 47 million people is more than twice the number of people living in New York (19.6 million). Another example of the world-class productivity of the American workforce.

5. Other comparisons: Florida produces about the same GDP as the Netherlands ($800 billion), Pennsylvania ($644 billion) produces almost as much as the entire country of Switzerland ($650 billion) and Ohio produces more than the entire country of Sweden.

MP: Overall, the US produced 22.7% of world GDP in 2013, with only about 4.4% of the world’s population. Three of America’s states (California, Texas and New York) – as separate countries – would rank in the world’s top 13 largest economies. And one of those states – California – produced more than $2 trillion in economic output in 2013 – and the other two (Texas and New York) produced more than $1.5 trillion and $1.3 trillion of GDP in 2013 respectively. The map and these statistics help remind us of the enormity of the economic powerhouse we live in. So let’s not lose sight of how ridiculously large and powerful the US economy is, and how much wealth and prosperity is being created all the time in the world’s largest economic engine.

US State	GDP (millions), 2013	Country	GDP (Millions), 2013
California	$2,202,678	Brazil	$2,242,000
Texas	$1,532,623	Australia	$1,505,277
New York	$1,310,712	Spain	$1,358,000
Florida	$800,492	Netherlands	$800,007
Illinois	$720,692	Saudi Arabia	$711,050
Pennsylvania	$644,915	Switzerland	$650,000
Ohio	$565,272	Sweden	$557,000
New Jersey	$543,071	Poland	$516,000
North Carolina	$471,365	Norway	$511,000
Georgia	$454,532	Belgium	$506,000
Virginia	$452,585	Taiwan	$489,000
Massachusetts	$446,323	Argentina	$488,000
Michigan	$432,573	Austria	$415,000
Washington	$408,049	UAE	$396,000
Maryland	$342,382	South Africa	$351,000
Indiana	$317,102	Denmark	$331,000
Minnesota	$312,081	Malaysia	$312,000
Colorado	$294,443	Singapore	$295,000
Tennessee	$287,633	Nigeria	$286,000
Wisconsin	$282,486	Chile	$276,000
Arizona	$279,024	Hong Kong	$273,000
Missouri	$276,345	Phillipines	$272,000
Louisiana	$253,576	Finland	$256,000
Connecticut	$249,251	Greece	$241,000
Oregon	$219,590	Portugal	$219,000
Alabama	$193,566	Qatar	$202,000
South Carolina	$183,561	Czech Republic	$198,000
Kentucky	$183,373	Kuwait	$185,000
Oklahoma	$182,086	New Zealand	$181,000
Iowa	$165,767	Ukraine	$176,000
Kansas	$144,062	Vietnam	$170,000
Utah	$141,240	Bangladesh	$141,000
Nevada	$132,024	Hungary	$133,000
Arkansas	$124,218	Angola	$122,000
District of Columbia	$113,362	Hungary	$124,600
Nebraska	$109,614	Morocco	$105,000
Mississippi	$105,163	Slovakia	$96,000
New Mexico	$92,245	Ecuador	$94,000
Hawaii	$75,235	Azerbaijan	$74,000
West Virginia	$73,970	Belarus	$71,000
New Hampshire	$67,848	Libya	$67,000
Delaware	$62,703	Sri Lanka	$66,000
Idaho	$62,247	Dominican Republic	$61,000
Alaska	$59,355	Luxembourg	$59,000
North Dakota	$56,329	Uzbekistan	$57,000
Maine	$54,755	Guatemala	$54,000
Rhode Island	$53,184	Bulgaria	$53,000
South Dakota	$46,732	Slovenia	$47,000
Wyoming	$45,432	Kenya	$45,000
Montana	$44,040	Lebanon	$44,000
Vermont	$29,509	Bolivia	$29,000

Chris Edwards

The programs, regulations, and laws that define most federal activities are so numerous and complex that it strangles effective governance. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is no exception. During the Hurricane Katrina disaster, DHS officials were in a fog of confusion, overwhelmed by events and all the complicated emergency rules and procedures.

A key marker of excess bureaucracy is the generous use of acronyms. In government, acronyms are used to identify the building blocks of bureaucracies, such as agencies, committees, programs, job titles, procedures, rules, and systems.

Recently, I’ve looked at aid-to-state programs run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which is part of DHS. Acronyms abound at FEMA. To get a sense of the bureaucracy, I looked for acronyms in this 84-page Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) for one of FEMA’s many aid programs.

Below is a list of all the bureaucratic structures that were capitalized and had acronyms in this document for one program. Actually, I left out some common acronyms that many people already know, including OMB, FBI, CDC, CBP, EIN, DOT, EMS, IED, FTE, MSA, DOL, GIS, FCC, TDD, and NIST. So the list below mainly includes specialized acronyms that workers in this policy area would need to know. Many of the acronyms refer to government structures that have their own lengthy documents full of acronyms.

H.L. Mencken said “The true bureaucrat is a man of really remarkable talents. He writes a kind of English that is unknown elsewhere in the world, and he has an almost infinite capacity for forming complicated and unworkable rules.”

DHS must be full of “true bureaucrats” because by the time I read to the end of this document, I had counted 113 acronyms. That is an impressive achievement in True Bureaucratic Excellence (TBE).

Bureaucratic Structures with Acronyms in the FOA for the HSGP
Homeland Security Grant Program (HSGP)
State Homeland Security Program (SHSP)
Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI)
Operation Stonegarden (OPSG)
Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment (THIRA)
State Preparedness Report (SPR)
National Preparedness Report (NPR)
Information Bulletin (IB)
Investment Justification (IJ)
State Administrative Agency (SAA)
Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC)
National Incident Management System (NIMS)
Federal Emergency Response Official (FERO)
Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS)
Comprehensive Preparedness Guide (CPG)
Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act (PKEMRA)
Law Enforcement Terrorism Prevention Activity (LETPA)
Environmental Planning and Historic Preservation (EHP)
Border Patrol (BP)
Federal Financial Report (FFR)
Biannual Strategy Implementation Report (BSIR)
Initial Strategy Implementation Plan (ISIP)
Strategic Implementation Plan (SIP)
Planning, Organization, Equipment, Training, and Exercises (POETE)
Grants Program Directorate (GPD)
Grant Adjustment Notice (GAN)
Centralized Scheduling and Information Desk (CSID)
Unified Reporting Tool (URT)
Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS)
System for Award Management (SAM)
Grant Reporting Tool (GRT)
Statewide Communication Interoperable Plan (SCIP)
Statewide Interoperability Coordinator (SWIC)
Statewide Interoperability Governance Board (SIGB)
State Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment (HIRA)
Critical Operational Capability (COC)
Enabling Capability (EC)
Information Sharing Environment (ISE)
Training and Exercise Plan (TEP)
Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program (HSEEP)
Training and Exercise Planning Workshop (TEPW)
National Exercise Scheduling System (NEXS)
After Action Report/Improvement Plan (AAR/IP)
Public Health Emergency Preparedness (PHEP)
Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR)
Hospital Preparedness Program (HPP)
Senior Advisory Committee (SAC)
Port Security Grant Program (PSGP)
Nonprofit Security Grant Program (NSGP)
Transit Security Grant Program (TSGP)
Area Maritime Security Committee (AMSC)
Regional Transportation Security Working Group (RTSWG)
Homeland Security Advisor (HSA)
Emergency Management Agency (EMA)
Emergency Medical Services for Children (EMSC)
Cities Readiness Initiative (CRI)
Baseline Assessment and Security Enhancement (BASE)
National Capital Region (NCR)
Community Emergency Response Team (CERT)
Integrated Planning Team (IPT)
Emergency Systems for Advance Registration (ESAR)
Volunteer Health Professional (VHP)
Metropolitian Medical Response System (MMRS)
Cyber Security Framework (CSF)
Citizens Corps Program (CCP)
Core Capabilities Tool (CCT)
National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS)
National Emergency Communications Plan (NECP)
Logistic Management Directorate (LMD)
Operational Pack (OPack)
Western Hemispheres Travel Initiative (WHTI)
Driver’s License Security Grant Program (DLSGP)
National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP)
High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA)
National Crime Information Center (NCIC)
Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS)
Fusion Liaison Officers (FLO)
National Disaster Recovery Framework (NDRF)
National Emergency Family Registry and Locator System (NEFRLS)
National Emergency Medical Services Information System (NEMSIS)
Regional Resiliency Assessment Program (RRAP)
Communications Assets and Mapping (CASM)
Nationwide Public Safety Broadband Network (NPSBN)
National Counter-IED Capabilities Analysis Database (NCCAD)
Multi-Jurisdictional IED Security Planning (MJIEDSP)
Corrective Action Plan (CAP)
Continuity of Operations/Continuity of Government (COOP/COG)
Medical Reserve Corps (MRC)
Volunteers in Public Service (VIPS)
National Preparedness Directorate (NPD)
Technical Assistance (TA)
Authorized Equipment List (AEL)
Center for Domestic Preparedness (CDP)
Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP)
Field Intelligence Group (FIG)
Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF)
Office of Emergency Communications (OEC)
Personnel Reimbursement for Intelligence Cooperation and Enhancement (PRICE)
Bomb-Making Materials Awareness Program (BMAP)
Responder Training Development Center (RTDC)
National Training and Education Division (NTED)
National Domestic Preparedness Consortium (NDPC)
Rural Domestic Preparedness Consortium (RDPC)
Emergency Management Institute (EMI)
Point of Contact (POC)
Single Point of Contact (SPOC)
Training Point of Contact (TPOC)
Maritime Security Risk Analysis Model (MSRAM)
Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC)
Urban Area Working Groups (UAWG)
Emergency Operation Plan (EOP)
Tactical Interoperable Communications Plan (TICP)

Matthew Feeney

Today, thousands of drivers of London’s iconic black cabs are taking part in a possibly illegal demonstration in response to how Transport for London (TfL), the city’s transportation agency, is treating Uber. The drivers plan to cause congestion which Kabbee, a mini cab app company, believes will cost the London economy an estimated £125 million. Licensed taxi drivers are also holding protests related to Uber across other European cities today.

The Licensed Taxi Drivers Association (LTDA) believes that Uber, the San Francisco-based transport technology company, is operating illegally in London. Thanks to the Private Hire Vehicles (London) Act 1998, it is illegal for a London vehicle with a private hire vehicle license to have a taximeter. Up until yesterday Uber’s website stated that anyone who wanted to be an Uber driver in London must have a private hire vehicle license. Today those requirements remain the same, however in response to the London protest Uber has opened to licensed black cabs.

TfL disagrees with LTDA and believes that the phones used by Uber should not be considered taximeters because they are not physically attached to the vehicle:

Smartphones used by private hire drivers – which act as GPS tracking devices to measure journey distances and relay information so that fares can be calculated remotely from the vehicle – do not constitute the equipping of a vehicle with a taxi meter.

However, TfL has asked the High Court to rule on the matter. LTDA’s secretary general, Steve McNamara, believes the court is unlikely to announce a ruling before the end of the year.

McNamara has used blunt language when discussing Uber and its presence in London:

This is not some philanthropic friendly society, it’s an American monster that has no qualms about breaching any and all laws in the pursuit of profit, most of which will never see a penny of tax paid in the UK.

Becoming a driver of one of London’s black cabs is a long process. In order to be a London black cab driver you need to pass “The Knowledge,” a rigorous test on London’s thousands of streets, roads, and landmarks, which takes years to prepare for. Not only do those hoping to become London cabbies have to spend years studying London, they also have to pay the relevant fees to complete the application process.

Speaking to the BBC, London black cab driver Lloyd Baldwin said:

Our beef with Uber is that these drivers have come straight into London, and have been licensed straight away by Transport for London. We’re regulated to within an inch of our lives.

We don’t do protests willy-nilly for petty things, we feel it’s our only course.

and,

We just want them to be treated exactly the same as we are.

Baldwin’s frustrations make sense in light of the time and money invested into becoming a driver of one of London’s iconic taxis. But, as in other jurisdictions, the answer is not to make new and innovative companies like Uber conform to already out-of-date regulations and legislation, but rather to liberalize the market Uber and London black cabs are competing in. When the Private Hire Vehicles Act was signed in 1998 the iPhone was still nine years away, and “The Knowledge” test, which began almost 150 years ago, predates cell phones (never mind smartphones). Regulations such as the ban on private hire vehicle license holders from having taxi meters are out of date, and it is long past due for them to be repealed in order to allow traditional cabs to compete with companies like Uber.

(Don Boudreaux)

Here’s a letter to Roll Call:

Tom Udall (D-NM) and 42 other incumbent U.S. senators propose a Constitutional amendment with the following key provision: “To advance the fundamental principle of political equality for all, and to protect the integrity of the legislative and electoral processes, Congress shall have power to regulate the raising and spending of money and in-kind equivalents with respect to Federal elections, including through setting limits on – (1) the amount of contributions to candidates for nomination for election to, or for election to, Federal office; (2) the amount of funds that may be spent by, in support of, or in opposition to such candidates” (“Senate Democrats Begin Efforts to Amend Constitution,” June 6th).

Never mind that this amendment strikes at the heart of the First amendment values of freedom of speech and freedom of petition.  Focus instead on the fact that, if ratified, this amendment would create far greater political inequality and eat like a cancer at electoral processes.  It would do so by shielding incumbent politicians from competition.

Suppose that Ford, Toyota, Volkswagen, and other of today’s successful automakers seek, and get, the power to regulate the raising and spending of money and in-kind equivalents with respect to auto advertising.  Do you think that these incumbent automakers - whose brands are currently established and well-known - would never succumb to the temptation to use this power to protect themselves from the competition of upstart automakers?

Would you take at face value all the fine rhetoric from these incumbent automakers about the need to protect members of the car-buying public from being overwhelmed and misled by expensive and glitzy ads?  And would you be confident that allowing incumbent automakers to regulate spending on auto ads and on sales campaigns would improve the quality of competition among automakers and heighten these firms’ responsiveness to the ‘true’ demands of the car-buying public?

I suspect that most people would correctly see such an effort by incumbent automakers as being a scheme to restrict competition - a scheme that would benefit greedy incumbent automakers and make them less responsive to the general public.  It’s astonishing, therefore, that so many people continue to believe that the very same such scheme by incumbent politicians is a noble endeavor to improve political competition - an endeavor that, we are unbelievably assured, will make politicians more responsive to the general public.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA  22030​​

….

Richard Epstein has more here.  (HT George White)

DELTA, UNITED and AMERICAN press Congress to block international airline offering cheap fares...


(Third column, 25th story, link)

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A Chicago woman is suing the city, along with ten police officers, for the abuse she was subjected to during a raid of the massage parlor she worked at. The entire interaction (which lasted more than 40 minutes) was caught on tape by the business' camera system.

Here's the beginning of the raid, which shows Chicago's finest interacting with Jianqing Klyzek using a combination of physical force and verbal abuse.

Here's the charming stuff Officer Di Pasquale had to say to Klyzek during their brief conversation.

Defendant DI PASQUALE: You're not fucking American! I'll put you in a UPS box and send you back to wherever the fuck you came from!

Plaintiff: I'm a citizen, OK?

Defendant DI PASQUALE: No you're not! No, you're not a citizen! No, you're not! No, you're not! You're here on our borrowed time. So mind your fucking business before I shut this whole fucking place down. And I'll take this place and then whoever owns it will fucking kill you because they don't care about you, OK? I'll take this building. You'll be dead and your family will be dead.

Note that this follows Officer Messina asking for permission to tase the 5'2" Klyzek "ten fucking times."

Also note -- especially those of you who claim bad cops are anomalies and not representative of the entire force -- that not a single officer (the plain-clothed men lined up against the counter impassively watching a small Asian woman being berated and manhandled by two "uniformed" cops) tried to dial back the aggression or suggested that some of things being said weren't appropriate or helpful. If anyone wants to know why there are so many bad cops, this is part of the problem -- the tacit approval offered by better cops who let this sort of thing happen without intervening.

Not only did these cops not try to defuse a situation that had gotten ridiculously out of hand, but they also assisted Di Pasquale and Messina in their search for the recording device in order to remove the evidence of their misconduct. Unfortunately for them, the device stored recordings off site. (Apparently, this fruitless search made up a large part of the 40-minute "raid.")

Since the officers couldn't find any evidence of prostitution (or human-sized shipping boxes), they fell back on weak claims that Klyzek assaulted an officer by "biting and scratching" as they attempted to restrain her. That failed as well when the judge threw the case out at a preliminary hearing.

But these officers weren't done failing. From the lawsuit:

On information and belief, sometime after the preliminary hearing, one or more of Defendant OFFICERS, contacted an Assistant State's Attorney in order to pursue a Grand Jury indictment for the offense of Aggravated Battery of a Police Officer against Plaintiff.

Based on Officer Sako's (allegedly) false testimony, the grand jury indicted Klyzek for aggravated battery. This was swiftly reversed when her lawyer brought some actual evidence to the grand jury.

On January 13, 2014, after viewing the video recording of Plaintiff's arrest, the State's Attorney's Office dismissed the aggravated battery of a police officer charges against Plaintiff.

Months later, the Chicago PD has yet to arrive at the same conclusion, despite being in possession of the same recorded evidence.

Police spokesman Adam Collins released a statement saying the matter is being investigated by the Independent Police Review Authority and that "the alleged comments, if true, are reprehensible and completely intolerable in our police department."

"If true." So, an officer's word is good enough to secure a grand jury indictment, but a recording -- containing both audio and video -- clearly depicting the chain of events detailed in the lawsuit -- is still up for discussion. If the IPRA ever gets around to using its eyes and ears, maybe it will finally be able to unload Officers Messina and Di Pasquale, something it should have done a half-decade ago.

A separate federal lawsuit alleged that DiPasquale and Messina were among a group of vice squad officers accused of abusing an immigrant during a 2008 prostitution sting. In the 2009 suit, DiPasquale was accused of sticking a gun in one man's face and slamming him into the dashboard of his car, breaking his nose.

The man's attorney, Richard Dvorak, said Monday that the case was settled out of court for less than $100,000.

There's the other reason bad cops are prevalent. The legal system pays victims minimal amounts using taxpayers' money. And those costing the city money simply man a desk or get a few weeks off from work before being given back their badges, guns and, most importantly, power.



Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

… is from Henry Hazlitt:

The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects, to his laziness, incompetence, improvidence or simple stupidity.

HT: Dennis Gartman in today’s The Gartman Letter

Daniel J. Mitchell

There’s an old saying that there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

That may be true if you’re in Hollywood and visibility is a key to long-run earnings.

But in the world of public policy, you don’t want to be a punching bag. And that describes my role in a book excerpt just published by Salon.

Jordan Ellenberg, a mathematics professor at the University of Wisconsin, has decided that I’m a “linear” thinker.

Here are some excerpts from the article, starting with his perception of my view on the appropriate size of government, presumably culled from this blog post.

Daniel J. Mitchell of the libertarian Cato Institute posted a blog entry with the provocative title: “Why Is Obama Trying to Make America More Like Sweden when Swedes Are Trying to Be Less Like Sweden?” Good question! When you put it that way, it does seem pretty perverse.  …Here’s what the world looks like to the Cato Institute… Don’t worry about exactly how we’re quantifying these things. The point is just this: according to the chart, the more Swedish you are, the worse off your country is. The Swedes, no fools, have figured this out and are launching their northwestward climb toward free-market prosperity.

I confess that he presents a clever and amusing caricature of my views.

My ideal world of small government and free markets would be a Libertopia, whereas total statism could be characterized as the Black Pit of Socialism.

But Ellenberg’s goal isn’t to merely describe my philosophical yearnings and policy positions. He wants to discredit my viewpoint.

So he suggests an alternative way of looking at the world.

Let me draw the same picture from the point of view of people whose economic views are closer to President Obama’s… This picture gives very different advice about how Swedish we should be. Where do we find peak prosperity? At a point more Swedish than America, but less Swedish than Sweden. If this picture is right, it makes perfect sense for Obama to beef up our welfare state while the Swedes trim theirs down.

He elaborates, emphasizing the importance of nonlinear thinking.

The difference between the two pictures is the difference between linearity and nonlinearity… The Cato curve is a line; the non-Cato curve, the one with the hump in the middle, is not. …thinking nonlinearly is crucial, because not all curves are lines. A moment of reflection will tell you that the real curves of economics look like the second picture, not the first. They’re nonlinear. Mitchell’s reasoning is an example of false linearity—he’s assuming, without coming right out and saying so, that the course of prosperity is described by the line segment in the first picture, in which case Sweden stripping down its social infrastructure means we should do the same. …you know the linear picture is wrong. Some principle more complicated than “More government bad, less government good” is in effect. …Nonlinear thinking means which way you should go depends on where you already are.

Ellenberg then points out, citing the Laffer Curve, that “the folks at Cato used to understand” the importance of nonlinear analysis.

The irony is that economic conservatives like the folks at Cato used to understand this better than anybody. That second picture I drew up there? …I am not the first person to draw it. It’s called the Laffer curve, and it’s played a central role in Republican economics for almost forty years… if the government vacuums up every cent of the wage you’re paid to show up and teach school, or sell hardware, or middle-manage, why bother doing it? Over on the right edge of the graph, people don’t work at all. Or, if they work, they do so in informal economic niches where the tax collector’s hand can’t reach. The government’s revenue is zero… the curve recording the relationship between tax rate and government revenue cannot be a straight line.

So what’s the bottom line? Am I a linear buffoon, as Ellenberg suggests?

Well, it’s possible I’m a buffoon in some regards, but it’s not correct to pigeonhole me as a simple-minded linear thinker. At least not if the debate is about the proper size of government.

I make this self-serving claim for the simple reason that I’m a big proponents of the Rahn Curve, which is …drum roll please… a nonlinear way of looking at the relationship between the size of government and economic performance. And just in case you think I’m prevaricating, here’s a depiction of the Rahn Curve that was excerpted from my video on that specific topic.

Moreover, if you click on Rahn Curve category of my blog, you’ll find about 20 posts on the topic. And if you type “Rahn Curve” in the search box, you’ll find about twice as many mentions.

So why didn’t Ellenberg notice any of this research?

Beats the heck out of me. Perhaps he made a linear assumption about a supposed lack of nonlinear thinking among libertarians.

In any event, here’s my video on the Rahn Curve so you can judge for yourself.

And if you want information on the topic, here’s a video from Canada and here’s a video from the United Kingdom.

P.S. I would argue that both the United States and Sweden are on the downward-sloping portion of the Rahn Curve, which is sort of what Ellenberg displays on his first graph. Had he been more thorough in his research, though, he would have discovered that I think growth is maximized when the public sector consumes about 10 percent of GDP.

P.P.S. Ellenberg’s second chart puts the U.S. and Sweden at the same level of prosperity. Indeed, it looks like Sweden is a bit higher. That’s certainly not what we see in the international data on living standards. Moreover, Ellenberg may want to apply some nonlinear thinking to the data showing that Swedes in America earn a lot more than Swedes still living in Sweden.

Andrew J. Coulson

The Washington Post reports that the leaders of the world’s most hierarchical, centralized faith don’t much care for the philosophy most closely aligned with individual liberty. Huh. What gives the Post that idea? Well, the cardinal sometimes referred to as the “vice-pope” just headlined a conference in DC titled “Erroneous Autonomy: The Catholic Case against Libertarianism.” In heaping scorn on those who celebrate free minds and free markets, the conference attendees accused libertarianism of being responsible for “selfies” and of being anti-poor.

And can you blame them? Think of all those notorious selfies by prominent libertarians.

And, really, you have to admit they have a point on that second accusation as well. Consider that when innovation, commerce, and entrepreneurship were unleashed on a mass scale during the Industrial Revolution, poverty went into a sustained decline for the first time in the 200,000 year history of humanity. In just the last fifteen or twenty years, the poverty rate worldwide has been cut in half. And the absolute number of people living in extreme poverty has been falling since 1980. The economics preferred by libertarians–the economics of freedom–has been quite hard on poverty. I mean, if this keeps up, in another few generations, there will hardly be any poor left.

STUDY: Clean Home Could Leave Newborns Vulnerable To Asthma, Allergies...


(First column, 23rd story, link)

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What we have here is a failure of basic logic:

U.S. fertility is not recovering from the financial crisis — and demographers aren’t sure why. The fertility rate fell to a record low 62.9 births per 1,000 women aged 15-44 in 2013, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

The total number of births, at 3.96 million, inched up by a mere 4,000 from 2012, the first increase since the financial crisis. But the total fertility rate, or TFR, the average number of children a woman would have during her child-bearing years, fell to just 1.86, the lowest rate in 27 years. TFR is considered the best metric of fertility. A TFR of 2.1 represents a stable population, with children replacing parents as they die off.

Demographers expected the fertility rate to fall during recession, as financially strapped families put off childbearing. But what has surprised some demographers is both the depth of the decline and the fact that fertility has continued to drop even over the course of the country's five years of slow but steady recovery. The rate has fallen steadily each year since 2007, when it stood at 2.1 percent.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and point out that since it is known that the economic statistics are massaged and seasonally-corrected and smoothed and retrofitted to the point of literal fiction (try to find the 2001 recession in the GDP statistics now), the more reasonable conclusion is that rather than an inexplicable change in historically observed human behavioral patterns, the U.S. economy has simply not been in the slow, but steady recovery reported by the relevant government agencies. Occam's Razor indicates that the economy is not in a recovery, but an ongoing six-year depression, and as it happens, this can not only be seen in the falling fertility rates, but also in statistics that are not so easily manipulated as GDP, U3, and CPI-U.

In my last post, there was a quote from a media article in which the First Lady takes credit for rising academic scores — despite no data that I could find.  It’s those low-fat USDA lunches with the hearthealthywholegrains and vegetables, ya see.  Never mind that kids are throwing the vegetables in the trash.

My girls eat their vegetables, but that’s because we slather them (the vegetables, not the girls) in butter and other yummy fats.  Pretty much everything they eat includes yummy fats.  Yummy fats are good for the brain.

So pardon another post full of shameless bragging, but we just received their report cards, which include their scores on the national standardized tests.  They both got straight A’s in school and scored in the high 90s in all subjects on the standardized tests — except for science, where they both scored 100.  (Sara was a little disappointed about her 97 in math.  She scored 100 last time.)

Yes, their capacity to learn is largely genetic.  But I believe their high-fat, whole-foods diet is also allowing their brains and intellectual abilities to grow to their inborn potential.  I also believe the good diet helps them to concentrate and stay focused.

Alana did quite well in math but would like to increase her speed on timed tests, so I built her a little flash-card program I figured I may as well share with any Fat Head readers who have kids in elementary school.  When you fire it up, there’s a setup screen:

The little tyke can choose to work with one number — all sixes, for example — and then see the cards in order, or in random order.  Or she can choose to see all possible cards within a range — everything from 1 x 1 to 10 x 10 in random order, for example.  Younger kids can choose a lower range of numbers.  It works pretty much the same way for practicing division.

Clicking the button on the right displays the answer.  Clicking it again displays the next card.  Pressing the ENTER key is the same as clicking the button, so the wee one can just keep pressing ENTER to work through all the cards.

Anyway, if you’d like to try the program for your future math whiz, right-click this link and choose Save As … (or whatever your browser calls it).  Unzip the folder and run the InstallFlashCards.msi file on your PC.  (Sorry, no Mac or tablet version.)

If you download it and like it, feel free to show your appreciation by clicking the donate button below.  That will put $5 in the Fat Head tip jar.

Judge Orders NSA To Stop Destroying Evidence -- For Third Time!


(Second column, 10th story, link)

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Related stories:

'SECRET CABLES' TAP PHONES...
Cellphone operator reveals scale of gov't snooping...
Academic: Young people giving up privacy, need to read Orwell...

(Don Boudreaux)

… is from Arthur Shenfield’s 1970 Modern Age article “The Ideological War Against Western Society”; specifically, it’s from pages 326-327 of the 1998 reprint of this article in Limited Government, Individual Liberty and the Rule of Law: Selected Works of Arthur Asher Shenfield (Norman Barry, ed.):

We need not dwell long here on Adam Smith’s ‘unseen hand’, though we ought to take note of the fact that the enemies of the free society love to make it the object of their derision, implying that poor Smith believed that there was some kind of beneficent magic at work in the free economy.  How easy to demonstrate the naiveté of the champions of the free economy if, after two centuries of experience, they believe in such magic!  But of course the ‘unseen hand’ was no more than a metaphor by which Smith sought to expound two propositions that are both true and important; one, that economic order or pattern can arise without any central direction; and two, that in the process of free exchange a man may promote the interests of others even though the interests he seeks to promote are his own.  There is nothing in Smith’s famous passage on the unseen hand to suggest that he thought that he had found the key to perfect order and harmony or that the way to serve others was always to serve oneself; still less that he thought that there was any magic in the processes he described.

Today is Adam Smith‘s birthday (or at least it is the date listed on his gravestone in Edinburg as that of his 1723 birth; some people argue that June 5, 1723, is instead the date of Smith’s baptism).  June 5th (1883) is also the birthday of John Maynard Keynes.  How’s that for historical irony?!

Alberto Mingardi remembers Smith’s birthday here, and Richard Ebeling does so here.

TALIBAN: WE'RE INSPIRED TO KIDNAP MORE!


(First column, 9th story, link)

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Related stories:

CLAIM: Bergdahl converted to Islam; Declared jihad...
Susan Rice defends 'honor and distinction'...
KRAUTHAMMER: Another 'whopper'...
Released commander vows to return to fight...
Feinstein: No Evidence of 'Credible Threat' to Bergdahl...
BUCHANAN: Somewhere in Hell, Bin Laden Is Smiling...
White House faces growing fury...

Tyrants Have Always Spied On Their Own People

Spying has been around since the dawn of civilization.

Keith Laidler – a PhD anthropologist, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a past member of the Scientific Exploration Society – explains:

Spying and surveillance are at least as old as civilization itself.

University of Tennessee history professor Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius agrees:

Espionage and intelligence have been around since human beings first began organizing themselves into distinct societies, cities, states, nations, and civilizations.

Unfortunately, spying hasn’t been limited to defense against external enemies. As documented below, tyrants have long spied on their own people in order to maintain power and control … and crush dissent.

Laidler notes:

The rise of city states and empires … meant that each needed to know not only the disposition and morale of their enemy, but also the loyalty and general sentiment of their own population.

Benevolent rulers don’t need to spy on their own people like tyrants do. Even the quintessential defender of the status quo for the powers-that-be – Cass Sunstein – writes:

As a general rule, tyrants, far more than democratic rulers, need guns, ammunition, spies, and police officers. Their decrees will rarely be self-implementing. Terror is required.

From Ancient Egypt to Modern America …

The Encyclopedia of Espionage, Intelligence and Security notes:

Espionage is one of the oldest, and most well documented, political and military arts. The rise of the great ancient civilizations, beginning 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, begat institutions and persons devoted to the security and preservation of their ruling regimes.

 

***

 

Early Egyptian pharos [some 5,000 years ago] employed agents of espionage to ferret-out disloyal subject and to locate tribes that could be conquered and enslaved.

 

***

 

The Roman Empire possessed a fondness for the practice of political espionage. Spies engaged in both foreign and domestic political operations, gauging the political climate of the Empire and surrounding lands by eavesdropping in the Forum or in public market spaces. Several ancient accounts, especially those of the A.D. first century, mention the presence of a secret police force, the frumentarii . By the third century, Roman authors noted the pervasiveness and excessive censorship of the secret police forces, likening them to an authoritative force or an occupational army.

The BBC notes:

In the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church was more powerful than most governments – and it had a powerful surveillance network to match.

 

French Bishop Bernard Gui was a noted author and one of the leading architects of the Inquisition in the late 13th and early 14th Centuries. For 15 years, he served as head inquisitor of Toulouse, where he convicted more than 900 individuals of heresy.

 

A noted author and historian, Gui was best known for the Conduct of the Inquisition into Heretical Depravity, written in 1323-24, in which he outlined the means for identifying, interrogating and punishing heretics.

The U.S. Supreme Court noted in Stanford v. Texas (1965):

While the Fourth Amendment [of the U.S. Constitution] was most immediately the product of contemporary revulsion against a regime of writs of assistance, its roots go far deeper. Its adoption in the Constitution of this new Nation reflected the culmination in England a few years earlier of a struggle against oppression which had endured for centuries. The story of that struggle has been fully chronicled in the pages of this Court’s reports, and it would be a needless exercise in pedantry to review again the detailed history of the use of general warrants as instruments of oppression from the time of the Tudors, through the Star Chamber, the Long Parliament, the Restoration, and beyond.

 

What is significant to note is that this history is largely a history of conflict between the Crown and the press. It was in enforcing the laws licensing the publication of literature and, later, in prosecutions for seditious libel, that general warrants were systematically used in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. In Tudor England, officers of the Crown were given roving commissions to search where they pleased in order to suppress and destroy the literature of dissent, both Catholic and Puritan. In later years, warrants were sometimes more specific in content, but they typically authorized of all persons connected of the premises of all persons connected with the publication of a particular libel, or the arrest and seizure of all the papers of a named person thought to be connected with a libel.

By “libel”, the court is referring to a critique of the British government which the King or his ministers didn’t like … they would label such criticism “libel” and then seize all of the author’s papers.

The Supreme Court provided interesting historical details in the case of Marcus v. Search Warrant (1961):

The use by government of the power of search and seizure as an adjunct to a system for the suppression of objectionable publications … was a principal instrument for the enforcement of the Tudor licensing system. The Stationers’ Company was incorporated in 1557 to help implement that system, and was empowered

 

“to make search whenever it shall please them in any place, shop, house, chamber, or building or any printer, binder or bookseller whatever within our kingdom of England or the dominions of the same of or for any books or things printed, or to be printed, and to seize, take hold, burn, or turn to the proper use of the aforesaid community, all and several those books and things which are or shall be printed contrary to the form of any statute, act, or proclamation, made or to be made. . . .

 

An order of counsel confirmed and expanded the Company’s power in 1566, and the Star Chamber reaffirmed it in 1586 by a decree

 

“That it shall be lawful for the wardens of the said Company for the time being or any two of the said Company thereto deputed by the said wardens, to make search in all workhouses, shops, warehouses of printers, booksellers, bookbinders, or where they shall have reasonable cause of suspicion, and all books [etc.] . . . contrary to . . . these present ordinances to stay and take to her Majesty’s use. . . . ”

 

Books thus seized were taken to Stationers’ Hall where they were inspected by ecclesiastical officers, who decided whether they should be burnt. These powers were exercised under the Tudor censorship to suppress both Catholic and Puritan dissenting literature.

 

Each succeeding regime during turbulent Seventeenth Century England used the search and seizure power to suppress publications. James I commissioned the ecclesiastical judges comprising the Court of High Commission

“to enquire and search for . . . all heretical, schismatical and seditious books, libels, and writings, and all other books, pamphlets and portraitures offensive to the state or set forth without sufficient and lawful authority in that behalf, . . . and the same books [etc.] and their printing presses themselves likewise to seize and so to order and dispose of them . . . as they may not after serve or be employed for any such unlawful use. . . .”

 

The Star Chamber decree of 1637, reenacting the requirement that all books be licensed, continued the broad powers of the Stationers’ Company to enforce the licensing laws. During the political overturn of the 1640′s, Parliament on several occasions asserted the necessity of a broad search and seizure power to control printing. Thus, an order of 1648 gave power to the searchers

 

“to search in any house or place where there is just cause of suspicion that Presses are kept and employed in the printing of Scandalous and lying Pamphlets, . . . [and] to seize such scandalous and lying pamphlets as they find upon search. . . .”

 

The Restoration brought a new licensing act in 1662. Under its authority, “messengers of the press” operated under the secretaries of state, who issued executive warrants for the seizure of persons and papers. These warrants, while sometimes specific in content, often gave the most general discretionary authority. For example, a warrant to Roger L’Estrange, the Surveyor of the Press, empowered him to “seize all seditious books and libels and to apprehend the authors, contrivers, printers, publishers, and dispersers of them,” and to

 

“search any house, shop, printing room, chamber, warehouse, etc. for seditious, scandalous or unlicensed pictures, books, or papers, to bring away or deface the same, and the letter press, taking away all the copies. . . .]”

 

***

 

Although increasingly attacked, the licensing system was continued in effect for a time even after the Revolution of 1688, and executive warrants continued to issue for the search for and seizure of offending books. The Stationers’ Company was also ordered

 

“to make often and diligent searches in all such places you or any of you shall know or have any probable reason to suspect, and to seize all unlicensed, scandalous books and pamphlets. . . .”

 

And even when the device of prosecution for seditious libel replaced licensing as the principal governmental control of the press, it too was enforced with the aid of general warrants — authorizing either the arrest of all persons connected with the publication of a particular libel and the search of their premises or the seizure of all the papers of a named person alleged to be connected with the publication of a libel.

And see this.

General warrants were largely declared illegal in Britain in 1765. But the British continued to use general warrants in the American colonies. In fact, the Revolutionary War was largely launched to stop the use of general warrants in the colonies. King George gave various excuses of why general warrants were needed for the public good, of course … but such excuses were all hollow.

The New York Review of Books notes that the American government did not start to conduct mass surveillance against the American people until long after the Revolutionary War ended … but once started, the purpose was to crush dissent:

In the United States, political spying by the federal government began in the early part of the twentieth century, with the creation of the Bureau of Investigation in the Department of Justice on July 1, 1908. In more than one sense, the new agency was a descendant of the surveillance practices developed in France a century earlier, since it was initiated by US Attorney General Charles Joseph Bonaparte, a great nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, who created it during a Congressional recess. Its establishment was denounced by Congressman Walter Smith of Iowa, who argued that “No general system of spying upon and espionage of the people, such as has prevailed in Russia, in France under the Empire, and at one time in Ireland, should be allowed to grow up.”

 

Nonetheless, the new Bureau became deeply engaged in political surveillance during World War I when federal authorities sought to gather information on those opposing American entry into the war and those opposing the draft. As a result of this surveillance, many hundreds of people were prosecuted under the 1917 Espionage Act and the 1918 Sedition Act for the peaceful expression of opinion about the war and the draft.

 

But it was during the Vietnam War that political surveillance in the United States reached its peak. Under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and, to an even greater extent, Richard Nixon, there was a systematic effort by various agencies, including the United States Army, to gather information on those involved in anti-war protests. Millions of Americans took part in such protests and the federal government—as well as many state and local agencies—gathered enormous amounts of information on them. Here are just three of the numerous examples of political surveillance in that era:

• In the 1960s in Rochester, New York, the local police department launched Operation SAFE (Scout Awareness for Emergency). It involved twenty thousand boy scouts living in the vicinity of Rochester. They got identification cards marked with their thumb prints. On the cards were the telephone numbers of the local police and the FBI. The scouts participating in the program were given a list of suspicious activities that they were to report.

• In 1969, the FBI learned that one of the sponsors of an anti-war demonstration in Washington, DC, was a New York City-based organization, the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee, that chartered buses to take protesters to the event. The FBI visited the bank where the organization maintained its account to get photocopies of the checks written to reserve places on the buses and, thereby, to identify participants in the demonstration. One of the other federal agencies given the information by the FBI was the Internal Revenue Service.

***

 

The National Security Agency was involved in the domestic political surveillance of that era as well. Decades before the Internet, under the direction of President Nixon, the NSA made arrangements with the major communications firms of the time such as RCA Global and Western Union to obtain copies of telegrams. When the matter came before the courts, the Nixon Administration argued that the president had inherent authority to protect the country against subversion. In a unanimous decision in 1972, however, the US Supreme Court rejected the claim that the president had the authority to disregard the requirement of the Fourth Amendment for a judicial warrant.

 

***

 

Much of the political surveillance of the 1960s and the 1970s and of the period going back to World War I consisted in efforts to identify organizations that were critical of government policies, or that were proponents of various causes the government didn’t like, and to gather information on their adherents. It was not always clear how this information was used. As best it is possible to establish, the main use was to block some of those who were identified with certain causes from obtaining public employment or some kinds of private employment. Those who were victimized in this way rarely discovered the reason they had been excluded.

 

Efforts to protect civil liberties during that era eventually led to the destruction of many of these records, sometimes after those whose activities were monitored were given an opportunity to examine them. In many cases, this prevented surveillance records from being used to harm those who were spied on. Yet great vigilance by organizations such as the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights, which brought a large number of court cases challenging political surveillance, was required to safeguard rights. The collection of data concerning the activities of US citizens did not take place for benign purposes.

 

***

 

Between 1956 and 1971, the FBI operated a program known as COINTELPRO, for Counter Intelligence Program. Its purpose was to interfere with the activities of the organizations and individuals who were its targets or, in the words of long-time FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize” them. The first target was the Communist Party of the United States, but subsequent targets ranged from the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference to organizations espousing women’s rights to right wing organizations such as the National States Rights Party.

 

A well-known example of COINTELPRO was the FBI’s planting in 1964 of false documents about William Albertson, a long-time Communist Party official, that persuaded the Communist Party that Albertson was an FBI informant. Amid major publicity, Albertson was expelled from the party, lost all his friends, and was fired from his job. Until his death in an automobile accident in 1972, he tried to prove that he was not a snitch, but the case was not resolved until 1989, when the FBI agreed to pay Albertson’s widow $170,000 to settle her lawsuit against the government.

 

COINTELPRO was eventually halted by J. Edgar Hoover after activists broke into a small FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, in 1971, and released stolen documents about the program to the press. The lesson of COINTELPRO is that any government agency that is able to gather information through political surveillance will be tempted to use that information. After a time, the passive accumulation of data may seem insufficient and it may be used aggressively. This may take place long after the information is initially collected and may involve officials who had nothing to do with the original decision to engage in surveillance.

In 1972, the CIA director relabeled “dissidents” as “terrorists” so he could continue spying on them.

During the Vietnam war, the NSA spied on Senator Frank Church because of his criticism of the Vietnam War. The NSA also spied on Senator Howard Baker.

Senator Church – the head of a congressional committee investigating Cointelpro – warned in 1975:

[NSA's] capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. [If a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A.] could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.

This is, in fact, what’s happened …

Initially, American constitutional law experts say that the NSA is doing exactly the same thing to the American people today which King George did to the Colonists … using “general warrant” type spying.

And it is clear that the government is using its massive spy programs in order to track those who question government policies. See this, this, this and this.

Todd Gitlin – chair of the PhD program in communications at Columbia University, and a professor of journalism and sociology – notes:

Under the Freedom of Information Act, the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) has unearthed documents showing that, in 2011 and 2012, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other federal agencies were busy surveilling and worrying about a good number of Occupy groups — during the very time that they were missing actual warnings about actual terrorist actions.

 

From its beginnings, the Occupy movement was of considerable interest to the DHS, the FBI, and other law enforcement and intelligence agencies, while true terrorists were slipping past the nets they cast in the wrong places. In the fall of 2011, the DHS specifically asked its regional affiliates to report on “Peaceful Activist Demonstrations, in addition to reporting on domestic terrorist acts and ‘significant criminal activity.’”

 

Aware that Occupy was overwhelmingly peaceful, the federally funded Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC), one of 77 coordination centers known generically as “fusion centers,” was busy monitoring Occupy Boston daily. As the investigative journalist Michael Isikoff recently reported, they were not only tracking Occupy-related Facebook pages and websites but “writing reports on the movement’s potential impact on ‘commercial and financial sector assets.’”

 

It was in this period that the FBI received the second of two Russian police warnings about the extremist Islamist activities of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the future Boston Marathon bomber. That city’s police commissioner later testified that the federal authorities did not pass any information at all about the Tsarnaev brothers on to him, though there’s no point in letting the Boston police off the hook either. The ACLU has uncovered documents showing that, during the same period, they were paying close attention to the internal workings of…Code Pink and Veterans for Peace.

 

***

 

In Alaska, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Wisconsin, intelligence was not only pooled among public law enforcement agencies, but shared with private corporations — and vice versa.

 

Nationally, in 2011, the FBI and DHS were, in the words of Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, “treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity.” Last December using FOIA, PCJF obtained 112 pages of documents (heavily redacted) revealing a good deal of evidence for what might otherwise seem like an outlandish charge: that federal authorities were, in Verheyden-Hilliard’s words, “functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.” Consider these examples from PCJF’s summary of federal agencies working directly not only with local authorities but on behalf of the private sector:

 

• “As early as August 19, 2011, the FBI in New York was meeting with the New York Stock Exchange to discuss the Occupy Wall Street protests that wouldn’t start for another month. By September, prior to the start of the OWS, the FBI was notifying businesses that they might be the focus of an OWS protest.”

 

• “The FBI in Albany and the Syracuse Joint Terrorism Task Force disseminated information to… [22] campus police officials… A representative of the State University of New York at Oswego contacted the FBI for information on the OWS protests and reported to the FBI on the SUNY-Oswego Occupy encampment made up of students and professors.”

 

• An entity called the Domestic Security Alliance Council (DSAC), “a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the private sector,” sent around information regarding Occupy protests at West Coast ports [on Nov. 2, 2011] to “raise awareness concerning this type of criminal activity.” The DSAC report contained “a ‘handling notice’ that the information is ‘meant for use primarily within the corporate security community. Such messages shall not be released in either written or oral form to the media, the general public or other personnel…’ Naval Criminal Investigative Services (NCIS) reported to DSAC on the relationship between OWS and organized labor.”

 

• DSAC gave tips to its corporate clients on “civil unrest,” which it defined as running the gamut from “small, organized rallies to large-scale demonstrations and rioting.” ***

 

• The FBI in Anchorage, Jacksonville, Tampa, Richmond, Memphis, Milwaukee, and Birmingham also gathered information and briefed local officials on wholly peaceful Occupy activities.

 

• In Jackson, Mississippi, FBI agents “attended a meeting with the Bank Security Group in Biloxi, MS with multiple private banks and the Biloxi Police Department, in which they discussed an announced protest for ‘National Bad Bank Sit-In-Day’ on December 7, 2011.” Also in Jackson, “the Joint Terrorism Task Force issued a ‘Counterterrorism Preparedness’ alert” that, despite heavy redactions, notes the need to ‘document…the Occupy Wall Street Movement.’”

 

***

 

In 2010, the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee learned … that the Tennessee Fusion Center was “highlighting on its website map of ‘Terrorism Events and Other Suspicious Activity’ a recent ACLU-TN letter to school superintendents. The letter encourages schools to be supportive of all religious beliefs during the holiday season.”

 

***

 

Consider an “intelligence report” from the North Central Texas fusion center, which in a 2009 “Prevention Awareness Bulletin” described, in the ACLU’s words, “a purported conspiracy between Muslim civil rights organizations, lobbying groups, the anti-war movement, a former U.S. Congresswoman, the U.S. Treasury Department, and hip hop bands to spread tolerance in the United States, which would ‘provide an environment for terrorist organizations to flourish.’”

 

***

 

And those Virginia and Texas fusion centers were hardly alone in expanding the definition of “terrorist” to fit just about anyone who might oppose government policies. According to a 2010 report in the Los Angeles Times, the Justice Department Inspector General found that “FBI agents improperly opened investigations into Greenpeace and several other domestic advocacy groups after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, and put the names of some of their members on terrorist watch lists based on evidence that turned out to be ‘factually weak.’” The Inspector General called “troubling” what the Los Angeles Times described as “singling out some of the domestic groups for investigations that lasted up to five years, and were extended ‘without adequate basis.’

 

Subsequently, the FBI continued to maintain investigative files on groups like Greenpeace, the Catholic Worker, and the Thomas Merton Center in Pittsburgh, cases where (in the politely put words of the Inspector General’s report) “there was little indication of any possible federal crimes… In some cases, the FBI classified some investigations relating to nonviolent civil disobedience under its ‘acts of terrorism’ classification.”

 

***

 

In Pittsburgh, on the day after Thanksgiving 2002 (“a slow work day” in the Justice Department Inspector General’s estimation), a rookie FBI agent was outfitted with a camera, sent to an antiwar rally, and told to look for terrorism suspects. The “possibility that any useful information would result from this make-work assignment was remote,” the report added drily.

 

“The agent was unable to identify any terrorism subjects at the event, but he photographed a woman in order to have something to show his supervisor. He told us he had spoken to a woman leafletter at the rally who appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent, and that she was probably the person he photographed.”

 

The sequel was not quite so droll. The Inspector General found that FBI officials, including their chief lawyer in Pittsburgh, manufactured postdated “routing slips” and the rest of a phony paper trail to justify this surveillance retroactively.

 

Moreover, at least one fusion center has involved military intelligence in civilian law enforcement. In 2009, a military operative from Fort Lewis, Washington, worked undercover collecting information on peace groups in the Northwest. In fact, he helped run the Port Militarization Resistance group’s Listserv. Once uncovered, he told activists there were others doing similar work in the Army. How much the military spies on American citizens is unknown and, at the moment at least, unknowable.

 

Do we hear an echo from the abyss of the counterintelligence programs of the 1960s and 1970s, when FBI memos — I have some in my own heavily redacted files obtained through an FOIA request — were routinely copied to military intelligence units? Then, too, military intelligence operatives spied on activists who violated no laws, were not suspected of violating laws, and had they violated laws, would not have been under military jurisdiction in any case. During those years, more than 1,500 Army intelligence agents in plain clothes were spying, undercover, on domestic political groups (according to Military Surveillance of Civilian Politics, 1967-70, an unpublished dissertation by former Army intelligence captain Christopher H. Pyle). They posed as students, sometimes growing long hair and beards for the purpose, or as reporters and camera crews. They recorded speeches and conversations on concealed tape recorders. The Army lied about their purposes, claiming they were interested solely in “civil disturbance planning.”

(More.)

Yes, we hear echoes to the Cointelpro program of the 60s and 70s … as well as King George’s General Warrants to the Colonies … the Star Chamber of 15th century England … the frumentarii of Ancient Rome … and the spies of the earliest pharaohs some 5,000 years ago.

Because – whatever governments may say – mass surveillance is always used to crush dissent.

Notes:

1. Spying is also aimed at keeping politicians in check.

2. The East German Stasi obviously used mass surveillance to crush dissent and keep it’s officials in check … and falsely claimed that spying was necessary to protect people against vague threats. But poking holes in the excuses of a communist tyranny is too easy. The focus of this essay is to show that governments have used this same cynical ruse for over 5,000 years.

3. This essay focuses solely on domestic surveillance. Spying outside of one’s country is a different matter altogether.

4. For ease of reading, we deleted the footnotes from the two Supreme Court opinions.

(Don Boudreaux)

… is from page 83 of the 1976 Vol. II (“The Mirage of Social Justice”) of Hayek’s Law, Legislation, and Liberty (footnote excluded):

Full [economic-outcome] equality for most cannot but mean the equal submission of the great masses under the command of some elite who manages their affairs.  While an equality of rights under a limited government is possible and an essential condition of individual freedom, a claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.

… is from Robert Murphy (“Thomas Piketty wants to keep billions of people poor to stop a few from becoming rich“):

Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the 21st Century is filled with shocking quotations making it perfectly clear that his proposed taxes are not designed to raise revenue, but instead are designed to prevent people from creating large wealth and incomes in the first place.

I must admit, I learned a lot from reading Piketty’s book. Specifically, I learned how many self-styled progressives today are willing to sacrifice the standard of living of billions of poor people, in order to prevent a few people from becoming really rich.