End this war, already (A continuing series)

American and other coalition forces here are being killed in increasing numbers by the very Afghan soldiers they fight alongside and train, in attacks motivated by deep-seated animosity between the supposedly allied forces, according to American and Afghan officers and a classified coalition report obtained by The New York Times.

A decade into the war in Afghanistan, the report makes clear that these killings have become the most visible symptom of a far deeper ailment plaguing the war effort: the contempt each side holds for the other, never mind the Taliban. The ill will and mistrust run deep among civilians and militaries on both sides, raising questions about what future role the United States and its allies can expect to play in Afghanistan.

via nytimes.com

The continuing casualties from a decade of war

Suicides among active-duty soldiers hit another record high in 2011, Army officials said on Thursday, although there was a slight decrease if nonmobilized Reserve and National Guard troops were included in the calculation.

The Army also reported a sharp increase, nearly 30 percent, in violent sex crimes last year by active-duty troops. More than half of the victims were active-duty female soldiers ages 18 to 21.

via nytimes.com

David Leonhardt's must-read column about your tax bill

What is clear, though, is that a large majority of American households — about two out of three — pays less than 15 percent of income to the federal government, through either income taxes or payroll taxes.

This disconnect between what we pay and what we think we pay is nothing less than one of the country’s biggest economic problems.

Many Americans see themselves as struggling under the weight of a heavy tax burden (partly for the understandable reason that wage growth has been so weak). Yet taxes in the United States are quite low today, compared with past years or those in other countries. Most important, American taxes are not sufficient to pay for the programs that many people want, like Medicare, Social Security, road construction and education subsidies.

What does this combination create? An enormous long-term budget deficit.

via nytimes.com

Read the whole thing.

Newt's race-hustling campaign

Ben and I talk about Newt Gingrich's food stamp comments in this week's Scripps Howard column. Is he running a racist campaign? My take:

Here's a little rule of thumb: If a politician offends someone but doesn't immediately "clarify" his remarks after the backlash, he meant to give offense. The fact that Gingrich doubled down on his remarks with smirking, sneering, patronizing comments to Fox News' Juan Williams -- an African-American journalist -- leaves little doubt: He is counting on the racism of South Carolina's Republican voters to keep him alive in the GOP nominating contest.

There's a long, storied and relatively recent history of racist appeals to the South Carolina electorate. In 2000, John McCain appeared to be a threat to George W. Bush's march to the GOP nomination -- until someone circulated fliers accusing McCain of fathering a black daughter. McCain lost South Carolina, and with it his chance to be president.

So Gingrich's recent comments are par for the course. What's particularly frustrating about them is how wrong-headed they are. It's true that the number of food-stamp recipients has grown under President Barack Obama. But that growth started under Bush -- fueled both by the recession and Bush's changes to food stamp eligibility.

The truth is this: Whites, not blacks, are the leading recipients of food stamps. A fifth of food-stamp recipients are employed, but not making enough money to stay out of the program. And the use of the food stamp program has most notably grown -- in recent years -- in white, middle-class suburbs.

If Gingrich really wanted to deliver a stern message in favor of work and shunning food stamps, he wouldn't go to the NAACP. He'd drive down to the nearest Ikea.

The problem isn't food stamps or race, however. It's that Americans lack sufficient opportunity to get paid work that keeps them out of the safety net. Gingrich should focus on that; instead he's choosing to be a race hustler.

Ben says only liberals can hear racist "dog whistles."

Overcoming privilege and wealth somewhat similar to overcoming racism

Yes, I think that's the case that Seth Mandel is making today. Because Romney is really wealthy, he's a minority that will have trouble overcoming the prejudices of a majority of Americans who are unlike him:

If Romney is the Republican nominee there is no chance Obama would refrain from the class warfare rhetoric he has already outlined. But the ironic thing about this line of attack is that it must insinuate, because to say it plainly–that Romney is unlike most voters–would outrage many Americans. Obviously Romney’s election would not carry nearly the same cultural significance as Obama’s, but Romney would nonetheless face a challenge somewhat similar to the difficulty Obama had in explaining himself to voters.

If Romney is elected president, it won’t be quite so dramatic, to say the least. But it will mean he had overcome a parallel challenge: his story, that of an honest, hardworking family man who built a life for himself and his loved ones through effort, education, skill, and yet more effort, is also a classic American story.

Well, sure. Mitt Romney's story goes to show that you can start out as the humble son of an American car company president-turned Michigan governor-turned cabinet member and rise to really make something of yourself despite the dearth of opportunity! Brings a tear to my eye.

In fairness, Mandel suggests that Americans aren't really buying the idea that we're a classless society anymore, and that pretending we are might have electoral consequences. But I think he reaches too far with this comparison.

Americans Anti-Big Business, Big Gov't

Americans' satisfaction with the size and power of the federal government is at a record-low 29% and their satisfaction with the size and influence of major corporations remains near the all-time low at 30% -- making both highly susceptible targets for politicians and presidential candidates in this election year.

via gallup.com

People, not profits: A response

A letter-writer responds to the Scripps Howard column on Mitt Romney and Bain Capital:

History shows that the "People not profits" slogan does "bear up under examination" contrary to Joel Mathis' assertion that it just "sounds cool". For example, KB Toys, an American company founded in 1922, employed manufacturing line workers, designers, engineers, and a host of supply chain jobs for thousands of workers. With health care and profit sharing for employees, KB was clearly a company that understood that when you consider people, profits come as a by-product. KB Toys wasn't in deep trouble, but the boom in electronic toys prompted KB to seek out Bain Capital for an infusion of money to bring the company in line with manufacturing more high-tech toys. Bain soon seized control of the company, off shored jobs, raided the company's pension fund, and eventually turned it into what is now Toys R' Us where you'd be hard pressed to find toys made in America or workers that are paid much more than minimum wage or have a benefit or profit sharing package. Ben Boychuk lauds Romney and Bain Capital for jobs created at Staples and Sports Authority as "how a dynamic economy works and grows". Both companies also pay workers minimum wage, offer no benefits, and sell goods manufactured mostly offshore. This is the free market capitalism Romney, conservatives, and the GOP envision for America.

David P. Lewis
Long Beach

Ben points out the KB deal was done after Romney left Bain.

Bill Kristol doesn't understand how to fight the war he loves so much

Bill Kristol is good at finding new ways to be contemptible. It's bad that Marines in Afghanistan urinated on dead Taliban, he says, but you know what really makes him mad? The Obama Administration apologizing for it. 

So perhaps, as Rep. Allen West, once a battalion commander in Iraq, put it last week, all the sanctimonious Obama administration bigwigs “need to chill.” Did Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta really need to speak up at all? Couldn’t comment have been left to some junior public affairs officer at Camp Lejeune? And once he decided to weigh in, did Panetta need to condemn the Marines’ action as not just deplorable but “utterly deplorable”? Perhaps he felt a need to match Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who expressed not just dismay but “total dismay.”

Maybe, our current civilian leaders should spend a little less time posturing and a little more time supporting the troops who’ve been sent abroad to fight at the direction of their administration.

Kristol is congenitally unable to praise Democrats, and the overall piece veers dangerously close to being an apologia for corpse desecration. (Patton pissed in the Rhine, after all!) But what he seems not to understand is that the Obama Administration very vocally deplored the urination video because it's otherwise it's a huge victory for the Taliban.

Even Kristol's fellow warmonger Max Boot understands this:

The Marines are fighting not a total war but a counterinsurgency in which their goal is not only to militarily defeat the enemy but to win over the population. This could potentially make that job harder. 

The Marines often speak of the “strategic corporal”–the notion being that decisions made even by a lowly corporal can have high-level repercussions. This is a perfect example; indeed, one of the urinating Marines was a corporal.

The reason top-level administration figures weighed in was because the acts of a few stupid Marines was potentially devastating to the war's strategic aims, one of which is winning over the population. (Afghan President Hamid Karzai is also pretty good at loudly condemning U.S. errors in order to shore up his own position.) Contrition from senior, recognizable figures was required to minimize the damage.

Kristol, though, turns this incident into one of Obama not loving the troops enough. "He and his administration have a responsibility to err on the side of supporting our troops, rather than competing to chastise them sanctimoniously," Kristol writes. But if those troops commit an act that actively aids the enemy, what the hell else is there to do? Bill Kristol wants his war in Afghanistan. But maybe he just mostly wants to use it as a cudgel against Democrats. Because this column makes clear that he has no clue about—and maybe less interest in—achieving victory.

Gary Schmitt, the forever war, and the First Amendment

Let's gut the First Amendment forever! That's not precisely what Gary Schmitt says today in The Weekly Standard, but that about covers the gist of it:

Congress and the president should enact a statute that straightforwardly makes it illegal to publish or circulate materials that support, praise, or advocate terrorism as long as we are still formally at war with al Qaeda and its allies.

Schmitt says such a statute could be "narrowly drawn" so that we don't go back to the bad old days of seditious libel. Maybe. But we still don't know which circumstances would cause the United States Congress to end the "war" authorizations spelled out in the AUMF and various other laws. Given the way our leaders have interpreted that so far, it might be a crime to praise the Muslim Uighurs who have rebelled against the Chinese government, or the Chechnyan Muslims who have revolted against rule from Moscow. More likely it might be used to prosecute Americans who praise Hamas. And that's where we start to get into plausibly scary territory.

Generally speaking: We don't know that the "war" will ever end. Which means a statute that sunsets when the war does is basically a statute on the books forever. Wanna draw First Amendment considerations a little more narrowly? You may well have the power to do so. Just don't pretend it's a temporary state of affairs.

Those dead Iranian scientists

I've been struggling with what to think—and how to express my thoughts—about the wave of assassinations directed at Iranian nuclear scientists. I think that war is bad and killing is bad, but I'm not the complete pacifist I was in my Mennonite days—back, that is, when I thought God would make everything OK in the end, making it easier to accept certain evils and injustices on Earth. Perhaps it's the Mennonite poking through, but the assassinations strike me as ... unsavory. Yet, unlike Glenn Greenwald, I'm not prepared to quite condemn it either. This troubles me. I like my moral conundrums easily resolved.

I suspect we could live with a nuclear-armed Iranian state. I don't think the mullahs are suicidal. I think they—like the U.S. and the old Soviet Union—would use the threat of nuclear arms use to throw their weight around the region and the world. But: The more nuclear weapons there are in the world, the more countries that get their hands on them, the more opportunities there are for something to go disastrously, genocidally wrong.

So what's the death of a few scientists compared to an averted genocide?

Yet, something doesn't feel quite right about that to me either. I found myself rubbed wrong by Jonathan Tobin's praise of the assassinations yesterday. He wrote: "Anyone who believes Iran should be allowed to proceed toward the building of a nuclear bomb has either lost their moral compass or is so steeped in the belief that American and Israeli interests are inherently unjustified they have reversed the moral equation in this case. Rather than the alleged U.S. and Israeli covert operators being called terrorists, it is the Iranian scientists who are the criminals. They must be stopped before they kill."

Wait. The scientists are criminals? That doesn't strike me quite right, either. It's entirely possible they're patriots, with all the good and bad that implies. (And I've heard a few experts suggest that the end of theocracy in Iran wouldn't necessarily mean the end of the pursuit of nuclear weapons; it's kind of rational for a country to want to have the ultimate weapon to use in its defense.) Or it's entirely possible, authoritarianism being what it is, that the assassinated scientists simply didn't have much choice about their participation: Show a talent for math or physics, and voila! You're working on a planet-killer. Do we have evidence that these scientists are, well, mad scientists, bent on the world's destruction? I'm not sure we do. Ascribing criminality to those individuals—instead of the regime they serve—seems a way of making us feel better about the awful thing that has happened.

But as awful as that hypothetical genocide?

I don't have a good answer to this. There's the certainty of the awfulness now, weighed against the (again) hypothetical danger avoided. It's a guessing game, but one in which a few lives or many might be sacrificed.

Rod Dreher gets at it better than I can here:

To be sure, I’m against war with Iran, and the main reason I would never vote for Santorum is that he relishes the thought of war with Iran. However, I am by no means certain that it was wrong for the Israelis to have killed this scientist, given that they are in a state of de facto war with Iran, and that the Iranian leadership has publicly and repeatedly vowed to exterminate the Israelis. My point here is that even if the killing of the Iranian scientist is justified as self-defense, it is nothing to be called “wonderful.” A grim, tragic necessity? Perhaps. But “wonderful”? We must not allow ourselves to bless these things, much less glory in them, as Santorum has done.

That sounds close to right to me. One reason I'm pretty sure I'll never become a certain variety of conservative is because I have enough Mennonite left in me to disdain glorying in such things. But I've also got enough distance from that faith to suspect that sometimes bad things must be done. I feel remorse about the death of the scientists. And I hope that their deaths served the (apparent) intended purpose. I suspect they'll just be another trigger in an endless cycle of recrimination that might one day end up immersing us in the awful violence we seek to avoid. I'm not sure we'll ever know the right answer.

Mom? Dad? MOM!?!?!?

In fact, people over 60 are now the fastest-growing group contracting sexually transmitted diseases, according to government agency figures. Since 2002, syphilis has tripled in the over-65s in the UK, and HIV is up by 60%.

via guardian.co.uk

It really is getting worse

After adjusting for inflation, the typical male college graduate earned about 12 percent less in 2009 than his counterpart did in 1969. Sounds pretty bad, right?

The numbers are even worse for men without a bachelor’s:
 

Inflation-Adjusted Change in Median Earnings for American Men, 1969-2009
	Weekly Earnings, Full-time, Full-year Male Workers	Annual Earnings of All Male Workers	Annual Earnings of Male Population
Ages 25-64	-1%	-14%	-28%
Ages 30-50	-5	-16	-27
Less than High School	-38	-47	-66
High School	-26	-34	-47
Some College	-17	-24	-33
College Degree	-2	-7	-12
Married	-1	-2	-13
Not Married	-2	-14	-32

Source: Adam Looney and Michael Greenstone, Hamilton Project

As you can see from the last column in this table, the median man whose highest educational attainment was a high school diploma had his earnings fall by 47 percent in the last four decades.

via economix.blogs.nytimes.com

Romney's problem: Profits over people

Ben and I discuss Mitt Romney's venture capitalist past in our Scripps Howard column this week. My take:

This is the problem with the Republican version of capitalism, as practiced by Mitt Romney and so many of his Wall Street friends over the last few decades: Profit isn't just regarded as the highest virtue; often, it is seen as the only virtue.

It wasn't always this way. During the 1950s, a time when labor unions were ascendant, the American social contract expected that big corporations would make big bucks, yes, but that those employers would also provide their workers a comfortable living, and would even hang onto those workers during rough times.

Now, quarterly profits are the only thing that matter and if a few jobs have to be sliced to make the accounting work out, then that's what has to be done.

The result? Our businesses are richer. But our society feels poorer.

And Mitt Romney helped lead the way.

Profit isn't unimportant. What today's market enthusiasts forget, though, is that it's a means to an end not the end itself.

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner," economist Adam Smith said way back when, "but from their regard to their own interest." The Romney Republican version expects the butcher to buy out the brewer and lay off the bakers, which might maximize profits in the short term. But it leaves everybody hungry in the long run.

Today's lefties have a little slogan that sounds cool, but doesn't bear up under examination: "People, not profits." That doesn't work so well. Neither do profits without people. Romney's not a bad man for making a profit, but his venture capitalist past raises questions about whether he can truly serve America's citizens.

Ben's take: "Venture capitalism creates, sometimes through destruction. Crony capitalism merely stagnates."

Conor Friedersdorf on liberals and civil liberties

If progressives are frustrated that relatively doctrinaire libertarians are attracting the attention and support of people who care deeply about civil liberties, why don't they work to offer some alternative? Guys like me will probably still prefer Johnson. But is it really the case that the Democratic Party can't produce a prominent civil-libertarian politician who Glenn Greenwald would prefer to Ron Paul?

That is itself a devastating truth about the post-2009 left.

As Election 2008 proved, however, it isn't impossible to change. Democrats can in fact unapologetically run against indefinite detention, excessive executive power, and needless wars, and get elected doing it. What's additionally required is a civil-libertarian constituency big and motivated enough to hold them to their promises. That is what progressivism apparently lacks.

via theatlantic.com

End this war, already

The U.S. intelligence community says in a secret new assessment that the war in Afghanistan is mired in stalemate, and warns that security gains from an increase in American troops have been undercut by pervasive corruption, incompetent governance and Taliban fighters operating from neighboring Pakistan, according to U.S. officials.

via latimes.com

Yeah, maybe it's time to simplify the tax code

There were approximately 4,430 changes to the tax code from 2001 through 2010, an average of more than one a day, including an estimated 579 changes in 2010 alone.  The IRS must explain each new provision to taxpayers, write computer code so it can process returns affected by the provision, and train its auditors to identify improper claims.

via irs.gov

War crimes in Afghanistan?

US forces in Afghanistan are facing fresh accusations of war crimes after film emerged which appears to show American marines urinating on dead bodies and laughing.

The US military command in Kabul, which was severely embarrassed last year by revelations that Americans soldiers were running a "kill squad" murdering Afghan civilians, said it would investigate the undated video, and that if it proved to be authentic, desecration of corpses would be regarded as a serious crime. Despoiling of the dead is illegal under the Geneva conventions as well as under US military law.

via guardian.co.uk

Ugh.

I blame Newt Gingrich's attacks on Bain Capital

Conflict between rich and poor now eclipses racial strain and friction between immigrants and the native-born as the greatest source of tension in American society, according to a survey released Wednesday.

About two-thirds of Americans now believe there are “strong conflicts” between rich and poor in the United States, a survey by the Pew Research Center found, a sign that the message of income inequality brandished by the Occupy Wall Street movement and pressed by Democrats may be seeping into the national consciousness.

via nytimes.com

Republican constituency includes people who dislike Republican ideology

A Pew Research Center survey identified financially-squeezed “disaffected” voters as a Republican-leaning constituency; just 21 percent of them agreed that “most corporations make a fair and reasonable profit.”

via nytimes.com

In the UK, the 1 percent looks out for the poor

The government's plans to reform welfare were badly hit on Wednesday when it suffered three defeats in the House of Lords on proposed benefit cuts.

Plans to means-test employment and support allowance (ESA) payments for disabled people after only a year were rejected by peers.

The means test would have applied to cancer patients and stroke survivors, and was denounced by Lord Patel, a crossbencher and former president of the Royal College of Obstetricians, as an immoral attack on the sick, the vulnerable and the poor. "If we are going to rob the poor to pay the rich, then we enter into a different form of morality," Patel said.

via guardian.co.uk

I'm not familiar with the ins-and-outs of British politics, but until now I honestly thought the House of Lords just sat there and looked pretty--performing more of a ceremonial function than doing actual governance. Now I have to learn some stuff.