Dissection of a Conspiracy Meme Part 5: Abuse of Veterans

In the first two blogs on this meme I looked at the accusation of treason as well as the claim that bribery played a role in the Uranium One decision. I also looked at some traits shared by those who believe this conspiracy.  On my third blog I looked at  “Politicized DOJ, FBI” and also “Weaponized Intelligence Communities”, and after finding out that the evidence for these claims are listed in incidents further within the coils of this snake decided to deal with each separately, starting with the “IRS Targeting Conservatives”.    Then I slithered along to Fast and Furious and found that it, like the others is the result of a true scandal that was then inflated by ignoring facts, making up facts, and twisting facts.  Now, I slide on to the Veterans Affairs scandal.

I find it interesting how the Veteran Affairs scandal was labelled on this meme: “abuse of veterans”.  It gives the impression that President Obama and his administration were going out and purposely and deliberately abusing veterans.  It brings up visions of Biden and Obama ambushing a veteran after he leaves the theater and beating him or her up.  By the way, this labelling here is a good example of the power of words to slant a story.

 

Beginnings

In 2014 it came out that there were not just a few instances of negligence within the VA hospitals, but a pattern of negligence. Military patients were supposed to be able to get an appointment within 14 days. This was not happening.  Worse, in some of these hospitals staff falsified records so it looked as if they were meeting the 14 day requirement.  And even worse, some patients died while still on the waiting list.

A CNN report from April 30, 2014 showed that at least 40 veterans died waiting for care at the Phoenix branch.  The VA internal investigation showed that 35 individuals had died while waiting for care at the Phoenix branch.  In expanding the investigation to cover all the VA, several other VA centers across the US were found to have the same problems as the Phoenix branch.   Over 120,000 veterans were left waiting or never received care.  Also, falsification or other ways to fudge the waits times were found.

In addition to the news investigation and the VA internal investigation, the FBI also investigated as did the White House, the House Veterans Affairs Committee, and the United States Office of Special Counsel. In addition the Republican Congress commissioned the RAND Corporation to study the VA.

 

A Slight But Relevant Digression

I am about to write about the findings of these investigations and discuss root causes and possible solutions.  Many view this sort of analysis as nothing more than “making excuses”, especially when the issue is one they have weaponized and used against their foes.

However, without a root cause investigation nothing can get fixed or be improved. Failures are going to happen.   No matter how well made a car is, it is going to break down at some point.  I wonder if those who think this way then view the diagnostics required to figure out what is wrong with the car as being making excuses for the car breaking down?

Most of the time those who weaponized this issue want to use it to show that governments, especially large governments are incompetent and cannot be trusted with anything important such as healthcare for the nation.  Instead, large government needs to be reduced to very small government with most of our current departments being eliminated.  I am not sure on this specific issue they would advocate for eliminating the VA.  I have never asked those making this argument that question before.

However, I think their claim of governmental incompetence is overstated in this case (I’ll go into why further down).  Sometimes a car is so bad off that it cannot be repaired.  However, most of the time a fix can be found that is at least marginally affordable.  However, it requires a good look at what went wrong, something those who take this position argue strongly against.  It was on a different topic, but I once tried to explain to someone who had this sort of view why a prediction I had made was wrong, but he quickly said “I don’t care. You’re wrong.”  Boom.

To my mind, this sort of thought, or lack of thought, process is indicative of someone who would rather destroy systems instead of fix and improve them, even if such destruction would result in literally millions of people being harmed.

 

Tidbit and Investigative Results

The results?  Well, just to build suspense a bit let me first mention one number that some have tossed out to show how big and terrible a problem this was.  Many extreme conservatives and most recently Trump, have said that 300,000 veterans died because of the excessive wait times.  However, while this was unacceptable and a terrible problem, it was not as terrible as 300,000 deaths.

The claim that 300,000 veterans died waiting for service is based upon September 2, 2015 VA Inspector General  report.  In this report the IG stated “that pending records included entries for over 307,000 individuals reported as deceased by the Social Security Administration.”

At first glance it sounds as if this does support the claim that 300,000 died as a result of VA waits.  However, look at it again. It never said that it was due to the waits.  In fact, just after this sentence the same report states the limitations of this sentence:

• The VA’s record keeping was so poor that it makes it impossible to determine how many of these deaths were due to waits for healthcare or for other reasons.
• This information was pulled from the VA enrollment database created in 1998. Some of the individuals listed as deceased died before the creation of the database.
• The VA provides a great many other services than healthcare; home loans and disability payments for example. In 2013 those records and information were added to this database.  This consisted of millions of records.  Due to glitches in the software it is impossible to determine how many of those who died were actually seeking healthcare or were seeking one of these other services.
• Some of these files pertained to those asking about services, not applying for them. Again, per the report, the VA “does not have a reliable method to distinguish which enrollment records were created in response to an enrollment application or records entered into (the database) by actions other than enrollment.

The Inspector General concluded that “Most of the pending records are old and inactive and many of them misclassified”

To sum this bit up – no, 300,000 veterans did not die due to incompetency at the VA.

And actually, the above was actually a good part of the findings of the Veterans Affairs Office of Inspector General.

As for the results of the multiple investigations.  It basically came down to two issues.  The first if that given the resources setting a 14 day timeline for getting in was unrealistic and created pressures to fudge the reality in reports.  The second is management failures in several areas.  Although providing a bit more detail, this sentence nicely summarizes that failure – “…This backlog developed because the HEC (Health Eligibility Center) did not adequately monitor and manage its workload and lacked controls to ensure entry of WRAP (Workload Reporting and Productivity) workload into ES (Enrollment Systems).”

In fact, these two issues – unrealistic timeline and management failures in tracking how the system was doing both in terms of wait times and provision of services afterwards – were two of the main root causes.   Another is not having the financial resources to deal adequately with their mandate.

 

Actions

• Both Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinsek and the Veterans Health Administration’s top health official, Dr. Robert Petzel retired early.  Shinksek retired after publicly accepting responsibility for the scandal.
• VA General Counsel Will Gunn and VA Acting Undersecretary for Health Robert Jesse stepped down
• Three other top officials were reprimanded.
• Several senior managers were removed from the Phoenix VA system.
• More than $390 million were moved inside the VA budget to fund care for veterans outside the VA system;
• Mobile VA medical units were deployed;
• The goal of providing appointments within the 14-day window that Nabors criticized as unrealistic and said may have “incentivized inappropriate actions” was ended;
• Twice-monthly public updates of VA wait times were posted;
• Performance bonuses were banned;
• Some senior managers from the Phoenix VA system were removed;
• Leadership emphasis on protecting whistleblowers from retaliation.

 

In addition to the above, several pieces of legislation were passed to try to correct this problem.

• The Veteran’s Choice Act was passed in 2014. Despite what he says, Trump did not create this. This happened during President Obama’s watch and was signed by him. Senator McCain and Senator Sanders were co-sponsors of this bill and shepherded it through Congress.  Trump did expand the program, which Senator McCain was also pushing through before he died.
  • One interesting thing to note here, and something I alluded to earlier, it is not being used as much as expected. There are two reasons for this, one of which I will be going into soon.  The other though is that the wait times in the private sector are, in general, worse than those in the VA system.

 

And Now for the Surprise – VA Care is actually Good

Earlier I mentioned a study done on the VA system by the RAND corporation at the request of the Republican Congress.  Its findings were interesting. Let me note that it did not look at wait times, and, instead, focused on quality of care.

The VA health care system performs similar to or better than non-VA systems on most measures of inpatient and outpatient care quality, although there is high variation in quality across individual VA facilities, according to a new RAND Corporation study.

Examining a wide array of commonly used measures of health care quality, researchers found that VA hospitals generally provided better quality care than non-VA hospitals and the VA’s outpatient services were better quality when compared to commercial HMOs, Medicaid HMOs and Medicare HMOs. The findings are published online by the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

“Consistent with previous studies, our analysis found that the VA health care system generally provides care that is higher in quality than what is offered elsewhere in communities across the nation,” said Rebeccas Anhand Price, lead author of the study and senior policy researcher at RAND, a nonprofit research organization.

While the study found wide variation in the quality of care provided across the VA health system, the variation is smaller than what researchers observed among non-VA health providers.

When all is said and done we wind up in an interesting place.  The wait times did not meet VA standards, but that wait time was unrealistically set, and one that most private healthcare providers did not meet.  However, the quality of care was as good as or better than most private healthcare providers.  As I said earlier, the scandal was caused by unrealistic wait time goals, a poorly developed and used management and computers systems, and attempts to cover up these problems.

 

Final Thoughts and Lessons

While acknowledging the very real and serious problems at the VA, (ones it still has under Trump by the way), these problems do not mean that the VA system is worthless.  Far from it in fact.  When evaluating how well an organization is doing (or machine or anything else for that matter), especially organizations as large and varied as the VA system, there are two criteria that need to be used.

The first is comparing it against perfection.   It is a good and needed standard.  However,  we need to remember that perfection is an impossibility.  This is true for individuals and even more true for large organizations.  Which is why we also need to compare against how other, similar organizations are doing.

Keep in mind that very large organizations are, well, large.  Which means they have several departments providing various different services and engaged in many different tasks.  A large organization can fail in one area but still be very good in other areas.  This is the situation with the VA.  In one area, wait times, they do poorly, although keeping in mind in looking how they do compared to other similar organizations they appear to be doing OK.  However, in providing quality care for our veterans they do better than most private healthcare groups.

Which now brings me back to my main point.  I mentioned earlier that there are those who like to weaponize problems such as this, and refuse to look at anything over than what they want to see.  They see this as supporting evidence that large government is inefficient and incompetent.  Further, in this particular case, they use the VA Scandal as evidence that a Medicare for all will not work, that it will be a flop.

However, when you look at this beyond just the problems, you see that the VA actually is evidence that the government can provide quality care.  When you add in the other two large government healthcare providers, Medicaid and Medicare, there is ample evidence that the government can deliver this service.

Will it be perfect. Hell no. But, it will be better than what we have now. And, if instead of calling everything excuse making we do a true root cause analysis and act upon its findings, we can bring them closer to perfect.

 

 

 

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Dissection of a Conspiracy Meme Part 4: Fast and Furious

In the first two blogs on this meme, here and here,  I looked at the accusation of treason as well as claim that bribery played a role in the Uranium One decision. I also looked at some traits shared by those who believe this conspiracy.  On my third blog I looked at  “Politicized DOJ, FBI” and also “Weaponized Intelligence Communities”, and after finding out that the evidence for these claims are listed in incidents further within the coils of this snake decided to deal with each separately, starting with the “IRS Targeting Conservatives”.   For this blog I look at Fast and Furious, and at scandals in general.

Like always, let us start with going over what it was.  Fast and Furious was the name of an operation started in 2009 and run out of the Phoenix Field Division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). They purposely allowed the sale of licensed firearms to straw buyers with the goal of then tracking these illegal gun sales and purchases higher and higher to eventually get the Mexican drug cartels.  They would then be able to arrest and dismantle these cartels.  Obviously, since it is considered a scandal and is on this meme, it did not go as planned.

This operation first hit public attention in the aftermath of Agent Brian Terry’s murder in December 2010. He was killed by guns that Fast and Furious had allowed to be purchased illegally and then done nothing to round up again. Whistleblowers stepped forth and investigations started and as a result it was found that thousands of these weapons were used in crimes, both in Mexico and the United States.  According to a DOJ report, 2000 of these weapons were allowed to be illegally purchased.  Only 710 were recovered (as of 2012 at least).

To understand this fully, it is necessary to realize that operations such as this, called gun walking, where agents let licensed gun dealers sell guns to straw purchasers, has been done before.   A prior operation, called Operation Wide Receiver, had the ATF agents coordinating their efforts with that of the Mexican government.  They would monitor the individual who had made these illegal purchases and see who they sold them to and then follow those individuals to see who they sold the guns to, and by doing so work their way up the food chain.  Or at least they hoped to.  It did not work. Of the 474 guns sold, which included  AR-15s, semi-automatic AK-pattern rifles, and Colt .38s, only 64 were eventually seized. Once they entered Mexico they disappeared.  Under President Bush no indictments or charges were made.  In 2010, under President Obama, the DOJ reviewed this operation again and nine people were charged with various felonies. Of these nine, one had charges against him dropped, five individuals had pled guilty, one was sentenced to one year and one day in prison, and two are still fugitives.  Let me note here that although I mentioned President Obama, he did not order this review and it was done at the DOJ level, which was normal and how things are supposed to work.

Enter Fast and Furious

A DOJ teleconference was held on October 26, 2009.  The purpose of this was to discuss strategies for dealing with Mexican drug cartels.  The goal decided upon from this meeting was to attack entire arms trafficking networks rather than low-level buyers.  It should be noted that during this meeting there was not talk of using gunwalking as a way to accomplish this. That idea seems to have sprung from the minds of the Phoenix ATF supervisors, most especially that of Bill Newell, special agent in charge of ATF’s Phoenix field division.

Using cases that the federal prosecutors had decided was not strong enough to prosecute, they identified individuals to monitor. On October 31, 2009 the operation was started. A local gun store reported the purchase of several AK-47 style rifles. From there it grew – one gun trafficker bought 34 firearms in 24 days. His associated bought 212 more the next month.  And so it rolled.

Remember that in the previous unsuccessful attempt to gun walk their way to taking down drug cartels, the ATF had coordinated and communicated with their Mexican counterparts. Mr. Newell made the deliberate decision not to do so.  Mexican officials were left in the dark.

As I mentioned, this did not go well.  The great majority of these weapons disappeared and wound up being used in various crimes, including the murder of the ATF agent that brought this to light.

As the whistleblowers talked, and more of these lost guns turned up involved in crimes, the scandal grew. And, as is usual, and proper, in such situations, multiple investigations ensued. Both the House and Senate investigated this.  So did the Inspector General of the DOJ.

The Results

Based on the DOJ 471 report, 14 federal officials received disciplinary actions, including firing and demotions, for numerous managerial failures and numerous poor decisions.  Two of these 14, Jason Weinstein, deputy assistant attorney general in the criminal division and former acting ATF Director Ken Melson resigned.  In addition, when the first of a three part joint Congressional report was released the deputy director of ATF, William Hoover resigned.

None of these reports found evidence that any higher officials in the Justice Department had authorized or approved the tactics of the Fast and Furious investigation. The DOJ investigation stated that it found no evidence of Attorney General Eric Holder having known about Fast and Furious before early 2011.  It also found that no previous AGs had known about gunwalking in Fast and Furious’s  predecessor Operation Wide Receiver.

Eric Holder

Two items to note in regards to AG Holder on this. There are documents showing that in July 2010 he received briefings on Fast and Furious. However, this turned about to be about a different case that had been started before Holden became AG.  Also, knowing of an operation called Fast and Furious and knowing that it involved gunwalking are not the same thing.  Assistant AG Lanny Breuer stated that he had found out about the gunwalking in April 2010.  However, he did not alert the AG about this.

The other item is the fact that AG Holder declined to provide Congress all of the records it requested on Fast and Furious.  His stated reason for this was that “would raise substantial separation of powers concerns and potentially create an imbalance in the relationship”.  On June 28, 2012, in a bipartisan vote (wonder if that will happen with Trump’s people), Holder became the first AG in history to be held in both criminal and civil contempt (although having officials being held in contempt has a long history under many different presidents).

Some have taken this to mean Holder was covering up something. And, this is a possibility. However, in the light of all the other investigations and testimony, and the absence of any evidence to corroborate this, such a supposition is not likely.

Scandal 

Let me spend a moment here and talk about the claim made by many, including Obama, that his administration was scandal free.  Are those people mistaken, or lying?  After all, I did use the word scandal a time or two myself in this blog.  The answer is that, as usual for many things, the criteria for scandal lies in the eye of the beholder.   Or to put it another way, there are scandals and then there are SCANDALS!!!!!

What I mean by this is that crimes vary in their seriousness. Jaywalking for example is not usually considered as bad as murder in the first.  So too with scandals.  Some are more comprehensive than others.

Let me point out the size and scope of government.  I seriously doubt that there has ever been an administration without something going wrong that resulted in things happening that shouldn’t.  Before those who hate “big government” start proclaiming “Yes, yes, yes”, I would point out the same holds true for big businesses, and for that matter small ones.

So, what is the difference between a scandal and a SCANDAL!!!?  For myself, I would say several things. I would say it would have to consist of at least one or usually more of these elements.  Was the President or any or his appointees involved in the decisions or actions leading up to it?  Was corruption involved?  Did the President or his appointees attempt to cover up the mistake?  Did the scandal result in a criminal conviction of the President or his appointees?   Did the mistake or unlawful act result in significant damage, either in terms of money or lives?  Did the President and/or his appointees take corrective actions.   Finally, I would add one caveat – investigations, unless they result in a conviction or assignment of responsibility do not count.

Some past scandals that do deserve the SCANDAL!!!! designation are President Reagan’s Iran/contra, President Nixon’s Watergate, President Clinton’s impeachment, and the arrest and sentencing to prison of President H.W. Bush’s Secretary of Treasury for tax evasion and obstruction of justice.

In Fast and Furious, we have a scandal, but not a SCANDAL!!!!! Neither AG Holder nor President Obama were responsible for Fast and Furious in terms of knowing about it and approving it. Both took actions to find who was responsible and take appropriate disciplinary action.  Neither tried to cover it up.  There was no corruption.

Let me say that the above is just my take on SCANDAL!!!!!, or major scandal. Others prefer to not count mismanagement and mistakes as major scandals but, instead, say that a major scandal has to have an element of corruption in it. Still others cast a much more broad net, at least when it is someone they don’t like, and count all mistakes, mismanagement and so forth as major scandals.

For me, while it is indeed an overstatement to say that President Obama had no scandals during his administration, it can be justly argued that he had no major scandals.  By the way, this meme misquotes President Obama.  He stated that his administration had no major scandals. That is arguably correct.

A couple of sources 

A couple of good sources I used were the Wikipedia article about gunwalking and the CNN timeline on Fast and Furious.  I used other sources to double check, and looked at the DOJ reports. But these two were both accurate and helpful.   I mention this even though in other blogs I have not mentioned and provided links to my sources due to me doing some very close paraphrasing of what I read in those sources and wanting to give credit where credit is due.

 

 

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Dissection of a Conspiracy Meme Part 3: IRS

In the first two blogs on this meme I looked at the accusation of treason as well as claim of bribery playing a role in the Uranium One decision. I also looked at some traits those who believe this conspiracy share.  In this meme we will slither on down to “Politicized DOJ, FBI” and also “Weaponized Intelligence Communities”.

What makes this claim, politicizing the DOJ and FBI, plausible is the fact that it has been done before. J. Edgar Hoover, the founder of the FBI did so.  For that matter, it doesn’t take a President to do this as evidenced by McCarthy.  So, did President Obama do the same?  Before answering this let me just clarify what is meant by politicizing the FBI and DOJ.

A brief definition would be purposely using governmental offices not for the purpose they were created but to obtain political objectives.   For my purposes the same definition would cover the claim of “weaponizing the intelligence community”.

So, using this definition, let’s examine the evidence of President Obama politicizing the DOJ and FBI as well as weaponizing the Intelligence Community. In looking at the examples posted in several conservative sites making this claim, I see most of the evidence lies further down the snake- Benghazi, Illegal FISA Search Warrant, Hillary Emails, and the IRS scandal.  Since I am going to deal with each of these as I come to them I won’t deal with all of them now.   However, it should be kept in mind that as I show the conspiracy believers understandings and portrayals of each and every one of these items is gravely flawed, that this then undercuts and voids their claim of politicization and weaponization.

For this blog I will deal with the IRS Targeting Conservatives.

The claim here is that President Obama used the IRS to target conservative groups.

There is a large problem with this belief though. There is no, repeat, absolutely no evidence that President Obama ordered the IRS to target conservative groups.

As with the Uranium One blog, let’s start by looking specifically at what the IRS was attempting to do and what they did wrong.  First, as I am sure everyone is aware, the vast majority of us, both as individuals and as businesses and organizations, pay taxes.  However, some do not. And no, I am not talking about Amazon (that is another subject).  I am though talking about organizations that are tax exempt.

The ones most people are aware of are churches and religious institutions.  However, there are also various types of non-profits too that are tax exempt.   In fact, there are 27 different types.  For example, there are the Social Advocacy Groups, 501 (c)(4); Charitable Organizations, 501(c)(3); Trade or Professional Associations, 501(c)(6); Cemetery Companies (not funeral homes, but, rather, organizations meant to provide burial services for its members), 501(c)(13); and many more.

One of the responsibilities of the IRS is to make sure that those organizations claiming to be tax exempt by being one of those organizations actually meets the criteria and definitions laid out in law.  After all, it wouldn’t do just to take each and every organization at its word. I imagine quite a bit of fraud would get through if the IRS did that.

Now, to the controversy…and conspiracy.  There were two type of tax exemptions involved in this. The   501(c)(4), which is a tax exemption that can be used by Social Welfare Organizations such as civic or neighborhood organizations. These purpose of these organizations are to promote the common good and welfare of a neighborhood. They inform about different issues and controversies. They can also participate in politics and even endorse candidates as long as that is not its primary purpose (meaning less than 50% of its income and time), and the money spent on political activities can be taxed.

The other type of exemption involved is a 501(c) (3), which is a tax exemption that can be used by “religious, charitable, scientific, literary or educational purposes, or for testing public safety, or to foster national or international amateur sports competition, or for the prevention of cruelty to children and animals”.

There are a few other odds and ends tossed into this category too.  These organizations though, unlike the 501(c)(4), are not allowed to conduct “political campaign activities to intervene in elections to public office”. They are however allowed to lobby for or against legislation.

What the IRS does then is make sure that everyone is being above board and following the guidelines and laws for their particular category. And in this case, that is what the IRS was attempting to do when they screwed it up (although perhaps not as badly as originally thought).

In 2013 the IRS started to focus on organizations in both of these categories. They did so by doing a computer search for certain key words.  At the time, the list of words and phrases  seemed to be geared mainly towards conservative groups and causes, and many of them started complaining of long wait times and lack of response on the part of the IRS when questioned.  Thus, came the charge of politicizing the IRS.

Before going further, let me state that this action did not threaten the existence of any of these groups, it did not threaten any member of those groups with jail time, it did not prevent any of these group from acting.  So, their existence and activities were not threatened.  What was threatened was their tax exempt status, which is importantbut not an existential threat.

So, moving on.  This, justifiably so, caused a great deal of controversy and hue and cry.  In addition there were numerous investigations of this conducted by a great many groups.  There was the Treasury IG investigation of 2013 and another, much more extensive and comprehensive one in that came out in 2017.  There was an FBI investigation.  There was a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and the House Committee on Ways and Means investigation.  The Senate also did their investigation, specifically, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

To sum up the results of all of these investigations:  No evidence was found linking President Obama to this.  Nor was there any evidence of political interference of the investigations.  At the most it was the result of the political bias of one person, Lois Lerner, the IRS Director of Exempt Organizations and those in her group.  However, even that was questioned with some of these investigations putting it down to mismanagement, poor judgement, and a lack of understanding on the part of IRS personnel on the rules.

Some facts that are interesting and that point towards thi not being a deliberate attack and targeting of conservative groups.  As more investigations were done, it was found that liberal groups were also targeted by the use of keywords too.  Not as many as conservative groups, but very close.  For example,  thirteen liberal organizations were flagged due to having possible ACORN ties.  They too had to wait over a year to get their cases resolved.  Also, of all the groups targeted for further investigation, only a few had their tax exempt status pulled, all of them liberals.

The Treasury IG report noted that while some conservative groups had been unfairly targeted, many liberal groups had been too. This had been on ongoing issue since 2004, and was nonpartisan in nature.  Which also fits with another study I saw that found that when an administration changes party who the IRS audits and examines more closely tends to change too. Not a great deal, but some.

Bottom line- the IRS did not target political affiliations, they targeted politics; whether the non-profit organization engaged in politics that is not allowed by their exemption. However, they did so clumsily and without adequate oversight and checks put in the system.  Using keywords is dependent on what individuals can come up with, which means it is subjective and thus subject to all the problems with that.  That would have been a good start, but more should have been done to prevent individual and possibly unconscious bias.   It was not a political hunt.  It was not weaponized.

ODDS AND ENDS

Ms. Lerner’s lost emails.  Yes, some were gone due to the IRS computer system crash. The conspiracy believers find this both highly suspicious and also evidence that there was a strong political link involved in this. However, while suspicious, it is not evidence.  It is the starting point, and not the end.  In this case, my first question is when did the computer crash occur?  Next would be do we have evidence that such a crash did occur?

The answers are that it occurred before there were any investigations, and there is indeed evidence that the system crashed.  This is not good for the conspiracy believers, and so is usually ignored.

Another thing that is sometimes  brought up, former IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman said that he had frequently visited the White House between 2010 – 2011.  However, he denied talking with the White House officials about the targeting of conservatives. Some conservative conspiracy believers pointed out that Shulman had visited the White House 157 times.  However, this number does not represent just visits to the White House, but also the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. White House visitor logs can only confirm 11 visits between 2009 and 2012.  I would though like to point out that even if he had visited the White House 157 times that alone is not evidence of something wrong being done. It is cause to ask questions, but is nothing more.

 

Again, bottom line, no deliberate targeting of conservative groups on the part of President Obama, and probably not by the IRS personnel  overall.  Poor procedures and sloppy controls do not constitute weaponization, just poor management.

 

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Dissection of a Conspiracy Meme Part 2: Uranium One

 

In my previous blog I discussed how people who believe in conspiracy theories, such as the one in this meme, are so certain of some beliefs that it is inconceivable to them that they could be wrong. Because of this everything they learn has to conform to this belief instead of the belief conforming to reality.

In this part of the dissection I will start with Uranium One and then see how far down I can get in one blog.  I will also continue to talk about the mindsets of the conspiracy believer.

 

Uranium One

So, what is the claim about Uranium One? Why is it on here as being treasonous and a scandal?

While there is some variation on the exact nature of the scandal and act, most such people believe that a bribe from Russia was given in the form of a $145 million donation to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary was Secretary of State. The bribe was to get her sign off on selling a company called Uranium one to Rosatom, a Russian state organization that specializes in nuclear energy.  Many of these people state that this is the true Russian scandal, and not Russia’s efforts to influence the election for Trump.

What does reality show?

In my previous blog on this meme I went over one of the traits of those who believe this meme; an absolute certainty about a position that warps reality around it in order to protect it.  On this one another trait of such people is displayed; finding a fact that supports their belief and ignoring the others that do not.

First, a little background about Uranium One.  Uranium One was a Canadian company that, among other activities, extracted uranium from the ground. At the time of its sale to Rosatom the U. S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission estimated that Uranium One controlled about 20% of the uranium in the ground in the United States.

So, did Hillary accept a bribe from Russia via the Clinton Foundation to okay the sale of Uranium One to a Russian state controlled company?  Well, there are several problems with this claim.

One problem is the approval process required to sell Uranium One. The approval process for selling Uranium One is not one that Hillary Clinton could make on her own.  Multiple agencies have to review and approve it.

First, the Committee on Foreign Investments has to approve the sale. This committee consists of the Secretaries of Treasury, State, Defense, Homeland Security, Commerce, and Energy; the Attorney General; and representatives from two White House offices, The United States Trade Representative and the Office of Science and Technology Policy.  One thing to note here, this committee cannot stop a sale.  Only the President can stop the sale, when at least one of the members of this committee raise an objection or issue with a proposed sale.

However, no one objected and all voted to approve the sale.  To make things even more difficult for those believing Hillary was bribed to approve this sale, she was not on the committee.  The State Department was represented by Assistant Undersecretary of State Jose Fernandez who has testified that Hillary Clinton never interfered in his work on the Committee on Foreign Investments.

So, for Hillary to have gotten this sale approved she would have had to bribe or coerce not only her representative on the committee, but also representatives from Treasury, Defense, Homeland Security, Commerce, Energy, the Attorney General, and two separate White House offices.  And the President – although most conspiracies already have President Obama helping Hillary on this.

This seems extremely unlikely.  And it gets worse for these conspiracy believers. The Committee is not the only organization that has to approve the sale and to approve the export of uranium to other countries.   While the sale was approved and did go through, approval to export uranium from the United State’s deposits were never given and still have not been given – meaning that they have never shipped any uranium out of the United States.  Given that one of the motives stated by conspiracy theories for why this sale was so important to Russians is that they wanted to be able to control more of the world’s uranium, this non-approval to export uranium rather puts a crimp in that.

Rosatom now controls less than the 20% it controlled when Uranium One was bought.  When Uranium One was bought there were only four in ground recovery facilities in the US.  Today there are ten such facilities, which has brought Uranium One, a wholly owned subsidiary of Rosatom, in control of about 10%.  And, according to a 2017 report by the U. S. International Trade Commission, Uranium One has been responsible for just under 6% of domestic production of uranium.

As can be seen, the claim that Hillary was bribed by Russia to approve the sale of Uranium One is rather ridiculous. She was not on the relevant committee (although a representative of the State Department was), and there were many other people involved who could have stopped the sale and so would have had to be bribed or coerced too.  Again, exceedingly unlikely.

Further, the motive for Russia to do this falls apart when you look at the restraints and restrictions on who could get the uranium.

So, why do the conspiracy theory people continue to believe such an absurdity?  Their evidence consists of donations made to the Clinton Foundation by Russian investors in Uranium One, Bill Clinton’s $500,000 speaking engagement in Russia on June 29, 2010, and a Russian spy who sought to become close to a friend of Hillary’s.  This highlights another problem with conspiracy thinking, one actually shared by a great many people.  Taking a few facts, coming up with an explanation and then believing the explanation is true without looking further.  They find the explanation plausible and that is enough.

I would point out that unicorns are plausible creatures too, but they do not exist.  In other words, just because something seems to be plausible does not mean it is true.  Evidence needs to be found showing that the plausible is also true.  In this case, there is no evidence.  This lack of evidence, coupled with the problems I already noted above, show that this belief, that Hillary Clinton was bribed by the Russians to allow the sale of Uranium One to them, is wrong.

However, logic and evidence and sound reasoning won’t matter. They have their mind made up on this, and the surface plausibility of part of this is enough for them to cling to that belief, even in the face of reality.

 

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History’s Shining Moment: President Barack Hussein Obama

 

When President Obama was first sworn in eight years ago, I watched with mixed feelings.  I fully felt and shared the feelings and emotions of the crowd attending in feeling that history had reached a watershed moment, that a group whose members had been despised and put down had one of their own in the most powerful office of the land.  I fully supported what Obama the candidate had said and the positions he took.  And he spoke inspiringly well.  But, being the first black president of the United States put him under a huge burden, under the intense scrutiny of all.  I worried about how this man, Barak Hussein Obama, would do. Could he live up to this moment?

Many of those asking this question along with me would be more likely to hold him to a much higher standard and more quickly and easily criticize him than they would a white person due to unconscious bias.  Some of us, too many no matter their numbers, looked at him with hatred due to openly held and argued racism.  And then there were those whose ideology and political beliefs would not allow them to support President Obama, no matter how well he would do the job.

Added to this was that Obama was taking over a country suffering under the worst recession since the Great Depression.  A country that was bleeding from wars in the Middle East and in whom most of the world had little respect.  Given these challenges, the chances of failure were great, the burden of Presidency even heavier.  As the years passed though, President Barack Hussein Obama proved more than equal to these challenges and these burdens.

Through all these last eight years President Obama has presided with grace, dignity and poise.  While some may blow this off as just style over substance, the style is important.  It sets the tone of our nation.  It sets the impressions that those outside of the US see.  It can open or close doors to communication and understanding.

 

However, President Obama was much more than just style.   His presidency was one of substance too.  These are just a few of the many accomplishments of his administration.

He managed our economy so that it came out of the recession more quickly and in better shape than almost any other industrial country in the world.  Yes, it was not perfect, but it was well done, and the best that could be done.  And it is still improving even at the end of his eight years:  unemployment down, pay checks rising, the stock market more than doubling, and record number of months with increased job creation.

In addition, he pushed for and signed into law stronger financial regulations that would help prevent another great recession such as the one he guided us out of; the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

President Obama also managed to pass massive healthcare reform, something that many presidents, both Republican and Democrat, had tried to do, and failed.   It is not perfect and it has flaws.  But, it is good, it is a step in the right direction, and it has provided millions and millions of Americans needed health care.  Lives have been saved; lives have been improved and made better, because of the Affordable Care Act.  It forms and could, if allowed, continue to form the basis of something much better.

President Obama made great strides towards providing equal rights towards gays.  Before President Obama gays had to serve secretly in the military and could not wed.  Now, they can proudly serve the US as themselves.  Now, they can wed the person they love, and openly love that person.

He improved our international standing through the use of diplomacy and new policies.  He ended the Iraq war and reduced our presence in Afghanistan.  He denounced and prohibited the use of torture.  He managed a new nuclear deal with Russia to reduce our nuclear arsenal.  He found and killed bin Laden.  He increased sanctions on Iran that led to a treaty on Iran’s nuclear program.

His administration has expanded opportunities for women in our country.

He has brought much needed light and discussion to racial issues still in existence in our country, including working to find ways to improve policing.

In regards to the environment, his administration not only helped craft and signed the Climate agreement in Paris, but has worked to reduce our carbon emissions, increase alternative energy use, improved our water and land usage, and increased our national parks.

President Obama has had no scandals in his administration or within his family – a first for a Presidential administration and family in a long, long time.

As I said, this is only a partial and incomplete listing of his accomplishments.

President Obama, like all Presidents, was not able to achieve all that he wished.  However, politics is the art of the possible.  Perfection, besides being beyond human ability, is also not possible in politics with so many differing, discordant, and conflicting views on what should and should not be done.

In regards to immigration, he was unable to get Congress to pass immigration reform.  But, he created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals act.

In regards to Guantanamo, he was unable to close it.  But, he was able to reduce its population from a peak of 700 prisoners to around 40 when he leaves office.

Like any President, he has had his failures.  Some of them large.  He has had policies and practices that I disagreed with, sometimes strongly.

However, through all of this he has handled successes and failures, progress and setbacks, with a calm dignity.  In addition he has handled the relentless insults and slanders and abuse directed at him with humor and aplomb, from the birther nonsense, to being called a liar by a Congressman during Obama’s speech to Congress, to portrayals of his wife as an ape and worse.

In fact, it was not only President Obama who has exhibited class and dignity, and an ability to communicate with Americans, but his whole family:  Michelle, Sasha, and Malia.   They have been one of the most positive family models in the White House in a long time.

JFK’s presidency has often been referred to as Camelot, from an interview with Jacqueline Kennedy in which she stated that “There will be great presidents again.  But there will never be another Camelot.”    This was in reference to the musical Camelot, which had these lines at the end, as King Arthur goes out to fight his final battle, his kingdom in rack and ruin.

While President Obama’s presidency is far from lying in rack and ruin, I think the line that inspired this is appropriate.

“Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief, shining moment, that was known as Camelot.”

It is not only his accomplishments, but his manner, his demeanor and that of his family that will last and continue to influence us for years to come.

History consists of a great many moments, some shining, some dark and ugly.  President Barack Hussein Obama’s election and time as our President was one of those shining moments.

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An Unusual Memorial Day Observation – Hiroshima, Obama, and the Extreme Right

On Friday President Obama delivered a speech at Hiroshima Japan.   For a couple of weeks before this visit I had seen news items from some of my more extreme conservative friends about how President Obama had either already apologized (interesting that they were not informed enough to even know that President Obama had not gone to Japan yet) or was going to apologize for the US dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

On Friday, President Obama delivered his speech.  And contrary to the claims of these conservatives, he did not apologize for Truman’s decision to drop the bomb.   From a New York Times article

 

“People in Asian countries that were brutalized by imperial Japan had warned that a presidential apology would be inappropriate. President Obama not only did not apologize, he made clear that Japan, despite a highly advanced culture, was to blame for the war, which “grew out of the same base instinct for domination, for conquest, that had caused conflicts amongst the simplest tribes.”

 

Having seen the reactions of these conservatives before President Obama had made his speech I was curious to see how they would react to the fact that he did not apologize for the United States dropping the bomb on Hiroshima.  I wish I could say that I was surprised, but sadly I was not.  They ignored reality and instead stated that President Obama was apologizing for dropping the bomb.

 

Since they have written several articles on this subject and are a favorite “news” source for the extreme conservatives I will use an article from Breitbart as an example of such conservatives thinking.  From Breitbart, “Obama Dishonors Memorial Day at Hiroshima”

 

“At Hiroshima, Obama was silent on the question of American sacrifice, American valor, and American virtue, but eloquent on the issue of American guilt.

What Obama did NOT do in his speech in Japan was to praise America’s fallen warriors, the men and women whose bravery and sacrifice saved the world from nuclear war over the 71 years since that first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.”

 

This quote is the gist, the heart of all the radical conservatives’ denunciation of President Obama’s Hiroshima speech – he did not laud American virtue and praise our fallen warriors.  He did not expound on the wonders of the United States.

 

However, that is what Memorial Day is for.  This was not Memorial Day and the purpose of this speech was different.  Its purpose?  From an interview President Obama had with the Japanese news organization NHK World,

 

“My purpose is not to simply revisit the past, but to affirm that innocent people die in a war, on all sides, that we should do everything we can to try to promote peace and dialogue around the world, that we should continue to strive for a world without nuclear weapons”

 

……

 

“…that I do not expect to provide a very long speech but rather, I think, some very humble reflections about my views on how we can forge a better peace around the world, and how we can use the model of relations between the United States and Japan as an example of how we can move forward.”

 

His purpose was not to dwell on the past but to use it as a way to reflect on how we can create a better world.

 

So, what did President Obama say in his speech?  Here is a link to the entire speech.   You will find no apology in it.  You will find no remonstration against the decisions made by our nation then.  Not even indirectly.

 

“Why do we come to this place, to Hiroshima? We come to ponder a terrible force unleashed in a not-so-distant past. We come to mourn the dead, including over 100,000 Japanese men, women and children, thousands of Koreans, a dozen Americans held prisoner.

Their souls speak to us. They ask us to look inward, to take stock of who we are and what we might become.”

 

This is no apology.  It is a statement of fact.  A “terrible force” was unleashed.  One that showed humanity had grown in knowledge to such an extent that humanity could now “destroy itself”.  This speech used the fact that in all wars innocents die to urge us to now grow in wisdom as we have in knowledge.  And then used the example of Japan and the United States to illustrate how that wisdom can happen.

 

“Some day, the voices of the hibakusha will no longer be with us to bear witness. But the memory of the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, must never fade. That memory allows us to fight complacency. It fuels our moral imagination. It allows us to change.

And since that fateful day, we have made choices that give us hope. The United States and Japan have forged not only an alliance but a friendship that has won far more for our people than we could ever claim through war. The nations of Europe built a union that replaced battlefields with bonds of commerce and democracy. Oppressed people and nations won liberation. An international community established institutions and treaties that work to avoid war and aspire to restrict and roll back and ultimately eliminate the existence of nuclear weapons.”

 

But read President Obama’s speech yourself and see with your own eyes and create your own understanding based on what he actually said and not what others say.  I will say that unlike the radical conservatives here  in the United States, the Japanese people see no apology.  That fact alone should give the conservatives pause since how can there be an apology to someone if that person does not see it as such?

 

Now before going over why these conservatives argue with a devil of their own making, I would like to point out two pieces of irony here in their strident criticism of this speech.

 

The first is that in his speech President Obama prominently and favorably talked about our Declaration of Independence.

 

“My own nation’s story began with simple words: All men are created equal and endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Realizing that ideal has never been easy, even within our own borders, even among our own citizens. But staying true to that story is worth the effort. It is an ideal to be strived for, an ideal that extends across continents and across oceans. The irreducible worth of every person, the insistence that every life is precious, the radical and necessary notion that we are part of a single human family — that is the story that we all must tell.”

 

 

The other piece of irony here is that these conservatives are so concerned with how President Obama has dishonored us, even to the point of calling on Congress to censure him, that they have totally overlooked the fact that he honored the memories of 12 American pilots who were being held captive in Hiroshima when the bomb dropped.

 

He not only mentioned these pilots in his speech, he embraced a Japanese survivor of Hiroshima, Shigeaki Mori who was 8 years old when Hiroshima went up in atomic fire.  The reason for the embrace?  Shigeaki has spent decades not only researching the fates of these American prisoners of war but rescued their memories.  Had he not done this research today we would still not know what happened to them.  Part of a good memorial is knowing the fates of those who died – how and when.  It is why the Vietnam War is still so fresh for so many who still do not know the fates of their loved ones.  It is why President Obama embraced Shigeaki.

 

Now we come to the question of why are these conservatives are creating and then believing in these delusions?  The answer is why I titled this blog “A Memorial Day Observation”.

 

Part of the reason why they are doing this may be a genuine inability to understand what President Obama said.  They are concerned only with looking back and justifying every action the United States has done.  They are focused tightly upon the honor of the United States, with making sure that our national pride is unhurt and unharmed that they interpret all things according to that measure, even things that have no bearing on that issue.  They want to ensure the world knows that the others are at fault and we are the virtuous ones in all ways and all actions.

 

Which may be one reason why this speech so confuses them – it looks forward. It uses the past, dropping the bomb on Hiroshima, as a jumping off point to look forward.  It looks to what can be done to prevent such decisions from ever having to be made ever again, from people having to suffer that devastation again.  The fact that statements explicitly stating that Japan started the war, that they committed brutal acts against not only soldiers but civilians,  and that our bombing of them saved American troops  were not needed nor the subject of this speech seems to be beyond their ability to comprehend.  The fact that President Obama used Hiroshima for something other than rubbing the Japanese faces into this muck and elevating our own stature by strutting has caused  them to overlook the fact that President Obama did NOT apologize for the United States dropping the bomb.

 

They are stuck in the past and so cannot comprehend an honest look at what could be.  All such views, to their mind, must first denigrate our opponents and laud our greatness.  They are rather like a two bit wrestler in this.

 

Of course, this is only part of the reason why these conservatives do this.   The other part is that they are so blinded by their hatred of President Obama, so bent by their bigotry, and so blinkered by their ideology that they can no longer recognize what is true or false about what President Obama did, does, and will do.  All such actions must be broken down, twisted, and bent into something that will pass the filters of their hatred, bigotry, and ideology.  Even at the expense of truth and reality.

 

And this leads me to my Memorial Day Observation.

 

Our soldiers have died to protect our freedoms – our freedom of religion, of speech, of association and all the others.  They died to protect such freedoms for all Americans, whether wise or foolish, whether ignorant or informed, whether hateful or empathetic.

 

But, while they died to protect the freedom of all, wouldn’t it be a better memorial to the sacrifice they made to have your view of the world be realistic, rational, and concerned with the well- being of all?  Wouldn’t it be a better memorial to their sacrifice for us to be working towards creating a world in which no one would have to make such a sacrifice ever again?

 

And that was what President Obama’s speech was about.

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A Broad Look At An On-Going Travesty and Tragedy

We are the only advanced country in the world that sees these shootings every few months.
President Obama, October 1, 2015

Another month, another mass shooting. Another day, another 88 deaths from the use of guns (based on 2011 CDC data). President Obama’s speech should make every American pause and think seriously about this and about what makes our country so heartbreakingly different than the other advanced countries?

I am not going to take a look at the details here. I am not interested in discussing different gun control options whether it be universal background checks, outlawing certain types of firearms and ammunition, buy back programs or any of a host of other ideas and proposals. Instead, this is a look at the broad picture, similar to what the President did. Its purpose is to get those who blindly believe that guns are not a problem in the United States and/or that more guns would result in a safer society and less gun deaths to at least momentarily question their position. I realize most of those who believe this will continue to remain willfully blinded by their dogma and love of guns. But, hopefully, a few will stop and think, and in that moment of Huh perhaps realize that our current system and love affair with guns is a problem and not a solution.

Consider the following facts – of all the developed nations and those considered advanced we are the country with the highest number of gun deaths per capita and with the highest number of mass shootings. With the exceptions of Brazil, Russia, Estonia and Mexico we have the highest number of murders through any means of these developed countries.

How can you not look at this fact and not believe that we have a problem in how we view and handle gun ownership?

For those who tout looser gun control laws and more guns – how can you advocate this when the United States has a higher civilian gun ownership rate than any other country (with only 5% of the world’s population our citizens own 35 – 50% of the world’s civilian owned guns)? How can you believe that more of the same will somehow result in a different outcome? In a quote that is generally attributed to Einstein, he defined insanity as “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” .

Yes, I know that many factors play a role in our high number of gun deaths and mass shootings. Factors such as our income inequality, poverty, lack of universal medical care, lack of support for education for all, how we deal with the mentally ill, institutional racism, and our own almost unique American culture that tends to glorify violence and violent solutions to problems and with guns being the means of choice for such solutions.

I read comments from those who almost rabidly support guns and argue against almost all gun control or even research into gun violence proudly claiming how they take guns to theaters, to public venues, to even answer their door. And I wonder that they do not question why they feel the need for this? Why they feel so proud of this, for they are indeed proud of it? Why do they not see this as reflecting a societal failure and feel ashamed of it instead? Why do they continue to promote the aspects of our culture that feed into that perception felt as a need?  Why do they not see that feeling the need to carry a gun is a trait more of those countries where laws and society have broken down, where governments are dysfunctional, or where civil war rages than of those with functioning institutions and an advanced economy.

Many things need to change in order to deal with our national problem of gun violence. Better and more effective gun control on its own will not be enough. However, any changes made that do not include more effective gun control laws and a change in our gun worshiping culture will be ineffective. Even worse, such a failure to pass such laws will be like a canary in a coal mine, a signal that our culture with its predilection for violent solutions and love of all things gun has not changed in the way it must.

The first step towards making these changes though lies in first acknowledging that there is a problem and that changes need to happen.

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Of Ferguson and Charleston, Of Confederate Flags and N—–…and Conservatives. Or Kum Ba Yah Bullshit.

Soon after the vicious and brutal murder of nine blacks at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church by Dylann Roof I started to hear conservative commentators commenting on how different the reaction of the Charleston community to this killing of blacks by a white than that of Ferguson; about how the Charleston community, both black and white, pulled together in unity while that of Ferguson erupted in violence.

The clear inference (one often made explicit by some conservative commentators) was that there really is no underlying race problem in America and that those who say that there is are race baiters intent upon stirring up racial conflict and hatred for their own personal and/or political benefit. The reality, according to these commentators, is that our society and its institutions are largely free of racial bias. That, contrary to the stated experiences of many millions of blacks, that our police departments are enforcing laws and reacting to citizens without regards to their color, that our justice system dispenses justice to black and whites alike largely without regards to color, that our educational system treats all students alike regardless of color, and that job opportunities for black and white are such that skin color plays no role the vast majority of times. In other words, that our society has achieved racial equality.

I call this Kum Ba Yah bullshit.

The danger of conservative’s kum ba yah bullshit is that It puts the responsibility for all change firmly on the backs of blacks. They are responsible for creating better families, for better educating their children, for better following the law and the police, for doing better on finding jobs. They are responsible for their culture and it is the black culture that is the problem. Blacks, according to this “logic” just need to work and try harder. No need for whites to change anything.

Now, in a discussion on this with a conservative a few weeks ago, he used a baseball analogy to try to bring home his point. He said that my position was akin to defeatism, that if we tell blacks that they cannot do it, that their problems are the result of institutional racism and unconscious biases and prejudices instead of them, then we are like the coach of a team telling his team that they are losers. And that by so doing that team, and blacks, do lose.

I applauded his analogy. And I agree, blacks do need to work hard at changing things, at trying to achieve goals and change their culture. However, I pointed out that a better analogy would be that of two teams playing a game of baseball. One team has the standard three outs in order to get hits. The other team though only has two outs before they are retired. No matter how good the coaching, no matter how much that team works at it, no matter how motivated they are, they are going to lose most of the time. Not because of talent or ability, not because of motivation and persistence, but because the rules of the game are rigged against them. And until those rules are changed to be fair and just no matter who is playing the game then members of that team are, justifiably, going to feel anger, are going to feel frustrated. So much so that they may take out their anger on the other team or on the umpires of the game. Or even those of the spectators watching the game.

Yes, the black community needs to continue to work hard to improve their culture and lot, but at the same time they are operating under a handicap even more severe than that of a baseball team playing with only two outs in hand. They are operating within a society that still has institutional racism as part of its fabric and in which largely unconscious biases and prejudices still hold sway in determining the actions of those in power. What makes it worse, so many do not even acknowledge that such problems exist and deny them totally.

Black culture. That is the favorite response of the conservative when asked what is at the root of the disparities in education, economic status, and justice between whites and blacks. And to an extent they are right. However, they never ask the more important question of how black culture was formed and what maintains it today. Instead, they seem to see black culture as something of a virgin birth or as something coming fully formed from the foam.

Conservatives ignore the fact that black culture was formed from the brutality that was slavery, modified by them chains of Jim Crow laws and lynchings, formed by government policies and industry actions, and reinforced by the media.

Black culture was formed by the broken families of the slave era, by the repression of the Jim Crow laws and actions of the KKK and others. It was formed by practices such as redlining which from 1934 – 1962 kept blacks form getting any of the 120 billion dollars handed out by the government for home loans which thus forced segregation by forcing blacks into living in ghettos. This has the ripple effect in that blacks, unlike the whites who received these loans, did not have property they could pass own to their children and use as a basis for creating wealth for themselves and their family.

Or consider the effect this had on education. Schools are funded by property taxes. Since the vast majority of blacks could not afford to live in good homes and could not get the loans to attain good homes, they did not have the tax base to create good schools. Combine this with the segregation effects and you have the basis for the educational disparities we see today. All of which then lead to less opportunities for getting better jobs.

And that is just one example of what is called institutional racism. Another is how blacks are portrayed in the media – tv, radio, newspapers, magazines. White skin and standards are held up as beautiful, blacks are not. Blacks are shown as criminals much more often than they are in real life, and whites much less than they are in real life.

Such practices as these and more effect all areas of society – medicine, justice, and family. They are what helped form black culture. And without efforts on the parts of whites to acknowledge this and change it, then blacks can only go go far, can only do so much. Individuals can overcome it – after all there are great people of all races, but most people of all races are average, and it is those people who are going to continue to suffer the most from this unresolved racism.
And then there is the very real effects of unconscious bias within our society. It affects whose resume will result in a call for an interview and whose will not, it affects how police and judges and jury react and dispense justice., it effects teachers and educators expectations.

The only way true racial justice and equality is going to be achieved is if all or most whites will recognize this problem. Many already do. However, this is a blind spot of most conservatives. They refuse to see this and thus make huge mistakes in judgements and in recommendations on what needs to be done. Mistakes that not only do nothing to solve the problems, but often actually make the problem worse.

For example, comparing Ferguson with Charleston. Yes, in both cases a white person killed a black person or people. However, that is as far as the comparison goes. In Ferguson, a white police officer and member of a police force that was found to be engaged in racist practices, shot and killed an unarmed black man. In Charleston nine blacks were killed by a lone racist gunman who belonged to no government organization or private one apparently. That lack of government affiliation makes a huge difference. Ferguson experienced riots not because a white had killed a black person, but because a white representative of a government agency which had been engaged in racist practices killed an unarmed black person. Charleston did not erupt into violent protests because the gunman was working on his own and did not represent a government with power over the black community.

A clear and easily seen difference. And yet, one that so many conservatives seem to be blind to.

Just as they seem to be blind to the problems inherent in the government flying the Confederate battle flag. Conservatives insist on defending this as just an exhibition of pride in their heritage. Pride in a heritage that included the attempted dissolution of the United States in order to protect their right to treat people as property, of no more worth than a hog or a cabinet. Yes, many like to phrase this in terms of state’s rights, but it was the state’s right to allow whites to own blacks to do with as they wish. It was a state right to refuse freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly to those who advocated for abolition; to confiscate abolitionist literature and burn it, to break the presses of those publications advocating for the abolition of slavery, it was the fining, imprisonment, flogging, and tar and feathering of those who advocated for treating blacks as free people.

Those are the heritage that conservatives want to remember and honor? Yes, many brave and good men fought and died for the south. But so too did good and brave men die fighting for Nazi Germany. I wonder, if the conservatives would make the same argument for those who would honor the Nazi flag.

And finally, one last area of racial blindness conservatives seem to suffer from. Today, a podcast came out, an interview with President Obama by Marc Maron in which President Obama used the word “nigger”. Conservatives are jumping all over President Obama’s use of this word. However, just as in their comparison of Ferguson with Charleston, and defense of the Confederate flag, their blindness to context and meaning is apparent. Here is the full quote:

“The legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every institution of our lives, you know, that casts a long shadow, and that’s still part of our DNA that’s passed on. We’re not cured of it. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say ‘nigger’ in public. That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination… Societies don’t, overnight, completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior.”

And this actually does a good job of summing up the problem with most conservatives. They believe that since we have made the use of nigger in public a thing to be ashamed of, since we have gotten rid of most of the overt discrimination that discrimination does not exist at all. And that is foolish of them. As President Obama said, “societies don’t, overnight, completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior”. In fact, I would amend that statement to say even as recently as the 1960s and 1970s this overt racism was still prevalent. And that past still lingers and impacts us today.

And this is something most conservatives do not see. They point to the very real gains that have been made in civil rights since the 1960s and declare victory. However, it is not. That was only the start of the victory. It is as if General Eisenhower had declared victory the day after the D Day invasion of Normandy and stopped all further actions since victory had been achieved. Blindness.

The greater struggle is with us now, the struggle to deal with those aspects of racism that are not so easily seen by those not on the receiving end of it. Change the institutional racism that still exists and make clear the hidden biases and prejudices that effect our decisions and then victory will be achieved. . And the first step that is needed to deal with this is to acknowledge that it exists.

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Syria, Chemical Weapons, and President Obama’s Decision

In reading and considering the crisis in Syria my first thought is that many people are confusing questions here.   Many see this as a decision on whether to take military action against Assad and for the rebels.   It is not.  Nor would I support such a decision.  The war in Syria has too many players, too many entanglements with other groups and countries, and is its reality too murky and cloudy for us to even have a chance of determining whether our actions would do more good or harm.   And this is not even considering the cost in human lives of our soldiers as well as money that such an action would cost.  So, not only no, but hell no on getting involved militarily in Syria as we did in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Fortunately, President Obama is not considering getting involved this way in Syria.

What is being seriously considered is whether to take military action (most likely a round or two of cruise missiles) against Syria due to its use of chemical weapons.  Many seem to think this another example of the U.S. setting its own moral policy as it wishes and for its own convenience.  However, the use of such weapons was banned by the international community after WW 1.  This ban was formalized in the Geneva Convention in 1925.   This Convention has been expanded over the years to more fully cover chemical weapons and to also include biological weapons.   So, rather than being enforcing a United States policy this action would be done in order to enforce this international Convention.

The agency responsible for implementing the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) is the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW); consisting of 189 member countries and based in the Netherlands.

While there have been some lapses and failures, overall this Convention has been successful.   For example, one of the primary tasks of the OPCW is the monitoring of chemical stockpiles and verifying their elimination.   As of 2/28/2013 78.57%, of the world’s declared stockpile of 71,196 metric tons of chemical agent and 45.56%, of the 8.67 million chemical munitions and containers covered by the CWC have been verifiably destroyed.

The United States is among those 189 member states of this organisation.   One thing about being a member is that all member states have pledged to “provide assistance and protection to fellow Member States threatened by the use of chemical weapons or attacked with chemical weapons.”

This is the basis for President Obama’s proposed military action; humanitarian concerns due to the breaking of the Chemical Weapons Convention.

Now that the real question has, hopefully, been clarified here, let’s look at some of the arguments being made against carrying out a military strike on Syria.

First up is that bullets, bombs, and other such weapons kill a person just as dead.  Given this, then why the big concern over chemical weapons?   This argument against action really does not hold up very well when examined closely.

–          Chemical weapons disperses and spreads.  It covers a much wider area than bullets do.

–          Of course, bombs also cover wider areas than bullets too.   However, bombs, like bullets, can be aimed, often surprisingly accurately nowadays.   This is not so true of chemical weapons.  As said earlier, it disperses and spreads.   It can go into areas not targeted very easily.   Winds can carry it far beyond its target area.

–          Chemical weapons can and do contaminate the ground.  If it reaches a water supply – rivers and streams, underground sources – it will continue to kill people in areas that were not even close to the target area.

All of the above is why they are considered weapons of mass destruction, along with nuclear and biological weapons.   It is why they were banned.   Consider this too, they were widely used during WW 1 and despite the horrors of WW1 with its trench warfare, the first use of tanks and aerial bombardments gas warfare was the only weapon that was immediately agreed upon to be banned.   It seems that those with first hand knowledge of the types of death that bullets and bombs can deal out found the use of chemical weapons even more horrific.  “They inflict excruciating and long term suffering on a mass scale.”

Also, for myself, someday in the possibly never to be future, I would like to see bullets and bombs along with all weapons of war outlawed.   We have in place limits to nuclear weapons, to biological weapons, and to chemical weapons.   Why in the world would we want to allow one to come back into play?    Isn’t it a good thing that we do have limits, imperfect as they are, on some types of weapons and warfares?    I think it is and I believe it to be worth maintaining and enforcing.  To not do so is to take a step backwards from the goal of a world without war.

Another argument made against the use of military force against Syria for its use of chemical weapons is that we did nothing when Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Iran during the Iraq/Iran war.  In fact, the U.S. provided satellite imagery to help guide Hussein’s use of chemical weapons.   And both the international community and the U.S. knew that Hussein had used gas on his own people.   And nothing was done.

However, this argument also fails.  Just because we failed to do the right thing one time is no justification for failing to do so again.   Those who use this argument justifiably condemn the U.S.’s actions and the international community’s inactions during Iraq’s use of chemical weapons.  To then try to use this inaction as an argument to again not take action is taking hypocrisy to new heights.   Just as a side note, Iraq became a member state of the OPCW in 2009.

It has also been brought up that the United States (as well as other countries) use such chemicals as napalm, white phosphorous, and the use of depleted uranium in munitions and that therefore the use of military force in Syria for their use of chemical weapons is not justified.

Short answer to this – those materials are not covered by the CWC.   Should they be?  Possibly, although their range and spread is not as dangerous as that of chemical gas.   But I would not object.  Indeed, I would argue that they should be either added to the Chemical Weapons Convention or banned in another agreement (for example, there is work to come to an agreement to ban depleted uranium munitions – although it is slow going at this point).   However, just because they are not included is no reason to not enforce the ban on those that are included.

Another criticism is that the United States should wait for the UN, or at the very least create an international coalition.   Now, I agree that the vast majority of the time we should work through international agencies such as the UN and NATO, or within an international coalition.   However, I also believe that there can be times when doing it alone might be necessary.   Our international organizations are imperfect and flawed.   While much better than not having any such organizations, they are limited.   For example, needed actions by the UN can be indefinitely blocked by just one country.   Because of this, I can see that there might arise cases where unilateral actions might be necessary.

Having said this let me also state that the vast majority of the times when we have done so were not justified.   My point in bringing this up is to show that because we may have to act unilaterally does not automatically mean that what we are doing is wrong.  It may be, but again it could also be the right thing to do.

In regards to the UN investigation team, they were tasked only with determining whether chemical weapons had been used or not; not with who used them.   Unless they find that no chemical attack occurred their report is going to be of limited to no use in determining who used them.

I would also point out that there is some limited international support for U.S. action.   France, Canada, Turkey, and several other countries have given their verbal support for US action.

 

 

 

 

 

To this point it must sound as if I approve of a military strike against Syria for its use of chemical weapons.

However, I do not.  Why?

The evidence that Syria used chemical weapons has not been shown in detail to the public and examined.   When Secretary of State Kerry laid out the evidence for Syria using chemical weapons there was a decided lack of specific information.   Security concerns were, as usual, the cited reasons for this.

Personally I tend to believe that the Obama administration does have good evidence that the Syrian government did use chemical weapons against the rebels.  First off, there was the chemical weapon attack back in May of this year.   If President Obama had wanted to take action in Syria and was just looking for an excuse to do so then he could have done this then.   However he did not, and suffered a lot of criticism for not doing so after having drawn the red line in the sand.   So, the fact that he is urging it this time seems to me to indicate that this time they do have good evidence.

Also, is it really that hard to believe that after all that Assad has done to his own people that he would not use the chemical weapons that we know he has if he felt them needed?  For myself, I find it very easy to believe.

However since Iraq and the total failure to find the WMD they were supposed to have the public has, justifiably, become skeptical of our government’s claims.  My personal feelings on this are really not relevant here since had this occurred during another President’s watch these feelings might be different.   The public deserves to know the evidence, especially if we are going to go it alone again.   The volatile nature of the Middle East in general, the reputation of the United States in that region, the political alliances involved and the chaotic blood soaked chaos that is Syria requires clear cut and undeniable evidence before we act.  This is not only necessary for the American public but for the international community too.

We did not get that though.   We were given the results of the intelligence gathering, but not the intelligence itself, not the details of how it was gathered and the raw data.  If President Obama was wanting to do this right then he should have pulled any human assets that might be compromised by revealing the evidence (and take the hit on having even less information in this region), and be willing to endure the consequences of letting those who do wish us harm to know what we are capable of doing in terms of intercepting communications and presented the evidence for the world to see.

However, he did not.   Nor did he lay out a case for why we shouldn’t wait and see what happens in the UN with its report on whether there was a chemical attack.

Just a couple of hours ago President Obama again strongly urged military action against Syria for its use of chemical weapons.  This time though he stated that he would try to get congressional approval for any military action against Syria.   I think this the prudent thing for him to do.   It avoids a domestic dispute on whether his actions are Constitutional or not, and allows more time for the UN report and to see which way the international dust settles.

In fact, I wonder if Obama had this in mind all along.   Having made the red line remark, President Obama was taking flak for not doing anything when Syria did (or at least appears they did) use chemical weapons.  By taking a hard stand based on (I assume) stronger evidence of Syria’s guilt he made his opponents argue against this action.   This gets him out of the doing nothing charge since now his opponents were arguing for him to do exactly that.   And now he gets to dump this in the lap of Congress, where, unless new developments come to light, nothing will happen.

If so, then this was a good political move on his part.  And if it caused Assad to sweat a bit waiting for some sort of military action, then so much the better.   Especially since this is probably going to be the only consequence of his use of chemical weapons, despite international conventions.

However, taking a look at the larger picture this is shaping up to be a failure not only for the U.S., but also for the international community.   We keep saying never again, never again.   No more chemical weapons being used on the battlefield or on unruly civilians.   We have a wonderful Convention signed by 189 nations against the use of chemical weapons.  And while much good work and progress has been made under this Convention, when it looks likely that chemical weapons were used again – on both the battlefield and bothersome civilians, a twofer – we are, again, not going to take action.

Instead of never again it is again and again and again.

The UN report may (I think it will) find that chemical weapons were used.   But they had no mandate to find out who used it and so no responsibility will be assigned to whoever committed this internationally agreed upon atrocity.   And in the unlikely event that some action will be taken, it will not be military.   After all, what would be the use?  With the amount of time that has elapsed any chemical munitions will have been moved and hidden again.   All we would do would be to hit where they used to be.  At best.   As for economic sanctions, given the status of Syria’s economy right now such sanctions would be a joke.

As for Congress, given the public opinion against a military strike and the lack of strong international support, I would be very surprised if they approved the use of military force.   Very surprised.

So again, what we said would never happened again has happened again.  Despite the conventions, despite the international organizations, despite the rhetoric.  And many will proclaim it good that we took no action.   Not just the US, but the international community.

It seems we have a ways to go before we are anything more than a group of barbarians with delusions of being civilized.

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The Political “Scandals” of President Obama

It says something about the nature of our times and of politics that the one policy of Obama’s that should be getting the greatest scrutiny and flack is his increasingly proliferate use of drones in the “War on Terror”.

It also says something about the nature of our times and of politics that the next policy that really deserves a great deal more attention is the trims and cuts and shortcuts around our liberties done in the name of security from terrorists.  Obama is not as bad as Bush on this, but they still occur.  And there is still too much secrecy involved.

Yet while these have indeed been mentioned and  Obama’s feet held to a wet match on these issues, the ones that have gotten the press today and that are generating the most heat today are nothing more than an example of a very small fire generating huge amounts of political smoke – mostly on the conservative side of the fence since they see these as the “gotcha’ to get the President.

Let me take the two current incidents and explain why there is more smoke than fire.

Benghazi

You would think that with the death of four of our people, including our ambassador to Libya, this attack would be the focus of the current hearings.  However, it is not.  Instead our politicians are dwelling on how the administration initially reported these attacks.

I have seen very, very little new information presented.  And to me, this has the appearance of political fighting between two different government organizations rather than a White House cover up.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/an-alternative-explanation-for-the-benghazi-talking-points-bureaucratic-knife-fight/2013/05/10/22a8df5c-b98d-11e2-b94c-b684dda07add_blog.html

 

However, disregard this possibility, disregard the possibility that it was the result of confusion and information fog; instead let us pretend that the White House really did change the talking points with the intent to deceive Congress and the public.   Obama’s administration should get slapped for it, and, given that they have already been slapped for their sloppy handling of this reporting, this has already occurred.  To continue to do so is redundant and serves no purpose other than purely partisan politics.

No laws were broken.  No people died as a result of this.  No money was lost due to this.   All of the actions causing this have been investigated, responsibility assigned, and actions taken.  All of the most important items have been taken care of and are not in question right now.  Instead, now it is about the most unimportant issue of all of the Benghazi issues.  And it is being given a semblance of importance only through positing a worst case scenario and doing a chicken little dance.  It is a 1% substance and 99% political smoke issue.

 

IRS

Now, this one has much more meat to it.   It is a real and important issue.  In fact, if President Obama is linked to this, if he gave the order or hinted that the IRS should go over the Tea Party groups then I think a discussion about possible impeachment is in order.

But man o man, the Republicans and conservatives are off and riding this for all its worth.  However they seem to have forgotten to bring along the horse to ride on.  President Obama has not been linked to this; there is not a hint of such a linkage at this time.  To me, it seems to be a bit premature to talk about impeaching Obama when there has been no evidence whatsoever showing him responsible for the IRS issue.

I keep hearing that this is worse than Watergate or just like Watergate.  Usually they reference the fact that one of the proposed articles of impeachment against Nixon was that he used the IRS to attack his political opponents and enemies.   However, that was only one of a total of 14 different charges.   Obama has yet to fall as low as Nixon.  Not even close.   Especially since he has not been linked.

From what I know right now, the biggest issue is not that they put these conservative groups through the wringer, but that they did not do the same to the liberal groups.  Given the changes in 2010 to groups and campaign donations, increased scrutiny was definitely warranted.  Given that conservatives were the largest block taking advantage of this, investigating them is also warranted.  What was not warranted, and for which the IRS should be and is getting blasted, is that they did not scrutinize the liberal groups the same way.

Now, just for fun, let me point out that every one of the conservative and Tea Party groups that were put under the microscope did get their tax exemption. Not even one of them were denied it.

 

History

Just for a bit more fun, I thought I would take a moment to go through some scandals involving the administrations of previous Presidents followed by ones involving the IRS.   In regards to Presidents I am not going to go over scandals involving their appointments.  Every president has had them.  Instead I am looking at policy scandals.

President W. Bush

–           No weapons of mass destruction,

–          Iraq did not support the terrorist group responsible for 9/11,

–          “Lawyergate’:  the dismissal of lawyers who were prosecuting Republicans instead of Democrats; during Congressional Hearings several senior Justice Department Officials refused to testify citing executive privilege and then resigned.

–          White House e mail – The Bush administration used the web servers of the Republican National Committee to send out millions of e mails which were then deleted and destroyed, probably in violation of both the Presidential Records Act and the Hatch Act.   Over 80 officials made use of these servers, including George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove.  Of these officials, e mails from 51 could not be found again.  Congressional investigations of other scandals requested millions of e mails that no longer existed.

–          Plame affair in which the name of a CIA operative was leaked for political reasons.

–          The administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Thomas Scully, withheld information from Congress about the projected cost of the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act.  He threatened to fire Medicare’s chief actuary if he provided the information to Congress.

–          NSA warrantless surveillance – President Bush implemented a program to listen in to domestic phone conversations by American citizens without getting a warrant through the FISA court.

–          Many more can be listed, but I still have several other Presidents to get to.

President Clinton

–          Monica Lewinsky – was impeached for perjury, obstruction of justice, and lying under oath.  He was acquitted by the Senate but cited for contempt of court.  Clinton had his license to practice law in Arkansas suspended for five years and was barred from practicing law before the Supreme Court.

President H. W. Bush

–          During his election campaign repeatedly denied knowing anything about Iran Contra.  However his dairy of that time stated that he was the only one who fully knew the details.   He refused to disclose this to investigators.

–          After being elected Bush pardoned to the five convicted government officials and also Casper Weinberger, whose trial had not yet begun.  By doing so he shut down the ongoing Iran Contra investigation.

President Ronald Reagan    

–          Iran Contra:   A plan to sell missiles to Iran in return for them releasing the hostages.  The money would then be used to fund the Contra rebels in their attempt to bring down the Nicaraguan government, something expressly forbidden by the Boland Amendment. Reagan initially went on TV and declared that there was no “arms for hostages”  deal.  He later had to go on TV and admit that there was. 

–          Sewergate:  funds from the EPA were selectively used for projects to benefit politicians favorable to Reagan’s administration. 

–          Inslaw affair:  top officials of Reagan’s Justice Department were involved in software piracy from Islaw Inc, forcing it into bankruptcy.  Both Attorney General Edwin Meese and his successor Dick Thornburgh were found to have blocked the investigation into this issue.   Their successor as Attorney General also refused to investigate. 

President Jimmy Carter

–          How nice, no policy scandals.

President Gerald Ford

–          Nixon Pardon; prevented Nixon from being tried by Congress and impeached.

President Richard Nixon

–          Watergate:  there were others, but enough said.

 

 

President Lyndon Johnson, President John Kennedy, President Dwight Eisenhower

–          No major policy scandals.

And let me end the President section here, on a happy note.

At first it seems as if more and more scandals are happening today.  However, despite appearances, I do not think that most modern politicians are any less ethical than their predecessors. Instead of the nature of the men who are elected as President having changed, it is our culture, society and government that have changed.

I believe that the political fighting between the two parties has become more intense and vicious, that our modern media is both more pervasive in our society and is not as inclined to hide and overlook issues, and that our modern government is larger, more complex, and involved in more aspects of society and the world than it once was.  It is these changes that have led to an increase in policy scandals.   I will say that looking through things, scandals involving political appointments seem to be consistently high regardless of era and time.   I guess this just shows that a good man is always hard to find.

 IRS Scandals

This will not be a long look, but instead more of a quick breeze through, as this blog is getting longer than what I had intended…. again.  In fact, let me just provide a link to a Time article about IRS and its history of scandal, with a few quotes from that article.

“By traditions, he [Obama] presumably meant the nation’s laws, which for decades have held that the federal government cannot target specific groups or individuals for tax enforcement without cause. But the IRS has a long history of disregarding this tradition.

For much of the post-war period, the agency has failed to meet its mission of neutrality, bowing to political pressure and resisting repeated attempts at internal reforms. On multiple occasions, it has become embroiled in scandal due to exactly the sort of behavior that senior IRS officials now admit occurred between 2010 and 2012.”

………………………..

Some of the most egregious abuses of the last 50 years were undertaken at the behest of the FBI, sometimes under the cover of a secret domestic counterintelligence program called COINTELPRO. In May 1968, a memo was sent to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. “The New Left on many occasions viciously and scurrilously attacked the Director and the Bureau,” the FBI memo read, according to the Church Committee report, a 1976 Senate investigation on U.S. intelligence abuses. The next day, Hoover authorized a new program to “expose, disrupt and otherwise neutralize” groups and individuals on the left, in part by employing the IRS as a weapon in the secret federal campaign.

……………………..

Questions have also been raised about whether the agency targets its audits to avoid complicating the lives of Presidents and key members of Congress. A 2001 empirical study of IRS audits published in the Economics and Politics journal found a clear pattern in audits between 1992 and 1997: “Other things being the same,” the authors wrote, “the percentage of tax returns audited by the IRS is markedly lower in states that are important to the sitting president’s re-election aspirations. We also find that the IRS is responsive to its oversight committees.”

 

Parting thought

Given the size of our modern government, its intricate and varied nature, along with the growth of the media and of confrontational politics, it is almost inevitable that every modern Presidential administration will have at least one if not more scandals.  The real measuring of a President in regards to scandals is not whether any occurred during his term in office, but rather, how directly was he involved in creating the scandal and what actions did he take to correct the problem after it was brought to light.

Using these more rational criteria, President Obama is still doing well.  At least in regards to Benghazi and the IRS.  Now, in regards to the drone program……

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