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Written by Mary L. G. Theroux
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Tuesday, 09 March 2010 |
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Census Data Not So Confidential After All
March 8, 2010
Mary L. G. Theroux
The current $350 million ad campaign for the 2010 Census, including the much-maligned $2.5 million Super Bowl spots, urges individuals to “Tell your story.” The Census Bureau is particularly eager for minorities and illegal immigrants to do so, as they are traditionally believed to be the most undercounted. Yet widespread non-compliance, especially among those most likely to be discriminated against by a majority, may not be rooted strictly in the “ignorance” the ads are designed to overcome. History—including very recent history—shows that the information provided to the Census can be used against you. The most recent examples occurred in 2002 and 2003, when the Census Bureau turned over information it had collected about Arab-Americans to Homeland Security. Data from the 1940 Census was used to intern Japanese, Italian, and German Americans following the U.S.’s entry into the war, and to monitor and persecute others who escaped internment. In addition to providing geographic information to the War Department, the Census Bureau released the name, address, age, sex, citizenship status and occupation of Japanese Americans in the Washington, D.C., area to the Treasury Department in response to anunspecified threat against President Franklin Roosevelt in 1943. There may well be other instances of such data sharing of which we remain unaware, as the full scope of the personal information released during World War II has only recently been brought to light. Thus, while the Census Bureau assures us that “your confidentiality is protected. Title 13 requires the Census Bureau to keep all information about you and all other respondents strictly confidential,” these exceptions negate such assurances. Of course, the release of the “strictly confidential” data was also perfectly legal: during World War II, under the terms of the Second War Powers Act, and more recently, under the terms of the USA PATRIOT Act, now extended by the Obama administration. In preparation for this year’s census, 140,000 workers were hired to collect GPS readings for every front door in the nation. Such pinpoint precision will certainly simplify the process of locating any individual or group that may be identified as a threat to “national security” in the future. Remember, for example, the 1976 Senate Report in which 26,000 Americans were slated for roundup by the FBI in the event of a national emergency at the height of the Cold War. Now that the U.S. Government’s Terrorist Watchlist has exceeded one million, the GPS data acquired could be instrumental in accomplishing such a roundup. Meanwhile, the data is also shared a little more broadly than advertised. Stanford University recently joined UC Berkeley, Duke, the University of Michigan, UCLA, and others in having its very own census data center. As the director of the new center explained, “The Census Bureau is very interested in making the centers more accessible to scholars who can use the data they provide.” As Henry Brady, dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley and principal investigator for the California Census Research Data Centers helpfully added: “We’re trying to make centers where lots of federal agencies will let us use their data.” While reassurances are repeated that the data is held under the strictest security, and will only be used for innocuous projects like “government programs and solutions to our problems,” do we really want academics to social engineer policy solutions based on sensitive personal data? After all, they may turn out to be no more desirable than the “solutions” provided by government programs like internment and renditioning. Without the protections afforded by a right to privacy, there’s little chance of escaping a political will to enforce discriminatory policies. This “mission creep” for the Census thus pushes up against a level of discomfort no amount of advertising dollars can likely assuage. Many will no doubt choose to follow former Senate majority leader Trent Lott’s advice to skip any Census questions they feel violates their privacy—which may well include any exceeding the Constitution’s mandate for an “actual Enumeration.” Unfortunately, choosing privacy now costs more: legislation recently passed raises the fine for “anyone over 18 years old who refuses or willfully neglects to complete the questionnaire or answer questions posed by census takers” from a limit of $100 to $5,000—a fact not advertised even in the small print.
Mary L. G. Theroux is Senior Vice President at The Independent Institute and a member of both the National and San Francisco Advisory Boards of the Salvation Army. She is also former Chairman of the San Francisco Salvation Army Advisory Board.
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Written by José Maria J. Yulo
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Wednesday, 11 November 2009 |
Faulty Dichotomies: Fort Hood and Reverse Racism
November 11, 2009 - The Abolitionist Examiner
José Maria J. Yulo
Originally published in Ignatius Insight
For neither Man nor Angel can discern
Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks
Invisible, except to God alone,
By his permissive will, through Heav’n and
Earth.
—John Milton By liberalism I mean false liberty of thought, or the exercise of thought upon matters, in which, from the constitution of the human mind, cannot be brought to any successful issue, and therefore is out of place.
—Cardinal John Henry Newman Within the first twenty-four hours the news broke on the attack by a gunman on an army base in Texas, and with the appropriate reserve owed to an event of such severity, various media outlets were hesitant at first to speculate on the identity and ethnic origin of the assailant, not wanting to foment irrational fears and reactions. What intrigued however was the quickness with which some news organizations began the narrative of a soldier ridiculed because of his ethnicity, ultimately cracking and lashing out in a rage against his perceived persecution. Making matters more interesting was the possibility of the murders carried out because of post-traumatic stress, an unusual possibility to say the least since by latest account, the attacker had not yet been deployed overseas and therefore had yet to experience the fire of combat. The mystery behind the massacre’s motivation still remain unclear. What is peculiar is the motivation behind a seeming attempt to find more preferable reasons to deliberately and with a fixed intention kill a dozen people and injure dozens more. Perhaps unknown to its authors, the veins of this narrative run deep and parallel to the precedents set forth by various philosophical schools in the last century. Paramount here is the dichotomous worldview ham-fistedly established by Marx and perennially finding converts among cultural elites. The dialectical clash between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is often chameleon-like, assuming the suitable color and hue to fit the assigned socio-political context. In the liberation theology of Paolo Freire, the paradigm of the oppressor and the oppressed takes form as the basis for the Brazilian’s distillation of Socratic dialogue into “conscientization.” In this third world setting, members of the latter class are made aware of their assigned status and encouraged to rebel, sometimes violently, against the former since, as Freire claims, rebellion is an “act of love.” Integral in this school of thought is the belief that group membership in the oppressed class, even removed by both time and current economic conditions, permits for looser interpretations of moral norms, enabling a historically underprivileged group the license to “correct” their plights by means restricted only by their creativity. An example removed from the wages of war perhaps here is helpful for illustrative purposes. In 1990, an undergraduate student at the University of Hawaii wrote a letter to a school publication addressing the word “haole” as it was and is used in pidgin Hawaiian. The term literally denoted a foreigner, but as most who have visited or lived in Hawaii would know, it is more specifically focused on people of Caucasian descent. The student went on to describe how he had discovered the many negative associations to the term, relating to his own experiences within the island of Oahu, up to and including his being assaulted and beaten more than once simply for his ethnicity alone. At university, one would expect perhaps a spirited letter or essay submitted to counter such claims, if only for the academic exercise they would involve. Such counterarguments did not come. Rather, what came in response surprised most observers. A faculty member in Hawaiian Studies wrote a letter to the selfsame publication accessed earlier, building, if one can call it that, a case not against the nature of the word “haole,” but against the student, a Caucasian male from Louisiana, who had the temerity to even suggest he was victimized because of his race. The teacher expounded that the student in question’s forefathers had permanently afflicted “her” homeland with racism, disease and all manner of oppression. In her words he was a haole, and ought resign himself to his negative treatment by reason of this. If he found such status difficult to bear, the faculty member advised him to take one of the many flights off the island and “go back to Louisiana.” Little is further known of the student who was involved in this case, though within three years, the lady teacher of Hawaiian Studies was awarded a full professorship by the university. There are two noteworthy errors exhibited by the reasoning of the faculty member in this case. Of course, both are predictably caused by the faulty dichotomous worldview cited earlier. First, the zeal with which students of this school of thought compartmentalize individuals into oppressor and oppressed camps allows for a generalization always tempting for the sociologist and liberation theologian alike. Namely, the assumption that since the student in question “belonged” to a historically privileged class, he must have ontologically enjoyed his lineage’s perks and savored its depredations. It is most ironic that this blanket perspective on race and culture is usually perpetrated by those who supposedly educate against such stereotype and prejudice. In short, the student in question may be a bad student, perhaps even a deplorable human being as well. Yet, the simple fact remains. He, himself, was not guilty of the crimes the professor cited. In a departure from ex post facto law, he was not guilty now from something he did legally then. Rather, he was guilty now for something someone else did a century before. It would appear that the teacher had loftier ambitions than professorship, assuming Yahweh’s capacity of punishing the sons for the sins of the fathers. Second, the professor’s implied approval and sanctioning of the ills visited upon the student logically extended from a stilted worldview on the plight of the oppressed. Name-calling, ostracizing, and physical beatings were “expected” repercussions by those from oppressed groups, even if the oppression occurred to someone else a century before. It is almost pitiable, this lack of exposure to Augustinian lessons on the free will. What is at work here however, is something more than blithe ignorance of medieval philosophy. In allowing “the oppressed” to bend, if not break moral standards of behavior, the professor, and the apologists for the Ft. Hood shooter write a common chapter with a shared pen. They write, “some people, because of the group they belong to, cannot be blamed for acts of malevolence.” As the evidence has yielded, only one man has his bloody prints on the murder weapon in Texas. Instead of excusing such behavior, which is the ultimate wish of such prevarication, a most condescending patronizing emanates. Who do societies claim are not responsible for their actions? The answers are obvious, children and lunatics. By asserting that certain segments of the population should be absolved of their freely chosen acts of mayhem, those who write this narrative do “the oppressed” a greater disservice than overt oppression: the rendering of convenient calibanization of human beings for the cause.
José Maria J. Yulo is a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He received his doctoral degree in the philosophy of education from the University of San Francisco and teaches philosophy and western civilization at the Academy of Art University.
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Written by Jonathan J. Bean
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Thursday, 17 September 2009 |
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What Jimmy Carter Doesn't Know
September 17, 2009 - The Abolitionist Examiner
Jonathan J. Bean
When Barack Obama dumped Rev. Jeremiah Wright during the presidential campaign, he explained that the Reverend was a man lost in another time, when hard-core white racism required hypersensitivity to issues of race. Likewise, former President Jimmy Carter seems lost in the hypersensitive radicalism of the late 1960s. In controversial remarks, the former president recently tagged opponents of President Obama’s policies as racists: “I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man.” During the late 1960s, activists on the left started to color-code policy debates, much like their white supremacist predecessors. Older readers will recall: before the health care debate, it was welfare. Welfare reform was “code” for white racism, according to the deep thinkers of the 1970s and 1980s. Never mind that there was strong black support for such reform. Now it is health care and budget deficits. Oppose the president’s proposal? You’re likely a “racist.” Concerned about massive deficits? Also “racist.” Here is what Jimmy Carter and others fail to see: On race, America has changed across the board. Witness the election of Barack Obama, the integration of new immigrants into U.S. society (even in the rural South), and the acceptance of racial intermarriage. In 1958, only 4 percent of whites approved of intermarriage; today it barely elicits a yawn. Immigration and intermarriage promise to change the black-white “race hustle” in ways the Left and Right can’t control. This is a teachable moment for Jimmy Carter and others who do not know the hidden history of civil rights. The civil rights movement owes much to individuals—some famous, some forgotten—who placed individual freedom, the Constitution, color-blind justice, and self-help above other interests. The movement started with Frederick Douglass, Lewis Tappan (the financial angel of abolitionism) and other evangelical Christians who struggled against the pernicious pro-slavery Christians of the South. In later years, these champions of liberty stood against Chinese Exclusion (1882), race-based immigration quotas (1924), and Japanese internment. They also stood for anti-lynching laws, merit-based college admissions (rejecting quotas on Jews), welcoming Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, and decriminalizing “illegal aliens,” a promise carried through by Ronald Reagan. If Jimmy Carter reads about this long struggle he will hear much name calling from opponents of “live and let live.” But he won’t hear it from Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, superlawyer Louis Marshall, H.L. Mencken, Zora Neale Hurston, Branch Rickey and the many others who opposed inserting race where it doesn’t belong: sports, politics, college, and so on. Part of the problem is that historians have blotted out this tradition. Only the “progressive” Left view is presented: that government is sometimes the problem, but always the solution. Those who favor nondiscrimination, what we used to call a “colorblind society,” are now to be considered racists. In fact, it is government that has done the most harm to people living in our country because of their skin color. Government supported slavery, Jim Crow, Chinese Exclusion, Japanese internment, forced sterilization of “inferior races,” and today’s race preferences in hiring, promotion, awarding of contracts, and other areas. Libertarians such as Ward Connerly, who led the charge against state-sanctioned racial preferences in California, are the true heirs of the long civil rights movement, not Jimmy Carter. Going deeper than law and politics, Americans can learn from pioneers such as Frederick Douglass that people should be treated as individuals rather than as symbols of group stereotypes. Carter ought to read Douglass’s orations, especially his speech envisioning an America where we are “one country, one citizenship, one liberty, one law, for all people without regard to race.” Jimmy Carter is a relic of a time and mindset past. It’s time to move on.
Jonathan J. Bean is Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, Professor of History at Southern Illinois University, and editor of the Institute book, Race and Liberty in America: The Essential Reader.
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 01 October 2009 )
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Written by Ivan Eland
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Monday, 23 February 2009 |
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Obama’s Policy on Civil Liberties: Bush Lite?
February 23, 2009 - The Multiracial Activist
Ivan Eland
Barack Obama entered the presidency as one of the most rhetorically pro-civil liberties politicians in recent memory. And shortly after taking office, he drew applause from friends of liberty for promulgating executive orders closing Guantanamo and CIA secret prisons, ending CIA torture, suspending kangaroo proceedings at military tribunals, and pledging more openness than the secretive Bush administration. Unfortunately, instead of prosecuting Bush administration officials, including George W. Bush, for violating criminal statutes against torture, illegal wiretapping of Americans, and other misdeeds—thus avoiding the bad precedent of giving a president a free pass on illegal acts—Obama appears ready to vindicate the prior administration’s anti-terrorism program by adopting Bush Lite. Warning signs that Obama was softer on civil liberties than advertised came even before he took office, when as a Senator, he voted for blatantly unconstitutional legislation that allowed federal snooping into some e-mail messages and phone calls without a warrant. The Constitution implies that all government searches and seizures of private property require a judicially-approved warrant based on probable cause that a crime has been committed—with no exceptions mentioned, including for national security. Politicians love symbolic acts and Obama’s rapid pledge to shutter the high profile prison at Guantanamo and secret CIA prisons was widely praised. But if civil liberties continue to be violated elsewhere, have we made much progress? Obama’s nominees have said the administration will continue the CIA’s policy of “extraordinary rendition” of terrorism suspects—a euphemism for secret kidnapping without the legal nicety of extradition or any other procedural due process rights. Prior to the Bush administration, such government-sanctioned kidnapping was authorized only to return the suspects to their home countries. The Bush administration began using such renditions to abduct suspects and send them to third-party nations that practiced harsh torture—presumably to keep U.S. hands (relatively) clean. Leon Panetta, Obama’s CIA director, has said that the new administration will continue the Bush administration’s practice of rendition to third party countries and relying on those countries’ suspect diplomatic promises not to torture. Also, Obama supposedly banned CIA torture by executive order, but such orders are not laws and can be reversed with the stroke of a pen. What’s worse, although CIA director Panetta has admitted that water boarding (simulated drowning) is torture, he has also asserted publicly that if regular interrogation techniques did not produce information from a prisoner suspected of being involved in an imminent attack, he would request the authority to use harsher methods. In perhaps the most important of the civil liberties waffling, Elena Kagan, the administration’s nominee for solicitor general at the Justice Department, pledged to continue detaining indefinitely prisoners without trial, even if they were noncombatant terrorist financiers arrested far from a combat zone. Ominously, the Obama administration is stalling on taking a position on the even more important Bush-era policy of perpetually incarcerating “enemy combatants” without trial on U.S. territory. To stay within the U.S. Constitution, such vital habeas corpus rights, one of the pillars of the rule of law, should only be suspended by Congress in areas where combat has rendered the civilian courts inoperable—hardly the case in the United States during the never-ending “war on terror.” Although Obama’s executive order suspended the Bush administration’s kangaroo military tribunals, which have insufficient legal procedural safeguards, it has kept its options open on their resumption. Finally, the new administration has mimicked the Bush administration’s use of the “state secrets” doctrine to try to nix lawsuits by former CIA detainees and, for the same reason, pressured another country’s court not to release information about U.S. torture of a prisoner. Traditionally, the doctrine was usually used to withhold specific evidence in a legal proceeding, not to nix entire cases against the government for malfeasance. So much for a more open government. The Obama administration is new and should be given a chance to do the right thing. Although certainly better than the lawless Bush administration, the new boss unsurprisingly resembles the old boss. Historically, party label has been a less good indicator about actual presidential policies than the era in which the chief executive served. For example, in terms of actual programs, Richard Nixon was the last liberal president, a chief executive who largely continued Lyndon Johnson’s government penetration into American society and even further expanded it. Similarly, Jimmy Carter started the move back to the right and Ronald Reagan continued it (but in practice he really wasn’t all that conservative). Civil liberties follow the general trend. After the first Word Trade Center bombing in 1993 and the Oklahoma City and Tokyo subway attacks in 1995, Bill Clinton signed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which augmented the government’s powers of surveillance on Americans and paved the way for the further vast expansion of such authority (and other aforementioned dramatic civil liberties violations of the Bush administration) after 9/11. Typically in American history, any crisis—such as 9/11—causes an expansion of government power. After the crisis recedes, a public reaction to government excesses usually ensues—as now exists with Bush policies. Yet government power never quite recedes to its pre-crisis level. Unfortunately, what we are likely to see from a post-9/11 Obama presidency is that same historical phenomenon playing out.
 Ivan Eland
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Ivan Eland is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute. Dr. Eland is a graduate of Iowa State University and received an M.B.A. in applied economics and Ph.D. in national security policy from George Washington University. He has been Director of Defense Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, and he spent 15 years working for Congress on national security issues, including stints as an investigator for the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Principal Defense Analyst at the Congressional Budget Office. He is author of the books, Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty, The Empire Has No Clothes: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed, and Putting “Defense” Back into U.S. Defense Policy.
Full Biography and Recent Publications
 New from Ivan Eland!
THE EMPIRE HAS NO CLOTHES: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed (Updated Edition)
Most Americans don’t think of their government as an empire, but in fact the United States has been steadily expanding its control of overseas territories since the turn of the twentieth century. In The Empire Has No Clothes, Ivan Eland, a leading expert on U.S. defense policy and national security, examines American military interventions around the world from the Spanish-American War to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Learn More »» |
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Written by Jonathan J. Bean
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Thursday, 12 February 2009 |
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NAACP 100th Anniversary: Exploiting Color Instead of Erasing It
February 12, 2009 - The Abolitionist Examiner
Jonathan J. Bean
George Orwell famously wrote “who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” As the NAACP celebrates its 100th anniversary, its leaders present a past that squares with its present positions on racial preferences, welfare, and a public school monopoly that traps poor children in failed schools. But that is not the NAACP’s past. The historic achievements of the NAACP—all but forgotten by most Americans—derived from a passionate dedication to colorblindness and individual freedom. From its founding in 1909 until the 1960s, the NAACP fought for a “colorblind Constitution.” Since then, it has become just another interest group pleading for favors. This flip-flop would make splendid material for an Orwellian novel: preference is equality, some “more equal” than others. The history of the NAACP is usually presented as a story of triumphant radicalism. School children learn about the contributions of NAACP founder W.E.B. DuBois but do not learn that DuBois quit the NAACP in the mid-1930s, joined the Communist Party, and left the country for self-exile in Africa. The forgotten colorblind tradition of the NAACP can be told through the story of other key figures. The NAACP’s cofounders included lawyers Moorfield Storey and Louis Marshall, two white men dedicated to the principle of colorblind law. From 1909 to 1929, the NAACP relied on their legal firepower. As NAACP president, Storey successfully challenged cities that segregated neighborhoods by law. In 1917, the Supreme Court overturned this residential apartheid—a victory that came thirty-seven years before Brown v. Board of Education. Louis Marshall followed with a victory in Nixon v. Herndon (1927), a decision banning the Democratic Party’s “white-only primaries.” Marshall also won a case in favor of school choice, winning a ruling that laws banning private schools, pushed in many states by the Ku Klux Klan, were unconstitutional. The court ruled in this historic case that private schools could not be banned because children were not “mere creature[s] of the state.” Today’s NAACP ought to take note of the irony: Its opposition to “school choice” is the position once taken by the bigots of the KKK. Black lawyers took the lead from the 1930s onward. A young Thurgood Marshall, who became NAACP chief counsel at the age of thirty-two, after winning the very first case he argued before the Supreme Court, shared the colorblind sentiments of Storey and Louis Marshall. An aide recalled: “Marshall had a ‘Bible’ to which he turned during his most depressed moments. . . . Marshall would read aloud passages from Harlan’s amazing dissent [in Plessy v. Ferguson]. I do not believe we ever filed a major brief in the pre-Brown days in which a portion of that opinion was not quoted. Marshall’s favorite quotation was, ‘Our Constitution is color-blind.’ It became our basic creed.” In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), Marshall asked the Supreme Court to desegregate schools and end Plessy’s “separate but equal” standard by declaring the Constitution colorblind. Instead, the court based its decision on dubious sociology. Nevertheless, into the 1960s the NAACP continued to argue that racial classifications were dangerous. For example, a letter writer asked NAACP attorney Robert L. Carter where the group stood on a bill to repeal racial identification on marriage certificates. Carter responded: “Color designations on birth certificates, marriage licenses and the like can serve no useful purpose whatsoever. If we are prepared to accept the basic postulate of our society—that race or color is an irrelevance—then contentions that race and color statistics are of social science value become sheer sophistical rationalization.” Likewise, Clarence Mitchell, the NAACP’s chief lobbyist for nearly three decades, declared that “the minute you put race on a civil service form . . . you have opened the door to discrimination.” Beginning in the 1970s, however, the Supreme Court upheld “benign” discrimination in the name of equality. When President Richard Nixon held out the prospect of racial preferences in jobs and government contracts, the NAACP shifted course and began seeking these favors. Those who still supported colorblind law became the new enemy. George Orwell was famous for challenging the “smelly little orthodoxies” of his time. The wayward NAACP needs the smelling salts of dissidents who can recapture the proud tradition that recent leaders have betrayed. They can begin by honestly presenting the history of “the civil rights century.” That history would be marked by the quest for a colorblind society—a legacy of liberty that contemporary NAACP leaders have abandoned.
Jonathan J. Bean is Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, Professor of History at Southern Illinois University, and editor of the Institute book, Race and Liberty in America: The Essential Reader.
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