Hi. Yesterday's afternoon mailing touched the nerve I'd hoped for and I've gotten several responses. Here's one from an old friend whose click-on advice I've followed and saved for reading. Then, Paul Krugman and David McReynolds -ep
Ed, Thank you so much for sending out the Stanton/Gornick article. Several things that I have been attempting to grapple with and discussing with friends are hit upon in it and it moved me tremendously. While trying to find Stanton's verbatim speech on the Web, I came across an astonishing fact: while Stanton originally gave the speech to the annual meeting of National American Woman Suffrage Association in January 1892 as Gornick states, she gave it again later that same month to the U.S. Congress's Judiciary Committee! If you are interested, you can read the whole speech at http://gos.sbc.edu/s/stantoncady1.html . The powerful, yet poetic, style of Stanton is breathtaking and well worth reading. It's also worth mentioning that Stanton talks about the terrible tidal wave that had occurred shortly before her speech at the Bay of Biscay. Deja vu... Peace, Kathleen O'Nan http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/04/opinion/04krugman.html?th=&pagewanted=print&position= January 4, 2005 OP-ED COLUMNIST Stopping the Bum's Rush By PAUL KRUGMAN he people who hustled America into a tax cut to eliminate an imaginary budget surplus and a war to eliminate imaginary weapons are now trying another bum's rush. If they succeed, we will do nothing about the real fiscal threat and will instead dismantle Social Security, a program that is in much better financial shape than the rest of the federal government. In the next few weeks, I'll explain why privatization will fatally undermine Social Security, and suggest steps to strengthen the program. I'll also talk about the much more urgent fiscal problems the administration hopes you won't notice while it scares you about Social Security. Today let's focus on one piece of those scare tactics: the claim that Social Security faces an imminent crisis. That claim is simply false. Yet much of the press has reported the falsehood as a fact. For example, The Washington Post recently described 2018, when benefit payments are projected to exceed payroll tax revenues, as a "day of reckoning." Here's the truth: by law, Social Security has a budget independent of the rest of the U.S. government. That budget is currently running a surplus, thanks to an increase in the payroll tax two decades ago. As a result, Social Security has a large and growing trust fund. When benefit payments start to exceed payroll tax revenues, Social Security will be able to draw on that trust fund. And the trust fund will last for a long time: until 2042, says the Social Security Administration; until 2052, says the Congressional Budget Office; quite possibly forever, say many economists, who point out that these projections assume that the economy will grow much more slowly in the future than it has in the past. So where's the imminent crisis? Privatizers say the trust fund doesn't count because it's invested in U.S. government bonds, which are "meaningless i.o.u.'s." Readers who want a long-form debunking of this sophistry can read my recent article in the online journal The Economists' Voice (www.bepress.com/ev). The short version is that the bonds in the Social Security trust fund are obligations of the federal government's general fund, the budget outside Social Security. They have the same status as U.S. bonds owned by Japanese pension funds and the government of China. The general fund is legally obliged to pay the interest and principal on those bonds, and Social Security is legally obliged to pay full benefits as long as there is money in the trust fund. There are only two things that could endanger Social Security's ability to pay benefits before the trust fund runs out. One would be a fiscal crisis that led the U.S. to default on all its debts. The other would be legislation specifically repudiating the general fund's debts to retirees. That is, we can't have a Social Security crisis without a general fiscal crisis - unless Congress declares that debts to foreign bondholders must be honored, but that promises to older Americans, who have spent most of their working lives paying extra payroll taxes to build up the trust fund, don't count. Politically, that seems far-fetched. A general fiscal crisis, on the other hand, is a real possibility - but not because of Social Security. In fact, the Bush administration's scaremongering over Social Security is in large part an effort to distract the public from the real fiscal danger. There are two serious threats to the federal government's solvency over the next couple of decades. One is the fact that the general fund has already plunged deeply into deficit, largely because of President Bush's unprecedented insistence on cutting taxes in the face of a war. The other is the rising cost of Medicare and Medicaid. As a budget concern, Social Security isn't remotely in the same league. The long-term cost of the Bush tax cuts is five times the budget office's estimate of Social Security's deficit over the next 75 years. The botched prescription drug bill passed in 2003 does more, all by itself, to increase the long-run budget deficit than the projected rise in Social Security expenses. That doesn't mean nothing should be done to improve Social Security's finances. But privatization is a fake solution to a fake crisis. In future articles on this subject I'll explain why, and also outline a real plan to strengthen Social Security. *** Viviane, As you know, I have to delete most posts - often unread - because of the sheer press of mail each of us has to cope with. But I took the time to read this piece. The material by Pipes is deeply disturbing. The fact Pipes has an audience at all is equally disturbing - as if an advocate for lynching was getting published in the mainstream press, or a Holocaust revisionist was being given an audience. Perhaps it is because I'm from the West Coast, was a child at the time WW II began, didn't realize then what was happening to the Japanese (and probably, given the climate of that time, and the fact my "politics" were hardly developed in 1941, would have supported the action). But for Pipes to defend this, or use it as an excuse to take similar action regarding Muslims, sickens me. I note he is active in matters involving the Middle East where I can guess his position. Some brief points. First, to cite 44% of the public favors something doesn't make it right - his logic is faulty (and of course, 44% isn't a majority in any case). For him to attack the "revisionist" history regarding US treatment of Japanese suggests that perhaps German historians who engage in a factual view of Hitler, or Japanese scholars who engage in a factual view of the old imperial order, are guilty of "revisionism". What is history except a series of endless revisions in an effort (never really possible) to assemble an accurate record? Pipes is playing word games - a contemptible pursuit for anyone in the academy. I don't know who Malkin is. It is hardly a surprise to me that out of the large Japanese population in Hawaii two Japanese collaborated. What was surprising was the large numbers of Japanese there who lined up at once to give blood. The report of an "extensive" espionage network is her version of the truth. No such network was ever made public, no prosecutions that I'm aware of were brought. Pipes has found good company in Malkin - making points is important to them, not a search for truth. The consistent use by Malkin and Pipes of "left leaning", "radical", is the discredited argument by innuendo. As the old lawyer said to the young lawyer, "When we have the facts on our side, we argue the facts, when we have the law on our side, we argue the law - but if the facts and the law are both against us, we raise our voices and pound the table". It is hard to know what to make of Malkin's abuse of the word "concentration camp". If we mean extermination camps, no they weren't. And no one called them that. If we mean people were detained there and unable to leave, forced to sell their land, businesses, goods, and move to distant and unpleasant locations without legal recourse, then I think concentration camp fits the bill. To now suggest that the Islamic population be subjected to intrusive investigation is the same as arguing that because Jonathan Pollard, a Jew, spied for Israel, then all Jews, rabbis, and temples be placed under surveillance. (It also overlooks the fact that Pollard, like most spies, did it for money, not because he was a Jew). It is true - I concede this without comfort - that in time of war the interests of the "State" come first. But the record will show that the Japanese posed no threat during WW II, just as the Islamic population poses no threat now. There is a threat to our democracy, however, and it comes from Malkin and Pipes - and our weapons are not internment but discussion, debate, and in any city where Pipes is published, letters to the editor. Peace, David ------------- Why the Japanese internment still matters By Daniel Pipes Middle East Forum 12/30/04 "Star-Telegram" -- For years, it has been my position that the threat of radical Islam implies an imperative to focus security measures on Muslims. If searching for rapists, one looks only at the male population. Similarly, if searching for Islamists (adherents of radical Islam), one looks at the Muslim population. And so, I was encouraged by a just-released Cornell University opinion survey that finds nearly half the U.S. population agreeing with this proposition. Specifically, 44 percent of Americans believe that government authorities should direct special attention toward Muslims living in the United States, either by registering their whereabouts, profiling them, monitoring their mosques or infiltrating their organizations. That's the good news; the bad news is the near-universal disapproval of this realism. Leftist and Islamist organizations have so successfully influenced public opinion that polite society shies away from endorsing a focus on Muslims. In the United States, this intimidation results in large part from a revisionist interpretation of the evacuation, relocation and internment of ethnic Japanese during World War II. Denying that the treatment of ethnic Japanese resulted from legitimate national security concerns, this lobby has established that it resulted solely from a combination of "wartime hysteria" and "racial prejudice." As radical groups like the American Civil Liberties Union wield this interpretation, in the words of columnist Michelle Malkin, "like a bludgeon over the War on Terror debate," they pre-empt efforts to build an effective defense against today's Islamist enemy. The intrepid Malkin, a specialist on immigration, has re-opened the internment file. Her recently published book, bearing the provocative title In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror (Regnery), starts with the unarguable premise that in time of war, "the survival of the nation comes first." From there, she draws the corollary that "Civil liberties are not sacrosanct." She then reviews the historical record of the early 1940s and finds that: . Within hours of the attacks on Pearl Harbor, two U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry, with no history of anti-Americanism, shockingly collaborated with a Japanese soldier against their fellow Hawaiians. . The Japanese government had established "an extensive espionage network within the United States" believed to include hundreds of agents. . In contrast to loose talk about "American concentration camps," the relocation camps for Japanese were "Spartan facilities that were for the most part administered humanely." As proof, she notes that more than 200 individuals voluntarily chose to move into the camps. . The relocation process itself won praise from Carey McWilliams, a contemporary leftist critic (and future editor of The Nation), for taking place "without a hitch." . A federal panel that reviewed these issues in 1981-83, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, was, Malkin explains, "Stacked with left-leaning lawyers, politicians, and civil rights activists -- but not a single military officer or intelligence expert." . The apology for internment by Ronald Reagan in 1988, plus the nearly $1.65 billion in reparations paid to former internees, was premised on faulty scholarship. In particular, it largely ignored the top-secret decoding of Japanese diplomatic traffic, codenamed the MAGIC messages, which revealed Tokyo's plans to exploit Japanese-Americans. Malkin has done the singular service of breaking the academic single-note scholarship on a critical subject, cutting through a shabby, stultifying consensus to reveal how, "given what was known and not known at the time," FDR and his staff did the right thing. She correctly concludes that, especially in time of war, governments should take into account nationality, ethnicity, and religious affiliation in their homeland security policies and engage in what she calls "threat profiling." These steps may entail bothersome or offensive measures but, she argues, they are preferable to "being incinerated at your office desk by a flaming hijacked plane." -------- Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum. www.DanielPipes.org [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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