Category Archives: Arsenal Analysis

In defense of the minimum wage

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There’s a proposed bill in Congress to raise the Federal minimum wage for the first time since 2009. It won’t pass, given Republican control of the U.S. House, but it’s still sparking debate. And by “debate,” I mean we’re getting to hear the same tired and false arguments against the minimum wage (let alone against raising it) that we hear whenever the topic comes up. I’d like to talk about one of these more common arguments.

People who want to eliminate the minimum wage often claim more people would be able to get jobs if wages weren’t so high (because businesses could hire more people with the same amount of money). For some, this is just a claim they make without believing it, but others have been duped into believing it’s actually a legitimate argument.

Let’s break down how this doesn’t make sense. Sure, we could employ everyone in the country for pennies an hour (if, for the sake of argument, people were willing to accept that), but that’s not really the point of having a job. The core goal of getting a job, at minimum, is to support, feed, clothe, and shelter one’s self (and often a family but not necessarily). The core goal of getting a job, for everyone except maybe some bored person born into great wealth, is not to have something to do from 9-5.

How does someone seriously believe that the goal of promoting higher employment is just to get everyone jobs even if the jobs don’t pay them enough to be able to do anything? Ending the minimum wage would just put more people on government benefits which also costs money and which the same conservatives opposing the minimum wage don’t want either.

And if not that, then it would create an expensive and awful Dickensian/Malthusian nightmare land with mass poverty, out-of-control levels of crime and associated violence, etc. Which eventually negatively impacts business — even without accounting for the lost/reduced purchasing power of the consumer base. We know this because it’s called the last three decades of the 19th century.

The minimum wage is not an economic “distortion.” It’s an efficient, market-oriented tool to address poverty that is probably actually better for business in the long run than the alternatives.

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U.S. won’t provide “smoking gun” Syria evidence

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Given the insistence that Syria 2013 case ≠ Iraq 2002 case, it’s probably a good idea to make damn sure we know exactly what happened. But the AP has carefully documented the complete lack of “smoking gun” evidence tying it to the regime, though the Pentagon/White House previously declassified lots of satellite images from Syria for other purposes.

We do have reasonable certainty that chemical weapons were used and that they were most likely used by someone aligned with the regime. But we still have seen no evidence that this was ordered by the regime we’re about to “punish” and that it was not some renegade, unauthorized action by a pro-regime unit or commander with access to the chemical weapons. It’s a complicated, opaque conflict with tons of different factions. There’s a lot of reasonable doubt going around.

Here are some key pulls from the AP review:
Excerpt 1:

The U.S. government insists it has the intelligence to prove it, but the public has yet to see a single piece of concrete evidence produced by U.S. intelligence – no satellite imagery, no transcripts of Syrian military communications – connecting the government of President Bashar Assad to the alleged chemical weapons attack last month that killed hundreds of people.

Excerpt 2:

“Some experts think the size of the strike, and the amount of toxic chemicals that appear to have been delivered, make it doubtful that the rebels could have carried it out. What’s missing from the public record is direct proof, rather than circumstantial evidence, tying this to the regime.”

Excerpt 3:

“We can’t get our heads around this – why would any commander agree to rocketing a suburb of Damascus with chemical weapons for only a very short-term tactical gain for what is a long-term disaster,” said Charles Heyman, a former British military officer who edits The Armed Forces of the U.K., an authoritative bi-annual review of British forces.

Excerpt 4:

Multiple U.S. officials have told AP that the intelligence tying Assad himself to the Aug. 21 attack was “not a slam dunk” – a reference to then-CIA Director George Tenet’s insistence in 2002 that U.S. intelligence showed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction – intelligence that turned out to be wrong. They cite the lack of a direct link between Assad and the chemical assault – a question the administration discounts by arguing Assad’s responsibility as Syria’s commander in chief. A second issue is that U.S. intelligence has lost track of some chemical weaponry, leaving a slim possibility that rebels acquired some of the deadly substances.

Brief thoughts on Turkey’s protests

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The police probably over-reacted and the protesters should have the right to assemble and complain about things. BUT — they aren’t freedom fighters resisting a tyrannical government. They’re extremist secularists who are unhappy with repeatedly losing democratic elections and would probably prefer secular military control to democratic moderate Islam. That’s not admirable.

Sometimes democratically elected governments do things you don’t like but aren’t gross violations or oppression. The solution is to protest peacefully and respectfully and then organize and defeat them at the ballot box. You don’t get to riot against a legitimately elected government because you don’t like their policies. 

Lacking the right to assemble is a pre-existing problem, not one tied to this particular administration, so I would separate that out of this situation. I also believe there is always a need to respect minority rights within a liberal democracy, but I don’t believe that’s really the issue here.

The AKP has done a tremendous amount of work in advancing and stabilizing representative democracy in Turkey, in a way that actually represented the population — something the secularists never did. The extreme secularists are fanatically opposed to the incumbent government no matter what it does — much like the tea partiers opposing President Obama — and they have been waiting for an opportunity to challenge the government. They controlled Turkey for many decades and supported repeated military coups to prevent non-secularists from taking power. The current government has already beaten back one or two coup attempts.

This is not about their rights being respected, this is about their bitterness at being out of power for 10 years. They are not being persecuted, they are just being unsuccessful at winning elections. The protesters’ cause is basically as illegitimate as if the Canadian left tried to riot against the conservative Harper government because of their own fractured incompetence and inability to win elections for half a decade, and they decided that made him Hitler. There’s a big difference between minority rights being infringed and losing free and fair elections several times in a row.

The AKP has been way better about respecting everyone’s rights and representing the people than the secularists are or were. They’ve also dramatically expanded public education, especially for young girls, and they’ve empowered more women to study at universities. If this group of extremists took power, they would immediately start trampling citizens’ rights, particularly non-secularists’ rights.

This is about being bitter losers looking for an excuse to fight, rather than about being a harassed minority. The US and other Western democracies should stand by the government (though not the police response) to preserve a successful model moderate Islamic government for the region to look to in democracy-building.

On Miranda Warnings

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This weekend, following the national drama of the Boston Marathon Bombings and metro area manhunt for the culprits, I’ve reposted & added notes to old posts on handling/prosecuting terrorists in the United States.

I wanted to add a note about Miranda Warnings because there’s been some hysteria over the fact that Suspect Number 2, who was taken alive, had not been “Mirandized” (read the standard notification of his legal rights under the Constitution and Bill of Rights) on the grounds of a “public safety” exemption to the Supreme Court-mandated advisory. First off, it bears repeating that there are no such things as “Miranda Rights.” This is a common misnomer. The rights, as mentioned above, come from the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. They were not invented by the Supreme Court’s Miranda v. Arizona decision in 1966; the court just established guidelines for a succinct set of warnings in an advisory to those being arrested so that they don’t later try to get their conviction thrown out because they weren’t notified of their right to have an attorney present and their right not to self-incriminate. Those four warnings are the ones you hear on television all the time, beginning with “You have the right to remain silent.”

Second and more importantly, he is not losing rights and no one is trampling on the Bill of Rights because the administration has invoked a “public safety” exemption and skipped the reading of the warnings. As I understand it — the “public safety” exemption on Miranda Warnings does not mean that the government will be prosecuting based on evidence obtained by statements made prior the warnings, so rights are not infringed. They usually use the exemption when they already have plenty of evidence — in this case a video has now surfaced of Suspect Number 2 placing one of the marathon bomb backpacks and walking away … so he’s going to jail no matter what he says or doesn’t say to investigators — rather they use the exemption when they want/need to find out quickly about other stuff they don’t already know. For example — they skip the warning of the right to remain silent so that they can ask if there are other bombs set to explode later or if there are other affiliated terrorists in the area. If he admits to having placed other bombs and they haven’t read him his rights, they probably can’t use that as evidence for further convictions, but they can at least find and disarm them. And at any rate, they still can’t compel the person to answer just because they didn’t officially read them their rights. Similarly, if they ask for a lawyer without prompting, the interrogation stops until a lawyer arrives. (This happened in January 2009 with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, when he was not Mirandized, after attempting to blow up a plane to Detroit in front of hundreds of witnesses.) Your rights remain whether or not you are advised of them. Not providing Miranda Warnings doesn’t take away rights and it can actually hinder prosecution later — so the exemption is used sparingly to obtain urgent information for public safety not to obtain new evidence for trial.

I also find it hard to believe that a 19-year-old who grew up in American culture wouldn’t know the Miranda Warnings from television — even Chief Rehnquist’s 2000 decision upholding Miranda v. Arizona that he originally opposed noted that the warnings had “become embedded in routine police practice to the point where the warnings have become part of our national culture.” He is in all likelihood well aware of his rights even if they don’t mention them. And that’s all the Miranda Warnings are: a brief mention of your rights under the law & Constitution. The rights themselves don’t change or disappear if the warnings are modified or skipped.

Mali update: African regional troops arriving; France playing wack-a-mole

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U.S. Air Force photo by Capt. Jason SmithThe BBC Africa service reports that the first 200 Nigerian troops of the UN intervention force are on their way to Mali. Nigeria plans to deploy 700 more along with fighter jets in the coming weeks. They will be leading the African forces in the UN mission. French military ally and regional neighbor Chad has committed 2,000 troops. Benin, neighboring Ghana, neighboring Niger, neighboring Senegal, neighboring Burkina Faso, and Togo also plan to participate in the police action, with probably about 400 more troops between them.

The UN-created coalition (read: PDF of UNSC Resolution 2085 from December 2012) has been named the “African-led International Support Mission in Mali” (AFISMA) and is tasked with re-capturing northern Mali from Tuareg separatist groups, training the Malian Army who apparently didn’t take direction well from the US trainers, supporting the interim democratic government to prevent another military coup, and organizing the safety of humanitarian missions.

The deployment has been accelerated by quite a few months due to the sudden progression of separatist troops beyond the unofficial dividing line in the conflict which prompted the start of a major French military campaign last Friday in response. France and the other Western powers believe that many of the separatist organizations in the impoverished, sparsely populated semi-desert region of northern Mali have links to terrorism including Al Qaeda affiliates.

One of the major groups claiming to represent the political and military aspects of the Tuareg ethnic separatist movement is an explicitly Islamist political group called Ansar Dine, which purports to impose some form of Sharia law across northern Mali and possibly the whole of Mali. Their main rival group is the longtime leading organization of the separatists known as the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA being the French abbreviation), which is secular and pro-independence and probably wasn’t really tied to terrorism. However, the MNLA lost territorial control of northern Mali in June 2012 to the Ansar Dine in a series of internecine skirmishes while the Malian government was still in some disarray from the spring military coup. (The coup took place in the south during the latest of many northern Tuareg rebellions over the past 99 years.)

Although the Malian government has long accused the MNLA of terrorist links for the cynical purpose of getting “War on Terror” funding from Western governments, it is far more credible to assert real terrorist links between the Ansar Dine and similar Islamist insurgent operations in North and East Africa, including Al Qaeda of the Maghreb (North Africa) or more likely the Shahab in Somalia (who have themselves recently been severely disrupted by intense African Union military campaigns). This rise of Ansar Dine and their serious movements toward expanding into the more populous southern “half” of Mali has understandably caused an uptick in concern and attention from the Western governments, thus prompting the sudden French intervention last week.

Meanwhile, as West African troops arrive, France (which I’m not sure will be part of the AFISMA/UN mission at all) now has 800 troops on the ground in Mali and that number is set to swell to 2,500. 50 armored vehicles have been deployed northward toward the front. The unilateral French air campaign in the north in support of the Malian government in the south continues at full tilt out of air bases in Chad.

The Malian Army is only participating lightly in ground actions coordinated with these airstrikes — hampering efforts to consolidate and hold any gains — and are reportedly fighting in “hand-to-hand combat” with rebels just 220 miles north of the capital, which seems fairly unproductive to me. Although the French operation initially dislodged the separatist forces from the informal border line between north and south this past weekend, these rebel troops suddenly reappeared on Monday much further southwest into government-held territory.

However, the separatist force holding Timbuktu seems to have withdrawn entirely from the ancient city, according to locals. It’s a bit of a game of wack-a-mole right now without much ground cooperation to keep any ground “won” from the bombings.

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The Fiscal Cliff Deal (and What It Means for Boehner)

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So the House of Representatives passed the New Year’s Fiscal Cliff Deal that the Senate passed in the middle of the night by a large margin, a few weeks after Speaker John Boehner’s unilateral “Plan B” proposal failed abysmally because neither the House Democrats nor his own Republican Majority were interested. So instead of the conservative Republicans getting a pretty good deal, they had to sit and watch in impotent rage as Speaker Boehner, 81 other Republicans, and nearly all the House Democrats held and passed a vote on a pretty damn great deal for the Democratic White House.

Here’s the quick summary of what Democrats got:
It’s a pretty good deal (for us). No changes to entitlement benefits (i.e. Social Security or Medicare), income taxes go back up to Clinton levels for the super-wealthy (individuals making over $400k/yr, couples making over $450k/yr), everyone else’s income taxes remain at the Bush Tax Cuts levels, unemployment insurance benefits are extended after expiring a few days back, all scheduled “sequester” spending cuts are delayed for 2 more months, milk prices are stabilized, and there’s some delay on a Medicare payment restructuring plan with regards to doctor compensation (but I don’t know much about that). The payroll taxes will roll back up to at least 2008 levels (which helps Social Security’s solvency), which was theoretically always supposed to happen eventually, since the cuts were a short-term stimulus. Democrats only conceded about $200 billion over ten years in potential revenues on the marginal incomes between $200k/$250k and $400k/$450k, which is not that big a problem in the grand scheme. I guess this means there’s a new tax bracket, which is fine by me. There’s also no resolution on the next debt ceiling raise that will need to happen in a few months, but that wouldn’t have been likely in an 11th Hour (or 13th Hour?) deal anyway, and it wasn’t urgent.

About those Spending Cuts:
If this were still going to be the ultra-obstructionist, big-Republican-majority 112th Congress we’ve had since January 2011, it would be a big problem that the spending cuts were delayed by 2 months, because it would just manufacture another artificial crisis/showdown in two months. But the 113th Congress is sworn in on Thursday of this week, and that means a new calculus, even if the Republicans still control the House. I think the 2 month postponement only helps the Democrats, not the Republicans. It’s now more on our turf to decide. Tuesday was the last opportunity for House Republicans to use their big 2010-won majority to shape cuts, and they blew it. Their majority isn’t as big once the 113th Congress is sworn in on Thursday. If Boehner and the remaining GOP moderates keep caving, Pelosi, Reid, and the White House will be calling the shots on things like spending cuts.

Granted, that’s obviously a big if. So let’s examine whether or not that is likely to happen. The 113th Congress will start with a Republican majority with only a 23 seat edge. I think that’s probably in the neighborhood of the size of the northeast/northern Republicans and the small cadre of people who still back Boehner to the hilt. They won’t vote with the Democrats on a lot of stuff, but they’ll vote with them on quite a few national-scale priorities if Boehner asks them to. Boehner won’t get voted out as speaker, but he has clearly lost all control of his caucus. Previously he could control his caucus to some extent, so he could be obstructionist and fight the White House and still get things. But now he can’t deliver Republican majorities for anyone’s bills. His only power play now — to demonstrate any level of control over the situation and to leave any kind of mark in his tenure as speaker — is to show that he can get some things, or rather any things, through. (Because at the end of the day, he’s still not one of the Burn Everything Down tea party Republicans, and he probably thinks of himself as a statesman.) Those things will from now on be designed by the White House and by the Senate Democratic Leadership, and they will only pass with Democratic help in the House. If the filibuster gets reformed, the Senate Democrats will have an even easier time passing legislation to send to the House. So Boehner will have to choose between trying and repeatedly failing to pass conservative legislation because neither the House Democrats nor the House Republican Conservatives will vote for it or trying to persuade House Democrats to vote with him and two dozen Republicans on centrist policies. And some Republicans will agree to do this either because they are actually moderates or because they realize that they are more likely to retain the Republican majority in 2014 by being able to claim some amount of credit and cooperation on accomplishing some stuff than by preventing anything from getting passed for two years. A lot of the few remaining folks in the Boehner loyalist cadre were veterans of the Gingrich Majority of the 1990s that almost collapsed in the 1998 & 2000 elections due to inability to pass almost anything and get it signed into law. The Republicans already got dinged badly in the 2012 House elections (and would probably have lost their majority were it not for favorable redistricting by the state legislators elected in the 2010 Republican wave) because Americans saw them as uncooperative bordering on saboteurs. Right direction or wrong direction, Americans nearly always prefer action in some direction over action in no direction.

About that Debt Ceiling:
The debt ceiling, untouched in this middle-of-the-night deal, is going to need to be raised again in, I guess, March or thereabouts. I’m not totally sure of the timeline but it’s not all that important here. It’ll be after the spending cuts postponement is up in 2 months. But it’s another point where the 2011 Republicans would have seized the opportunity to create a crisis and force a showdown right up to the brink of disaster. They did that in 2011. But the Republican majority and Speaker Boehner in particular won’t have that kind of leverage anymore.

I think the world-ending showdowns from 2011 and 2012 are probably over for the next two years or will be far, far less frequent. Once again, Boehner’s majority will be a lot smaller starting Thursday (only a 23 seat edge) in the 113th Congress, and he no longer has influence over most of that majority. He and some of his supporters would really prefer not to bring down the government and economy, even if the conservative wing is claiming to be just fine with that outcome. Since he’s never going to reach a deal that could win a Republican majority and Senate and White House passage, and will in fact embarrass himself every time he tries (as happened with the “Plan B” proposal), he no longer has an incentive to futz around trying to get such a deal — and the White House knows that. No leverage for him, now. Likelier scenario is that he bangs his chest a bit and then puts together a deal with the Senate Majority and White House that the House Minority Democrats will back. And then he, his merry band of two or three dozen Republicans who aren’t complete maniacs on the debt ceiling, and the House Democrats will cobble together a slim majority and pass a deal. The White House, I believe, has already said that they will exercise the Amendment 14 Section 4 option (a unilateral raise) if Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling. They don’t want to do that — it’s still an open question has to whether or not the Courts would accept it and no one really wants to find out the hard way — but they will do it if they have to. So he can negotiate or not negotiate, but the debt ceiling will be raised either way, so it’s in his interest to negotiate the best deal he can get, given that this White House would prefer a deal to that extreme option.

One final unavoidable caveat to all of this:
Never underestimate the power of the current crop of Republicans to cut off their noses to spite their faces. All of what I’m saying could be woefully over-optimistic and naive. They’ve shown on more than a few occasions that they will go to all kinds of unprecedented extremes unseen in the modern era even when it hurts them. They’re a bit fundamentalist in that regard. I’m arguing on a questionable assumption that at least a couple dozen of them (including speaker Boehner) are still acting on a rational self-interest basis. And you know what happens when you assume…

We can do better

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A nation’s economic engine runs fastest and takes a country the farthest when the creativity and work ethic of a population are harnessed at full capacity. Full employment and basic economic security are the keys to unlocking that potential. An unhealthy, unemployed, under-educated population can never take a nation as far as it could go with a healthy, fully employed, well-educated workforce.

When we invest in our middle and working classes, when we lift people out of poverty, when we ensure everyone gets a slice of the pie…we make the pie bigger for everyone and we grow our economy faster and bigger than ever. When we ensure basic equalities to our entire population, we provide equal opportunities for all our people to succeed and join our united endeavors as a nation.

In a representative democracy, government is the means by which we as a large society carry out these noble goals. That’s not class warfare or statism, that’s just economics and common sense.