The folly of privatization

I don’t know about you, but I like my military self-contained. You know — complete with cooks and bottle washers? Oh, and not to mention all the armed troops and support personnel necessary to get the job done?

The latest news about Blackwater, the private security firm heavily deployed in Iraq, raises serious questions about the viability of privatization. Their almost total lack of culpability in the recent shooting deaths of Iraqi civilians alone undermines our credibility as a nation of just laws. But there’s another issue that should be of equal concern to American taxpayers. Blackwater, and other companies providing services once the responsibility of the military itself, are businesses. Their goal is profit — which means that not all of the taxpayers’ money is being spent on the mission.

And what must an army enlistee be thinking, when he or she puts his life on the line for military pay, while a Blackwater employee earns thousands of dollars a week? For the individual who enjoys that kind of work, what’s the incentive to remain in the military?

The US has a military tradition that goes back to its founding. In every war, our military has provided its own warriors — and its own cooks, truck drivers, administrative personnel, doctors, nurses, and everyone it needed to be self-sufficient. This is as it should be. The trend toward privatization is, in the long run, a danger to national security and a stain on our national conscience.

False Hopes

We live in a land of false hopes. When Democrats regained control of Congress in the 2006 elections, we hoped that at last there would be a call for accountability. What Congress failed to do before then would now happen — oversight. The President, we hoped, would be on the carpet, asked to explain why we went to Iraq to fight a war that didn’t need to be fought, a war that was based on faulty, flawed, illegitimate intelligence.

Would it be such a bad thing if at least ONE branch of government let it be known to the world that the United States made a grave error in 2003 and would like to make amends? Would it be such a bad thing if Republicans got over their party loyalty, their allegiance to the President, and admitted it was all a tragic mistake? Then perhaps the US could hold out its hand to invite other nations to help “fix” it. Bush himself could do this. He himself could say, “Boy I sure screwed up.” But he won’t of course. He probably doesn’t even admit it to himself in his own secret thoughts.

Well, the chaos continues, and the puzzling silence from Congress at large speaks ominously for the future. We didn’t expect Republicans to watch over the administration, but we kinda hoped the Democrats would. Were they false hopes?

The Constitution is No Joke, George

A Federal judge in Detroit has decided that the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program is unconstitutional (see story). What’s new.

But his hasn’t been the administration’s only egregious violation of the Constitution. To date, the president has issued more signing statements on passed legislation than all other presidents combined, a policy that clearly smacks of an imperial presidency. Most legal scholars find this, and the eavesdropping programs, unconstitutional.

Apparently the president doesn’t hire legal scholars though. Apparently he hires lawyers who share his agenda, who interpret the Constitution in the same bizarre way the president and his advisors do, legal ideologues who apparently believe the president is above the very Constitution he has sworn to defend and protect. The Constitution is pretty clear about the process of creating laws. Nowhere does it state that the president can ignore portions of a bill once it is signed into law. No competent attorney would advise the president to the contrary.
This falls under the heading of “high crimes,” which the Constitution speaks to quite clearly. It is an impeachable offense. But the president’s attorneys don’t need to advise the president that he is immune from impeachment, because they know Dick Cheney would be waiting in the wings, and that’s pretty good impeachment insurance.

How Do We Repair Our Democracy?

The current version of the United States has existed since 1789, when the Constitution was ratified — not a bad run for what was rather novel at the time. We were an experiment in democracy that, by all accounts, has been fairly successful.

Along the way, thanks to the amendment process, we’ve fine-tuned the Constitution here and there to make improvements — to make clarifications, to fix mistakes. We granted every American equal status as citizens, we gave women the right to vote, and we strengthened civil rights. But somehow our democracy got broken anyway — and in my opinion there are two flaws that need fixing.

The first centers on campaign financing and lobbying — the influence of narrow interests before and after elections. While no elected official will admit to being influenced by the money and favors he or she receives from corporations and organizations, voting records leave a pretty telling trail. Republicans, by far the chief recipients of campaign contributions from energy companies, routinely vote against environmental measures and for bills that grant tax breaks to oil and coal companies or otherwise favor them. Democrats, on the other hand, typically receive the lion’s share of contributions from labor organizations, and are more apt to favor pro-labor legislation.

If you’re like me, of course, you don’t mind the Democratic tilt — it is, after all, more pro-people than business. But I’d rather see legislation passed on its merits, and not because of who donates what to whom.

The second flaw has to do with checks and balances. The framers of our Constitution were careful to devise a system wherein no branch of government would be more powerful than either of the other two. Yet in recent years, thanks to the ideological match between the executive and legislative branches of government, Congress no longer presents a check on the administration. To make it worse, that ideological match has allowed the Supreme Court to be stacked with equally matching justices, the result being an almost imperial executive.

One partial remedy that would address this is a constitutional amendment that would clarify the approval process for federal court nominations — including, of course, the Supreme Court. As I’ve written in the past, it makes absolutely no sense to require a simple majority to approve judges because jurists serve life-long terms, far outliving any administration and congresses. It is therefore essential that judges be ideologically independent of either party, and the best way I can think of to ensure this is to require a two-thirds’ vote in the Senate to approve a nomination. While it can be argued, I think, that the Constitution already says this, an amendment would clarify it and set it in stone.

Our democracy was created to support and safeguard the interests of the people of the United States, and it is currently under threat. Its remaining flaws have become glaringly obvious in recent years, and only now are people realizing that something must be done. But it’s up to the very people who are supposed to be protected by the Constitution to do what’s necessary to fix what’s broken — and that process begins this November on election day.