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Questions for the candidates in The New York Times
On October 15 the Op-Ed page of The New York Times listed ten questions that “a few writers and thinkers” would like the presidential candidates to answer. I’m going to give my answers, one at a time. They’re not political answers. They’re the ravings of an angry old man who is fed up to you know where and out the you know what with politics.
Send the old man a comment on any of the questions below
25 October 2008: Q&A: electoral uniformity (last question)
A professor of law and political science at Columbia Law School, by the name of Nathaniel Persily, asked: “Should we bring greater consistency to our electoral system by mandating a uniform federal ballot to be used in all 50 states and uniform rules for voter eligibility in federal elections?”
Great idea. We should be all for it. Not. There are two questions here, one about a uniform ballot, and the other about uniform eligibility rules, and both are tricky.
Does a uniform ballot also mean a uniform means of presenting the ballot and recording the votes? Can you really have uniform ballots when one ballot is on paper and the other is on a touch screen? Or, can you have uniform ballots when a candidate has electors on the ballot in one state but not in another state?
Assuming that a uniform ballot means also the same type of voting machine everywhere, we are in grave danger. It was a federal mandate that led us to use electronic voting machines that are vulnerable to hacking and lack even the capability for a recount. Nobody can say with certainty at this time what the best voting technology is.
Electronic voting machines can be made to record a vote other than what the voter entered, simply by altering a few lines of code and substituting the altered program (which could be done without even going near the machine if it’s on a network), and the change is not visible inside the machine. In contrast, the lever voting machines that are now out of fashion can’t be hacked remotely, nor can they be made to record the wrong vote without visibly altering the gears and levers inside, but they can't be recounted the way paper ballots can. Paper ballots can be counted and recounted, but they can also be lost or stolen. So we are not yet ready to mandate a uniform ballot.
Uniform eligibility rules are another problem. One of the tricky bits is residence. Some states have counties, some have parishes, some have municipalities covering the whole state and some do not. Voters are required to vote in the place where they reside, but where they reside is defined differently in different states.
Another tricky bit is eligibility of felons, that is, people who are in prison because they have been convicted of a crime, as well as people who have been released from prison. Convicting people of a crime is a great way to keep them from voting if felons are denied eligibility to vote. However, if the federal rules say felons can’t vote, the rules are not uniform because the state laws under which people are convicted are not uniform. On the other hand, if the federal rules say felons can vote, then the only way states can keep people from voting is to impose the death penalty. You can see where that could lead us to.
There are also related questions that Professor Persily didn’t mention. One is about the availability of polling places and the number of ballot boxes or voting machines in each place, so voters can go to vote and vote without too much waiting. Another is whether requiring voters either to go to a polling place on a Tuesday that is not a holiday, or else go through the paperwork of applying for an absentee ballot, is the best way to get everybody to vote. Then there is the business of districting, which can be used to define “safe” districts where thousands of voters could change their votes without changing the outcome, and “swing” districts where just a few votes could decide who goes to Congress. There are probably other questions I haven’t thought of. And these are all ways that election officials can effectively keep people from voting.
In answer to the first question, we need better education for officials and legislators about what they should look for in designing ballots and choosing a technology before we can develop a design that’s good enough to be federally mandated. In answer to the second question, we need more uniformity in criminal laws and sentencing guidelines, more uniformity in defining place of residence, and so on, before we can think about uniform rules.
24 October 2008: Q&A: supremacy in science
David Baltimore, in case you don’t remember (or didn’t exist yet at the time), shared the Nobel prize in medicine in 1975. He sees the center of physics research moving from the U.S. to Europe, notes that we in the U.S. are producing fewer young American scientists in all fields, and asks what the candidates would do to win back world leadership in scientific research.
This one doesn’t even need money to be thrown at it (though it will take money). We got into the race to the moon by making it a national priority to get ahead of the Russians. We got into Afghanistan, and later Iraq, by making it a national priority to exterminate terrorists. The presidency (to translate Theodore Roosevelt’s remark into standard modern English) is a splendid pulpit. Harangue them and they will come. You won’t have to throw the money; the taxpayers will beg you to spend it, and the young people will beg to be allowed to learn science.
23 October 2008: Q&A: sending messages to countries
John Ashcroft, U.S. Attorney General from 2001 to 2005, wrote: “Colombia has worked to eliminate terrorist activity and drug production within its borders, yet it has seen its efforts rewarded by having prominent members of the House and Senate lobby against a free trade agreement with us. What message does this send to other countries, like Afghanistan or Pakistan, that are working at our behest to eliminate security threats to both our nation and theirs?”
I quoted Ashcroft’s question in full because I don’t want to be accused of misinterpreting it. You can see it for yourself while I take it apart and explain Ashcroft’s misinterpretations. It was bad enough to have him as Attorney General; it’s a good thing he wasn’t Secretary of State.
To begin with, Colombia is in our hemisphere, so anything we do or say with regard to Colombia has no effect on what we say or do with regard to Pakistan or Afghanistan. The countries of the Western Hemisphere south of the United States have had a special place in U.S. foreign policy ever since 1823, the year that the U.S. recognized Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Mexico and enunciated the Monroe Doctrine.
Next: members of the House and Senate do not lobby (lobbyists lobby them). They can express any opinions they please as they address their constituents or their respective houses of Congress, but nothing they say is an official act of the United States until and unless it is either enacted into law by both houses of Congress or adopted as policy by the Executive branch. That’s what freedom of speech is all about.
Thirdly, Ashcroft is confounding countries and their governments. The government of Colombia, as evidenced by the existence of native “terrorists” within its borders, is not fully supported by its citizens. The same can be said of Pakistan and Afghanistan. All three governments are having difficulty managing their respective countries, and it is the governments, not the countries, that are cooperating with U.S. foreign policy. The “security threats” they and we are working to eliminate are, to a great degree, threats to the government by its own citizens.
Ashcroft’s question rests on so many false assumptions that it’s meaningless. A more interesting question might be: what messages are we sending to the people of Colombia, Pakistan and Afghanistan? But that question is too complicated to deal with here and now in this space, if only because in each country the “people” are themselves divided into several blocs, some supporting the government currently in power, some supporting various alternative factions, and some, perhaps the “silent majority,” just waiting for some kind of settlement so they can get on with their lives.
22 October 2008: Q&A: military tribunals
Mary Jo White, who was the United States attorney in Manhattan from 1993 to 2002, asks what is the proper balance between using military proceedings and criminal trials for people accused of international terrorism against the United States.
We’re not talking about courts martial. Courts martial are military proceedings, but they are only for members of our own armed forces. They afford many of the protections available in civilian criminal trials. We’re talking about military tribunals.
Military tribunals are inconsistent with democratic ideals of justice. They should be avoided whenever possible. They should be used only to try members of the enemy armed forces, not civilians. They should be used only when the exigencies of war make full criminal trials impractical. They should be used only when the evidence of guilt is so persuasive that it can be argued that a full criminal trial would have the same outcome. If any of these conditions is not met the defendant is entitled to a full scale criminal trial by jury.
But the question as posed is incomplete. What’s actually happening for most of the terrorism suspects is not military tribunal or criminal trial, but indefinite detention without either the rights of prisoners of war or the rights of suspects awaiting trial. Most of them haven’t even been accused of anything.
We are being asked to condone the use of military tribunals solely on the basis that so many people have been detained for so long on such flimsy grounds that it would be impractical to give them all trials by jury. That’s a totally false claim as well as a violation of the human rights of the detainees.
21 October 2008: Q&A: recording interrogations
Paul Ekman, purveyor of “cutting edge behavioral science for real world applications” and author of at least ten books in that area, points to the Illinois law that requires audio or video tapes of all interrogations of murder suspects. He asks whether the candidates would require federal agencies to record all interrogations of both suspects and witnesses in felony cases. He also asks whether they would urge Congress to encourage state and local police to require recordings.
Of course. But that’s a half measure, only the beginning. We need videotapes of all police activities, including (but not limited to) arrests and searches, to make sure that evidence was not planted or otherwise compromised, that suspects were not treated violently before or after being arrested, that witnesses were not coerced before the official interrogation, that evidence gathered by the police was not withheld from the defense, etc., etc.
All these activities have been observed or recorded more or less accidentally by bystanders who happened to be there. I don’t mean to disparage state or local police departments. On the contrary, respect for state and local police is likely to improve when the few bad actors among them are identified and mustered out.
20 October 2008: Q&A: all Georgians, or all Americans
Bill Bradley, the erstwhile Democratic senator from New Jersey, squared off against Republican Presidential candidate John McCain by challenging McCain’s remark to Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, in the thick of Georgia’s conflict with Russia, that “we are all Georgians.” Bradley reminds us that we are all Americans and suggests that Georgia’s interests are less important to us than Russia’s.
Bradley is right when he says we are all Americans. That is, we Americans are all Americans. In the rest of their argument, they’re both wrong. We as Americans should not side with any undemocratic government and should not become involved in quarrels that don’t concern us.
The conflict between Russia and Georgia is a wee bit complicated. Georgia once was part of the Soviet Union but is now an independent nation. The conflict between Russia and Georgia is over whether the regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which are now included within Georgia, should be allowed to secede and themselves become independent nations. It seems to the old man that Russia’s only interest in the secession is to weaken its neighbor and erstwhile dependent Georgia, while McCain’s primary interest is to be unfriendly to Russia.
It may well be true, as Bradley claims, that Russia has helped the American effort to “eliminate nuclear proliferation, safeguard nuclear materials and assist in the war against radical Islamic terrorism.” I’m not sure how much the autocrats in the Kremlin have actually helped us, and I’m not at all sure we should be engaged in a “war against radical Islamic terrorism.” But in any event, that’s no reason to side with Russia in a local territorial dispute.
Now I may have got Bradley’s implication wrong. He left his conclusion up on the air without offering an explicit recommendation. If he meant that we should support Russia instead of Georgia, I strongly disagree. If he meant that we should not support either side, I’m with him one hundred percent.
19 October 2008: Clamping down on credit-default swaps
We interrupt this question and answer series to bring you on a brief visit into the shadowy world of credit-default swaps. A credit-default swap is essentially an insurance contract, with a few twists. Like any insurance, it’s a contract to pay if something bad happens. In this case, it’s a promise to pay a certain amount if a certain bond, mortgage, or similar instrument isn’t paid up at the appointed time, that is, if the debtor defaults. But if it were called an insurance contract, it would be subject to regulation, so it’s called a “swap” instead. Also, it’s traded on the open market, and can be bought and sold for speculative purposes.
According to an Op-Ed article in The New York Times this morning, by none other than Christopher Cox, the chairman of the SEC, a company called AIG issued $440 billion of credit-default swaps that lost their value when two things happened. First, many of the credit-default swaps covered mortgages, and it became increasingly likely that the debtors would not be able to pay off on them. Second, as a result of the first, it became increasingly likely that AIG would not be able to pay off on the swaps. AIG tanked, and so did other companies in the same situation, as well as other companies that were counting on these companies for financial services, and the U.S. government had to bail them all out.
Credit-default swaps are a unique kind of insurance. When a company issues fire insurance, and there are a lot of fires, that can’t cause a fire in the company’s office. If it issues accident insurance, and there are a lot of accidents, that can’t cause an accident in the company’s office. But if it issues insurance against default, and there are a lot of defaults, that can cause a default in the company’s office. And if a lot of companies have insured against each others’ defaults, the whole system can collapse.
And that’s exactly what happened.
Mr. Cox wants the credit-default swap market to be regulated. He wants “transparency.” Well, it doesn’t matter how transparent the market is if the commodities being marketed are opaque.
He says credit-default swaps “play an important role in the smooth functioning of capital markets.” There are now, he says, about $55 trillion in credit-default swaps outstanding -- more than the annual gross domestic product of the whole world. But as recently as 2000, the market in credit-default swaps was so small that Congress decided not to regulate it. I would like to know how the capital markets were able to support nearly two centuries of growth and innovation -- from the railroads in the early nineteenth century to the Internet at the end of the twentieth -- without benefit of credit-default swaps. Do we really need them?
Insuring against default is different from all other kinds of insurance, because it exposes the insurer to a risk of the very loss it’s insuring against. The U.S. government has undertaken some of that kind of insurance. Currently it insures individual bank deposits, home mortgages, and pensions. This insurance is backed by “the full faith and credit” of the United States. No other company can claim that, and no other company should be allowed to insure against default.
Credit-default swaps should not be regulated. They should be prohibited.
18 October 2008: Q&A: executive appointee ethics
This one looks very simple but it may be more complicated than it looks. Pat Choate is the author of Dangerous Business (Knopf, 2008) and was Ross Perot’s running mate back in 1996. He reminds us that on the day Bill Clinton became President in January 1993, he issued Executive Order 12834, which required his appointees to certify that for five years after leaving office they would not engage in certain kinds of lobbying -- but just before he left office, eight years later, he revoked the order, releasing his appointees to lobby as they pleased, and his successors never reinstated the order. Choate wants the candidates to say whether they would reinstate the order and initiate legislation to make its provisions permanent.
The revocation tainted the history of the order. Clinton’s critics say he revoked the order just in time for his appointees to cash in. His defenders claim that with the transition to a Republican administration, Democrats would have no influence as lobbyists anyway. Did Clinton intend his Democratic allies to harass the Republicans by engaging in whatever lobbying they could? Hard to say at this point.
It was a good idea, and it probably should be reinstated and made permanent as law. But there’s a bigger problem that it doesn’t address.
The big problem is not that appointees serve the government during their tenure in office, and hire out as lobbyists after they leave office. The problem is that during their tenure in office, appointees serve the interests of some private company, and are rewarded after they leave office with richly paid jobs in the company they served.
I don’t know how to address that problem. The obvious solution would be a law barring former appointees from serving in private industry in the area of their professional expertise. But that would deprive the nation of the benefits of their expertise.
What we really need is a direct approach to ethics. But I don’t know what that would be.
17 October 2008: Q&A: help for failing schools
Diane Ravitch, a professor of education at New York University and an assistant secretary of education from 1991 to 1993, expects that “most schools will become failing if the [No Child Left Behind] law sticks to its deadline that all children must become proficient in math and reading by 2014,” and asks “How would you change the law so that it helps schools improve instead of stigmatizing them>”
There are two different issues here. One is the question of how you would help schools improve, to which the answer is: you can’t. We don’t know how.
One of the purposes of the charter school movement was to let people try different ways of running a public school to see how they work. But the articles about charter schools mainly say that charter schools, on the average, do no better and no worse than regular public schools. That’s not the answer we wanted. What we want to know is which charter schools do better, and which do worse, and why.
For that matter, we might just as well ask which of the regular public schools do better, and which do worse, and why. The articles are a little more helpful, but not much.
The schools that do better are the ones that are managed by exceptional administrators. Nice trick, but we can’t afford it. To put an exceptional administrator in each and every public school we would have to make the average principal’s salary one figure longer.
The schools that do worse are usually the ones in the poorest districts. Not always; there are exceptions. But usually. The obvious conclusion is that these schools need more money. Then you hear people saying that you can’t solve a problem by throwing money at it. That’s true, but it’s also true that if the solution costs money, you can’t solve the problem by refusing to spend the money.
I said there were two issues here. The other issue is that in a few years most schools will be labeled as failing if the law doesn’t change. Maybe they’re really failing, maybe not. But what’s the point of saying they’re failing if all you’re going to do is punish them for it?
Oh, wait. It’s these conservatives who don’t believe in evolution, but they believe that if you keep on punishing the schools for failing, they will somehow learn not to fail, even if nobody knows how they’ll do it. Think about the argument for intelligent design vs. natural selection. Schools don’t just happen. They have to be designed. But if you don’t know how to design a better school, you can just keep on closing the worst schools and the schools will improve by themselves.
16 October 2008: Q&A: how to prevent mass destruction
As chair and vice-chair of the 9/11 commission, respectively, Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton want the candidates to say what they would do to defend the United States against a terrorist attack using weapons of mass destruction.
I say, close the borders. Nothing and nobody comes ashore or crosses our land borders without being scanned for radioactivity, assayed for poisons and explosives, and tested for biological weapons. Nothing short of such measures can assure us that we are safe.
But we can’t do that. It’s not technically impossible, but we can’t afford it. The equipment could be built, but we don’t have the capability to build enough of it, nor do we have enough people to operate the equipment.
A better defense is not to have terrorists. We could get along without them. We have a rigid policy that “we don’t negotiate with terrorists.” But there are two kinds of terrorists: the strong against the weak, and the weak against the strong. We don’t have any trouble negotiating with the first kind, the despots who terrorize their own citizens. We’ve been negotiating with China for years. It’s only the second kind that we refuse to negotiate with.
Well, negotiate with them. They will probably want us to leave them alone, stop sending our troops all over the world wreaking “collateral damage,” undermining governments we think they foolishly elected, and propping up “stable governments” that either never were elected or have long outlasted their electoral mandate.
Apply the “golden rule”: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Would you like to have foreign troops on our soil to protect us from our own foolishness? Then don’t do it to others.
Be nice. “A soft answer turneth away wrath.” “You catch more flies with honey.” “Love thine enemy.” “If thine enemy smite thee, turn the other cheek.” Or “live by the sword, die by the sword.” Thousands of years of traditional wisdom tell us that to get what you want, all you have to do is learn how to “win friends and influence people.”
It would be great to be able to “speak softly and carry a big stick.” But we don’t have a big enough stick any more. So we should just speak softly, and use what wealth we have, not to make bigger sticks, but to be good to people.
15 October 2008: Q&A: government as shareholder (first question)
Richard Sylla, a professor of financial history and economics at the Stern School of Business at New York University, notes that the government is about to invest enough in U.S. banks to become a major shareholder, asks whether that would raise the risk that “lending decisions will be based more on politics than economics,” and wants to know what would be the exit strategy for returning the banks to private control.
My answer is that while government expenditures certainly are based to a great extent on pork barrel politics and quid pro quo, private management hasn’t done any better. Private managers have cheated the customers, looted the companies, invested for the quick buck instead of the long haul, and wrecked the markets. The only reason the government is doing this at all is that private control brought the financial system past the breaking point. I wouldn’t look for an exit strategy until and unless experience showed government management to be truly worse than private control.
