Putting Out Fires, Starting New Ones

The failure of government regulators to anticipate the financial crisis and their continued failure to deal with its fall-out has been a noted flashpoint for partisans on both sides of the aisle. The dominant narrative assumes that most observers were content to stand idly by and reap the benefits of corporate largesse while the “getting was good”. It’s true, some saw the signs and did their best to sound the alarm, but in the great tradition of American politics, these Cassandras went unheeded. And if the developments of the last year and a half are any indication, we’re no closer to fixing the problem than we were at the start of the crisis, because as of yet our leaders have been unwilling to make the hard decisions required of them. In the meantime, we suffer from record levels of unemployment, saddled by mounting debt, and with little hope that the culprits will actually be held accountable. All this begs the question, what lessons if any have we learned from this crisis? Former Governor Eliot Spitzer does just that in this month’s issue of the Review, in his piece for the New Democracy Forum, “The Rules.” Read the rest of this entry »

Terror Trials in New York – a Crucible for the Criminal Justice System

In a highly anticipated news conference on Friday, November 13th, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed – 9/11 mastermind – along with four of his co-conspirators, would be tried in a federal courtroom in Manhattan, mere blocks from Ground Zero and nearly eight years after the deaths of his some 3,000 victims. Although a recent Marist poll of native New Yorkers puts approval for the venue at 45%, with disapproval at 41%, the announcement has drawn fire from both sides of the isle, with Republican leadership accusing the President and AG Holder of playing into the hands of “liberal special interest groups” at the expense of the American people, unnecessarily placing them in harm’s way while potentially exonerating the defendants, as well as critics on the left who lament the continued use of ‘modified’ military commissions for an additional five detainees. The caucus’ more conservative members, like Senator Jim Webb (D-WV), fear the trials will invite untoward disclosure of privileged information. Despite assurances from Holder that the administration will have sufficient authority to keep state secrets classified, critics remain unconvinced. Read the rest of this entry »

Health Care Round-up

This summer health care reform is all over the news, and politicians back home in their districts during the recess are encountering all sorts of interesting characters. The Washington Post characterized a recent spate of town hall meetings, held by legislators to discuss the subject with their constituents, as “[having] transcended their original purpose [to] become a kind of professional wrestling for the civically engaged.”

Following up on Sam’s post, and on all the craziness going on in town halls, here is a sampling of past Boston Review on health care. The magazine has been covering health care issues for over a decade, in a manner hopefully closer to chess, or perhaps poker, than professional wrestling. But don’t take it from me – I’m a rugby person, myself.

Also: see if you can spot the brother of a White House official in this list (hint: the official in question is sometimes called “Rahmbo.”)
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Cyberwar hysteria? Reading Morozov against recent attacks

I found Evgeny Morozov’s article in the latest BR to be a compelling argument against cyberwar hyperbole, and I thought his call for a focus on infrastructure needs rather than on overblown claims Internet terrorism was a sound one.

A friend in NYU’s Computer Science department pointed out after reading the article that he was troubled by the author’s tendency to put the weight of responsibility for cyber-security on “end-users,” that is, consumers of software systems and platforms, rather than on those who designed the systems. I think this point is valid, and while perhaps Morozov’s emphasis on user action is to be expected in a time so focused on individual responsibility rather than systemic accountability, I too am skeptical of blaming individual Internet users for any security problems they may encounter. The solutions that Morozov espouses —

be careful, and avoid trafficking data in open spaces

– are somewhat over-simplified, and while his caution about believing government hype about cybersecurity may be justified, he may be going too far in obscuring the real steps that governments can take to protect their citizens and their own classified data.

Of course, the moment I was ready to turn the page on Internet terrorism, the news media became saturated with coverage about North Korean cyberattacks on South Korea and the US. Read the rest of this entry »

Iran, “People Power,” and the Ghosts of 1989

A whole host of professions devoted to the memorialization of political movements — journalists, activists, historians hungry for op-ed opportunities –  anticipated 2009 if for nothing but the fact that it marked the twentieth anniversary of two of the most consequential events in recent world history: the fall of communism in Europe and, in China, the massacre at Tiananmen Square.

But this year has  marked far more — the culmination of a decade during which the shine came off the “end of history,” as Francis Fukuyama blandly labeled the post-communist period. First came the wars (Iraq, Afghanistan) often irresponsibly dressed up as civilizational struggles, then a collapse of faith in capitalism so stunning that, had it happened during the Cold War, might have sparked, if not a reverse 1989, a considerable propaganda coup for the Soviet bloc. Whereas one of the cataclysmic events of 1989 — the fall of the Berlin Wall — was more widely celebrated in the soaring boom of the late 90s, 2009 seems more ripe for an exploration of the ambiguous legacy of both the popular movements that swelled, on both sides of Eurasia, twenty years before.

Enter the Iranian election imbroglio, perfectly timed to capture a zeitgeist brimming with expectation of cultural chaos and refreshed by reminders of the popular demonstrations that erupted on the streets of Berlin and Beijing. Salient memories of the former make it unsurprising to watch media figures, cheerleading what they hope is yet another replay of 1989 Berlin, lump the demonstrations against the election result with other recent “Twitter Revolutions”. While Evgeny Morozov disputed social media’s usefulness for such movements in the March/April issue of BR, he is having slightly more trouble doing so in the context of Iran, where the government — let’s all stop inconsistently plastering every momentarily disfavored system with the epithet “regime” — is either much less sophisticated at harnessing the internet for propaganda purposes, or doesn’t need to.

After all, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad counts among his supporters significant numbers of the lower classes, and, though reported on with far less zeal by the BBC or (when it finally stuck its head out of the embarrassing gutter of celebrity gossip in which it’s been increasingly entrenched) CNN, many thousands of them also managed to mobilize in Iran’s capital without the aid of an expensive iPhone. Indeed, missing from the many discussions about the protests in Iran, from technology to the flared tempers on display in the streets, are they they, like many large street demonstrations over the past decade — and unlike the uprisings of 1989 — have been taking place in an atmosphere charged with class politics.

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Prison Reform: In BR and On the Hill

As Dahlia Lithwick noted in Slate this past weekend, Guantanamo may be America’s most infamous “prison problem,” but it is far from our only one.

Our sentencing and incarceration system is broken. With the U.S. having only 5 percent of the world’s population and yet almost 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, we are imprisoning people at nearly five times the world average; according to Lithwick,

approximately one in every 31 adults in the United States is in prison, jail, or on supervised release.

Democratic Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, who famously served as Secretary of the Navy under Reagan and was at one point thought to be under consideration as Obama’s running-mate, has introduced landmark legislation to retool our prison system. Called the National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009, Webb’s bill would set up a commission to examine the American criminal justice system and make recommendations about how to best reform it.
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