Regulatory corruption and 9/11

There has been much written about how our civil liberties have been irrationally eroded after 9/11, and how burdensome air travel has become. What seems to have been forgotten is that a significant factor in 9/11 was our corrupt regulatory system. The FAA had become another federal agency largely unable to regulate because of industry lobbying. The airlines resisted pre-9/11 FAA proposals to strengthen cockpit doors, for example. Failing to require those doors be strengthened was one of nine fatal mistakes made by the government that could have prevented the tragedy, according to the 9/11 Commission.

The industry also was not following passenger screening rules, and the FAA was not holding airlines accountable for this. Some of the hijackers paid for tickets in cash at the airport just before their flights, which should have triggered additional screening. What's more, the hijackers did this several times before 9/11 as a test, and none were subjected to additional checks. If regulations had been followed, the hijackers might have been caught, since some were already on watch lists and the FBI was trying to find them.

Our safety has gotten worse, not better, since 9/11, because in the name of security, we vote for politicians who simultaneously promise more security and preach that we'd all be better off if government just left business alone. In contrast to the some of the overreaction in airline security, regulation abdication by government has made us less safe in so many other ways. For example, although we may be less likely to die in a hijacked airplane, our kids and our pets are more likely to die from tainted food or dangerous toys.

Ron Paul & George Bush: separated at birth?

Ron Paul just set a record for the most money raised on the Internet in a single day. What’s going on here? His Presidential bid has been compared to that of Howard Dean’s in 2004, but other than the outsider label, nothing about them is the same. To find the answer, I suggest you read the Newsweek Magazine story on the politics of fear, which reviews how politicians use fear to get elected.

Then compare the platforms of George Bush in 2000 with Ron Paul in 2008. As loyal Republicans, Bush and Paul both have opposed abortion, gay rights, gun control, taxes and nation building. The first three of these issues are about fear. Abortion opponents boast of their moral outrage at killing, but most of them support the death penalty and don’t bat an eye if a lot of innocent people in other nations are killed in order to eliminate a few terrorists. They also don't tend to support policies that would lower the inexcusable U.S. infant mortality rate below its present level, which is higher than virtually all of Europe. (We nose out Croatia.) If they even give lip service to the need for universal health care, they don't tend to support remedies with any teeth.

Opposition to abortion is mostly driven by fear that making abortion easily available leads to sexual promiscuity and women not assuming their proper role in society, thus destroying the social fabric. An excellent book on this subject published by Cornell University Press analyzed the history of laws in all fifty states affecting women's rights and freedoms and those affecting the protection of life. It concluded that the states with the strictest abortion laws also offer the poorest protection of women's rights and worst protection of life in all areas other than abortion, and that restricting women's rights was a much stronger motivator of anti-abortion laws than fetal protection. (The Journal of Christian Ethics described the book as a balanced prescription for a "seamless garment of love for unborn children.")

Homophobes fear that greater rights for gays would unleash the demon of sexual promiscuity. Fear of crime drives opposition to gun control. Support for strict adherence to the constitution and states rights is intended to counter court decisions supporting gun control, gays, women seeking abortions and host of other fear driven issues. Abandoning federal standards would allow states to revert back to their nineteen century policies, including on criminal justice and discrimination, which were the reason Congress and the courts intervened in the first place. In this context, the states rights movement is akin to the U.S. rendition program sending terror suspects to third world nations to be tortured, enabling the U.S. government to absolve itself of responsibility for the resulting horror.

Those who are adamant about lower taxes are mostly people who would much rather make decisions about charity themselves and who don’t want to give their hard earned money away to people they think are a bunch of lazy lowlifes. This includes lowlifes in poor countries, hence the opposition to nation building. (The story of how the opposition to nation building got perverted by fear of terrorists and an opportunity for some loyal Republican to get rich on the war has been recounted at length elsewhere.) The ridiculous rationalization that lower taxes stimulate today's economy ignores the fact that deficit spending irresponsibly shifts the burden to pay for today's government services on future generations. Not exactly family values.

I don’t see a lot of daylight between what Ron Paul is preaching and what George Bush preached in 2000. On global warming, the only other issue that’s big right now, Paul and Bush both agree that government should not do much.

Paul’s talk about abolishing the Federal Reserve, the IRS, and Social Security gives him that radical edge, but the demise of these institutions is a political impossibility and he knows it. So why is Ron Paul a phenom? Some of the right wingers disenchanted with the Republican Party establishment suddenly have found a home. Perhaps he’ll launch a third-party bid and do to the Republicans what Ralph Nader did to the Democrats in 2000 – siphon off votes. Yea!