Testifying before Congress yesterday, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld told Congress that it was time to eliminate military bases around the country that are no longer needed. Unfortunately eliminating such bases is always a political hot potato.

Representative Rob Simmons (R-Connecticut) summed up the attitude that most members of Congress have toward military bases,

You refer to closing unneeded bases. I only have one base, and I do need it. I just want to make that clear.

Note that Simmons didn’t say that the military needs the base nor that the country or even his state needs the base. Rather, Simmons needs the base. If Congress eliminates it, voters in Simmons’ district might be more likely to vote him out of office.

In fact many communities will go to extreme lengths to keep their military bases. I’ve seen this first hand when the military proposed eliminating a small and unneeded base in the town where I grew up, Battle Creek, Michigan. Local campaigners managed to remove the base from the list of those to be eliminated temporarily, but there is really no earth shattering strategic reason to maintain a base in a small Midwestern backwater.

According to the New York Times the Pentagon itself estimates that as many as 25 percent of its bases are unneeded and could be closed without affect its military readiness. Lets get on with doing that already.

Source:

As Defense Secretary Calls for Base Closings, Congress Circles the Wagons. James Dao, The New York Times, June 29, 2001

A group of at least eleven juveniles in New Jersey recently culminated a day of violence by beating to death a homeless man. The juveniles were black and the victim was Hispanic, and almost immediately there were cries on conservative sites like Free Republic about why the boys weren’t being charged with a hate crime. Prosecutors replied that there simply wasn’t evidence that the crime as motivated by racism. Really? Not according to a story in today’s New York Times,

It was around 10:45 Wednesday morning, June 20th, and a crowd of nearly 50 students, most of them black, had gathered in front of a vending machine inside the high school. Some of them wanted to play a violent form of tag, going after Hispanic students to physically abuse them. A 17-year-old defendant offered the closest semblance of an explanation for the nature of the game: some black students did not like the way some Hispanic students were showing off during a fire drill. “So they were like, someone is going to get it,” he said.

Wired News has an article on the Supreme’ Courts ruling on freelancer rights that backs up what I pointed out earlier — this ruling not only won’t help but actually hurts freelancers since it gives an incentive to media companies to force freelancers to sign away all rights.

Kendra Mayfield writes,

Since the mid-1990s, most publishers have included all distribution mediums, including the Internet, in their contracts.

While the Supreme Court’s decision applies mainly to contracts that are several years or even decades old, authors are already feeling its impact.

Many writers who refuse to sign away their rights have been denied work. Those who do sign can no longer resell their own works to other markets — a practice that has long been a major source of income for many freelancers, [Miriam] Raftery said.

Bruce Brawer wrote an interesting review of Angela Dillard’s book, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner Now? Multicultural Conservatism in America. According to Brawer’s review, Dillard attempts to explain away the existence of minority conservatives by relegating their ideas to the main evil of Western political culture — the emphasis on individualism. Brawer writes,

This, she claims, is a consequence of the lamentable and misguided conservative fixation on the individual — and it illustrates the superiority of leftists’ emphasis on the group. (Naturally, she ignores the enthusiasm of left-wing academics for such pious, if sometimes notoriously unreliable, works of personal testimony as “I, Rigoberta Menchu.”) In a classic bit of doublethink, she refers to “the conservative desire to silence irreducibly different collectivities in the name of a constrictive and artificially singular American identity” — thereby elegantly equating individual liberty with oppression and enforced group think with variety.

The other day, completely by accident, I ran smack into an example of this. The College of Education at the university I work is dominated by a handful of extreme Left wing professors — the sort of people who have actually claimed in books that things like spelling tests are right wing conspiracies (I’m not making that up).

A couple weeks ago I had to drop off a contract in the same building where the education folks are located. As I was walking down the hall there was this huge display case filled with large posters. THe posters had been made by college students in education classes, and a little placard indicated these posters were chosen because they represented outstanding work by teachers-in-training.

All of the posters were well done, but it was the one displayed prominently in the middle of the display case that had me looking several times to make sure I understood its message. It was displayed in landscape format, and on the left side about a third of the poster was taken up with a huge symbol. The student had created a dollar sign – $ – with the “S” portion made out of pennies and the straight line made out of dimes. The space to the right was taken up by a single bulleted list which indicated an progression of ideas:

• Competition
• Warmaking
• Individualism

The letters were very large and the student had decorated the insides of the letters with negative images relating to all three ideas. The clear implication was that money and capitalism lead to competition, warmaking and individualism all of which are tied up inextricably with each other. This idea is very in keeping with the ideological position that is included in texts that are required reading for most students who go through the education program here.

For example, the reason spelling tests are a right wing conspiracy — according to one of the most influential education professors here — is that inevitably some people do better on such tests than others which introduces ideas of individual merit and effort which are “reactionary” concepts.

For the past few years the United States has applied special tariffs to, of all things, imports of chilled or frozen lamb meat. In May the World Trade Organization ruled that the tariffs were inconsistent with the WTO agreement and gave the United States 60 days to lift the tariffs.

Almost all lamb meat imports come from Australia and New Zealand. In order to protect farmers who claim they can’t compete with the imports, the United States imposed a 9 percent tariff in 1999, a 6 percent tariff in 2000, and a 3 percent tariff in 2001. Those tariffs, however, were for an initial quota. Lamb imports beyond the quota were taxed at a rate beginning at 40 percent in 1999 and falling to 24 percent this year.

A country such as the United States, which complains that developing nations hurt their economic prospects through protectionist tariffs for local industries, has no excuse for such blatant protectionism.

Source:

WTO urges US to lift lamb tariffs. The BBC, May 2, 2001.

For the past several years there has been a worldwide boom in farm crops, making it difficult for many American farmers to survive. And for the fourth year in a row Congress has done the single dumbest thing imaginable to deal with the plight of farmers — it passed a massive bill to provide emergency payments to farmers.

The problem is that the low price of farm commodities means that least efficient producers should switch to some other commodity, but instead Congress is going to reward the least efficient producers meaning they’ll go on with producing crops even though they can’t possibly recoup their costs, much less make a decent profit.

According to Fox News, opposition from the Bush administration kept the bill from being even higher. Rep. Larry Combest (R-Texas) wanted to up the price tag to $6.5 billion but apparently abandoned that effort when advisers to George W. Bush said they would recommend the president veto the bill if it were higher than $5.5 billion.

But the principle here is exactly the same as the various proposals and schemes for controlling energy production — market interference merely encourages inefficiency and, while it might feel good and be politically palatable now, will only cause further problems in the future.

Source:

House approves billions in farm aid. Associated Press, June 26, 2001.

Last year Hollywood heavily supported Al Gore and Sen. Joe Lieberman in their run for the White House. Now many of those same Hollywood folks find themselves under attack by Lieberman’s perennial support for censorship.

Lieberman’s latest proposal is a bill that would grant the Federal Trade Commission to go after the entertainment industry for “deceptive advertising.” Joining him to co-sponsor the legislation is none other than Sen. Hillary Clinton.

The bill would give the FTC the ability to fine entertainment executives who “target” children with ads for movies, music and video games which are rated as requiring parental advisory. Imagine, for example, that an CD has a “Parental Advisory” for explicit lyrics, but there’s an advertisement for the CD in Seventeen or some other magazine read by minors. In that case the FTC would be empowered to investigate and fine the company.

William Baldwin, the actor and president of the Creative Coalition which opposes the bill, said, “A governmental role in defining ‘acceptable’ entertainment is an indirect form of censorship.” Actually I’d argue it is a pretty direct form of censorship.

Ironically, the man that many in Hollywood worked hard to defeat is reportedly unlikely to support the bill. A spokesman for Bush recently said that it would instead concentrate its efforts on working with the entertainment industry on better means of self-regulation — exactly what Baldwin and the Creative Coalition advocate.

Many in Hollywood, including Jack Valenti of the Motion Picture Association of America, believe that the Lieberman bill would mean an end to the voluntary ratings of movies as companies would stop having their films rated in order to avoid potential liability.

Sources:

Celebs urge pols to drop marketing bill. Pamela McClintock, Variety, June 21, 2001.

Bush resists Lieberman’s fight against Hollywood. NewsMax.Com, June 22,2001.