In 1995, three US Marines kidnapped, beat, and raped a 12-year-old Okinawan girl. The men were convicted in a Japanese court, served their time, and went home. One of them went on to murder his girlfriend and then kill himself. The other two live somewhere in obscurity. As for the child, I have no information on what happened to her. I assume she was shielded from public view, and I hope that she has been able to get on with her life. For the people of Okinawa, this horrible crime is still very much alive. For the last 20 years, the people have been trying to get the US military to leave.

This last weekend, Al Jazeera reported, Thousands Protest Against US Airbase in Japan’s Okinawa. There are a total of 47,000 US military personnel in Japan, and over half of them are located on the Okinawa prefecture (kind of like a Japanese state). And the people are not happy. Think about it. There are roughly a million and a half people on the islands. And after two decades, they are still showing up in large numbers to protest. An estimated 35,000 protesters showed up in Naha — by far Okinawa’s largest city with a population of less than 350,000 people. It’s impressive, and maybe we should listen to them. (Obviously, it is a question for the Japanese government, but if we led, they would follow.)

After the outrage of the rape, the US military decided to move their Futenma base, where roughly 3,000 Marines are stationed. But all they wanted to do was to move it from one place on the Okinawa prefecture to another. Not too good. A 2007 poll found that 85% of the people in Okinawa were against the US military presence. But it seems only about half of them want the bases to go away completely; the other half would like to see them greatly reduced in size. And it isn’t surprising. According to The Guardian back in 2011, between 1972 and 2009, there were 5,634 criminal offense committed by the servicemen. “Among them are 25 murders, 385 burglaries, 25 arsons, 127 rapes, 306 assaults and 2,827 thefts.”

So why aren’t the military bases being moved? Well, according to the Japanese government, it is all Okinawa’s fault. At this point, Tokyo says that if they don’t want the base moved to another place on Okinawa, they have to come up with an alternative. This reminds me very much of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. As an occupation force, Israel is in charge of security, but Israel constantly complains about the Palestinian Authority not controlling its people. It’s the usual thing: those with power use it however they want, and when they don’t, they dump the responsibility onto the weak.

But look at the map at the top of this article. The red areas represent US military bases. We have these all over the world. This is what American empire looks like. I know that conservatives like to respond that we aren’t controlling the governments of other countries. But we don’t allow non-compliant governments to exist in areas that are important to us. And that was the same way it was under the British empire and the Roman empire. They always had their local stooges. I don’t think it is necessary for us to have an empire. In the long run, I think it is bad for us. But the least we could do is cooperate with the wishes of the people of Okinawa.

Paul Krugman highlighted a bit of disingenuousness about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) from the White House, Tariffs Versus Currencies. I thought it would be helpful to go into this a little bit because it is probably the most important single economic issue that we have to deal with. Basically: the dollar is too damned high. This is the reason that so many people are out of work. And this is the reason that we only manage to get to full employment when we have things like the late 1990s stock bubble and the late 2000s housing bubble.

In this new report (pdf), the authors said, “US businesses must overcome an average tariff hurdle of 6.8 percent, in addition to numerous non-tariff barriers (NTBs), to serve the roughly 95 percent of the world’s customers outside our borders.” Krugman noted that the 6.8% is supposed to sound like a very big number. But it isn’t. He provided the following graph that shows that value of the dollar (weighted by where we export) went up over 20% from last summer and the beginning of this year:

Clearly, the value of the dollar is a far bigger deal. But I understand: 6.8% is still extra forcing against our exports. The problem is that the tariff forcing works both ways: we tax their goods and they tax our goods. So this discussion is disingenuous in the same way that these discussions always are on the issue of increased trade.

Dean Baker provided a good way to think of this. Imagine that there is a car being built in Ohio. After the trade deal, the company decides to send all the parts to Mexico to have the car assembled, and then shipped back here for sale. All of those car assembly workers are out of a job, yet “trade” has gone way up!

The question remains, “Why don’t we do something about the over valued dollar?” And the reason is because having a high valued dollar is great if you already have a lot of them. The high valued dollar is only a problem if you are like 99% of working age Americans who need a job. In addition to this, companies like Walmart depend upon buying cheap products from other countries. If paper towels out of China suddenly go up in price by 20%, it is a big problem for them because their supply lines are already set up. If paper towels can be purchased more cheaply in the US, then another retailer could beat Walmart’s prices.

All of this is entirely typical of the way the we deal with all problems in this country: we don’t go straight at the problem; we nibble around the edges. The TPP apologists will claim that we don’t deal with currency manipulation because it is a hard problem. But the value of the dollar is not just an issue of currency manipulation. During the Clinton years we explicitly had a “strong dollar” policy — and nothing has really changed. And that shows you that the real reason we don’t deal with the issue of the value of the dollar — and by extension, the issue of our trade deficit — is because the power elite in this country don’t want to. And that should tell you all you need to know about the TPP: it is being crammed down our throats because the power elite want it — not because it is good for the country.

Have you read the privacy policy here at Frankly Curious? I’m assuming not, because there isn’t one. But if there were one, I can promise you this: I would have really meant it when I wrote it. I’m like Google: I do my best not to be evil — as long as it doesn’t inconvenience me much. But if I had a bunch of your private information, and I could sell it and retire in Paris (or even Canada), I would have a policy change. You would probably think that I was a jerk, but I would be justified in thinking that you were an idiot for believing me. For one thing: you didn’t even know that I didn’t have a privacy policy! If I did, I would doubtless have put something in it to allow me to weasel out of it.

Okay, maybe not. I pride myself on standing for something. Just the same, I have my price. I wouldn’t murder someone just to spend my evenings in cafes drinking Burgundy, but giving your contact information so that some company could sell you things is not the same. If someone offered me a more reasonable (but still unrealistically large) amount of money, like $1,000, I wouldn’t do it. I already have a hard enough time living with myself; I don’t need that on my conscience. So you are safe. More or less.

But given that privacy policies are apparently not legally binding, one might wonder why companies have them. The reason, I think, is because they are evil. They don’t know what they are going to do with all the personal information they have, but they know that it might be helpful to have it. At some point, it might be worth a lot of money. And then it is Burgundy Time, my friends! (How ever they may define that.) And then they just change that policy and sell out. Go team!

The reason I bring this up is because Radio Shack just announced that because of its bankruptcy, it is selling all of our personal information for $26 million. If you are as old as I am, you may remember that you simply could not go into a Radio Shack and purchase a half foot of wire without providing them with your full name and address. Really, the next time an employer wants to know where I’ve lived the last ten years (and increasingly, they all do), I should just refer them to Radio Shack. Or rather, Standard General, the company that is buying Radio Shack’s rotten corpse.

As Michael Hiltzik noted, Radio Shack made a very big deal out of their commitment to the personal data that the company collected on upwards of 120 million of us:

They did pride themselves on that! And now that they did exist, they don’t need no stinking pride. They need money to pay their creditors. And these creditors aren’t little people like are in their data files; they are rich people; you know, people who matter. Hiltzik joked that Radio Shack is like Captain Corcoran in HMS Pinafore, for whom “never” means “hardly ever.” But I’m afraid that is too generous a description of the company. Radio Shack valued customer privacy exactly up to the point where it didn’t.

The government doesn’t care. “Privacy Ombudsman” Elise Frejka decided that it was okay for Radio Shack to sell the data because it “is not of a sensitive nature.” One has to wonder, however, if that’s the case, why did Radio Shack make such a big deal out of collecting it? Also, it seems to me that it provides enormous amounts of personal data about shopping patterns. Regardless, if it is such banal data, why is it worth $26 million?

My only advice is to not trust anyone. And that is impossible in this modern world. We are supposed to have a government to protect us from such things. But in America, the government just facilitates whatever the rich want. The only solution if for us to take control of the government. I’m not hopeful about that.

Many years ago, I had the unfortunate experience to see the television documentary, 14 Children and Pregnant Again! about the Duggar family. And then there was 17 and 18 and finally 19 Kids and Counting.

I thought it was very creepy. The family had child rearing systematized, so that after the first year or so, the older children raised the younger children. It seemed to me that Michelle Duggar might be addicted to babies — neither she nor Jim Bob seemed to care that much about the children.

But what really bothered me was the complete lack of individuality of the children — and the complete lack of anything that I recognized as true joy. Of course, there was also the fact that the family clearly fetishized baby making, while taking an “abstinence only” approach to sex for the the kids and all the others who were not married according to God’s plan.

The Story of Josh

So now that we know that Josh, the eldest of the Duggar children, molested four of his younger sisters, we should not be surprised. Nor should we be surprised that Duggar Inc seemed to have already spent years with lawyers and PR advisers in preparation for this moment.

Both the statements by Jim Bob and Michelle, as well as that by Josh himself, refer to him being a “young teenager.” Not so much. I’ve gone over the 33 page police report from 2006, and Josh was molesting his sisters at least from June 2003 to March 2004 — that’s when Josh was between the ages of 15 and 16.

The statements are also full of euphemisms so juicy that I got dragged into this whole thing. Josh said he “acted inexcusably” and took steps to address the “situation.” His parents said that Josh made “some very bad mistakes” and they were “shocked.” And, of course: “Even though we would never choose to go through something so terrible, each one of our family members drew closer to God.”

I’m really tempted to make a sarcastic comment here, but it seems inappropriate. Christians always claim that no matter what happens to them, it brings them closer to Jesus; that’s fine, but maybe we should let the young women speak for themselves.

Denial Even in Rehab

Apparently, after Josh’s behavior was first alerted to his parents, he was sent to a “rehab” for three months. But according to the person who alerted the police to the situation, it was “not a rehab for sex offenders.” Given the timing of the first occurrences — roughly June 2003 — I assume it was some kind of Christian summer camp where postpubescent boys are taught that they must stifle all sexual urges until they get married. In other words, exactly the kind of thing that doubtless brought out this behavior in Josh in the first place.

I doubt very seriously that Josh Duggar is some kind of sexual deviant. Or at least if he is, that he was born that way. I simply do not think you can have a family whose raison d’être it pumping out babies and not make a 15 year old (or 14 or 13 — we don’t really know) mighty curious about what’s down there. And given the philosophy of the family about sex, it isn’t surprising. Stifling biological urges tends to create neuroses. So I’m inclined to be sympathetic to young Josh. (Grown Josh seems to be a total jerk.)

The Victims

I’m also, of course, sympathetic to the Duggar girls, who would have been ages 9-10, 10-11, 12-13, and 13-14. (I’m assuming he did not molest Joy-Anna, who would have been 5-6.) In the police report, they seem to have forgiven their brother and gotten on with their lives. But that gets back to what originally creeped me out about their kids: their acceptance of how ever life was — like dogs suffering from learned helplessness. I don’t know, but I wish them well.

But my sympathy does not extend to the the Duggar parents. To me, they’ve treated their children as a kind of commodity — something they sell for their very station in life. We didn’t need a sex scandal to know this. They’re clearly scarred their children in their clear neglect. And I wonder what other wounds are lurking in that family — both obvious and not. It’s very sad. Please Lord, don’t let these people adopt. And please just make them go away.

Update (22 May 2015 8:29 pm)

Looking at more of the police report, the Duggars said that the events took place a year earlier than stated in the initial complaint. That makes all of the ages one year older than I reported above. Of course, that timeline also just so happens to put the behavior outside the statue of limitations. But I assume that it is correct.

I’ve also heard a lot of people talking about Josh molesting girls who were not his sisters. This does not seem to be the case, although it is hard to say for sure. Also, it looks like he may also have molested 6-year-old Joy-Anna. Other miscellaneous information: the Duggars spank their children with a rod and the children were home schooled.

Update (30 April 2021 12:04 pm)

It just gets worse. Josh Duggar was already facing a civil case for real estate fraud (you know, like Jesus). And now he’s been indicted on child pornography charges.

Josh Duggar by Tengrain under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Digby wrote a great article over at Kevin Drum’s blog at Mother Jones, No, the GOP Has Not Lost Its Lust for War. It is about all the garbage that we’ve been hearing from “centrist” pundits about how the Republican Party is finally turning libertarian. The truth is that Republicans have never been libertarians. It is an affectation. And during the glory months of the Tea Party, it was a delusion.

The main thing you have to remember is that most Republicans are sheep. They don’t really think anything; they just feel — mostly, outrage and fear. And so, when the Tea Party was big, they were willing to follow along with the libertarian bent of the early days. Of course, that libertarian bent was only there so they could justify the policy that they were suddenly for. Remember that the Tea Party did not start because of the bank bailouts. It started when the federal government wanted to help homeowners. So supporters of the movement didn’t want to come off as the complete jerks that they were. So now they were against all government intervention! And that meant they were “libertarians”!

Once the coast was clear and there was no Fox News drum beat about this stuff — no Amy Kremer interviews to explain what they were to think — they went back to their base instincts. As Elvis Costello put it in Suit of Lights, “If it moves then you fuck it. If it doesn’t then you stab it.” In the case of the Republican base, it is about “getting those people.” And that means cuts to welfare for the poor and more foreign wars. In other words: the standard conservative line. And the elites were fine with it, as long as the base kept voting Republican.

Of course, even in 2010, the main thing that distinguished Tea Party candidates was there extreme social conservatism. The single most important issue was abortion absolutism: no abortions for any reasons at all (even the anti-libertarian belief of no exception for the life of the mother). So none of this should come as any surprise. The truth was that Rand Paul’s non-interventionist positions were treated with either mystification or hostility. And as I predicted, Rand Paul has been willing to abandon even his tepid libertarianism. Why? Because he has to — there is no appetite for it in the Republican Party.

Digby’s article quoted an NBC-WSJ poll that found that a whopping 27% of Republicans said that national security/terrorism was the most important issue facing the country. This has more than tripled since the question was last asked in 2012. And way? Check out this amazing reason that goes right along with what I’ve been saying, “[A] ‘savvy Republican operative’ explained that this threefold increase in concern can be attributed to the rise of ISIS and the movie American Sniper arousing the militarist urge in the GOP base.” A movie! Of course, as Digby commented, “That may be true, but let’s just say it was never exactly deeply buried.” That’s right: outrage and fear.

I’ve argued a lot in the past that if libertarians were serious, they would be more attracted to the Democratic Party than the Republican Party. The Democratic Party is much stronger on individual rights. What the Republican Party is good at is the rights of the wealthy. That may be great in a theoretical sense, but as a practical matter, it is the Democratic party that increases liberty. The Republican Party is still dead set against cannabis legalization. Of course, the vast majority of libertarians are not serious.

What Republicans mean when they say they are libertarians is that they are for “smaller government.” As should be clear by now, Republicans Are Not for Smaller Government. And in the same way, they are not for libertarianism. (Not that many actual libertarians are either.) But Republicans will call themselves anything as long as they are told to. They are excellent followers.

See also: Republican Party’s Libertarian Fantasies.

I watched the Frontline episode Secrets, Politics, and Torture. It’s sad that the show now has to be so careful, but even still, the whole thing is outrageous. I was literally talking to the screen while watching it. And there really wasn’t anything in it that I didn’t already know. I suppose the hard part about watching it was seeing these people who clearly should be prison for the rest of their lives. And I have a policy idea that I’ll discuss in a bit.

Not surprisingly, most of the CIA didn’t show up to be interviewed. The main representative was for Deputy Director John McLaughlin. And despite all his apologetics and, frankly, outright lies, his position was summarized in this quote, “We were at war; bad things happen in wars.” That’s so true. But that didn’t stop us from trying and executing Nazis. But of course, the statement itself is disingenuous. We were at war, but that wasn’t what the torture program was all about. Obviously, the CIA’s torture program eventually infected the military, but it didn’t start there.

Regardless, the torture program was not a matter of some agents getting out of hand — over-eager in carrying out their duties. This was a clear plan — decided at the top. It was implemented with eyes wide open. And that is clear from the other representative of the government CIA Acting General Counsel John Rizzo. He did everything he could to get political cover for the torture program and lay the legal foundation for it. I don’t especially blame him; he’s a lawyer, after all. But the fact remains that the torture program was no accident of war.

Rizzo claimed that he had never heard any complaints about the program not working or being, you know, wrong. I believe him. Why would he have been told? I do think it most likely that he did everything he could to avoid hearing anything. But the others knew. And they didn’t care. Or more accurately, they didn’t care what they were doing to other people; they loved the program. Perhaps we can say that George W Bush was just misinformed. But clearly, the top people in the CIA pushed the program and lied about its effectiveness to keep the torture going. They should all die in federal prison.

A very telling part of the documentary is the story of Abu Zubaydah. After his capture, FBI agent Ali Soufan was brought in to use the standard — and highly effective — technique of rapport building. And Zubaydah was very helpful. But the CIA were certain that they could get more from him if they just got tough. Think: Tom Clancy Combat Concepts. So the CIA took over and began to torture him, using two charlatans who had no actual experience with interrogation. And in the end, they got nothing. This is largely due to the fact that the opportunity costs of torture greatly outweigh any possible benefits. But also because they had always been wrong: Abu Zubaydah was not a high ranking member of Al Qaeda. But that didn’t stop Deputy Director McLaughlin from repeatedly claiming that the torture was necessary because Zubaydah was a “psychopath,” who wouldn’t be truthful — even though he had been!

I have an idea for how we can avoid these things. As we saw at Abu Ghraib, even when people are held to account, it is just low level people. What was done at that prison was nothing compared to what the CIA did for years. So I say we hold top people accountable for systemic “failures” like this — because they aren’t failures. Sure, there will be the occasional “bad apple.” But what happened at the CIA was not a case like that. In fact, it seems that many if not most of the agents being forced to do the torture didn’t want to — at least in the early days. So when Jose Rodriguez erased the torture tapes, he should have been arrested, tried, convicted, and spent the rest of his life in jail. So should John McLaughlin and George Tenet and Dick Cheney and many others. Will that mean that people are reticent to take those jobs? Sure. But who cares? All the high level people will have a great incentive to not allow anything to get out of hand.

Afterword

The documentary ends with a discussion of the Panetta Review. It is a “top secret” document that apparently shows that internally, the CIA agrees with everything the Congressional investigation found. The main thing I thought while watching it was that none of it or any of the other documents will come out in my lifetime. But the reason that they won’t is the same reason that the United States probably won’t be a great nation in a century. Like all great empires, we spend most of our time just trying to hang onto power and save face. Meanwhile, there are countries out there that are actively working to improve themselves. There is too much power consolidation in the United States. And power will do whatever it can to maintain that power in the short term. And inch by inch, our country is destroyed. The day will come when our economy just can’t bear to spend almost as much on our military as the rest of the world combined. And after that, what do we have?

The British surveillance agency GCHQ (more or less their version of the NSA) showed its liberal colors by literally lighting its exterior with rainbow colored lights. Glenn Greenwald is not pleased, GCHQ’s Rainbow Lights: Exploiting Social Issues for Militarism and Imperialism. He related this to a very general tactic that we’ve seen for decades of wars being sold as liberal causes. But of course, all that is really going on is that liberal excuses are being offered for conservative and nationalistic policies. This is how you get people like Peter Beinart and Jonathan Chait to support a bloody good war: give them some (Any!) rationale for the war and they hop right on board.

I remember what is perhaps the best example of this. As we were set to go to war with Afghanistan, we were feed all this information about how terrible the Taliban were to women. This, of course, had the advantage of being true. But just like the old liberal cause for war — “Free people from oppressive regimes!” — this excuse had nothing to do with the reason that we were going to war. There are lots of regimes all over the world that treat women as bad or worse. But we weren’t invading them. (Also note: when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, it too brought equitable treatment of women — but that didn’t change our opinions of that war.)

I used to think about this a lot when I was a kid. We supposedly went to war in Vietnam to keep the country democratic and the people free. Yet we were just fine with Latin American despots like Augusto Pinochet. And as became very clear shortly after that time, democracy is not something we approve of if the people vote for governments we don’t like. You have to be pretty naive to think that we go to war for the benefit of the people we are bombing. It’s a pretty story, but it is almost never the case.

It should be seen as a good thing that now LGBT rights are mainstream enough that they are used by neocons to sell wars. But there is one thing that bothers me. Both LGBT and women’s rights are issues that are most effective to sell to the upper classes — Chris Hedges’ “liberal class.” The ultimate liberal cause would be the poor: that regime is harming the poor! But we don’t hear that. And I think we don’t hear that because no one cares what the working poor in this country think. For one thing, they are too busy surviving to pay much attention. The “liberal class” — like all classes — only care about themselves. The “liberal class” is filled with women and LGBT members. So let’s go to war anywhere because those kinds of people are being oppressed, am I right?!

This gets to one of the most depressing elements of politics in America. Over the last thirty years, “liberalism” has largely been cleaned of economics and foreign policy. The Democratic Party mostly stands for social issues. African Americans are largely as poor as they were fifty years ago, but at least they have the right to vote! Women may face systemic career discrimination, but at least they have the constitutional — but often not the practical — right to an abortion! LGBT members may not be able to afford a wedding, but they largely have the right to one![1] Modern liberalism sure is grand: if you are rich, it really does make you equal!

There seems to be a general political law here. If GCHQ or other odious government institutions are ostentatiously in support of certain kinds of rights, then those rights are no longer liberal. They are just mainstream. That’s especially true of LGBT rights. If you are against them, then you are a bigot. If you are for them, it doesn’t mean you a liberal — just that you are a human. Liberals need to be held to a higher standard than just figuring out an issue at the same time the average American does. (And yes: that was a reference to President Obama.)

[1] None of this is to say that any of these gains are unimportant. Most especially, the right to vote is very important. And African American show this by voting at high (for Americans) levels.