One of the great conservative canards is that the government can’t do anything right. Not only is this wrong, but the government is very often better at offering its complicated services than the private sector is at offering its simple services. But the one area where the government does the worst job is when the operations are secret. The things we’ve learned years later about covert operations are often scandalous in their stupidity. Of course, these are exactly the things that conservatives most approve of with regard to the government. And not surprisingly, they are also the parts of the government that are most controlled by conservatives.

Thus, I was intrigued to read Cora Currier, Glenn Greenwald, and Andrew Fishman, US Government Designated Prominent Al Jazeera Journalist as “Member of Al Qaeda.” It is based upon the Edward Snowden files — the gift that keeps on giving. Apparently, the US government has labeled veteran Islamabad bureau chief for Al Jazeera Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan as a member of Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. And it is all based upon metadata. Given that Zaidan has traveled to and from terrorist locations, they’ve determined that he must be a courier. Like I said: stupid. Of course, it is also just heartless. What does it matter to them if an innocent man is targeted? Especially an actual journalist!

Note that it is based upon this kind of metadata that the CIA and the military call in drone attacks. So this kind of bulk collection of data doesn’t just put the very practice of journalism in jeopardy, it potentially puts journalists’ lives in danger. I have to wonder what our government would say after calling a strike on Zaidan in downtown Islamabad while having lunch with a group of journalists. “They were all men of military age, so they must have been combatants”? It wouldn’t be anymore absurd than much else that the government has claimed in the “war on terror.”

Of course, none of this is new. The article also goes through various times in the past when the US government has targeted Al Jazeera and its employees. This included, “Sami al-Hajj, an Al Jazeera cameraman, was imprisoned by the US government at Guantanamo for six years before being released in 2008 without ever being charged.” It’s been clear for a long time that the US government just doesn’t like the network because it has a “scary” sounding name and it reports from the other side of our bombing campaigns and so makes us look bad.

That hasn’t stopped the US from being hypocritical, however. “The Obama administration has criticized Egypt for holding three of Al Jazeera’s journalists on charges of aiding the Muslim Brotherhood.” And so on. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the US government doesn’t do more harm than good. In the name of making the world “safe for democracy” it is destroying democracy.

This doesn’t just apply to “those people” over there. This revelation comes right after the domestic news, NSA’s Bulk Collection Of Americans’ Phone Data Is Illegal, Appeals Court Rules. But the story of Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan shows what a farce are the government claims that metadata don’t mean anything. The only way that we get control of this is if we drag this stuff out into the light. And the government will do everything it can to avoid doing that. I’m not hopeful.

Last week, I posted a quote from Matt Bruenig, Don’t Blame Unions for Police Brutality. I didn’t realize that calling for an end of police unions was becoming a thing. Last weekend, Ross Douthat wrote, Our Police Union Problem. I will admit, I’ve never been that keen on police unions, simply because I haven’t been that keen on the police. But I nevertheless support police unions because I support workers and their rights to organize. Of course, Douthat is a complete nitwit when it comes to the issue.

He started his article with the usual litany for why public sector unions are bad. For example, “[T]he government’s money is not its own, so negotiations between politicians and their employees (who are also often their political supporters) amount to a division of spoils rather than a sharing of profits.” His unstated assumption here is that taxation is theft. That’s a position that one can take, but almost no one actually buys it. He also noted that unions drive up the costs of services. But who is to say what the value of the services is? We could use slave labor for our policing. That would certainly drive the price of services down. But would that be just? Why is the compensation derived at through collective bargaining too high, while a divide-and-conquer approach is correct?

Just to show that there are no limits to his nonsense, he finished off, “Finally, union lobbying power can bias public-policy decisions toward the interests of state employees.” But private sector companies lobby the government over public policy decisions with the intent of advantaging themselves. How is this different? Douthat doesn’t say because it is just a given that workers are bad and businesses are good.

Finally, Douthat got to his main point: police unions. He made some kind of weird comparison between police and teacher unions. And then he concluded that police unions are always standing in the way of making positive changes in public policy. For example, police unions have been against the use of body cameras. I take his point, but this is not the problem of police unions. They are not the all powerful entities of conservative imagination. And the main way that they have power is through their alignment with conservative politics where laws are passed to disempower public sector unions with special carve-outs for the police.

The big problem here is that people don’t understand the purpose of unions. They exist to protect their members. They are not NGOs or other groups looking out for the public good. Cesar Chavez was given a lot of heat at one time about the UFW being against immigration. People seemed to think that it was his job to be looking out for the interests all Latinos or something. That wasn’t true. His job was to get the best working conditions for his union’s members. The same is true for teachers. And for the police.

Unions are a counterbalance to the power of those who employ them. No one ever questions but that Walmart should be making money. No one complains that it isn’t out in the world trying to get its customers to eat right and exercise. But unions are expected to do this. Or rather, people like Ross Douthat pretend that this is what unions should do. It’s a way of vilifying unions by pretending that they have a charter to make the world a better place.

I accept that police unions — any unions — can be a problem in making positive changes. But that doesn’t make them bad. And regardless, the problems we see with policing throughout the United States are not due to police unions. If the governments who oversee them want to make changes, they can make the changes. Policing did not become militarized because of police unions. Abusive officers do not flourish in departments because of police unions. The lack of widespread use of body cameras is not because of police unions. The government has great resources to make changes, and people like Ross Douthat want to avoid the real question by blaming police unions. It’s a step up from blaming police brutality on single motherhood. But not much of a step.

You may have heard the story of US Army Major Mathew L Golsteyn, whose application to go to the CIA ended in an investigation of his committing war crimes in Afghanistan. Well, this week, Ryan Devereaux and Jeremy Scahill at The Intercept published, Documents: Green Beret Who Sought Job At CIA Confessed To Murder. When it was originally reported, The Washington Post only said that, “Mathew L Golsteyn was investigated by the Army Criminal Investigation Command for an undisclosed violation of the US military’s rules of engagement in 2010 that resulted in the death of a known enemy fighter and bombmaker in Helmand province, Afghanistan, according to the officials.” That puts a rather nice gloss on it.

It turns out that Golsteyn had told the CIA that he had captured and murdered this man, “Golsteyn stated that he knew it was illegal but was not remorseful as he had solid intelligence…” Judge, jury, and executioner. According to him, he buried the body, but then want back a couple of days later with two friends and burned the body. The army punished him as much as they could, but they couldn’t court martial him because they had no corroborating evidence. That in itself is interesting, because scores of Americans have been sent to their deaths based only on confessions — or supposed confessions. I’m glad the army works this way; I wish our civilian criminal justice system were so fair.

What is most interesting about all this is that Golsteyn might be lying. He might have been saying this just to impress his future employers. And I find that quite troubling. It shows that a lot of our men in uniform are psychopaths. What’s more, this kind of behavior shows a complete lack of respect for the military chain of command. Supposedly, Golsteyn alone knew that this man was a bomb maker and he alone went out and did something about it. According to the Army, the man was a noncombatant. Thus, Golsteyn is either a murderer or just a guy who wants to be thought of as a murderer.

Of course, now Golsteyn has become something of a cause célèbre on the right. Basically, he had some medals taken away, and now the army seems keen on getting rid of him. Law of war expert, Geoffrey Corn, noted, “It’s a career ending administrative sanction for an officer. The stripping of the medals is peripheral. The real thing is once he gets this reprimand in his official file, then somebody’s going to say we should process him to be separated from the military—in other words, fire him.” It doesn’t much matter whether he was telling the truth or not; he’s made the Army look bad.

It’s interesting to see the conservatives flock to Golsteyn’s defense, because it shows that they don’t really support the military and the troops. Their notions of the military come from Rambo. But individuals don’t win wars; armies win wars. What the Army is doing to Golsteyn is the maximum that it can given the information that they have. Golsteyn claimed that “his actions protected the safety of his fellow teammates.” That might have been true in the short term. But in the long term, it hurts the military mission in Afghanistan. But in the mind of conservatives, we just need a small group of Golsteyns to go in there and kick ass. This is the same kind of thinking that we can bomb our way to victory. Yes, we can kill everyone. But that isn’t what we are trying to do in Afghanistan.

Ed Kilgore made a good point: if you want to know what the Republican response to the problems in Baltimore are, look at Jeb Bush. After all, he is the most “moderate” of the 2016 presidential candidates. So we are going to get the most reasonable ideas from him. So it is worth while to take a look at his little OpEd, Jeb Bush’s War on Poverty Revamp. It starts off with the obligatory “it sure is sad that a young man was murdered by the police.” But then, he goes immediately after the city government, “Those who permitted this to happen must be held accountable because public safety is the first responsibility for those who lead our cities.” He’s not referring to what happened to Freddie Gray; he’s referring to the burning of the CVS. Apparently, that’s the real story.

Bush is not at all interested in revamping the war on poverty. He’s interested in slapping at Democrats and liberal policy. In a bit of unintended comedy, he wrote that “voices on the left tick off tired explanations.” And then he went on to provide three incredibly tired and useless ideas of his own. Idea number one: “If our government leaders want to attack poverty, they should first acknowledge that an effective anti-poverty program is a strong family, led by two parents.” What insight!

Apparently, no Republican can talk about poverty without talking about the two parent household. There is a correlation here. Two parent households do have higher standards of living. But it simply isn’t true that making people stay in dysfunctional marriages is good for the kids. But conservatives love this idea because it allows them to blame the poor for their problems. It’s like David Brooks’ continued lectures to the poor that if they’d only act like middle class people, they too would succeed.

But the bigger reason why Bush wants to “strengthen” the family is because it doesn’t require that the government do anything. The biggest social change that I’ve seen in my lifetime has been the shift to two earner households. When I was a kid, pretty much all the the mothers were at home. That added a great deal of social cohesion. Families could survive and even thrive on a single paycheck. But is Bush in favor of that? Of course not! He’s on the leading edge of taking money away from the poorer classes and giving it to the rich.

His second idea is just as unimpressive and tired: education. If only we provide better education, then everyone will get good jobs. I’m not keen on the whole “education as job training” idiocy. But regardless, we now see millions of young people who did get good educations, including college degrees, who can’t find good work. Why? Because the jobs just aren’t there. Again, this is because we have an unfair economic system that takes from the poor and gives to the rich. And who is to blame for the fact schools are failing? Teachers’ unions of course!

But even worse is that Bush just lies about the situation in Baltimore. He claims that on average, $15,000 is spent per child on their education. The problem is that this includes all schools — including charter schools. Public schools get just over $5,000 per year per student.[1] And as I harp on all the time, students in rich areas get more money spent on them than children in poor areas. Is Bush willing to do anything about that? Fat chance.

And Bush’s third idea for fixing Baltimore is probably the worst: “encourage people in the toughest neighborhoods to start up businesses.” And how will they do that? Well, as Mitt Romney instructed, they should just get a loan from their parents. Bush seriously suggests that it is regulation that is stopping people from starting businesses in “tough” neighborhoods. He’s just clueless.

As we all know, Bush is moderate only in the sense that he doesn’t foam at the mouth. His solutions to Baltimore are exactly the same as we will hear from the rest of the Republicans running for president. If you strip away the very minor policies that are implied, they are just about blaming the victims: you aren’t staying married; you aren’t staying in school; you aren’t starting businesses. If Republicans were honest, they would just say that they have no ideas for how to make things better in places like Baltimore and they are okay with treating the people there as though they didn’t matter.

See also: Media Determined to Make Jeb Bush a Moderate.

[1] Since there seems to be some confusion about Baltimore school funding, here is the quote from Think Progress:

It’s hard to get too upset about this last week’s elections in the United Kingdom. The truth is that the UK still has a decent welfare state and the Tories aren’t nearly as crazy as our own Republicans. (There are indications that it is getting worse, though.) But I find the whole thing interesting. It’s especially notable that what happened in the UK is the same thing that happened in Israel: the people have become more polarized. The Conservative Party won the election outright, but not because people stopped being liberal. Its gains came from the destruction of the centrist Liberal Democrats.

It’s actually remarkable. In 2010, the Conservative Party got 306 seats and the Liberal Democrats got 57 seats. So the coalition got 363 seats or 56% (they got 59.4% of the popular vote). This time, the Conservative Party got 330 seats but the Liberal Democrats got only 8 seats. So the coalition got 338 seats or 52% (just 44.8% of the popular vote). So all that really happened was that a large part of the Liberal Democrats moved to the Conservative Party — but over half went somewhere else completely. This does not bode well for the Conservative Party. And again, it is just like what happened to Likud in Israel — it hangs onto power because all the conservative minded people jumped to its defense. But where does that lead? After all, the Conservative Party may have won 51% of the seats, but it only won 37% of the vote.[1]

The Labour Party did worse in terms of seats this time, going from 258 in 2010 to 232 this year. But they got decidedly more votes: from 29.0% in 2010 to 30.4 now. And they should have done even better. They seem to have seen the opposite of what happened to the Tories: liberal minded voters moved from Labour to smaller parties. The Green Party saw a huge surge in vote totals, from 0.9% to 3.8% — although they still only have one seat. But the biggest news is from the Scottish National Party (SNP). Now part of that is just because of the Scottish independence movement. But as Richard Seymour noted, the party also benefited by not being ideologically squishy, “SNP defended a simple, civilized position: no austerity, stop demonizing people on welfare, and welcome immigrants.”

It is hard to say whether or not Labour lost because — like the Democratic Party here in the US — it doesn’t much stand for anything other than not being quite as bad as the conservatives. The main issue, I think, is just that the economy in the UK has been doing fairly well the last year or two. As Paul Krugman has pointed out, that tends to trump all else. Basically, the Conservative Party got into office, hurt the economy badly with austerity policies, eventually stopped the austerity policies, and when the economy improved, credited the austerity policies for it. We’ve seen this again and again in the US; see, for example, the 2004 presidential election.

But in another post, Krugman pointed out another potential problem, Stop-Go Austerity and Self-Defeating Recoveries. One can look at this election very cynically. The Tories enacted harsh austerity to destroy social programs. Then they stopped it to get re-elected. Now they could enact more austerity for a while, and then again reverse it to get re-elected. But I don’t even think they have to be cynical to do that. I think that the conservatives actually think that austerity is the right thing to do. I suspect that they see the easing up on austerity as being an unfortunate political necessity, but that in the long run, destroying all unions and environmental regulations and welfare is the best for everyone. And by “everyone,” they mean themselves.

We’ll see what the future holds for the United Kingdom. The Tories may be disinclined to do too much damage, because Scotland still poses a problem. It seems to be getting more liberal by the day. So it may be what saves the UK. On the other hand, if Scotland ever does leave the UK, it might bode very poorly for the people of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. If that happens, Labour will really need to step things up. Or just wait until the Tories destroy the country.

[1] I will admit to being mystified by parliamentary elections. The vile UK Independence Party (UKIP) got 12.6% of the popular vote and yet only one seat out of 650. I guess they have a little support everywhere but a lot of support only one place. But I don’t know.

Jonathan Chait wrote, Hillary Clinton Sets an Immigration Trap for Republicans. This is in reference to her full throated support for immigration reform and promise to do even more regarding the issue than President Obama has. Chait thinks it is quite a brilliant move, and I agree. It has the added benefit of being something that no one can doubt Clinton actually believes in. What I don’t quite follow is this continued narrative that somehow the Republicans had an opportunity to “take immigration off the issue table” after the 2012 election. That just isn’t true.

What the Republicans had was the opportunity to do something about immigration. But what they were willing to do only made them look worse. I’ve been writing about this for years, Republican Control of Congress Will Not Rebrand Them. When the Senate passed an immigration bill it had a staggering 13 year — best case scenario — pathway to citizenship. But even that was too much for the House, which increased it to 18 years — and then wouldn’t even vote for it. I just don’t see that it would do the Republicans much good to say to the Latino community, “We’re going to do this one thing for you, and we really resent doing it, so don’t ever ask for anything ever again!” I think that’s probably worse than doing nothing at all.

According to Chait, the Republican plan is to not talk about immigration during the primary and then in the general election to not sound too awful. That strikes me as a pretty lame strategy. To start with, the conservative base shares a myth. They all believe that fixing immigration is the same as fixing just about any problem: easy. According to their mythology, the only reason people get into the country illegally is because we allow them to. If only the president put his foot down and somehow willed it, there would be no more undocumented immigrants. The fact that most undocumented immigrants came here legally and overstayed their visas doesn’t matter in the least.

The main point is that conservative voters want to hear how “hard” their candidates are going to be. They don’t want nuance. They don’t even want solutions. They want aggressive rhetoric. So they are not going to allow the Republican Party to get all the way through the primaries without getting a bidding war between the candidates. “I see your self-deportation and raise you a special immigration force that will go through immigrant areas with flame throwers.” If the Republican Party were in control of this kind of thing, it would have done something about the problem long ago. But the primary appeal of the Republican Party is that it is against “those people.” Otherwise, their old white voter base might as well go with the Democrats who are at least competent.

There is a bigger problem. No Republican will ever support an immigration deal that is not predicated on “closing the border.” This, of course, will never happen. Given the conservative voters’ belief that it is a kind of conspiracy that anyone gets across the border, as long as anyone can get across the border, it is an excuse to do nothing. And now we have Scott Walker arguing that — far from providing a pathway to citizenship for people here illegally — we should greatly reduce legal immigration. All of this is likely to cause a feeding frenzy among the Republican candidates. Who can be the “hardest”?

This is a political mess for the Republicans, and it is of their own making. Being against any form of immigration reform is not a policy position. For the Republican primary voter, it is a necessary condition. The plan for the candidates was always to say nothing now, and then, during the general election, to make vague promises with caveats that made them meaningless. So the Republicans’ big plan was just to not be too offensive to non-white voters. And that was no plan at all.

Something that conservatives don’t seem to have much of a grasp on is the fact that the corporation is a government defined entity. There is nothing natural about it. In the natural world, if a company sold Thalidomide as a cure for morning sickness for pregnant women and their babies were born with absent or greatly deformed limbs, there would be no personal immunity. The top executives in the company would be executed by mobs of people. The decaying executive heads would be mounted on pikes with signs that read, “This is what we do to people who put profits above people.”

But despite what just about any libertarian you talk to will say, we don’t live in a natural world. We protect capitalist villains and one of the big ways we do that is through the legal construct called the corporation. This is something I understood very well when I was a libertarian. I was the only libertarian I knew who was for the elimination of the corporation. As the saying goes: with rights come responsibility. But for the modern conservative, just the opposite is true: the greater the rights, the less you should be held accountable. But don’t let the ideologues fool you: corporations are a something we give to business owners. And they need to pay us back for it.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has a new proposal to clean up the corporate world. And while it won’t make things worse, it fully embraces an idea that is destroying our country and the world. It takes as given a point that is very much contested: that shareholders are the the only stakeholders of a corporation. Think about that for a moment: the society gives corporations all kinds of legal immunity and tax advantages. But the society isn’t a stakeholder. The corporation can rape the society and it is all fine because the society had no part in the success of the corporation. Note also: these are the same corporations that run to the government the moment they get into trouble.

Michael Hiltzik wrote a really informative article earlier week, The Right Way to Measure CEO Pay Has Nothing to Do With “Shareholder Value.” I hadn’t known that it was Milton Friedman who really got going the idea that corporations owe nothing to anyone but their shareholders. And the argument he used was the most facile of libertarian nonsense: basically because that was the only obvious way to figure out what a corporation ought to be doing. Workers aren’t stakeholders, so when Carly Fiorina fires tens of thousands of workers even while driving her company into the ground, she should be paid tens of millions of dollars. It’s just obvious to Milton Friedman and other psychopaths.

It’s fairly easy to see why corporations looking only at shareholder profits is a doomed strategy. It is akin to the paradox of thrift. With every company trying to cut its workforce and move its operations out of the country, you gradually destroy the customer base for your products. As Hiltzik pointed out:

But I don’t blame the corporations. They are like the caribou who were so successful they staved to death. We shouldn’t expect corporate CEOs or stockholders to be any smarter than those stupid animals. This is why we need to regulate companies. We need to stop them from doing what might help themselves this quarter, but will hurt them and the rest of the economy in the long run. “Enlightened self-interest” was always a myth.