Handcuffs for 20% of Our Workforce

Handcuffs for 20% of Our Workforce

We Call them Non-Compete Agreements

“Noncompetes harm competition in U.S. labor markets by blocking workers from pursuing better opportunities and by preventing employers from hiring the best available talent.” 

January 5th FTC Announcement

There are viable alternatives under state and federal law to protect trade secrets, but we have built an new employment system in much of the country to restrict employees from working for competing companies when they leave their existing employers: the use of non-compete clauses in employment agreements. And as the above title suggests, the practice is pervasive and has become downright abusive. While a few states have banned or placed limits on the practice, the use of non-competes at all levels of employment remains widespread.

You may have noticed a major tilt in judicial (particularly the US Supreme Court) and administrative rulings during the Trump administration, and thereafter where Trump appointees still hold position of power, favoring minority populist beliefs. Including allowing big business to restrict their workers when they move on, for whatever reason. While the Biden administration, via the Federal Trade Commission, is focused on ending some of these abuses, there is a real question on whether or not the FTC has the legal authority to restrict past and future non-compete agreements.

Leveling the playing field and encouraging competition seem like bedrock principles of American business, those with power – whether via campaign contributions or simple raw economic mega-power – are used to getting their way in Congress and so many state legislatures. There’s a reason why fund managers are taxed at vastly more favorable rates than their administrative assistants. Those “accelerated depreciation” benefits embedded in the Internal Revenue Code don’t really reduce taxes for all but the richest in the land, and the current GOP House majority’s efforts to repeal recent upgrades to the IRS budget are obviously not focused on 90% of American taxpayers. The benefits and exemptions accorded to those with true economic power is absurdly disproportionate. Call it corporate socialism if you will.

In the January 9th edition of the Journal of the American Bar Association (disclosure: I am an ABA member), Debra Cassens Weiss addresses the issues surrounding a proposed effort by the FTC to ban or limit the use of non-competes in United States: “The proposed rule would ban new noncompete agreements and require rescission of existing noncompete contracts. Generally, the rule would not ban other types of employment restrictions, unless they are so broad that they function as a noncompete agreement. The rule would also include an exemption for noncompete clauses between the seller and buyer of a business.

“The FTC is seeking comment on the proposed rule, including on these topics:

• Whether franchisees should be subject to the rule

• Whether noncompetes for senior executives should be exempted from the rule or subject to a rebuttable presumption of unlawfulness

• Whether low- and high-wage workers should be treated differently

“The FTC’s power to adopt the law will likely be challenged in court, according to Bloomberg Law. During a press briefing, Lina Khan, chair of the FTC, cited a 1975 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, National Petroleum Refiners Association v. FTC, which held that the commission may issue rules related to unfair competition.

“Richard Pierce, a professor at the George Washington University Law School, told Bloomberg Law that the decision is a weak justification… ‘It’s highly unlikely that it would be upheld by the Supreme Court today,’ Pierce said. ‘I continue to be extremely skeptical that FTC has power to use notice and comment rulemaking to define an unfair method of competition.’” Indeed, given the current configuration of the US Supreme Court, knowing that any restrictive rulemaking by the FTC in this arena would instantly be challenged in court, the ability of the FTC to act against non-competes is questionable. With Congress mired in gridlock, seeing any bills against non-competes pass is little more than a hope and a prayer. Cassen continues:

“Bloomberg Law also cited a statement by Sean Heather, a senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Heather said the rule would not survive because ‘Congress has never delegated the FTC anything close to the authority it would need to promulgate such a competition rule.’… One obstacle is the ‘major questions’ doctrine, which holds that courts should not defer to agency statutory interpretations on questions of ‘vast economic or political significance.’

“‘We could see a major-questions doctrine challenge arguing that whether noncompetes are good competition policy is something to be decided by Congress, not an agency,’ said Catherine Fisk, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law, in an interview with Bloomberg Law… Clifford Atlas, a principal at the law firm Jackson Lewis, told Law.com that the FTC was ‘swinging for the fences,’ and there would ‘absolutely’ be legal challenge to the rule.”

The GOP has openly abandoned maintaining a political platform, now focused on culture wars, finding blame and reversing existing laws and precedents. The notion of solving this nation’s problems seems to have left the building. As the disarray in selecting the House Speaker illustrates, we have a congressional configuration that is thoroughly incapable of governing, and if there are to be any changes championed by this populist GOP congressional contingent, it is only like to favor the rich or those with evangelically-supported national beliefs. As for most of us, don’t hold your breath for any positive movement on your behalf.

I’m Peter Dekom, and in so many ways, large and small, our elected representatives and their appointees are slowly chipping away at a legal system that is supposed to treat all of us equally to be replaced with some very limited and radical minority views.

Supreme Court vs the United States: Abortion Revisited

If the massive protests and the results of the midterm “red ripple” did not tell you how American women felt about the Supreme Court’s reversal of their own precedent (Roe vs Wade) in last year’s Dobbs vs Jackson Women’s Health Organization, poll results make that statement very clear. Reflective of a 26% differential between Republicans and Democrats on whether religious influence in politics is a good thing, a Gallup Poll, announced on February 2nd, also tells us that only 26% of those polled are in accord with the Dobbs decision and the state of abortion rights in this country. The number approximates the number of self-identified American evangelicals.

We know that with GOP House majority, there is no real likelihood of a Congressional bill to make the prior Roe standard (or some semblance thereof) into a federal statute. As candidate Donald Trump himself has pointed out, the red state obsession with banning or limited abortion lost House seats and kept a Democratic majority in the Senate was materially responsible for that result. He obviously did not reference sentiments over his support for many losing candidates. Even the noise of rightwing voices in Congress trying to pass a national abortion ban is well drowned out by reality. The Biden administration, with full support of elected Democrats, has used its power to open as many channels as it can to women in red states seeking what would otherwise be illegal abortions.

While some of these red state efforts – such as attempting to prosecute individuals, institutions and even governmental agencies in abortion-permissive blue states for performing abortions on red state residents and banning travel from red to blue states to get an abortion – seem violative of the Constitution on their face (although with a rogue Supreme Court, one cannot be certain) – presidential executive orders, federal agency jurisdiction (e.g., the military, the Food and Drug Administration) and Department of Justice advisories, guidelines and interpretations have been crafted to open doors to red state women seeking to end unwanted pregnancies. But such federal efforts have quickly been countered by red states’ continuing to seek to impose a distinct minority view on anyone they can.

Some Republicans standing for higher office in states where anti-abortion sentiments are “light,” have often sidestepped being overtly supportive of abortion bans or simply iterated the Supreme Court’s deference to state abortion prerogatives. But the battlelines between Biden efforts to open abortion doors and red states’ trying to slam them shut are clearly escalating. As trial courts in different cities have created inconsistent decisions over the legality (often based on state or federal constitutionality) of federal administrative rulings/guidelines vs state statutes, with concomitant results beginning to reach appellate levels, its does seem as if the Supreme Court will soon have additional “abortion” refinements to review.

One of the hottest and most contentious issues surrounds the use of the US Postal Service to deliver “abortion pills” from red to blue states or for local but federally certified pharmacies to fill local red state orders for such medications, allowed under a federal ruling. “Republican attorneys general from 20 states wrote letters to executives at CVS and Walgreens warning the pharmacy chains against using the mail to dispense abortion pills in their states, in a shot against a new Biden administration policy.

“The letters rebuke recent guidance from the Justice Department – issued in an opinion from the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel – that concluded the federal law did not prohibit the mailing of abortion pills. The release of the Justice Department opinion came ahead of the rollout of new rules from the Food and Drug Administration allowing certified pharmacies to dispense medication abortion with a prescription, including by mail order.

“‘We reject the Biden administration’s bizarre interpretation, and we expect courts will as well,’ the GOP attorneys general wrote, while suggesting that they may bring civil litigation to challenge the claim that federal law allows the mailing of abortion pills. CNN.com, February 1st. Clearly, women facing this toxic exchange face complicated choices that have rewritten pregnancy termination practices.

“Medication abortion – in which pregnancies are terminated with a two-pill regimen – now makes up a majority of the abortions obtained in the United States. Several states restrict medication abortion, some with blanket bans on abortion and others with specific limits on access to abortion pills. CVS and Walgreens have said that they intend to comply with federal and state law with their plans to dispense mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in medication abortion. (Pharmacies were previously allowed to distribute the second drug, misoprostol.)

“Asked about the new letter from the attorneys general, a spokesperson for Walgreens said it is not dispensing mifepristone at this time… ‘We intend to become a certified pharmacy under the program, however we fully understand that we may not be able to dispense Mifepristone in all locations if we are certified under the program,’ the spokesperson Fraser Engerman said in an email.” CNN.com. Not to mention the potential of state criminal sanctions as well.

Some blue states have opted to follow California’s model, where state law protects any woman traveling to California from any extrinsic red state legal effort to prosecute or limit that woman’s rights. These are “free choice zones,” destined to be adjudicated across the land. It does seem odd to force women into a religiously mandated practice to surrender control of their bodies… through legislation passed in legislatures overwhelmingly dominated by older White men.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I suspect these battlelines will only grow in scope and passion, a boon to Democrats and an albatross around the neck of the Republican Party.

Water, Water, Everywhere, Except Where It’s Supposed to Be

Water, Water, Everywhere, Except Where It’s Supposed to Be

Or “Cry Me a River”

How do colleges evaluate an applicant who attended a public high school where truth is trumped by religious distortions? Are those children ready for college where critical thinking and verifying facts are core values? Are those graduates unfavorably compared to those who attended school in districts which are focused on accurate education based on truth? Is anti-“woke” education by definition an inferior product?

I’ve expressed my concern as to the true meaning and impact of the rightwing focus on so-called “culture wars” including anti-CRT legislation, like Florida’s recent passage of the de facto anti-truth, anti-1st Amendment, so-called Stop Woke Act. See, for example my January 16th Is Ron DeSantis the New Emperor of White Christian Nationalism?, January 15th Thou Shall Not Speak of It!, December 17th What Increasingly Seems to Be OK is Certainly Not OK and my October 9th But Not Banned in Boston blogs, to present a few such opinions. But banning books and limiting classroom lesson plans – hallmarks of historically repressive autocracies – are covering up some serious and permanent negative realities about our nation.

First, if you take George Santayana’s admonition seriously (and I do) – Those who do not study are condemned to repeat its mistakes – I suspect that censoring and distorting the teaching of history have the same result. Japan continues to deny its atrocities against WWII-era China in its textbooks and lesson plans, just as Germany requires that its high school students face the ugly truth of the Holocaust as a condition to graduation. What does “never again” mean?

Second, we really should take a look at the recent explosion (literally a tripling) of race and gender hate crimes in this country. So much of this is more about White supremacy, searching for a word that does not say this outright, that letting parents decide what their children can learn in school is really disguised racism and religious bigotry. We have a very, very long legacy of public education without giving parents direct control over the classroom and what’s in local public libraries. What’s changed? Yeah, that!

Indeed, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, the champion of that Stop Woke Act, has found a path to foster White supremacy and evangelical values – pretty much denigrating almost anyone else – with one word: anti-woke. He no longer has to use words like “Christian values” or “White traditional leadership.” “Woke” is the buzzword that short circuits using words that just might otherwise turn off “voters in the middle.” It effectively challenges those “liberals” who believe in racial, gender, ethnic and religious equality. After all, White supremacy rejects that liberal axiom.

In January, the DeSantis administration sent a letter to the College Board (curriculum standard bearer and national testing entity) rejecting their standards for a purely elective Advanced Placement course in African American Studies, saying, “As presented, the content of this course is inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value.” Topics like contemporary racial discrimination and the results of past slavery and Jim Crow laws are subject to heavy censorship under DeSantis’ view. In short, the Board is apparently changing their national requirements for this AP elective course to cater to a rightwing bully.

But lest you think that this red state proclivity to declare and fight this culture war cannot happen in the blues of the blue states, California, think again. Just a few miles south of Los Angeles, “Madison Klovstad Miner ran for the Orange [County] Unified school board with financial backing from conservative groups, signaling her ideology with phrases like ‘parent first’ and ‘education fundamentals.’… On the campaign trail, she stopped short of favoring a ban on critical race theory but said it was ‘not the best way for our students to become more inclusive, to become more accepting.’… Earlier this month, in her second meeting after narrowly beating an incumbent Democrat, Miner voted with three colleagues to fire the district’s superintendent…

“The board’s new conservative majority has not stated a reason for the move, which was opposed by many parents and teachers. But it appeared to be the opening salvo in an effort to bring what is taught in the district’s classrooms in line with conservative values… ‘I will not let this district’s reputation be destroyed by a group of extremists that are coming in to tear down the work that we’ve been doing as parents and active members of the community for the last decade and a half,’ said Kris Erickson, a Democrat on the school board.

“In the November elections, conservative groups backed school board candidates around the state, with limited success… Where conservatives did take control, as in Orange, the new majorities have begun laying the groundwork for their agendas, despite heated opposition. The conflicts are likely to grow more intense as communities debate proposals that seek to remake public education.

“A new conservative Christian majority on the [nearby] Temecula Valley school board immediately banned critical race theory — an academic framework that seeks to examine how racial inequality and racism are embedded in legal systems, policies and institutions — then called a special meeting last week that adjourned early amid protests and fears that the board would fire the superintendent.” Los Angeles Times, January 28th.

I have taught (as lecturer and adjacent professor) in two UC universities, at the undergraduate, graduate and professional school levels. Students that rely on extremist theories in college-level courses, in lieu of hard factually based research, simply are not prepared for a higher education. They can adhere to their beliefs without question, but when they substitute their beliefs for research as a primary proof of the empirical studies, not even presenting alternative views, exactly how should their instructor/professor grade them and evaluate their work? Should they be given the imprimatur of a college degree based on that approach? Perhaps that view may hold in state universities in Idaho, Florida and Alabama (and it might not work even there), but when you look at what employers and most of the world expect from college grads, that just plain does not cut it.

Are those anti-woke high schools actually preparing their students for the real world or for the challenges of solid college education? Are college admissions officials accepting such high school preparedness at the same level of students not so limited in their learning parameters? Exactly what does such anti-woke teaching actually mean for their students’ future?

Remember the anti-science revolution, the guilty verdict against a man teaching evolution contradicting creationism in the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial? History.com adds: “In 1927, the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the Monkey Trial verdict on a technicality but left the constitutional issues unresolved until 1968, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a similar Arkansas law on the grounds that it violated the First Amendment.” Spoiler alert, rightwing school districts are still trying to find a way to legitimize creationism as a solid alternative to Darwin’s vision of evolution.

I’m Peter Dekom, and wearing my academic hat, I do not consider a high school with an anti-woke mandate as the equal of a high school that has no such restriction.

American Identity Redux

“This course on Black history, what’s one of the lessons about? Queer theory? Now who would say that an important part of Black history is queer theory? That is somebody pushing an agenda.”

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on his banned high school elective AP Black history course

Sometimes I think racial tolerance in this country has never been worse since the Jim Crow era, and then I think that perhaps that only now is a pervasive pattern of American bigotry more visible. Still, as a student of social change, I am reminded that in times of uncertainty and rapid change, particularly where income inequality and impaired access to basic resources are at stake, people often circle their wagons among their peers and look to clearly identifiable demographic cohorts to blame. After the destructive sanctions and confiscations imposed on defeated Germany after WWI created an economic intolerable state, Hitler used “financially controlling greedy Jews” as his scapegoats. American White traditionalists, particularly those with less education, are feeling left behind. Immigrants, Blacks and Browns were getting preferences.

Were racial and religious minorities recapturing that mantle of blame here? “Replacement” theory would seem to support that view. Remember the 2017 summer chant of torch-bearing angry White protestors in Charlottesville? “They shall not replace us!” A call that soon became a favored Fox News storyline, particularly from the venomous Tucker Carlson, that seeped deeply into MAGA culture. Repercussions against affirmative action, an issue before the United States Supreme Court, began to echo. Has MAGA politics legitimized racism?

MAGA leaders, most importantly from one of the two GOP frontrunners for the 2024 presidential nomination (Ron DeSantis), declared that they would fight a “culture war” against leftwing antagonists attempting to “indoctrinate” their children with “woke” critical race theories. “Woke” was a little wink and a nod to White Christian nationalists without having an overt “White” supremacist reference. But everybody who heard that utterance understood. DeSantis was successful in causing the College Board to redefine their criteria for an acceptable high school Black Studies Advanced Placement course to eliminate what he felt were objectionable and controversial subject areas, what Black scholars describe as our contemporary “truth.”

As the above suggests, there has been particular focus placed on classroom discussions dealing with contemporary discrimination, racial inequality and even topics concerning our tortured history in the slavery and Jim Crow eras. There is a notion that White students (from elementary school to college years) should not feel latent guilt for racial and religious discrimination, and that according equal rights to LGBTQ+ people is offensive to a vast pool of evangelicals. But exactly how pervasive are these racial feelings? Survey results are most telling.

A “Yahoo News survey was conducted by YouGov using a nationally representative sample of 1,585 U.S. adults interviewed online from Feb. 2 to 6, 2023. The sample was weighted according to gender, age, race, education, 2020 election turnout and presidential vote, baseline party identification and current voter registration status. Demographic weighting targets come from the 2019 American Community Survey...” The questions centered around what students should or could be taught about American racial issues. Reporting for Yahoo!News (February 10th), Andrew Romano summarizes the results:

“[W]hite Americans are just as likely to favor (40%) as to oppose (41%) a ban on teaching Advanced Placement courses in African American studies in public schools — the same sort of ban that Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis recently threatened to implement in Florida, unleashing a storm of national controversy.

“In contrast, Black Americans (65% oppose, 20% favor) and Democrats (70% oppose, 19% favor) are far more resistant to a DeSantis-style ban. Yet because white Americans outnumber Americans of color — and because a full 58% of DeSantis’s fellow Republicans support a ban — the overall number of Americans who are against banning AP African American studies (46%) does not even clear the 50% mark… The rest of the country either favors a ban (34%) or isn’t sure (20%)…

“A full 65% of 2020 Donald Trump voters favored the initial Florida ban; even more Joe Biden voters (75%) opposed it. But when asked about the revised curriculum — which no longer includes ‘contemporary topics such as Black Lives Matter, incarceration, queer life and the debate over reparations’ — the numbers flipped, with most Trump voters now saying they favor offering the AP course (53%) and a plurality of Biden voters saying they oppose it (44%).

“These gaps reflect a deeper divide between Republicans and Democrats — and, to a degree, between white and black Americans — over the role of race in America today. The right largely believes that racism is now personal, the product of one individual discriminating against another. The rest of the country mostly agrees that racism is still systemic, a force that continues to harm people of color, regardless of how isolated individuals treat them.

“Asked if there is ‘a problem with systemic racism in America,’ nearly every demographic group says yes more often than not: Democrats (by a 63-point margin), Black Americans (by a 61-point margin), adults under 30 (by a 28-point margin), independents (by a 26-point margin) and even white Americans (by a 13-point margin). Overall, far more Americans say yes, the U.S. has a problem with systemic racism (54%) than say no, it does not (30%).

“The only groups that say no more often than not are on the right: Republicans (by a 15-point margin) and Trump voters (by a 33-point margin)… As a result, the right — a group that is also disproportionately white — seems to be suspicious of any teachings that suggest systemic racism is a present-day problem and not just a thing of the past.

“For instance, the new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows majority approval of ‘U.S. public schools including lessons on African-American history within the regular U.S. history curriculum’ among all Americans (67%), white Americans (65%), Black Americans (79%), Democrats (82%) and Republicans (58%)… Yet Republicans (40%) and white Americans (41%) are far less likely than Democrats (54%) and Black Americans (52%) to say the lessons that ‘U.S. public school students are currently taught about African-American history’ are ‘appropriate.’”

If one were simply to watch the abundant video evidence of racial discord and violence that occurs daily across the land, it is painfully obvious that we have a long way to go to achieve true equality. But if our children do not learn about it, cannot discuss it in their classrooms, exactly how are we ever going to erase these anomalies from the soul of our nation?

I’m Peter Dekom, and vanilla is most obviously the wrong color to apply to texts and lesson plans about racial divisions within our country.

Punishing a Regime that Its Own People Hate

“Companies are begging us to buy products, but we don’t place orders or stock goods because people are not buying…Basics like rice and chicken are just not staple foods anymore.” 

An Iranian shopkeeper who refused to give his name.

As a boy, when traveling to my stepfather’s diplomatic post in Beirut, Lebanon (US Embassy), we stopped off in Tehran, Iran. Then still under the oppressive boot of the secular Pahlavi monarchy (which gained power with direct US involvement), I admired a meticulously clean city, modern yet with a most magnificent Middle Eastern look. I called it a “super-clean Beirut.” Iran had close ties to Israel in those days, and the US made sure that Tehran was stocked with state-of-the-art weapons and aircraft. Then, in 1979, a super-conservative Shiite cleric (Iran is over 90% Islamic Shiite) left his refuge in Paris, France to lead a revolution that deposed the Pahlavi regime and instituted a brutal theocracy in its place. The US embassy became the site of a 444-day siege of American hostages. Our failed efforts to extract our people helped toppled the Jimmy Carter presidency.

We are approaching half a century of rule-by-ayatollahs. Iran still treasures higher education. There are still ski resorts for those few who can still afford that luxury. But Iran has refined enough fissionable material at this point, experts believe, to create several strategic nuclear weapons. For almost the entirety of the theocracy’s tenure, relations between Iran the United States (and what Tehran calls America’s puppet Israeli regime) have been horrible. Maybe worse.

For over four decades, the United States has imposed powerful economic sanctions against Iran, making its export of oil from its massive reserves difficult at best and limiting all manner of exports to Iran, including consumer goods and even food, to Iran. The animosity against the United States has accelerated, even as massive numbers of Iranians, particularly from their small Jewish population, emigrated to the United States, creating one of the most successful diasporas in American history. But four-plus decades of US-led Western sanctions against Tehran, under a mistaken belief that we could force a quick regime change, have mostly punished the people… and not the religious leadership that believes God is on their side… and that the people must therefore accept their hardship in the name of Allah.

As Iran began to mount a nuclear program, ostensibly to generate electricity, the United States sensed a need to curtail that effort, at least as it was also targeting the creation of fissionable nuclear weapons. The Council on Foreign Relations summarizes an international accord that, according to our own Department of Defense, stopped the military aspect of Iran’s nuclear efforts: “Signed in 2015 by Iran and several world powers, including the United States, the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] placed significant restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.

“President Trump withdrew the United States from the deal in 2018, claiming it failed to curtail Iran’s missile program and regional influence. Iran began ignoring limitations on its nuclear program a year later.” The accord had obviously crumbled, and the theocracy rapidly restored their nuclear weapons program. US sanctions escalated. When Trump was replaced by Joe Biden, there were clear indications that Iran was willing to trade a lifting of sanctions for accepting an imposition of severe restrictions on its nuclear program. All that positive news was stopped dead in its tracks after the death of a 22-year-old Mahsa Amini last September while in custody of the Iranian morality police; her crime: improperly wearing a required head shawl (hijab).

All hell broke loose as hundreds of thousands of protestors took to the streets in protest. US sanctions increased. Protestors where shot and killed, and many were arrested. The Iranian criminal justice system began trying and executing several participants. A “tsunami of unrest has surged across Iran, with protests persisting despite a brutal crackdown by authorities and the threat of execution for demonstrators. Though women’s rights were the spark, the government now faces broader grievances, especially long-simmering resentments over the tanking economy and the evisceration of people’s finances.

“Experts said the bleak economic situation has left Iranians all but tapped out after a decade of such challenges. But they doubted that growing discontent will translate into enough popular anger to seize power or even weaken the government’s ability to suppress dissent.” Los Angeles Times, February 12th. While the Amini-driven protests have subsided, the hatred for the religious regime has intensified. Strangely, the US sympathy for the protestors manifest itself in harsher sanctions against that same regime… which in turn made life even more miserable for the Iranian people. And while that regime continues to have rural support, educated urban Iranians are facing price increases for basic foods… to a level where they can no longer afford to eat.

If relations with the West were horrible, Iran’s decision to supply drones and missiles to Russia in its invasion of Ukraine made our sitting down to discuss a nuclear accord a virtual impossibility. Meanwhile, “Though the protests have not died down, they have waned in scale and scope — for the simple reason ‘that the population cannot afford them,’ said Ali Vaez, Iran project director for the International Crisis Group think tank. ‘The focus of the population has moved to making ends meet.’

“Already-dire economic indicators have worsened even more in recent weeks. On the black market, the Iranian rial has stumbled to 443,500 to the dollar, a slight improvement from the all-time-low of 450,000 a few weeks ago but nowhere near the 300,000 mark before the protests began in September… Inflation has surpassed 50%, the highest rate in decades. Food prices have risen by more than 70% . More than half of the young are unemployed. In early December, local commerce apps such as Sheypoor and Divar saw people trying to barter kitchen utensils, tools, toys and clothes for food.

“‘When I go shopping I have to be very selective,’ said Negar, a 29-year-old homemaker who works part time in a nursery and who declined to give her last name. ‘Forget about steaks. I don’t buy olive oil anymore. Iranian rice is much more expensive.’… She and her husband could never hope to own the apartment where they live, which they can afford to rent only because her father-in-law pitches in. Before, she loved to entertain there, regularly hosting lunch and dinner gatherings for friends… ‘Now there’s no way,’ she said. ‘You have to give up your entire salary for a month.’” LA Times.

Iran remains a cultured, educated society with a religiously-justified paramilitary and military infrastructure that has embraced torture, murder and severe incarceration as well as the willingness to let her own people suffer in their daily lives to support religious fundamentalism. Is there a lesson for Americans in letting religious fundamentalists impose their values on the rest of us? Is there a hypocrisy in imposing sanctions on a nation’s leadership where only the people suffer… and nothing changes for decades?

I’m Peter Dekom, and as cruelty and egotistical leaders the world over tighten their grip on their subjects, democracy is threatened to its core… and the increased civilian violence and military conflict has risen to the highest global threat levels ever experienced.

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Not Classy, Just Overclassified

“Unless secrecy is reduced, it cannot be protected.”

Then-Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) 30 years ago on his Commission on Government Secrecy report.

While it’s making headlines and giving headaches to Donald Trump, Joe Biden and Mike Pence, the discovery of private possession of highly classified governmental documents is nothing new. “On a winter day in 1984, a briefcase stuffed with classified government documents showed up at a building in Pittsburgh, borne by someone who most certainly wasn’t supposed to have it… That someone was 13-year-old Kristin Preble. She had taken the papers to school as a show-and-tell project for her eighth-grade class. Her dad had found them in his Cleveland hotel room several years earlier and had taken them home as a souvenir…

“Teacher Jim DeLisio’s eyes popped when he saw the warnings on the documents inside. Among them: ‘Classified, Confidential, Executive’ and ‘Property of the United States Government.’” Associated Press January 30th. That middle school student only got a B on her presentation. Washington Post OpEd writer, Fareed Zakaria (January 26th) notes the obvious, that the “The system is out of control.” His analysis presents some staggering facts about our proclivity to over-classify:

“One 2004 essay put the number of classified pages in existence at about 7.5 billion. In 2012, records were classified at a rate of 3 per second, making for an estimated 95 million classifications that year alone. Today, no one knows how frequently information is classified. And as of 2019, more than 4 million people were eligible to access classified information, about one-third for top secret records, the highest general designation…

“In 1998, then-Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), who served for years on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence beginning in 1977, wrote a book titled ‘Secrecy: The American Experience.’ In it, he lamented the rise of the ‘culture of secrecy’ within the U.S. government, which he believed was both bad for foreign policy and dangerous to democracy. On the first point, Moynihan argued that many of the government’s biggest mistakes were a result of its reluctance to share information and subject its analysis to outside criticism.

“Remember that the intelligence community was largely created to assess one question — the nature of the Soviet threat. It got this wrong. In the late 1950s, for example, it claimed that the Soviet Union was significantly ahead of the United States in missile technology and deployment, a very consequential but totally false assertion. More broadly, it got the state of the Soviet economy in the 1980s dead wrong, claiming it was sturdy when, in fact, it was collapsing. After the Cold War, in the late 1990s, the intelligence community’s central directive was to establish whether Saddam Hussein was trying to develop weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It got that wrong, as well.

“Moynihan argued that secrecy had become a form of regulation and bureaucratic control. People in government viewed information as power, didn’t want to share it, and developed elaborate mechanisms to horde it. They covered up mistakes, embarrassments and illegal activities by classifying the problem away…

“This problem has become much, much worse in the digital era. Timothy Naftali, a New York University scholar and former director of the Nixon Library, told me, ‘We now have a tsunami of classified documents — tens of thousands of emails, PowerPoints, all kinds of stuff — all stored somewhere in the cloud, but we still have a tiny staff of people at the National Archives for the declassification process.’ He estimated that it could take five years for a request to declassify a single document to even make it to the agency that has to decide whether to do so. Another scholar, Matthew Connelly of Columbia University, points out that the U.S. government spends about $18 billion a year on classifying and protecting information and just $100 million on declassification.”

When I was a 17-year-old working in an overseas US Embassy communications office in the 1960s, I was a complete security violation. Too young to receive any security clearance and operating without FBI clearance, I was charged with dropping off and picking up the diplomatic pouch from an exhausted US Air Force 2nd lieutenant at the local airport. On the tarmac with a huge local driver at 6 AM on a Sunday (no one else wanted to do it). But what really shocked me was the use of this “for classified materials only” system by local CIA staff to ferry their personal belongings, even laundry, in this sacred “pouch” (just a really tough duffle bag with a lead seal).

David Lauter, writing for the January 30th Los Angeles Times, embellishes: “[I]n 2017, officials made 49 million classification decisions, either on paper or, increasingly, by electronic means, according to the government’s Information Security Oversight Office, which was created 45 years ago by President Carter to set policy for management of the classification system… That was the last annual estimate: The number has grown so big, officials have given up trying to count… How much of that really requires secrecy?... One estimate came from former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean after he chaired the commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.. ‘Three-quarters of what I read that was classified shouldn’t have been,’ Kean said…

“Other former senior officials have put the share of unnecessary classification even higher, noting that a lot of what appears in classified documents involves information routinely published by news organizations such as this one… And as many national security experts say, the system contains huge incentives for over-classification and essentially none for openness… ‘There’s not much punishment for over-classification,’ said Scott Amey, general counsel to the Washington-based Project on Government Oversight. ‘There’s is a lot for inadvertent release.’… An official who improperly releases a sensitive document could be fined, fired or prosecuted. One who needlessly blocks public access faces no real penalty… Moreover, while most documents are supposed to become unclassified after 25 years, in practice, agencies routinely get extensions. The system for declassifying documents over time is hamstrung by understaffing and has never become a serious priority.

“[Yale Law School professor Oona Hathaway, a former special counsel to the Defense Department] has proposed flipping the system to automatically declassify documents after 10 years, with a few narrowly specified exceptions to protect intelligence sources and methods. If an agency wanted to keep something under wraps longer, it would have to prove the need for secrecy, rather than have the burden of proof fall on advocates of open government… Another potential reform would be to hold officials accountable for the amount they classify.

“Proposals for fundamental reforms like that have gone nowhere in the past. Just as national security officials have huge incentives to over-classify, elected officials have incentives to avoid challenging them… Few politicians want to run the risk of appearing complacent about security.” We could also require multiple levels of officials to classify anything. Even trying to get an older document declassified can take years. The current system obviously does not work, there are too many people with access to just about anything classified at any level, and the costs of maintaining this system are beyond justification. And exactly how much of this secret information… still is?

I’m Peter Dekom, and if you want to empower a bureaucrat, give him or her a rubber stamp that reads “top secret” and a nice cover envelope.

Untrained, Unprepared and Unleashed?

 

Officials "need to clean the department of bad apples…

They need to get intensive training and make sure de-escalation comes first."

Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen to CNN responding to the death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of the Memphis police.

Isn’t that the way it always it is? A few “bad apples” and send the rest back to the classroom for sensitivity training? We’ve had riots over blue-on-black killings. Really costly riots. In lives and property. With the advent of body cams and ubiquitous smart phone footage, we’ve even got few, very few, criminal convictions over cops deploying excessive violence, often resulting in the death of a suspect who may have committed a relatively minor crime or infraction. There are rightwing MAGA officials who want to return to our police practices of yesteryear, where cops had fairly free rein without much in the way of personal risk. And we have municipalities writing multimillion dollar settlements to victims of success excess. Why?

Is the United States different from the rest of the developed world? Do we need to supply local police departments with surplus military armored personnel carriers, weapons and technology – adding training in military assault tactics – because we live in a nation where there are as many civilian guns as there are people, including well over 20 million military grade semiautomatic assault rifles? Is it really an “armed us” vs an “armed them”? Do cops who hang together after work really scan the rest of us looking for perps? Is it a more generic “us” vs “them”? That well-trained tactical unit in Memphis – called “Scorpion” – was home to the five cops who have been charged with second-degree murder in Nichols’ death. The unit was immediately disbanded.

What’s the problem? First, take a good look at the above set of photographs. Could be what you might expect in an Army or Marine boot camp regimen, soldiers training for combat against trained enemy soldiers, but all of the above pictures are of various American police training facilities. We just keep talking about fixing the system, adding sensitivity and de-escalation training classes to our nation’s police force. Our nation’s police do place themselves in harms way every day. Their personal risks are increasingly dangerous, as technology and a gun-loving Supreme Court ensure that countless numbers of guns are kept in civilian hands with few if any meaningful restrictions. Is that why it seems we are training our cops for war? Barking sergeants with most of the training focused on military discipline and tactical weapons proficiency?

Jack Date, writing for the January 30th ABC News, presents an entirely different take: “A recent report by the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), an independent research organization that focuses on critical issues in policing, shows significant gaps in how police in the U.S. are trained when compared to their international counterparts…

“‘Almost every major aspect of policing has fundamentally changed in recent decades, except for one: how we train officers,’ the report states… Police training in the U.S. is most often measured in weeks, while in many other countries it is measured in months or years… ‘Our training is outdated, antiquated, and is trying to do on the cheap what other places have done in a comprehensive way,’ PERF Executive Director Chuck Wexler told ABC News.

“A 2018 Justice Department study of state and local law enforcement training academies found that the average length of core basic police training in the U.S. is 833 hours, or less than 22 weeks. A more recent survey by PERF found a similar result, with responding agencies reporting an average of 20 weeks of basic police training… In comparison, police recruits in Japan get between 15 and 21 months of training. Police in Germany get 2.5 years of training. And in Finland, police education takes three years to complete…

“Many police academies in the U.S. still resemble military boot camps, with cadets in buzz cuts and hair buns getting yelled at by drill instructors… ‘Barking orders and giving commands and sort of a military kind of thinking — it's not a problem-solving approach. It's not critical thinking,’ Wexler said… Much of the training in American police academies emphasizes skills like marksmanship and defensive tactics, with less focus on so-called ‘soft skills’ like communication and crisis intervention… ‘People call those soft skills — those are not soft skills, those are hard,’ Wexler says. ‘Communicating, being a good listener, responding, thinking, and sometimes saying, 'You know what, we need to step back, we're not the right ones here. For this we need to bring someone else in.' Those are important skills, to know your limitations, and also to ask the right questions.’…

“Meanwhile, police departments across the country continue to struggle with staffing shortages. Qualified new recruits are in short supply, and many departments are not keeping pace with the number of police retiring or leaving the profession… Expanding police training is costly and could have the undesirable effect of slowing down the pipeline of new officers at a time when law enforcement agencies can't get new police online fast enough. According to a 2020 PERF survey, 71% of police agencies spend less than 5% of their budgets on recruit training.”

The police mantra, often posted on police cars in many cities, to protect and serve, gets lost in building a team esprit de corps that substitutes an “us vs them” police code that serves officers but not the public they are sworn to protect. We need to stop training our cops, many of whom have served in our armed forces, as if they were in a military function. They are supposed to be peacekeepers and public servants. The gun and the baton should not be a first line in our police world, but cops do face rough streets, piled with illicit drugs and well-armed gangs. So…

Start with better focus on the obligation to understand, deescalate, protect and serve. Spend the extra time and money in training… or be prepared to watch municipalities’ continue to write big settlement checks, watch angry mobs feeling helpless against blue-prone-violent-“solutions” riot because nothing else seems to work… as citizens place unchecked crime as one of our nation’s biggest issues. Emphasize that cops are not soldiers, and any violence or threat of violence needs to be viewed as a last resort, not an easy solution to an immediate problem. Remember, every Supreme Court decision supporting civilian gun ownership will kill more cops… and put more guns in the hands of those who should never have them. Our average police recruit training regimen does not prepare these officers sufficiently to protect themselves or the public. We must do better!

I’m Peter Dekom, and we can better serve both the public and our police force by a ground-up new approach to training the next generation of police officers.

Feeling Safe?

As Americans in the modern era, we feel pretty safe. During WWII, for example, the lights of New York blazed bright, radio beacons beckoned, radio radiated clearly… as Nazi submarines began to wait offshore to pick off transport ships with munitions, fuel oil and troops, grateful to the lackadaisical Americans continuing daily life with relatively few changes. For a while, the Navy didn’t even posit a defense to these torpedo attacks, preferring instead to focus on escorting ships across the Atlantic. Pearl Harbor and a small invasion in the Aleutians were as close to a full-frontal assault on our nation as we faced.

We really didn’t feel any direct attacks of significance here on our soil until our involvement in the Middle East, protecting oil fields and providing massive aid to regional allies. All the fighting and “bad stuff” were happening “over there.” But in the early 1990s and certainly on 9/11/01 we were deeply disturbed when Islamic terrorists, mostly under the al Qaeda flag, brought those attacks to our shores, killing thousands of Americans in New York City, with more than a few more in the fields of Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon.

We still hear the admonitions from Islamic terrorists – from Boko Haram, al Shabab, ISIS and even from al Qaeda – that the Great Satan (i.e., the United States) is their number one enemy. Our destruction is their most cherished goal. But these days, those forces are facing their own regional confrontations and failures. Climate change has decimated their local food chain, and internecine warfare is depleting their ranks. While we remain vigilant, the FBI has made it abundantly and repeatedly clear, our main terrorist threat today is from within, primarily from White nationalists. Many nations believe that the United States will unravel and self-destruct from our deep partisan divide in a country with more guns than people.

Americans tend to believe that “mutually assured destruction” (MAD) protects us from an apocalyptic nuclear confrontation with our foreign antagonists, led by Russia, China, North Korea and Iran – all nuclear weapons powers or on the verge of becoming such a power. But there are a range of recent developments that should temper our notion of safety. First and foremost, each of these consequential foes is led by an entrenched, ego-driven leader, reveling in growing power, ready to sacrifice his (yes his) people to ensure a strong military who appears to be dedicated to toppling or belittling the current king of the mountain: the United States.

It no secret that all four of these countries are interrelated and allied in significant ways. North Korea cannot exist without the trade routes and support from China. China and Russia bellied up to the autocratic bar and shared a stiff ideological drink of togetherness, and Iran has taken to supplying Russia with missiles and drones in support of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. Each of these countries is deeply hostile to the United States, choosing to do whatever they can to oppose our interests everywhere. But the specific reports we are seeing suggest that we still have much more to fear from those four countries, each of which is attempting to expand its reach to nations around the world.

“North Korea displayed an unprecedented number of long-range nuclear missiles at a military parade, in an effort to show the country is mass producing weapons capable of striking the U.S… The parade, which was held Wednesday [2/8] night in Pyongyang, featured at least 11 [12?] Hwasong-17 intercontinental ballistic missiles and a prototype of a new missile designed for faster deployment, state media photos showed. North Korea has never showcased that many nuclear missiles at one time. The show of force appeared to be aimed at demonstrating the advances the country has made in its missile production capabilities, analysts said.” Dasl Yoon writing for the February 9th Wall Street Journal.

But here’s the catch. We are pretty sure that these new missiles are capable of reaching our west coast. The above noted parade, showed off “up to 12 individual Hwasong-17 ICBM launchers. The U.S. has just 44 missile interceptors on America's West Coast, with some stationed in California and others in Alaska, according to Politico… If the 12 ICBMs carry a payload of four warheads each, they would overwhelm America's prepared defenses, according to the report.” Fox News, February 9th. Fire more missiles than there are defenses to shoot them down?

As we back Ukraine in its resistance to Russia’s invasion, high-ranking Russians are beginning to refer to the conflict as a “hybrid war,” the effective beginning of WWIII. In addition to supplying increasingly sophisticated weapons to Kyiv, including our recent commitment to supply our state-of-the-art Abrams battle tanks to Ukraine, the United States is more actively and directly involved in the combat itself than assumed. “Ukrainian officials said they require coordinates provided or confirmed by the United States and its allies for the vast majority of strikes using its advanced U.S.-provided rocket systems, a previously undisclosed practice that reveals a deeper and more operationally active role for the Pentagon in the war...

“A senior U.S. official — who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue — acknowledged the key American role in the campaign and said the targeting assistance served to ensure accuracy and conserve limited stores of ammunition for maximum effectiveness. The official said Ukraine does not seek approval from the United States on what to strike and routinely targets Russian forces on their own with other weapons. The United States provides coordinates and precise targeting information solely in an advisory role, the official said.” Washington Post, February 9th. Russia has backed out of nuclear weapons limitation commitments and has indicated that the use of tactical (more narrowly targeted) nuclear weapons is now on the table.

Moscow has pledged revenge against the United States without naming specifics. But Russian state television has openly admitted that Moscow intends to do everything in its power to unseat an anti-Russian Democratic Party and to enlist grassroots in nations, particularly in Latin America, to increase anti-American sentiments. We can expect worse.

Meanwhile, the anti-Chinese rhetoric from the White House, the active enlistment of Japan to build an offensive military, our military aid and exercises with South Korea, our ban of many high-level tech sales to the PRC and a unanimous Congressional vote against China over their spy-balloon have President Xi authorizing a larger and more frequent menacing PRC military sea and air power in areas adjacent to Taiwan, often very narrowly missing US military aircraft and ships. They have only upped their coveted lust over Taiwan itself.

To make matters worse, those “red phone” emergency connections between the US and the PRC are no longer part of any attempt to deescalated incidents that could explode. On February 10th, the Associated Press reported: “Within hours of an Air Force F-22 downing a giant Chinese balloon that had crossed the United States, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin reached out to his Chinese counterpart via a special crisis line, aiming for a quick general-to-general talk that could explain things and ease tensions… But Austin’s effort Saturday fell flat, when Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe declined to get on the line, the Pentagon says.

“China’s Defense Ministry says it refused the call from Austin after the balloon was shot down because the U.S. had ‘not created the proper atmosphere’ for dialogue and exchange. The U.S. action had ‘seriously violated international norms and set a pernicious precedent,’ a ministry spokesperson was quoted as saying in a statement issued late Thursday [2/9].” With all this anger, the numerous incidents of physical confrontation, hateful exchanges and de facto disconnect, what could possibly go wrong, go wrong, go wrong….?!

I’m Peter Dekom, and it does not help that the reportage in each of these nations uses footage from our protests, the January 6th Capitol attack and the extremist Tweets from American elected officials to convince its people that democracy cannot work and that the United States is on the verge of collapsing, perhaps with a little push from these antagonists.

Adversity, Perversity, and Diversity

 

“This unilateral action potentially eliminates vital educational

content from our state courts’ judicial education curriculum

and does so in a manner inconsistent with this court’s yearslong

commitment to fairness-and-diversity education… Moreover, it paves

the way for a complete dismantling of all fairness-and-diversity

initiatives in the state courts system.”

Dissenting Florida State Supreme Court Justice Jorge Labarga, as the majority rules that

Florida judges can no long take the existing set of “fairness and diversity”

courses to satisfy their continuing judicial education requirements.

If you listened to newly elected Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ official Republican rebuttal to the President’s February 7th State of the Union Speech, her focus was on fighting a “culture war” purportedly started by Democrats. She repeatedly used the word “freedom” as equated to rightwing evangelical orthodoxy. Sanders’ speech included attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, the “woke mob” and other rightwing buzzwords, like railing against “critical race theory,” a concept that has never really been clearly defined. “The choice is no longer between right or left,” declared Sanders, former press secretary to Donald Trump. “The choice is between normal and crazy.” Normal to whom? And which side is crazy? Is striving for equality – the wokest effort of them all – that repugnant to the GOP? What exactly is “freedom from indoctrination”?

Indeed, in her first days in office, Sanders issued a spate of executive orders, including one in which she labeled critical race theory an indoctrination that is “antithetical to the traditional American values of neutrality, equality, and fairness.” The same deeply anti-abortion candidate who campaigned that that she would “make sure” that a “kid” in the womb would be as safe as those in a classroom. Given our guns laws and recent shootings, that may not have been much of a pledge.

The essence of anti-CRT advocates is that racial, religious and ethnic discrimination occurred in the past, our civil rights laws of the 1960s have indeed “eliminated” that bias from our nation, and that White children should not feel any responsibility or guilt for that past. For those who have missed the litany of voting restrictions and gerrymandering focused to keep minority voters from having a political voice or the bodycam/CCTV/smartphone footage of blue-on-Black and Brown assaults and killings, the further impoverishment of the entire bottom segment of our economy, of all races and ethnicities, or the strident marches of well-armed White rightwing extremists, some bearing torches, repeating the mantra that “they shall not replace us,” such discrimination remains rampant in our country. “They,” as used above, being those racial, ethnic and religious minorities. For evangelicals, gender bias is simply a fulfillment of their interpretation of the Bible… LGBTQ+ represents unholy perversity to them.

But the wave of anti-diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives from conservative leaders in the U.S. is rampant and accelerating in red states as well as in smaller rightwing municipalities even in blue states. How can seeking equality be divisive… but it is? If you are a current GOP supporter, you are against DEI. A Dem, the opposite. Why?

The legacy of the past continues to haunt us. Restrictions that are no longer legal often still define contemporary life. Legacy restrictive racial covenants and redlining, sometimes de facto continuing into the present (as noted in a $30 million bank settlement reached between the SEC and a CNB subsidiary), have long since set “them” vs “us” racially coherent neighborhoods. Laws may change, but people generally don’t immediately move. Most often, feeling threatened, they even stay where they are safe and what they can afford.

Black and Brown students are those most impacted by inferior inner city schools and remain underrepresented in colleges and universities, even as the Supreme Court considers eliminating affirmative action. The civil rights laws of the 1960s also have been defanged and reduced by a Supreme Court appointed by rightwing GOP presidents.

As reported by Chanelle Chandler in the February 8th Yahoo!News: “Amid the polarizing effects of the conversation around DEI and its evolution, experts say the purpose of these initiatives and programs has been lost in politics and rhetoric. They explained to Yahoo News that DEI was not meant to be divisive, but was intended to level the playing field in an increasingly diverse but systematically fractured society — and they argue that it would be a mistake to eradicate such initiatives…

“‘Equity is those practices, policies and programs to ensure that people are treated fair and have an equal opportunity to succeed, regardless of who they are,’ Rick Wade, senior vice president for strategic alliances and outreach at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told Yahoo News. ‘That's really important. You can't separate where we are with regards to diversity and equity without understanding the full context: that there have been some individuals in our society who have not necessarily been treated equitably.’…

“In late January, [anti-DEI leader and Florida Governor Ron] DeSantis — a possible 2024 presidential contender who has a history of challenging educational institutes and who recently banned the College Board’s Advanced Placement high school course in African American studies in Florida — announced a proposal to eliminate what he called ‘ideological conformity.’

“His plan targets DEI programs in Florida’s higher education system. DeSantis blamed the initiatives for draining resources and driving costs up. Under his proposal, there would be mandated courses in Western civilization and the protections of tenure would be limited… The governor’s office, in a press release, called out DEI programs for being discriminatory and vowed to push back against ‘the tactics of liberal elites who suppress free thought in the name of identity politics and indoctrination.’ He also voted to ban universities from funding the programs, even if the money isn’t coming from the state.

“‘That’s not what we believe is appropriate for the state of Florida,’ DeSantis said on Jan. 31 during an appearance at the State College of Florida, Manatee-Sarasota, one of Florida’s publicly funded state and community colleges.” Equality really has never been in the building to be able to leave it.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I wonder when “patriotism” will return to the fundamental Constitutional value that all men (people) are created equal.

How the United States Destroyed El Salvador

 

If you live in Los Angeles, you are undoubtedly aware of both the plethora of wonderful Salvadoran restaurants… and the terrifying reputation of one particular Hispanic gang: MS-13. Many in this country use MS-13 as an exemplar of those “rapists, murderers criminals” illegally crossing our border, ensuring a constant flow of illicit drugs and deploying their exceptional reputation for ultra-violence (including executing not only their perceived enemies but the families and supporters of those deemed enemies). MS-13, like most urban gangs, leaves its graffiti, marking territory all over Los Angeles… and vast number of cities across the United States where MS-13 has spread. But MS-13 is an American gang that spread.

The BBC.com (4/19/17) gives Americans a little summary about who MS-13 really is: “The gang began in the barrios of Los Angeles in LA during the 1980s, formed by immigrants who had fled El Salvador's long and brutal civil war. Other members came from Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico.

“The MS stands for Mara Salvatrucha, said to be a combination of Mara, meaning gang, Salva, for Salvador, and trucha, which translates roughly into street smarts. The 13 represents the position of M in the alphabet… MS-13 established a reputation for extreme violence and for killing with machetes. It took root in neighbourhoods dominated by Mexican gangs, and later expanded to other parts of the country… According to the FBI, the gang has spread to 46 states.

“In 2012, the US Treasury designated the gang a ‘transnational criminal organisation’. It was the first street gang to receive the dubious honour, placing it alongside much larger international cartels like the Mexican Zetas, Japanese Yakuza and Italian Camorra.

“MS-13 has been accused of recruiting poor and at-risk teenagers. Joining is said to require being ‘jumped in’ - subjected to a vicious 13-second beating - and ‘getting wet’ - carrying out a crime, often a murder, for the gang… Leaving is potentially even more dangerous. Large chest tattoos brand members for life, and some factions are said to murder members who attempt to leave.”

The Los Angeles MS-13 shot callers who formed the gang were born in the brutal streets of San Salvador during a seemingly interminable civil war where the United States became the main supplier of weapons and training to the government’s security forces. The main war began with the rise of a left-wing faction, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), and the explosive resulting oppression by the government (which US arms and money supported) began a civil war in 1979 that did not end until 1992. “Overall, the United Nations estimated that FMLN guerrillas were responsible for five percent of atrocities committed during the civil war, while 85 percent were committed by the Salvadoran security forces.” Wikipedia. US government aid money funded that 85%.

MS-13 may have been fueled by the brutality, murders and torture of this civil war, but as noted, the gang was founded in Los Angeles, California. While the legendary MS-13 machete was the weapon of terror control, MS-13 enjoyed the ease of obtaining guns in the United States, especially semiautomatic pistols and long guns. They also benefitted from the flow of money from Americans seeking illegal drugs… and formed their own drug cartels. Many returned to El Salvador and neighboring countries to recruit new members… and those who refused were often killed or were forced to watch their family members being killed. Ah, that machete. American guns flowed into that region, and MS-13, awash in cash, had little trouble buying their way into de facto political control of their home country.

If the original civil war in El Salvador had been brutal, this merging of the “legitimate” elected government with MS-13 extended that brutality into the daily lives of Salvadorans (and those in neighboring countries as well). Elected officials soon realized that they really no longer controlled their country. A confusing new de facto civil war erupted between the gangs and those aspects of regional governmental control that pretended to be in charge. The ensuing brutality has rendered El Salvador a “failed state.” So many of those pounding at our southern border are seeking asylum from the regional violence that was born in the United States, was armed by weapons easily obtained in the United States, was financed by drug sales to American buyers and was destabilized by US aid to the brutal government during that earlier civil war.

As much as we denounce the corruption in that Central American region, that local governments are not remotely trustworthy to distribute economic and medical aid from the United States, our interference in the region created the problem… and those asylum-seekers know that. The brutality that defines contemporary El Salvador has collapsed any semblance of governmental stability. Daily life there is squeezed between the brutality of the government and neighborhood violence from the local gangs.

The January 28th Associated Press illustrates this collapse: “Human Rights Watch says it has obtained a database leaked from El Salvador’s government that corroborates violations of due process, severe prison overcrowding and deaths in custody under the emergency powers put in place last March to confront a surge in gang violence… The global human rights organization said Friday [1/28] that the database from the Ministry of Public Safety lists details about some 50,000 people who were arrested between the implementation of the state of exception in late March and late August… A spokesperson for President Nayib Bukele said the office had not seen the report early Friday [1/28] and had no comment.

“El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly approved the suspension of some fundamental rights after an outburst of violence among the country’s powerful street gangs. People no longer have to be told why they are being arrested or what rights they have or be given access to a lawyer. The government also suspended the right of association.

“Many of the abuses have been previously reported by Human Rights Watch and local civil society organization Cristosal, but the government data added some detail, including the name, age and gender of those arrested; where they were arrested; the charges they face; and the prisons to which they were sent… Among those arrested during the period were more than 1,000 minors who were sent to pretrial detention… In March, the country’s Legislative Assembly lowered the age of criminal responsibility for gang-related crimes to 12 from 16.

“The database also pointed to staggering levels of overcrowding in El Salvador’s prisons. The government is building a massive new facility, but in the meantime, more detainees are stuffed into existing prisons while awaiting trial… As of August, the prison population had grown to more than 86,000; according to government information in February 2021, the facilities have a capacity of 30,000… The government reported in November that 90 people had died in custody since March… The most common charge is ‘unlawful association,’ accounting for some 39,000 of the new arrests. More than 8,000 face a charge of belonging to a terrorist organization.

“‘The use of these broadly defined crimes opens the door to arbitrary arrests of people with no relevant connection to gangs and does little to ensure justice for violent gang abuses, such as killings and rape,’ Human Rights Watch said in a statement.” But it was all born here in the United States.

I’m Peter Dekom, and for those who rail at that mass of humanity at our border with Mexico, so many asylum-seekers are from narco-states that owe their very intolerable levels of local violence to the United States… which disavows its direct responsibility for the problem.