Summaries of New and Important Research
Edited By Eli Lehrer
POLITICS
Security at What Price?
John Yoo and Eric Posner, "The Patriot Act under Fire," AEI on the Issues, December 2003 (aei.org)
Ever since its inception in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the USA Patriot Act has been a magnet for criticism of the Bush administration's conduct in the war on terror at home.
Columnists ranging from Maureen Dowd to William Safire have denounced the Act's alleged suspension of civil liberties, and Democratic Presidential front-runner Howard Dean has called it "morally wrong," "shameful," and "un-Constitutional." But does the grim rhetoric surrounding denunciations of the Patriot Act bear any resemblance to reality? "Putting aside the hysterics," write AEI scholar John Yoo and University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner, "the worst thing about the Patriot Act is its Orwellian name." Yoo and Posner argue that the supposed marginal reductions in peacetime liberties due to the Patriot Act are "a reasonable price to pay for a valuable weapon against al-Qaeda."
These reductions in liberties turn out to be quite minor, if indeed they can be said to be reductions at all, write Yoo and Posner. For instance, the act amends the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to eliminate the wall of separation preventing law enforcement and counterintelligence officials from pooling information. Other modifications of FISA merely expand it to include business or other records relevant to terrorism investigations, or update its language to account for new communications technology.
Critics of the Patriot Act have argued that not even a small diminishment of liberties can be justified, even during emergencies. History doesn't bear out that judgment, however. "Civil liberties throughout our history have always expanded in peacetime and contracted during emergencies," claim Yoo and Posner, citing the Civil War, the two World Wars, and the Cold War as precedent. After the emergency passes, either Congress and the President voluntarily give up their temporary powers, or, "when they do not, the courts step in."
ECONOMICS AND REGULATION
Unneeded Protections
Claude Barfield, High-Tech Protectionism: The Irrationality of Antidumping Laws, AEI Press, 2003 (aei.org)
Under the World Trade Organization regime that currently governs trade among most major countries, nations can stem the flow of goods and services by declaring other nations' trade practices "unfair." Most unfair trade practices are based on accusations of "dumping" --selling a good below cost in order to damage another nation's industrial base.
AEI's Claude Barfield focuses on efforts to protect high-tech industries including supercomputers, flat panel displays, semi-conductors, and steel. (He counts steel as a high-tech good because of its increasingly complex production processes.) Looking at each industry he finds that the costs of protecting a given industry far outweighed whatever benefits Americans received. Protecting uncompetitive steel producers, for example, may have cost Americans as much as $70 billion over the past ten years.
Some industries asking for protection don't even seem to need it: American supercomputer makers have almost locked the Japanese out of the U.S. market and now enjoy such a large market share worldwide that Barfield sees a "growing risk of anti-competitive behavior" by American companies.
Barfield's preferred solution is to end the use of dumping-related trade sanctions altogether: Foreign firms that behave in a truly anticompetitive fashion could still face lawsuits under the same anti-trust laws that apply to domestic firms. Barring this, he proposes raising the standard of evidence required to implement retaliatory trade barriers and giving the President more direct control over trade restrictions. Finally, if a domestic industry truly does need protection to survive, policymakers should substitute "safeguard actions" (such as the tariffs that covered steel for most of 2003), which Barfield terms a nakedly honest way of stating that a certain industry needs some protection to rebuild and restructure.
Labor Moves Rightward?
Various labor union staff members, "Multi-Union Growth Partnership," New Unity Partnership, 2003 (rankfile.net)
Ever since the 1950s, a combination of a less-friendly legal environment, internal corruption, economic change, and growing government control over workplace regulation has sent American organized labor into a steep decline. While about a third of the workforce belonged to unions in 1956, less than 15 percent does today. John Sweeney, President of the AFL-CIO, has swung the massive labor federation hard to the left but has no membership gains to show for it.
In an effort to improve organized labor's standing, the heads of five major unions (ranging from the Service Employees International Union to the Carpenters Union), meeting during late 2003, agreed to form the New Unity Partnership in an effort to expand the American labor movement. According to the outline from the organizers' meeting, the partnership will hire a small staff of its own to focus organizing efforts on reasonably narrow geographic areas and highly specific industries that the unions believe are ripe for organizing. The group also wants the AFL-CIO to focus on growing the union movement and increasing union presence in industries while eliminating much of its political work disconnected from organizing, and on cutting its own bureaucracy by reducing its own policy development, international outreach, and civil rights departments. The AFL-CIO's local and regional bureaucracy--central labor councils--would also be cut back significantly under the New Unity Partnership's proposals. Instead, local and national unions would gain significantly more power. The union leaders also strike a rightward course, noting that meetings with Karl Rove and "moderate Republicans" in Congress are among the new group's top goals. The group also appears ready to consider leaving the AFL-CIO if its agenda is not adopted.
SOCIETY
No More Mr. Nice Regulator
Frederick Hess, "The Case For Being Mean," AEI on the Issues, December 2003 (aei.org)
Since the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, student performance testing has become a national mandate in American schools. Frederick Hess, an AEI scholar, says that there are two ways to hold schools accountable: a "nice" method that uses test measurements only for information and a "mean" one that threatens school personnel with job loss and students with extra work when they don't measure up.
Hess argues that real school reform in the United States will require a "mean" approach to accountability that "harnesses self-interest of students and educators to refocus schools and redefine… expectations." Policy, Hess believes, should make "a lack of improvement so unpleasant for local officials" that they will "take those painful steps [such as firing teachers, canceling programs, and denying students diplomas] that are regarded as 'unrealistic' most of the time."
Hess admits, however, that being tough isn't always easy: It produces "broad and widely dispersed" benefits, along with highly visible costs for individual teachers and students. As a result, he says, many accountability regimes have been dumbed down following protests from parents and minority activists: Sanctions can become weak or non-existent, test questions can be made easier, and students can be given almost unlimited second chances. Finally, some students are simply allowed to graduate without meeting the standards.
Rather than compromise and thereby abandon "mean" accountability, Hess argues that proponents of high standards should admit that their system has some defects, but not allow that to detract from their basic position. Defining what students must know, after all, is an "ambiguous and value-laden exercise," that will never reach a state of perfection. This fact, however, should not stop advocates of rigor from demanding meaningful high-stakes testing. The ultimate question, Hess writes, is whether accountability testing will fulfill its potential, "or became another hollow rite of spring."
NATIONAL SECURITY
Card Carrying Americans
Amitai Etzioni et al., "Reliable Identification for Homeland Protection and Collateral Gains," in Creating a Trusted Network for Homeland Security, The Markle Foundation, December 2003 (markle.org)
Since 9/11, many Americans have worried about the measures governments use to separate terrorists and other potential wrongdoers from ordinary citizens and visitors going about their business. In an appendix to a longer report on how to distribute intelligence data related to homeland security, a group of scholars, activists, political leaders, and corporate executives led by George Washington University professor
Amitai Etzioni, examine ways to improve "purposeful identification," a means of verifying one's identity in order to gain access to a controlled area such as an airport, school, or country of which one is not a citizen.
The authors identify a wide range of problems with current efforts to protect sensitive facilities, e.g., government agents using homemade credentials have crossed borders and entered federal buildings--even secure military facilities. Instead of calling for a specific national ID card, which the authors believe would be too easy to manipulate, they support a variety of measures to make current ID cards more secure.
Among them:
• Standardize "breeder documents" and make them electronically searchable throughout the country: Breeder documents, primarily birth certificates, are used to get other forms of ID such as drivers' licenses and passports. Right now, the U.S. has a profusion of different forms and formats for these documents; this makes it almost impossible for DMV personnel and passport clerks to sort the forged from the authentic. A standardized form and national database wouldmake this process easier.
• Improve drivers' license standards: Drivers' licenses, currently the most used identity documents in the U.S., have almost no common standards, the panel finds. Etzioni and the others report that they are also too easy to obtain with a false Social Security number and too easy for illegal aliens to use. They also believe that DMV personnel should receive better training.
• Seek assistance from the private sector: The government should look to the private sector to provide many kinds of identification, including some that government agencies might accept.
These steps, the panel argues, would also result in some collateral gains by reducing credit card and voter fraud, making it easier to track fugitives, and otherwise making the nation safer and more secure.
Fear of a New Weapon
Michael Abrams,"Dawn of the E-Bomb," IEEE Spectrum, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, November 2003 (spectrum.ieee.org)
During Operation Iraqi Freedom, the U.S. military used a high-power microwave (HPM) weapon to knock out an Iraqi television station. In so doing, Abrams contends, the U.S. ushered in a new era of warfare.
An HPM weapon or, as he terms it, "E-bomb," uses a blast of electromagnetic radiation so strong that it overloads electrical circuitry. (Nuclear weapons also generate electromagnetic pulses.) These microwaves can pass through steel, concrete, and most other building materials, but the types of metallic conductors used in computer chips and electrical systems absorb them and are often melted as a result. An attack with a microwave weapon would cause only brief pain when used against people but would entirely destroy computer circuitry.
Two major types of HPM weapons exist: ultrawideband and narrowband. Ultrawideband weapons are the types of bombs the U.S. military already stockpiles: They go off once and destroy just about any electronics within their area of reach. (The area of effect varies with the amount of power given to the microwave.)
