Category: Politics

Leaks in Government Intelligence

The WikiLeaks scandal is exposing the internal contradictions of liberal democracy, which pretends to promote an open society while its heavily entrenched power structure relies on coercion and espionage. The hypocrisy of Western democracies is not a new thing; in fact, we can turn to the revolutionary movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to see how the principles of “liberty” and “equality” were often imposed by brute force or deceit.

The infamous “Reign of Terror” in revolutionary France was but the culmination of an increasingly aggressive secularism that had sought to turn the Church into an arm of the state with its Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1791. Thousands of priests, aristocrats, and peasants who opposed the new order were killed or exiled. Similarly, in Mexico, the liberals, once securely in power, abolished the Catholic university, and eventually all public manifestations of Catholicism. Back in Europe, democratic and republican revolutions were prompted through coups and assassinations, including the infamous throat-slitting of Pellegrino Rossi, interior minister of the Papal States.

The use of secret societies, Masonic or otherwise, was a staple of liberal and revolutionary movements of the nineteenth century, as is well documented. In England, whose Protestant culture is also the product of a successful intrigue – the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 – and its cultural heir the United States, it has been common to dismiss such claims as paranoia, since they are vested in defending the legitimacy of the liberal power structure. In fact, the existence of a real Masonic conspiracy (as opposed to the various bugaboos of more recent times) was publicly exposed in France in 1904. In “l’Affaire des Fiches,” the anticlerical war minister General Louis Andre was found to have been determining promotions and denunciations on the basis of a card file he kept of who was a Catholic and who attended Mass. Both Andre and Prime Minister Emile Combes were Freemasons, and had acquired their information from the spy activities of the Masonic Grand Orient of France.

Once victorious in destroying the cultural infrastructure of its rivals, democrats hypocritically proclaim “freedom of education”, where all education dogmatically accepts the tenets of secular democracy, which is why, to a historically educated person, there is surprisingly little ideological diversity in modern academia. The dissenting academics having been purged or rendered impotent, a new form of coercion is free to impose itself. It is only through a historically inaccurate demonization of previous forms of government that our modern Western governments can pretend to any virtue.

After the outbreak of the First World War, the governments of the West gradually abandoned any notion of aristocratic honor, and learned to wage war and peace mercilessly. Apart from the mechanical destruction of much of Europe’s cultural patrimony in the two world wars, there arose intelligence agencies that took the ancient art of espionage to new levels, systematically intercepting communications even of allies, and attempting to corrupt foreign citizens into betraying their governments (i.e., act as “agents”). The U.S. and Britain were most advanced in this regard, especially in the aftermath of World War II.

In the U.S., the presence of an agency that systematically violates personal privacy would run into constitutional problems. These were circumvented by allowing the CIA only to spy on foreigners, and by collaborating with the FBI, which spies on U.S. citizens in the name of police security. The NSA can spy on U.S. citizens indirectly by making use of data gathered by British collaborators. Between the U.S. and the U.K., no one’s information is safe, as was proved by the infamous scandal of the U.S. and U.K. spying on UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and other officials.

We know from bitter experience that the U.S. and its allies are ruthlessly amoral when it comes to espionage – absolutely nothing is exempt from the catchall excuse of “security”. The successful 9/11 attacks only allowed the U.S. to declare openly what it had already been doing in secret for decades: illegally spying on its own citizens, and detaining people in foreign prisons for years without trial. A majority of the docile public actually supports these policies. So much for their supposed love of liberty.

Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange have lain bare the contradictions of our liberal establishment, which demands that we respect the authority of governments that were founded by murdering and destroying the previous social order throughout the nineteenth century. Liberal democracy, at its core, was founded on intrigue and brute force, so it is only fitting that it clings to power by using coercive tactics against its citizens. We should find it blessedly ironic, then, that the government of Sweden makes use of its extraordinarily liberal laws regarding sexual consent as an excuse to arrest Assange shortly after his latest wave of embarassing leaks. Liberal efforts to defend women, the poor, and the disabled are really designed to pit the citizenry in competition with one another, always asserting their rights against each other, rather than joining forces against their real enemy.

When the core of the liberal democratic establishment (and I use “liberal” in the classical sense, which includes today’s so-called “conservatives”) is challenged, it is remarkable how everyone suddenly marches in lockstep. Credit card companies refuse to process payments, hosting companies drop the site, and even the ostensibly neutral ICANN takes away the domain name ‘wikilieaks.org’. It is chilling how all the powers in the world can line up against someone and try to suppress them, even on the supposedly free and open Internet.

Fortunately, there are countermeasures available. Already, a host of mirror sites have been created, and there are even instructions online for creating a mirror site. Supporters of Wikileaks have initiated distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against some of the companies that tried to kill the original site. While such activity is illegal, it is surprisingly easy to accomplish, as are other forms of online hacking. A person needs only to set himself up behind a proxy in a country that does not forward tracking records to the U.S. or other Western countries, or simply login through a neighboring wireless network. These tricks and other hacking tools can be found by searching on the scraper site Scroogle, which lets you search without being tracked by Google.

The weapons of the hacker can provide a potent counterbalance to the temerity of our governments, which pretend that they own you and have the right to spy on you or do whatever they want with you, but heaven forbid that you should find out what they are doing. These illegitimate usurpers, who use public authority for private aggrandizement, should be thankful that we do not do anything worse to them.

Invasion of the Body Scanners

A funny thing happened on the way to the airport: the American public has finally stopped its docile submission to the ludicrous security measures imposed by the Transportation Security Administration, a division of Homeland Security. The last straw apparently is the new “virtual strip search” body scanning being installed by the hundreds in airports throughout the U.S., at a cost of $173 million, giving new meaning to the term “stimulus spending”. Pilots, airlines, and travelers have all raised massive protests against these scans, and a national opt-out day has been planned on November 24. The alternative to the scan is an aggressive frisk, akin to sexual molestation, which serves no real security purpose, but is intended to frighten passengers into assenting the scans.

Some citizens, finding both the scans and the opt-out procedures abhorrent, have called for a boycott on flying. A public policy research center, EPIC, has filed a against Homeland Security, holding that the scans are a violation of the Fourth Amendment, as well as the Administrative Procedure Act, the Privacy Act, the Video Voyeurism Prevention Act, and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The last act is cited by a Muslim litigant who holds that the scan-or-grope system is a violation of Islamic modesty. Indeed, it is a violation of any semblance of sexual decorum retained by any culture.

The defense of the scans is predictably crass and utilitarian, with the usual senseless fearmongering about terrorism we are accustomed to hearing from Homeland Security apparatchiks. It is no matter that Americans are far more likely to be murdered by non-terrorists – 15,000 victims a year – but we do not on that account put high-crime areas under lockdown. Terrorism is a convenient excuse for the expansion of the police state. It is not even true that airline terrorism is at its worst in this decade. As airline pilot Patrick Smith points out on Salon.com, the world experienced a horrific sequence of airplane terrorism from 1985 to 1989, yet this did not result in a call for draconian security measures. Even if a 9/11-scale catastrophe happened every year, you would still be more likely to die as a pedestrian in a road accident (over 4,000 deaths per year).

If this were not enough, the scans do not even enhance security as is claimed. Body scans would not have detected the low-density materials carried by the “underwear bomber”, the ostensible reason for implementing the scans. Even if it were so, should we have randomized cavity searches if a single terrorist smuggles contraband in an orifice, as is common practice among prisoners and guerrillas? As Israeli counterterrorism experts understand, effective security requires breaking up the plan before it gets to the airport, or identifying suspects based on behavior. This is why Tel Aviv’s airport doesn’t use the scanners, and a leading Israeli airport security expert has called them “useless”.

That’s right. All the tough-talking TSA fearmongers who talk about needing to counteract “the enemy” aren’t even being effective at doing that. Fortunately for them, their performance can be rationalized as a success no matter what happens. If there are no more successful attacks, this proves that the scans work (“banana in the ear” syndrome), and if there is a successful attack, that will only prove that we need more power in the hands of TSA. Their ineptitude will still be obvious to those who are well informed, and as for their tough talk about the need to sacrifice some liberty in order to win this fictitious war, it cannot mask their craven cowardice, for only a creature somewhat less than a man could allow the fear of death make him seriously consider compromising his dignity.

8 Ways to Reduce Health Care Costs

Currently, most discussion in the United States regarding health care reform is focused on the extent to which health care costs are covered by public or private insurance. However, it will make little difference whether health care is funded privately or publicly if the cost of health care is not held in check. Even with the current predominantly privatized system, the federal budget will be overwhelmed in a few decades by Medicare outlays, which are rising much faster than inflation due to increased health care costs. If the government will not be able to afford paying for health care for seniors, it will hardly be able to provide it for others. Our energies would be better directed, therefore, at reducing the cost of health care.

There are several ways that we can reduce health care costs almost immediately; others will take more time. These approaches are primarily directed at undoing the antiquated system of medical education and hospital regulation, much of which is grounded in the politics of the 1930s. Supposedly non-profit hospitals and universities are able to gouge the public for their services, yet receive federal subsidies. It would be considered abominable if a non-profit charity or church indulged in the extravagances of these institutions, many of which have billion-dollar endowments. Anyone who has seen an $8000 bill for routine testing or a night’s hospital stay should know that the major culprits behind health care cost are the service providers, not the insurance companies.

Indeed, the oft-maligned HMOs are themselves the product of the last great effort at liberal health care reform, the HMO Act of 1973. Prior to the HMO act, most health insurance only covered major illnesses or surgeries, just as auto insurance only covers accidents, not routine maintenance. Ordinary care could be paid out of pocket, or in the cases of the extremely poor, not at all. This was not burdensome, since the cost of a routine doctor’s visit was not much. With the advent of mandatory employer health insurance, much more extensive coverage was required, driving up the cost of insurance premiums. Further, since the patient no longer paid for routine health care out of pocket (except a fixed co-payment), he did not care what exorbitant fee the hospital charged the insurance company. Since patients no longer had any incentive to keep costs down, and indeed were often unaware of the price, the cost of health care could rise, and the insurance companies would pass on this cost in their premiums.

Going further back, our medical education system has relied on a bizarre system of requiring four years of medical school in addition to university, and then three or four years of grossly underpaid internship or “residency”, after which the young doctor emerges with staggering debts often well over $100,000. Given this burden of education and debt, it is no wonder that a large proportion of American doctors choose to become high-priced specialists, leaving a deficiency of general practitioners. Only the extremely intelligent can pass the rigors of U.S. medical schools, where emphasis is placed on the mathematical and analytical aspects of medicine, and less on preventive nutrition and humanitarian aspects. The typical medical school student is intellectually overqualified to be a GP; many highly competent doctors in other countries would not pass muster in U.S. schools, even though experience proves they are quite capable in their profession.

Nurses possess the education necessary to diagnose and treat most common ailments; and pharmacists have the education to prescribe medications, yet both are prohibited from exercising their craft due to our arcane medical system that requires an MD to be involved in every diagnosis and treatment. Given that this same system induces a shortage of GPs, this can only drive up cost. What is worse, these science-oriented, non-humanitarian doctors tend to think everything is to be solved with expensive testing and drugs, especially since ordering tests and drugs takes less of their time than getting to know the patient and his behavior. I once had an “old school” doctor who resigned out of disgust with the increasing pressure to become a pill dispenser.

The residency program, which is supposed to be a time of apprenticeship, is often just an opportunity for the hospitals to exploit cheap labor. Residents often work 100 hours a week, with little sleep, thereby impairing performance, and much of their time is spent on menial administrative tasks unrelated to patient treatment. With yet another three years of lost income, it is no wonder that they all wish to cash in on a high-paying position. To cover their increased debt, they will actually have to be paid more than if they had been paid justly in the first place.

In sum, I propose the following cost-cutting measures:

  1. Abolish Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) advertising for prescription drugs, as this was illegal before the 1990s, and consumers (not to mention doctors) are often poor judges of what medications they should take. Billions of dollars would be saved from this act, since the cost of TV advertising would no longer need to be built into drug costs.
  2. Reform the residency program so interns have the right to demand competitive salaries and reasonable hours. Increasing their salaries should actually lower costs in the long run, as doctors will begin their careers less debt-laden.
  3. Allow RNs and pharmacists to diagnose and treat ailments within their competency. This will reduce costs, as they have lower salaries.
  4. Reduce the cost of medical school (by student grants) or allow admission to medical school direct from high school. Less stringent mathematical requirements should apply to GPs, as mathematical geniuses don’t necessarily make better family doctors. A certain amount of scientific hubris would have to be swallowed here.
  5. Set limits on tort claims related to medical malpractice. This will lower malpractice insurance premiums, greatly reducing the salary demands of doctors.
  6. Stress preventive medicine in medical education, including nutrition and exercise. Less emphasis on surgery, drugs, and high-tech testing as solutions to preventable diseases will greatly reduce costs.
  7. Require full advance disclosure of costs to the patient. Often the patient does not know or care what the cost is, allowing gouging by the hospitals. Ideally, insurance should not cover routine care, which would force caregivers to drive down their prices in order to be competitive among consumers. Emergency care should be price-regulated, since the patient often has no choice of caregiver in such a situation.
  8. The government could demand more stringent accounting from hospitals and universities to account for their non-profit status. If the institution is federally funded, salaries derived from ordinary revenue should be held to the federal executive pay limit. Alternatively, abolish their non-profit status, and dispense with the myth that hospitals and universities are not just businesses.