Archives for the 'Sanctimony' Category
Why the GINA “Genetic Discrimination” Law Is Bad
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At Slate, Eric Posner explains why the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act is a bad idea as a basic concept. The law nevertheless recently passed the Senate 95-to-0 and the House 414-to-1 because politicians’ thinking is controlled by labels, not logic or substance, and no one (especially not sanctimonious people) wants to be labeled as being in favor of “discrimination,” as Richard Ford notes.
Prior to its passage, I criticized GINA’s ban on employment discrimination in the National Law Journal for lacking a “direct threat” exception for public safety. The Economist’s blog suggested its ban on insurance discrimination could fundamentally undermine insurance markets and the availability of private health insurance in the long run.
The Children’s Crusade
Steven Dubner asks whether children are responsible for the recent explosion of environmental concern.
He’s got a point. As well as the decidedly non-secular holiday of Earth Day, which appears to be celebrated at every public school in the US, my daughter’s Brownie troop was assigned a project recently to learn about a foreign country. As well as learning about famous people, landmarks and so on, they had to tell the other Brownies “how they are green.” Hmmmm.
Yet this example of pester power at work would also help explain one phenomenon that is infuriating to the environmental movement. Consistently, Americans have said they are concerned about global warming, but when asked to rank it among urgent issues that action must be taken on, they rank it next to or right at the bottom. For instance, a Pew Research Center for the People and the Press poll in January found it ranked right at the bottom, tied with “making the Bush tax cuts permanent.” Even a minority of Democrat supporters called it a “top priority.” I suspect this is compatible with an agenda in the household set by people who don’t have to make the hard decisions.
What will be interesting is how this translates as these children leave school and start having to square living a “sustainable” life with working for a living and having to satisfy other needs. Perhaps they will put a higher value on the environment than their parents (and if prosperity continues to increase, I think this is going to happen in any event), but if times get hard as a direct result of environmental policy, then the choices made will be very interesting.
Cross-posted from The Really Inconvenient Blog.
Drill for Oil to Save the Environment
In the Washington Post, Robert Samuelson’s column “Start Drilling“ points out that ethanol production is far worse for the environment than drilling for oil in Alaska’s Arctic tundra, yet Congress promotes ethanol subsidies to reduce our reliance on foreign oil, even as it blocks drilling in the Arctic and ”the Atlantic and Pacific coasts” that would do far more to reduce our reliance on foreign oil. “What keeps these areas closed are exaggerated environmental fears, strong prejudice against oil companies and sheer stupidity,” he writes.
A news story today in the Post describes how ethanol production is devouring our food supply, even though a study shows that “greenhouse-gas emissions from corn and even cellulosic ethanol ‘exceed or match those from fossil fuels and therefore produce no greenhouse benefits.’ By encouraging an expansion of acreage, the study added, the use of U.S. cropland for ethanol could make climate conditions dramatically worse. And the runoff from increased use of fertilizers on expanded acreage would compound damage to waterways all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.”
In the American Spectator, Iain Murray notes that ethanol production has caused “food shortages and massive increases in food prices around the world. There have been food riots in Indonesia, Mexico, Egypt, and most recently, Haiti — where the poor have been reduced to eating cakes made with bleach and are on the verge of bringing the government down. Even in America, some grocery stores have begun to institute a form of rationing. Meanwhile, massive tracts of rainforest are being cleared in Indonesia to produce biodiesel, threatening the orangutan and other magnificent animals with extinction. In Brazil, the growth of sugar cultivation for ethanol is forcing food producers into the Amazon.”
By contrast, one of the Audubon Society’s chief bird sanctuaries (the Paul J. Rainey Wildlife Refuge in Louisiana), has 37 oil wells on site, and has produced natural gas for 50 years without harming the environment. Drilling for oil hasn’t harmed the birds a bit. But ethanol production causes environmental destruction, mass hunger, starvation, and rioting worldwide.
Disclosure: like many Americans, I have a retirement plan (both a 401(K) and an IRA). Like most retirement plans, it contains mutual funds. And most of those mutual funds own some stock in oil companies. So when politicians demand that the government impose a “windfall profits tax” on oil companies, what they are really trying to do is take money from my retirement plan — and your retirement plan, too, if you have one. That’s not going to encourage exploration for new sources of oil, or reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
GMU Law School Should Sue ABA Over Racial-Quota Mandates
The American Bar Association is continually threatening to pull the accreditation of George Mason University Law School for failing to adopt illegal racial quotas in admissions. That’s what San Diego law professor (and member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission) Gail Heriot notes in the Wall Street Journal. The ABA first forced GMU — one of the few law schools without a marked liberal bias — to use what the ABA itself refers to as “preferential affirmative action admissions program” to radically increase its minority percentage from 6.5 percent to 19 percent. But the ABA still wasn’t happy with the results, which were insufficiently extreme for the ABA’s quota-mongers (never mind that the qualified applicant pool for a law school of GMU’s caliber is lower than 19 percent minority, as is the percentage of non-white lawyers even in heavily-minority states like California, so it’s not as if having 19 percent minorities is a sign of discrimination. Indeed, the ABA conceded that GMU has long had a “very active effort to recruit minorities,” even before adopting racial preferences in admissions). So now the ABA is demanding what are in essence racial quotas.
The ABA’s actions violate 42 U.S.C. 1981 and the Supreme Court’s ruling in Gratz v. Bollinger (2003), which held in footnote 23 that racial quotas violate 42 U.S.C. 1981 (which bans both private and public discrimination) as well as the Fourteenth Amendment (which bans only governmental discrimination). Moreover, the ABA and its accreditors are liable for pressuring GMU to engage in racial discrimination under 42 U.S.C. 1981, which allows not only employers and other institutions to be held liable for racial discrimination, but also individual discriminators. And GMU and its president and law school dean, who were personally summoned to appear before the ABA in order for them to be pressured to maximize GMU’s racial quotas, have standing to sue over those quota mandates under Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod v. FCC, 141 F.3d 344 (D.C. Cir. 1998), which held that the Lutheran Church had standing to sue the FCC to keep the FCC from pressuring it to take race into account in hiring employees for its religious radio stations in order to satisfy a ”diversity” mandate. (Note that GMU is a state university).
Heritage Speech
I’ve just got back from delivering a speech at the Heritage Foundation on the subject of my book. I think it went well and the audience certainly seemed enthusiastic about it. You’ll be able to watch it here when the webcast gets properly archived within a day or so. Thanks to ever-excellent John Hilboldt and his team for putting it on and to Ben Lieberman for hosting it.
More on Deadly Ethanol Subsidies
Nate Beeler has an an excellent editorial cartoon, “Food for Thought,” that captures the deadly and costly consequences of ethanol subsidies, in today’s Washington Examiner. Many go hungry because of the greed of a few. We wrote earlier about how ethanol subsidies are causing hunger and starvation worldwide. Rioting and violent protests have occurred in many countries, including Mexico, Pakistan, Egypt, Indonesia, Haiti, El Salvador, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Senegal, Ethiopia, Mauritania, Madagascar, and the Philippines. Ethanol subsidies are also contributing to environmental destruction.
The Bottom Line on ‘Earth Week’
Our good friend Tim Carney’s Examiner column this week connects a few very interesting dots - what, for example, does Alicia Silverstone talking about energy efficiency on NBC have to do with corporate welfare for one the nation’s largest companies? Tim puts it all together.
Earth Day was Tuesday, and NBC Universal has extended the celebration into “Earth Week.” Reprising its “Green Week” from last fall, NBC and its affiliates worked some sort of environmental message into all of its programming this week.
Amid its calls for individual sacrifices in the name of the environment and paeans to “green” legislation, the network once again failed to disclose prominently that its parent company stands to get rich off of “environmentalist” laws.
NBC Universal is owned by General Electric, which plays a regular role in this column because of how aggressively the company has hitched its profits to its lobbying successes. GE spends more than any other corporation in America on lobbying the federal government — more than $20 million annually over the past three years — and Green Week and Earth Week probably should be disclosed as lobbying efforts.
In many of GE’s businesses, the profit model appears to be: (1) invest in something for which there isn’t much demand; (2) then lobby to mandate or subsidize it.
This is all also part of of GE’s must discussed “ecomagination” campaign, which so far seems mostly to have produced ever more imaginative ways of getting U.S. taxpayers to pay GE to manufacture technologies consumers don’t want.
Kristof: Stop Antagonizing the World
Nicholas Kristof has a column today in the New York Times, “Better Roses Than Cocaine,” in favor of the proposed free-trade agreement with Colombia, and debunking common claims made against it. We earlier described how House leaders pushed through special tax breaks for an oil company controlled by Venezuela’s anti-American dictator, even as they seek to undermine Colombia’s pro-American government and block a deal that would spur even more economic growth here than in Colombia. The Washington Post, in an editorial, also questioned why they’re helping Venezuela’s “repressive government” while attacking Colombia’s “democratic government.”
The FDA Tobacco Regulation Bill = Monopoly
The Wall Street Journal has an editorial today against the FDA tobacco regulation bill. It argues that the bill contradicts the government’s own lawsuit against the tobacco industry, even as it undermines competition in the tobacco industry by giving Big Tobacco “protections against smaller competitors.” Lobbyists have gotten rich pushing the bill. We previously discussed how FDA regulation of the tobacco industry could backfire against public health here, here, and here.
The Indian Question
At a time when liberal condescension is an important issue in domestic American politics, we shouldn’t forget that it is extremely important in the global warming issue as well. An excellent post at The Breakthrough Institute by Siddharta Shome sums it up:
Last week, the New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin blogged about the World Bank’s decision to finance a major new coal fired power plant in India. Revkin ended his blog with a question: “Is all of this bad? If you’re one of many climate scientists foreseeing calamity, yes. If you’re a village kid in rural India looking for a light to read by, no.”
In response, the famed environmental writer Bill McKibben asked his own question:
“The really interesting question, to follow on the last sentence of the story, is: what if you’re an Indian kid looking for a light to read by-and also living near the rising ocean, or vulnerable to the the range expansion of dengue-bearing mosquitoes, or dependent on suddenly-in-question monsoonal rains.”
McKibben may think he knows better but I think the answer for that village kid would probably be the same. Take the electricity and the light to read by and worry about malaria and monsoonal rains later.
Indeed. Read the whole thing. It makes good use of the “maybe the horses will learn to sing” story so often misattributed to Herodotus. The only thing missing is some mention of the inevitable result of satisfying the material needs so rightly identified as a precondition for “the modern appreciation of the nonhuman world.” Not just value attached to the environment, but a more resilient society that is affected far less when the nonhuman world changes for the worst.
Cross-posted from The Really Inconvenient Blog.
The Left on Ethanol
As the ethanol disaster gets more and more apparent, the liberal left is trying to wriggle out of any responsibility for it, blaming it on Bush and agribusiness. Now, I agree that the President and the rent-seeking giants like Archer Daniels Midland bear a large part of the blame, and several environmental pressure groups have consistently been against corn ethanol (but have put very little of their considerable lobbying weight behind opposing ethanol expansion measures) but it was actually the liberal left’s conversion on the issue that tipped the balance. At one point, Sen. Clinton and the California Senators, for instance, were staunch opponents of ethanol, but as the demands for decarbonization gathered steam, they switched. The terrible energy act of 2007 that massively expanded ethanol subsidies was passed by a Democrat-controlled Congress, after all.
For instance, compare and contrast Senator Clinton’s changing stances. In 2002, she said during a Senate energy debate, something CEI gave her credit for:
We are providing a single industry with a guaranteed market for its products—subsidies on top of subsidies on top of subsidies and, on top of that, protection from liability. What a sweetheart deal.
By 2006, she had switched, citing environmental and energy security concerns for her support for renewables, including ethanol. In 2007, on the campaign trail in Iowa, she said:
Now, Iowa is way ahead of the rest of the country. What you’ve done with ethanol . . . you’re setting the pace.
Anyway, it’s also important to note the role of Al Gore in promoting and sustaining ethanol, something he claims credit for:
When I was in Congress we used to wrangle about the value of making ethanol from corn. Despite the moonshine jokes, I supported ethanol. Even though some of its environmental consequences made me uncomfortable, I thought it was important for us to work on alternatives to fossil fuels to begin to break our dependence on foreign oil. Since then, newer innovations have [come along]: one company has figured out a way to make a new kind of ethanol out of plant fiber–cheaper & cleaner than regular ethanol.
Source: An Inconvenient Truth, by Al Gore, p.137 May 26, 2006
Here’s things he did while he was Vice President:
Supports ethanol subsidies & “farm safety net”
Vice President Al Gore maintains that “it’s well known that I’ve always supported ethanol. I have a consistent record of shoring up the farm safety net.” Gore, who as vice president cast a tie-breaking vote in 1994 against a proposal Senator Bill Bradley sponsored to cut tax incentives for ethanol fuel, adds that “I have not ducked when votes for … agricultural interests were on the floor.”
Source: Sustainable Energy Coalition, media backgrounder #2 Nov 18, 1999Triple use of biomass, ethanol, plant-based textiles, etc.
“Our administration’s goal is to triple the use of biomass technologies, ethanol, gasoline additives, plant-based textiles and other environmentally friendly products by 2010. This is just one of the exciting ways our efforts to protect the environment will begin to help America’s ailing farming economy.”
Source: Sustainable Energy Coalition, media backgrounder #2 Nov 18, 1999
As for biodiesel, the European Union still insists that its promotion of the Orangutan-killing fuel is predicated on greenhouse gas reduction:
“There is no question for now of suspending the target fixed for biofuels,” said Barbara Helfferich, spokeswoman for EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas.
“You can’t change a political objective without risking a debate on all the other objectives,” which could see the EU landmark climate change and energy package disintegrate, an EU official said.
Ethanol was once just a boondoggle. It became a disaster when the greens insisted on making decarbonization the sine qua non of energy policy. They let the genie out of the bottle.
When campaigning for Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar in 2006, Al Gore asked, “What is so complicated about choosing fuel that comes from Minnesota farmers rather than from the Middle East?”
Quite a lot, as it turns out, Al.
“Too Much Money for AIDS” Treatment
So much foreign-aid money is being spent on costly AIDS treatment in Africa, compared to other diseases, that “H.I.V.-infected children are offered exemplary treatment, while children suffering from much simpler-to-treat diseases are left untreated, sometimes to die.” Political correctness is at the root of this problem: AIDS afflicts people in wealthy countries like the U.S. and Europe (especially those people who have unprotected anal sex or share needles), but the other diseases that kill millions of people in Africa don’t (indeed, many diseases that kill or cripple people in the Third World, like polio, no longer even exist in the United States). But people who point out the obvious bias in favor of AIDS get criticized by people like Michael Gerson as “mean-spirited,” even though the flood of AIDS money, much of it wasted, has had resulted in a brain drain from primary care that harms some African health-care systems.
In today’s Washington Post, the Chair of Uganda’s National AIDS Prevention Committee makes another important point: cheap and effective AIDS prevention is being shafted in favor of costly treatments for people who already have AIDS. Rev. Sam Ruteikara notes that “to prolong one AIDS patient’s life with antiretroviral treatment for one year costs more than $1,000. In 2007, 1.6 million people in sub-Saharan Africa died from AIDS — and 1.7 million became infected with HIV. In Uganda, we have a proverb: ‘You cannot continue mopping the floor while the broken tap is still running.’ Every $1 spent on treatment is $1 unspent on effective prevention.’”
Using International “Law” to Subvert Basic Legal Protections and Democracy
International courts and “human rights” bodies issue rulings that purport to have the force of law. But much of their reasoning is based not on written laws found in any law book, or agreed to by any legislature or citizenry. Instead, it is based on vaguely-defined “customary international law,” principles of so-called “natural law” derived from a supposedly “clear consensus” by enlightened people across the globe. But that “consensus” is often illusory, since it can easily be fabricated, manipulated, or distorted by international lawyers.
Lawyers are, on average, further to the left politically than the average citizen. And so-called international lawyers are even more so. (I used to practice international law at Skadden, Arps). Just as the grass always seems greener on the other side of the fence, lawyers often claim that the law is more liberal elsewhere in the world than in their own benighted country, and that such liberal norms — at odds with their own country’s law — constitute customary international law. Thus, it is commonly argued that customary international law bans the death penalty for mass murderers, and requires countries to ban disfavored forms of speech (such as ”hate speech,” or criticism of any religion), although in reality, the strongest support for bans on such speech actually comes from undemocratic regimes like Cuba and China.
It is hard to fight these claims even when they are false, because ordinary people (and even most lawyers) don’t know much about foreign law. The lawyers who fashion “customary international law” are thus largely unaccountable. Perhaps as a result, customary international law is generally of poorer quality than domestic law. Scholars have cited this fact in celebrating the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Medellin v. Texas (2008), which refused to make Texas hear yet another challenge to a murderer’s conviction (which had already twice been upheld by different court systems) when ordered to do so by the International Court of Justice (a ruling at odds with the fact that virtually all ICJ member countries permit only one appeal of a conviction, not successive appeals).
Misleading the public about foreign law is common among “human rights” officials. For example, an official in Australia’s new Labour government claims that people accused of race discrimination should have to prove themselves innocent, rather than being proved guilty. To justify this outrage, he and Australia’s “human rights” commission claim that is the practice in America, when in fact it is quite the contrary.
American law puts the burden of proof on the complainant and the government, not the alleged offender, in discrimination cases. The U.S. Supreme Court explicitly so ruled in Texas v. Burdine (1981) and St. Mary’s Honor Center v. Hicks (1993). But Australia’s Race Discrimination Commissioner, Tom Calma, and the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission falsely claim that under American law, “the onus of proof” is on “the person who has been accused of discrimination.” (See “Call to Switch Onus on Racist Offenses,” The Age, News, April 5, 2008).
Joseph H.H. Weiler, a law professor who co-drafted the European Parliament’s Declaration of Human Rights and Freedoms, made American legal thinking seem more liberal than it is, by inviting to Europe to represent it two of America’s most radical law professors: the University of Michigan’s Catharine MacKinnon, who considers most heterosexual sex to be rape; and Harvard Law School’s Duncan Kennedy, who advocated having law school professors periodically exchange their positions with college janitorial staff in order to promote diversity and social equality.
By contrast, when laws across the world are more conservative than a law professor’s own, they are studiously ignored in formulating “human rights” law (like the world-wide aversion of most countries’ legal systems toward civil punitive damages and late-term abortions, which U.S. law often permits).
The very international “human rights” lawyers who insist that ”hate speech” should be curbed are often radicals who are blind to certain forms of prejudice. A classic example of this is the disturbing Richard Falk, recently appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council to investigate Israel. Falk, a liberal Princeton professor emeritus, has likened Israel to the Nazis, praised the Ayatollah Khomeini (the Iranian dictator whose regime ordered the killings and torture of many religious and ethnic minorities in Iran), and promoted 9/11 conspiracy theories that accuse the U.S. government of complicity in the 9/11 attacks. Falk’s wackiness may offend the general public and Israel, which plans to bar him from coming to Israel, but it apparently does not offend lawyers and state judges very much: it did not stop the Washington State Supreme Court from citing his advocacy of affirmative action to uphold a discriminatory, gender-based affirmative-action set-aside in public contracting, in Southwest Wash. Chapter v. Pierce County, 667 P.2d 1092 (1983).
It’s the French, again
I know, I know, the French are targets of easy ridicule here in the USA. But still. Seems French lawmakers passed a bill making it illegal for fashion houses and so forth to show extremely thin models. (See Yahoo! story.) Seems the author of the law, Conservative lawmaker Valery Boyer, had insisted this sort of display encourages anorexia or severe weight loss and should be punishable in court. True, the photo accompanying the Yahoo! story is rather grim - a model with extremely protruding shoulders and ribs. It seems quite unfathomable that a fashion designer would walk that, literally, skeletal look down the runway. But, do we really need a government law to tell us this? A little bit of independent thinking and decision-making would go a long way here. Sure, we are all subject to social pressures - how to dress, how to present ourselves, how much to weigh, etc. But the best advice I can think of is to encourage people (children included) to exercise some independent judgment. Even if we make bad decisions from time to time, we have opportunity to make better decisions in the future. The alternative, as we see in France, is to use government as a tool to treat us all like idiots incapable of making good decisions.
Hundreds of Thousands Will Starve, IMF Says
“Hundreds of thousands of people will be starving” soon, the International Monetary Fund says. Government officials and food relief agencies quoted in the story cite growing “biofuel production” as a key reason. Ethanol subsidies and mandates are causing farmers to shift from producing food to producing ethanol. As a result, food riots have taken place across the world, in Mexico, Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia, Haiti, El Salvador, Ivory Coast, and other countries.
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