Category: reason

It’s been five years since Americans saw a cellphone video of Eric Garner wheezing “I can’t breathe” as a police officer appeared to put him in a choke hold. Garner would later die, and the officer’s actions would get part of the blame.

That officer, Daniel Pantaleo, is now finally facing some sort of accountability for his actions. A departmental trial is supposed to determine whether Pantaleo violated the law, or even just violated police procedures, on that day. He could be fired. Or he could lose some vacation days. Or nothing might happen at all.

The police who confronted Garner suspected he was illegally selling “loosies,” single cigarettes, to people who want to get around New York City’s incredibly high cigarette taxes. Garner refused to cooperate with the cops, and the cops responded with the violent and ultimately fatal takedown.

It has taken years for the New York Police Department to take any sort of action here, in part because they were waiting to see if the Department of Justice was going to get involved. The district attorney for the Staten Island area sent a case to a grand jury in 2014, but the jurors declined to indict.

Of the police slayings that have sparked protests over the last few years, Garner’s was particularly egregious, given he was not himself accused of any violent activity. He had a long history of getting in trouble with police, but only for low-level offenses like selling loose cigarettes and possessing marijuana.

This trial is supposed to determine what sorts of consequences Pantaleo will face. But it’s unclear whether we’ll actually learn the officer’s fate. The New York Times explains:

The courtroom is in the Police Department’s headquarters in Lower Manhattan. The trial is open to the public, but no court transcripts will be available, and lists of testifying witnesses will not be provided.

Even the judge’s decision will be not necessarily be disclosed. It will be sent to the police commissioner, James P. O’Neill, who has the authority to uphold, modify or even vacate the ruling.

There is no mechanism for compelling Mr. O’Neill to announce his conclusion, though it is expected to be revealed by people with knowledge of the decision.

New York state law includes incredibly thorough demands that records of police conduct be kept secret, with the open goal of protecting officers from public embarrassment. The fact that Pantaleo had a history of misconduct before the confrontation with Garner only become public because somebody leaked it to the press.

California has finally changed its laws to improve access to records of police misbehavior. New York State has not followed suit. New York City passed an ordinance in 2016 that simply requires the NYPD to provide some statistical data on the number of officers who have engaged in misconduct in a given year—and the police aren’t even complying with that demand. New York desperately needs reforms to force more transparency about police conduct.

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A recent poll commissioned by the anti-pot group Smart Approaches to Marijuana supposedly shows that support for legalization is slipping in Illinois, where Gov. J.B. Pritzker and his allies are hoping to pass a legalization bill by the end of the month. The poll actually indicates that support for legalization is on the rise. It also shows that the way people respond to questions on this subject depends on how they are framed.

In March a poll by the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University, using a sample of 1,000 registered voters, found that 66 percent favored “the legalization of recreational marijuana if taxed and regulated like alcohol.” That result is strikingly similar to what Gallup found in a national poll last fall, when it reported that 66 percent of Americans thought “the use of marijuana should be made legal.”

The new survey, commissioned by Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM) and conducted last week by Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy based on a sample of 625 registered voters, found that 41 percent supported “legalizing commercial production, use and sale of marijuana for recreational use.” That’s up from 23 percent in a similar SAM-sponsored survey conducted in November 2017. But the Chicago Sun-Times compared the Mason-Dixon survey to the Simon Poll and reported that “support for legal pot” is “thinning.” WSIL, an ABC station in Southern Illinois, likewise reported that “support is dwindling for recreational marijuana.”

That conclusion seems suspect, given the difference in wording between the two polls. Here is how SAM asked about legalization:

Currently, possessing 10 grams of marijuana—enough for about 30 joints—is not a crime in Illinois. Instead, it is a civil violation like a traffic ticket. Many people call this policy “decriminalization.” Medical marijuana use is also legal in Illinois. Knowing that personal marijuana possession is already decriminalized in Illinois, which one of the following marijuana policies do you prefer:

– Keep the current policy of decriminalization and medical marijuana

– Keep the current policy of decriminalization and medical marijuana but also allow for past misdemeanor marijuana convictions to be expunged

– Change the current policy of decriminalization by legalizing commercial production, use and sale of marijuana for recreational use

– Make all marijuana use illegal

Given those choices, 31 percent of respondents favored the current policy, down from 47 percent in November 2017, while 41 percent preferred full legalization, up from 23 percent in the previous poll. Another 16 percent wanted to keep the current policy while expunging marijuana misdemeanors (an option that was not included in the earlier poll). Only 9 percent thought marijuana should be completely illegal, down from 18 percent in the earlier survey, while 3 percent weren’t sure, down from 8 percent in 2017.

SAM argues that the Simon Poll presents a “false dichotomy” and that offering more than two options shows that support for legalizing marijuana is lower than commonly thought. That may or may not be true. One could also argue that the Simon Poll’s comparison to alcohol, while it apparently makes legalization more palatable, puts the issue in the proper context, while SAM’s failure to mention regulation is misleading. But by SAM’s own logic, the two polls are not comparable. Meanwhile, its own polling, using the wording it prefers, shows that support for legalization is up 78 percent since November 2017, while support for complete prohibition has been cut in half.

It also should be noted that SAM’s description of current Illinois law is misleading. Leaving aside the debatable estimate that an average joint contains just one-third of a gram, possessing more than 10 grams of marijuana—about a third of an ounce—is still a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail for a first offense and a felony punishable by one to six years in prison for a second offense. In other words, people can still be arrested and incarcerated for possessing personal-use quantities of marijuana, so in that sense it is not really true that “personal marijuana possession is already decriminalized in Illinois.”

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Florida’s straw-banning cities sucked victory from the jaws of defeat on Friday, when Gov. Rick DeSantis vetoed a bill that would have banned their straw bans.

Two weeks ago, the Florida Legislature overwhelmingly passed HB 771, a recycling bill that included a five-year moratorium on localities passing new plastic straw regulations or enforcing the ones they already have on the books.

The target of the moratorium was the 10 towns that had passed either all-out straw bans or straw-on-request laws, which make it illegal to give out unsolicited straws. The law’s passage was a rare victory for straw ban opponents, who had tasted little but defeat since anti-straw mania began sweeping the nation in early 2018.

The Republican’s veto message makes it clear that his veto was meant to preserve the straw bans already on the books.

“A number of municipalities, including Sanibel, Ft. Myers Beach, and Miami Beach, have enacted ordinances prohibiting single-use plastic straws,” it says. “These measures have not, as far as I can tell, frustrated any state policy or harmed the state’s interests….[T]he State should simply allow local communities to address this issue through the political process.”

Despite a less-than-liberal record on green issues when he was a member of the U.S. House, DeSantis has surprised many by supporting several progressive environmental policies. He has boosted funding for Everglades restoration, opposed offshore drilling, and established two new state-level environmental offices. So his veto should not be a shock.

Nevertheless, the governor’s veto statement displays from some puzzling logic. DeSantis tells Floridians “who oppose plastic straw ordinances can seek recourse by electing people who share their views.”

That is exactly what they did by electing a Republican state legislature that then went on to pass the bill that the governor is now vetoing. In a political system where power is divided between state and local governments, people who lose the policy fight at city hall can take their issue to the state house.

Indeed, Florida already has passed a law forbidding localities from banning plastic bags.

Lawmakers in Colorado and Utah have introduced similar straw-ban preemption laws. Neither made much progress in those legislatures. With DeSantis’ veto, the tactic appears to be a bust in Florida as well.

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In a series of tweets starting Friday and continuing over the weekend, President Donald Trump outlined a plan for the federal government to use tariff revenue to buy agricultural goods from American farmers and redistribute it to other parts of the world.

It is, well, a pretty wild idea.

Though Trump has repeated this notion in a few other tweets, none of them go into much detail.

He seems to be proposing to use tax revenue paid by farmers—and by other Americans hurt by tariffs—to pay farmers to grow products they cannot sell, then to buy up the excess supply and spend more money shipping it to other countries where there is a demand for food.

If only there were some other mechanism for balancing supply and demand, right?

This Rube Goldberg–esque scheme is a good indicator of how convoluted Trump’s trade war has become. Even before last week’s ramp-up of U.S. tariffs and today’s retaliatory action from China, the trade war was already warping international supply chains. Brazil, for example, was shipping more soybeans to China after China, the world’s top consumer of soybeans, cut off imports of the crop from the United States. Brazil was sending so many soybeans to China that it actually had to import some from the U.S. to meet domestic demand.

Because trade, uh, finds a way.

Those alternative export markets weren’t enough to make up for the loss of the Chinese market, where nearly 50 percent of all U.S.-grown soybeans ended up prior to the trade war. The Trump administration tried to ease farmers’ pain by making $12 billion in payments to farmers stung by the trade war. Predictably, that became a boondoggle.

Now Trump wants to make this even more of a mess. Paying farmers to grow crops that they won’t be able to sell sounds a lot like something China would do, as Reuters columnist Karen Braun points out:

The govt buying product from farmers… sounds a lot like… China. Price support/govt purchasing has artificially inflated prices in China relative to the rest of the world. There’s no genuine price discovery. It didn’t exactly work either, so China has been phasing that out.

— Karen Braun (@kannbwx) May 10, 2019

Even the seemingly altruistic part of this wacky idea—handing out American surplus goods to the rest of the world—would likely be a disaster in practice.

For one, simply dumping American-grown agricultural goods into other countries would likely wreck local markets—and would probably violate World Trade Organization rules prohibiting such behavior.

For another, shipping goods all around the world requires a massive logistics operation that the federal government does not currently possess and likely would not handle well. And unless Trump is planning to nationalize the shipping industry too, there would be very real questions about who is paying for these shipments to “poor and starving countries.” I’ll give you one guess about the likely answer.

Prices and markets do a great job of predicting where supply will be needed to meet demand, even on the opposite side of the globe. There’s no reason to think the federal government, once it buys up all those excess goods from American farmers, will be anywhere near as efficient. The most likely end result of Trump’s Buy American policy is lots of American farm goods rotting in federal warehouses.

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You know what’s not fake news? It’s that politicians scream about the alleged dangers of “fake news” to justify efforts to censor speech that rubs them the wrong way. As Singapore’s rulers join a growing list of their peers in America and around the world promising to punish “false statements of fact,” it’s important to remember that the supposed plague of misleading and harmful information on the internet is nothing new, nor is governments’ desire to muzzle anybody who says inconvenient things.

Without a doubt, there’s bullshit on the Internet. Some of it results from sloppy fact-checking, and some is deliberate publication of untrue information and propaganda. But this isn’t a peculiar quality of online publishing—it’s an inevitable product of any publishing platform.

People want to reach the public with their messages, and they use the tools available to them.

Politicians like that power when it’s targeted at their enemies, but they resent it when they’re on the receiving end.

We’ve Been Here (Long) Before

“There has been more new error propagated by the press in the last ten years than in an hundred years before 1798,” President John Adams complained of his treatment by opposition newspapers at a time when news—fake or real—was printed by hand.

Adams’s Federalist allies in Congress responded to the president’s concerns about fake news with legal restrictions on “any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government.” Unsurprisingly, the first person charged under the law was an opposition lawmaker—Rep. Matthew Lyon of Vermont—who accused President Adams of “an unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp.”

Ironically, the then-president’s own cousin, Samuel Adams, had been an especially effective propagandist and publisher of arguably misleading information in the years leading up to the American Revolution. But that was the sort of fake news to which John Adams had no objection.

Censorship in Singapore

Striking a note that John Adams and company would have recognized, Singaporean newspaper The Straits Times suggests that speech controls are necessary because “an erosion of trust in governments and institutions has threatened the very foundations of democracy worldwide” and the “spread of fake news on new media have deepened this crisis.”

Presenting the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Bill for debate, Singapore’s Home Affairs and Law Minister K. Shanmugam said it was “an attempt to deal with one part of the problem. The serious problems arising from falsehoods spread through new media. And to try and help support the infrastructure of fact and promote honest speech in public discourse.”

Shanmugam’s party has held power continuously since 1959, largely by suing into bankruptcy any opposition figures who dare to utter speech critical of the regime.

His position is unlikely to become less secure now that government ministers have the unilateral power, “to prevent the communications of false statements of fact in Singapore” by requiring people to change or recant what they’ve published under threat of fines and imprisonment. The law—passed May 8—is intended to apply to information published not just inside the country but also elsewhere, a response to the government’s frustration with the international reach of the Internet.

That Singapore follows in the wake of Malaysia, another managed sort-of-democracy, is no surprise. That country last year banned the publication of “news, information, data and reports which is or are wholly or partly false” in a move transparently aimed at the opposition.

But traditional liberal democracies with supposedly firmer civil liberties protections also feel the allure of speech controls.

Channeling his own internal John Adams, France’s President Emmanuel Macron demanded government action against “propaganda articulated by thousands of social media accounts.” He went on to sniff, “If we want to protect liberal democracies, we must be strong and have clear rules.”

France’s lawmakers obliged their president with a law allowing government officials to order the removal of online articles deemed to be false.

They then erupted in outrage when Twitter determined that the French government’s own online efforts couldn’t be brought into compliance with the law and so rejected a voter registration campaign.

Macron continues to pressure online platforms to eliminate information he doesn’t like, meeting just days ago with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May also finds too much information published online to be inconvenient. She has accused Russia of “weaponizing information” and claims that Internet “companies have not done enough to protect users, especially children and young people, from harmful content.”

Without bothering with legislation, the British government is creating a “fake news” rapid response unit that is tasked with monitoring social media and going after stories officials claim are false. The government also proposes to hold online publishers liable for “inciting violence and violent content, encouraging suicide, disinformation, cyber bullying and children accessing inappropriate material.”

“The era of self-regulation for online companies is over,” Digital Secretary Jeremy Wright bluntly claims. “Voluntary actions from industry to tackle online harms have not been applied consistently or gone far enough.”

Censors plan, yet again, to suppress speech through involuntary means when people won’t muzzle themselves? What a shock.

Not that modern American politicians are immune to such temptations…

Speech Suppression Efforts at Home

Luckily the First Amendment, for now, poses a barrier to Singapore/Malaysia/France/UK-style suppression of disapproved speech in the U.S. But modern American politicians are far from immune to such temptations.

President Donald Trump famously denounces every inconvenient news story and critical report as “fake news.” His use of the term is so frequent that it was named word of the year for 2017 by the American Dialect Society.

Trump’s Democratic opponents may not agree that Trump should occupy the White House, but they share his resentment that online speech is out of (their) control.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) frets that Russia uses social media “to sow conflict and discontent all over this country” and threatens government intervention. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) openly envies the UK’s regulation of online media and says the U.S. should probably follow suit.

Last month, members of Congress from both parties alternately pushed extremism and political bias as reasons for government regulation of online speech.

Not that the rationale for regulating speech matters. The fakest news of all is the claim that politicians respect our liberty, including our free speech rights. Whatever excuse they raise, government officials will always find an excuse to try to suppress criticism and ideas they find uncomfortable. It’s our right to speak out anyway.

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