Tag: hit&run

Jeffrey Epstein’s Death in Manhattan Jail Sets Off Conspiracy Theories, But Police Neglect Seems More Likely

Alleged pedophile and child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein died Saturday of an apparent suicide in a Manhattan jail. News of his death was met almost immediately with wild speculation that he was the victim of a plot meant to stop him from ratting out high-profile friends who might have been implicated in his sex trafficking operation. Yet Epstein’s demise is probably the result of jailhouse incompetence rather than conspiracy.

Epstein was arrested last month on charges of trafficking dozens of minors for sex between 2002 and 2005. He’d previously pleaded guilty to soliciting sex with a minor in 2008, but federal prosecutors did not pursue a larger case against Epstein at that time—a decision made by former Trump Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta, who had handled the case as a South Florida federal prosecutor in 2008 and who resigned last month after the new charges against Epstein surfaced. After his latest arrest, Epstein was being held at the Manhattan Metropolitan Correctional Center.

Conspiracy theories have run wild in the days since Epstein’s death in large part because the 66-year-old financier had long-running friendships with both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. Partisans on both sides had high hopes that one or the other would be implicated as participants in Epstein’s crimes if a trial was held. In the immediate aftermath of Epstein’s demise, Twitter lit up with claims that he’d been offed by a Trump goon or Clintonian hit squad—with the president himself helping to promote the latter theory. If you’re going to believe something like that, why not go big and assume the once-friendly Trump and Clinton clans worked together?

The reality of Epstein’s death is likely to be much more mundane—though likely preventable. Despite earlier reports that Epstein had been on “suicide watch” at the time of his death, officials now say Epstein had been taken off round-the-clock observation more than a week ago. Epstein had been put under suicide watch after a July 23 incident that left him unresponsive in his cell, though it was unclear whether he’d tried to kill himself or been attacked by someone else. Instead, he was left alone in a single jail cell in a part of the prison where guards were supposed to check on prisoners every 30 minutes—something that apparently did not happen early Saturday morning when Epstein killed himself, according to The Washington Post.

The union representing prison guards at the Manhattan facility is already on the defensive, claiming that staffing cuts and forced overtime have left the prison’s staff unable to supervise all inmates all the time. Another suspicious detail is the fact that video cameras in the part of the prison where Epstein was housed were inoperable on the night he died.

None of that should be taken as proof of a conspiracy, but the conditions in the prison and the circumstances surrounding Epstein’s death demand further investigation. Not because it might implicate Trump or the Clintons, but because if the people running Manhattan’s prison are always this bad at their jobs, prisoners far less objectionable than Epstein are at risk of suicide.

FREE MINDS

Hong Kong protests turn violent; airport shut down. Sunday was the most violent day yet in more than two months of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. Police reportedly fired tear gas and rubber bullets directly at protesters in a packed subway station.

On Monday, thousands of protesters again packed the main terminal of Hong Kong’s international airport, forcing the cancellation of all flights, and raising fears that police may try to forcefully displace the protests. The airport handles more than 1,100 commercial and cargo flights every day, according to CNN, so the shutdown may cause additional problems with flights throughout Asia.

As the situation in Hong Kong intensifies and China threatens to intervene, it becomes increasingly clear that the U.S. should accept individuals forced to flee the city.

FREE MARKETS

Elizabeth Warren admits that raising taxes will hurt businesses. Now let’s see if she will apply that lesson more broadly, or if she assumes it only works on businesses she doesn’t like.

QUICK HITS

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2YN8p1e
via IFTTT

Can Excluding Someone from a Town Be a Proper Remedy in a Libel/Harassment Case?

From a New Hampshire Supreme Court decision earlier this year in MacDonald v. Jacobs:

The record supports the following facts. The defendant [Lisa Jacobs] seasonally resides in Fitzwilliam. According to the plaintiffs [Lorraine and Peter MacDonald], in 2012 they purchased a vacation home that abuts or is near the defendant’s family’s property.

Thereafter, the defendant began letter-writing campaigns in which she falsely accused the plaintiffs of, among other things, a variety of illegal activities. In 2016, the plaintiffs sued the defendant for defamation. Following a trial, the jury found that the defendant’s statements were defamatory and that they were made with malice, thereby warranting the award of special damages. In addition, the trial court, finding the defendant’s statements “vast and disturbing,” issued a permanent injunction prohibiting the defendant from, inter alia, going within a five-mile radius of the plaintiffs’ home in Fitzwilliam [where defendant’s family has a summer home] and from entering the plaintiffs’ hometown in Sterling, Massachusetts….

The trial court found that the geographical restrictions it imposed were “appropriate because a less restrictive order would be ineffective.” According to the court, the plaintiffs’ “fear for their safety is a rational response to [the defendant’s] relentless and increasingly intimidating behavior,” and the defendant’s “several threats” toward the plaintiffs provided a “compelling interest” for granting the injunction. Thus, the trial court reasoned that preventing the defendant from accessing her family’s summer home in Fitzwilliam, “the epicenter from which all of [her] attacks have stemmed, [was] an appropriate, narrowly tailored restriction to address this interest.”

The trial court further found that “[the defendant] has more than demonstrated her belief that she has a right to harass the [plaintiffs] and that she has an absolute fixation on the victims. She has published defamatory, false materials; contacted numerous federal and state authorities to report these falsities; threatened the [plaintiffs’] lives; and travelled to the [plaintiffs’] hometown in Massachusetts to solicit signatures to support her false and extreme accusations. [The defendant] has also given the Court no indication that she will abide by a more narrow court order, and she has shown no contrition for any of her actions—actions that were defamatory, threatening, and even criminal, as she was arrested for impersonating an agent of the New Hampshire Attorney General a week before trial and yet testified during the defamation case that she was such an agent.

“Even when the defamation case was approaching trial, and even with standing orders from this Court to refrain from harassing the [plaintiffs], [the defendant] published more defamatory material. [The defendant’s] increasingly threatening actions and her failure to follow previous court orders make geographical banishments necessary.

“[The defendant] has harassed the [plaintiffs] … for no apparent reason and they have been driven to desperation by continuous harassment…. These innocent victims deserve to be able to live their lives free from the constant fear of being tormented and attacked. The geographic restriction … will provide them with a margin of territorial safety in which they can live in peace. This Court also considered the fact that the [Fitzwilliam] property, where [the defendant] has occasionally resided, is not a year-round residence, and that [the defendant] was not at the residence during the summer months of 2017…. [The defendant], therefore, would not have her liberty and right to travel overly burdened by the five-mile restriction around the [plaintiffs’] Fitzwilliam residence. Similarly, since [the defendant] is not a resident of Sterling, and has not evidenced reasons to visit Sterling other than to garner signatures for her false affidavits implicating the [plaintiffs], preventing her from entering Sterling would not unconstitutionally constrict her right to travel.”

To the extent the defendant challenges the injunction because there was insufficient evidence for the trial court to conclude that she presents a danger to others, we disagree. The trial court relied upon evidence that the defendant sent a letter to several state and federal authorities, including the Boston, Massachusetts office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), stating that she had “been having fears of homicidal ideation of having to be put in the position of killing the [plaintiffs] and or their drunken tenants.” The trial court also found that in her letter to the FBI the defendant stated that she had considered hiring a federal contractor “with an assault weapon to try to protect [her] to help [her] calm down” when she was at the house in Fitzwilliam, that “issues between neighbors blossom to the point until someday one neighbor gets a gun and shoots the other neighbor,” and that she had “thought about getting a gun.”

Based upon this evidence, the trial court found that the defendant is “irrational and quite capable of inflicting harm — both physical and emotional” on the plaintiffs, that she believes she is a “surrogate” of multiple law enforcement agencies, including the New Hampshire Attorney General and the New Hampshire State Police, and that “[i]t is quite rational to conclude that she could convince herself — as a self-proclaimed law enforcement agent — to arm herself,” which would be a “disastrous, but foreseeable, result.” Thus, there is ample support in the record to support the trial court’s determination that the defendant presents a danger to others….

[T]o the extent that the defendant argues that the injunction unconstitutionally restricts her freedom of travel, she has failed to develop this argument sufficiently for our review.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2KG2YqW
via IFTTT

China Exports its Panopticon 

Science fiction writers have wondered for years what an all-encompassing surveillance state might look like. China decided to build it.

Over the last year, The New York Times has revealed the lengths to which Beijing has gone to identify and control Uighurs, a Muslim minority that has lived for centuries on the country’s western frontier. While Chinese state secrecy means we don’t know the full extent of the regime’s malevolent policies, what has been uncovered should chill every civil libertarian to the bone.

Within Kashgar, a majority Uighur city, residents must line up to be scrutinized before they can move from place to place. They are legally required to travel with ID cards and to swipe them at each checkpoint. They are also required to expose their faces to cameras that feed their pictures to facial recognition software. At the behest of the national government and regional police forces, Chinese software makers are training their algorithms to distinguish Uighurs from Han, China’s ruling ethnic majority. Police officers stationed throughout Kashgar need neither probable cause nor a warrant to detain Uighurs and check their phones for the surveillance software that they’re legally required to install.

And if a Uighur resident raises a red flag during one of these encounters? He or she will likely be sent to a “re-education” camp where, Human Rights Watch reported last year, Chinese Muslims are “held indefinitely without charge or trial, and can be subject to abuse.” The camps may contain tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of Muslims. The lack of government transparency makes it impossible to know even this basic information.

To the extent that China has justified its systematic targeting of a religious and ethnic minority, the government says it wants only to combat Islamic terrorism as part of its “stability maintenance” program. Yet the country’s surveillance apparatus has no obvious form of due process, no regard for civil liberties or privacy, and no avenues for appeal.

Perhaps we should not be surprised that China, the most oppressive global superpower since the Soviet Union, is a leader in this race to the bottom. More alarming is that the disease is spreading. Foreign Policy reported in August 2018 that Ecuador is using a “national emergency response and video surveillance system built entirely by Chinese companies and financed by Chinese state loans.” The Times reported in April that the country may soon add China’s facial recognition software as well.

As this technology improves and gets cheaper, it will likely become affordable to every two-bit dictator on Earth. What happens then is a chilling mystery.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2Z31AE1
via IFTTT

Brickbat: Big Money

Ottawa city treasurer Marian Simulik wired nearly $130,000 ($98,000 in U.S. dollars) to a fraudster after getting an email she thought was from the city manager. She later got another email asking for $200,000 ($150,000 U.S.), but this time the city manager happened to be sitting nearby. That’s when they discovered Simulik had sent money to a scammer.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2MUSE0Y
via IFTTT

If You Oppose Punishing and Deporting Undocumented Workers, You Should also Oppose Punishing Employers that Hire Them

A protest against ICE raids.

Last week’s ICE raids on undocumented workers in Mississippi—the largest of its kind—has drawn widespread protest for brutally separating parents from their children and deporting migrants whose only sin is escaping poverty and oppression in their homelands by finding job opportunities in the US. The protests are justified. But some critics also complain that ICE targeted workers, without also penalizing their employers. For example, CNN commentator Jake Tapper simultaneously decried the humanitarian effects of the raids, and also criticized an administration official for failing to “hold buisnesses responsible for this.”  Such complaints are not new. There is a long history of federal immigration enforcement agencies rarely penalizing employers, and critics complaining that they should do so more often, even as they also lament the harm ICE raids inflict on workers.

But if you truly believe that it is wrong to punish and deport undocumented workers, you also have every reason to oppose punishing the employers who hire them. Those who oppose deportation do so, at least in large part, because they believe (correctly, in my view) that these individuals should not be barred from starting a new life in the US and seeking opportunity here. But they cannot do that if they are effectively barred from holding jobs because anyone who hires them will be punished for doing so.

Some of the opposition to deportation is driven by the impact on families, most notably children (including many who are US citizens) separated from parents. But children also suffer if their parents are not allowed to work, and therefore cannot earn income to support their families.

Imagine that a person named Bob is seeking work to escape poverty and support his family. Congress enacts a bill known as Bob’s Law. Under this legislation, Bob is allowed to live wherever he wants, and law enforcement agencies are forbidden to punish him for taking any job that might be offered him. But there’s a catch: any business that hires Bob will be severely sanctioned for doing so, even though Bob himself will not be (perhaps they must pay a large fine, or the owner must go to prison, or both). Moreover, Congress earmarks funds for a special Bob’s Law Enforcement Budget (BLOB), which can only be spent on prosecuting Bob’s Law violators, so that officials will have a strong incentive to actually go after employers who dare hire Bob, as opposed to letting them off the hook.

Formally, Bob’s Law doesn’t constrain Bob in any way. The only people who can be punished are the employers who hire him. But, in reality, the law consigns Bob to a life of poverty and desperation, as he will either have to take shady black market jobs, or subsist on charity or welfare (if he can get it).  Bob’s family will also suffer, of course, since he is unlikely to be able to support them with more than a paltry (and highly uncertain) income.

Bob’s law is purely imaginary. But those who argue that the federal government should refrain from punishing undocumented workers, but rigorously prosecute the employers who hire them, are effectively advocating much the same sort of policy in real life. This regime would not target undocumented workers directly, but in practice it would consign them to much the same sort of miserable existence as Bob would face.

A “punish employers only” also prevents undocumented workers from contributing to the economy as much as they otherwise would. Rigorously prosecuting employers who hire them ensures that they will either be unable to find work at all, or will only be able to do so in underground enterprises, where they are likely to be less productive than at legitimate enterprises.

Targeting businesses is also likely to harm US-citizen workers, as well as undocumented ones. The types of measures employers would have to adopt to ensure compliance are likely to exclude many citizen workers, or at least put them through bureaucratic nightmares, such as those inflicted by the E-Verify system, mandated by some states.

Some might argue that the employers should be punished regardless of consequences, because they have violated the law. But, of course, the same thing can be said for the workers. In the case of the latter, opponents of deportation rightly point out that the laws in question are so deeply unjust that migrants are justified in violating them. Moreover, in a world where we have vastly more violators of federal law than the government can possibly punish, law enforcement should focus its resources on enforcing those laws that have the strongest moral justifications. “Just enforce the law” is not a viable moral theory in a world where many laws on the books are deeply unjust, and it is in any event impossible to punish more than a small fraction of violators. These objections apply to employer sanctions in much the same way as attempts to punish workers. Indeed, efforts to punish the former almost inevitably harm the latter, as well.

If you nonetheless do believe that all laws should be enforced to the hilt,  regardless of how unjust, than you cannot also argue that the government should let undocumented workers go, but punish their employers. Both are lawbreakers, after all.

Another possible variant of the “punish employers only” theory is that these businesses should be blamed for the poor conditions under which many undocumented workers labor. If employment conditions are your beef, then you should at least advocate limiting enforcement actions only to cases where conditions fall below whatever you believe to be the right minimum standard. There should be no general effort to punish employers of undocumented immigrants, as such.

You should also keep in mind that government-mandated employee benefits tend to result in a combination of reduced employment, reduction of salary and/or other employee benefits, or some combination of both. Undocumented workers might prefer worse conditions with higher pay to the opposite combination. At the very least, the more you care about the welfare of these workers, the more you should hesitate to support policies that forcibly reduce the range of options available to them, at least in the absence of strong evidence that those measures will make them better off.

Obviously, there are cases where employers use coercion or fraud to abuse undocumented workers. Where that happens, there is good reason to punish them, as is also true of employers who inflict similar abuse on other employees. Unlike in the case of poor working conditions that employees might willingly accept in exchange for higher pay, coercion and fraud are not voluntary transactions, and usually don’t leave workers better off than they would be otherwise. But mandatory infliction of sanctions on all employers of undocumented workers actually makes it more difficult to root out such genuine abuses. Workers are unlikely to report abusive employers if doing so will predictably lead to them losing their jobs, because the employers are not allowed to hire them in the first place, and the government will terminate those jobs if it finds out about them.

In sum, if you oppose punishment of undocumented workers, you should also oppose punishing their employers. The latter inflicts much the same injustices as the former, including by harming the workers themselves.

 

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2MZ9agj
via IFTTT

Deprivation of Voting Rights as a Collateral Consequence of a Felony Conviction

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a report on the collateral consequences of a felony conviction several weeks ago. Its members are against ’em. And to some degree, so should we all be. There are too many collateral consequences to a felony conviction these days. Examples include laws that prevent ex-offenders from engaging in certain professions and rules that make it difficult or impossible for ex-offenders to live in public housing.

On the other hand, the Commission appears curiously naïve about the reasons behind some of these collateral consequences. They seem to think they are just gratuitous efforts to kick people who are already down. But high rates of recidivism are a fact. According to Bureau of Justice statistics, “Five in 6 (83%) of state prisoners released in 2005 across 30 states were arrested at least once during the 9 years following their release.” The average number of re-arrests is five. Some collateral consequences are genuinely useful in protecting the public.

For example, few would argue against laws that forbid those who have been convicted of the sexual abuse of a young child from working in a day care center. And maybe it’s not such a bad idea to invest in more halfway houses for recently released prisoners instead of immediately putting them in unsupervised public housing, where some ex-offenders will likely put innocent residents in greater danger.

Even so, there have to be limits. Some collateral consequences seem to be nothing more than the work of a special interest seeking to squelch competition. In West Virginia, for example, “waxing specialists” and “shampoo assistants” must demonstrate “good moral character” to a government board. Maybe it’s just me, but I like rather like shampoo assistants “with a past.”

My Commissioner Statement (along with Commissioner Peter Kirsanow) urges a bit more effort to assess collateral consequences on a case-by-case basis.

What struck me most about the Commission’s report was its emphasis on laws that deny felons the vote. The report purports to be about how collateral consequences make it too difficult for ex-offenders to re-integrate and hence increase the likelihood of recidivism. And yet it devotes more pages to the deprivation of voting rights than to any other kind of consequence. And it uses by far the report’s most florid language to describe it, arguing that “denying this right to even a ‘subset of the population’ jeopardizes democracy for the entire population,” and that “the right to vote is the ‘essence of a democratic society, and any restrictions on that right strike at the heart of representative government.” [Italics added.]

Curiously, this is the one collateral consequence that is unlikely to prevent re-integration. If one doesn’t have a job or a place to live, it is easy to see how one might be lured back into crime. Not being able to vote isn’t in that category at all.

Alas, it is a little hard to imagine that the Commission’s Progressive majority would have been as focused on voting if they had not been quite so convinced that ex-offenders tend to vote for left-of-center candidates. (Ditto for the lack of enthusiasm shown by Republican state legislators.)

If useful reform is going to happen, it makes sense to focus elsewhere.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2yTpd7k
via IFTTT

Authoritarian Rulers Mobilize Private Violence To Advance Their Goals

Authoritarian figures rarely rely on state power alone to accomplish their draconian ends. They often also mobilize the very thing that legitimate rulers are supposed to stop: private violence. That is part of how the Jim Crow South maintained its regime of racial apartheid after the abolition of slavery limited the scope of formal state action. And now President Donald Trump is dipping into that ignominious tradition to activate the white nationalists in his base to advance his border control objectives.

Trump did not pull the trigger in the El Paso carnage that killed 22 people and counting, but it’s hard to deny that he has helped foment the atmosphere in which the trigger was pulled. Trump kicked off his presidential run by calling Mexicans rapists and criminals, of course. And in his rallies he teasingly encouraged his supporters to “rough up” dissenters who protested his incendiary rhetoric. Far from cooling such language after getting elected, he ramped it up. He has repeatedly referred to immigrants as an infestation and painted a lurid picture of an out-of-control southern border under attack by “invaders” that border patrol agents are powerless to stop because, as he laments, “we can’t let them [the agents] use weapons.” As New York‘s Eric Levitz points out, the unmistakable message to “trigger happy patriots” in all of this is that “we can’t use weapons” but “perhaps you should.”

That, of course, is precisely what the 21-year-old El Paso shooter, who reportedly wrote a manifesto that billed his attack as a “response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” did. Although he took matters much further than Trump intended with his inflammatory rhetoric, the same cannot be said for border militias steeped in white supremacist ideology that have increasingly been doing for Trump what Trump can’t do for himself.

For months now a slew of paramilitary outfits in border states have taken it upon themselves to patrol the southern border more aggressively than the government, constrained by due process and other concerns, can. “Having the most powerful person on Earth echo their hateful views may even give extremists a sense of impunity,” points out Louisiana State University’s Nathan P. Kalmoe.

Indeed, after Trump stoked fears of the Central American migrant caravan before the November midterms, about 100 volunteers from the Texas Minutemen, draped in camouflage suits, night-vision goggles, aerial drones, and semiautomatic weapons, holed up along the Rio Grande and conducted night vigils to supplement the border patrol. Meanwhile, the Arizona Border Recon, founded eight years ago by the notorious army veteran Tim Foley, has ramped up its raids in the Sasabe desert in search of drugs and border crossers over the last two years. And then there is New Mexico–based United Constitutional Patriots (UCP). It started patrolling the New Mexico border in February 2018 and videotaping its encounters with migrants. By its estimates, it has apprehended some 3,000 border crossers.

In one particularly egregious episode in April whose video the group brazenly circulated on social media to gain recruits, its “patriots” held 300 terrified asylum seekers—men, women, and toddlers—on their knees at gunpoint.

This was tantamount to an illegal hostage taking, and the backlash finally prompted the arrest of its leader—though not for holding up the migrants at gunpoint, but for impersonating a federal agent. The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol issued a pro-forma disclaimer declaring that it “does not endorse” enforcement action by private groups. But if that’s the case, asks the ACLU’s Peter Simonson, how does the agency explain photos of two border patrol agents on horseback posing on either side of masked vigilantes? “All indications are that they had a collaborative relationship with UCP and never told the vigilantes to cease and desist, even though the vigilantes were dressed up to impersonate BP officers, badges and all,” he notes.

Even more shockingly, such actions have not made the group too radioactive for Trump and his allies. Indeed, notes Simonson, UCP is now working closely with We Build the Wall, an organization founded by Trump’s former ultra-nationalist advisors, Steve Bannon and Krish Kobach. We Build the Wall’s mission is to raise private funds to build Trump’s wall. A few months ago, without obtaining any permits, it erected a short wall on private land on New Mexico’s southern border and then illegally extended it across a federal road. The ACLU is challenging the extension, notes Simonson.

In the name of enforcing the law, these vigilante groups are breaking the law at every turn. Yet instead of facing the wrath of the administration, they are making friends in the highest circles; Bannon, after all, was the architect of Trump’s America First campaign and served in the White House, while Kobach headed his voter fraud commission and was a serious contender as Trump’s immigration czar.

By contrast, migrants who cross the border without proper authorization, a mere misdemeanor the first time around, are having their babies snatched from them under Trump’s zero tolerance border policies, a practice that has continued even after a court order barred it. At the same time, the administration is cracking down on the sanctuary movement. Immigration activists such as Arizona State University’s Scott Warren are being slapped with anti-harboring charges that carry a 20-year prison sentence merely for offering food and first aid to those crossing the harsh desert. Even advocates who merely speak out on behalf of the migrants aren’t being spared.

All of this is reminiscent not in scale but in kind of the Jim Crow era, when southern states (and some northern ones) relied partly on unofficial private actors rather than official government channels to enforce its ideology of apartheid, allowing the white establishment to perpetrate the worst atrocities with impunity. Indeed, between 1877 and 1950, blacks suffered 4,000 documented incidents of extrajudicial lynchings for everything ranging from unproven accusations of sexual assault to speaking disrespectfully to a white man. In one case, a white mob in Blakely, Georgia, lynched a black World War I army veteran just because he refused to take off his uniform.

Even as whites went scot-free for these unspeakable crimes, blacks faced harsh punishment for minor crimes such as violating anti-vagary laws that criminalized black unemployment in order to keep blacks working for whites. In other words, the state systematically perverted the rule of law so that a combination of state action and private actors could keep blacks under its thumb.

America isn’t the only country where this kind of thing has happened. To this day, Indian authorities rely on actual and tacit private violence to perpetuate the caste system. But America is supposed to be the country most dedicated to equality under the law. It is therefore distressing that Trump is violating that dedication by uncorking private movements and personal demons to further border objectives that he can’t openly promote through legitimate state means.

Of course the El Paso shooter is facing the full brunt of the law and is being treated like a domestic terrorist. But the fact that it took Trump two days to condemn him for his sick ideology signals to his ilk that while man’s law might be against them, higher law is with them, exactly as was happening under Jim Crow. Unless Trump fundamentally changes course, no one should be shocked at more vigilante action and El Paso–style shootings as his most militant supporters take his inflammatory rhetoric literally.

A version of this column originally appeared in The Week.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2OZWEjw
via IFTTT

Illinois Is the Canary in the Pension Coal Mine, Says Adam Schuster 

Illinois is running out of time to fix its public sector pension problem. A new report from Moody’s Investors Service identified the Prairie State as one of the two most likely to suffer during an economic downturn. Illinois towns and cities are already paring back government services to pay for generous benefits packages for retirees, and Chicago’s pension debt alone is larger than that of 41 states. That arrangement can’t last forever.

“The worst-case scenario is there’s another national recession, which would cause our pension funds to lose a bunch of their assets again,” says Adam Schuster of the Illinois Policy Institute. “As the assets shrink, the pension funds go into a financial death spiral. We might end up with some kind of Puerto Rico–style pseudo-bankruptcy or federal bailout. Everybody in the nation is now on the hook for Illinois politicians’ irresponsible decisions.”

The best-case scenario would involve repealing an automatic 3 percent raise that pensioners receive each year of their retirement and requiring workers to pay more into their own plans. Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker would prefer to scrap Illinois’ flat income tax and replace it with a progressive tax scheme, which could cause even more people to flee the state. In May, Schuster spoke to Reason‘s Mike Riggs about the pension conundrum.

Q: If somebody had been paying attention 30 years ago, could they have anticipated this pension problem? 

A: Thirty years ago would be just about enough time to stop some of the mistakes. We changed the state constitution in 1970 to add a pension protection provision, which essentially says that as of the day of hire, an employee’s benefit formula cannot be changed in any way. So it doesn’t only protect benefits that somebody has already earned. It protects the future growth rate of those benefits for life and gives the state legislature no flexibility to change them.

Q: What happened next?

A: In 1990, Illinois implemented a guaranteed 3 percent compounding cost of living adjustment. So a person’s pension goes up by 3 percent every year regardless of how much inflation there is in the economy. It basically doubles the size of somebody’s pension over the course of 25 years.

We also had a series of governors, both Republican and Democratic, who habitually shorted the system by putting in less than the required contribution. The reason they did that is that the required contributions were unaffordable and never would have been affordable because we overpromised the benefits.

Q: Do Illinois taxpayers know what’s going on? 

A: I think there is pretty widespread knowledge about the problem, but there’s also a defeatist apathy. We’ve had five straight years of population loss. We’re losing our prime working-age adults, and poll results say that the No. 1 reason they’re leaving is that the taxes are too high here. And the No. 2 reason they’re leaving is job opportunities are better elsewhere, which is related to No. 1.

Q: What do public sector union leaders say about the pension crisis? How about union members?

A: I appreciate that you make that distinction, because I’ve found there is a huge disparity in how they react to this kind of thing. Union leaders, who are involved in politics and lobbying, are against having this conversation at all. But when I talk to regular rank-and-file union members, they actually think the plan we put forward is a very fair and very reasonable compromise.

Q: What is the short version of your plan?

A: It would amend our constitution so that instead of protecting the future growth rate, it would only protect the pension benefit that somebody has earned to date. So if you retired today, your annuity would be protected, but it would give the legislature flexibility to change retirement ages for younger workers and to change that 3 percent cost of living adjustment, for example.

Q: What happens if Illinois does nothing?

A: I don’t know if you followed at all the story of Harvey, Illinois, but it’s a South Chicago suburb, and they have one of the highest effective property tax rates in the nation. Even still, their police and fire pensions are so underfunded that in order to make their pension payment, they had to lay off dozens of current police officers and firefighters.

Q: That’s what people pay taxes for: government services! 

A: Harvey was the canary in the coal mine. Down in Peoria, they’ve had to lay off municipal workers, people who plow the streets. In Rockford, they’re being told they need to sell their city water system. Municipalities around the state are laying off public safety workers today to pay for yesterday’s pensions.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2ORaZ1A
via IFTTT

A Violent Movie Satirizing America’s Culture War Gets Cancelled by America’s Culture War

At the intersection of post-shooting panic and our hyperpartisan culture wars, the film The Hunt was struck by a semi-truck of stupid outrage and cancelled.

The Hunt, an R-rated violent satire of the very attitudes that ended up destroying it, is based on the well-worn horror trope of people hunting other people for sport. The twist for The Hunt is that the hunters are rich urban elites (read: liberals) hunting average Joes with accents from flyover territory (read: conservatives). The movie comes from Blumhouse Productions, the same folks behind the Purge series and Get Out, which also involve the privileged violently taking advantage and killing the less privileged.

Here’s the trailer:

In movies like this, the audience is expected to identify with and cheer for the people being hunted. The elite liberals are the bad guys of the movie. They are hunting down and murdering conservatives because of their opinions.

Yet somehow, thanks to Fox coverage and some subsequent tweets from President Donald Trump, the movie’s concept was twisted into an idea that Hollywood wanted us to be rooting for murderous elites. The Daily Beast notes that The Hunt has been the subject of at least 21 segments on Fox News and Fox Business Network (including reruns), and that these reports have generally assumed that the movie is a celebration of murdering conservatives:

For instance, during Thursday night’s broadcast of Lou Dobbs Tonight, host and top informal adviser to the president Lou Dobbs described the film as a “sick, twisted new movie,” adding that the prospect of “globalist elites hunting deplorables sounds a little too real.” His guest, Fox News contributor and close Trump ally Robert Jeffress, further noted that this “revealed the hypocrisy of the left” and if the movie “was about conservatives killing liberals, you would see an outrage on the left.”

The movie was scheduled to open on September 27, but now Universal Pictures won’t be releasing it at all.

The Hollywood Reporter notes that the decision not to release the film also follows those shootings. This is true. It is also true that they alread yanked ads for the film in the wake of last weekend’s mass shootings. But of course you cannot help but note that Donald Trump tweeted out attacks on the film the day before the cancellation came.

This is stupid snowflake nonsense from right-wing pundits—and probably just the pundits. (Are any conservatives who don’t make a living off the televised culture war offended by the film?) It is as inane as blaming video games for real-world violence.

Certainly, movies and television shows have been pulled or delayed when the timing of violent or deadly real-world incidents intersects in a potentially traumatic way. But this isn’t really a case of that. The Hunt is being cancelled because a group of vocal partisans cannot handle a movie that satirizes the caustic turn the culture war has taken.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2Z4nniI
via IFTTT

New Research Shows There’s One and Only Way To Combat Obesity

Like death and taxes, obesity research and dietary advice are both unavoidable and to be avoided at all costs.

Tamar Haspel of the Washington Post became fully convinced last month by a new study that says we know highly processed food makes us fat. (She’s not alone.) Others argue that it’s not just processed food but cheap processed food that makes us fat. Still others are equally convinced now that genes and molecular stuff make us fat. Or maybe it just boils down to our gut bacteria.

Elsewhere, new research suggests empowering America’s youth could be the key to stopping obesity in its tracks. But why stop there? Could empowering cats (or perhaps kittens, to keep the analogy going), which new research argues have been gripped by the same obesity epidemic that plagues their human owners, also yield similar results?

Or maybe all this stuff doesn’t matter. Maybe all we need is someone like Lucy in A Charlie Brown Christmas, who takes Chuck’s five cents before telling him that the key to reversing his melancholy is simply finding the right label for his fears. Ergo, let’s just call obesity a disease so we can regulate it and its causes, effects, and victims.

If your head is mostly spinning, so is mine. That’s why I was heartened this week to learn about a University of Iowa study that’s revealed what may just be the one and only simple truth behind the cause of obesity: “Obese people eat more food because it simply tastes better, a new study has found.” 

This new research suggests a simple fix to the problem of obesity: by law, all food shall now taste worse. After all, if obese people eat more food because it tastes better, mandating that food taste worse will force obese people to eat less food. That will, in turn, make obese people thin.

Once every last obese person is thin, lawmakers can mandate that food may taste good again. No one will overeat because—and here’s the key—only obese people eat more food because it tastes better. With no obese people left, thanks to the success of my all-food-shall-now-taste-worse diktat, everyone will eat exactly the right amount of tasty food.

I jest, of course. But just like the premise that “obese people eat more food because it simply tastes better,” new research often doubles down on things that sound suspiciously obvious. Take a new study showing obesity is a risk factor for other illnesses. I don’t know what (if anything) was lacking with the old research that said largely the same thing.

But new research also sometimes tells us something new, and even can upend old ideas. Take a person’s proximity to grocery stores. Living in close proximity to grocery stores was long associated, as a 2006 study argued, with lower obesity rates. But subsequent research in 2014 poured cold water on the earlier claims, showing that one’s proximity to a grocer has no impact on dietary habits or obesity.

Now, the latest research is claiming that the opposite of the 2006 study may be true. It’s not that living near a grocery store is good, as the 2006 study claimed. And it’s not that it doesn’t matter, as the 2014 study argued. No, now having supermarkets and grocers near your home is the thing that will make you fat. (For good measure, this same new research also claims commuting past fast-food restaurants makes you fat.)

I’ve written time and again that taxes and bans and marketing restrictions and assorted other nudges favored by food activists doesn’t work when it comes to combating obesity. One reason: no one knows why exactly America (and the world) has become obese. And that may be the one thing all this obesity research makes clear.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2TqfKOi
via IFTTT