Former top FBI attorney James Baker, who now serves as Twitter’s deputy general counsel, has had a spotlight thrown on him after billionaire Elon Musk, who recently negotiated a deal to buy Twitter, responded to comments about Baker’s past actions during the FBI’s Russia investigation in 2016.
On April 26, a day after Musk reportedly reached an agreement with Twitter, filmmaker Mike Cernovich wrote on Twitter that Baker, during his time as FBI general counsel, “personally arranged a meeting” with cybersecurity attorney Michael Sussmann, who was at the time working for the Clinton campaign.
“In this meeting, Sussmann presented fabricated evidence in the Alfa bank matter,” Cernovich wrote.
Sussmann was charged last year by special counsel John Durham for lying to Baker during that meeting.
According to court documents, it was Sussmann who asked for the meeting, which took place in September 2016 at FBI headquarters. The two men knew each other from their time working in the Justice Department criminal division.
Sussmann emailed Baker that he was going to the meeting not representing any client. But in fact, he billed the time to the presidential campaign of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Durham alleges that this was a material lie, which means that it had a natural tendency or was capable to affect government decisions.
During their meeting, Sussmann gave Baker data and reports purportedly showing secret communications between The Trump Organization and Russia’s Alfa-Bank. The FBI determined that there was no such secret communication. A tech expert firm hired by Alfa-Bank concluded that the data may have been fabricated, although Durham hasn’t made that assertion.
The data and reports were provided to Sussmann by Rodney Joffe, who has run several tech companies. Sussmann, Joffe, and others were in a “joint venture” to dig up dirt on Trump and help Clinton, Durham said, thus far stopping short of alleging the venture amounted to a criminal conspiracy.
Baker told congressional investigators in 2018 that it was unusual for him to be personally approached by somebody in order to pass on information to the FBI. He remembered two other instances: one related to the Dennis Montgomery case of alleged illegal government spying on Americans and the other being Mother Jones reporter David Corn, who said he sent Baker a copy of the infamous Steele Dossier in November 2016. Baker said he had long known Corn, and their children used to carpool together (pdf).
The dossier was prepared by former British spy Christopher Steele, who was, in turn, paid (through intermediaries) to collect dirt on Trump by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
As it turned out, much of the dossier, including its core claim of Trump–Russia collusion, was fabricated.
There was nothing inappropriate about Sussmann’s passing on the Alfa-Bank information, Baker said. He said he was generally aware that Sussmann had an association with the DNC.
The Sussmann trial is scheduled for mid-May. He has pleaded not guilty.
Durham was tasked, around March or May 2019, with reviewing the 2016–’17 FBI investigation of alleged collusion between candidate and later President Donald Trump and Russia to sway the 2016 election. No such collusion was found.
Baker told lawmakers that the FBI probe was lawfully predicated. Durham previously contested such a claim.
In October 2020, then-Attorney General William Barr appointed Durham as special counsel. In February 2021, Durham resigned his position as a federal prosecutor and has continued the investigation in the sole capacity of special counsel.
Heatwave Triggers Indian “Power Crisis” As State Firms Seek Russian Crude To Secure Supplies
India is one of those G-20 members not bowing down to US pressure to halt purchases of Russian energy products. The South Asian country’s power grid is dominated by fossil fuels, particularly coal and crude, and has come under severe stress as one of the worst heatwaves in years causes widespread blackouts.
Another devastating heatwave has parched large swathes of India this week (after record heat in March), resulting in power blackouts. In the capital New Delhi, high temperatures hit 104 Fahrenheit and could increase even more through the weekend.
Fossil fuels power about 75% of India’s power grid, and the rest is renewable energy. Soaring temperatures mean increasing power output as cooling demand rises. The government has forced power cuts for factories in various provinces to mitigate the grid’s collapse. Nearly 42% of the grid comprises the industrial sector, followed by residential at 24% and agriculture at 18%.
“In view of the present power crisis, .. it has been decided to impose scheduled cuts,” a state power utility told Reuters.
“Power cuts are expected to worsen in the coming days as the heatwaves and a pickup in economic activity are seen increasing electricity demand at the fastest pace in nearly four decades,” Reuters explained.
Since most electricity generated in India is from fossil fuels and extreme heat increases power demand. Reuters revealed that Indian refiners are negotiating a six-month oil deal with Russia to import millions of barrels per month.
Western sanctions against Russia forced many countries to find alternative sources, but a growing number of G-20 members are becoming defiant and ignoring Washington and continuing to do business with Moscow outside the dollar system.
Reuters also notes that New Delhi has asked state-run energy companies to evaluate a potential purchase of European oil major BP’s stake in sanctions-hit Russian firm Rosneft. BP exited its stake in Rosneft in late February, taking a massive $25 billion hit.
India is securing its future with fossil fuels from sanctioned Russia to ensure its supplies for power generation remain adequate. New Delhi is ignoring Washington’s request to boycott Russia shows the West’s waning control over the rest of the world. Is this the latest example of a bipolar world emerging?
Daily Briefing: Inflation, Stagflation, and Recession: No Way Out
U.S. equity indexes traded lower today, with the Nasdaq Composite down 2.7% two hours before the close of regular trading and headed toward its worst month since 2008. The S&P 500 was down 2.3%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average 1.5%. Inflation remains the major overhang, with supply-chain disruptions as well as high food and energy prices only made worse by pandemic and war and the authorities’ responses to those crises. The Federal Reserve has turned aggressively hawkish, but its efforts to tighten monetary conditions into a slowing economy threaten to bring about recession. Raoul Pal joins Ash Bennington for today’s Real Vision Daily Briefing to talk about inflation, stagflation, and recession. Want to submit questions? Drop them right here on the Exchange: https://rvtv.io/3MDmdzM. To join Raoul on his multi-week journey of learning and discovery for global recession, Is Everyone Wrong, go to https://rvtv.io/3s0ep3d.
Peace advocates reacted to Thursday’s request by U.S. President Joe Biden for $33 billion in additional aid to Ukraine by warning against what they called a dangerous escalation and by accusing the administration of misplaced priorities.
Biden is asking Congress for additional funding for war-ravaged Ukraine, including more than $20 billion in “security and military assistance,” $8.5 billion in economic aid, and $3 billion in “humanitarian assistance.”
“It’s not cheap. But caving to aggression is going to be more costly if we allow it to happen,” said Biden. “We either back the Ukrainian people as they defend their country, or we stand by as the Russians continue their atrocities and aggression in Ukraine every day.”
The president’s appeal for additional funds comes on top of the $4.6 billion in security assistance the U.S. has given Ukraine since January 2021, including $3.7 billion since Russian forces invaded the country in February.
Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the women-led peace group CodePink, called Biden’s request “a down payment on World War III.”
“Biden’s call for an enormous $33 billion for Ukraine is over half the entire budget for the State Department and USAID,” she tweeted, referring to the United States Agency for International Development. “We need diplomacy, not billions more in weapons!”
Benjamin also noted that the Biden administration—which refuses to unfreeze Afghanistan’s central bank reserves—”won’t fill the $2 billion shortfall in the urgent U.N. appeal for the desperately poor people of Afghanistan.”
$33 billion to the Ukraine.
Ppl can’t put food on the table. Rents gone up. Housing prices have gone up. Raises have almost gone down when accounting for inflation. We’re having supply shortages across the board.
But we have $33 billion to spend on Ukraine but not US citizens.
— Joe Biden Hates Black People (@realnikohouse) April 28, 2022
Jennifer Briney, host of the Congressional Dish podcast, tweeted: “How can the U.S. possibly maintain the already-pretty-clear-fiction that we aren’t ‘in’ the Ukraine-Russia war if we inject $33 billion into it? How can this not lead to escalation?”
Ben Freeman, a research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, pointed out that “the $20 billion military assistance package is more than the total defense budgets of all but 13 countries in the world.”
Others commented on what they implied are the administration’s misplaced priorities amid the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, worsening economic inequality, and the climate emergency. “Biden’s $33 billion ’emergency’ military aid package for Ukraine is three times the size of the EPA’s entire budget for 2022,” tweetedCounterPunch editor Jeffrey St. Clair, referring to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
DATA: A cumulative total of U.S. military aid to Ukraine since Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion.
February 25: $350m
March 12: $550m
March 16: $1.35b
April 1: $1.65b
April 5: $1.75b
April 13: $2.55b
April 21: $3.35b
April 24: $3.67b
April 28: $14.67b (if approved by Congress)
Writer and activist Margaret Kimberly bemoaned that “Biden is asking struggling Americans who lost their child tax credit for $33 billion after his Ukraine police blew up in his face.”
Ben Cohen, co-founder of the ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s, wondered why Biden is “asking for an extra $33 billion to help Ukraine and not an extra $33 billion to replace every single lead pipe in America” when “we have at least 1.2 million children suffering from lead poisoning here and now.”
Spring Wheat Used In Pizza Crust Nears 14-Year High As Floods Devastate Northern Plains
U.S. spring-wheat futures are nearing the highest level since 2008, as the Northern U.S. Plains are plagued with devastating floods that prevent farmers from planting in the high-producing crop region.
Blizzards, winter storms, high winds, and extreme flooding battered the Dakotas and stalled plantings in April, raising concerns about shrinking crop yields as prevent plant dates for North Dakota are at the end of May.
Because of wet conditions, farmers cannot work their fields, which means yields will decrease everyday wheat isn’t planted.
“The spring-wheat crop should continue to see planting delays with heavy rains, and cold weather in the forecast,” commodity research firm The Hightower Report said.
The most-active spring wheat futures contract increased more than a 1% to $12.02 a bushel, nearing March’s peak and closing in on the highest level since 2008. Prices have more than doubled since the virus pandemic low. $4.90.
Spring wheat is used in specialty items like rolls, croissants, bagels, and pizza crust. Money managers are holding a record net-long position due to supply fears following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, disrupting global wheat production.
Compound the U.S. drought of 2021, the Ukraine crisis, and floods in the Northern U.S. Plains, the world is even more dependent on the Northern hemisphere for major food needs. If the U.S. experiences production woes this crop season, if that’s because of weather-related issues or simply not enough fertilizer, then there’s an increasing risk a global food crisis could become more pronounced by the end of the year or into the next.
Libertarians have historically had an ambivalent and occasionally even antagonistic attitude towards higher education, in part because academics and administrators are overwhelmingly left-wing, including many who have a deep antipathy to libertarianism. That hostility, of course, is sometimes reciprocated.
Some libertarian criticisms of universities are well-founded. But it’s also important for libertarians (and others) to recognize that the net effect of higher education is to make people more libertarian! A large-scale new study of British college graduates by political scientist Ralph Scott confirms and extends previous findings from the United States. Here is his summary of the results:
An individual’s level of education is increasingly significant in explaining their political attitudes and behaviour, with higher education proposed as a new political cleavage. However, there is limited evidence on the causal effect of university on political attitudes, due to self-selection into educational pathways. Addressing this gap, this article estimates the change in political values that occurs within individuals who graduate from university by applying longitudinal modelling techniques to data from the 1970 British Cohort Study, overcoming the selection problem by accounting for time-invariant confounding. It provides the first causal estimate of higher education specifically, finding that achieving a degree reduces authoritarianism and racial prejudice and increases economic right-wing attitudes. This has important implications for the study of politics: as populations become more highly educated on average, we should expect continuing aggregate value change towards lower levels of authoritarianism and racial prejudice, with significant consequences for political behaviour.
By “economic right-wing attitudes” Scott essentially means support for free markets and limitations on government spending and regulation. By “authoritarianism,” he means not support for dictatorship, but “support for social order over individual liberty,” including on such things as weakening protections for criminal defendants, and the like censorship of media to uphold traditional moral standards. This use of the term “authoritarian” is common in academic social science, though it is can be confusion for nonexperts. “Racial prejudice” means roughly the same thing as in ordinary usage. Among the questions Scott uses to measure it is opposition to interracial marriage and to people of a different race moving into your neighborhood.
On all three dimensions Scott finds that higher education moves people towards more libertarian positions, even if he doesn’t use that term. For obvious reasons, libertarians oppose most government intervention in the economy and on “social” issues. Libertarianism is also deeply at odds with racial bigotry, which is both intrinsically inimical to an ideology that emphasizes individual rights over ethnic group loyalty (Ayn Rand rightly called racism “the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism”), and a major source of oppressive government policies.
In each case, the impact of higher education holds true, even after controlling for other variables, including the student’s family background and pre-college attitudes.
As Scott notes, these findings are consistent with those of previous research on the impact of higher education in the United States. Much of the latter research is summarized by libertarian economist Bryan Caplan in his important 2018 book, The Case Against Education (which I reviewed here). As the title indicates, Caplan is far from uncritical of higher education. But he does acknowledge its libertarianizing impact.
Scott discusses some possible reasons why higher education leads to more libertarian attitudes. With respect to racism and “authoritarianism,” one obvious reason is that these ideas are decried by most academics and university administrators. In addition, going to college can expose students to people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds with whom they share common interests. They may take classes together, participate in extracurricular activities, and so on. This may lead them to realize they have more in common than previously thought, thereby breaking down some of the natural human tendency towards suspicion members of “out” groups.
Perhaps the most surprising finding of this and previous studies is that college education increases pro-free market economic beliefs. Obviously, that is not the view of the vast majority of faculty and administrators, and probably not the effect that most want to have on students.
The causes of this tendency are far from fully understood. But one factor may be courses in economics and finance, which many students take. Data indicates that studying economics increases pro-free market attitudes among students, even though the vast majority of economics professors are far from libertarian. Even left-liberal economics professors usually cover a variety of free market ideas in their courses. Many of these are counter-intuitive, and cut against the tendency to believe that the economic world is a zero-sum game in which government intervention is routinely needed to protect some groups against others.
Obviously the vast majority UK and US college graduates are not libertarian. Studies like Scott’s do not show that higher education makes people full-blown libertarians; it has that effect only on a small minority. Rather, the point is that it tends to make people more libertarian than they would be otherwise.
For libertarians, the implication of this research is not only that we should have a more favorable view of higher education, but that the university world is potentially fertile ground for recruiting new supporters. A group (students) that is already moving in an incrementally libertarian direction on many issues can more easily be influenced to go further than most other segments of society. This factor works in tandem with the reality that younger people are, on average, less set in their views than older ones, and thus easier to persuade to consider new ideas. Libertarians would do well to increase investment in groups like Students for Liberty and the Institute for Humane Studies, which do outreach to students and younger academics.
Another useful lesson for libertarians here is that, at least among the young, support for economic liberty tends to rise in tandem with racial and ethnic tolerance and with support for social freedom. Around the world, ethno-nationalist and socially conservative political movements tend to view economic liberty with suspicion, when they are not outright hostile to it. They fear (often rightly) that economic freedom will undercut some traditional values, and also break down the ethnic and cultural barriers nationalists value. Thus, it is no surprise that the US Republican Party has become more hostile to free markets and property rights as it has become more nationalistic. Right-wing nationalist movements in Europe, such as Viktor Orban’s movement in Hungary, and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France (formerly called the National Front) are also economically statist.
The link between conservative nationalism and statism was long ago noted by the great libertarian economist F.A. Hayek:
Connected with the conservative distrust if the new and the strange is its hostility to internationalism and its proneness to a strident nationalism…. It is no real argument to say that an idea is un-American, or un-German, nor is a mistaken or vicious ideal better for having been conceived by one of our compatriots.
A great deal more might be said about the close connection between conservatism and nationalism . . . I will merely add that it is this nationalistic bias which frequently provides the bridge from conservatism to collectivism: to think in terms of “our” industry or resource is only a short step away from demanding that these national assets be directed in the national interest [by the government].
This does not prove there can never be any useful cooperation between libertarians and conservatives. Still less does it prove that the latter will always see eye to eye with the political left. But it does suggest that cosmopolitan liberals have more affinity for free markets than nationalistic conservatives.
None of the above should cause libertarians to ignore the many flaws of the higher education system. It remains true that there is lots of wasteful spending in academia, that many faculty and administrators behave badly in various ways, and that too many are intolerant of opposing views (including, in some cases, libertarian ones).
These findings do not even prove that libertarians (or anyone else) should necessarily want to increase the percentage of high school graduates who go on to get college degrees. For many people, the benefits of higher education are likely to be outweighed by costs. There is a lot of truth to Bryan Caplan’s critique of the education system along those lines.
But libertarians should be aware of the ideological impact of higher education and the ways in which it helps our cause. And we should adjust our political strategy accordingly.
While Scott’s and other scholars’ findings on the effects of higher education should cheer libertarians (who haven’t had much else to cheer about in recent years!), they are bad news for right-wing nationalists. The latter’s growing hostility towards the university world is somewhat understandable. Not only is academia filled with people who oppose their values. It also tends to influence students against them.
A teenager who asked to call his attorney but was denied the opportunity by police did not have his rights violated, the New York Court of Appeals ruled this week, reinvigorating a debate around what linguistic specificities are necessary to firmly and unequivocally invoke your Miranda rights.
In May 2016, Malik Dawson, then 19, was arrested for allegedly sexually assaulting a woman in Albany, New York, the week prior. When asked if he’d like to call his lawyer, the following exchange took place between Dawson and the detective:
Detective: Do you understand each of your rights?
Dawson: Yeah, definitely. I just wish that I’d memorized my lawyer’s number. He’s in my phone. Is it possible for me to like call him or something?
Detective: Do you want your lawyer here?
Dawson: Right now?
Detective: Yeah.
Dawson: If I could get a hold of him ’cause I don’t know his number; it’s in my phone.
Detective: OK.
Dawson: But you could still tell me what’s going on though, right?
Detective: No, I can’t talk to you if you if you want your lawyer here and you already said you did, so let’s, you know what, let’s give him a call.
But when the detective returned to the interrogation room, he came without Dawson’s phone. Instead, he said: “Here’s the deal, I’m just going to ask you flat out, because we’re in the middle of this and this is something we could potentially resolve—do you want your lawyer here or do you want to just figure this out?” Dawson responded that he wanted to “figure this out.”
As the detective began questioning Dawson about the alleged assault, Dawson insisted the encounter was consensual. The detective then told Dawson that if he were apologetic, it might work in his favor. So, without counsel present, he penned a letter to the victim admitting guilt and saying he was sorry.
Whether or not the detective violated the Constitution in demurring at Dawson’s request for an attorney is the subject of the New York Court of Appeals’ recent decision. “Here, there is support in the record for the lower courts’ determination that defendant—whose inquiries and demeanor suggested a conditional interest in speaking with an attorney only if it would not otherwise delay his clearly-expressed wish to speak to the police—did not unequivocally invoke his right to counsel while in custody,” the majority wrote.
Associate Judge Rowan D. Wilson dissented. “Here, Mr. Dawson unequivocally invoked his right to counsel—the record supports no other conclusion,” he said. “As is clear from the quoted portion of the colloquy with the detective, he twice said he wanted to call his lawyer, and the detective twice expressly stated that he understood Mr. Dawson had asked to call counsel and therefore the detective could no longer speak to Mr. Dawson….An unequivocal request does not require ‘magic words.'” (It is illegal for the government to continue questioning the accused after he has affirmatively invoked his desire for an attorney.)
This isn’t the first time that granular language choices have been at the center of such disputes.
Consider the case of Warren Demesme, who told police in Louisiana that he wanted to speak to a “lawyer dog.” He was not provided with one, and the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that his rights were not violated because the request was too ambiguous.
That case, which was decided in 2017, got quite a bit of attention, with some deriding the absurd idea that any officer could have reasonably thought Demesme wanted to speak with a pet as opposed to an attorney. But even that decision was not so cut and dry. “Demesme obviously meant ‘friend,’ not the animal, and the police surely understood that. So if that’s the criticism, it seems pretty fair.” writes Orin Kerr, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, for the Volokh Conspiracy. “I think the ambiguity is not in the word ‘dog’ but in what Demesme said before that….On one hand, he did say ‘give me a lawyer.’ On the other hand, that phrase seems to have some conditions on it. He only wants a lawyer, he says, if the police think he did it.”
In other words, whether or not someone has actually invoked their right to counsel is, to some degree, subjective, though it can have far-reaching consequences in a defendant’s case. “The detective’s statement that ‘this is something we could potentially resolve’ — after having confirmed Mr. Dawson’s request to contact his counsel — is particularly concerning,” wrote the dissenting judge in Dawson’s case. “The statement implied that Mr. Dawson, if he were to abandon his right to counsel, might be able to very quickly settle the matter without issue. Of course, nothing could be farther from the reality.” With the apology letter as evidence, Dawson was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison, followed by 10 years of post-release supervision.
Libertarians have historically had an ambivalent and occasionally even antagonistic attitude towards higher education, in part because academics and administrators are overwhelmingly left-wing, including many who have a deep antipathy to libertarianism. That hostility, of course, is sometimes reciprocated.
Some libertarian criticisms of universities are well-founded. But it’s also important for libertarians (and others) to recognize that the net effect of higher education is to make people more libertarian! A large-scale new study of British college graduates by political scientist Ralph Scott confirms and extends previous findings from the United States. Here is his summary of the results:
An individual’s level of education is increasingly significant in explaining their political attitudes and behaviour, with higher education proposed as a new political cleavage. However, there is limited evidence on the causal effect of university on political attitudes, due to self-selection into educational pathways. Addressing this gap, this article estimates the change in political values that occurs within individuals who graduate from university by applying longitudinal modelling techniques to data from the 1970 British Cohort Study, overcoming the selection problem by accounting for time-invariant confounding. It provides the first causal estimate of higher education specifically, finding that achieving a degree reduces authoritarianism and racial prejudice and increases economic right-wing attitudes. This has important implications for the study of politics: as populations become more highly educated on average, we should expect continuing aggregate value change towards lower levels of authoritarianism and racial prejudice, with significant consequences for political behaviour.
By “economic right-wing attitudes” Scott essentially means support for free markets and limitations on government spending and regulation. By “authoritarianism,” he means not support for dictatorship, but “support for social order over individual liberty,” including on such things as weakening protections for criminal defendants, and the like censorship of media to uphold traditional moral standards. This use of the term “authoritarian” is common in academic social science, though it is can be confusion for nonexperts. “Racial prejudice” means roughly the same thing as in ordinary usage. Among the questions Scott uses to measure it is opposition to interracial marriage and to people of a different race moving into your neighborhood.
On all three dimensions Scott finds that higher education moves people towards more libertarian positions, even if he doesn’t use that term. For obvious reasons, libertarians oppose most government intervention in the economy and on “social” issues. Libertarianism is also deeply at odds with racial bigotry, which is both intrinsically inimical to an ideology that emphasizes individual rights over ethnic group loyalty (Ayn Rand rightly called racism “the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism”), and a major source of oppressive government policies.
As he notes, these findings are consistent with those of previous research on the impact of higher education in the United States. Much of the latter research is summarized by libertarian economist Bryan Caplan in his important 2018 book, The Case Against Education (which I reviewed here). As the title indicates, Caplan is far from uncritical of higher education. But he does acknowledge its libertarianizing impact.
Scott discusses some possible reasons why higher education leads to more libertarian attitudes. With respect to racism and “authoritarianism,” one obvious reason is that these ideas are decried by most academics and university administrators. In addition, going to college can expose students to people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds with whom they share common interests. They may take classes together, participate in extracurricular activities, and so on. This may lead them to realize they have more in common than previously thought, thereby breaking down some of the natural human tendency towards suspicion members of “out” groups.
Perhaps the most surprising finding of this and previous studies is that college education increases pro-free market economic beliefs. Obviously, that is not the view of the vast majority of faculty and administrators, and probably not the effect that most want to have on students.
The causes of this tendency are far from fully understood. But one factor may be courses in economics and finance, which many students take. Data indicates that studying economics increases pro-free market attitudes among students, even though the vast majority of economics professors are far from libertarian. Even left-liberal economics professors usually cover a variety of free market ideas in their courses. Many of these are counter-intuitive, and cut against the tendency to believe that the economic world is a zero-sum game in which government intervention is routinely needed to protect some groups against others.
Obviously the vast majority UK and US college graduates are not libertarian. Studies like Scott’s do not show that higher education makes people full-blown libertarians; it has that effect only on a small minority. Rather, the point is that it tends to make people more libertarian than they would be otherwise.
For libertarians, the implication of this research is not only that we should have a more favorable view of higher education, but that the university world is potentially fertile ground for recruiting new supporters. A group (students) that is already moving in an incrementally libertarian direction on many issues can more easily be influenced to go further than most other segments of society. This factor works in tandem with the reality that younger people are, on average, less set in their views than older ones, and thus easier to persuade to consider new ideas. Libertarians would do well to increase investment in groups like Students for Liberty and the Institute for Humane Studies, which do outreach to students and younger academics.
Another useful lesson for libertarians here is that, at least among the young, support for economic liberty tends to rise in tandem with racial and ethnic tolerance and with support for social freedom. Around the world, ethno-nationalist and socially conservative political movements tend to view economic liberty with suspicion, when they are not outright hostile to it. They fear (often rightly) that economic freedom will undercut some traditional values, and also break down the ethnic and cultural barriers nationalists value. Thus, it is no surprise that the US Republican Party has become more hostile to free markets and property rights as it has become more nationalistic. Right-wing nationalist movements in Europe, such as Viktor Orban’s movement in Hungary, and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France (formerly called the National Front) are also economically statist.
The link between conservative nationalism and statism was long ago noted by the great libertarian economist F.A. Hayek:
Connected with the conservative distrust if the new and the strange is its hostility to internationalism and its proneness to a strident nationalism…. It is no real argument to say that an idea is un-American, or un-German, nor is a mistaken or vicious ideal better for having been conceived by one of our compatriots.
A great deal more might be said about the close connection between conservatism and nationalism . . . I will merely add that it is this nationalistic bias which frequently provides the bridge from conservatism to collectivism: to think in terms of “our” industry or resource is only a short step away from demanding that these national assets be directed in the national interest [by the government].
This does not prove there can never be any useful cooperation between libertarians and conservatives. Still less does it prove that the latter will always see eye to eye with the political left. But it does suggest that cosmopolitan liberals have more affinity for free markets than nationalistic conservatives.
None of the above should cause libertarians to ignore the many flaws of the higher education system. It remains true that there is lots of wasteful spending in academia, that many faculty and administrators behave badly in various ways, and that too many are intolerant of opposing views (including, in some cases, libertarian ones).
These findings do not even prove that libertarians (or anyone else) should necessarily want to increase the percentage of high school graduates who go on to get college degrees. For many people, the benefits of higher education are likely to be outweighed by costs. There is a lot of truth to Bryan Caplan’s critique of the education system along those lines.
But libertarians should be aware of the ideological impact of higher education and the ways in which it helps our cause. And we should adjust our political strategy accordingly.
While Scott’s and other scholars’ findings on the effects of higher education should cheer libertarians (who haven’t had much else to cheer about in recent years!), they are bad news for right-wing nationalists. The latter’s growing hostility towards the university world is somewhat understandable. Not only is academia filled with people who oppose their values. It also tends to influence students against them.
A teenager who asked to call his attorney but was denied the opportunity by police did not have his rights violated, the New York Court of Appeals ruled this week, reinvigorating a debate around what linguistic specificities are necessary to firmly and unequivocally invoke your Miranda rights.
In May 2016, Malik Dawson, then 19, was arrested for allegedly sexually assaulting a woman in Albany, New York, the week prior. When asked if he’d like to call his lawyer, the following exchange took place between Dawson and the detective:
Detective: Do you understand each of your rights?
Dawson: Yeah, definitely. I just wish that I’d memorized my lawyer’s number. He’s in my phone. Is it possible for me to like call him or something?
Detective: Do you want your lawyer here?
Dawson: Right now?
Detective: Yeah.
Dawson: If I could get a hold of him ’cause I don’t know his number; it’s in my phone.
Detective: OK.
Dawson: But you could still tell me what’s going on though, right?
Detective: No, I can’t talk to you if you if you want your lawyer here and you already said you did, so let’s, you know what, let’s give him a call.
But when the detective returned to the interrogation room, he came without Dawson’s phone. Instead, he said: “Here’s the deal, I’m just going to ask you flat out, because we’re in the middle of this and this is something we could potentially resolve—do you want your lawyer here or do you want to just figure this out?” Dawson responded that he wanted to “figure this out.”
As the detective began questioning Dawson about the alleged assault, Dawson insisted the encounter was consensual. The detective then told Dawson that if he were apologetic, it might work in his favor. So, without counsel present, he penned a letter to the victim admitting guilt and saying he was sorry.
Whether or not the detective violated the Constitution in demurring at Dawson’s request for an attorney is the subject of the New York Court of Appeals’ recent decision. “Here, there is support in the record for the lower courts’ determination that defendant—whose inquiries and demeanor suggested a conditional interest in speaking with an attorney only if it would not otherwise delay his clearly-expressed wish to speak to the police—did not unequivocally invoke his right to counsel while in custody,” the majority wrote.
Associate Judge Rowan D. Wilson dissented. “Here, Mr. Dawson unequivocally invoked his right to counsel—the record supports no other conclusion,” he said. “As is clear from the quoted portion of the colloquy with the detective, he twice said he wanted to call his lawyer, and the detective twice expressly stated that he understood Mr. Dawson had asked to call counsel and therefore the detective could no longer speak to Mr. Dawson….An unequivocal request does not require ‘magic words.'” (It is illegal for the government to continue questioning the accused after he has affirmatively invoked his desire for an attorney.)
This isn’t the first time that granular language choices have been at the center of such disputes.
Consider the case of Warren Demesme, who told police in Louisiana that he wanted to speak to a “lawyer dog.” He was not provided with one, and the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that his rights were not violated because the request was too ambiguous.
That case, which was decided in 2017, got quite a bit of attention, with some deriding the absurd idea that any officer could have reasonably thought Demesme wanted to speak with a pet as opposed to an attorney. But even that decision was not so cut and dry. “Demesme obviously meant ‘friend,’ not the animal, and the police surely understood that. So if that’s the criticism, it seems pretty fair.” writes Orin Kerr, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, for the Volokh Conspiracy. “I think the ambiguity is not in the word ‘dog’ but in what Demesme said before that….On one hand, he did say ‘give me a lawyer.’ On the other hand, that phrase seems to have some conditions on it. He only wants a lawyer, he says, if the police think he did it.”
In other words, whether or not someone has actually invoked their right to counsel is, to some degree, subjective, though it can have far-reaching consequences in a defendant’s case. “The detective’s statement that ‘this is something we could potentially resolve’ — after having confirmed Mr. Dawson’s request to contact his counsel — is particularly concerning,” wrote the dissenting judge in Dawson’s case. “The statement implied that Mr. Dawson, if he were to abandon his right to counsel, might be able to very quickly settle the matter without issue. Of course, nothing could be farther from the reality.” With the apology letter as evidence, Dawson was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison, followed by 10 years of post-release supervision.
It’s like playing baseball with one side (patients) wearing blindfolds and the other side (hospitals) running up the score at will.
Topline
It was an historic, bipartisan healthcare reform. In 2020, President Donald Trump proposed and the Biden Administration finalized the transparency rule whereby hospitals were forced to open their books and post their prices for healthcare services online and in real time.
Blatantly, though, hospitals are refusing to comply. As of January 1, 86-percent of hospitals were not complying with the transparency rule according to an investigation by the organization Patient Rights Advocate.
One year after the rule went into effect, a staggering 857 out of the 1,000 hospitals surveyed refused to open their pricing books or were non-compliant.
In 2021, three of the largest hospital systems in the country – HCA Healthcare, CommonSpirit Health, and Ascension — made a collective $120 billion. Yet, those systems still weren’t posting their prices online by January 2022.
Even smaller “non-profit” hospital groups, like, UPMC in Pittsburgh, were non-compliant. However, in 2020, their CEO made $9 million; between 2016 and 2020, he was paid $34.7 million.
That’s like playing baseball with one side (patients) wearing blindfolds and the other side (hospitals) running up the score at will.
The Rule
The federal hospital price transparency rule took effect on January 1, 2021 as a part of the Affordable Care Act. It required hospitals to post all their prices online in a way that’s easily accessible to patients, without barriers like requiring that they submit personal identifying information.
Hospitals must provide the clear pricing information online “(a)s a comprehensive machine-readable file with all items and services” and “in a display of shoppable services in a consumer-friendly format,” according to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
Big number
There are 361 hospitals owned by the three large hospital systems and only two of those hospitals were posting their prices. According to the report:
HCA Healthcare had $58.8 billion in revenue (2021) — none of 188 hospitals complied.
CommonSpirit Health had $33.3 billion in revenue (2021) – only one of 88 hospitals complied.
Ascension had $27.2 billion in revenue (2021) – only one out of 85 hospitals complied.
CommonSpirit Health and Ascension didn’t respond to requests for comment by our deadline.
Case study – HCA Healthcare
An HCA Healthcare spokesperson responded to our comment request and said the hospitals are compliant – but wouldn’t say exactly when they began posting the required information.
“Over the last year, we have worked diligently and have completed our implementation of these requirements,” the HCA spokesperson said.
“Our hospital websites have a consumer-friendly Patient Payment Estimator tool that provides relevant information to help patients understand what their out-of-pocket costs may be for hospital care, including those that are uninsured. In addition, we have posted contracted rates with third party payers using one of the machine-readable file formats listed in the regulations to provide the five types of ‘standard charges.’”
Certainly, it’s a good first step; however, more work needs to be done.
Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com reviewed about a dozen of HCA Healthcare hospital’s websites and found information under “patient financial resources” or “patient payment estimator” tabs.
While HCA hospital websites all have downloadable files of standard charges, they all include disclaimers that the prices can vary in several ways from what is stated.
The HCA files all also have shorthand or abbreviated descriptions of the services, making it hard to understand some of the services.
HCA also includes a gross cost and a discounted cost of services but lack the required payer-specific negotiated charges, and de-identified minimum and maximum negotiated charges.
The hospital websites are also required to have a “display of at least 300 shoppable services.” In the absence of the shoppable services list, hospitals can display an internet-based price estimator tool that patients can access without having to submit personal identifying information.
The HCA websites have these patient payment estimators, where patients can search for a service. But the customer must add their information — their full name, date of birth and insurance. This appears to violate the rules.
Case study — UPMC
Susan Manko, vice president of public relations for UPMC and University of Pittsburgh, told OpenTheBooks that the Patient Rights Advocate report is inaccurate.
“The PRA website is (and has been for some time now) wrong,” she said.
“PRA completely missed that the appropriate pricing information has been available to the public on these hospitals’ websites for more than the past year and that these hospitals are compliant with federal regulations regarding pricing transparency.”
She provided the links for UPMC Shadyside and UPMC Magee-Womens, which indeed have a price estimator tool and a machine-readable file of items and services on the websites.
Patient Rights Advocate argues that while UPMC’s machine readable file lists prices for services provided by three dozen insurance companies, it lacks specific plans, like HMO and PPO plans, making the list incomplete. The rule clearly requires that “each list of payer-specific negotiated charges must be clearly associated with the name of the third party payer and plan.”
Big potential penalties
Price transparency can revolutionize U.S. healthcare by introducing price competition in the industry. Price disclosure also helps to prevent gouging and surprise billing.
So, on January 1, CMS increased the penalty for hospitals that don’t comply with the transparency rule. The upper bound penalties for the three large healthcare groups with 361 hospitals could collectively exceed $724 million per year.
Minimum penalties start at $300 per day for smaller hospitals with 30 or fewer beds, and increase to $10 per bed per day for hospitals with more than 30 beds, up to $5,500 per day.
If hospitals aren’t in compliance for a full year, the minimum penalty is $109,500 per hospital, and the maximum penalty is more than $2 million per hospital.
Key background
Patient Rights Advocate reviewed the websites of 1,000 licensed hospitals – out of the 6,000 across America. The group analyzed whether the required pricing information was posted.
Hospitals are required to display the price of the 300 most common shoppable services, either in a standard charges list or a price estimator tool. But the report criticized the latter, saying “price estimator tools” give non-binding estimates (including price ranges) accompanied by disclaimers.
That’s far different from actual price disclosure, the report noted.
The report found most hospitals did not post allpayer-specific and plan-specific negotiated rates.
For instance, there was incomplete or missing data fields, fields with zeros, N/As and asterisks for negotiated rates.
It also found that hospitals often listed many more “accepted insurance plans” on their websites away from where they listed their standard charges, implying that their standard charges didn’t include all accepted plans.
Our organization at OpenTheBooks.com was at the forefront of shaping the federal rule, encouraging the public in the fall of 2019, and beginning of 2020 to comment on the health care price transparency proposal put forth by the Trump Administration.
With that push, about 2,000 comments were sent to Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Biden Administration finalized the rule. A true bipartisan reform that forces transparency from a politically powerful group.
Noncompliant hospitals—a year later and no fines
As of March 2022, CMS, which enforces the rule, has issued approximately 345 warning notices to noncompliant hospitals, a spokesperson told OpenTheBooks.com on April 25.
The agency has also issued 136 corrective action plan requests “to hospitals that previously received warning notices but have not yet corrected deficiencies,” and 145 hospitals “have received case closure notices after having addressed previous citations,” the spokesperson said.
CMS hasn’t issued any penalties because “each hospital that has come under compliance review has resolved its deficiencies, or is in the process of doing so.”
OpenTheBooks.com filed a Freedom of Information Act request earlier in April, asking HHS to divulge which hospitals received noncompliance notices and corrective action plans and whether the general public has notified HHS of noncompliant hospitals.
While HHS has acknowledged the request, it has not yet provided the records.
But the spokesperson said, “specifics surrounding the compliance and status of hospitals are not publicly available. The Hospital Price Transparency final rule indicates that once CMS issues a civil monetary penalty, CMS will make public the name of the hospital on a CMS website; releasing this information prematurely could identify hospitals that have already taken corrective actions and come into compliance after issuance of a warning letter, given the relationship in timing of our reviews and the hospitals being at various stages addressing compliance requests.”
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Crucial quote
Until CMS strongly enforces the rule, there is no reason for the remainder of the hospitals to comply, the Patient Rights Advocate report noted.
“We are now entering the second year since the hospital price transparency rule became law, and compliance remains at very low levels,” the report stated. “The largest hospital systems are effectively ignoring the law, with no consequences.”
Critics
The Wall Street Journal reported in December 2021 that some hospitals have posted pricing data on their websites but they “masked the information from online search results, using special code that blocks pricing data on their websites from the results of search engines,” noting the coding is illegal under new rules that take effect in 2022.
One hospital system, the North Oaks Health System, based in Hammond, La., posted some data early in 2021 but removed it two weeks later, as none of its competing hospitals had posted their rates.
“You get nervous about putting those negotiated rates out there,” the system’s chief financial officer, Mark Anderson, told The Journal. “You don’t know who will look at those rates and say, ‘I want to negotiate to the Medicare rates.’ We didn’t want to put ourselves at a competitive, strategic disadvantage.”
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Additional Reading
An OpenTheBooks.com June 2019 report “Top 82 U.S. Non-Profit Hospitals: Quantifying Government Payments and Financial Assets” showed that hospitals with non-profit tax status and their CEOs are getting richer while the American people are getting healthcare poorer.
Our study published at Forbes showing the top 82 non-profit hospitals added billions of dollars to their bottom line, lavishly compensated their CEOs, and spent millions of dollars lobbying government to defend the status quo.
Adam Andrzejewski (say: And-g-f-ski) is the CEO/Founder of OpenTheBooks.com. Last year we filed 47,000 FOIA requests and captured $12 trillion in government spending (2021). Work featured at The BBC, Good Morning America; ABC World News Tonight; USA Today; The Wall Street Journal; Forbes; and The New York Times. My presentation to the Hillsdale College National Leadership seminar posted on YouTube has 3.7+ million views. Learn more at OpenTheBooks.com.
