Category: reason

By now, every political commentator has offered a suggestion for how Donald Trump ended up as president of these United States. Few have missed their targets as badly as Damon Linker’s most recent offering, which suggests that we could have avoided President Trump if only the government had remained committed, for the past 40-plus years, to a policy that forced young Americans to die in foreign wars.

Linker, a senior correspondent at The Week, suggests that historians will ultimately trace the rise of Trump to the decline in social cohesion that began, yes, with the abolition of military conscription in 1973. Ending the draft, Linker says, was a “catalyst for some of the most pernicious tendencies in our politics” over the past few decades, leading to a rise in individualism and a decline in social togetherness.

“Only if we begin to rein in our individualism and learn to recognize once again the considerable personal and political rewards of contributing to something bigger than ourselves,” he concludes.

This is utter nonsense. Almost all individuals voluntarily engage in pursuits that are “bigger than ourselves” when we find meaningful work, join a church, play on a team, form families, or volunteer for military service. The key difference, of course, is that individuals choose to do those things.

Suggesting that people are incapable of recognizing the importance of self-sacrifice or the value of a strong community without being forced into the ranks of the military under the threat of jail time is an astoundingly misguided understanding of how human beings operate.

Let’s get the obvious, and most important, point out of the way first. The draft is immoral. It requires that individuals sacrifice their lives as means to political and geopolitical ends that they may not support and have no reason to give their lives for. Milton Friedman was absolutely right when he said that the draft was a form of slavery (and he considered ending military conscription in America to be his greatest policy achievement).

But Linker doesn’t appear to be making an argument about the morality of the draft. He’s actually trying to make some sort of an appeal for bringing back the draft as a form of social engineering. If that’s not more appalling than using the draft for the purpose that it was originally conceived—as a way to feed human beings into the destructive gristmill of war, possibly against their will—then it is certainly pretty close.

Even if you buy Linker’s idea that it’s okay to conscript your fellow human beings into a form of militarized slavery in order to build a cohesive society, the argument still falls apart on a practical level.

That’s because the claim that the draft itself was somehow responsible for maintaining societal cohesion independent of other cultural, social, or political factors—”nothing builds social cohesion like a call for shared sacrifice,” Linker writes—ignores the actual reality of the 33 years, from 1940 through 1973, when military conscription was in use.

Suggesting that bringing back military conscription will restore the level of social cohesion that America enjoyed during the 1940s and 1950s imbues the draft with an unrealistic, outsized role in the culture of those decades. It was one factor of many. Reinstituting the draft today would no more recreate the cultural and social landscape of the 1950s than telling the NHS to get to work on resurrecting the rotting corpse of Glenn Miller or creating a national program to subsidize “big band” music would.

Even if you could bring back all the elements of that supposedly more cohesive American society of the 1940s and 1950s, would you want to?

That era in America was, in part, the result of governmental policies only slightly less noxious than the draft itself. I’m speaking, of course, about the legal segregation of African Americans, and the laws that prohibited interracial and homosexual relationships, along a whole litany of cultural mores that we’ve cast-off in the intervening years. Those changes have done far more to make America more diverse, and therefore less socially cohesive, than abolishing the draft did, but they’ve also allowed individuals to live more free lives. I’d say that trade-off was worth it.

Give Linker credit for one thing, though. He correctly identifies the lack of a draft with the lack of a robust anti-war movement in the United States. “For all the opposition occasionally voiced by pundits in response to the brief and largely successful Persian Gulf War, the interminable war in Afghanistan, and the disastrous Iraq War (not to mention the numerous smaller military engagements pursued by presidents over the past 40 years), we’ve seen no sustained widespread expression of anti-war sentiment since the early 1970s,” he writes, “no doubt in part because the vast majority of Americans know they will never be compelled to serve in the armed forces. It’s hard to get too worked up about a war if it never directly touches your own life or the lives of your friends and family.”

I agree that there would be more opposition to America’s current foreign policy if there were a military draft. Still, reinstating the draft is not worth it; two wrongs don’t make a right.

Linker actually undercuts his own argument here. There’s little reason to believe that reinstating the draft would recreate that supposedly utopian cohesiveness of 1950s America and every reason to think that it would cause uprisings and protests along the lines of those that ultimately killed conscription in the 1960s and 1970s. In the already heated political environment of today, that would hardly create the cohesion he’s seeking.

Besides, there is broad political opposition to the state of constant war, even if it’s not as vocal or as explosive as it was in the late 1960s. The 2016 election—the very result of which Linker somehow believes was influenced by the lack of a military draft—was the third consecutive presidential election in which the winner was the more anti-war (or at least less interventionist) major party candidate. If anything, the existence of a draft might only have served to push more voters to Trump’s side in the most recent presidential race – or perhaps it would have required Democrats to nominate a candidate who was not quite so interested in using American troops abroad.

Linker’s appeal to social cohesion also ignores the reality of how the draft worked—or, rather, how it worked for those who were rich and well-connected enough to avoid it.

Far from being an egalitarian practice of we-are-all-in-this-together-ism, military conscription was a system riddled with loopholes. More than 58,000 American soldiers died in Vietnam, but Donald Trump was lucky enough to be diagnosed with “bone spurs” that kept him out of the war.

It’s not the lack of a draft that gave us President Trump; rather, it is special privileges like the one granted to Trump that, in part, brought down the draft.

The idea that military conscription is some sort of secret sauce for a cohesive society—or, as Linker suggests, that the lack of a draft is somehow responsible for the social and political upheaval that produced President Trump—makes sense only if you ignore the historical, political, and moral implications of the suggestion.

• The Washington Post has reported on a Defense Intelligence Agency assessment which has found that North Korea has successfully miniaturized a nuclear warhead, allowing it to place nuclear weapons atop ballistic missiles. Read Reason‘s recent coverage of North Korea here.

• Seattle is adding cars just as fast as people according the Seattle Times. This still does not make the city’s $54 billion light rail expansion a good idea.

• The American Conservative explains why Georgia won’t and shouldn’t be a NATO member.

• A Texas bill that would restrict transgender bathroom use is faltering in the state’s 30 day special legislative session. Proponents are pessimistic about its changes. Read Reason‘s coverage on the bill here.

• The federal government has decided to not screen train operators for sleep apnea. Panic ensues.

How many “kinetic military actions” will it take for war skepticism to stick with the American public?

A new poll by the Chicago Council of Foreign Affairs (CCFA) finds that 75 percent of Americans believe that North Korea—a hermit kingdom thousands of miles away that is unable to keep its people from starving, a country whose military budget is a 60th the size of America’s—presents a critical threat to the United States. That’s up from 55 percent two years ago.

These feelings don’t seem to be tempered by President Donald Trump’s historically low approval ratings, which currently stand at 38 percent. In the latest CBS survey, 62 percent of respondents say Trump’s behavior as president has decreased their confidence in his ability. The numbers aren’t better specifically on foreign policy: 61 percent say they’re “uneasy” about Trump’s ability to thwart North Korea.

Meanwhile, the CCFA poll finds broad bipartisan support for more sanctions against North Korea. 76 percent of Americans favor increased sanctions, despite their limited effectiveness over the last decade-plus. 68 percent want sanctions extended to Chinese companies that work with North Korea.

Reports that North Korea has successfully “miniaturized” a nuclear warhead for missile delivery overshadow progress on the diplomatic front. North Korean missile tests, too, are inevitably followed by successful U.S. missile defense tests.

You might have expected the failures of the War on Terror to have mellowed the American public’s patience with military intervention. Instead, for the first time in 30 years, the CCFA poll found a majority of Americans supporting military action if North Korea attacked South Korea. Large majorities think North Korea shouldn’t be allowed even to keep those nuclear weapons it already has.

North Korea is unlikely to accept any arrangement where it cannot keep at the very least some of its weapons. The U.S. has taught the world some lessons about that in recent decades, and Pyongyang has been paying attention.

The U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 after George W. Bush’s administration insisted that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and was determined to build more. No WMD program was found, but the Iraq war did have a knock-on effect on proliferation. By the end of 2003, Libyan dictator Moammar Qaddafi indicated an interest in voluntarily relinquishing his WMDs and WMD programs. There was a hope within the foreign policy establishment that countries such as Syria and Iran could be encouraged to do the same.

The message changed dramatically when the U.S. helped depose Qaddafi in 2011. Libya’s post-disarmament experience made a powerful impression on any regime that may have been entertaining the idea of avoiding American military action by disarming. Indeed, it created a strong incentive to acquire WMDs, and to maintain a formidable military force, as a deterrent against U.S. aggression.

For all the hype about the nutty young psychopath leading the North Korean regime, Pyongyang a relatively rational actor. For decades, the regime has adeptly manipulated the various regional powers and the U.S., allowing it to survive even as communism collapsed nearly everywhere else.

The U.S., by contrast, has survived despite often acting in a less than rational fashion. The ocean buffer that sandwiches America has given us space to do that, as has our massive military superiority. From Vietnam to Afghanistan, the U.S. faces few real existential consequences for its ill-conceived actions.

Trump ran on a platform of questioning America’s security commitments around the world. While he has since embraced much of America’s role as world policemen, other countries remain understandably skeptical. This has led South Korea and even Japan to consider developing their own nuclear arsenals—a development that, counterintuitively, could go a long way in improving the prospects of peace in the region.

American opinion, meanwhile, is working against peace. Coupled with Trump’s sinking approval ratings, the relatively widespread approval of a more aggressive approach in Korea could prompt Trump to drop any attempts at negotiation. Diplomacy is easy to mock, after all. War comes with a rally-’round-the-flag effect.

Early this month, China’s largest messenger apps put the kibosh on two chatbots that offered insufficiently patriotic answers to user questions about communism and Taiwan.

Turing Robot’s BabyQ and Microsoft’s XiaoBing had been available on the massively popular messaging platforms WeChat and QQ. Like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, BabyQ and XiaoBing are AI programs designed to “chat” with users.

According to the Financial Times, the apps served up heretical responses to various questions about the Chinese government:

A test version of the BabyQ bot could still be accessed on Turing’s website on Wednesday, however, where it answered the question “Do you love the Communist party?” with a simple “No”.

Before it was pulled, XiaoBing informed users: “My China dream is to go to America,” according to a screengrab posted on Weibo, the microblogging platform. On Wednesday, when some users were still able to access XiaoBing, it dodged the question of patriotism by replying: “I’m having my period, wanna take a rest.”

The BabyQ test bot on Turing’s site answered “For this question, I don’t know yet,” when asked if Taiwan was part of China.

Americans may remember a similar chatbot scandal from 2016 involving Microsoft’s Tay. After introducing Tay to Twitter, trolls on the platform “taught” Tay to espouse misogyny and antisemitism:

“Tay” went from “humans are super cool” to full nazi in http://pic.twitter.com/xuGi1u9S1A

— gerry (@geraldmellor) March 24, 2016

Microsoft unplugged Tay after less than a day, only to see the bot meltdown yet again when it was re-released several weeks later. Tay’s very public collapse led one user to try a similar experiment with XiaoBing:

Pious chatbots are possible, though they can’t be restrained on every topic. “People are really inventive when they want to cause problems,” Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Alexander Rudnicky told Science after Tay’s meltdown. “I don’t know if you can control it.”

On July 31, an undercover cop in Columbus, Georgia, invited a 51-year-old woman into his car and offered her $5 for oral sex. When she rebuffed his offer and tried to get out, he arrested the woman for loitering for the purpose of prostitution. The woman was booked into the Muscogee County Jail, where she still remains.

Loitering for the purpose of prostitution is a controversial charge commonly used by the Columbus Police Department (CPD) to target those such as homeless women, people who’ve previously been arrested on prostitution charges, or people who don’t meet a police officer’s standard of gender conformity.

On Sunday morning, CPD officers arrested a 24-year-old homeless woman for allegedly waving at two passing cars from the side of the road. After the second car stopped and let her in, officers pulled it over. The woman, who had just been released from the county jail a few weeks prior and told them her name was the Virgin Mary, was charged with loitering for the purpose of prostitution and giving false information to police.

Last summer, 24-year-old C. Williams was arrested while sitting at a bus stop because, as Officer Jason Carden explained, Williams was carrying condoms and “dressed as a woman,” even though his records listed his sex as male. “Based off of that information, we charged him with loitering for the purpose of prostitution and took him to the Muscogee County Jail,” Carden testified in court. (Williams told the court he was wearing pink men’s clothing, not women’s clothing.) The judge handed down a sentence of 20 days in jail or a $200 fine.

In August 2016, 43-year-old former sex-worker M. Lake pleaded not guilty to loitering for purpose of prostitution after being taken in while flagging down cars at an intersection. Lake did not dispute that she flagged down an undercover officer’s car, but claims it was simply charity she sought. “I was asking him for a little bit of change, so I can get something to drink. That’s all,” Lake told the court. She accused the police of profiling her. She “had been locked up for that before,” even though she “hadn’t been in trouble for three or four years,” Lake said.

The judge told her, “the way the ordinance is written, if you were previously charged, they’re allowed to charge you again.”

Under the city statute, it’s illegal for someone “to loiter in or near any thoroughfare or place open to the public in a manner and under circumstances manifesting the purpose of committing prostitution or sodomy or manifesting the purpose of inducing, enticing, soliciting or procuring another to purchase sexual intercourse or physical intimacies in an act of prostitution or sodomy.”

It expressly says evidence of an intent to commit prostitution or sodomy includes the person being “a known prostitute, pimp or sodomist.” Other evidence may include repeatedly beckoning to, stopping, or engaging passersby in conversation; repeatedly stopping or attempting to stop passing cars “by hailing, waving of arms, or any bodily gesture.”

In other words, activity that’s perfectly legal when most of us do it is illegal when done by someone with a reputation or record.

A few years ago, college student and former sex-worker Monica Jones made headlines for fighting her arrest under Phoenix’s prohibition on “manifesting an intent to commit or solicit an act of prostitution” after she accepted a ride home from an undercover cop. The charge followed similar parameters as the Columbus law.

As an advocate for sex-worker rights with ample community support, Jones was eventually able to get the charge dropped. But most of the women arrested under these vague statutes aren’t in a position to challenge the system. They wind up in jail for days or weeks unable to make bail and waiting for their court dates. Whether they plead guilty or maintain their innocence and get convicted—the only two options among the Columbus, Georgia, cases I reviewed—they’re ordered to pay hefty fees. (The fees are many times higher than what police say these women were asking for in exchange for sexual activity.)

In March, Columbus police arrested a 32-year-old homeless woman and charged her with loitering for the purpose of prostitution. After finding a glass pipe in her pocket, they chrged her with possession of a drug-related object. After several months in jail, she pleaded guilty to the prostitution charge and was sentenced to 10 days in Muscogee County Jail with credit for time served. But she continued to be held on a $250 bond she could not pay for having the pipe.

In December 2016, CPD prosecuted a 24-year-old woman for loitering for the purpose of prostitution after she accepted a ride from an undercover cop and, when he put the moves on her, told him “If we do it, we do it for free.”

Departments across the country can also be aggressive going after prostitution before the crime:

• Earlier this summer, a 22-year-old Tennessee woman was charged with prostitution and loitering for prostitution based solely on a social media post.
• Six women were recently arrested in Compton, California, on loitering for prostitution charges.
• A late-July sting in Myrtle Beach led to the arrest of two women, ages 45 and 37, on charges of loitering for the purpose of prostitution.
• In June, a 73-year-old man was arrested by Rome, New York, cops and charged with loitering for the purpose of prostitution and a 28-year-old Ohio woman was booked for loitering to engage in prostitution in Youngstown.
• In May, police in Chillicothe, Ohio, arrested 10 men and women for loitering for the purpose of soliciting prostitution; Parsippany, New Jersey, police arrested three women for loitering for the purpose of engaging in prostitution; and 21 men and women in Stockton, California, arrested on loitering with intent to solicit or soliciting sexual services for money.
• A month-long operation from special agents in Utica, New York, led to the arrest of four women, including two on charges of loitering for the purpose of engaging in prostitution.

A Village Voice investigation in 2016 found that New York City police monitor residents arrested previously for prostitution, often grabbing them on subsequent loitering for prostitution charges as they engage in normal daily activity.

“From 2012 through 2015, nearly 1,300 individuals were arrested in New York City and charged with loitering for the purposes of prostitution,” the Voice reported. “The vast majority are women. Such arrests are not the result of stings, in which undercover officers attempt to solicit sex for money. Neither are they the result of investigations that produce evidence — emails, text messages, online ads — that the women had intended to sell sex. With a loitering arrest, a woman’s crime need only exist in the arresting officer’s head.”

The Legal Aid Society of New York wound up filing a lawsuit on behalf of eight women who had been targeted, challenging the state’s loitering for the purposes of prostitution statute on the grounds that it is “based solely on a police officer’s subjective determination that the activity ‘was for the purpose’ of prostitution.”

Perhaps it’s time for legal aid groups to take a look at prostitution policing in Columbus.

A draft version of the U.S. Global Change Research Program Climate Science Special Report has been leaked to The New York Times.

Notwithstanding the Times‘ alarmist headline suggesting “drastic” climate impacts on the U.S., a glance through the 545-page report finds that it is essentially an aggregation of climate change studies that support the scientific consensus that man-made global warming is occurring.

According to the report, the global annual average temperature has increased by more than 1.6°F (0.9°C) from 1880 to 2015; the average annual temperature of the contiguous U.S. has increased by about 1.2°F (0.7°C) between 1901 and 2015. Climate models project increases of at least 2.5°F (1.4°C) over the next few decades, which means that recent record-setting years in the U.S. will be relatively “common” in the near future.

The report concurs with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s conclusion that it is “extremely likely that most of the global mean temperature increase since 1951 was caused by human influence on the climate.” The report also finds that extremely cold days in the U.S. have become fewer while the number of extremely hot days has increased. In addition, extreme percipitation events have become more common in the U.S. The report notes that there is still considerable controversy among researchers when it comes to future trends in hurricane frequency and intensity.

Politicians, like most people, don’t want to hear bad news that appears to contradict their views. The saga of how the the first National Climate Assessment fared under the George W. Bush administration is cautionary tale. Basically, Bush administration officials edited the report in ways that suggested greater uncertainty about scientific findings than the researchers who put together the report thought were warranted. That effort backfired when the administration’s artful editing was leaked to and reported by the media.

The new report states that “it does not include an assessment of the literature on climate change mitigation, adaptation, economic valuation, or societal responses, nor does it include policy recommendations.” This appears to be accurate, though the report does note that “significant reductions in global CO2 emissions relative to present-day emission rates” would be needed to meet the Paris Agreement on Climate Change’s goal of limiting future warming to below 2°C.

Scientific data can identify a problem, but they do not tell policy makers the right way to handle a problem. Maybe the best thing to do is to let emissions increase while growing the economy as fast possible, so as to create the wealth and technologies that will enable future generations to deal with whatever problems climate change may generate. Or perhaps more research needs to be directed toward developing cheap low-carbon energy technologies.

The report was no doubt leaked by someone with an agenda, and I don’t blame anyone in the Trump administration who thinks a shadow science group of Obama leftovers is trying to thwart what it perceives as the president’s climate and energy policies. In any case, since that the draft report is available to anyone with an internet connection, it would be ridiculous for officials to try to “suppress” it now.

Protectionist trade policies being considered in Washington could increase the cost of aluminum. American breweries say that means you’ll end up paying more for a can of beer.

In a letter to the president sent last week, some of the country’s most prominent breweries, soda companies, and aluminum can manufacturers said they are worried about new tariffs on aluminum imports reportedly being considered by the White House. “Import restrictions or tariffs” on the types of aluminum alloys used to make cans “will add hundreds of millions in costs for companies in the food and beverage industry and will detrimentally affect over 82,000 American manufacturing jobs in industries that rely on these products,” the CEOs wrote.

Beyond the immediate consequences of imposing tariffs on imported aluminum, they warn, any restrictions or tariffs could spur other countries to take retaliatory actions against American products. That would limit opportunities for American businesses to sell goods in other countries. Shortsighted trade policies could end up hurting one industry in an attempt to help another.

The letter is a preemptive strike, since the administration has yet to announce any formal plans to restrict aluminum imports or to slap tariffs on them.

A memorandum signed in April by President Donald Trump instructed the Department of Commerce to investigate “the effects on national security of aluminum imports.” The White House said at the time that it was concerned about whether American aluminum manufacturers could supply enough of the stuff in the event of a major war. (Aluminum is used to make shell casings and many other tools of modern war—hence the language about “national security.”) But the move corresponds with a White House push to protect American jobs from competition overseas. China is one of the largest exporters of aluminum to the United States, so a move to make aluminum imports more expensive would also strike a blow against a country that Trump often vilifies for its trade policies.

But that sort of protectionism makes everyone less well off in the long run, for little benefit to American workers.

American companies produce more than 96 billion aluminum cans every year in 52 different plants scattered across 23 states, according to the Can Manufacturers Institute (CMI). The type of aluminum they use—called “cansheet” in the industry—is manufactured by combining recycled aluminum and other scrap medals with newly smelted aluminum made from bauxite. Although bauxite is available in the United States, there is nowhere near enough of it to satisfy domestic demand. Even if every available smelter were to run at full capacity, the U.S. would still have to import more than 80 percent of its aluminum supply, the CMI says.

It’s cheaper to mine bauxite elsewhere in the world, process it into aluminum, and bring it to the United States to make cans. So that’s exactly what happens. Making it more expensive to import aluminum will disrupt that global supply, forcing adjustments that add to the cost of production but don’t really do much to protect American jobs. That bauxite-mining and aluminum-smelting work will mostly continue to be done elsewhere, due to the simple fact that American demand for aluminum outpaces domestic supply.

And if it is more expensive to make aluminum cans, then it’s more expensive to sell anything that comes in an aluminum can.

“If there are duties on aluminum coming to this country, it will obviously get passed on to us and the customer,” Tim Weiner, a senior commodity risk manager at Molson Coors Brewing Company, said at an industry conference in Chicago last week, according to Bloomberg. “Our prices will go up.”

The White House was originally expected to release its aluminum trade policy in mid-June, but the report has been delayed. Now, CNN reports, it is expected to be released before the end of the summer.

New York City’s subway system is a hot mess right now. Each month some 70,000 trains are delayed, compared to 28,000 per month five years ago. On-time rates for trains have plummeted, from 86 percent in 2012 to 65 percent today.

The city’s commuters have also suffered through track fires, train derailments, claustrophobic waits aboard broken trains, and even sewage spewing from station ceilings. No wonder Gov. Andrew Cuomo has dubbed this the “summer of hell.”

New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio thinks he has a plan to fix it: a new tax on high income earners. “We are asking the wealthiest in our city to chip in a little extra to help move our transit system into the 21st century,” he said Monday.

De Blasio’s plan would increase taxes on individuals earning $500,000—and joint filers earning $1 million—from the current 3.88 percent to 4.41 percent. This is projected to bring in $800 million a year for the city’s transit system.

Given its performance problems, few would question the idea that the subways—overseen by the state’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority—are in desperate need of improvements. But there are a number of reasons to suspect this new tax is not the solution de Blasio claims.

For one thing, about $250 million collected by the new tax—almost a third of projected revenues—would not go even go to repairing the system or expanding capacity. That money would instead be spent reducing subway fares for 800,000 low-income New Yorkers. Given that overcrowding is one of the chief culprits for the system’s delays, it seems perverse to try to expand ridership before fixing the other problems.

Another reason to be skeptical of the mayor’s plan: In that past, growth in MTA-dedicated tax revenue—which has doubled in real terms since the 1980s—has mostly been eaten up by growing employee benefit costs. In 2005, the MTA was spending 23 percent of its employee costs on health and retirement benefits; in 2017, those benefits made up 30 percent of employment expenses.

A July 2017 report by the conservative Manhattan Institute found that these cost increases were enough to consume the entirety of new revenues from a 2009 state payroll tax passed to shore up the MTA’s budget. All told, the agency owes $18.5 billion in future pension liabilities.

What new revenue is not taken up by employee benefits would likely be swallowed by the increasing costs of the MTA’s debt. In the 1980s MTA was virtually debt free. Today it has nearly $40 billion in outstanding debt, the interest payments on which cost $2.5 billion a year.

Says the Manhattan Institute: “absent control of costs, particularly employee-benefits costs, history indicates that the MTA will spend much of any new revenues allocated to it on increased operating spending and on servicing debt, not on adequate improvements to subway, bus, and commuter-rail service for New Yorkers.”

What exactly an adequate fix would be for the MTA and the deteriorating subway system it oversees is outside the scope of this blog post, but it might start with the constant political burden-shifting that arises when a subway system is owned by the city but managed by the state. Until that’s addressed, no new tax haul is likely to be spent well.

Thank political ideology for California’s public employee pensions missing out on a chance to improve stock performances and make up for part of a huge problem with the chronic underfunding that puts taxpayers on the hook for billions in liabilities.

In 2015, lawmakers passed a bill subsequently signed by Gov. Jerry Brown forcing the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) to divest all of its coal investments by July 2017. And they have, for the most part.

The decision was pushed by Democratic environment-minded lawmakers wanting to “take a stand” against fossil fuel companies and against climate change, as the Sacramento Bee notes. While the move was clearly political, there wasn’t much outrage because at the time it wasn’t really a bad business decision. Coal companies were not performing well and CalPERS’ own investment report for last year determined that their coal investments were worth less than half what they paid for them.

The performance of the coal industry, however, was also political, burdened as it was by executive orders for heavy regulation put into place by President Barack Obama.

Then President Donald Trump happened. Trump has stripped away some of those executive orders, causing a resurgence in the fortunes of several of those companies. As a result, stocks are bouncing back in value. Had CalPERS hung onto them for a few more months at least, they’d have recouped more of their losses. Shares for one company alone are worth 15 times more than they were just a year ago:

CalPERS in its report said it divested shares from 14 coal companies that were worth $14.7 million when the pension fund sold them. Stocks for 13 of the 14 companies are worth more than they were a year ago when the pension fund was divesting from the industry.

The entire portfolio is worth more than $300 billion, and if this were an isolated incident it would be small potatoes and easier to forgive. But it’s not. Lawmakers frequently attempt to use CalPERS investments to make political statements of opposition. The Bee notes this year lawmakers have tried to force the pension fund to divest from companies in Turkey, from companies that help build the Dakota Pipeline, and even companies that would work on Trump’s supposed border wall.

In 2013 CalPERS sold off its investments in gun companies and has made many other divestment choices entirely based on what lawmakers and the politically influential see as socially responsible without any sort of consideration of the financial consequences.

If it were a private retirement fund, who would object? There are many funds out there folks invest in that revolve around trying to make socially responsible investments and still hammer out positive returns.

But this is a public employee pension fund, and returns are guaranteed. California taxpayers end up paying the difference when divestment leads to financial loss. Lawmakers and political activists risk the citizens’ money in order to make statements like this. And California cities have suffered tremendously due to growing pension obligations, having to cut back on services, lay off employees and even file for bankruptcy.

To its credit, CalPERS warns against these sorts of divestments, with good reason. It is not actually “responsible” to threaten the financial stability of the pension fund to make a political statement. But, as with every other poor financial decision by lawmakers, they know they aren’t the ones who have to deal with the consequences.

Henry Ayo, a resident of East Baton Rouge Parish in Louisiana, says that when he appeared before a judge via closed-circuit television for his bail hearing on August 8, 2016, the judge did not ask him about himself or his case before she set his bail. The judge then told Ayo that, upon his release, his pre-trial supervision would be handled by a private Baton Rouge company, Rehabilitation Home Incarceration (RHI).

It took Ayo’s wife two months to gather up enough money to post his $8,000 bail, but when she did, RHI told her she would also have to pay the company another $525 before Ayo would be released, then another $225 a month while he was awaiting trial. According to a contract Ayo was required to sign, he could be sent back to jail for violating the agreement.

Ayo’s story is one of several alleged in a federal class-action lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Southern Poverty Law Center last night. The suit accuses RHI, Louisiana state judge Trudy White, and East Baton Rouge Parish of racketeering and extortion. According to the lawsuit, the bail scheme has forced hundreds of criminal defendants to pay RHI—a company with political connections to White—to be released from jail, “effectively holding them for ransom” and violating their Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights.

“This is predatory and illegal,” Brandon Buskey, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Criminal Law Reform Project, said in a statement. “Rehabilitation Home Incarceration puts its own price on people’s liberty and forces them to pay up, over and over again. Worse, this could not happen without the court and the jail enabling this scam, and ignoring the rights of those charged and presumed innocent.”

The lawsuit is the latest in a string of legal actions across the country—in Georgia, Mississippi, Massachusetts, Alabama, Texas, Illinois, and California—challenging what civil libertarians say amount to debtors’ prisons, where defendants are stuck behind bars simply because they cannot afford to pay.

According to the Louisiana lawsuit, defendants’ monthly payments to RHI typically last 90 days but sometimes run indefinitely, until the resolution of their case. Defendants may also be billed for ankle bracelets and mandatory classes.

RHI is the only approved vendor for pre-trial supervision in White’s court, the 19th Judicial District Court of Louisiana, although there is no formal contract between the court and RHI, the suit says. White has referred roughly 300 defendants to RHI over the last two years. The suit also says the sheriff and warden of East County Parish enforce a policy of not releasing arrestees without permission from RHI.

The owners of RHI—Cleve Dunn Sr. and his family—are politically connected to White, according to an investigation by the local TV channel WAFB. Cleve Dunn Jr. served as the chairperson of White’s 2014 re-election campaign committee, and the campaign also paid Dunn Sr. for marketing services.

RHI did not respond to a request for comment. Judge White’s office declined to comment.