Checking My Privilege: Character as the Basis of Privilege

By Tal Fortgang

Wednesday, April 02, 2014

There is a phrase that floats around college campuses, Princeton being no exception, that threatens to strike down opinions without regard for their merits, but rather solely on the basis of the person that voiced them. “Check your privilege,” the saying goes, and I have been reprimanded by it several times this year. The phrase, handed down by my moral superiors, descends recklessly, like an Obama-sanctioned drone, and aims laser-like at my pinkish-peach complexion, my maleness, and the nerve I displayed in offering an opinion rooted in a personal Weltanschauung. “Check your privilege,” they tell me in a command that teeters between an imposition to actually explore how I got where I am, and a reminder that I ought to feel personally apologetic because white males seem to pull most of the strings in the world.

I do not accuse those who “check” me and my perspective of overt racism, although the phrase, which assumes that simply because I belong to a certain ethnic group I should be judged collectively with it, toes that line. But I do condemn them for diminishing everything I have personally accomplished, all the hard work I have done in my life, and for ascribing all the fruit I reap not to the seeds I sow but to some invisible patron saint of white maleness who places it out for me before I even arrive. Furthermore, I condemn them for casting the equal protection clause, indeed the very idea of a meritocracy, as a myth, and for declaring that we are all governed by invisible forces (some would call them “stigmas” or “societal norms”), that our nation runs on racist and sexist conspiracies. Forget “you didn’t build that;” check your privilege and realize that nothing you have accomplished is real.

But they can’t be telling me that everything I’ve done with my life can be credited to the racist patriarchy holding my hand throughout my years of education and eventually guiding me into Princeton. Even that is too extreme. So to find out what they are saying, I decided to take their advice. I actually went and checked the origins of my privileged existence, to empathize with those whose underdog stories I can’t possibly comprehend. I have unearthed some examples of the privilege with which my family was blessed, and now I think I better understand those who assure me that skin color allowed my family and I to flourish today.

Perhaps it’s the privilege my grandfather and his brother had to flee their home as teenagers when the Nazis invaded Poland, leaving their mother and five younger siblings behind, running and running until they reached a Displaced Persons camp in Siberia, where they would do years of hard labor in the bitter cold until World War II ended. Maybe it was the privilege my grandfather had of taking on the local Rabbi’s work in that DP camp, telling him that the spiritual leader shouldn’t do hard work, but should save his energy to pass Jewish tradition along to those who might survive. Perhaps it was the privilege my great-grandmother and those five great-aunts and uncles I never knew had of being shot into an open grave outside their hometown. Maybe that’s my privilege.

Or maybe it’s the privilege my grandmother had of spending weeks upon weeks on a death march through Polish forests in subzero temperatures, one of just a handful to survive, only to be put in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where she would have died but for the Allied forces who liberated her and helped her regain her health when her weight dwindled to barely 80 pounds.

Perhaps my privilege is that those two resilient individuals came to America with no money and no English, obtained citizenship, learned the language and met each other; that my grandfather started a humble wicker basket business with nothing but long hours, an idea, and an iron will—to paraphrase the man I never met: “I escaped Hitler. Some business troubles are going to ruin me?” Maybe my privilege is that they worked hard enough to raise four children, and to send them to Jewish day school and eventually City College.

Perhaps it was my privilege that my own father worked hard enough in City College to earn a spot at a top graduate school, got a good job, and for 25 years got up well before the crack of dawn, sacrificing precious time he wanted to spend with those he valued most—his wife and kids—to earn that living. I can say with certainty there was no legacy involved in any of his accomplishments. The wicker business just isn’t that influential.Now would you say that we’ve been really privileged? That our success has been gift-wrapped?

That’s the problem with calling someone out for the “privilege” which you assume has defined their narrative. You don’t know what their struggles have been, what they may have gone through to be where they are. Assuming they’ve benefitted from “power systems” or other conspiratorial imaginary institutions denies them credit for all they’ve done, things of which you may not even conceive. You don’t know whose father died defending your freedom. You don’t know whose mother escaped oppression. You don’t know who conquered their demons, or may still conquering them now.

The truth is, though, that I have been exceptionally privileged in my life, albeit not in the way any detractors would have it.

It has been my distinct privilege that my grandparents came to America. First, that there was a place at all that would take them from the ruins of Europe. And second, that such a place was one where they could legally enter, learn the language, and acclimate to a society that ultimately allowed them to flourish.

It was their privilege to come to a country that grants equal protection under the law to its citizens, that cares not about religion or race, but the content of your character.

It was my privilege that my grandfather was blessed with resolve and an entrepreneurial spirit, and that he was lucky enough to come to the place where he could realize the dream of giving his children a better life than he had.

But far more important for me than his attributes was the legacy he sought to pass along, which forms the basis of what detractors call my “privilege,” but which actually should be praised as one of altruism and self-sacrifice. Those who came before us suffered for the sake of giving us a better life. When we similarly sacrifice for our descendents by caring for the planet, it’s called “environmentalism,” and is applauded. But when we do it by passing along property and a set of values, it’s called “privilege.” (And when we do it by raising questions about our crippling national debt, we’re called Tea Party radicals.) Such sacrifice of any form shouldn’t be scorned, but admired.

My exploration did yield some results. I recognize that it was my parents’ privilege and now my own that there is such a thing as an American dream which is attainable even for a penniless Jewish immigrant.

I am privileged that values like faith and education were passed along to me. My grandparents played an active role in my parents’ education, and some of my earliest memories included learning the Hebrew alphabet with my Dad. It’s been made clear to me that education begins in the home, and the importance of parents’ involvement with their kids’ education—from mathematics to morality—cannot be overstated. It’s not a matter of white or black, male or female or any other division which we seek, but a matter of the values we pass along, the legacy we leave, that perpetuates “privilege.” And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Behind every success, large or small, there is a story, and it isn’t always told by sex or skin color. My appearance certainly doesn’t tell the whole story, and to assume that it does and that I should apologize for it is insulting. While I haven’t done everything for myself up to this point in my life, someone sacrificed themselves so that I can lead a better life. But that is a legacy I am proud of.

I have checked my privilege. And I apologize for nothing.

Will 80% Income Taxes and a New 10% Wealth Tax Fix Our Economy?

By Hunter Lewis

Sunday, May 04, 2014

The economist offering this “solution” has been feted by the Obama White House economic staff, the International Monetary Fund, and by many of the people running world economies today. His ideas are definitely “in play.”

Thomas Piketty, the forty-two year old French economist whose book, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, became an overnight sensation and unexpected bestseller, is being hailed as the new Keynes, an economic thinker who can lead us out of our current economic malaise, just as Keynes is alleged by his followers to have lead us out of the Great Depression.

Keynes’s keynote book, The General Theory, is loaded with economic theory. There are only two pages of data in that book, and Keynes dismisses the scant data he cites as “improbable.” By contrast, Piketty’s new book, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, is stuffed with data. Indeed Piketty considers himself a successor to the economist whose data Keynes dismissed, Simon Kuznets. Almost everyone admits that Piketty’s theoretical case is weak — but, his supporters say, look at all this data. You can’t argue with this mass of historical evidence!

Let’s take a closer look. Piketty’s primary argument is that wealth (which tends to be concentrated in few hands) grows faster than the economy, so that those with a lot of wealth keep getting richer relative to everyone else. This is supposed to be an inescapable feature of capitalism. (If this sounds familiar, it should be. It echoes both Marx and Keynes, although we should remember that Keynes mocked most of what Marx said as “hocus-pocus.”)

So what then is the evidence that wealth has grown faster than the economy?

We’ll start with the chart below, adapted from Piketty’s book. The top line is return on capital and the bottom line is the economic growth rate. The top line is supposed to be how the rich are faring and the bottom line how the average person is faring. Note that the lines on the far right are just a projection of Piketty’s, and not actual history.

This chart is astonishing for many reasons. First of all, it suggests that capital earned a 4.5 percent or higher return for the years 0-1800 C.E. This is a crazy number. If the human race had started out with only $10 in year 1 and compounded it at 4.5 percent a year for any series of 1,800 years, by now we would have much, much more than a trillion times the entire world’s wealth today, which is estimated at $241 trillion by Credit Suisse.

The 4.5 percent or higher number is also crazy because Piketty is right that there was negligible economic growth prior to the industrial revolution, and such high returns for the rich are just not consistent with so little growth. The truth is that rich people for most of those years were interested in spending or hiding their wealth, not in investing it, because wealth out in the open was likely to be stolen, if not by bandits, then by government.

If you look closely at the more modern part of the chart and ignore the projection into an unknown future, you will see that the lines do not support Piketty’s thesis. His idea that the rich will always necessarily get richer relative to everyone else under capitalism is not supported by the data he presents.

The next chart shows the share of wealth of the 10 percent richest in Europe over time (dark-blue, top line), the share of wealth of the 10 percent richest Americans (the light-green, second line from top), the share of wealth of the top 1 percent Europeans (the light-blue, third line from top), and the share of wealth of the top 1 percent Americans (the dark-green, fourth line from top). This chart doesn’t support Piketty’s thesis either. Yes the share of the rich has grown since 1970, but only after falling previously.

The next chart is one that I have commented on in an earlier article. It shows the income of the top 10 percent in the US over time as a percent of all income. Income in this case includes capital gains which arguably are not true income, but rather the exchange of one asset for another, and excludes government transfer payments which make a considerable difference to the results. Even so, once again we do not see an inexorable rise in the income of higher earners over time, far from it.

What we actually see is two peaks for high earners, right before the crash of 1929 and again before the crash of 2008. These are the two great bubble eras in which government printed too much new money, which led to a false and unsustainable prosperity. These were also crony capitalist eras, as rich people with government connections used the new money to become even richer or benefited from other government favors.

Unfortunately world central banks have blown up yet another bubble in capital markets following the crash of 2008, which has again brought the high earners share back to 50 percent in 2012, based on data that became available after the book’s publication. This newest bubble too will eventually burst and bring the share back toward the 40 percent level of 1910, the start of the chart.

Perhaps the most astonishing claim in Piketty’s book is that government bureaucracies need to be reformed so that they can make most efficient use of all the new income and wealth taxes that are recommended. The assumption is that almost complete government control of the economy would be best, but that the machinery needs some fine tuning.

Economist Ludwig von Mises demonstrated almost 100 years ago that a state managed economy will simply not work, because among other problems it cannot set workable prices. Only a consumer run economy can do that. Socialists have been trying to disprove Mises’s thesis ever since, but have never succeeded. Piketty should at least read Mises.

A state managed economy is also unable to save and invest, especially invest with intelligence. This is crucial, because it is quality, not quantity of investment that matters most for job creation.

Piketty says that taxing away the savings of private individuals is a better choice than alternative ways of controlling inequality such as communism, protectionism, or capital controls. But none of these approaches will control inequality; they will just create poverty for everyone, rich and poor alike, without ending inequality.

A significant wealth tax would be self-defeating from the start. It would destroy the stock, bond, and real estate markets. With many sellers and few buyers, wealth would simply evaporate.

Liberal Racism

By Derek Hunter

Sunday, May 04, 2014

Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling is being run out of professional basketball for racist comments he made in private while both Democrats and Republicans rightly cheer. Racism, many in the media would tell you, is no longer acceptable in America. But that’s a lie. Racism in America is dying, but it’s not dead yet. It’s being kept alive by the Democratic Party.

I recently went to New York to see Bryan Cranston on Broadway play President Lyndon Baines Johnson in All The Way. It was an excellent performance, but it was an incredibly well-crafted piece of propaganda.

The hero, LBJ, has to fight racist Republicans and many Democrats to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He feels compelled to do this because it’s right and it finished the work of JFK, whom he replaced after Kennedy was assassinated. But although JFK is routinely cited as a civil rights hero, it’s rarely noted he did little more than pay lip service to the cause, constantly putting off the NAACP because he was afraid it would hurt him in the 1964 election. In other words, President Kennedy put his own political fortune ahead of what was right. Not exactly the quality one seeks in a hero.

But LBJ would not be stopped, at least according to the play. And he really does deserve credit for pushing what JFK wouldn’t try. But the cooperation of Republicans, without whom Democrats would have filibustered and blocked the bill, is downplayed.

This is how history is written – not in books or the public record, but in the minds of a disconnected public that gets its news from pop culture. LBJ’s racism also is downplayed – he’s simply a man working to do what is right, though often in a Machiavellian way. The play refers to LBJ’s Great Society, but only in passing – it focuses on the Civil Rights Act and his election in November 1964. This leaves the audience with an incomplete picture of LBJ’s legacy, one that perpetuates the myth of an altruistic hero.

But that altruistic hero went on to implement anti-poverty programs that have trapped generations of Americans in poverty and created a loyal base of voters for his party that successive Democrats have exploited to obtain and maintain power.

“Vote for us and we’ll give you stuff” has been the subtext of every major Democratic campaign of the last 40 years. In the black community, this scare tactic has been cynically married to the charge of racism, creating a 1-2 punch that ensures the Democrats’ power base, even though blacks’ unemployment rate stands at 11.6 now – nearly twice that of all Americans and higher than any other ethnic group. How’s that loyalty working out?

When Republicans attempt to reform anti-poverty programs, liberals cry racism. Why? Because they equate “poor” with “black” – even though there are more white people on welfare than any other race. It’s Pavlovian – but in this case liberals are both Pavlov and the dog.

Democrats have locked up the black vote for generations not because they’ve solved any problems in the black community – those they’ve attempted to address have done nothing but get worse – but because they’ve cynically, and diabolically injected race into every issue and labeled with “otherness,” anyone who strays from the orthodoxy they’ve deemed “acceptable thought” for black Americans.

Where Sterling was run out of public life for his racist comments, elected Democrats face no repercussions for theirs. The late Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.V., a former leader of the KKK, twice was elected the majority leader in the U.S. Senate and served a 6-year stint as, ironically, minority leader in between. Add Harry Reid, Joe Biden, Bill Clinton and countless others to the list of elected Democrats who’ve said things just as racist as Sterling, yet faced no consequences. And that list continually grows.

In one of the most disgusting displays of recent liberal bigotry, U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., called Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas an “Uncle Tom” on a radio show for the New Nation Of Islam. Hilariously, the host immediately said, “You said that, I didn’t.” You know it’s bad when the New Nation Of Islam host distances himself from a bigoted comment.

When confronted about his hateful comments the next day by CNN, Thompson was unrepentant, saying he could call Thomas an “Uncle Tom” because he’s black too. "Well if you look at his decisions on the court, they have been adverse to the minority community,” Thompson said. “And the people I represent have a real issue with an African American not being sensitive to those issues."

In other words, Thompson’s problem is Clarence Thomas takes his oath to the Constitution too seriously and should ignore it to “favor” people who share his skin color. To liberals, people are their skin color first, and that should dictate their thoughts and behavior. To stray from that is somehow a betrayal. It’s the basest form of racism, even if the victim and the perpetrator share the same melanin.

But was Thompson rebuked for his assault? Did Democratic leadership criticize him for accusing Thomas of leaving the liberals’ mental plantation? Quite the opposite.

U.S. Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., the No.3 Democrat in the House, was asked on MSNBC’s Morning Joe if he agreed Thomas was an “Uncle Tom” for not adhering to liberal orthodoxy. His reply was “Well, I don’t know.”

Let that sink in.

This is the assistant Democratic leader, not some backbencher. Clyburn’s refusal to rebuke Thompson is an implicit embrace of what Thompson said. And, more importantly, think of what Thompson’s words imply – if you are black and you stray from the liberal/progressive ideology, you’re betraying your race.

To progressives, you aren’t an individual, you’re your skin. Clarence Thomas isn’t a man, he’s a black man. He isn’t an American, he’s an African American. It’s the prefix, not the person, that matters. That, at its core, is racism.

Donald Sterling never will be accepted in polite society again, and rightfully so. He may even be forced to sell his NBA team for his private racist comments. Meanwhile, Democrats will continue to exude racism publicly, and proudly, in the hope that it scares the hell out of voters, particularly minority voters, and keeps them from realizing their lives depend more on who they are and what they do than on any politician or party. Democrats will continue to convince people that even though their lives haven’t improved after decades of loyally voting for Democrats and their ever-increasing government programs, the alternative is worse, so don’t try it.

It’s divisive, cynical, cruel, un-American and racist. It’s also the path to, the reason for, and the basis of Democrats’ power. As long as it works, they’ll never stop doing it.

A Foreign Policy of Self-Delusion

By Charles Krauthammer

Thursday, May 01, 2014

Barack Obama’s 949-word response on Monday to a question about foreign-policy weakness showed the president at his worst: defensive, irritable, contradictory, and at times detached from reality. It began with a complaint about negative coverage on Fox News, when, in fact, it was the New York Times front page that featured Obama’s foreign-policy failures, most recently the inability to conclude a trade agreement with Japan and the collapse of Secretary of State John Kerry’s Middle East negotiations.

Add to this the collapse of not one but two Geneva conferences on Syria, American helplessness in the face of Russian aggression against Ukraine, and the Saudi king’s humiliating dismissal of Obama within two hours of talks — no dinner — after Obama made a special 2,300-mile diversion from Europe to see him, and you have an impressive litany of serial embarrassments.

Obama’s first rhetorical defense, as usual, was to attack a straw man: “Why is it that everybody is so eager to use military force?”

Everybody? Wasn’t it you, Mr. President, who decided to attack Libya under the grand Obama doctrine of “responsibility to protect” (helpless civilians) — every syllable of which you totally contradicted as 150,000 were being slaughtered in Syria?

And wasn’t attacking Syria for having crossed your own chemical-weapons red line also your idea? Before, of course, you retreated abjectly, thereby marginalizing yourself and exposing the United States to general ridicule.

Everybody eager to use military force? Name a single Republican (or Democratic) leader who has called for sending troops into Ukraine.

The critique by John McCain and others is that when the Ukrainians last month came asking for weapons to defend themselves, Obama turned them down. The Pentagon offered instead MREs – ready-to-eat burgers to defend against 40,000 well-armed Russians. Obama even denied Ukraine such defensive gear as night-vision goggles and body armor.

Obama retorted testily: Does anyone think Ukrainian weaponry would deter Russia, as opposed to Obama’s diplomatic and economic pressure? Why, averred Obama, “in Ukraine, what we’ve done is mobilize the international community. . . . Russia is having to engage in activities that have been rejected uniformly around the world.”

That’s a deterrent? Fear of criticism? Empty words?

To think this will stop Putin, liberator of Crimea, champion of “New Russia,” is delusional. In fact, Putin’s popularity has spiked ten points since the start of his war on Ukraine. It’s now double Obama’s.

As for the allegedly mobilized international community, it has done nothing. Demonstrably nothing to deter Putin from swallowing Crimea. Demonstrably nothing to deter his systematic campaign of destabilization, anonymous seizures, and selective violence in the proxy-proclaimed People’s Republic of Donetsk, where Putin’s “maskirovka” (disguised warfare) has turned eastern Ukraine into a no-man’s land where Kiev hardly dares tread.

As for Obama’s vaunted economic sanctions, when he finally got around to applying Round Two on Monday, the markets were so impressed by their weakness that the ruble rose 1 percent and the Moscow stock exchange 2 percent.

Behind all this U.S. action, explained the New York Times in a recent leak calculated to counteract the impression of a foreign policy of clueless ad hocism, is a major strategic idea: containment.

A rather odd claim when a brazenly uncontained Russia swallows a major neighbor one piece at a time — as America stands by. After all, how did real containment begin? In March 1947, with Greece in danger of collapse from a Soviet-backed insurgency and Turkey under direct Russian pressure, President Truman went to Congress for major and immediate economic and military aid to both countries.

That means weaponry, Mr. President. It was the beginning of the Truman Doctrine. No one is claiming that arming Ukraine would have definitively deterred Putin’s current actions. But the possibility of a bloody and prolonged Ukrainian resistance to infiltration or invasion would surely alter Putin’s calculus more than Obama’s toothless sanctions or empty diplomatic gestures, like the preposterous Geneva agreement that wasn’t worth the paper it was written on.

Or does Obama really believe that Putin’s thinking would be altered less by anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons in Ukrainian hands than by the State Department’s comical #UnitedforUkraine Twitter campaign?

Obama appears to think so. Which is the source of so much allied anxiety: Obama really seems to believe that his foreign policy is succeeding.

Ukraine has already been written off. But Eastern Europe need not worry. Obama understands containment. He recently dispatched 150 American ground troops to Poland and each of the Baltic states. You read correctly: 150. Each.

If Lethal Injection Is Torture, Who's Responsible?

By Debra J. Saunders

Friday, May 02, 2014

News reports this week were filled with lamentations from death penalty opponents about the messy and unnecessarily painful execution of Oklahoma's Clayton Lockett. As Andrew Cohen wrote in The Atlantic, Oklahoma corrections officials "were using an untested mix of lethal drugs, never previously used in that dosage combination, obtained through secret means, which precluded the possibility of oversight from attorneys or medical officials on the quality of the drugs. They were warned by medical experts, and asked by defense attorneys, to open up the process to review -- by the courts, by doctors, by some members of the public. Yet they refused."

Missing from that report -- and most others -- was the reason states are using new drug mixes obtained through unconventional means: Since the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Kentucky's three-drug lethal injection protocol as constitutional in 2008, death penalty opponents have used every trick in the book to make the drugs disappear.

Of course, before the big bench's 7-2 ruling, lawyers for death row inmates had argued that the three-drug protocol violated convicts' constitutional protection against "cruel and unusual punishment." The remote possibility -- a 0.001 percent chance -- that an inmate might suffer unduly prompted federal Judge Jeremy Fogel to halt California's three-drug executions in 2006; despite the Supreme Court ruling, there hasn't been one since.

After the big bench affirmed the three-drug protocol, activists went after suppliers. The European Union threatened to ban the export of sodium thiopental to the United States. European producers stopped making it. U.S. manufacturer Hospira also stopped making the drug.

That's when states started experimenting and scrounging for "untested" drugs.

When an investigation of Lockett's gruesome end is complete, it may find that the drug cocktail had little to do with Lockett's unintended pain. The problem could have been intravenous needles that were damaged or poorly inserted.

Kent Scheidegger of the pro-death-penalty Criminal Justice Legal Foundation blogged Wednesday that because lethal injection requires the involvement of medical professionals, it "was a mistake from the beginning. We should have kept the gas chamber and merely used a different gas. Carbon monoxide, for example, is painless." He's right.

I should note that Lockett had it easier than Stephanie Neiman, the innocent 19-year-old victim whom he and his friends beat and bound with duct tape in 1999. Lockett shot her twice before he ordered an accomplice to bury her alive in a shallow grave.

White House spokesman Jay Carney called the Oklahoma execution inhuman. He did not mention the Obama administration's role in pressuring states to surrender drugs found to be constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2011, the Obama Department of Justice actually seized Georgia's supply of sodium thiopental because the drug, among other problems, did not have FDA approval. Really.

"If the White House is upset," Scheidegger wondered, "why don't they do something about the supply problem? Everyone knows that pentobarbital, the single-drug method, works just fine." Maybe President Obama should sign an executive order.