King's Hearing Promotes Hate, Undermines Homeland Security

“We need to conduct a thorough, fair analysis and do no harm. The approach of today’s hearing, unfortunately, does not meet these standards.

Today’s hearing is entitled, “The extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community’s response.”

It is true that specific individuals, including some who are Muslims, are violent extremists. However, these are individuals – but not entire communities. Individuals like Anwar Al-Aulaqi, Faisel Shazad, and Nidal Hasan do not represent the Muslim American community. When their violent actions are associated with an entire community, then blame is assigned to a whole group. This is the very heart of stereotyping and scapegoating, which is counter-productive.

This point is at the heart of my testimony today. Ascribing the evil acts of a few individuals to an entire community is wrong; it is ineffective; and it risks making our country less secure.”

Minnesota representative Keith Ellison articulated the problem with the approach the House of Representatives is taking in addressing perceived areas of homeland security in his testimony at the House’s Homeland Security Committee’s March 10th hearing, “The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community’s Response.”

The committee is chaired by representative Peter King and the hearing focused exclusively on Islamic extremism and the threat Islam poses to the United States. Rather than look at new solutions to improving homeland security, King’s hearing paraded witness after witness and drummed up the same type of destructive, divisive rhetoric seen in Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations.” Although King’s stated intentions of this first hearing in the series were to examine Al Qaeda’s targeted recruitment of American Muslims, none of the testimony actually addressed this.

Ellison is exactly correct in his assessment of these hearings. Placing blame on an entire community for the actions of very few individuals does not help solve any problems. And this blame is not applied to all communities uniformly when one individual characterized in a certain manner happens to act violently. Stereotyping serves to only further alienate an important part of the American population, and an approach such as King’s might in fact serve Al Qaeda and other extremist groups’ interests in the United States.

And this is a serious problem. Of all the testimony of the course of the several hours that the hearing lasted, only Ellison, Laura Richardson, and Sheila Jackson Lee actually spoke out about the counterproductive and discriminatory nature of this hearing. Why are they standing alone while 3 million Americans are reduced to nothing more than one aspect of their identity and held accountable for actions perpetrated by a miniscule minority?

As Richardson writes in a letter imploring King to cease such discriminatory hearings, “Our concern is that holding a hearing targeting this community, will have the unintended consequences of breeding alienation and fostering feelings of resentment. As a result, we risk hindering law enforcement’s efforts to detect, deter, or prevent potential threats that hide themselves within these communities.”

Coming Up ACES...Almost

On June 26, the House passed the American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) Act (aka Waxman-Markey) by a vote of 219 to 212. ACES has come under fire from both the right and the left. Some environmental groups, including Greenpeace, oppose the bill because it does not go far enough. (While they have a point, I support the bill because it appears to be the best we're going to get and could spur better legislation in the future.)

The right has meanwhile responded with, "AARGH!!! THIS BILL IS GOING TO KILL THE AMERICAN ECONOMY!!!! APPLE PIE WILL NEVER TASTE GOOD AGAIN!!!"

Well, they're wrong. But let's look at their claims and take them apart one by one:

This bill will cost American families exorbitant sums of money. The CBO estimates that the average American household will have to pay an extra $175 per year by 2020 in direct costs, or about 0.2% of post-tax income. The EPA estimates it will cost $1100 per year by 2050. Even if you claim that those numbers would be higher, it's important to remember that Americans will be making and spending more by then anyways. ($164,348 per year in 2050)

It's important to note that the costs borne by households vary because of progressive subsidies and varying usages. The poorest fifth would actually receive a net $40, while the richest 20% would pay $245 in 2020. Costs also vary by state in ways that might affect Senate votes:

This bill will make manufacturing in the United States more expensive. Companies will outsource. First of all, it doesn't seem like companies are too thrilled to employ Americans in manufacturing in the first place. It's easy to make this claim and then blame all future outsourcing on ACES, though they might have moved even if ACES had not been passed.

More importantly, the consequent goal should not be to avoid adopting stringent environmental regulations in the United States. It should be to make foreign countries adopt more stringent environmental regulations. This will ameliorate environmental problems and level the economic playing field. Obama has an opportunity to do just that at Copenhagen. China and India, presumably the countries that has the right-wingers most concerned, have an incentive to do so: they will be hit hard by global warming.

Global warming is expected to reduce global GDP by only 5% anyways. GDP should not be our main concern. Nate Silver shows how 81 countries, accounting for 2.8 billion people, could be wiped off the face of the earth and the global economy would only suffer a 5% hit. These countries mostly lie in sub-Saharan Africa or the tropics, incidentally the same places that would suffer the most from global warming.

This bill will increase prices, reducing consumption and thus production. Yeah, well, that's the point. Currently, we produce too much greenhouse gas pollution. We do this because the cost of emitting is external to the company doing the emitting. The company accrues all the benefits of producing thingamajigs but the cost of the resulting pollution is borne by everybody. By internalizing these costs, i.e. making the company bear these costs, a more economically efficient amount of pollution will be produced. Cap-and-trade is an ingenious, market-based solution to a classic market failure.

Now, the bill moves to the Senate, where I'm hoping it will be improved. But that's like hoping that a tornado will come along and clean my apartment.

Cents-less

Currently, the cost it takes to produce one penny (1.26 cents) is greater than the value of that penny. Same thing for nickels (7.7 cents). But Congress is acting! The House unanimously passed H.R. 5512, the Coin Modernization and Taxpayer Savings Act, on Thursday. (I had two friends--one liberal, one conservative--who said that if they agreed on something, they must be right. Expand this to 435 friends and you can see how right this bill is.) The bill would require pennies and nickels to be primarily made of steel and is estimated to save $1 billion over the next decade.

But the Bush administration is balking at the bill, mostly because it doesn't like Congress telling any twig on the Executive Branch what to do. Never mind that the Constitution says, "The Congress shall have Power...To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures."

So President Bush doesn't like this bill, even though it clearly has wide popularity and makes good business sense, because he doesn't like being told what to do. Now I understand why the oil companies in which he had major stakes in the 80's failed miserably.