Tell Me: Who Let the Dogs of War Out?
Nicholas Johnson
The Gazette, August 26, 2018, p. D3
Most Americans and their elected representatives take “ain’t going to study war no more” to heart. They’re neither studying nor upset by war.
Put aside the inability to rationalize continuous wars of choice, personnel in 150 countries, the human slaughter and misery, devastated cities, death and lifelong injury to our troops. Just “follow the money.” When military-related costs exceed a trillion dollars a year, and are put on our grandchildren’s credit card, maybe it’s time to get back to studying war. [Photo credit: By DVIDSHUB - Operation Unified Response - CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22430525]
Conservatives care about constitutional “original intent.” Liberals care about sacrificed infrastructure, education, healthcare and other needs. Both should care why the founders gave Congress power “to declare war.”
The founders knew burdens of wars fall heaviest upon the people, those who fight and pay for wars. They explicitly rejected giving a president the unchecked power to start wars claimed by kings. They wanted the branch most responsive to the people to declare war. [Photo credit: Foreign Policy, WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP/Getty Images]
As the Constitutional Convention Record reports, “Mr. [George] Mason … was for clogging rather than facilitating war.” James Madison later contributed, “No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
Pay-as-you-go war meant increased taxes. World War II rationing meant little or no gas and tires for cars or bubblegum for kids. The draft impacted even small towns during the Viet Nam war. Without the draft we might still be there. [Photo credit: Ames Historical Society]
Not only was there no rationing during post-9/11 wars, our president told us to “go shopping.” No burden of increased war taxes. No young marching protesters, fearful of being drafted. Sacrifice fell only upon those 0.4 percent of Americans fighting the wars.
After 9/11, given the lack of public protest the founders forecast, Congress became more complacent and compliant about executive encroachment on Congress’ war powers.
(1) In 1961 President Dwight Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex. Its grip only tightened as legislators became ever more entangled with their districts’ military bases and generous weapons manufacturers.
(2) For-profit private prisons create political support for longer sentences. Similarly, political support for longer wars results when for-profit contractors’ battlefield employees outnumber the military.
(3) The old Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines have competitors. The CIA, once an intelligence agency, now has its own military arm. Both CIA and Special Operations, like Delta Force or SEAL Team 6, are outside the conventional chain of command and thorough congressional oversight.
These factors contribute to President Donald Trump’s signing a $717 billion Defense Department authorization bill. Like the banks’ insistence they are “too big to fail,” the DOD is “too big to audit.” Trillions can’t be traced. Add $200 billion for Department of Veterans Affairs, war’s share of $300 billion yearly interest on the national debt, billions for Department of Energy’s nukes, other military-related expenses and the total’s well over a trillion dollars.
Whose fault is this?
Those who wrote the Constitution assumed “we the people” – not the president, Congress, or judges – would tightly leash and not let slip the dogs of war. In response to the people’s sacrifice, their paying the human and financial costs of war, they would speak up, protest, organize and otherwise clog the path to war.
War hawks and weapons makers understand they must eliminate war’s impact on we the people if they are to continue their profits from perpetual war.
However, they have not eliminated our founders’ hope, nor our responsibility to honor their hope that we will fulfill our responsibility to resist.
As Edward R. Murrow closed his documentary about Senator Joseph McCarthy, “We cannot escape responsibility for the result. … Cassius was right. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.”
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Nicholas Johnson, as U.S. Maritime Administrator, was involved with military sealift to Vietnam. www.nicholasjohnson.org Comments: mailbox@nicholasjohnson.org
Columns of Democracy (2018)
For those interested in more on this topic and others, Nicholas Johnson's latest book, Columns of Democracy (2018), is now available from Amazon, https://tinyurl.com/yama2h3b (scroll to "Books by Nicholas Johnson," click on "Paperback," for "Sort by" select "Publication Date"), Barnes & Noble, https://tinyurl.com/ybjwxuuh (scroll down), Lulu Press, https://tinyurl.com/yd8g47de, and all Iowa City bookstores requesting copies from the author, mailbox@nicholasjohnson.org.
Defending Democracy
Nicholas Johnson
The Gazette, December 3, 2017, p. C4
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
‘Til it’s gone
— Joni Mitchell, “Big Yellow Taxi”
There are many divisive issues these days: climate change, renewable fuels, perpetual war, health care, tax reform, higher education, trade policy. The list seems endless.
However, most agree on preserving democracy’s fundamental pillars: free speech, public education, voting rights, and an independent judiciary.
Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison offered us insights.
Media. Jefferson wrote, ““were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
Media are one of the few industries expressly protected by the Constitution (First Amendment). They were to serve all the people, creating a “marketplace of ideas,” a check on abuses by the powerful, from which “truth” would emerge. There would be no central control of media by either government or big business.
Americans’ 19th Century “Internet,” its “social media,” was transportation -– rivers, roads, a trans-continental railroad, and pony express. Our “e-mail” was their postal mail. Low postal rates encouraged the distribution of books, magazines and newspapers.
For the FCC to repeal Net Neutrality, ownership limits, or the Fairness Doctrine, or politicians to say media are “the enemy of the American people,” chops away at democracy’s pillars. (Now 46% of voters believe media make up anti-Trump stories.)
Free public education and libraries. Jefferson continued, “But I should mean that every [person] should receive those [newspapers] and be capable of reading them.” In his epitaph, he chose to be remembered as “Father of the University of Virginia” –- omitting any reference to his presidency.
Madison agreed: “a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”
Free public schools would enable citizens to inform themselves. Free public libraries would provide every American access to the information resources of kings.
When legislatures don’t fully fund public universities, adding to the trillion-dollar debt of graduates, they are undercutting democracy’s pillar of “free public education.” This not only hampers America’s ability to compete with the nations that do provide tuition-free college, it also strikes a blow against democracy.
Voting rights. Over time, the opportunity to vote – a democracy fundamental -- was expanded from white, male, landowners over 21 to everyone over 18.
State legislatures that pass laws making it more difficult, rather than easier, for all to vote, or that draw district lines enabling a minority of voters to elect a majority of their representatives, are attacking a democracy fundamental.
Independent judiciary. The founders created a respected, independent branch of government, the judiciary, as a constitutional check on Congress and the executive branch. Federal judges’ independence was protected by their lifetime appointments. Justice would be delivered under a “rule of law” rather than a law of rulers.
To disparage the judiciary, charging bias, or lack of competence, to appoint those unqualified, weakens a democracy’s last, best protection of our civil rights.
We can probably survive most wrongheaded public policies. What our democracy can’t survive are attacks on its fundamental pillars. Let’s defend what we’ve got before it’s gone.
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Nicholas Johnson is a former FCC commissioner who maintains www.nicholasjohnson.org. Contact: mailbox@nicholasjohnson.org
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September 29, 2008, 9:45 a.m.
"Censorship" and Anonymous Electronic Speech
The Daily Iowan has, without explanation, removed comments, and shut down the ability of readers to add more, to a couple of stories about the UI's President Sally Mason. Until the paper explains what happened and why it is premature to assume it was either a "computer error" or an outrageous bit of state censorship.
[See Amanda McClure, "No Raise for Mason," The Daily Iowan, September 26, 2008, and Amanda McClure, "Mason Apologizes to Regents," The Daily Iowan, September 26, 2008, and the six comments complaining about those deletions posted between September 26 11:34 a.m. and September 28 7:41 a.m. to Lauren Sieben, "Regent: No 2nd Thoughts," The Daily Iowan, September 26, 2008.]
But that's not the only bit of blogging news.
Some of the best literary as well as policy writing on the Press-Citizen's editorial pages occurs when the paper's own editorial page editor, Jeff Charis-Carlson, writes and publishes a piece that is entirely his own.
But it's a significant commentary about the role of blogs and other forms of electronic speech these days that someone who has such exclusive access to his own editorial page in a newspaper also chooses to communicate by way of a blog.
It's especially appropriate that he would do so in this case.
He's blogging about blogging.
Specifically, he's addressing some of today's hot issues surrounding the propriety of mainstream media permitting on their online Web sites anonymous comments from readers about stories in the paper's hard-copy edition. These comments can sometimes include those that are little more than name calling and mean-spirited allegations with little or no factual basis, coming from those able to hide their lack of decency and manners behind their anonymity.
Charis-Carlson sides with the practice of anonymous speech utilized by three of our nation's founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. Jeff Charis-Carlson, "Anonymous Online Comments: Good, Bad or Just Ugly?", September 24, 2008, 4:24 p.m. He begins:
I was asked to take part in an Iowa City Public Library panel discussion on Online News and Message Boards. I had prepared five-minutes worth of introductory remarks, but the organizers launched right into questions. So, I thought I'd share these remarks with the people who could appreciate them most -- anyone reading and commenting on www.press-citizen.com:
"Introduction for the Intellectual Freedom Festival: Online News and Message Boards."
Last week, I attended the annual convention of the National Conference of Editorial Writers — this year in Little Rock, Ark.
As you can imagine, our focus was primarily on trying to justify our own profession at a time when anyone with an Internet connection can set himself or herself up as a purveyor of opinion.
Not only did we discuss the issues arising from our own anonymity — writing the nameless consensus opinions of our editorial boards — but we had many discussions on the degree to which allowing anonymous online responses to news and opinion articles either:
a) Represents a revolution in citizen journalism (which is good),
b) Provides a crass way to drive up online traffic statistics at the expense of reasoned, vetted, well-edited news and opinion (which is bad), or
c) Does a lot of both (which is just ugly).
The three witnesses called by Charis-Carlson are, as you'll recall the authors of the famous and influential "Federalist Papers," writings encouraging the ratification of the Constitution while impressing the authors' interpretations of it upon the public and judges who followed. They chose to write anonymously, using the name, "Publius." (Originally published as newspaper articles, October 1787-August 1788, they were ultimately published in book form as The Federalist (J. and A. McLean, 1788).)
The courts have tended to look favorably upon anonymous speech as well -- and to some extent for the same reasons Charis-Carlson identifies: "at times, cyber-anonymity is the only way to allow contrary opinions to be raised without retaliation against those who dare speak out against majority opinion. At times it is the means by which a voice crying in the wilderness can find an audience." (See, e.g., "Anonymous pamphlets, leaflets, brochures and even books have played an important role in the progress of mankind. Persecuted groups and sects from time to time throughout history have been able to criticize oppressive practices and laws either anonymously or not at all." Talley v. California, 362 U.S. 60 (1960).)
I guess, while I would not differ with the basic doctrine approving anonymous speech (with such a distinguished historical foundation), I do think it is not compromised by modifying it in the specific context of readers' comments on a newspaper-owned Web site.
As it was put in Justice Jackson's separate opinion in Kovacs v. Cooper, 336 U.S. 77, 97 (1949): "The moving picture screen, the radio, the newspaper, the handbill, the sound truck and the street corner orator have differing natures, values, abuses and dangers. Each, in my view, is a law unto itself."
The Court has made clear that the only people who have meaningful First Amendment rights in our monopoly-media-dominated society are those who own them. And those are only rights as against government action. Editors and journalists can be fired by owners; they certainly don't have any First Amendment rights as against the owners. Even though a paper has a local monopoly, and has posted rates for the sale of advertising, it can refuse to publish an ad just because it doesn't like the content. It can attack someone in its pages and refuse to sell or give them the space to reply. (See, e.g., Miami Herald v. Tornillo, 418 U.S. 241 (1974), overturning as unconstitutional a Florida statute providing for precisely that right.) Clearly, the public doesn't have any First Amendment right as against the owners. (All are actions that would in most contexts be violations of the First Amendment if done by governments -- a consideration that may impact on the propriety of The Daily Iowan's recent actions.)
As the Court argued in upholding the Fairness Doctrine (now repealed) in Red Lion v. FCC, 395 U.S. 367 (1969), the Congress/FCC could have decided to require broadcast licensees to share frequencies (that is, one licensee might broadcast Sunday through Wednesday, another Thursday through Saturday -- both in the same town and on the same frequency). Therefore the much lesser Fairness Doctrine requirement was clearly permissible (i.e., the sole licensee had to (a) deal with local controversial issues of his/her choice, and (b) present a range of views, also of their choice, in doing so).
Similarly, if a privately owned newspaper can refuse to carry any letters to the editor, and refuse to permit any comments from readers about its stories on its Web page, it would seem to me perfectly permissible for it to allow only the comments of those willing to identify themselves.
Most papers will go to some considerable lengths before publishing a letter to the editor to confirm that the letter submitted to the paper has been written and sent by the person indicated as the author. Of course, once published the author's name is known. And at least two of the standards the paper will use in deciding which letters to publish, presumably, are (1) the extent to which the letter makes a worthwhile substantive contribution to the community dialog, and (2) the civility of the language employed.
By what rationale does a paper apply such relatively rigid, responsible, professional standards to the letters to the editor in its hard copy edition, and virtually none to what amount to the "e-letters to the editor" in its online edition?
If (1) there is, in fact, a problem of outrageously offensive comments about stories being placed on newspapers' Web pages (what Charis-Carlson calls "grossly inappropriate commentary"), and if (2) there is reason to believe that requiring those placing comments to identify themselves might reduce or eliminate the problem, why would it be so wrong to require those commenting to identify themselves by their actual names?
On the other hand -- like President Truman's request for "a one-handed economist," would you really want me to be a one-handed blogger? -- the printing press has been around a lot longer than the World Wide Web. (China had movable porcelain type in 1040; Korea the first metal movable type in 1230. Johannes Gutenberg was a Johannes-come-lately, waiting around in Mainz until 1439.) The Congress and the courts have taken a somewhat lenient free market approach to the Internet's wild west excesses during its baby years. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 gives those who provide an opportunity for online comments from others something of a base on balls when it comes to what would otherwise be the provider's liability for third-party content.
Many papers and other services have at least some mechanism for readers to flag comments of others they believe to be over the top. As Charis-Carlson notes, "in the past year we’ve [the Press-Citizen] had to kick off dozens of participants for grossly inappropriate commentary."
But that sort of thing can raise other problems -- as anyone can quickly discover when their e-mail provider gets put on an industry-wide "do not receive" list, friends no longer get their emails, and there is little to nothing they can do about it. (It's kind of similar to the "Red Channels" list of tainted actors and writers during the "anti-communist" years of Senator Joseph McCarthy.)
Privately-owned papers are not restrained by the First Amendment. They can, legally, be selective about which readers' ideas will be permitted on their Web sites, and which will be removed. When the government opens up what is called a "public forum" it cannot make such content-based distinctions between who can, and cannot, use the facility. But even though not legally required to do so, the underlying principles suggest a similar standard would also make sense for privately owned newspapers. If you're going to open up your Web site to reader comments, a community dialog, doesn't it make more sense to permit all of them?
That's the way this blog of mine has been operated. The only comments I've ever removed are those that are clearly advertising for goods or services (primarily from gambling casinos; comments appended to blog entries dealing with gambling). As long as I get my say in the blog, I think readers are entitled to their say in the comments -- though I would tend to be more tolerant of comments criticizing me than comments bordering on defamation, or invasions of privacy, regarding others, were those situations to arise.
It helps, in trying to understand both the First Amendment and the utility of considering its underlying foundations' applicability to private media as well, to lay any proposal involving speech alongside the First Amendment's purposes to see how it fares.
1. "Marketplace of ideas." It is believed that "truth" is more likely to emerge from a public dialog in which all persons and ideas can be presented and weighed.
2. "Self-governing." If a self-governing people are to have a prayer at making democracy work they must at least have access to the maximum possible range of information and opinion on public matters (whether they take advantage of that access is, of course, another matter).
3. "Checking value." The press is sometimes called "the Fourth Estate" because it is both recognized in our Bill of Rights as an important component of government and one that is totally outside of government. As every school child knows, the legislative, executive and judicial branches provide a check on each other. But the media can serve as an additional "check" as well, not only on abuses by government, but abuses by other powerful institutions as well (this week think "Wall Street").
4. "Safety valve." There is a theory/assertion that by permitting the frustrated and angry an opportunity to speak we can reduce somewhat their alternative response: violent actions of one kind or another perpetrated against the community and the elements within it they perceive to be the cause of their misery.
5. "Self-actualization." Humans belong to, as a general semanticist has observed, "the only species able to talk itself into difficulties that would otherwise not exist." We are bested by the other species -- especially squirrels -- in many ways (speed and athletic prowess; sight and hearing; survival skills; the bats' radar; etc.). Our superiority is in our ability to create and use language. Speaking and writing -- and the analytical thought that, hopefully, precedes it -- contribute to our growth as individuals, our self-actualization, with regard to the only quality that sets us apart.
To the extent those "First Amendment values" resonate with you, most if not all would seem to be served by readers' comments on newspapers' Web pages.
As Charis-Carlson concludes, permitting them is: "an act of optimism as well as commercial exploitation, but we’re betting its potential benefits of increasing conversation will outweigh the current hazards of having those conversations end in a flame out."
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