Mexico’s Drug Cartels Influence Map, 2011 02/10/2012
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Global.Tags: Anonymous, Drug Cartels, Drug War, Mexico, STRATFOR
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Photo Credit: STRATFOR
THE GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE firm known as “STRATFOR” — Strategic Forecasting — was thrust into the attention of laymen when the loosely connected “hacktivist” collective known as Anonymous, shut down its site by way of a distributed denial-of-service attack, and subsequently exposed and compromised its list of paid-for-services clients — those who subscribe to STRATFOR’s premium intelligence products — and obtained (reportedly) unencrypted credit card information over the holidays to make several charitable donations.
However ironic the event was (perhaps the leading security company not being very secure), STRATFOR has been at the center of the for-profit security and global intelligence dissemination business for 16 years, and they have provided many of their summary findings to the public and have even been somewhat transparent and “open-source” minded — a software development principle that argues information should be free to all — with a number of their products, much like that of fellow company, RAND Corporation. At the end of last month, (January 24), STRATFOR posted its annual Mexico drug map with cursory analysis of the Mexico Drug War murder victims’ numbers, which has proven to be a thorny issue in regards to accuracy, because of the rate of the killings and the Mexican government’s inability to provide its own official numbers in a timely fashion.
As of the second-last quarter of data for 2011, STRATFOR reports a dip in the overall number of deaths, but it was not enough to produce the slightest glimmer of hope in the most rosy of analyses: From January 2011 to September 2011, 12,900 people died as a result of Mexico’s drug war. That number is less than the figure for 2010, but that clocks in at a still-ghastly 1,400 deaths per month. If that rate per the period of January 2011 to September 2011 holds for the final three months of 2011, it would result in 17,000 total drug-related murders in Mexico, for the year.
There were dips in the well-known, hard-hit cities and regions such as Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, where the death toll dropped from 3,111 in 2010 to 1,955 in 2011 (for the months available), yet still, Juarez registered as the country’s deadliest city. There were also significant increases across the nation in regions such as Durango, Durango state, Matamoros Veracruz, Monterrey, Nuevo León state, Veracruz state and Tamaulipas state. The Sinaloa cartel and the Los Zetas faction, the Sinaloa’s former enforcers, have divided the nation’s regions into two respective hemispheres of influence over a turf war with the Sinaloa controlling the west and Los Zetas controlling a majority of Mexico’s eastern region.
View STRATFOR’s Mexico’s Drug Wars Map (Enlarged) [Here]
Simulating Syrian Intervention? 01/11/2012
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Defense, Global, Policy, Politics.Tags: Bashar al-Assad, Foreign Policy, Global Security, Syria
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I RECENTLY READ that the Ministry of Defense (M.O.D.), Britain’s equivalent to the Department of Defense, is having an issue with keeping its recruits’ attention. (Not a real surprising story there.) The M.O.D.’s inability to keep the attention of its potential canon fodder is not being blamed on Britain’s deployment to horrific war zones — after all this is in the job description and what these young men have been sold, and have been buying [my own self included, in a smaller sense] for centuries, as a rite of passage — but because M.O.D.’s war simulators were not fully engaging potential grunts into the peaked interest necessary to compel full commitment to the nation’s military defense. Those boys, mostly; they’d probably rather let DICE and Activision virtually teleport them to the pixelized counterparts of the countries that the West are currently entangled with.
Those who game or follow entertainment business news, will know that Activision and DICE are the names attached to two firms who currently control the first-person shooter/combat simulation market with their current Battlefield 3 (part of the Battlefield series) and Modern Warfare 3 (a part of the Modern Warfare behemoth) titles, respectively. The games, to a lesser degree, are a crash-course in urban warfare, general sniper tactics — the latter, particularly online — and the all-out mayhem soldiers should (somewhat) expect in fighting. But this cannot be stressed enough, that this only to a degree. (You’re in a cushy room, for God sakes.) There are none of the tragedies of war, there are no days and weeks spent in terrible weather conditions on patrol, nor the 50-70 pounds of gear, no dying friends, no complicated interactions with locals who may be resistance fighters: No left behind family left to pick up the pieces of a shattered promise to go through life together. The article is important, though, because it tells the novice and those outside of the subculture of combat simulations’ gamers, in general, what this type of gaming has become.
Troops are so used to playing high-quality commercial games set in combat zones that they tend to lose concentration unless the MoD simulations look equally realistic. This has become an important issue at the MoD, which is increasingly turning to digital simulations to help prepare soldiers for duty.
Thousands of troops sent to Afghanistan have been trained on Virtual Battlespace2, a spin-off from a commercial game that can, for instance, test their responses when they come under mortar attack from insurgents.
Though the military stresses that these games only supplement traditional methods, it reflects the way technology is transforming military training. With budgets being squeezed across the MoD, simulations are also a comparatively cheap way of giving troops a “virtual” taste of what they might come up against in a warzone.
- “Ministry of Defence Forced to Update Its War Games for Xbox Generation,” The Guardian
The modern video game experience trumps what many of the advanced militaries of the world can produce in order to train their soldiers for battle, and commercial gaming has unexpectedly become an unofficial augment to government’s official means of recruiting, as war culture products have been, since there has ever been a thing called “culture.” The reason it’s such an uphill slog for governments’ recruiters versus the more realistic vision presented by the gaming industry, particularly those two big-name companies just mentioned, is the profit motive of gaming companies to produce the most realistic experience to date, with each iteration becoming better than the other, as the bar is raised year by year. And as pointed to in the article, the gaming industry as a whole is able to spend more money on perfecting their simulations than the government.
All of this has produced a dialogue between the M.O.D. and private gaming firms to specifically help produce better products for the government. In the United States this has already happened to some degree, when the U.S. Army actually released a game called America’s Army, to decent reviews and sales. So it is quite evident that the military branches of Western governments have a particularly high regard for the ability of games to recruit and to simulate, which is why I didn’t scoff when I read about a video game being used to seriously discuss potential outcomes with a hypothetical military operation in a current hot-spot.
Foreign Policy recently ran a feature article — “The Syrian Invasion” — discussing the outcomes of a game that simulates military intervention in Syria, a nation currently embroiled in a civil uprising that has Syria’s regime and president, Bashar al-Assad, tightening his vice-grip on his slipping power and the melting of his version of law and order. Combat Mission: Shock Force, simulates a fictional 2008 invasion of the country in response to state-sponsored terror. It’s not equivalent to what the Modern Warfare and Battlefield series have become in the culture, but the game is realistic. It primarily focuses on the larger strategic elements of such a war, however, more than the moves of individuals or squads in space, in order to squeeze off rounds and move through tight quarters to meet objectives.
Produced in 2007, the game, as the author of the article says, “shows the hallmarks of considerable research into the forces of the combatants and the capabilities of the weapons they use.” Generally, though, it’s about command and control and the decisions and factors involved in determining the success of such a combat enterprise. The game allows for several options in regards to how one might choose to invade Syria to face a melange of elite forces using the old Iraqi “Republican Guard” tag, fedayeen units and conscripts armed with souped Soviet-Era mechanized weaponry and Kornet missiles. One can go in with the U.S. Marine Expeditionary Brigade, a U.S. Army Stryker light-armored vehicle element or a multi-national coalition led by Germany, comprised of Britain, Canada and the Netherlands.
The results of the simulations varied, but the outcomes and the way in which the battles unfolded was a range with a core theme of N.A.T.O. units attempting to move dug-in Syrian fighters. According to the article’s author, at times it appeared to play out like Iraq at the beginning of the insurgency in 2003 with Syrian forces made up of conscripts and fedayeen fighting with rocket-propelled grenades and machine-guns, and at other times, the fighting looked like Lebanon in 2006 with Syrian commandos ducking-in-and-out using Kornet anti-tank missiles and fighting in a guerrilla style. What was found — as pointed out, in a still somewhat limited simulation system that doesn’t take into account drone intelligence operations assisting Western generals, or the auxiliary forces that would find their way to fight in support of Syria such as Hezbollah – was that military intervention in the country could become a mixed bag, highly dependent on which Syrian military shows up.
If it is the Syrian military that cowardly fires at civilians to squelch dissent and hasn’t fought a real opposing force in 30 years, then there would be some somewhat non-damaging Western losses, from a public perception sense. But if the Alawite-dominated Syrian force that decides it must fight to the end engages, primarily motivated by the consequences of what a loss would mean to their people in a Shia dominated land following a regime change; politically damaging numbers could conceivably be racked up against any Western coalition of fighters. While intervention in Syria hasn’t been prominently discussed, it has been pondered by some, and after the limited handling of Libya, it seems unlikely that a full intervention would ever take place. But if this video game simulation that factors in many of the things generals would have to, tells us anything, it’s probably that doing anything like this could be a courageously stupid coin flip.
Read “The Syrian Invasion” at Foreign Policy [Here]
Scenes: Upon the Demise of Kim Jong-Il 12/29/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Defense, Global, Politics.Tags: Global Security, Kim Jong-Il, North Korea, Politics, The Atlantic
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North Koreans have shown extraordinary displays of grief in the days since the death of their leader Kim Jong Il on December 17th. Today marked the start of a two-day funeral ceremony, as thousands of North Koreans lined the snowy streets of Pyongyang to witness the procession of vehicles as it made its way to Kumsusan Memorial Palace. Official North Korean news sources have been declaring Kim Jong Un the “great successor,” but questions about the transition and future governance of the volatile, secretive state continue to make foreign governments wary. South Korean intelligence recently indicated that North Korea has tightened security in cities, put troops on alert and won loyalty pledges from top generals after Kim’s death as it consolidates power behind the anointed heir. Collected here are images — most of them official North Korean releases — of the public mourning in North Korea.
Photo Credit: The Atlantic
THE SUDDEN PASSING OF KIM JONG-IL from a heart attack, removed a longstanding figure from the balance of power in the Pacific; kept it all the same in another, while completely flipping a valued (relative) predictability on its ear, in yet another. While American forces, the State Department and Western intelligence services all suddenly lost the figure that they’ve painstakingly focused so much time and effort on, collecting information looking to understand a hidden, cloistered nation, but were still mostly in the dark about, a face who stared at American military power across from the Demilitarized Zone’s 38th Paralell for five decades, from a land frozen in time (and atmospherics); they now gain his heir, along with a North Korea now worse off than years’ prior and greater uncertainty.
The historic factors of this change are significant, as Kim Jong-Il’s successor and youngest son, Kim Jong-un, becomes the country’s next leader with far less grooming than his father had, and in a world less stable than the one Kim Jong-Il took the nation’s yoke in; way back when the dangers of the world were just comprised mainly of the influence of superpowers. But it is also historic within the context of potential stability: In this crisis for North Korea, there is the slight chance of an opportunity for the West and North Korea to find an alternate path than the one that has been established, even if it is but a small one.
The young Jong-un, a man in his late 20s, inherits this seat of power in one of the very last (ostensibly) communist countries on the planet, and which is suffering from crippling economic stagnation. And perhaps this will practically necessitate an opening of what is known as “The Hermit Kingdom.” (North Koreans are already practicing micro forms of capitalism, following the failure of the Soviet Union in the 1990s leading to starvation, as consequence to the elimination of subsidies for the nation.) How and if Jong-un can navigate out of that economic and diplomatic trench created by years of enmity, or if he even has the inkling to, is another question all together, though. He will undoubtably have an old-guard couturier of handlers that he would have to sway his way.
The situation Jong-un assumes leadership of isn’t easy, either. In the last couple of years, North Korea has been stricken by famine as a result of flooding in the country soaking its grain crops, and this has killed many North Koreans; a morose flashback to the North Korea of Kim Il-Sung and the 1990′s when torrential rains flooded the area and killed millions of people. It has been precarious in North Korea ever since that time, and Jong-un may be well-served by looking to engage the world, even though China already provides a great deal of help. And he, like many others of visibly anti-Western figures, is evidently somewhat open to the West, in the form of America’s soft-power, our culture, much like his father, who reportedly kept a collection of N.B.A. basketball tapes. Jong-un, supposedly, also has an interest in the N.B.A., and particularly Michael Jordan. He was also educated in Switzerland.
Pictures from North Korea and any general, confirmable knowledge about it is somewhat difficult to come by due to its strict rules concerning foreign press. However, the state media broadcast of Kim Jong-Il’s funeral were readily available for all the world, as were photographs of the multitude of saddened North Koreans. The Atlantic‘s In Focus provided some of the best of the lot, covering its circumference with the help of Reuters.
View The Atlantic‘s In Foucs blog’s “North Korea Mourns Kim Jong Il” [Here]
The ‘Paradox of Autocracy’ and the Young 12/16/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Global, Politics.Tags: Bloomberg Business Week, Politics, The Great Recession, Youth Unemployment
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Photo Credit: Coverjunkie
IN the midst of the many uprisings of 2011 — from the Arab Spring to the week of the London Riots; the latter leaving those with left-leaning analytical orientations, stretching from Marxists’ conflict perspectives to neo-Marxists and the sociological thought that flows from them, argue were class-rage expressions of our day — several major news magazine titles hit the newsstands displaying covers discussing the world’s disgruntled, unemployed youth, who played the central figure in those disruptions.
During the Arab Spring protests and just months before the London riots, Bloomberg Business Week published “The Kids Are Not Alright” cover in which the lot of the young across the globe was given exegesis in their feature piece,”The Youth Unemployment Bomb.” And it’s no state secret that the future of the youth across the globe, especially in the undemocratic nations, is in jeopardy now; what with dwindled prospects for a good life, employment and the like, and the consequences it may wrought for the future of several nations. In ”The Youth Unemployment Bomb,” Peter Coy analyzes world youth unemployment and its influence upon the unrest seen throughout the globe.
The contentiousness of this current generation has been spurred by a broken promise: the idea that they would work hard to get educated and develop employable skills, and in kind they would be afforded passage through the gates of adulthood and experience lives of substantial contribution to the society. However, when that traditional promissory note has been turned on its ear — as a result of a global recession, poor governance, [and in the Democratic West], lack of market oversights, stagnated and narrowed economies with rigged markets and real wage diminishment over the past three decades — great disruptions occur. This longstanding issue finally reared its head this past year, and it has long been a concern in countries like Libya and Egypt for sometime. (It has also been a recent issue in much of Europe, Japan and the United States, to a degree. Though these nations are far less hampered, because of democracy’s ability to accommodate such expressions of grievance and produce change over time.)
I once linked to a 2008 New York Times’ report from well before the Arab spring – Memo from Cairo: “In the Shadow of a Long Past, Patiently Awaiting the Future” — that made mention of Egypt’s young population’s growing disaffection with the state of the economy and the anxiety it was creating internally for the government. It was but a small element in a story about how the nation was oddly, heavily reliant on tourism, as the pyramids crumbled and tourists’ interest in them waned, and how Mubarak was losing support due to years of a paralyzed economy affecting many of Egypt’s educated young.
By 2011, Mubarak’s contracting support morphed into a tidal wave of young who wanted to take the leader and his phalanx to the scrap heap. What Mubarak was ultimately experiencing in 2011 is known as “the paradox of autocracy,” * a sociological phenomena identified by a University of California at San Diego professor, which explains much of the plight of this educated youth and the challenges governments in Arab Spring states face. It’s also a phenomena that was mentioned in “The Kids Are Not Alright”:
For decades, Mubarak coped with Egypt’s youth unemployment problem by expanding college enrollments. That strategy couldn’t last forever. This past March, scholars Ragui Assaad and Samantha Constant of the Middle East Youth Initiative, a venture of Brookings Institution and the Dubai School of Government, put it bluntly: “In Egypt, educated young people who spend years searching for formal employment, mostly in the public sector, are now forgoing this prospect as the supply of government jobs dries up. Formal private sector employment—quite limited in the first place—is not growing fast enough. … Hence, young people are left with either precarious informal wage employment or expected to simply create a job for themselves in Egypt’s vast informal economy.”
Mubarak gave no sign of knowing how explosive the situation was, but his ministers did state repeatedly that Egypt needed rapid growth to soak up new job-seekers. The country started getting some things right in 2004, when Mubarak appointed a business-minded government under Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif. The nation lowered corporate taxes and import tariffs, privatized telecom, and expanded exports. The economy grew 7 percent annually from 2006 through 2008, dipped below 5 percent in 2009, and was on track for over 5 percent growth this past year, according to the International Monetary Fund.
That was good and bad. While growth is essential for easing social tensions in the long term, it can exacerbate them in the short term in a country such as Egypt. That’s because, former Finance Minister Youssef Boutros-Ghali told BusinessWeek several years ago, the first fruits of growth go to those who are already wealthy.
* The lack of democracy in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East—Israel being the exception—makes matters worse. Goldstone, of George Mason, says Mubarak is running afoul of the “paradox of autocracy,” a phrase coined by the late University of California at San Diego sociologist Timothy L. McDaniel. “Any authoritarian ruler who wants to modernize his country has to educate the workforce,” Goldstone says. “But when you educate the workforce you also create people who are not so willing to follow authority. Thus you create this threat of rebellion and disorder.” Democracies are “much better at managing large numbers of highly educated people,” Goldstone notes. Spain’s youth unemployment is even higher than Egypt’s, but young Spaniards aren’t trying to overthrow the government.
Even so, rich democracies ignore youth unemployment at their peril. In the 34 industrialized nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, at least 16.7 million young people are not employed, in school, or in training, and about 10 million of those aren’t even looking, the OECD said in December 2010. In the most-developed nations, the job market has split between high-paying jobs that many workers aren’t qualified for and low-paying jobs that they can’t live on, says Harry J. Holzer, a public policy professor at Georgetown University and co-author of a new book, Where Are All the Good Jobs Going? Many of the jobs that once paid good wages to high school graduates have been automated or outsourced.
Read “The Youth Unemployment Bomb” at Bloomberg Business Week [Here]
The War in Africa 12/07/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Defense, Global, Journalism.Tags: Africa, Foreign Policy, Global Security, Special Operations
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Photo Credit: Army Times
STARTING with The Nation‘s, Jeremy Scahill, reporting of secret bases used for the War on Terror (I forget that this is now an anachronism, and the conflict is now known as “The Overseas Counterinsurgency Operation“), in Somalia, the new-ish reports of a drone program in the region and President Obama’s recent move to send 1oo special operations soldiers to act as advisers; it is clear that there is a move afoot to focus American efforts on the continent. This, accompanied by the newly established Africa Command (AFRICOM), to oversee counter-terrorism operations in the region, makes this only more obvious. The motivation behind this is partly the rise of al-Shabaab (“Movement of Striving Youth”), an African al-Qaeda affiliate working primarily out of controlled areas in Somalia. (And years of perhaps inchoate policy in regards to terror threats on the continent, however there are some who ask whether the cells in Africa present a clear threat to America.)
When it has come to intelligence, there has simply been a vacuum on the African continent, both those of the technical and human variety. The war in Africa, itself, beyond the War on Terror produces a new reality with regards to the overall global counter-terror effort, as we ramp down in Afghanistan and Iraq and ramp-up elsewhere in what seems like the equivalent of proxy wars, like those of the Cold War, only this time focused on counter-terror. Recently, the Army Times conducted a six-month long, six-part special investigation on the matter in a series called “Secret War in Africa” which began with “The Secret War: Africa Ops May Just Be Starting.”
In “The Secret War: Africa Ops May Just Be Starting” the Army Times tells of a pivotal mission of divergent details and accounts — in the sense of what’s true depends on just who you ask — where two human intelligence (HUMINT) soldiers were taken hostage as either covert operators or as non-covert military personnel, in what may have been a clandestine operation in the Ogaden of Ethipoia. It was the first major incident, that indicated something had changed with our approach.
The two men were on the ground as part of Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa’s intelligence directorate, and were granted permission to go “beyond the wire” to handle, presumably, intel-collection duties. But just how they did that may have been part of the problem, as they reportedly developed a cover story which had them working for the Red Cross and which created a much larger issue when they were eventually approached by Ethiopian troops, and their weapons were found. The two soldiers were detained by the Ethiopian forces who presumed the soldiers to be hostile, particularly after their cover story of working for the Red Cross was upturned by their concealed pistols.
Depending on the conflicting account you choose to believe, the men were held anywhere from 48 hours, according to Major General (Maj. Gen.) Timothy Ghromley the head of Central Command during that time; or about 10 days, according to a senior intelligence officer. The account by Maj. Gen. Ghromley had the men under his charge acting in rogue. According to him, they were not to be operating in a covert manner:
‘They’re completely overt,’ he said. ‘They’re supposed to identify themselves as U.S. service members.’
The account by the intelligence official implies something a bit different, calling it a “clandestine operation.” The men were not in their uniforms, but according to the senior official; if they were detained they’d be able to declare their status as American soldiers, so that in the official’s words, “somebody could get them the hell out of there.” It eventually took the ambassador to Ethiopia, the State Department, and Central Command commander, (now-retired) Admiral William Fallon, to free them. The incident led to African intelligence operations in the specific area to become public and compromised. Everything from notepads, military-related items and papers, was scooped up by the Ethiopian government, according to the State Department. An intelligence official quoted in the Army Times article stated:
‘It was like amateur hour, this team that got rolled up,’ the intelligence official said. ‘There was information that they had that they should not have been carrying … It gave away techniques and procedures that we couldn’t afford to do, because we knew at that time that al-Qaida was building up its capability in Somalia and that was why we were trying damn hard to get into Somalia with really sensitive collection.’
The event which transpired between March 2007 and March 2008, depending on who one talks to (again), may have set the operations back in the horn of Africa for years. That is until now. A quick timeline of events show an escalation between the summer of 2009 to roughly the present:
• On Sept. 14, 2009, a U.S. special operations helicopter raid killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a senior al-Qaida in East Africa figure.
• On April 19, 2011, the U.S. captured Somali national and al-Shabaab member Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, 25, as he crossed the Gulf of Aden on a ship to Yemen from Somalia. The U.S. held Warsame, who allegedly has links to Yemen’s al-Qaida branch, for two months on a Navy ship before flying him to the U.S.
• On June 7, TFG [Transitional Federal Government] forces killed Harun Fazul, the most-wanted al-Qaida figure in East Africa, when he mistook their roadblock in Mogadishu for an al-Shabaab position.
• On June 23, U.S. drones struck al-Shabaab targets near Kismayo.
• On July 6, there were reports of airstrikes in Lower Juba, the southernmost region of Somalia, according to the website SomaliaReport.com.
• In early August, under increasing military pressure from the TFG [Transitional Federal Government] forces backed up by 9,000 African Union peacekeepers from Uganda and Burundi, al-Shabaab announced its withdrawal from Mogadishu.
• On Sept. 15, there were more airstrikes on an al-Shabaab training camp in Taabta in Lower Juba, according to SomaliaReport.com.
• On Sept. 21, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. is building a “ring of secret drone bases” including facilities in Ethiopia, the Seychelles and “the Arabian Peninsula.”
• On Sept. 23, airstrikes hit al-Shabaab’s main camp at the Kismayo airport.
• On Oct. 4, an al-Shabaab truck bomb killed an estimated 65 people in Mogadishu.
Read “The Secret War in Africa” series at the Military Times [Here]
Police: ‘Keeping the Peace’ Through Military Ways? 11/07/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Defense, Journalism, Law and Order, Policy.Tags: Militarization, Police, The Atlantic
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Photo Credit: National City Police Department
To assist them in deploying this new weaponry, police departments have also sought and received extensive military training and tactical instruction. Originally, only the largest of America’s big-city police departments maintained S.W.A.T. teams, and they were called upon only when no other peaceful option was available and a truly military-level response was necessary. Today, virtually every police department in the nation has one or more S.W.A.T. teams, the members of whom are often trained by and with United States special operations commandos. Furthermore, with the safety of their officers in mind, these departments now habitually deploy their S.W.A.T. teams for minor operations such as serving warrants. In short, “special” has quietly become “routine.”
ANYONE who has watched any National Geographic Television or Discovery Channel all-access program following law enforcement, or have witnessed them in action, or unfortunately have dealt with them first hand, will have noticed something: There is increasingly little difference between cops and the appearance of our modern infantrymen, deployed in war-zones.
The trend towards beefing up our police, military-style, started with Special Weapons and Tactics (S.W.A.T.) teams and high-priority, specialized gang units in big metropolitan areas, and was probably given momentum by watershed events like the violent and televised North Hollywood shootout in 1997; between bank robbers in full body armor, toting fully-automatic rifles, and woefully under-armed Los Angeles Police Department officers, that seemed to bring about imagery from the film Heat.
But it is mostly the great effect of 9/11 and the constant specter of myriad forms of terrorism that could potentially require military-type firepower, lurking just around the corner, that is mostly responsible for this new approach. Nationally, law enforcement had been reminded time and again, that in many ways they were not as well-equipped as they should be, to meet the challenges of modern-day policing. (And because Americans love their guns, it has increasingly fostered an arms race between cops and criminals, who can purchase an easily-converted-to-automatic AK-47 or an AR-15 at a gun show, and with some savvy and evil enterprise, load it with explosive rounds or those meant to pierce through body armor.)
As any global security analyst will tell you, law enforcement was and is considered one of the first lines of defense against terrorism. That is until the days after 9/11, when George W. Bush declared a “War on Terror” and the focus shifted towards our military. Under the old paradigm, the basic nuts and bolts of thwarting terror was laid at the police’s doorstep: doing good detective work, showing a presence, working with the community to be vigilant, and so on. But our dramatic intelligence failure on 9/11 and the two successive wars to address Islamist terror — if one counts Iraq as having this justification — and the creation of several agencies under the new Department of Homeland Security, all have conferred this fight largely to the domain of the United States military and the national-security-industrial-complex.
This, in turn, has changed the posture of America’s law enforcement. The police, now feeling even more under-prepared to handle all of its duties along with the addition and prioritization of the staving of potential terror plots, began to invest in military-style weapons, adopt its tactics, consult with the military’s special operations units for training (as though they are some opposing guerrilla force to a dictator in a banana republic), and now work to absorb the military mindset. In The Atlantic‘s “How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police,” Arhtur Rizer, a former officer and the article’s author, explains that the justification behind this “weapon inflation” is primarily safety.
What was once considered tactics or weaponry only to be used in special circumstances, say like a S.W.A.T. team or the application of once-limited, but now readily available, assault rifles, are being regularly employed in the more routine parts of policing. But as pointed to in “How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police,” there are some legitimate civil liberty concerns because of this, as a recent mishap in a botched raid involving an innocent ex-Marine named, José Guerena, who served two tours in Iraq implies:
Within moments, and without Guerena firing a shot–or even switching his rifle off of “safety”–he lay dying, his body riddled with 60 bullets. A subsequent investigation revealed that the initial shot that prompted the S.W.A.T. team barrage came from a S.W.A.T. team gun, not Guerena’s. Guerena, reports later revealed, had no criminal record, and no narcotics were found at his home.
Sadly, the Guerenas are not alone; in recent years we have witnessed a proliferation in incidents of excessive, military-style force by police S.W.A.T. teams, which often make national headlines due to their sheer brutality. Why has it become routine for police departments to deploy black-garbed, body-armored S.W.A.T. teams for routine domestic police work? The answer to this question requires a closer examination of post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy and the War on Terror.
The chief concern in regards to this escalation of firepower and this new mentality among the police is that the organizational culture in the military and its operational philosophy of: identifying if someone is a threat and neutralizing them, and if so, do it with limited civilian casualties; is unlike that of the police, whose role is to “keep the peace,” uphold the law and the rights’ of citizens, even those it suspects. If the police changes its posture from “keeping the peace” and treats everyone as criminals, the way the military treats everyone as a potential combatant, it creates more situations such as that of José Guerena, where excessive and lethal force is sometimes just the cost of doing business, and where suspects no longer have the rights that they are supposed to, as the officers become judge, jury and executioner.
When law enforcement begins to adopt the soldiers’ mentality, it tends to forget its original goals of maintaining a good solid relationship with its public, while upholding the laws when they are broken, along with the most important rights of the individual. This is not to understate the difficulty of their jobs or minimize their optimal chances for safety by not having them bring as many resources to bear as possible, as Arhtur Rizer put it:
The point here is not to suggest that police officers in the field should not take advantage of every tactic or piece of equipment that makes them safer as they carry out their often challenging and strenuous duties. Nor do I mean to suggest that a police officer, once trained in military tactics, will now seek to kill civilians. It is far too easy for Monday-morning quarterbacks to unfairly second-guess the way police officers perform their jobs while they are out on the streets waging what must, at times, feel like a war.
Notwithstanding this concern, however, Americans should remain mindful bringing military-style training to domestic law enforcement has real consequences. When police officers are dressed like soldiers, armed like soldiers, and trained like soldiers, it’s not surprising that they are beginning to act like soldiers. And remember: a soldier’s main objective is to kill the enemy.
Read “How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police” at The Atlantic [Here]
A Telling Answer on Inequality 10/21/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Economics, Journalism, Policy, Politics.Tags: Inequality, Politics, Scientific American
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Photo Credit: We Are the 99 Percent
AS THE OCCUPY WALL STREET movement gains steam and 68 percent of millionaires, according to The Wall Street Journal, now say that they actually support more taxes on their earnings, a recent article in Scientific American implies a retreat on the idea of increasing taxes on the nation’s top earners, in a key sector. While a vast majority of the one percent — despite our currently personally beneficial tax situation — feels that a country in need should have those most able of it to pitch-in just a bit more, there has been a surprising attitudinal adjustment with working-class Americans.
In the article “The Last Place Paradox,” Scientific American reporters Ilyana Kuziemko and Michael I. Norton, Ivy League business school professors who co-authored a paper of the same title, found that among the nation’s blue collar, support for income redistribution (taxes) fell, marking this odd shift of millionaires, generally, approving to be taxed, while potential beneficiaries of such taxes believing it is unfair to tax them. Between 2008 and 2010 — the most recent years of data available — support for such measures actually “plummeted.”
My first inclination was to presume that the drop was due to the demagoguery of President Obama as a “socialist re-distributor” by his opponents on the right, but that presumption does not square with who is primarily in fundamental opposition to the government addressing large-scale income inequality; our have-nots in this winner take all system.
While the working-class is a demographic that is known to vote against its general interests, and those actions are thought to be an expression of their aspiration – for example, voting for policies that favor the wealthy, because they innately believe that they will be the wealthy someday, or their kids will be — it turns out that their motivations in regards to flagging support for re-distribution efforts, is actually motivated by a fear of being met at the same economic rung, or lapped, by those below them.
Our recent research suggests that, far from being surprised that many working-class individuals would oppose redistribution, we might actually expect their opposition to rise during times of turmoil – despite the fact that redistribution appears to be in their economic interest. Our work suggests that people exhibit a fundamental loathing for being near or in last place – what we call “last place aversion.” This fear can lead people near the bottom of the income distribution to oppose redistribution because it might allow people at the very bottom to catch up with them or even leapfrog past them.
How does last-place aversion play out with regard to redistribution? In our surveys, we asked Americans whether they supported an increase to the minimum wage, currently $7.25 per hour. Those making $7.25 or below were very likely to support the increase – after all, they would be immediate beneficiaries. In addition, people making substantially more than $7.25 were also fairly positive towards the increase. Which group was the most opposed? Those making just above the minimum wage, between $7.26 and $8.25. We might expect people who make just below and just above $7.25 to have similar lifestyles and policy attitudes – but in this case, while those making below $7.25 would benefit if the minimum wage were raised to, say, $8.25, those making just above $7.25 would run the risk of falling into a tie for last place.
The writers replicated this finding in lab tests where an artificial income distribution was created and subjects are shown their position within it, and where each rank is separated by just $1.00 USD. The subjects were then given $2.00 USD to either give to those below them in the distribution or above them, meaning giving to those below them would make those recipients jump past them in position, relative to the scale. While most gave the money to those below them, regardless of those recipients jumping their position, those in the penultimate (or second-to-last) and would thus become the lowest in the income distribution, were the least likely of all to give to those below them.
While these finding are not necessarily indicative of how things actually work in America, because of a number of factors, but primarily that it’s not always certain that everyone knows their position on the economic scale, as seems to be the case, since most Americans consistently identify themselves as “middle class,” it is an important finding that provides some very strong explanations as to why the G.O.P. is undeniably successful in attracting blue-collar workers, beyond just their economic aspirations to be wealthy. And beyond that, as said by the writers, this experiment and its finding portends a key effective strategy on the part of the Occupy Wall Street movement, because instead of dividing the income distribution among several strata, which would then produce potential supporters of the cause competing against each other, it focuses on one large group versus another, smaller group. As the writers said:
Framing the issue this way focuses the attention of people at the bottom of the distribution on those at the top – rather than on each other – and implicitly suggests that anyone not in the top 1 percent (“them”) is one of “us.” While it is too soon to tell if OWS has staying power, their rhetoric has the potential to reframe the discussion on redistribution and inequality.
Read “The Last Place Paradox” at Scientific American [Here]
The Fight Over Chavez 10/08/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Politics, Street Brands.Tags: Chavez Ravine, Fresh Jive, Los Angeles, Los Angeles Dodgers, Politics
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Photo Credit: FreshJive
WHILE LOS ANGELES’S sports fans are anxious over the still unresolved and perpetually ongoing saga of the Frank McCourt divorce and its potential to reap utterly negative consequences upon the franchise, possibly leaving it to Major League Baseball to step in — or owner Frank McCourt having to split the Dodgers in half with his wife — and now with an absolutely deplorable and savage beating of a Giants’ fan, Bryan Stow, leaving him in a coma at the beginning of this baseball season; some in the city are pointing fingers and becoming very critical of just how the Dodgers are being managed off the field of play. It is mostly the uncertainty surrounding the team now and the lack of security in the venerable stadium in recent years, along with “the element” McCourt supposedly attracted through his economical marketing promotions, often involving the sales of beer, and which is presumed to be a culprit in the Stow attack, that the Dodgers franchise now find themselves in a bad way with a segment of its faithful public.
But the McCourt case and even the Stow beating, are a mere pebble compared to the boulder of a problem that the building of now-timeworn and iconic Dodger Stadium was, in order to get the Dodgers here; an event which exposed the racial cleavages between whites and Latinos in the city, in the 1950s, just years after the Zoot Suit Riots. (One can argue that the recent ramping up of security by Dodgers’ management and the Los Angeles Police Department, and their perceived racial profiling of Latino Dodger fans, in particular — one of the team’s courted and stalwart patronages — in response to the most recent controversy, has also shown this, in the aftermath of the Stow incident.)
Prior to Chavez Ravine housing Dodger Stadium, the area was home to a community of mostly Mexican-Americans spread among a conglomeration of three smaller towns by the names of Bishop, La Loma and Palo Verde. The 175 acre tract of land was originally inhabited by 3,800 residents and named after Julian Chavez, the original landowner, and early Los Angeles councilman in the 1800s. Once a parcel tended to by the state government, over time, Chavez Ravine became a neglected area where its inhabitants relied heavily upon each other, and where they created a communal garden, began to hold social functions and essentially produced a de facto ghetto or ethnic enclave, depending on how one wants to parse it. But more importantly, it became a tightly-bound, respectable community. However, as many of these stories go concerning resource-neglected and predominantly minority communities, Chavez’s perception to those on the outside in surrounding Los Angeles, found it to be a less-than desirable blight. This began a move to look to re-develop the swath with 10,000 new units furnished by the 1949 Federal Housing Act.
Through several political machinations to clear the land by a group of local business elite known as Citizens Against Sociable Housing (C.A.S.H.) — that acronym is some kind of irony! — and a grand deceit on part of the local government who promised Chavez’s residents first crack at the new homes being built and also largely recanted a promise of compensations to those who were dislocated; the Ravine became a ward to the city at a bargain-basement price of $1.25 million (a 75 percent discount), but only under the federal government’s required auspice of using it for a “public purpose.” This “public purpose” condition was the byproduct of negotiations by mayor, Norris Poulson, a man essentially elected through the works of C.A.S.H., and who ran on an anti-housing development platform for Chavez Ravine.
The individuals who made up C.A.S.H. had plans for the Ravine all along and to “cake-up,” as we say now, but several failed attempts by the city to do anything with the space made it a nuisance to some in the local government, and a portion of the original homes were cleared to be used for firefighter training, while others were just stripped and sold piece meal at auction. At that point, still unable to find that federally mandated public purpose for the area, Chavez Ravine could have just been handed back to its original community, who were now seen as squatters; to do with it what they once did, and which would meet the federal requirements for its selling. That didn’t happen.
But that was just the beginning, because Brooklyn Dodger owner and legend Walter O’Malley wanted to move West and showed interest in the spot, or at least used it as bargaining chip to have Brooklyn help him build the new stadium he was looking for. And so began a battle with a series of dramatic turns that speaks to the powerful and their flagrant moral abuses of power to make money, with little regard for people, and which is outlined at luminary Los Angeles street wear company’s, FreshJive‘s, blog. Here is an excerpt:
Playing off the needs of both coasts, O’Malley spent much of 1957 considering the idea of staying on the east coast or heading west. Facing mounting pressure from city businesses and politicians to bring the Dodgers to Los Angeles, Mayor Paulson gathered city officials together to begin planning a way to bring the Dodgers to L.A. Considering the legal and financial solutions of the move, Mayor Paulson found that his biggest obstacle lay in the rhetoric of the legalities, as the construction of a stadium did not serve as an “appropriate public purpose” to the citizens of Los Angeles.
After rejecting O’Malley’s proposition to build a new stadium in New York, the Dodger’s owner’s attention turned to Los Angeles. Receiving approval from the National Baseball League to pursue a move to the west coast, Walter O’Malley was given until September 30th, 1957 to make his decision. Amongst mounting pressure from the Los Angeles Times urging city officials to bring baseball to Los Angeles at any cost, The Los Angeles City Council sat down to propose a deal to attract the Dodgers. Crafting what would later be considered a “sweetheart deal” with the Brooklyn Dodgers, the city of Los Angeles offered to trade 300 acres of the Chavez Ravine land, while taking on over $4 million towards the construction and grading of the ravine. In return the Dodgers would trade the 9-acre Wrigley Field property owned by O’Malley, while paying $350,000 in annual property tax. Additionally, the deal called for the Dodgers to maintain a 40-acre public park for 20 years that would become the property of the Dodgers after the duration was over: the small stipulation regarding the 40-acre park serving as a sly political maneuver aimed to make the deal appear as though the agreement served an “appropriate public purpose.”
Needing a two-thirds vote to confirm the deal by midnight of September 30th, a 14 member city council met to decide the fate of Chavez Ravine. Debating throughout the day and into the night, a deal had not been confirmed as the council grew closer to midnight. Eager to conclude the dispute and bring the Dodgers to Los Angeles, Mayor Paulson lied in front of press and media, telegramming the National Baseball League that the council had reached an agreement when in fact they hadn’t. The lie spurred an unexpected series of events. Although facing immense backlash from city council, the National Baseball League extended their deadline two more weeks, allowing O’Malley more time to declare his decision. Taking another week to reach a verdict, the Los Angeles City Council voted in favor of the Chavez Ravine deal in a ten to four vote, officially allowing for the move of the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles.
Read more of “For the Love of Baseball: The Battle for Chavez Ravine” [Here]
9.11.01 | A Confirmation 09/11/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Conflict, Defense, Editorial, Essay, Global.Tags: 9/11, Foreign Policy, Politics
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9.11.01 | A Confirmation
THE REGULAR SCHOOL YEAR hadn’t begun yet, it was still summer and I was taking a stats course during summer session at the local city college; a course I didn’t take all that seriously. My mom and dad didn’t wake me up that morning, after watching the replays from hours earlier of what was going on back east, for some unknown reason. I’ve never asked them why. It was probably out of fear and their own still-developing conversation of what was next. I am an only child and at times my parents, possibly because I am pretty much their sole fully-fleshed frame of reference for young people, often treated me like I was much younger than I was. They didn’t say a thing to me other than “Did you see?”; when I did awake.
A couple of people on my father’s side of the family worked at the Pentagon — an aunt and an uncle — but they were not hurt. That part of it is hazy, so I am not exactly sure when we found out they were safe. My dad’s nearly thirty year career in the military and my life behind the concertina wire of base fences overseas already made me acutely aware of the situation, far before it happened. We’d had run-ins with al-Qaeda in the years prior, and I’d already had discussions about Osama Bin Laden before the event, and I wrote somewhat extensively about Clinton’s response in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Khartoum to al-Qaeda’s bombing of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the U.S.S. Cole in my high school political science course, and I even discussed it with a teacher who was a former Marine.
Still — despite the cliché — this was truly a detached cinematic experience for me, an apocalyptic Hollywood flick about the dangers of this world. My nascent sociopolitical and personal consciousness was not yet jibing with this reality, even with my knowledge of Bin Laden’s already fully-realized applications of terror abroad. To me, this moment I saw on replay was the flickering images of The Siege. I drove to that morning statistics’ lecture and walked through the campus in a zombieish haze, wondering why I even decided to go, when the professor said something like: “For those interested, they’ll be playing the news all day in the conference room.”
The weeks and months just after, I remember discussing with a professor during office hours what it was like being at school during the uncertainty of Vietnam, knowing that at some point you could be called on — as the Afghanistan War hadn’t started yet, and I believed that there could be a draft — and he said: “Oh, I think these times will be far more interesting.” Shit, if he wasn’t right. With another professor, I remember saying, “We have to be wary of producing even more terrorists, in our response.” (Shit, if I wasn’t right.)
9/11 was ultimately for me a clarion call that I feel and hear to this day, and which I probably will feel for the rest of my life. I took courses on terrorism and on social movement organizations, which had a specific component in the lectures on terror groups, and I took classes on Mid-East relations, because of it. I also declared as an international development studies major during the year after; and I’ve just recently begun to develop an interest in picking up more languages. Because if you can’t understand another culture’s language, then you can’t truly understand that culture. And I also further looked to understand al-Qaeda’s reach in my other home, my mom’s native land, the Philippines.
I ended up feeling even more like a child of the world because of the event, part of a tapestry of people who looked at that moment and said: “We are one against the extremism and terror, and want to understand why,” while not feeling particularly heartened by the racial prejudice, arrogance and disease of misinformation that I could see forthcoming in the States. I felt not a part of the jingoistic America I was beginning to see. Still, a part of me felt the real threat from terror that the fearful version of America I saw was feeling, but also the resolve of my own patriotism; which believed in the idea that our response was necessary and should be swift, pronounced and surgical. I also believed that we could and should respond to this event, while fiercely maintaining our ideals of “exceptionalism.”
Further, I was determined to absorb the notion that the kind of inequality in the poorer communities of our nation and the structural problems within our economic system that I saw ravage America’s streets and which created various levels of rage against the power structure, and which I heard in hip-hop and specifically Tupac’s lines, was similar to the anger that was ultimately being mobilized by Islamist extremism around the world; but instead it wasn’t the marginalized ethnic minorities in our borders, but the hungry and suffering populations all over the globe who exist in their lands with little development, great discontent and burdened by their lots of young and uneducated. This helped to focus my lens.
Looking back over the last ten, I could chart my growth as a kid and then as a young man who was influenced profoundly by this moment. I began to question faith as a whole during this time, admittedly with only some childhood experiences with Catholicism; and now I was pointing to the darkest corners of belief — seen in the myriad forms of religious radicalism which wrought events like this — as a part of my justification for my agnosticism and then my atheism.
This time also blotched my view of our government and chipped away at some of my idealism, as I began the path to cynicism as one of the foolish who believed that there was a chance that the Iraq War could change the map of the Middle East — regardless of whether or not it was justified — since I actually never bought the story of W.M.D.s. And to further complicate this dangerously slippery worldview, I believed that in the end, if the war did “change the map,” it would actually provide a decent moral justification: that of providing another democracy in the region, to act as a countervailing force against the extremism we faced. I was just so appallingly blasé about it. How did that happen? After I was myself surrounded by war, my whole life, in some way?
What I didn’t get was that war was always to be a final measure that was reached with great deliberation, and it wasn’t to be engaged in just because it could meet a desired, possible peace-creating and seemingly existential end, even if it seemed so easy, and waged against an already diminished military which we had encountered before, as was the case with Iraq. I didn’t realize that the drumbeat to war, which I was swept up in, and which was supported by most of the New York Times‘ op-eds, was just a mere rally-around-the-flag that I had bought into, although for an altogether different reasoning; and this was despite my disdain for that new jingoism.
The events of 9/11 probably didn’t change me in the sense that it placed me on a path to becoming someone else I wasn’t going to be before it, essentially spurred to make a 180 degree pivot, but it did congeal who I was on the path to being. These ten years after have cleared up my thinking about and strengthened my interests in the world that created it. It also made me realize the costs that so few of us pay in the prosecution of a war that we all benefit from, in some small way, even if we don’t believe we do. The War on Terror was undertaken for a nation of people, among other things, who are ten years after, as disconnected from the struggle as they were before. (Other than their dealings with the T.S.A.) Only one percent of us fight these wars, and that one percent fight it over and over, re-deployed constantly. And then, if lucky, because they survived, they will fight it again, in their minds at night or in their struggle every day without a limb.
His Lost Situational Awareness 07/20/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Editorial, Policy, Politics.Tags: Politics, President Obama
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WE are now even more ensconced in this remarkable fix: the economy has been putrid for years and shows little signs of improvement, and with no actual assistance from the government, other than a largely de-fanged stimulus; that lets those who do not believe in the already accepted hallmarks of Keynesian economics — that when a country is in a situation like ours and no one is willing to spend, the government must — say, “Look, in fact, it doesn’t work.” And this may actually be a commentary on the setup of our political system and its dogmatic allegiances that separate facts from the discussion; a system which is proving to be not well-equipped to handle crises of this kind, magnitude and scope, since it is based on limiting the actual amount of policy change that can be made. (Not to mention an obstructionist Republican contingent, which blunts necessary and deliberately dramatic measures.)
The corporations are now holding onto their cash — $2 trillion USD — while upping their productivity and still turning profits at an unprecedented level in the midst of a global economic downturn, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Depression; the exact opposite of what we need them to do. And the political conversation in America is so polarized as a result of the fragmenting of the information consumers to outlets that only parrot their views — and which stoke the flames of partisanship, that reason has left — and now neither side of the political divide is willing to talk to one another, and even centrists are forced to choose sides. And this is exacerbated by a faction within the right, the “Tea Party,” that magnetically pulls its moderates towards a cartoon version of the G.O.P. to look like that idiotic neocon character in Dr. Strangelove, and ultimately enforces a militantly arrogant ignorance about the most fundamental of modern notions from climate change, to the birthplace of an already elected U.S. president; to how to respond to such an economic crisis, in spite of experts’ opinions.
It is a Democratic president saddled with all of this, a totality of factors that almost makes it impossible to govern the country out of its mess. I mean, we are still hearing questions about his birth certificate and from those who look to de-legitimize him in every way, from race-coding him into an anti-colonialist revolutionary, to the idea of who is “American,” yet for some unbelievably insane reason, he still looks to compromise with a bunch unwilling to even meet him half-way and ultimately has him giving much of the pot, usually, just to get just a third of what he wants. And the problem is, what he wants is usually some lessened form of what is ideally best for us all (based on reason and well-proven historical political data), but the environment has made this not so in many minds. What is he left to do? Since he is a believer in government, in democratic values, in debate and in consensus building?
The forces aligned against him are many and so vast and deep within our culture (example: rugged individualism versus a distrust of European-style socialism), both individually and institutionally, that he is already fighting what might be a Sisyphean battle, yet he doesn’t seem to be consciously aware that it is thus, and it is necessary that he respond more forcefully. For a guy so aware of everything socially and culturally to the point of it sometimes being a problem (e.g. I believe that he is reluctant to put on even a stern face, because of the implicit stereotypes of being an “angry black man”), why is he now so unaware of this situation? He at his core wants to sensibly play the middle, but now is not the time, particularly since there is no middle; just right and wrong. This has been talked about over and over by the pundits, but the president has to channel F.D.R. and talk about the “Do-Nothing Congress” and the political atmosphere we all now inhabit. As Ronald Dworkin at The New York Review of Books, NYR Blog, points out in “How FDR Did It“:
We now have a President we can admire and respect. But he seems unaware that his opponents are not patriots anxious to help govern through a decent consensus but fanatics who would destroy the country if that would lead to his defeat. We think he should understand that this is a time for confrontation not compromise. He should therefore remember the words of another president running for reelection in the middle of an even graver economic catastrophe, words that seem eerily relevant now.
Here is Franklin Roosevelt, in Madison Square Garden, in 1936:
For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred. I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.
President Obama might recall that Roosevelt won re-election by the largest majority before or since.
July 7, 2011 2:38 p.m.
