The photos on the left are slowly coming online. The system for generating the galleries works, but the images themselves are yet to be sorted. At least it gives me something to do while avoiding work.

Health care is not the ‘responsibility… of the individual citizen.’ Citizens are workers, and their productivity is inextricably linked to their personal health. It is in everyone’s interest, corporations and citizens, that we are a healthy nation. Because employers pay for the current system, the cost has a negative impact on the free movement of capital. President Bush’s solution is the end of government health care, and a change to complete privatization. But what will happen to the 40 million uninsured Americans, and the 8 million unemployed? Are they to live in squalor and sickness because they cannot pay for care? Is that how a moral nation treats its citizens? What happened to Rousseau’s social contract?

The alternative to complete privatization is a single payer system, or “socialized medicine.” Yes, government intervention would necessarily increase under this plan, but so would public health. While opponents of this system are quick to complain about the inefficiencies of a public health care system, this ignores the inefficiencies and injustice inherent in a private system. Any for-profit health care provider will have layers of bureaucracy to determine if a particular patient merits a particular treatment. Under a public health care system, a treatment is performed if it is medically necessary. While this might seem more expensive, note that Canada spends far less on their health care system as a percent of GDP than we do (9.5 percent vs. 13.9 precent in 2001), while achieving a similar provision of care. A public system helps the economy by guaranteeing that workers are healthy and productive. Our current system makes employers pay for their sick workers, and makes companies think twice before adding jobs. Given that Bush has presided over the loss of nearly two million jobs, one would assume he would jump at any opportunity to lower the barriers to job creation.

Social security was one of the most contested issues of the last election, and it continues to vex politicians today. Nesmith calls it a ‘pyramid scheme,’ and it is in that we use today’s funds to pay today’s debt to retirees. The financial crisis stems not from poor accounting by the Social Security Administration, which has a large surplus saved to pay future benefits, but from Congress, which has borrowed $1.4 trillion of this surplus to pay for tax cuts and spending increases. When they have to pay this money back as the baby-boomers begin to retire, we will either have to borrow money from someone else, decrease spending, or increase revenue by raising taxes.

Here is where the candidates differ. John Kerry advocates ‘common sense accounting.’ Find yourself in a hole? Stop digging. Don’t borrow money to pay for spending now when you know you’ve got large expenses in the future. Surely you’d expect the only president with an MBA to understand this, even if it is from Harvard. Bush’s solution involves shredding the common safety net, and replacing it with a giveaway to corporations. Private savings accounts sounded like a great idea four years ago, when the stock market seemed unstoppable. After that period of ‘irrational exuberance,’ and too many scandals to list, this seems a little less brilliant. Private savings accounts will be administered by Wall Street management firms, which charge exorbitant fees for their mutual funds. According to investment legend John Bogle, they also perform on average 2 percent worse than the market as a whole. Those who have extra money to invest in the stock market are still welcome to do so. But for those millions of Americans who can’t afford to save, the government takes 6.2 percent of their pretax income from both them and their employer to pay for their future well-being. If you make more than $87,900 a year, you’re credited back any excess you paid. This means that Nesmith’s concern about rich retirees paying more than their fair share is misplaced. The poor pay for their own retirement, and the rich are allowed to invest their excess income privately. The government just helps the process along, and charges far less overhead than private investment firms.

Education was also a point of contention in the last election, and Bush claims to have done something about it. In reality, the No Child Left Behind Act is the largest unfunded federal mandate ever placed on the public school system. It requires high standards and ‘accountability,’ but doesn’t aid failing schools with extra financial assistance. Schools that fail are merely shut down and replaced with ones run by for-profit corporations or vouchers for religious schools.

It is in our economic interest that all young people are educated to similar standards. Vouchers and religious schools, while they educate students to their parents’ wishes, are not held to these standards. In Florida, a test-bed for national voucher policy, nearly one third of the schools accepting vouchers were not accredited. While the public school system (of which 71 percent of MIT undergrads are a product) may not be perfect, more funding and real federal help are the solution, not utopian nonsense like No Child Left Behind.

And before conservatives start whining about the ‘nanny state,’ let me remind you who believes the government should be able to tap your phone and review the books you read without your knowledge or consent. Who wants to stop dangerous terrorists like Ted Kennedy from flying, without providing a system to challenge the secret No Fly List? Who wants to write discrimination into the Constitution, when it took so many years to rid ourselves of the stain of miscegenation laws? Who turned the largest surplus ever into a deficit of $422 billion for fiscal year 2004? Who sent us to war over weapons of mass destruction that Colin Powell now says may never be found, and still refuses to project a final cost for the war and reconstruction? Who fired his own Secretary of the Treasury when he dared to offer such an estimate; an eerily accurate $200 billion? Is this sound economic policy, firing the one man who gives straight advice?

George Bush has been the worst president in recent memory, and this nation can hardly afford another four years. Since Ken and I clearly disagree, I’d like to propose one of our finest methods of settling political disputes. In the spirit of Zell Miller, Aaron Burr, and Andrew Jackson, I challenge him to duel at high noon on Killian Court. Weapons may be of his choosing, although I suggest the AK-47, legal because Bush let the Assault Weapons Ban lapse on Monday. The two candidates most certainly differ on this issue, and to Ken Nesmith, that should matter greatly.

- Published in today’s Tech as a response to this article by Ken Nesmith.

A Thousand Killed:

I read of a thousand killed.
And am glad because the scrounging imperial paw
Was there so bitten:
As a man at elections is thrilled
When the results pour in, and the North goes with him
And the West breaks in the thaw.

(That fighting was a long way off.)

Forgetting therefore an election
Being fought with votes and lies and catch-cries
And orator's frowns and flowers and posters' noise
Is paid for with cheques and toys:
Wars the most glorious
Victory-winged and steeple-uproarious
... With the lives, burned-off,
Of young men and boys.

Bernard Spencer, 1936
Borrowed from Slate.com

The program was written in Python, and requires wxPython for windowing and Numpy for plotting. I have compiled all these dependencies together for binaries for Windows and Mac OS X 10.4. The source is also available, and will be of interest to the discerning user. The Read Me has more information on the specifics of the simulation, and is required reading if you’re going to do anything serious with this data.

Disclaimer: I wrote this software as a sophomore engineering student, and I make no guarantee as to the accuracy of the output. It gives me correct values for my test cases, but don’t make policy (or go to war), on my say so.

> Sen Specter (R-PA, Chairman): I’m a moderate Republican, and am slowly being edged out of my party. Will you respect the constitution right to privacy that underlies the Roe vs. Wade decision?

> Judge Roberts: I’m cold, logical and calculating. A legal machine, devoid of any feeling, despite my all-American looks and picturesque family. If the words “right to privacy” aren’t in the Constitution, they’re dead to me.

> Sen Durbin (D-IL): I’m running for President, and have a big neck.
> Judge Roberts: As that question regards issues that may come before the court, I don’t believe it would be proper for me to answer.

> Sen Kennedy (D-MA): I’m an elder statesman, and still haunted by the ghost of Chappaquiddick. Will you defend the civil rights I fought for half a century ago?

> Judge Roberts: I have no respect for the march of time, and the progress of human values. If slavery were still legal, that would be the precedent I would uphold.

> Sen Feinstein (D-CA): As the only woman on this panel of old white windbags, will you answer my questions?

> Judge Roberts: Not a chance.

> Sen Brownback (R-KS): I’m also running for President. May I kiss you?

> Judge Roberts: On the cheek only; the mouth would cross the line between adoration and Satanism.

> Sen Hatch (R-UT): Will you answer my sycophantic questions?

> Judge Roberts: With pleasure.

> Sen Biden (D-DE): I’m also running for President, I also co-authored the Violence Against
Women Act, which is unconstitutional. Do you feel that men and women deserve equal protection under the law?

> Judge Roberts: I think women should be barefoot and pregnant, just as God intended.

> Sen Graham (R-SC): I think we can all agree to that.

> All, sans Feinstein: (laughter)

Now that the panel has adjourned, Roberts has returned to his squirming children and doting wife, Bush has returned to ignoring the plight of the poor, Congress can get back to their tense partisan standoff, and the nation can return its attention to things that really matter, like football, Renee Zellweger’s divorice, and missing blonde teenagers.

As a card-carrying pinko-Commie-Liberal, I’m supposed to hate Roberts. But try as I might, no matter how many hours of hearings I forced myself to sit through, I couldn’t. He’s got a calm, strong persona, without the craziness or malice of Bork. Although he is a Harvard grad, he is clearly an intellectual of the highest level. Anyone who puts their faith in two hundred year old words instead of human experience deserves the respect of this school.

In all seriousness, it looks like Roberts will be easily confirmed, and it was wise that the Democrats didn’t put up too strong of a fight. Enough resistance to show that they have a spine, but not enough to actually make a difference. They saved their right to filibuster for a truly divisive candidate, like the one that Bush will most likely nominate for the position vacated by O’Connor. To keep the gender ratio at a sensible 2/9, he will likely put forward a woman with real conservative credentials like Priscilla Owen, the Wicked Witch of Texas. Will the circle be unbroken Lord, by and by?

Published in the September 20th Tech. The following letter, and my response ran in the next issue.

Instead of starting off with “In case you missed last week’s C-SPAN3 coverage…”, Josh Levinger might have said “In case you missed last week’s David Brooks Op-Ed in The New York Times.” \["Card-Carrying, Pinko-Commie-Liberal Can't Force Self to Hate John Roberts," The Tech, Tuesday, Sept. 20.\] It seems that Brooks had the exact same idea as Levinger, namely to provide a bitingly satirical “transcript” of the Roberts confirmation hearings. Not only did the Brooks piece outshine Levinger’s stylistically, it was published on Sept. 15, three days before the submission deadline on the September 20 Tech.
*Ian Z. Jacobi ’06*

Author’s Response: While I acknowledge the similarity between David Brooks’ column and my own, the truth is that I had not read his before I submitted my own. I assure the readers that I was unaware of either the topic or the text of Brooks’ column. *Josh Levinger*

The son of a rabbi and an author, Sam was an adventuresome child. At the age of eight he ran away from his home in Delaware to re-enact the story of Huckleberry Finn, floating south on the Mississippi. He didn’t get very far. His family were active liberals and anti-fascists, not Communists. His parents supported both Franklin Delanor Roosevelt & Norman Thomas, a socialist candidate for president in 1936. They were proud defenders of striking workers. When Sam was fourteen, he ran away to join a coal workers strike in Kentucky. He was the sole person to be arrested for “talking back” to the sheriff.

At a May Day Parade in New York City in 1936, he carried on his shoulders a young child named Staughton Lynd, who grew up to be a prominent social and labor activist, and professor at Yale University. In a 1998 address to the Friends of Kent State University Libraries, Lynd said the following about his memory of Sam:

“When I was five or six years old, a young man named Sam Levinger carried me on his shoulders in a May Day parade in New York City. Later that year Sam Levinger went to Spain as a volunteer for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. As a child I was told that he was wounded in the groin by machine gun fire, and died because medical supplies were inadequate.

Recently I was asked to review a book on the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and learned more facts about Sam Levinger. He came from Columbus, and attended Ohio State. His father was a rabbi. For the last sixty years I have assumed that Sam Levinger was a Communist, as were most of the volunteers for the Lincoln Brigade. Now I learn that he was a member of the Young Peoples Socialist League, as I might have been had I been fifteen years older. I learned the date and place that he was fatally wounded: in August 1937, at Belchite. These facts are all new to me, but the inward, essential meaning of Sam Levinger’s life and death became part of me as a child. I do not even actually remember being carried on his shoulders. Like so much of oral history, it was told to me, and I accepted it as true, and it was true. Levinger touched my life, teaching me without words that one should be prepared to give one’s all for an ideal.”

Sam wanted to use his experience in Spain to further his writing. He was collecting material for his future career as a professional writer; the talents for which he certainly had. Here is an article published in The Nation under the pseudonym “RP.” I have been told by my mother that it was actually written by Sam. Reproducing this article is probably in violation of copyright law, but given that the date of publication is 1937, I doubt anyone will care. Sam’s war journal was published posthumously in the now-defunct Columbia Dispatch. Rabbi Mark Samuel Hurvitz, whose middle name comes (partly) from my great-Uncle’s, tracked down a copy and transcribed and posted it.

Sitting down with Mother and searching through her collection of family papers, we found a half finished manuscript of a book my great-grandmother had started to write about her son. Elma Ehrlich Levinger was a well published author of children’s and Jewish stories, and she intended to memorialize Sam by telling his story. Her book was never published, but my mother or I may resume the task in the future.

I wrote a research paper on the Spanish Civil War when I was in high school, for which I received second place in the annual American History Essay Contest. (I was bested by the inimitable Jared Malsin, the kind of person who, had he been born 75 years ago, might also have joined the International Brigades to fight fascism.) Given that I wrote this as a sophomore in high school, it doesn’t comport to my current standards of research or writing, but it’s worth posting for the sake of completeness.

Here is a copy of his last letter home, informing his parents that he was going back to the front from a hospital in Madrid. It is a truly stoic piece of writing, almost to the point of being glib. Without ever having known Sam, I have no reference point to compare it with. But it does compare with the standard Levinger humor: always biting, revealing the truth of a situation, even in the worst of times.

Sam’s idealism and courage were far above that of the average 20 year old, and I am honored by the knowledge that some of the same blood flows in my veins. I am inspired by his sacrifice in the face of evil, and I dedicate myself to the pursuit of social justice in his memory. ¡No Pasaran!

Samuel Harold Levinger (1917-1937)

My cherished home state of Vermont has no such restriction, but there are sadly no bars on that side of the river anywhere near my hometown.

To the state of New Hampshire, you can’t keep me down any longer! I will exercise my right to abuse my liver as I see fit, drive a motorcycle without a helmet, and dye margarine pink. This agression will not stand, I am drawing a line in the sand. The Freestaters can have NH, I’ll remain a Green Mountain Boy ’till the day I die.

The trigger for the recent violence was the bombing of the Shiite shrine at Samarra on February 22nd. This attack, presumably carried out by Sunnis trying to foment sectarian violence, lead to days of protests and riots that killed over 200 civilians. Reprisal killings of journalists, professionals, and government officials have claimed at least 1,000 in the last two months. These are throes all right, but far from the last.

A generally accepted social science definition of civil war is: “Sustained military combat, primarily internal, resulting in at least 1,000 battle-deaths per year, pitting central government forces against an insurgent force capable of effective resistance…” (Henderson and Singer, “Civil War in the Post-Colonial World, 1946-92,” Journal of Peace Research, May 2000). Iraq fits every clause of this definition. While there are foreign fighters, the majority of the violence is perpetrated by Iraqis against Iraqis. We cannot blame this violence on Iran, or Syria, or al-Qaeda, only ourselves. Prime Minister Iyad Allawi notes that “We are losing each day as an average 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more.” This is a significant increase over the baseline rate of about 30 Iraqi military casualties per day during 2004 (Department of Defense, “Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq,” 17 February 2006, p27). The insurgent force is clearly capable of offensive actions against the government, and they have infiltrated the Iraqi security apparatus so thoroughly that they are often aware of American counter-attacks as soon as the order is issued to move.

Why is the Bush administration trying so hard to maintain the aura of control over this rapidly disintegrating situation? Because the moment it becomes clear that this is indeed a civil war, our mission to promote democracy becomes null and void. When democracy fails to take root, and protracted sectarian violence takes hold, American and allied public support for an winnable war will plummet. Spending blood and treasure to fight a civil war is not quite the mission we signed up for.

Sadly, because we started this conflagration, we bear the responsibility for what happens when, not if, we leave. While a permanent American presence in Iraq is being built and planned for, it is not our long term goal to patrol the streets. A friendly Iraq was supposed to be a check against Iran, and a beacon of liberty in a region darkened by autocracy. An Iraq mired in civil war doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the righteousness of the American way.

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell stated this dilemma as the “Pottery Barn Rule”: You break it, you buy it. We certainly broke this vase, but do we have the skill or ? In the coming Iraqi civil war, whose side will we be on? We have placed our faith so far in the Shia, but do we dare trust the young rebel cleric Moqtada al-Sadr? His Mahdi Army was responsible for the uprisings of August 2004 and our subsequent siege of Fallujah. Or perhaps the ruling Sciri party (Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution In Iraq), which was founded in the intellectual heritage of Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979. This is the party of the current Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, who is currently in the process of being forced out by Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. Under his leadership, the Parliament has failed to form a government for the last three months. Remember that election in Janurary? They still haven’t actually formed a coalition. Could we back the Kurds, who we helped save from Saddam with our Northern No-Fly Zone during the inter-war containment? But they are now self sufficient, with their own private army, the Pershmerga. If they can control Kirkuk, and its oil wealth, they have no need for a united Federal Iraq. An independent Kurdistan would infuriate the Turks, who continue to repress their eastern Kurdish minority.

Clearly none of our putative allies are convincing champions of democracy, and we have no horse to back in this race. Even if you’re not up on your Iraqi politics, there’s no denying that the situation looks abysmal. Every ethnic group has their own agenda, and none are entirely friendly to the United States. Even if we were to choose a side, no one wants to be on ours.

As Iraq slowly crumbles, we will continue to pass the buck. In the eyes of the Bush administration, it’s the Iraqi’s fault that they couldn’t create a modern society out of the wreckage Saddam left them. Never mind that we never gave them the security or the support they needed, or that the one crucial decision of disbanding the Iraqi army essentially created the insurgency.

Leaving Iraq in a civil war will have profound repercussions in the region, none of them good. Iran may exert it’s influence more directly, creating another state ruled by sharia. Turkey may invade to stop the creation of a Kurdish state. And Israel won’t be happy about yet another unfriendly pocket of violence in their neighborhood.

We have failed the Iraqi people. When we pull out and leave them with a country in pieces, perhaps even worse than before the our ill-planned invasion, we will have only ourselves to blame.

–

Published in the April 7, 2006 edition of The Tech.

Check out the fancy new stuff I can do, like have a Gallery embedded in the blog.