Alger Hiss should remind us to say as little as possible

by philg

Alger Hiss is covered in The Great Trials of World History and the Lessons They Teach Us, by Douglas Linder.

I dimly remembered the Alger Hiss case as a prelude to McCarthyism, but the case turns out to be a compelling example of what not to do.

Hiss was almost certainly guilty of working for the Soviets, but he couldn’t have been prosecuted for that due to a five-year statute of limitations on treason/espionage (at the rate that Robert Mueller’s investigation is going, let’s hope that this is extended for Donald Trump!). From the course notes:

In the 46 years that Alger Hiss lived after his perjury conviction, he
never departed from his claim of innocence. But he and his supporters
found their case weakened in the mid-1990s with the release of the
Venona cables, intercepted communications sent to Moscow by Soviet
agents in the United States. The intercepted cables suggested that Hiss
was a Soviet agent who had supported the Communist cause at the
1945 Yalta Conference.

Hiss would have gotten away with everything if he hadn’t denied via letter and then via testimony in Congress that he was a working Communist. He claimed never to have met Whittaker Chambers, a guy who told Richard Nixon that Hiss and his wife were birdwatchers and “had once been excited to spot a prothonotary warbler.”

A turning point in the investigation came when Richard Nixon asked,
“What hobby, if any, do you have, Mr. Hiss?” Hiss answered that his
hobbies were “tennis and amateur ornithology.” Congressman John
McDowell jumped in: “Did you ever see a prothonotary warbler?” Hiss
fell into the trap. He answered enthusiastically, “I have—right here
on the Potomac. Do you know that place?” This response convinced
previously skeptical committee members that Chambers had been
telling the truth.

Hiss then went so far as to sue Chambers for slander and discovery in that case revealed “65 typewritten copies of State Department documents, and five strips of microfilm featuring photographs of State and Navy Department documents.” Chambers had actually been trying to spare his former friend and Communist comrade Hiss from a lot of embarrassment.

From the course notes:

The confrontation between Chambers and Hiss initiated a polarization
of the political left and the political right. Chambers saw the world as
a battle between godless Communists and Christian anticommunists,
between darkness and light. Liberals largely rejected this division as
arrogant and overly simplistic.

I’m not sure that we can attribute today’s political divisions to the struggles against Communism in the 1940s and 1950s. For one thing, a larger percentage of the U.S. economy is centrally planned than the Russian or Chinese economies.

But the Hiss case certainly shows the virtues of keeping quiet about past misdeeds! (The course also covers the prosecution of Oscar Wilde, which never would have happened if Wilde hadn’t first sued a friend’s father for libel in the form of a note calling him “a posing sodomite.”)

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Scottsboro Boys: scientific evidence was not persuasive

by philg

One idea that we have these days is that DNA evidence and scientific evidence in general is the gold standard for a jury.

One thing I learned The Great Trials of World History and the Lessons They Teach Us, by Douglas Linder, a professor at the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Law, is that the trial of the Scottsboro Boys included excellent scientific evidence.

From Wikipedia:

The Scottsboro Boys were nine African American teenagers, ages 13 to 20, falsely accused in Alabama of raping two White American women on a train in 1931. The landmark set of legal cases from this incident dealt with racism and the right to a fair trial. The cases included a lynch mob before the suspects had been indicted, all-white juries, rushed trials, and disruptive mobs. It is commonly cited as an example of a miscarriage of justice in the United States legal system.

The U.S. Communist Party took over the defense of these guys. From the course notes:

The star prosecution witness was Victoria Price. Direct examination was brief, lasting only 16 minutes. Price recounted her trip to Chattanooga, a fight that had broken out on the train between white and black youths (the reason the train was stopped in the first place), and the alleged gang rape. Prosecutor Knight’s strategy was to cover the essential facts in a condensed, unadorned way. He wanted to minimize opportunities for defense attorneys to expose contradictions with the more detailed story Price had told in the first trials.

Leibowitz’s cross-examination of Price was merciless. His questions suggested his answers. She never, as she claimed, stayed at Callie Brochie’s boardinghouse in Chattanooga. There was no boardinghouse, no Callie Brochie. Semen that had been found in Price’s vagina came not from rape on a train, but from an adulterous encounter with a man named Jack Tiller two days earlier.

Dr. R. R. Bridges, the Scottsboro doctor who examined the girls less than two hours after the alleged rapes, was the next prosecution witness to take the stand. He turned out to be a better witness for the defense. He confirmed that semen was found in the vaginas of the two women, but observed that the semen contained no live sperm—even though sperm generally survive for 12 to 48 hours after intercourse. On cross-examination, Bridges admitted that the women were both calm, composed, and free of bleeding and vaginal damage when he had examined them two hours after the alleged rape.

Even without modern DNA evidence, therefore, the jury could have acquitted these guys on scientific grounds. There was conflicting evidence from the two women at the second trial:

The defense’s final witness was Ruby Bates, who said that she suffered from a troubled conscience after her testimony in the first trial and had returned to tell the truth about what happened. Bates testified that there was no rape, that none of the defendants touched her or even spoke to her. She said that her allegation had been made up after Price told her “to frame up a story” to avoid morals charges.

(Not as confusing as the first trial, in which one defendant said that the rapes had occurred, but were perpetrated by the other defendants. From Wikipedia: “Defendant Clarence Norris stunned the courtroom by implicating the other defendants. He denied participating in the fight or being in the gondola car where the fight took place. But he said that he saw the alleged rapes by the other blacks from his spot atop the next boxcar”)

So we do have a lot more scientific tools at our disposal these days, but it seems that there was plenty of science back in the 1930s and it wasn’t enough to keep these guys out of jail.

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States radically diverging in terms of immigrant percentage

by philg

This chart shows that, as of 5-10 years ago, the experience of living in California would involve finding an immigrant family in every fourth house (3 native-born families and then 1 immigrant).

The experience of living in Ohio, on the other hand, would involve finding 1 immigrant family per every 25 houses. In West Virginia it would be 1 per every 70 families.

(These per-house numbers need to be tweaked since fertility and family size are different for immigrant and native-born Americans, but I was too lazy to do the arithmetic. There is some state-by-state data available on this.)

(All of these percentages are likely higher in 2018 due to historically high levels of immigration continuing; see Pew Research for the trend since 1990. My home state of Massachusetts went from 9.5 percent immigrant to 15.1 percent over a 22-year period. My birth state of Maryland went from 6.6 percent to 14.1.)

I wonder if this partly explains why Americans feel that they don’t have as much in common as they used to. When it comes to encountering immigrants as co-workers, neighbors, friends, competitors for jobs and real estate, etc., they really don’t have that much in common, especially if we were to zoom down to the county level. Americans are essentially living in different countries, one of which is substantially made up of immigrants and one of which is substantially made up of native-born people.

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Hillary Clinton says 333,000 immigrants per year is bad for Europe…

by philg

…. but 1+ million migrants per year is good for the U.S.?

“Hillary Clinton: Europe must curb immigration to stop rightwing populists” (Guardian):

“I think Europe needs to get a handle on migration because that is what lit the flame,” Clinton said, speaking as part of a series of interviews with senior centrist political figures about the rise of populists, particularly on the right, in Europe and the Americas.

“I admire the very generous and compassionate approaches that were taken particularly by leaders like Angela Merkel, but I think it is fair to say Europe has done its part, and must send a very clear message – ‘we are not going to be able to continue provide refuge and support’ – because if we don’t deal with the migration issue it will continue to roil the body politic.”

Clinton’s remarks are likely to prove controversial across Europe, which has struggled to form a unified position ever since more than 1 million migrants and refugees arrived in the EU in 2015.

The EU population is 508 million. So 1 million migrants since 2015 is a much lower percentage of the total population than the roughly 1 million immigrants per year into the U.S. (population 330 million).

The apparent contradiction between Hillary’s opposition to Donald Trump in the U.S. and her opposition to migrants in Europe was addressed a day later. “Hillary Clinton calls for reform, ‘not open borders,’ in explaining European migration remarks” (NBC):

“Maybe Hillary has understood the lesson,” Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the far-right Brothers of Italy party, told The New York Times. “If you don’t control migration it will affect mostly poor people, people living on the outskirts, working classes.”

The “EU needs a more comprehensive policy that builds societies that are both secure and welcoming,” she continued.

“On both sides of the Atlantic, we need reform. Not open borders, but immigration laws enforced with fairness and respect for human rights. We can’t let fear or bias force us to give up the values that have made our democracies both great and good,” she wrote.

“Can’t just keep doing the same things.”

“There are solutions to migration that do not require clamping down on the press, on your political opponents and trying to suborn the judiciary, or seeking financial and political help from Russia to support your political parties and movements.”

But what are the solutions? Hillary is keeping them secret until she is elected President?

I thought about this during a recent trip to Montgomery County, Maryland (DC suburb). All of my Uber drivers were immigrants. None spoke English fluently. One driver had immigrated from El Salvador 13 years ago and  didn’t speak English well enough to qualify for legal immigration to Canada, for example. It looks as though a family of four is entitled to welfare (e.g., housing subsidies) if earning less than $89,850 per year (table). If you consider subsidized health insurance to be welfare, the income number for a family of 4 in Maryland is $100,400 per year (March 1, 2018). How are people who don’t speak English going to earn enough to get off welfare? And, if they can’t get off welfare, why will existing taxpayers in Maryland welcome more immigrants at the same skill level?

What is the grand theory supporting the current policy? That the children of someone who couldn’t learn English in 13 years are going to be above-median learners and earners?

Or maybe this is just adverse selection? Immigrants who are really bad at learning languages differentially choose to drive Ubers? The rest of the El Salvadorans who came 13 years ago are executives now?

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New York governor admits that a rational business would locate in Texas

by philg

“A $2 Billion Question: Did New York and Virginia Overpay for Amazon?” (nytimes):

Gov. Andrew Cuomo defended the deal, arguing that New York has to offer incentives because of its comparatively high taxes. At 6.5 percent, New York’s corporate income-tax rate is only modestly higher than Virginia’s 6 percent, according to the Tax Foundation. But other business and individual taxes are higher in New York.

“It’s not a level playing field to begin with,” Mr. Cuomo said in an interview Tuesday. “All things being equal, if we do nothing, they’re going to Texas.”

In the history of the U.S., how many times has a governor admitted that, absent special treatment, a company would be better off locating in a different state?

[Separately, any family court plaintiff suing an Amazon worker will be very grateful that the company didn’t move everyone into Texas, where the profitability of a child is capped at about $20,000 per year and “lifetime alimony” typically turns into “no alimony”.]

Related:

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Seventeen years later and we still have a September 11 security fee?

by philg

If you’re traveling today, God help you!

I made it back to Boston from Denver via United Airlines on Wednesday. Buried in the fine print of a “Fare Breakdown” was “September 11th Security Fee: $11.20”. There is also “U.S. Passenger Facility Charge: $9.00”

It has been 17 years since 9/11. Why do we still pay a fee associated with that event? The TSA is not temporary. If we have a permanent high cost of going through an airport, shouldn’t that just be added to the “facility charge”? That would make it an even $20.

Inquiring minds want to know!

(Separately, my hotel in downtown Denver tacked on a mandatory “resort fee” that added roughly 10 percent to the cost of the stay. What stops them from selling rooms at $1 via Orbitz or Expedia and then using fine print to note that there will be a mandatory $175/night “resort fee”?)

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Socrates was not tried for being annoying…

by philg

According to The Great Trials of World History and the Lessons They Teach Us, by Douglas Linder, a professor at the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Law.

My dim memory of Classical history was that Socrates was put on trial for asking annoying questions and making people uncomfortable.

Linder’s view, however, is that Socrates was primarily prosecuted for his hostility to democracy and support for Alcibiades and the Thirty Tyrants. Supporters of the tyrants couldn’t be prosecuted for their support per se due to an amnesty, so Athenians went after Socrates on other charges. From the course notes:

Athenians considered the teachings of Socrates—especially his disdain for the established constitution—partially responsible for the death and suffering during those two awful periods. Thugs with daggers and whips roamed the streets, murdering opponents. Many of Athens’s leading citizens went into exile, where they organized a resistance movement. It is no coincidence that Anytus, the likely instigator of the prosecution of Socrates, was among the exiles.

Socrates, unbowed by the revolts and their aftermaths, resumed his teachings. Once again, it appears, he began attracting a band of youthful followers. The final straw may well have been another antidemocratic uprising—this one unsuccessful—in 401. Athenians finally had had enough of their know-it-all busybody. It was time to send a message that the city would do whatever it took to defend its precious democracy.

Anytus, on the other hand, was a well-known politician, highly influential, and the driving force behind the prosecution. Anytus had a number of reasons to be upset with Socrates, including Socrates’s (likely sexual) relationship with Anytus’s son and the philosopher’s antidemocratic political message.

The professor also points out that the Salem Witch Trials conveniently often pitted low-wealth accusers against high-wealth defendants, whose property often ended up in the hands of the accusers after the inevitable hanging. Also, something I hadn’t heard before: accusers and defendants were generally those who’d been on opposite sides of a schism in the local church.

The lecture on the Trials of Oscar Wilde was also interesting.

An 1885 law criminalized acts of “gross indecency,” which had been interpreted to apply to any form of sexual activity between members of the same sex. Interestingly, the 1885 law was widely seen at the time of its passage as progressive legislation. Prior to 1885, sexual assaults on boys over the age of 13 that fell short of rape were not crimes at all. The law was passed to protect boys from preying adults, not to punish consenting adults.

Prior to Wilde’s trials, prosecutions for consensual homosexuality in England were about as rare as they were in the United States at the end of the 20th century. What offended Victorian society about Wilde’s conduct was not so much that it involved sex with other males, but that Wilde had sex with a large number of young male prostitutes. Wilde was not prosecuted because he was the lover of a social equal who happened to be male; he was prosecuted for his participation in a somewhat indiscreet prostitution ring

This guy is a great lecturer. If you’re looking for inspiration to go to law school (at the University of Missouri at least), look no further!

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If we’re so rich, why aren’t we better off?

by philg

Thanksgiving weekend seems like a good time to ponder the big picture.

Here are a couple of potentially helpful articles. From Newsweek:

The United States has spent nearly $6 trillion on wars that directly contributed to the deaths of around 500,000 people since the 9/11 attacks of 2001.

Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs published its annual “Costs of War” report Wednesday, taking into consideration the Pentagon’s spending and its Overseas Contingency Operations account, as well as “war-related spending by the Department of State, past and obligated spending for war veterans’ care, interest on the debt incurred to pay for the wars, and the prevention of and response to terrorism by the Department of Homeland Security.”

The final count revealed, “The United States has appropriated and is obligated to spend an estimated $5.9 trillion (in current dollars) on the war on terror through Fiscal Year 2019, including direct war and war-related spending and obligations for future spending on post 9/11 war veterans.”

This could explain why many Americans aren’t all that thankful. The economy has grown, but $6 trillion of the growth has been spent on something that does not make us better off.

“Taxpayers Cannot Afford More Subsidies For The Middle-Class” (Forbes):

The federal government spends about $4 trillion per year. Of that, somewhere around $3 trillion is what economists call transfer payments. A transfer payment is when the government just takes money from one person (through taxes or borrowing) and gives it to somebody else. Social security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare payments, farm programs, corporate welfare, and the like are all transfer payments which simply redistribute money.

Middle-class benefits are an entirely different story, however. The bottom 75% of households by income pay only about 13% of all income taxes. If we define the middle-class as the 70% of households below the top 10% and above the bottom 20% of households by income, the middle-class only pays about 29% of all income taxes, according to IRS data.

Because the middle-class doesn’t pay much in taxes and because they are the largest in number, there is no way to pay for generous benefits for that many people. Today, the middle-class is collecting around $2 trillion per year in federal transfer payments. Yet, even accounting for payroll taxes, they are only paying taxes of $1 or $1.1 trillion per year (29% of all individual income taxes and about 50% of all payroll taxes). Thus, the rich are already fully paying for all the benefits to themselves and to the poor, plus around half of the benefits to the middle-class.

Another reason why we might not be thankful is that many of us expect more than is theoretically possible given the size of our economy. Also, a huge amount of these transfer payments is devoted to subsidizing an inefficient health care industry. So beneficiaries of Medicaid, Medicare, and Obamacare subsidies are not actually benefitting as much as we might expect given the spending levels.

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Thankful we don’t have lynch mobs anymore

by philg

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

After listening to The Great Trials of World History and the Lessons They Teach Us, by Douglas Linder, a professor at the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Law, I’m thankful that we don’t have lynch mobs anymore.

The course covers United States v. Shipp, a criminal contempt case tried by the U.S. Supreme Court that grew out of the almost-surely-wrongful conviction and then lynching of Ed Johnson, a man whom multiple witnesses placed at his place of work when a woman was raped. From the course notes:

The first witness for the defense was Ed Johnson. Johnson spoke in what observers call “a strange voice” and grabbed the arms of his chair with both hands. He denied having attacked Nevada Taylor. Johnson testified that he spent the evening in question working as a poolroom  porter at the Last Chance Saloon. He said he had arrived around 4:30 pm and stayed until approximately 10:00 pm, which would have made it impossible for him to rape Nevada Taylor at 6:00 pm. Thirteen witnesses followed Johnson to the stand. Each one swore that he had seen Johnson at the saloon during the time Johnson claimed to be there.

The defense moved on to attack the credibility of Will Hixson. One defense witness testified that two days after the rape, Will Hixson had asked him the name of a black man doing some roofing work at a church. When he told Hixson the roofer’s name was Ed Johnson, Hixson asked him for a physical description—an odd thing to ask about someone Hixson would then identify as the suspect.

The most dramatic event of the Johnson trial occurred on its third and final day. At the request of jurors, Nevada Taylor was recalled to the witness stand. During questioning, a juror rose and asked, “Miss Taylor, can you state positively that this Negro is the one who assaulted you?” Taylor answered, “I will not swear he is the man, but I believe he is the Negro who assaulted me.”

The juror was not satisfied. He asked again: “In God’s name, Miss Taylor, tell us positively—is that the guilty Negro? Can you say it? Can you swear it?” Tears streamed down Taylor’s face. She answered in a quivering voice: “Listen to me. I would not take the life of an innocent man. But before God, I believe this is the guilty Negro.”

The U.S. Supreme Court grants an appeal. The Chattanooga sheriff responds by sending all but one jail guards home for the night, a prearrangement with the mob leaders. The mob then breaks into the jail and drags Johnson out to be lynched off a bridge over the Tennessee River. Johnson died in an almost saintly manner:

Johnson’s last words were: “I am ready to die. But I never done it. I am going to tell the truth. I am not guilty. I have said all the time that I did not do it and it is true. I was not there … God bless you all. I am innocent.” When Johnson was dead, a leader of the mob pinned a note to his body: “To Justice Harlan. Come and get your [n-word] now.”

(Lawyers tend to be more plainspoken than laypeople. The professor actually uses the n-word both in the audio (bleeped out) and in the notes! He did not get the memo about Jonathan Friedland!)

The guys who faciliated the lynching and/or perpetrated it were sentenced to either 60 or 90 days in jail and then returned home to hero’s welcomes (a crowd of 10,000 welcomed Sheriff Joseph Shipp, for example).

So… this year I’m thankful that our society has moved beyond real-world lynch mobs, even if Facebook and Twitter can now facilitate virtual ones.

(The whole lecture series is worth buying, in my opinion just for this one lecture.)

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How many adult New Yorkers can live off a gay black youth?

by philg

Some of my Facebook friends posted in outrage over a synagogue in New York City being defaced with graffiti by a guy named “James Polite” (you can’t make this stuff up!). To them this was further proof of Donald Trump’s unfitness for the office of President. The Democrat-for-most-of-his-life and native New Yorker has been generating a tidal wave of Jew-hatred (especially bad because it takes away energy from the more important task of Israel-hatred to which many of these Trump opponents are devoted?) and plainly this graffiti incident was Trump-inspired.

The discussion motivated checking out “After Years in Foster Care, Intern ‘Adopted’ by City Hall Catches a Break” (nytimes, Dec 14, 2017):

In 2008, at a gay pride rally for Mr. Obama, Mr. Polite met Christine C. Quinn, then the City Council speaker.

Ms. Quinn still remembers their introduction on the steps of City Hall. “James was telling me his story,” she recalled recently in an interview. “And I said, ‘Do you have an internship?’ And he said ‘No.’ And I said, ‘Well, you do now.’”

He interned with Ms. Quinn, a Manhattan Democrat, for several years, working on initiatives to combat hate crime, sexual assault and domestic violence. He also took part in her re-election campaign in 2009 and returned to help with her unsuccessful bid for mayor in 2013.

He was placed with a foster family in Queens. His mother regained custody of him when he was in the third grade.

But he felt pressure mounting as he neared his 21st birthday, which would mark the end of foster care services, including money for room and board.

Months before that birthday, a Brooklyn couple learned about the possibility of fostering him. The couple, Josh Waletzky and Jenny Levison, said they had wanted to foster an “L.G.B.T.Q. youth” on the brink of aging out of the system.

(in others, the expert on fighting hate crime is now accused of perpetrating one).

The article carries a fun correction:

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article referred incompletely to the type of youth whom Josh Waletzky and Jenny Levison sought to foster. It was an “L.G.B.T.Q. youth” on the brink of aging out of the system, not merely a gay youth.

Based on just this one article, let’s see how many adult New Yorkers were mining the resources of a black gay (or “LGBTQ”) youth:

  • the mother (no father is mentioned and, depending on the income of their former sex partner, “single mothers” usually receive either welfare benefits, such as free housing, health care, and food, or child support cash under New York family law)
  • bureaucrats in the New York foster care industry
  • various foster parents, each of whom would be getting paid (table of rates by state)
  • employees of the Children’s Aid non-profit org
  • Christine C. Qunn, who got positive political spin from employing this guy
  • the final foster parents who snagged the laurels associated with an “LGBTQ youth” only “months” before his 21st birthday.

I’m wondering if this shows a path to boost one’s social standing among Manhattanites. Foster a “child” from a fashionable victim group two days before the child turns 21. Then spin the tale of being a foster parent to an LGBTQ youth or South Sudanese refugee or former child soldier at cocktail parties, neglecting to mention that the foster arangement lasted only two days.

Related:

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