The Progressive Zone

Jihadis are Muslim

Over the years, I’ve taken the position that Jihadis are not representative of Islam because they comprise such a small percentage of all Muslims. While I know little about Islam, I believe that most Muslims are peace-loving and condemn the militant actions of Jihad. It seemed unfair to me that 1.6-billion Muslims who are predominantly moderate should be painted with the brush of the few extremists.

But I had a recent epiphany that has me rethinking that position. Ironically, it came out of conversations I’ve had correcting people who claim that Barack Obama is Muslim. When I mention to a Christian woman I know that he is Christian, she counters that, no, Obama is not Christian. This woman does not believe that Obama is Muslim (as 29% of Americans do) and she knows that he proclaims himself to be Christian. She bases her assertion that he is not Christian on the fact that the Christian doctrine he believes in differs significantly from the doctrine in which her Christian sect believes (she is a Messianic Jew).

The problem with establishing someone’s faith this way is that there could never be universal agreement about a person’s faith. I explained to the woman—who considers herself to be a devout Christian—that Obama might claim that she is not a “true” Christian because she does not celebrate Christmas or Easter (and if Obama wouldn’t contest it, there are millions of other professed Christians who would). Since there is such great potential for disagreement among purported authorities in a faith that a given person is a true believer in the faith, it’s not possible to effectively communicate about a person’s faith based on some “authority’s” determination. The only way you can unambiguously communicate about someone’s faith is by conceding—at least for the sake of that conversation—that the person’s faith is the one he (or she) himself proclaims it to be.

Getting back to Jihadis, I realized that I was doing the same thing that this woman was doing. Even though most Jihadis strongly believe that they are practicing true Islam when making a terrorist attack, I was countering that, no, Jihadis are not “true” Muslims. Well, I can no longer have my cake and eat it too. If a Jihadi professes to be Muslim, I have to concede that they are Muslim. I must accept that the Jihadi is Muslim to fully understand the motivations behind their actions, even if it is to discuss whether or not Jihad is permitted by Islam.

The path of most resistance

Back in September, President Barack Obama called for the USA to accept at least 10,000 Syrian refugees in the next year. Since then, there have been cries from all levels of government to not permit this immigration from Syria. Not surprisingly, those cries have increased and gotten louder since ISIS perpetrated the terrorist attack on Paris earlier this month.

I sympathize with most of the people voicing those sentiments. While some criticize the plan simply to oppose the president, most sincerely feel that their security would be threatened by Syrian refugees in the USA. They are concerned for the safety of their loved ones. The problem with this sentiment is that it’s based on faulty logic—it would not help prevent a terrorist attack in the USA.

Yes, as the name Islamic State of Iraq & Syria implies, ISIS occupies portions of Syria. And yes, ISIS uses terrorism to control Syrians and terrorize people like the French and Russian. But if an ISIS terrorist wanted to attack inside the USA, posing as a Syrian refugee would be the last method he would use to enter the USA. Just about any other way in would be more suitable for a terrorist. That’s why the odds of being killed by a refugee in a terrorist attack are about 1 in more than 3.6-billion, according to a Cato Institute study (PDF).

The process for a Syrian refugee to resettle in the USA is long and arduous, involving numerous federal agencies and intense background checks. It must begin in a refugee camp run by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) somewhere outside of but neighboring Syria. After registering with them, not only does the UNHCR decide whether it will resettle the refugee at all, it also decides to which country it refers the refugees who get resettled. Well over 95% of Syrian refugees resettle in five Muslim countries around Syria. Only about 0.05% of the 4.3-million Syrian refugees have arrived in the USA.

For the small number of Syrian refugees the UNHCR refers to the USA, the U. S. Department of State takes over the admissions process. But they do so in the refugee camp—it will be about two years before the refugee makes it to the USA. In the meantime, they undergo the most rigorous screening of any traveler to the USA and only about half of them will be accepted. They have an adjudication interview then, in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security, they conduct an enhanced security screening on refugees from Syria. If the refugee passes all this, they undergo a health screening and those with a contagious disease, such as tuberculosis, do not enter the USA. A U.S.-based resettlement agency provides a “sponsorship assurance” before those that can clear all these hurdles steps foot on American soil.

It’s far faster and easier for someone to enter the USA as a tourist, a student, or a businessman—and with less scrutiny—than it is as a refugee. Any Syrian wanting to commit an act of terrorism inside the USA would follow the path of least resistance to get here, which would be just about any method other than as a refugee. A terrorist could easily get a counterfeit Syrian passport in just a few days for less than $1,000 in places like Istanbul. The only people who would take all the time and deal with all the difficulties of the refugee process to get to the USA are Syrians desperate to escape the terrorists in their homeland.

Doonesbury comic strip about Jihadis entering the USA as a refugee — Doonesbury

The right way for USA to deal with ISIS aggression

The Islamic State of Iraq & Syria, more commonly known by its acronym ISIS, has recently begun attacking western targets. It bombed a Russian passenger airliner flying over Egypt last month, killing everyone on board, then staged a multi-point attack in Paris, killing well over a hundred civilians last week. How should the USA respond now that ISIS is expanding its attacks outside the territory it currently occupies? It should end all military activity against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

That is neither a retreat nor a defeat. It’s the smart move to stop throwing good money after bad. The USA has been leading a costly aerial bombing campaign against ISIS for over a year but has not significantly impacted the situation on the ground. There’s no evidence that a continued or even a stepped-up air campaign would substantially degrade ISIS’s power but every indication that it would result in the deaths of non-ISIS residents in the region via collateral damage.

ISIS does not pose an impending threat in America, so the USA should definitely not deploy any American troops on the ground in Iraq or Syria. If we learned anything from the Vietnam War, it should be that putting small numbers of special forces on the ground in another country’s civil war is likely to escalate to a large presence. In that case, ISIS could simply blend into the community, requiring the USA to occupy the territory indefinitely to maintain security, just as occurred during the Iraq War. It’s often said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

ISIS will only be defeated when people on the ground rise up against them. The people under occupation by ISIS are more likely to rise up if they believe that the USA will not get involved in the conflict. The USA should even leave the air campaign because there are already Muslim nations in the region with sufficient air strike capability to support a ground campaign. The neighboring Muslim countries should also put boots on the ground fighting ISIS.

I’m not confident that ISIS would be more effectively defeated without the USA involved but I don’t think the situation would get substantially worse, either, without the USA in the war. And there’s no indication that ISIS would be defeated if the USA were to continue its air campaign as it has been the past year. Pulling out of the war on ISIS would be neither a victory by nor a defeat of the USA but sometimes a victory is not the best alternative. A victory of the USA over ISIS is well within the capacity of the American military but it would result in substantial negative and costly consequences, including the loss of many American lives and another protracted occupation in the Middle East.

The conflict with ISIS is not the USA’s fight. The USA does not always have to be the world’s police. To be the caliph, Sunni law requires Abu Musa’b al Zarqawi (ISIS’s leader) to have ’amr, or authority. This requires that the caliph have territory in which he can enforce sharia. However, the first amendment of the constitution prevents the USA from qualifying as a territory of the caliphate. That’s why ISIS is attempting to establish the caliphate among Muslim population and that’s why Muslim people need to be the ones to put a stop to ISIS. If Muslims resist al Zarqawi’s authority, he would not think it would be easier to establish his authority in secular lands.

ISIS explicitly stated that the reason for bombing the airliner and attacking Paris is because Russia and France are currently bombing them in the Middle East. If the USA left the fight, ISIS would not have any more justification or motivation to attack it on American soil, thereby making Americans safer from ISIS.

Senator Dianne Feinstein on Social Security disability income

Motivated by news that the Social Security disability trust fund could run dry soon, I wrote to my federal representatives. President Obama was the first to reply to me but I recently received a reply that more directly addresses my concern from Senator Dianne Feinstein. Here is what she had to say:

Dear David:

Thank you for writing to me about Social Security benefits for people with disabilities. Your correspondence is important to me, and I welcome the opportunity to respond.

I recognize that millions of Americans with disabilities rely upon Social Security benefits to maintain their independence and live heathy, productive lives. According to the most recent figures, 709,509 disabled workers, 12,586 spouses, and 128,447 children in California received Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) benefits in 2014, and more than 1.3 million Californians received Supplemental Security Income (SSI) in 2013. I hope that Congress will act to ensure the long-term solvency of these important programs.

The Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) retirement program and DI programs are funded largely by revenue from a dedicated payroll tax collected from both employers and employees and paid into each program’s respective trust fund to earn compounding interest. The 2015 annual report by the Social Security Board of Trustees projects that DI trust fund reserves will be depleted by late 2016. In the absence of Congressional action, this reserve depletion would force the Social Security Administration (SSA) to implement an across-the-board reduction in payments to DI beneficiaries by an estimated 20 percent. This would mean that the average monthly DI benefit for July 2015 would be reduced from $1,022.16 to $817.73 per month.

In the past, Congress has routinely reallocated payroll tax revenue between the OASI trust fund that supports retirees and the much smaller DI trust fund, which supports people with disabilities and their families. Congress has reallocated payroll revenue between the trust funds a total of 11 times since 1968. In five instances Congress transferred payroll tax revenue from the DI trust fund to the OASI trust fund. According to a recent analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a reallocation of payroll tax revenue to put the two trust funds on an even footing would expedite the OASI trust fund’s projected reserve depletion by one year (from 2034 to 2033) while extending the solvency of the DI trust fund by an estimated 17 years (from 2016 to 2033).

You may be interested to know that I am an original cosponsor of the “Social Security Earned Benefits Payment Act of 2015” (S.2090), which was introduced by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) on September 28, 2015. This legislation would reallocate a part of payroll taxes to the Social Security Disability Insurance trust fund to ensure full benefits are paid through the early 2030s. S.2090 currently awaits action by the Committee on Finance, of which I am not a member.

As you may know, the SSI program provides monthly cash assistance to low-income people who are disabled, blind, or elderly with no real financial assets to help those individuals achieve a basic standard of living. Unlike OASI and DI, the SSI program is funded by general tax revenues from the U.S. Treasury and not Social Security payroll taxes. As such, each year Congress authorizes taxpayer funds that are used to pay eligible SSI recipients. Many SSI recipients who have worked long enough and paid payroll taxes are also eligible to receive Social Security benefits.

Please know that I will continue working with my Senate colleagues to preserve Social Security programs for the millions of Americans with disabilities and their families who count on these vital programs.

Again, thank you for your letter. If you have any additional comments or questions, please feel free to contact my Washington, D.C., office at (202) 224-3841 or visit my website at http://feinstein.senate.gov. Best regards.

Sincerely yours,
Dianne Feinstein

I commend Senator Feinstein for co-sponsoring S.2090. Let’s hope the senate Finance Committee advances the bill to the floor.

Jumped the gun

Google indexed this news story three hours ago:

Listing of The Washington Post article in Google News — Biden to launch a presidential campaign

But by the time I hyperlinked to it, the landing page said:

The Washington Post landing page titled "Editor's note" — This file was inadvertently published.

Does The Washington Post know something Joe Biden doesn’t?

Capitalism can coexist with a socialist democracy

When asked if he’s a capitalist, Senator Bernie Sanders says he is not. He doubled down on that claim during the Democratic debate last night when he reasserted it. Instead, Sanders claims to be a democratic socialist.

I think this is a tactical error on Sanders’ part. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being a democratic socialist but Sanders should not disavow capitalism. Sanders should more explicitly recognize that the two philosophies are not mutually exclusive.

He implied as much when Sanders stated that:

“Everybody is in agreement that we are a great entrepreneurial nation. We have got to encourage that. Of course we have to support small- and medium-sized businesses.”

Capitalism is defined as an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state. But this system can exist side-by-side with Bernie Sanders’ view of democratic socialism. Neither has to be (or even should be) an all-or-nothing system.

Sanders only proposes socializing those sectors that capitalism does not do well. For example, private health insurance companies (like those used in Obamacare) have almost a 25% overhead because of the cost of advertising, executive salaries, stock holder dividends, and administrative overhead. Medicare, which is a single-payer system like Sanders proposes, has only a nine percent overhead.

He also proposes using tax dollars to rebuild America’s aging and crumbling infrastructure. If the federal government didn’t do it, no capitalist company would rebuild our highways, bridges, sea & airports, power grid, schools, and telecommunications networks. But without rebuilding the national infrastructure, American companies will be unable to be compete globally in the heart of the 21st century.

While Sanders proposes socializing those sectors and a couple of others, he does not advocate eliminating free enterprise. He explicitly says that we need to support small- and medium-sized companies, calling them the backbone of our economy. He does not call for eliminating investment banking. He just thinks investment banking needs to be regulated like it was under the Glass-Steagall Act because it was the deregulation of the banking industry that led to its near collapse in 2008. Sanders demonstrates that he is a believer in capitalism.

The countries that Bernie Sanders cites as examples of successful socialist democracies all have robust capitalism in their economies. Too bad Sanders doesn’t clearly state that they do. It’s fine for him to say that he is a socialist democrat because he is. But Americans would be more accepting of it if he also said that a foundation of capitalism that builds a strong middle class is critical to a healthy socialist democracy.

Bullshit hater

I find myself regularly defending President Barack Obama against Republicans and other conservatives. So it comes as no surprise that I’m sometimes accused of being an Obama-lover. I’m told that I drink the Kool-Aid served up by the “liberal media.”

As much as I find myself defending President Obama, what is surprising is that I’ve actually criticized him about many serious issues over the years:

I’ve been critical of the Affordable Care Act—better known as Obamacare—since it became law because I see it as a government handout to health insurance companies.
I opposed Obama’s approach to recovering the housing market when he presented his homeowner affordability and stability plan shortly after taking office.
I consider the fact that the detention center at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba is still in operation to be a failed promise by Obama to close it down as soon as he became president.
I believe Obama continues to violate Americans’ right to privacy by authorizing the NSA to gather information about our communiques en masse as they are transmitted over public communications networks.
I strongly oppose the assassinations by drone strikes of people, including American citizens, in countries that are not at war against the USA without allowing the person assassinated due process.

The list could go on but that’s not the point of this article. I think there are plenty of legitimate criticisms that can be levied against President Obama and there is also no lack of grounds and reasoning to defend those criticisms. That’s why it disturbs me to see the endless string of criticisms of Obama coming from the Right that have no validity whatsoever.

A recent example was the speech President Obama gave after the mass shooting at Umpqua College last week. Conservatives quickly denounced the president for opportunistically politicizing the incident to press a gun control agenda. I think a reasonable case can be made that the incident should not be used by the president to advance his agenda. But in almost the same breath, conservatives deride the president for not calling for religious tolerance, as he would have if the shooter had been a Muslim, and instead demands gun control—never mind that he publicly stated no one in the USA should ever be targeted by a shooter because of how they worship. But conservatives can’t have both. If the president uses the incident to call for religious tolerance, he’s politicizing it.

The completely groundless criticism we probably hear most frequently from the Right is that the economy is worse off now than it was when President Obama took office. Do these people not remember that the USA’s economy was teetering on the brink of a total collapse at the end of 2008? The American economy lost 2.6-million jobs that year but has gained almost 8-million of them in the intervening years. The unemployment rate was 7.6% then but is now 5.1%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was around 7,000 when Obama took office but now it’s almost 17,000 and the S&P 500 has increased 157% since then. The Consumer Confidence Index was around 25 when Obama took office and is now over 100. Of course, the most telling statistic is GDP because it’s the basic indicator of a recession. It was contracting before Obama took office and has grown every year since then. By almost every major metric used for the health of the economy, it is in far better shape than it was when George W. Bush handed it off to Obama.

Although it has nothing to do with issues that impact everyday American lives, conservatives often deride President Obama for using the pronouns “I” and “me” excessively in his speeches. The implication is that Obama is narcissistic and self-serving in the presidency. But an objective count paints a very different picture. Just 2.5% of the total words Obama has used in news conferences were first-person singular pronouns—only Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt used them less often since 1929.

Although it’s an older example, conservatives also criticized President Obama for withdrawing from Iraq prematurely. They should have been pointing the finger at George W. Bush instead. It was the Bush administration that established the agreement with Iraq to complete a full withdrawal by the end of 2011 before Obama was elected president.

There will probably be criticisms of President Obama’s patriotism, faith, and birthright citizenship ‘til the day he leaves the Oval Office. Republicans have outright accused him of not loving America and intentionally harming the country. To this day, 43% of Republicans still believe Obama is Muslim. Of course, only Obama himself knows the truth on his patriotism and faith but publicly he has always proclaimed his love for his country and professes to be Christian. He has also released his long-form birth certificate showing he was born in Hawaii (PDF).

The list of invalid or outright false criticisms of President Obama could also go on. They are everywhere in the media and when I see groundless attacks in social media, I find it difficult to resist defending Obama against them. But it’s not because I’m an Obama-lover—it’s because I’m a bullshit hater. Make a legitimate criticism of Barack Obama and I’ll join you in the criticism.

Obama bombs humanitarian aid workers

An airstrike by the US military against a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan yesterday killed twelve Doctors Without Borders staff and seven patients, including three children. Thirty-seven others—nineteen staff members and eighteen patients and caretakers—were injured.

A spokesman for the coalition forces in Afghanistan, Col. Brian Tribus, said the bombing was targeting “individuals threatening the force” but that they “may have caused collateral damage to a nearby health facility.” That does not give you a pass, president Obama. You are the commander in chief and these bombings are made with your authorization. According to the Doctors Without Borders operations chief Bart Janssesns, the coalition forces had known well the location of the hospital for five years. Yet officials said they “frantically phoned” NATO and Washington D.C. as the bombing of the hospital continued for “nearly an hour.”

There’s no excuse for US military forces to be dropping any bombs in Afghanistan. You promised us over a year ago, Mr. President, that US combat operations in Afghanistan would end in December 2014. The Taliban does not pose an imminent threat to the USA. We are not at war against Afghanistan. What legitimate justification can you give us for the slaughter of these humanitarian aid workers?

To be or not to be

That is the question: am I retired or not? I lost my last full-time job over four years ago. Considering myself to be unemployed, I immediately began a concerted job search. I focused on employment because I consider my management skills to be my greatest vocational strength. But at the same time, I also sought contract work to generate some income while seeking employment. If I could build up enough contracts to pay the bills, I was open to becoming permanently self-employed.

Things started out strong. I was getting lots of interest in my résumé and I locked down far more interviews than anyone else I knew seeking employment. I also got a semi-regular part-time job and even some contracts to bring in some income while I was looking for a regular pay check. This work activity helped me to keep my professional chops up. I was also studying for a vocational certificate in Internet marketing. Although I was not working full-time in a permanent role, I was definitely not retired.

The first couple years after losing my job continued like this. I felt like most of my job interviews went real well. Quite a few employers had invited me back for second and even third interviews for some of the positions, making me feel confident I would be extended a job offer. I had also earned the certificate by the end of the second year of my job search, giving me another avenue of employment to pursue. No one had extended me an offer for full-time permanent employment in the first couple years of my job search but I felt like an offer was sure to be forthcoming as long as I kept interviewing at the strong pace I was keeping. I was unemployed but sometimes felt more like I was just under-employed.

After a couple of years had passed since my previous full-time employment, the job interviews began slowing down. I had loosened my standards on the jobs I pursued, willing to take a non-management position in either elearning instructional design or Internet marketing. But I still lined up fewer and fewer interviews. Even my most regular contract work had been taken over by internal employees when the company I had been contracting for was acquired by a larger corporation. But I kept diligently looking for full-time employment and still managed to periodically schedule interviews for some seemingly promising recruitments.

Last month, I hit the four-year mark since losing my last full-time job. By that time, I had interviewed multiple times at a few companies I had been targeting. In a couple of cases, I had even interviewed for the same position that I had interviewed for earlier after it had been vacated again. When I never received a job offer for many positions I was ideally qualified for, I began to think maybe I was facing what I didn’t want to believe I would face from hiring managers—discrimination against me because of my disability, even though it doesn’t impact my performance in the kind of knowledge work I do (my track record of success proves this).

I’ve finally lost the motivation to keep up the search for full-time employment. My efforts seem to be all in vain, so I have tired of making them. Nonetheless, although the bulk of my time is now taken up with leisure activities, I would still much prefer to be working. I find the type of work I do to be more gratifying than my leisure activities. But if I’m not employed and not looking for work, I don’t think I can continue to consider myself unemployed. Although I’m too young to be, it has reached the point that I should start considering myself to be retired.

Ha ha Hajj

More than 700 pilgrims were killed near Mecca in a stampede during Hajj today. As tragic as this was, it was the seventh (but far from the most deadly) such catastrophe at the annual pilgrimage in a quarter century. According to the Saudi Arabian health minister Khalid al Falih, “this is God’s will.” It makes me wonder, is Hajj—a mandatory religious duty for Muslims—God’s idea of a cruel joke?