Advertisement

Think Tanks Wrap-up

WASHINGTON, Dec. 4 (UPI) -- The UPI Think Tank Wrap-Up is a daily digest covering brief opinion pieces, reactions to recent news events, and position statements released by various think tanks.


Institute for Public Accuracy

Advertisement

(The IPA is a nationwide consortium of policy researchers that seeks to broaden public discourse by gaining media access for experts whose perspectives are often overshadowed by major think tanks and other influential institutions.)

The FBI and Domestic Spying

WASHINGTON -- Attorney General John Ashcroft is apparently planning to loosen safeguards that have restricted FBI surveillance of religious and political groups. The following IPA critics have commented upon the move.

-- Nkechi Taifa, director of the Equal Justice Program at the Howard University School of Law.

"Ashcroft would like us to trust the FBI with sweeping new powers. This is the FBI that tried to disrupt and destroy numerous nonviolent organizations ranging from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to the Committee In Solidarity with the People of El Salvador to Students for a Democratic Society. This is the FBI that targeted Martin Luther King and framed Geronimo Pratt with murder. Although the claimed purpose of the Bureau's COINTELPRO [Counterintelligence Program] action -- which Ashcroft seems to want to revive and expand -- was to 'prevent violence,' many of the FBI's tactics were clearly intended to foster violence, and many others could reasonably have been expected to cause violence."

Advertisement

-- Brian Glick, associate professor of law at Fordham University and the author of "War at Home: Covert Action Against U.S. Activists."

"Ashcroft is not just proposing to drop the limits for spying on violent organizations -- he wants to drop the limits, period. The FBI has a history of violating the legal limits; there is no telling what they might do without such limits. The document that launched the COINTELPRO operations against the black social movements directed FBI agents to 'disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize' dissident movements. It's not just the surveillance part of Ashcroft's proposal that is worrisome; it's the psychological operations, the false rumors, the planted media stories, forged documents and the infiltration of dissident groups that the people running the country dislike or fear."

-- Chip Berlet, senior analyst at Political Research Associates, Berlet is an author and paralegal investigator who studies illicit government surveillance.

"Surveillance of dissidents across the political spectrum is now conducted through a loose network of government agencies, corporate security and private right-wing researchers. ... By re-establishing a dynamic where any dissident group can be secretly accused of being linked to terrorism, and subject to disruption, the government opens the door to domestic covert operations that in the past led to orchestrated confrontations and killings."

Advertisement

-- Jim Redden, author of "Snitch Culture: How Citizens Are Turned into the Eyes and Ears of the State."

"Even before September 11, the government was running COINTELPRO-style operations against a coalition of radical labor, environmental, and human rights organizations opposed to corporate control of the global economy. The truth is, there's a long and sordid history of government operatives committing the very crimes they are supposed to prevent and setting up dissidents with phony charges."


East-West Center

(The East-West Center is an education and research organization established by the U.S. Congress in 1960 to strengthen understanding and relations between the United States and the countries of the Asia Pacific region. The Center carries out its mission through programs of cooperative study, training and research. The center is supported by the U.S. government and the governments of nine Asia Pacific nations.)

Déjà vu all over again? Why Dialogue Won't Solve the Kashmir Dispute;

HONOLULU -- The U.S. war on terrorism clearly shows how the Kashmir conflict can complicate American global politics, and how important it is to stabilize the longstanding dispute, says Arun R. Swamy, a South Asia specialist at the East-West Center.

The United States faced an inherent dilemma after the Sept. 11 attacks. India has charged that militants fighting in Kashmir are not only supported by Pakistan, but are also closely tied to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, both U.S. targets in the war on terrorism.

Advertisement

"The United States was faced with choosing whether to ignore Indian charges in order to keep Pakistan's support against the Taliban and Al Qaida," Swamy says, "or heed Indian concerns by pressuring a reluctant Pakistan to stop supporting the militancy in Kashmir."

Since the collapse of the Taliban, the United States has been confronted by a new dilemma -- whether to rapidly abandon Pakistan in order to re-establish ties with India, the more important of the two, or act against its long-term strategic goals in order to maintain credibility.

The stakes for India and Pakistan, both nuclear-armed, are high. Each views Kashmir as the validation of its national ideology; each fears that giving it up will result in serious domestic turmoil. Moreover, each country has plausible legal arguments for its claims along with a long history of grievances.

The deep differences over Kashmir that divide the two countries have so far proven intractable, and following Sept. 11 the movement toward confrontation accelerated. While diplomatic engagement seems necessary for a resolution of this dispute, Swamy says "past results indicate that simply pressuring the two sides to talk may be disastrous."

Any effort to intervene must be undertaken with an awareness of how the conflict evolved, why it has been so difficult to resolve, and what kinds of solutions to it might realistically be pursued.

Advertisement


Asia-Pacific Journalists Question U.S. War On Terrorism

HONOLULU -- "As global terrorism evolved into a beast out of control, America enjoyed the good life," writes Sri Lankan journalist Amantha Perera, "until the beast struck at its very heart."

Perera, with The Sunday Leader, says millions of Sri Lankans, plagued by terrorism for decades, are asking why the United States looked the other way for so long.

"If the United States had led military action against global terrorism much earlier, or at least promoted a global campaign, the picture would not be this bloody all over the world."

Perera is one of five Asia-Pacific journalists featured in a new East-West Center publication, "Terrorism and America: Five Asia Pacific Perspectives." The authors shared their countries' perspectives on the Sept. 11 attacks and the U.S. war on terrorism. They were part of the Fall 2001 Jefferson Fellowship, an East-West Center media exchange program for Asia-Pacific and U.S. journalists.

Gautam Chikermane, with the Intelligent Investor in India, asks why only now did the United States declare war on terrorism -- because "the grief pours out of American eyes?"

In Japan, resentment over America's increasing "unilateralism" coexists with an unprecedented willingness to send troops overseas, says Takeshi Yamashina, with The Mainichi Newspapers.

Advertisement

Unaloto Ofa Kaukimoce with the Fiji Broadcasting Corp. notes that calls for international action are accompanied by "unease over violent retaliation."

The mixed emotions described by many are dramatically evident in predominantly Muslim Indonesia where, says Harry Bhaskara of The Jakarta Post, anti-American demonstrations defied President Megawati's assurances of support for the United States.


The Ludwig von Mises Institute

Irony Survives

By Paul A. Cantor

AUBURN, Ala. -- With a new book out on the portrayal of globalization in four American television programs ("Gilligan Unbound"), I have found myself drawn into the debate over how the events of September 11 may change popular culture in the United States.

In the weeks immediately following the World Trade Center and Pentagon disasters, commentators were quick to predict in apocalyptic terms that television and movies would never be the same again.

In my view, it is still too early to tell whether there really has been a sea-change in the American psyche. The way military and political events unfold over the next few months and even years will determine whether September 11 truly marked a watershed in our cultural history. I have begun to suspect, however, that the changes may not be as deep or as lasting as many initially predicted.

Advertisement

Naturally, right after the terrorist attacks, television schedules needed to be hastily reshuffled. The Fox Network yanked a showing of the movie "Independence Day" advertised for Sunday, September 15. That movie's trademark shot of the White House exploding was exactly what Americans did not want to view so soon after witnessing all-too-similar disasters in the real world.

The Family Channel cannot have been happy that it had "Earthquake in New York" slated for September 18. Television comedians were faced with similar dilemmas. Late-night talk-show hosts like David Letterman and Jay Leno were understandably at first reluctant to go ahead with their normal comedy routines at a time when the nation was more inclined to grieve than to laugh. For a while, it looked as if television -- forced to do without extremes of either tragedy or comedy -- might be reduced to an unprecedented level of blandness.

In particular, a number of cultural commentators seized the occasion to proclaim the end of irony. They argued that a whole generation of Americans, who had never felt truly threatened before, would now have to renounce their cynicism and learn how to take life seriously. This argument seemed to be carrying the day at first, but even from the beginning there were signs that irony -- which, after all, has a very long history, stretching back at least as far as ancient Greece -- might prove more difficult to stamp out than terrorism itself.

Advertisement

The official organs of popular culture -- especially television -- may have adopted a solemn and somber tone in the aftermath of September 11, but popular culture is not always so neatly contained. The cultural elites had passed a death sentence on irony, but it was by no means clear whether the American public was ready to carry it out.

In fact, popular culture always has a way of colonizing new media, especially when they offer greater freedom of expression, and as a result, in the past decade much of American popular culture has in effect migrated to the Internet. And it was to web sites and e-mail that one had to turn in mid-September to get a fuller picture of how America was reacting to the terrorist attacks and indeed to see that, despite everything else they had lost, Americans had not lost their sense of humor.

One cannot repeat in polite circles the obscene and cruel jokes that almost immediately began to circulate about Osama bin Laden via e-mail, and the computer-generated graphic suggestions about how to deal with him proved that American ingenuity -- and irony -- were still very much in force.

Advertisement

Irony began to resurface in semi-respectable public venues with surprising speed. The marvelously irreverent and politically incorrect satirical newspaper "The Onion" decided not to pull its punches. By September 26, it was running a tasteless but hilarious story headlined: "Hijackers Surprised To Find Selves in Hell: 'We Expected Eternal Paradise For This,' Say Suicide Bombers." Here was a heavy dose of precisely the kind of irony that September 11 was supposed to have banished from America forever.

By November 14, "The Onion" was making fun of the whole obsession with how the threat of terrorism will affect popular culture in a story headlined: "Luann Creator Wrestling With How To Address Terrorist Crisis." The newspaper has Gary Evans, creator of the popular comic strip, saying: "I definitely feel an obligation to address this tragedy -- through Luann's eyes. It's a real high-wire act: entertaining, informing, and providing emotional support to my readers all at the same time."

In short, the cultural elite may have prematurely proclaimed the death of irony because they were looking in the wrong places in an American popular culture that has found new outlets in recent years and has become increasingly de-centered and diversified.

To return, however, to the traditional media of popular culture, I would date the official end of the end of irony to a much-publicized on-the-air exchange between Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of NBC's Saturday Night Live, and New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Seeming to reflect the mood of a newly chastened entertainment industry, Michaels apparently was seeking official sanction to return to comedy business as usual from the man who more than anyone had come to personify the agony of New York. He asked the mayor: "Can we be funny?" Giuliani's by-now legendary reply -- "Why start now?" -- is of course a perfect example of television at its most ironic.

Advertisement

We thought Giuliani was going to answer as the mayor of New York, perhaps saying something statesman-like: "We have been through a lot, Lorne, but we need to maintain our sense of humor." But instead, Giuliani replied as "the mayor of New York," a character in a comedy sketch scripted for him by the SNL writers. This was irony in its postmodern form -- Giuliani self-consciously playing himself and playing himself for laughs.

And for most New Yorkers, as well as most of the nation, this exchange showed that irony can be cathartic: precisely because it gives us distance on our emotions, it can help us come to terms with them.

Indeed, in their understandable shock at the course of world events and their haste to proclaim the end of irony, cultural commentators had forgotten one of the basic lessons of Media Studies 101. As media guru Marshall McLuhan would have put it, these critics became fixated on the content of television and neglected the nature of the medium itself. Television is an ironic medium.

This does not mean that irony is the only thing television can do; as the reporting of the events of September 11 showed, television can still transmit a serious message when it has to. But irony is one of the things that television does best. There is something about that little box---even in these days of widescreen TV--that does a great job of reducing and deflating people, events, and ideas.

Advertisement

Unlike the cinema, television is not an aggrandizing or magnifying medium -- that is one reason politicians are wary of it. The television camera is a microscope; it has a way of seeing into things, of undercutting pretensions, exposing foibles, and generally ironizing whatever takes itself too seriously. In giving us some distance on our emotions, irony allows us to think critically.

As political events in our day become more complicated, we should welcome the ability of television -- and popular culture in general -- to view the world ironically, and especially our politicians. If anyone is tempted to lament the survival of irony in our popular culture, it is worth recalling that its most famous practitioner was a man named Socrates.

(Paul A. Cantor is professor of English at the University of Virginia and the author of "Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization," which the L.A. Times recently named as one of the best nonfiction works of 2001.)


The Cato Institute

Cato TechKnowledge

The EchoStar-DirecTV Merger: Antitrust Folly Reaches Outer Space

By Wayne Crews and Adam Thierer

The recently proposed marriage of satellite television providers EchoStar Communications and DirecTV (owned by Hughes Electronics) has raised the possibility of antitrust intervention by federal regulators. Objections to the deal stem from a presumably straightforward concern: If the top two competitors in the satellite TV marketplace are allowed to merge, it will eliminate any vestiges of competition in that sector.

Advertisement

But, as is often the case, things aren't really that simple.

As private enterprises, the companies should have the right to organize as they see fit without seeking permission. But antitrust law places concern for "protecting competition" ahead of the principle of private property -- which is the basis for competition in the first place. Even on traditional antitrust grounds, perspective is needed: Although an EchoStar/DirecTV combination may "dominate" its sector (to borrow the hand-wringing stance of antitrust orthodoxy), such a merger could in fact herald unprecedented competition to cable, broadcast, and even telephone services potentially.

Besides, the number of subscribers the combination would serve (estimated at 17 million) isn't particularly alarming when compared with America's 104 million households, its 68 million cable subscribers, and an over-the-air broadcast infrastructure that reaches almost everyone.

In an environment in which the public has yet to embrace broadband Internet services and interactive television remains an unfulfilled promise, satellite may yet break though where cable and DSL have not. Thus policymakers can cause considerable damage when interfering with network industries' efforts to orient themselves to suit customers' needs.

Satellite company mergers are just one element of an evolving marketplace that will increasingly put consumers in direct control of their viewing experiences. TiVo and ReplayTV, for example, are building their recording technologies into satellite and cable set-top boxes. Such innovations magnify consumer choice and allow the user to serve as programmer and scheduler. No longer do three major TV networks dictate prime time.

Advertisement

But it will take vast resources to build the broadband networks of tomorrow, and mergers on an unprecedented scale will be part of the market processes required to make it happen. Although it may be asking too much to expect a large crop of small Mom-and-Pop competitors to jump in and roll out massive networks, it is true that what seems "dominant" today often gets superceded by newcomers. As the Wall Street Journal put it, AOL acquired Time Warner when it wasn't even old enough to buy beer. Change and evolution are certain.

Antitrust, on the other hand, institutionalizes market stagnation. Policymakers thwart the natural progression of markets by placing antitrust regulatory hurdles in the way of companies that seek the economies of scale necessary to offer ubiquitous communications network services. Competitors would be powerless to stop market-driven deals from going forward were it not for the institutionalized governmental manipulation of free markets known as antitrust. The regulatory mentality that seeks to mold the communications marketplace to fit its own misguided vision will simply discourage investment in crucial new facilities-based networks.

Alarmingly, regulators are using the merger review process to extract a parade of concessions from merging communications firms. The quid pro quo is simple: If you want the feds' antitrust blessing, you'd better play ball. You must offer service to areas were it might not be economical to do so, offer drastically reduced rates for that service that may keep you from recouping upfront investments, and subject yourself to an endless array of fines or penalties if you do not comply perfectly with those requirements.

Advertisement

Such regulatory blackmail has been employed in mergers between Verizon-NYNEX-GTE, SBC-Ameritech, AOL-Time Warner, MCI-Sprint, and others. Regulators tend to be least tolerant of mergers between direct competitors.

Blocking such horizontal mergers, even between rivals like DirecTV and EchoStar, has a dramatic downside. As the communications sector grows, the opportunities thwarted by intervention accumulate. For example, the Department of Justice, in an ill-advised spasm of enforcement, blocked a merger between long-distance competitors WorldCom and Sprint.

Yet in the reasonably near future, the Bell companies will likely enter the long-distance business, and a combined WorldCom-Sprint might have been a formidable rival. Now, the low valuation of WorldCom since rejection of the merger could result in the takeover of that company by a Baby Bell. Thanks to antitrust, instead of seeing a viable Bell rival emerge in long distance and data services, we may see WorldCom absorbed by a Bell. Policy could hardly get more perverse.

Things needn't be this way. The media and Internet sectors provide ample ground for rethinking merger policy. In today's shaky economy, debts, overcapacity, the dot-com collapse, price wars, and efforts to sustain growth create an urge to merge that should be allowed to play out, as resources are reallocated. Just as antitrust policy shouldn't block the EchoStar/DirecTV merger, it must also stand clear of healthy market responses to the merger. The Echostar/DirecTV combination will face discipline from programmers, consumers, already-poised rivals, new entrants, and innovations such as improved Internet video over fiber.

Advertisement

Meanwhile, all artificial barriers to a competitive telecommunications and information marketplace should be removed. For example, Federal Communications Commission chairman Michael Powell, the courts, and some in Congress are skeptical of restrictions barring ownership of both TV stations and newspapers in the same market, as well as of cable/broadcast cross-ownership bans. Also under scrutiny is a 1996 rule limiting market share of broadcasters' and cable firms' national market share to 35 percent.

And in addition to Department of Justice or Federal Trade Commission review or mergers, the FCC has merger review authority based on its role in approving broadcasting license transfers. Such paralysis by analysis should be eliminated. Ending this lineup of restrictions would enable a flexible marketplace poised to respond to any competitive eventuality.

Finally, on the satellite front, the real barrier to entry problem is being caused not by companies, but by global bureaucrats and regulatory organizations that assign orbital slots over the Earth. If policymakers want to encourage more competition on the ground, they need to find ways to make it easier for companies to launch more satellites into space.

There are no grounds for worry that big telecom interests will monopolize information in a free society. The bandwidth cornucopia represented by wireless airwaves and fiber breakthroughs is barely tapped, and the peer-to-peer computing revolution promises to make a broadcaster out of everyone.

Advertisement

The worry over media monopoly seems especially misplaced given that most programming consists of entertainment and fantasy-hardly the necessities of life. But antitrust law is busy engaging in a fantasy of its own, that of imagining itself an improvement over free markets.

(Wayne Crews is director of technology studies, and Adam Thierer is director of telecommunications studies at the Cato Institute in Washington.


Don't Fill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve: Drain It

By Jerry Taylor and Peter VanDoren

President Bush recently announced that he has directed the Department of Energy to completely fill the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve for the first time in history. The feds are saving up oil for a rainy day, the administration said, to blunt any future use of the oil weapon against the U.S. economy.

Politicians and pundits of all stripes applauded the idea -- so you know there has to be something wrong with it. And there is: America does not need a Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

If having the feds buy oil when prices are low and sell it later when prices are high is a good idea, why doesn't anyone in the private sector do it? After all, if it makes economic sense for the taxpayer to pay for this, it ought to make sense for a private investor as well.

Advertisement

Unfortunately, it doesn't. Holding oil inventories is so expensive that companies rarely get the opportunity to cash those reserves in at a profit. And when they do get that rare opportunity to make a profit by buying low and selling high, pitchfork populists and their political henchmen will, like clockwork, scream bloody murder about "price gouging" and threaten to confiscate profits if the company insists on recouping its investment.

This is underscored by back-of-the-envelope calculations that, once you factor in inflation and overhead, the oil in the SPR has cost the American taxpayer over $60 a barrel. The SPR is no "bargain" for the taxpayer or the economy. It's like buying an insurance policy that has a premium that's higher than the expected payout.

Moreover, private inventory holders have to worry that, just when prices get high enough to allow them to unload petroleum stockpiles at a profit, the feds will dump oil onto the market, driving down prices and taking away the profit opportunity before it can be realized. So even when there are incentives to build oil inventories, the SPR crowds out and deters such private investments.

If the SPR makes so little economic sense, why this near-universal support for the program? The obvious answer is that few people in Washington understand energy economics but almost everyone understands (wrongly) that there's an "oil weapon" out there pointed at our heads. The SPR would appear at first blush to make sense -- until you do the math.

Advertisement

The less obvious answer is that it's a backdoor bailout for the domestic oil industry. That's because, due to the recession, demand for oil is dropping which, in turn, drops oil prices and thus profit margins for oil producers. Having the feds step in with massive purchase orders for oil artificially boosts demand and thus raises oil prices and, accordingly, oil profits. Prices may in fact continue to slide, but they would have slid a lot faster and a lot steeper had the president not stepped in with this federal "buy" order.

Now, before you get your dander up about "Big Oil," it's worth noting that the SPR is far more important to the small, independent producers that dot Texas and Oklahoma (the so-called "Little Oil" crowd that used to include President Bush) than it is to their larger corporate brethren. Higher prices help them too, of course, but not as much.

"Little Oil" is living closer to the economic edge than, say, ExxonMobil. "Big Oil" lobbyists support the SPR but do so without a lot of enthusiasm. "Little Oil" looks at the SPR the same way the corn lobby looks at ethanol programs.

There is a reasonable case for the SPR -- it's just not one that you've probably heard much about. Oil economists know that it's not so much production cutbacks or supply interruptions that spike oil prices as it is fear of future supply interruptions. The SPR, some economists maintain, is an important institutional break against panic buying, ensuring investors that, if oil supplies ever did run dangerously low, the feds would step in and flood the market. If the only thing we have to fear about oil markets is fear itself, then taking away that fear with the SPR serves a valuable economic and political purpose.

Advertisement

Well, maybe. But investors aren't stupid. Most of them take the SPR into account when they walk in to the spot or futures market. That's one reason why President Clinton's release of oil before last year's presidential elections didn't affect oil prices as much as many analysts thought it would. The chance of intervention was already factored into oil prices.

Let's just drain the reserve and call it a day. The oil therein would return about $13 billion to the treasury. We'd be better off spending that money on the war against terrorism than on the war against sliding oil prices.

(Jerry Taylor is director of natural resource studies at the Cato Institute. Peter VanDoren is editor of Regulation: The Cato Review of Business and Government, published by the Cato Institute.)


Reason Public Policy Foundation

What's Bill Bennett Smoking? The former drug czar's latest tirade defies reality.

By Michael W. Lynch

LOS ANGELES -- The latest release from William J. Bennett Inc. -- the book and op-ed factory also known as Empower America -- appeared last week on the commentary pages of the Wall Street Journal. Its subject was familiar -- the War on Drugs, and why we need it now more than ever.

Advertisement

Bennett, of course, didn't actually write the piece. "I wrote that," said a proud Kevin Cherry of Empower America when I called and asked who was writing Bennett's thoughts these days. The responsibility for the column, of course, remains with Bennett, under whose name it appeared.

The column (available on this paid site) makes these muddled arguments: 1) Terrorist groups rely on the drug trade as one source of funds; 2) We've yet to rethink our drug policy in light of the new threat from terrorism; 3) Unlike the glorious 20 months in 1989-90 when Bennett was drug czar, the federal government has since neglected the drug war, even as children increased their drug use.

Bennett deployed each of these points to support his ultimate point, the purpose of the essay: that his former sidekick, John Walters, ought to be our next drug czar.

"The Taliban have lost control of Afghanistan, despite the nay-sayers," the article states. "And Mr. Walters's own record shows that we can reduce the use and harm of illegal drugs, that lives can be changed and saved."

Whether Mr. Walters is suited for the role of top drug cop is, I believe, moot -- any drug czar is likely to be a bad drug czar. Even so, none of Bennett's arguments holds up.

Advertisement

For starters, there is little relationship between American drug use -- especially by our youth, who mostly smoke pot -- and revenues that supported those terrorists who operated under the Taliban regime. The reason is simple: The heroin used in the U.S. comes primarily from Mexico and Columbia; little comes from Afghanistan.

"The U.S. war on drugs is not connected to the funding of the terrorism we care about," says University of Maryland economist Peter Reuter, co-author of the recent book, Drug War Heresies: Learning from Other Places, Times and Vices (2001). "It's the large drug markets in Pakistan, Iran, Western Europe, and, increasingly, Russia. We're not significant players in that. It's not like the world oil market where it comes out of one barrel. It's highly segmented."

Empower America's Cherry said he's never heard this argument.

But even if the scag here did come from Afghanistan, the point would still be wrong. Drug markets, unlike terrorist networks, are still markets. This makes them extremely difficult to disrupt and impossible to eradicate, since they are populated by highly motivated buyers and sellers who value making the exchange -- and keeping it private. Just because the military can wipe out the Taliban doesn't mean Bennett and his friends can wipe out drug production.

Advertisement

They can't even keep drug distribution out of prisons, as anyone the former drug czar has helped put behind bars could certainly tell him.

More important, criminal elements are attracted to the drug business precisely because it is an illegal business made extremely profitable (if dangerous) by our War on Drugs. The nastier the government repression, the nastier the people who engage in the trade become.

Cherry's response to this point is a non sequitur: "The Mafia still makes a living even though prostitution is legal in Las Vegas and gambling is legal in Atlantic City."

Of course, terrorism is just a convenient news hook for a very old obsession of Bennett's. What about his charge that "Illegal drug use, especially among our children, is a plague that has lacked serious federal attention -- from Democrats and Republicans, as well as from the executive and legislative branches"?

None of this is true. In 2000, one in four high school seniors admitted to having used an illegal drug in the previous 30 days, according to Monitoring the Future. Fewer than one in 10 used a drug other than marijuana. Is this a plague? I don't know.

But I -- and Bennett -- do know that drug use peaked in 1978, when 38.9 percent of high school seniors copped to using an illegal drug -- mostly marijuana -- in the previous 30 days. Monthly drug use then went into a long decline, which continued during Bennett's drug czardom, that bottomed out in 1992, at 14.4 percent. Bennett cites cocaine and LSD use among high schoolers, and the fact that they continue to use those drugs after they graduate, as evidence that "the idea of 'youthful experimentation' is all too often a dangerous myth."

Advertisement

I'm not sure what "all too often" means, but here are the data. Very few 16- and 17-year-olds use either cocaine or hallucinogens. According to the government's own 2000 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, 1.1 percent and 2.3 percent of 16- and 17-year-olds said they used coke or hallucinogens in the past month.

Even fewer adults use those drugs, so those trying them do indeed appear to be experimenting. Drug use drops dramatically by age, and the context matters. While nearly one in five college students uses drugs, according to the survey, fewer than one in 20 college graduates do. And it's apparent that people experiment with drugs, enjoy them, and then move on to other things. (Individuals who attended college are far more likely than others to have tried drugs in their lifetime than are people who never attended an institution of higher learning. Yet college graduates are less likely than non-graduates to be regular users.)

But what about those awful 1990s, when the government was ignoring the problem, as compared to Bennett's 20-month reign?

"The statistical differences are negligible," says University of Maryland's Reuter, when I tell him of Bennett's boast. "The budget [for drug control] kept on growing, and the percentage going to enforcement didn't change at all. Two-thirds went to enforcement and one-third for treatment and prevention. Prison numbers kept going up. I don't know what he means."

Advertisement

When I told Cherry that I thought the federal government fought the drug war hard in the 1990s, spending more money each year, hiring more cops, arresting more people, and passing more laws, he disagreed.

"Not really," he said with a sigh. "Yeah, seizures were up, but so were the amounts imported. You have to recognize that use went up, so something must have been going on. Steaming hours of the Coast Guard were down dramatically. Purity went up, price went down."

So where did all the money go, I asked? "It was not used," replied Cherry, who said that U.S. Customs agents were reassigned away from narcotics.

"Sure, sure, sure," Cherry said when I pointed out that Gen. Barry McCaffrey did everything possible to repress medical marijuana and that Congress passed and that President Clinton signed a bill preventing anyone with a drug conviction from getting student loans.

"But," argues Cherry, "I'm saying that Clinton's biggest statement on illegal drugs was, 'I didn't inhale.' That was the message people remember from Bill Clinton about illegal drugs."

But none of that really matters, nor do any of the actual facts of drug use and terrorism. Partisan politics are back.

Advertisement

"They want to do to Walters what they did to Ashcroft," Cherry told me. But he was confusing me with someone who cares.

(Michael W. Lynch is Reason magazine's national correspondent.)


The National Center for Public Policy Research

(NCPPR is a communications and research foundation dedicated to providing free market solutions to public policy problems, based on the principles of a free market, individual liberty and personal responsibility. NCPPR was founded to provide the conservative movement with an organization capable of responding quickly and decisively to late-breaking issues, based on thorough research.)

Beating Swords into Plowshares -- The 21st Century Way

By Tom Randall

President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin, meeting in Crawford, Texas, renewed pledges to make drastic reductions in nuclear weapons -- Bush offering to unilaterally cut the number of U.S. warheads by up to two-thirds, Putin promising "corresponding reductions."

While such a reduction in nuclear weapons is an admirable goal, it would leave both countries with the need to dispose of tens of thousands of pounds of weapons-grade plutonium.

What can we do with it? In this age of terrorism, how can we keep it from falling into the wrong hands?

Advertisement

If Congress acts, we could use the nuclear material in the warheads as part of the means of providing nearly limitless, virtually pollution-free electricity.

We could also consume the waste from current nuclear reactors and cut the length of time that nuclear waste needs to be isolated from tens of thousands of years to just a few hundred. As a result we could, in time, transfer much of the natural gas now used for electricity generation to other uses -- such as powering cars and trucks, thus reducing our dependency upon foreign oil.

In short, our desire to convert decommissioned plutonium warheads and nuclear waste to electricity could and should provide the impetus for building revolutionary new integral fast reactors -- known as IFRs -- the embodiment of the technology that can make all this possible.

In the early 1990s, scientists at Argonne National Laboratory, outside of Chicago, and at "Argonne West" in Idaho, were within just a few years of completing research leading to the design of full-scale IFR power plants. In fact, they had a small pilot plant up and running, performing safety functions flawlessly when the project was abruptly halted in 1994 by the then-Secretary of Energy, Hazel O'Leary.

Advertisement

The project shutdown was based on the unfounded fear that the IFR and fuel reprocessing, which contributes significantly to its efficiency, would produce a market in weapons-grade plutonium. But this is false.

The IFR would use a process known as pyroprocessing to convert plutonium and nuclear waste into useable fuel. Further, it allows for the repeated reuse of that fuel. It cannot, however, create plutonium of the chemical purity needed for weapons. The process, known as PUREX, that is used by today's generation of reactors can do so, however.

An additional benefit of building integral fast reactors is that IFRs would make a major contribution to the resolution of the sticky political and safety issues surrounding the management of nuclear waste. Currently, this waste is stored near nuclear reactors across the country, much of it underwater in storage pools. The storage pools might be vulnerable to terrorist attacks. While dangers from such an attack are minimal, this waste would arguably be safer deep underground in the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada, the completion of which has been delayed for years because of political controversy.

Much of this controversy is due to the fact that the current generation of nuclear power plants produces waste that must be stored for 20,000 years -- longer than recorded history. However, if integral fast reactors were built, the waste from the IFRs would need to be isolated for only 300 to 500 years. This is, admittedly, a substantial time, but far less than 20,000 years, making the requirements for the Yucca Mountain facility much less demanding.

Advertisement

When Secretary O'Leary killed the IFR project in 1994, the laboratories were only $200 to $300 million dollars and two to three years from being ready to build an operational prototype of a commercial IFR plant. However, since 1994, Congress has apparently failed to see the great significance of this technology and has only dribbled out funds for work on it -- even though the total amount needed for the project's completion is relative chicken feed in federal budget terms.

It is time to change that and move ahead with all possible speed on the Integral Fast Reactor and pyroprocessing. The benefits of IFRs in an energy-starved, pollution averse, terrorist-infested, post-cold war world could be dramatic.

(Tom Randall is Director of John P. McGovern, MD Center for Environmental and Regulatory Affairs at the for Public Policy Research.)


Comptetitive Enterprise Institute

(CEI is a free-market think tank that supports principles of free enterprise and limited government, and actively engages in public policy debate.)

CEI Supports Quick Passage of Energy Legislation

WASHINGTON -- The Competitive Enterprise Institute Tuesday urged U. S. Senators to pass vital energy legislation, including opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, known as ANWR, to oil and gas exploration. The Senate is scheduled to vote late Tuesday on a procedural motion which would force a final decision on major elements of the House-passed energy bill.

Advertisement

"Majority Leader Tom Daschle's refusal to allow debate and a vote on urgently-needed energy legislation is disgraceful. He should stop putting the special interests of environmental pressure groups above the nation's interest," said Myron Ebell, director of global warming and international environmental policy at CEI.

"Since September 11, the elements of President Bush's energy plan have become too important to delay until Senator Daschle and his allies can tack on tens of billions of dollars of subsidies and tax breaks for corporations that can't compete in the market.

"The folly of President Clinton's veto of legislation in 1995 to open ANWR is now clear for everyone to see. If he had signed that bill, a major new source of petroleum could now be only a year away from production, said Ebell.

"We should not listen to the same specious argument again that opening ANWR won't solve our current energy problems because it will take several years before the oil begins to flow. The American people should demand that their elected leaders plan more than a few months ahead," Ebell said.

Latest Headlines