What Would Justify America’s Homeland Security?

The Article: 1,667 Times Square-Style Attacks Every Year: That’s how many terrorism plots we would have to foil to justify our current spending on homeland security by John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart of Slate.

The Text: Is it possible to measure the risk of terrorism? Measuring risk can be difficult, but it is done as a matter of course in such highly charged areas as nuclear power plant safety, airplane safety, and environmental protection. There is adequate information about terrorism: There is plenty of data on how much damage terrorists have been able to do over the decades and about how frequently they attack. The insurance industry has a distinct financial imperative to understand terrorism risks to write policies for it. If the private sector can estimate terrorism risks and is willing to risk its own money on the validity of the estimate, why can’t the Department of Homeland Security?

A conventional approach to cost-effectiveness compares the costs of security measures with the benefits as tallied in lives saved and damages averted. The benefit of a security measure is a multiplicative composite of three considerations: the probability of a successful attack, the losses sustained in a successful attack, and the reduction in risk furnished by security measures. This product, the benefit, is then compared to the cost of the security measure instituted to attain the benefit. A security measure is cost-effective when the benefit of the measure outweighs the costs of providing the security measures.

The interaction of these variables can perhaps be seen in an example. Suppose there is a dangerous curve on a road that results in an accident from time to time. To evaluate measures designed to deal with this problem, the analyst would need to estimate 1) the probability of an accident each year under present conditions, 2) the costs of the consequences of the accident (death, injury, property damage), and 3) the degree to which a proposed safety measure lowers the probability of an accident (erecting warning signs) and/or the losses sustained in the accident (erecting a crash barrier). If the benefits of the risk-reduction measures—these three items multiplied together—outweigh their costs, the measures would be deemed cost-effective.

These considerations can be usefully wrinkled around a bit in a procedure known as “break-even analysis” to calculate how many attacks would have to take place to justify a security expenditure.

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On The Future Of The Revolution In Syria

The Article: Is Civil War in Syria Inevitable? by Hussein Ibish in the Atlantic.

The Text: The prospects for a full-blown and largely sectarian civil war in Syria are mounting by the day. Much of the Syrian opposition, dedicated to non-violence, appears extremely reluctant to even consider the prospect. But as President Bashar al-Assad’s crackdown worsens, as the options for any other means of achieving regime change seemed to dwindle, and with the Libya model presenting itself, however imprecisely, as an alternative stratagem, the drift towards conflict is starting to feel palpable.

The Syrian Powder Keg

In some senses, all of the required element are already in place for a civil war to erupt. In recent weeks some of the opposition has been slowly suggesting a greater willingness to accept the use of arms. There are hints that arms and financing for weapons are being delivered by outside forces. And increasing numbers of the rank-and-file Syrian military are defecting. Together, these factors could prepare the nucleus for an armed rebel group. The emergence of a significant and potentially effective armed rebel group in Syria is now readily imaginable.

The Christian Science Monitor reports that Lebanese arms merchants are noticing a huge spike in prices, which they attribute to vastly increased demand for black market weapons in Syria. Mohammed Rahhal, a leader of the Revolutionary Council of the Syrian Coordination Committees (one of many opposition groups), last week bluntly told the pan-Arab newspaper Ash Sharq al-Awsat, “We made the decision to arm the revolution, which will turn violent very soon, because what we are being subjected to today is a global conspiracy that can only be faced by an armed uprising.” According to David Ignatius, “a newly emboldened Saudi Arabia has been pumping money to Sunni fighters in Syria.”

The most important factor pushing Syria in the direction of civil conflict may be that the Assad regime has left the opposition few other options for anything resembling success. The largely nonviolent protests have brought nothing in the way of serious reform or to weaken the regime’s grip on power. The protest movement, as it is presently structured, does not seem capable of either. If anything, the regime seems to have consistently worsened its behavior. With the opposition basing its strategy primarily on embarrassing the regime and increasing international pressure, rhetoric, and sanctions, the nonviolent tactic has been almost all pain with very little gain. At some point, other options will have to be considered — or the fight against Assad abandoned.

The battle lines are already drawn in Syria, and they are largely sectarian

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The Autocrats Club In The Middle East

The Article: Gadhafi leaned on Arab allies to stay in power by Maggie Michael at Yahoo.

The Text: Moammar Gadhafi’s dictatorship likely wouldn’t have survived for more than four decades without the sea of dictators all around, protecting one another and working together to silence dissident voices.

Gadhafi himself saw collapse was inevitable as Arab unity frayed, and he pointed to the fall of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein as a sign of things to come. “Your turn is next,” he warned fellow leaders in a scathing speech at the 2008 Arab League summit in Damascus.

Back in 2008, Gadhafi’s listeners laughed. Now, besides Gadhafi, longtime autocrats have been swept from power by popular uprisings in Tunisia, where the Arab Spring began, and Egypt. Syria’s Bashar Assad and Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh are also under fierce pressure.

Ties with autocrats stretch back to the early days of Gadhafi’s regime, historians have written. The night Gadhafi — then a junior officer who would later promote himself to colonel — ousted King Idriss, the first planeload of official visitors to land in Tripoli was from Egypt. Gamal Abdel Nasser sent veteran journalist and top adviser Mohammed Hassanin Haikal to take the measure of his neighbor’s new ruler.

Gadhafi told Haikal he would seek Nasser’s guidance. Haikal promised Egypt’s support.

Only four months after Gadhafi’s coup, two members of his Revolutionary Command Council turned against him. Egyptian intelligence officers tipped off Gadhafi that he faced a coup, according to historians.

Shortly after that, King Idriss’ nephew Abdullah al-Abid al-Senoussi, also known as the Black Prince, led a force of 5,000 mercenaries from Chad and planned to arm tribes loyal to the king to fight against Gadhafi. This time, it was Tunisians who are believed to have tipped off Gadhafi.

In a recent interview, Gadhafi’s former Foreign Minister Abdel-Rahman Shalqam, who defected during this year’s rebellion, told the pan-Arab newspaper Al-Hayat that Gadhafi used to pay former Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali a monthly salary, and that Tunisian-Libyan cooperation was “at the highest level.”

The exchange of security and intelligence information was the only successful sphere of cooperation among Arab governments, asserted Fathi al-Baja, a Libyan political scientist and top political leader for the Libyan rebels.

“This is the only thing they could do,” he said.

Gadhafi even paid the editors of state-owned newspapers in Egypt, Syria and elsewhere to run “propaganda glorifying him or at the very least to block any channels between the opposition and public opinion,” said Fayez Jibril, a Cairo-based founder of the National Front for the Salvation of Libya, Libya’s oldest opposition group.

Gadhafi’s pursuit of his opponents included televised executions of students, professors, clerics and others in public squares and on university campuses. In the worst instance of repression, more than 1,200 prisoners, including many political detainees, were gunned down at the notorious Abu Salim prison in 1996.

Little of that made it into the Arab press at the time.

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The Rights War On Democracy

The Article: The GOP War on Voting by Ari Berman in Rolling Stone.

The Text: As the nation gears up for the 2012 presidential election, Republican officials have launched an unprecedented, centrally coordinated campaign to suppress the elements of the Democratic vote that elected Barack Obama in 2008. Just as Dixiecrats once used poll taxes and literacy tests to bar black Southerners from voting, a new crop of GOP governors and state legislators has passed a series of seemingly disconnected measures that could prevent millions of students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts and the elderly from casting ballots. “What has happened this year is the most significant setback to voting rights in this country in a century,” says Judith Browne-Dianis, who monitors barriers to voting as co-director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization based in Washington, D.C.

Republicans have long tried to drive Democratic voters away from the polls. “I don’t want everybody to vote,” the influential conservative activist Paul Weyrich told a gathering of evangelical leaders in 1980. “As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” But since the 2010 election, thanks to a conservative advocacy group founded by Weyrich, the GOP’s effort to disrupt voting rights has been more widespread and effective than ever. In a systematic campaign orchestrated by the American Legislative Exchange Council – and funded in part by David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers who bankrolled the Tea Party – 38 states introduced legislation this year designed to impede voters at every step of the electoral process.

All told, a dozen states have approved new obstacles to voting. Kansas and Alabama now require would-be voters to provide proof of citizenship before registering. Florida and Texas made it harder for groups like the League of Women Voters to register new voters. Maine repealed Election Day voter registration, which had been on the books since 1973. Five states – Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia – cut short their early voting periods. Florida and Iowa barred all ex-felons from the polls, disenfranchising thousands of previously eligible voters. And six states controlled by Republican governors and legislatures – Alabama, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin – will require voters to produce a government-issued ID before casting ballots. More than 10 percent of U.S. citizens lack such identification, and the numbers are even higher among constituencies that traditionally lean Democratic – including 18 percent of young voters and 25 percent of African-Americans.

Taken together, such measures could significantly dampen the Democratic turnout next year – perhaps enough to shift the outcome in favor of the GOP. “One of the most pervasive political movements going on outside Washington today is the disciplined, passionate, determined effort of Republican governors and legislators to keep most of you from voting next time,” Bill Clinton told a group of student activists in July. “Why is all of this going on? This is not rocket science. They are trying to make the 2012 electorate look more like the 2010 electorate than the 2008 electorate” – a reference to the dominance of the Tea Party last year, compared to the millions of students and minorities who turned out for Obama. “There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today.”

To hear Republicans tell it, they are waging a virtuous campaign to crack down on rampant voter fraud – a curious position for a party that managed to seize control of the White House in 2000 despite having lost the popular vote. After taking power, the Bush administration declared war on voter fraud, making it a “top priority” for federal prosecutors. In 2006, the Justice Department fired two U.S. attorneys who refused to pursue trumped-up cases of voter fraud in New Mexico and Washington, and Karl Rove called illegal voting “an enormous and growing problem.” In parts of America, he told the Republican National Lawyers Association, “we are beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where the guys in charge are colonels in mirrored sunglasses.” According to the GOP, community organizers like ACORN were actively recruiting armies of fake voters to misrepresent themselves at the polls and cast illegal ballots for the Democrats.

Even at the time, there was no evidence to back up such outlandish claims. A major probe by the Justice Department between 2002 and 2007 failed to prosecute a single person for going to the polls and impersonating an eligible voter, which the anti-fraud laws are supposedly designed to stop. Out of the 300 million votes cast in that period, federal prosecutors convicted only 86 people for voter fraud – and many of the cases involved immigrants and former felons who were simply unaware of their ineligibility. A much-hyped investigation in Wisconsin, meanwhile, led to the prosecution of only .0007 percent of the local electorate for alleged voter fraud. “Our democracy is under siege from an enemy so small it could be hiding anywhere,” joked Stephen Colbert. A 2007 report by the Brennan Center for Justice, a leading advocate for voting rights at the New York University School of Law, quantified the problem in stark terms. “It is more likely that an individual will be struck by lightning,” the report calculated, “than that he will impersonate another voter at the polls.”

GOP outcries over the phantom menace of voter fraud escalated after 2008, when Obama’s candidacy attracted historic numbers of first-time voters. In the 29 states that record party affiliation, roughly two-thirds of new voters registered as Democrats in 2007 and 2008 – and Obama won nearly 70 percent of their votes. In Florida alone, Democrats added more than 600,000 new voters in the run-up to the 2008 election, and those who went to the polls favored Obama over John McCain by 19 points. “This latest flood of attacks on voting rights is a direct shot at the communities that came out in historic numbers for the first time in 2008 and put Obama over the top,” says Tova Wang, an elections-reform expert at Demos, a progressive think tank.

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Teaching In New York City

The Article: Confessions of a bad teacher by John Owens at Salon.

The Text: By the time we sang “The Star–Spangled Banner” in 9th grade English, it was too late to save me. So I didn’t even try to keep the kids quiet, and joined the class as they burst into song.

Almon, an A-average boy whose parents had emigrated from the Dominican Republic by way of Milwaukee, was absolutely sure our national anthem includes the lyric “cheese bursting in air.”

Daria, who came from Honduras just a few years ago and was struggling with English, was gamely singing, trying to guess what words would be appropriate for a song about her new country. “Nice!” “Nice! In air!”

Sarah, the daughter of Ghanese immigrants, got every word right and hit every note with church-choir perfection. And from Rikkie, the highly intelligent, perhaps brilliant, boy, whose father is serving six years in an upstate prison, to Cristofer, a skinny kid who fancies himself a Puerto Rican tough (“I didn’t even cry when my father died”), to A’Don, whose mother doesn’t speak English, to Michael, whose father doesn’t speak English, to Macon, who only seems to care about basketball, we sang loud, we sang laughing, we sang whatever words we knew, and we sang for all we were worth.

Considering that there’s no daily Pledge of Allegiance in New York City public schools, and that American flags are almost as scarce, the class did quite well.

“The dawn’s early light” hadn’t echoed off the linoleum floor before an administrator and a school aide were in the doorway ready to quell this “disruption,” as they did with so many of my classes.

But it was this high-spirited, everybody-participates approach that made the 9th Grade Writing Workshop a joy for me. And, I believe, for my students.

Assign spelling words or read a short story in class, and it would take all of my wits to keep the texting, talking, sleeping and wrestling in check. But make it 80 words on “Would you give up your cellphone for one year for $500?” and every student — even those who never did any schoolwork — handed in a paper. When I read these essays to the class in dramatic, radio-announcer fashion, there was silence punctuated by hoots of laughter or roars of agreement or disagreement.

It was almost magic. It was really fun. And I often could squeeze in some spelling, even punctuation. But we weren’t always quiet.

And, according to my personnel file at the New York City Department of Education, I was “unprofessional,” “insubordinate” and “culturally insensitive.”

In other words, I was a bad teacher.

From Michael Bloomberg to Bill Gates to hedge-fund-enriched charter school backers, the problem with our schools is bad teachers. With salaries sometimes surpassing $100,000, summers off and “job for life” tenure, it’s easy to believe that our schools are facing a bed-bug-caliber infestation of bad teachers.

Amid all of this, I thought I could do some good. I am a middle-aged white guy from the suburbs, but I’m not lazy. I’m not crazy. I’m good with kids, and I love literature.

During a three-decade career as a writer, editor and corporate executive, I traveled to more than 100 countries, met heads of state, and picked up wisdom that I thought was worth sharing. When I left publishing, I was senior vice president/group editorial director at Hachette Filipacchi Media (the bulk of which was recently sold to Hearst Magazines). Now, I was determined to make an impact directly with kids in the classroom, and I set out for the South Bronx.

Little did I know I was entering a system where all teachers are considered bad until proven otherwise. Also, from what I saw, each school’s principal has so much leeway that it’s easy for good management and honest evaluation to be crushed under the weight of Crazy Boss Syndrome. And, in my experience, the much-vaunted “data” and other measurements of student progress and teacher efficacy are far more arbitrary and manipulated than taxpayers and parents have been led to believe.

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