Obama Engages Dictators, Abandons Pro-Democracy Movements

The column below was published in The Pitt News today. Enjoy, read and comment:

Two nights of clashes between students and police have stolen the local media spotlight in the aftermath of the G-20 Summit but the major story for the international community to come out of Pittsburgh is the disclosure of Iran’s second nuclear facility.

            

Located on a military base outside of the holy city of Qum, Iran’s second uranium enrichment facility raises the stakes in tomorrow’s talks between Iran, the United States, Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia.

            

These talks, to take place in Geneva, constitute the fulfillment of one of Obama’s key campaign promises to engage Iran diplomatically and it is a promise that Obama has adhered to in the face of Iran’s June 2009 coup, its continued funding of terrorism and its recent missile test.

            

Indeed, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has done everything in his power to communicate his regime’s intransigence to the world. He even appointed a wanted terrorist to the cabinet position of Defense Minister, thumbing his nose at international norms and laws.

            

Ahmadinejad is closely following the North Korean playbook of outrageous international provocations and his conduct is a clear indication that he cannot be trusted.

            

Instead of recognizing Ahmadinejad’s government as the illegitimate and brutal farce that it is, Obama has blindly adhered to his vague foreign policy of engagement. This policy is not only harming the interests of this nation but also damaging the Iranian people whose pro-democracy movement has been largely ignored by the Obama Administration.

            

Rather than denounce the Ahmadinejad government and materially pressure it to abandon its nuclear program, Obama has handled Iran’s leaders with kid gloves and granted them international legitimacy by engaging them diplomatically.

            

Obama should recognize that the Iranian government thrives on illusions and requires international sanction in order to exist. For instance, every time that Obama refers to Iran as an “Islamic Republic,” he is participating in the Iranian illusion of representative government.

            

To call Iran a republic is to ignore the fact that an unelected religious despot known as the “Supreme Leader of Iran” and his council of Medievalist mullahs control the foreign and domestic policies of Iran. This Supreme Leader appoints the heads of the military, media and judiciary as well as the 12 members of the Guardian Council tasked with deciding who runs for president and what laws are ratified.

            

It is impossible to treat this government as representative of the Iranian people but Obama continues to do just this in his desperate attempt to placate the American Left and its nonsensical belief that Iran can be engaged diplomatically.

            

Not only is this policy of engagement a dramatic betrayal of American principles, it is an insult to the Iranian people who have taken to the streets in support of democracy. We should be engaging with these pro-democracy activists and aiding them in their attempt to establish a true Iranian republic not actively undermining them by treating their dictators as legitimate rulers.

            

Indeed, a democratic Iran unfettered by the tyranny of theocracy would have no need for nuclear weapons and would pose no threat to the United States or our allies in the region. Promoting democracy in Iran is the only sure way to prevent nuclear weapons from falling into the hands of Ahmadinejad and being used in his genocidal plans to wipe Israel off the map.

            

But what’s most troubling about Obama’s engagement with Iran is that it’s part of a larger foreign policy that fails to delineate between democracy and despotism, right and wrong. Obama has shown a remarkable propensity to reach out to dictators and treat them as legitimate rulers and potential partners with the United States.

            

He has warmed American relations with the Castro dictatorship in Cuba, reached out to Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and sent high-level American politicians to meet with despots in Myanmar and North Korea.

            

Dictators crave international legitimacy and whether it’s shaking Chavez’s hand in a photo-op or trading meetings with powerful American politicians for the release of hostages, Obama has consistently delivered this legitimacy to some of the world’s most despicable rulers.

            

It’s time for Obama to tell the truth about despots in Iran and throughout the world and to stop treating them as trustworthy diplomatic partners. Only by standing with the oppressed, pro-democratic elements of nations such as Iran can our nation secure its national interest. 

Interns Deserve Pay Too

This column was published in The Pitt News today. After considering the issues in greater depth, I'm not sure I fully stand by this published position any longer but that's a post for another day.

Internships are a popular way for students to learn valuable work related skills while also getting their foot in the door at a corporation of their choosing. While many interns are paid for their work or at least granted a stipend, the unpaid internship is a fixture of college life.

           

Students in the social sciences flock to unpaid internships working at non-profits, political offices and news publications because they perceive the experience of working for these outfits as vital not only to their college experience but also to their future career.

           

In this process of working for experience rather than money, students are harming themselves and the labor market.

           

First, by working for free, students are telling employers that their labor is not valuable. Remember, internships vary from five to 40 hours a week and many approach full time employment.

           

Working these kinds of hours without any compensation except for “experience” signals that students don’t take their skills and time seriously in the context of a capitalist free market. Keep in mind, we function in an economy where hiring and pay are largely determined by skill.

           

Certainly, nepotism and affirmative action skew this metric but in a majority of situations it is an applicant’s ability that secures them a paying job. And the fact that it is paying is important because exchanging your skills and time for nothing but a letter of recommendation is a reflection on how you view yourself in a job market.

           

Remember, if companies weren’t able to dupe a student into photocopying, answering phones and writing internal memos for free, they would have to hire a paid secretary to perform these tasks. In any other economic system, this demand would give the applicant leverage to secure meaningful compensation for their time.

           

But this isn’t only about the individual college student and the fact that they’re getting ripped off by corporations. No, college students accepting and even clamoring for unpaid internships affect everyone by devaluing labor and making it impossible for students in some areas to trade their skills and time for compensation.

           

For instance, a political science major would be hard-pressed to find a paid internship in a political office and it is almost impossible to find one on Capitol Hill. Instead, there’s intense competition for unpaid internships in politics making it almost impossible for a student to find a paid position.

           

These unpaid internships may teach students the ins and outs of the political system, but they make a political education almost impossible for students who have to pay their own way through college. Without income through the internship, students have to take on second jobs, rely on family or go further into debt in order to gain a firsthand political education in the nation’s capital.

           

This trend is repeated throughout many disciplines as students who have to pay their own way are priced-out of internships. This turns a job market based on merit and ability into one based on wealth and connections.

           

Of course, in some instances, unpaid internships may be necessary for a particular field of study such as law but as an overall trend in education, unpaid internships should be discouraged.            

The difficulty is that many colleges and universities have incorporated unpaid internships as part of their curriculum, encouraging students to basically perform volunteer work for credit. But while a student’s labor can teach them many things through work experience, employment should be considered primarily an economic question and only secondarily as an aspect of education.

           

Treating work as an economic issue rather than an educational one will prepare students for the reality of their time after college, when securing a job is based on your skills rather than your willingness to work for free.

           

On the whole, unpaid internships distort the job market, price many students out of positions in competitive fields such as politics, and reinforce an unrealistic understanding of post-college work. Universities should encourage students to secure the greatest monetary gain possible for the skills they possess, rather than support the exchange of hundreds of hours of labor for little or no material gain.

Local Media Scrutinizes Students for Justice in Palestine

WTAE aired a piece today on Students for Justice in Palestine and their involvement with the Pittsburgh G-20 Resistance Project. Local and national media has picked up the story since my first column was published in The Pitt News. The University must realize that no student's activities fee should go to fund this organization.

Pittsburgh: Proof that Capitalism Works

This column was just published by The Pitt News. Read it below and comment.

G-20 protesters have descended on Pittsburgh not to protest any single policy of the G-20 but to rail against capitalism as an oppressive and unjust system foisted upon billions of people by a cabal of world leaders. These protesters promise to make our city their ideological playground filled with tent cities, anti-capitalist marches and – if the bluster of online anarchists is to be believed – violence directed against local businesses.

            

But Pittsburgh is a vibrant counterpoint to the incipient whining of socialists, Marxists and anarchists who seek to blame an economic system for all the world’s troubles. Our libraries, museums and universities are the product of industry.

            

Every building or public space with the name Mellon, Frick, Carnegie, Heinz or Schenley is a product of capitalism and the wealth generated by innovation and competition.

            

Of course, our city’s relationship with capitalism and industry has had its ups and downs. From the great railroad strike of 1877 to the Battle of Homestead to the attempted assassination of Henry Clay Frick, Pittsburgh bore witness to violence perpetrated by both labor and capital.

            

But in spite of the occasional conflict between labor and business, Pittsburgh’s economic history is one of growth driven by industry.

            

Although we look back on the practices of 19^th century industry with distaste and today view coal, the material that powered this nation, as a disastrous pollutant, Pittsburgh would not exist today as a center of education and medical research had it not been for our past industrial success.

            

Our story of success is one of hard work, competition and innovation and it is a story that goes hand in hand with the history of capitalism in this nation. The simple truth is that no other economic system would have enabled such a history and we need look no farther than the gulags of Soviet Russia, the murderous Great Leap Forward of Communist China or the authoritarian nightmare of Fidel Castro’s Cuba to understand the capitalist imperative.

            

The history or state-directed economies is the greatest vindication of capitalism as the economic system that allows people the greatest liberty and chance for success without undue impositions or interference.

            

Of course, with this chance for success comes the chance for failure and no capitalist economy is without those who have failed. This appears to be a major source of contention for protest organizations like Bail Out the People who kicked off this week’s G-20 protests with their March For Jobs on Sunday.

            

On their website, Bail Out the People called for “a moratorium on layoffs, foreclosures and evictions” and proclaimed “the right of everyone to a job or a guaranteed income.” The suggestion that everyone deserves an income regardless of his or her ability or work is ridiculous.

            

Bail Out the People is demanding that need be elevated above ability and that competition be abandoned in favor of an individual’s “right” to employment regardless of their ability to perform a job or the job’s necessity to the economy.

            

Bail Out the People is just one of the organizations protesting the G-20 but it is important to recognize their ethic of need for what it is and remember that neither this nation nor this city were built by giving jobs to the unqualified or by paying people to do nothing.

            

Over the next week, we will all be subjected to the protesters’ slogans, placards and proclamations. As they criticize and demonize capitalism as an economic system of oppression, we must remember that all we hold dear in this city would be impossible without it.

            

We must remember that capitalism’s critics have had their chance in other nations to establish socialist, communist and statist alternatives but have only succeeded in creating greater pain and suffering.

            

We must remember that for all of capitalism’s flaws, it has still proven to be the economic system most conducive to individual liberty and social mobility.

            

Let the protesters attack capitalism, let them march in our streets and protest outside our businesses because when they’ve exhausted their rage and the circus has ended, our city will still be standing as a testament to the achievements of free men and women engaged in a free capitalist economy.

Student Radicals Mistaken in Assault on Capitalism

Students and young people from Pitt and around the country have been planning protests against the G-20 Summit and, later this week, they’ll have a chance to prove their radical credentials and rail against capitalism in a public space.

            

At permitted and unpermitted protests throughout the city, radical students will, as one proclamation endorsed by Pitt’s Students for Justice in Palestine put it, “take to the streets of Pittsburgh to disrupt the summit and the institutions of capital that profit from its domination.”

            

At a meeting in David Lawrence, Students for Radical Change and Liberation even brought a speaker from Pittsburgh’s own anarchist group, the Pittsburgh Organizing Group, to teach them about participating in mass actions and managing their “arrest-risk” during the G-20 protests, PittBriefly reported.

            

Whether online or on campus, radical student groups at Pitt have assaulted capitalism as our great oppressor and planned to bring it to its knees during the G-20 Summit. But while students and other protesters will undoubtedly get lots of media and police attention during the G-20, the only thing they’re likely to disrupt is the lives of Pittsburghers.

            

The real assault on capitalism is being perpetrated by the heads of the G-20 themselves whose nations are less free market giants than bloated, planned economies. Remember, the list of G-20 states includes Communist China, the Oil State of Saudi Arabia and social-democratic Brazil whose current president, Lula da Silva, is the leader of something called the Workers’ Party.

            

If anything, the G-20 is an organization of major planned economies seeking to turn the world market into a safer, planned market devoid of the sort of risks and rewards inherent in capitalist economies.

            

In fact, the most capitalist nation on that list may well be the United States but President Obama, by proposing caps on wages at financial institutions and an expansion of federally funded health care benefits, is steadily moving our country toward a more statist economy.

            

But protesters would rather identify lack of health care, lack of jobs and global warfare as products of a global capitalist cabal than the result of their own inability to pay for health care, get a job or elect anti-war candidates to office.

            

Of course, the problem with scapegoating is that it’s an easily debunked charade perpetrated by those unable (or unwilling) to engage in serious debate about the facts.

            

The fact is that capitalism lifted this world out of the feudalism and perpetual warfare of the Middle Ages.

            

Capitalism popularized and funded the inventions that improved every American’s life from the steam engine to the telephone.

            

Capitalism made it possible for people to devote four years of their lives to studying Marx at a university.

            

Whether protesters like it or not, capitalism has done more to lift humanity out of bondage and poverty than any tent city in the history of man. Protest China’s human rights policies, Saudi Arabia’s treatment of women or the United States’ continued discrimination against the LGBT community but don’t build up a false enemy in capitalism as an excuse to disrupt businesses and communities in Pittsburgh.

Senate Votes to Allow Guns on Amtrak

The senate voted 68 to 30 on Wednesday to require Amtrak allow passengers to transport unloaded, locked guns in their checked baggage or lose its $1.6 billion subsidy, The New York Times reported. This requirement is similar to how the airline industry handles the transportation of guns but Amtrak protested that it did not possess the same screening capabilities as major airlines and would be unable to handle the new gun regulation safely.

            

While I fully support Second Amendment rights, I’m mainly interested in this story for what it says about Amtrak and government involvement in industry. Amtrak’s Chairman said that this new congressional mandate would require a significant amount of time and money to implicate – far more time than the six months the Senate is giving Amtrak to adopt the new regulation.

            

But Amtrak really has no right to complain because they got themselves into this mess in the first place by becoming a federally subsidized corporation unable to turn a profit or even stay afloat without Federal aid.

            

Personally, I’d like nothing more than to see Amtrak fail to implement this regulation in time, lose its federal funding and go bankrupt the way it should have years ago. With Amtrak out of the way, perhaps this country would finally see the rise of for-profit passenger rail service operated by leadership not beholden to Washington.

            

As far as other businesses are concerned, this Senate amendment should be a cautionary tale: take federal money and abandon the free market and some day you too will be told to implement costly new practices at the ideological whim of some senator.

Camping Protesters Violate City Law, Residents' Rights

This column appeared in The Pitt News today.

A group of six local and national protest organizations filed a federal lawsuit on Friday against the city, the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and the Secret Service, The Post-Gazette reported. The suit alleges that the three defendants have conspired to deny protesters their First Amendment rights by failing to approve a number of permits for G-20 related protests.

            
Represented by American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania attorney Witold Walczak, the six plaintiffs are Code Pink, The Thomas Merton Center, Pittsburgh Outdoor Artists, Bail Out the People, G6 Billion and the Three Rivers Climate Convergence.

            
They are petitioning U.S. District Judge Gary L. Lancaster to decide exactly how close to the convention center protesters will be allowed to go and to order the issuance of permits by the city.

            
The permits sought involve a variety of protests including a march from Oakland to downtown sponsored by the Merton Center and the erection of tent cities by Code Pink and the Three Rivers Climate Convergence in Point State Park. Similarly, Bail Out the People and Pittsburgh Outdoor Artists want to camp in East Park and South Side Riverfront Park, respectively.

            
This question of camping in parks and erecting tent cities is really the most baffling to me as a Pittsburgher because, rather than view this as a free speech issue, I see this as a question of the law and the rights of Pittsburgh tax payers.

            
City code states “No person in a park shall camp except with permission of the Director and only for groups of persons under adequate supervision. No person shall set up tents, shacks or any other temporary shelter for the purpose of overnight camping…”

            
Importantly, the parks director has not given these groups permission to camp in the parks, it would be almost impossible to adequately supervise these groups while they camp and it would be a violation of city code for these organizations to set up tents overnight.

            
These regulations govern the activity of every resident of this city throughout the year and I see no reason why thousands of protesters from out of town should be able to violate these regulations based on a flimsy claim that the First Amendment protects camping.

            
A statement on g20media.org, self-described as an “information clearinghouse and media support for dissent at the Pittsburgh G-20 Summit,”            called on activists to “claim Pittsburgh parks for the people” and “affirm the people’s right to use the people’s commons for our activities.”

            
But these activists don’t represent the will of the residents of this city and their assertion of a right to our public parks to use for their activities is ridiculous. The citizens of this city whose taxes pay for the maintenance of these parks will be excluded from them if these activists have their way and are allowed to use our parks as free housing for the duration of the G-20 Summit.

            
For all of their criticism of the G-20 leaders who activists claim represent an “undemocratic” imposition on the world and on our city, at least the G-20 leaders, diplomats and attending press corps will be paying for their lodging while they’re here. But instead of paying for their housing, activists are asking a federal judge to allow them to violate city regulations and set up tent cities in our parks.

            
There is nothing more undemocratic than thousands of protesters from out of town asking a federal judge to overturn the judgement of the elected leaders of the city of Pittsburgh.

            
The G-20 Summit itself represents an inconvenience to many Pittsburghers with traffic jams, security cordons and closed businesses that many of us would not have chosen to bring to our city. That being said, it isn’t right for us to also have to confront the kind of violence and vandalism that G-20 protesters have brought to cities such as London, Seattle and Genoa when they’ve hosted international summits.

            
The protesters planning to camp in public parks, hold unpermitted protests against scores of local businesses and hold unpermitted marches in Pittsburgh neighborhoods are taking our city from us over the span of two days and then have the gall to speak on our behalf.

            
Let me put it simply, the G-20 protesters do not represent the interests or opinions of an overwhelming majority of Pittsburghers who would prefer to have the use of their parks, streets and businesses the week of the G-20 Summit. It is inappropriate for protesters to assume the mantle of “the people” while they try to take from us our parks and our city.