The Voting Rights Act permanently and nationally abolished literacy tests and poll taxes (payments) required in order to vote.
In the run-up to the Iraq war another group emerged, the liberal hawks. Liberal hawks strongly advocate American intervention to promote American values and/or to neutralize threats against American interests. Liberal hawks may support diplomatic and multilateral efforts abroad, but they generally merge the liberal internationalist desire to create a moral universe with some aspects of realist foreign policy. Liberal hawks favored invading Iraq, and most stand by that opinion.
Sunnis thought the leader ought to be elected, while Shiites felt any leader should be a relative of the prophet’s.
Iraqis were angered further buy American tactics, which cut against their cultural values. For examples, entering a house and intruding on the women of the family is taboo; shouting at men and taking them from their homes in the presence of their family is a great humiliation. The treatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib insulted the entire nation. And in Iraq, humiliation is cause for a violent reaction. To regain face, Iraqis were willing to fund and carry out insurgent operations against Western interests. Insurgents became especially good at creating IEDs, that would plague coalition forces.
To help ex-soldiers, Congress and President FDR created the GI Bill, a huge aid package that paid tuition at private and public universities and even included money for books and living expenses. More than eight millions Americans received their education under the program; but as education cost rose, the GI Bill covered less and less. The military no longer offers a free ticket to outside education.
Around 200,000 veterans are homeless, usually as a result of mental illness or addiction, which many maintain was the cause or exacerbated by their time in the military — especially if they served in Vietnam. PTSD is often blamed for soldiers’ lasting psychological damage, but it’s nothing new: during WW1 it was called shell shock, and many of its symptoms are described even in ancient military literature.
Medicare is a government health insurance program for the elderly.
Medicaid is a government health insurance program for low-income citizens.
The cost of health care has outpaced that of any other sector of the economy.
Medical expenses are the most common cause of personal bankruptcy in the US.
Insurance itself is partly to blame for rising costs, because it has made some providers and patients unaware of the price being paid. If you have insurance, you might not notice the difference between a brand name and a generic drug, though generics are often much less expensive and equally effective.
Doctors, also often unaware of costs, frequently order unnecessary tests. However, it is important to note that doctors function at the intersection of public, private, and individual health interests. While limiting testing may be the responsible course for the health care system, overall, and for the profitability of health companies, conducting all possible tests on a patient might be the most responsible course for that individual. Thus doctors must constantly manage the competing interests of the public, private, and individual good. In any case, unnecessary testing had padded the nation’s health care spending.
Pharmaceutical companies argue that patents and no price controls are necessary to encourage the massive investment in R&D that each new medication necessitates. Without a reasonable chance that a new product will be profitable, it would be sheer folly for the company to develop it in the first place, given the cost to run large clinical trials and pass FDA muster. The scale of risk is huge, since a single drug that fails might cost tens of millions of dollars, and companies must test an average of three failing drugs for every one that goes to market.
Emergency care has been in crisis for years. Since 1986, federal law has required hospitals to provide emergency care regardless of an individual’s ability to pay. Hospitals must also tell you that this is the case, so most uninsured people know that emergency room will treat them. This has led to an overuse of emergency rooms for what ought to be nonemergency care. But emergency care costs a hospital more than conventional care, and emergency rooms are packed, compromising the care they provide. Since most hospitals will go to great lengths to collect what a patient can pay, emergency rooms really provide free care only for those who are very poor.
Opponents of nuclear power further contend that it is relatively easy to target nuclear facilities by cutting the power, interfering with the cooling systems, or sabotaging the equipment by infiltrating the staff.
We have a lot of coal, almost all of which stays in the US and is used to generate electricity; about half of our electricity comes from coal-fired plants. Democrats are thought of as the more environmentally friendly party, and coal is probably the least environmentally friendly energy source, but many Democrats are pro-coal. Because a significant number of congressional Democrats come from states that produce and / or consume a lot of coal.
Oil shortages triggered all three American recessions in the past 30 years.
After September 11, the number of warrants granted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court skyrocketed, and according to its published reports, the court has denied a warrant only five times, while more than 20,000 warrants have been granted.
Fundamentally, one’s philosophy of how the Constitution ought to be read underlies this debate. Some think that the Constitution enumerates a set of fixed rights; others counter it was meant to be, or ought to be, a more flexible document that can respond to changing needs and public opinions. In the latter case, people contend that the rights specifically named by the Constitution do not comprise a complete list, and can be reinterpreted as the need arises; they are sometimes considered developmentalists. Those who disagree are called strict constructionists, and that phrase is often used to describe judges who do not support legal abortion.
Not that long ago, the US had a labor force comprising legions of children and indentured servants who worked around the clock in dangerous conditions. In 1835 children called a strike against New Jersey silk mills in order to reduce their workweek to eleven hours a day, six days a week.
Some, however, are suspicious of food stamps in general. Low-income people who do not take food stamps but manage to eat well an inexpensively are particularly critical. They resent that others are receiving benefits that their own experience tells them are unnecessary. Indeed, the same protest is heard in debates over welfare. It’s hard to argue with people who independently make do in lean time. It’s no wonder they are resentful of paying taxes that subsidize others.
Pork projects are usually slipped into bills with which they have little or nothing to do. Congressional representatives often insert earmarks, provisions that fund specific projects, in appropriation bills, which allocate spending on a yearly basis. Not all earmarks are wasteful, but they have a negative connotation because they are associated with pork projects. Earmarks are sometimes allowed into bills to ensure that a given representative will support its passage, called horsetrading; you allow an earmark in return for support on another bill. Congressional politics often depend on this kind of quid pro quo.
Some, mostly liberals, view bankruptcy for huge private industries such as airlines as tantamount to a taxpayer-funded subsidy for private, already wealthy groups, which they think is inherently unfair. Others, moderate Democrats and most Republicans, reason that bankruptcy is efficient because it allow some companies to survive otherwise fatal financial problems, which is good for employees and the economy as well as for owners and management. Still others figure that airlines are so vital to infrastructure that the government must help save them. In 2004, US Airways made headlines when it made the largest default on a federal loan in history, after its second bankruptcy filing in two years. Airlines took their lead from the automobile industry, the first to enjoy a federal bailout of guaranteed loans in 1979 and 1980. Only the auto and airline industries have ever received this form of federal aid.
Those who remained encountered a terrifying storm with winds so powerful that downtown highrises were said to sway like palm trees. They faced rapid floodwaters that rose without warning as levees failed. Even the wind was deadly, turning ordinary objects into hazardous shrapnel. The flood stranded tens of thousands, and as the waters did not immediately recede, victims were caught without food, water, shelter, or toilet facilities. They were surrounded by water full of raw sewage, debris, toxic chemicals, and decomposing bodies. Lawlessness was rife. Looting was caught on camera. Some incidents were surely motivated by the legitimate need for basic supplies, but most was theft. Many reported that rapes were common but downplayed in the media.
One of the main lines of thought followed by early supporters of affirmative action was that preferential hiring of minorities was compensation for past injustice. Many found this position untenable, and countered that preferential hiring “benefits individuals likely harmed by past wrongs (blacks and women possessing good education credentials) while it burdens individuals (younger white male applicants) least likely to be responsible for past wrong.” Other argued that merit was partly a question of opportunity: “some white [applications] have better qualifications only because they have not had to contend with the obstacles faced by their black competitors.” This view is legally discredited, and is not popular in either academia or politics.
California’s Stanford University filed an amicus brief, a legal letter of opinion, in support of affirmative action for whites: it argued that without affirmative action, its entire incoming class would be Asian American. To many, this displayed discrimination against Asian Americans, a category that is furthermore too broad to be meaningful: if a first-generation poor Bangladeshi refugee and a third-generation, wealthy, one-quarter Chinese American both count as Asian American, the category isn’t very descriptive. In any case, O’Connor’s opinion mentioned racial integration: “In order to cultivate a set of leaders with legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry, it is necessary that the path to leadership be visibly open to talented and qualified individuals of ever race and ethnicity.
What we now call the World Bank was founded as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Its mission was to make loans to countries to encourage that their — you guessed it — reconstruction and development. Keep in mind that the World Bank was, and is, able to dictate the terms of these loans. The ability to tell a government to set its currency at a certain level, interest rates at a specific percentage, or spending at a limited figure gives the World Bank great power.
“Development” is the word most used today when talking about the role of the World Bank, but “reconstruction” was really its founding principle; and while the Bretton Woods founding fathers are often vilified these days — especially by liberals — their ideas did help avert global economic disaster. The initial idea behind the Bretton Woods plan was laudable by most any standard, but how these ideas have played out is another story. Depending on who you talk to, the World Bank is a force for moral good in the world or is Satan’s usurious spawn.
Another Bretton Woods brainchild is the International Monetary Fund, or IMF, conceived as an economic paramedic team “charged with preventing another global depression.” The IMF would provide liquidity (cash) when an economy tanked and would put pressure on countries to keep their economies from tanking in the first place. By tradition the head of the World Bank is American, and the head of the IMF is European. Which probably explains not only some of the conflict but the sense that the two agencies have appeared to grow apart over the years. According to economist Joseph Stiglitz, the IMF is a “public institution, established with money provided by taxpayers around the world… founded on the belief that there was a need for collective action at the global level for economic stability” Stiglitz emphasizes the words he does because he believes that the IMF has been taken over by technocrats who serve the interests of a wealthy elite and not the worldwide poor.
The final Bretton Woods baby is the World Trade Organization, or WTO. Conceived to regulate trade among nations and promote free trade (also called open trade), the WTO didn’t actually come into being until 1995 because various groups opposed it, crucially the US Congress in 1950. In the intervening time, the General Agreement on Tarriffs and Trade, or GATT, did the work of the WTO. The two most important rounds of trade negotiation that fell under GATT were the Tokyo Round (1973-79) and the Uruguay Round (1986-94). The Uruguay Round finally created the WTO, and it took so long partly because there were so many new issues to discuss: nontariff barriers, antidumping laws, and intellectual property regulations.
The protectionist sentiment boils down to Dorgan’s following statement: “Do they really think it is fair… to compete with a 12-year-old worker, working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 12 cents an hour in some foreign country? American workers cannot compete with that and shouldn’t have to. Not after we’ve fought for a century for fair wages, safe workplaces, and the right to organize.” Free marketers would counter that the American breadwinner should find ways to compete, and more people will be better for it.
Many protectionists argue that when America loses jobs, it also loses buying power. Wal-Mart might be able to sell cheaper bicycles because Huffy moved its production to China, but the people who used to make the bikes in the US can no longer afford to buy them — and the upper classes can only consume so much, and they tend to consume different products. Losing manufacturing capability can be considered an issue of national security. Not only has the US outsourced the manufacture of some of our weapons, we also have fewer and fewer factories that could be used to produce munition if necessary. If you think that our trade partners will always sell us the weapons we need and not sell them to our enemies, then you don’t worry about this. If, however, you think politics often makes strange bedfellows, you might be concerned.