re: supreme court rejects inmates' rights to dna

I submitted an edited version of my last post, "supreme court rejects inmates' rights to dna," to the Oregonian editorial board, and it's been selected along with one other submission as the Wednesday offering for a new feature on their online opinion page:

Jason, Richard:
I've chosen your letters on the recent Supreme Court DNA ruling as the Wednesday offering for a new feature on our online opinion page at http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion

Point-Counterpoint offers two opposing viewpoints on the same subject.

Your letters are scheduled to post at 9 a.m. 6/24. Readers may comment on your thoughts and you are welcome to respond to them and to each other.

Thanks very much for contributing to our community's conversation.

All best,

Helen Shum
Public Access Editor
The Oregonian
503-221-8039

Here's the edited version:

No innocent person should be incarcerated, but the recent Supreme Court ruling seriously undermines an inmate's ability to challenge their incarceration and prove their innocence via new, more advanced DNA testing methods.

The 5-4 ruling denies that inmates have a constitutional right to DNA testing after their conviction and places the states in charge of setting their own policies concerning whether inmates can have access to post-conviction DNA testing.

Amendment 6 of the U.S. Constitution states that "the accused shall enjoy the right ... to be confronted with the witnesses against him" and "obtaining witnesses in his favor." And this applies to physical evidence as well.

The right to, as Reuters puts it, "obtain access to a state's biological evidence to conduct DNA testing when pursuing claims of innocence" should easily fall under this amendment.

I agree with the dissenting justices that "the right to post-conviction DNA testing should not depend on the widely varying laws enacted by the states."

supreme court rejects inmates' rights to dna

While my opinion is that no innocent person should be incarcerated, and that we should make every effort to ensure their freedom if wrongly convicted, the recent Supreme Court ruling seriously undermines an inmate's ability to challenge their incarceration and prove their innocence via new, more advanced DNA testing methods.

The 5-4 ruling denies that inmates have a constitutional right to DNA testing after their conviction and places the states in charge of setting their own policies concerning whether inmates can have access to post-conviction DNA testing or not. What this means is that if someone's innocent and wrongfully imprisoned for a crime they didn't commit, and a new DNA test might clear them of any wrong doing, they have no constitutionally protected right to that biological evidence.

So states such as Alabama, Alaska, Massachusetts and Oklahoma that have no laws allowing post-conviction access to biological evidence can arbitrarily decide whether or not someone can have access to such evidence or new, more advanced testing methods. And the states that do have laws often place strict limits on who is eligible, so there's no guarantee that inmates in those states will be able to exonerate themselves either.

As for the constitutionality of this issue, Amendment 6 states that "the accused shall enjoy the right ... to be confronted with the witnesses against him" and "obtaining witnesses in his favor." And this applies to physical evidence as well. So as far as I'm concerned, the right to, as Reuters puts it, "obtain access to a state's biological evidence to conduct DNA testing when pursuing claims of innocence" should easily fall under this amendment.

In other words, I think it is a Constitutional issue and I agree with the dissenting justices that "the right to post-conviction DNA testing should not depend on the widely varying laws enacted by the states." This has got to be one of the most disturbing rulings from the U. S. Supreme Court in recent memory. It's absolutely unbelievable.

the more things change, the more they stay the same

In One-Way Street, Walter Benjamin wrote:

The notion of the class war can be misleading. It does not refer to a trial of strength to decide the question "Who shall win, who be defeated?" or to a struggle whose outcome is good for the victor and bad for the vanquished. To think in this way is to romanticize and obscure the facts. For whether the bourgeoisie wins or loses the fight, it remains doomed by the inner contradictions that in the course of development will come through itself or through the proletariat. The continuance or the end of three thousand years of cultural development will be decided by the answer. History knows nothing of the evil infinity contained in the image of the two wrestlers locked in eternal combat. The true politician reckons only in dates. And if the abolition of the bourgeoisie is not completed by an almost calculable moment in economic and technical development (a moment signaled by inflation and poison-gas warfare), all is lost. Before the spark reaches the dynamite, the lighted fuse must be cut. The interventions, dangers, and tempi of politicians are technical—not chivalrous.

Sometimes I can't help but feel the same way.

re: too little, too late

Someone commented:

the unfettered exploitation of natural resources by a small minority is unsustainable

The small minority here are the indigenous people who are fighting violently to keep a monopoly on the land resources that they just happened to be lucky enough to be born near. What right do they have to determine how those resources are used? Big deal, they won the genetic lottery and are on land that contains value natural resources.

The Peruvian government has every right to carry out violence against tiny minorities (1 percent of the population) who become violent when the democratically elected government of Peru legally brokers deals on the natural resources in the country. Groups who threaten to do things like sabotage oil pipelines and kill police officers are committing crimes against humanity.

Peru may be rather poor, but its still a stable democracy with a fairly high GDP per capita. Its not Niger, or Burma. You could more rightfully compare oil drilling in Peru to drilling in US states like Alaska or Texas.

My response:

To begin with, you've taken that quote out of context. It's part of a general statement regarding the way society is currently structured and the fact that a small minority of people who possess both power and capital exploit the majority of the world's resources for their own gain, even to the detriment of local populations.

As for Peru being a "democracy," I agree with Madison, albeit somewhat reluctantly, about the dangers of having a majority of citizens who are united and motivated by a common interest who can take away the rights of the minority of other citizens. As he put it in Federalist No. 10, "… the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society."

Of course, I think Madison was more worried about protecting the small minority of property owners from the majority of the propertyless; nevertheless, his ideas about protecting "individual liberty" from majority rule are still important ones to think about. All in all, I think it's a good argument for a constitution-based, representative government in which the majority prevails while also including certain protections for minorities that discourage abuse.

In this case, the people who'll arguably be impacted the most by President Garica's decision to open vast expanses of forest to foreign investors interested in drilling for oil, logging and building dams have almost no say whatsoever, even when its their own land. I don't think that's acceptable. And, apparently, neither do the indigenous Peruvians.

The President of Peru [who said "40,000 natives did not have the right to tell 28 million Peruvians not to come to their lands"] blames "foreign forces" for the violence of the native people, and I think he's right—if by "foreign forces" he means the foreign investors interested in drilling for oil, logging and building dams on their land without their consent.

too little, too late

The recent unrest in Peru over government decrees that "would open large jungle areas to investment and allow companies to bypass indigenous groups to obtain permits for petroleum exploration, logging and building hydroelectric dams" is a glaring example of how the capitalist system of production — a system in which privately owned and controlled production based on profit — can lead to the exploitation of people and resources (Protesters Gird for Long Fight Over Opening Peru’s Amazon).

The president of Peru, Alan Garcia, has opened vast expanses of forest to foreign investors interested in drilling for oil, logging and building dams despite the fact that the area in question is home to native Amazonians who are opposed to these things. So not only are these people's interests being marginalized in the decision-making process by the foreign investors and multinational corporations who want nothing more than to exploit these natural resources without care or concern for the indigenous people or their way of life, they're being marginalized by their own government!

It's a sad state of affairs. On the one hand, the way society is currently structured, the unfettered exploitation of natural resources by a small minority is unsustainable. On the other hand, there seems to be very little the average person can do to change things. It seems like more and more areas are being drilled and logged and mined etc. by huge multinational corporations while more and more people are being negatively affected economically, environmentally and socially as a result.

Certainly there are places like Norway, where the majority of people have generally benefited from local oil production, but there are many places where the people have benefited very little, e.g., places like Burma, the Niger Delta and, of course, Peru. Even residents in Norway, whose oil reserves in the North Sea are rapidly being depleted, are starting to run into problems with the never ending search for more oil (Opposition grows to Norway's Arctic oil search). And while things in Norway are being worked out in the political arena, with the views of both sides being taken into consideration, it's taking more and more extreme measures for others to have their voices heard or to even fight back when necessary.

Case in point. In the Niger Delta, where government corruption is rampant, locals outraged over the environmental devastation caused by the oil giant Shell and the unequal distribution of wealth have resorted to attacking and sabotaging commercial oil refineries and pipelines, as well as taking foreign workers hostage. And in Peru, where the president claims there's "a conspiracy afoot to keep Peru from using its natural riches," indigenous protesters (who the president called "ignorant") have not only been forced to take to the streets for the past three months to defend their ancestral lands, but to face tear gas and automatic weapons in the process (Peru's Deadly Battle Over Oil in the Amazon).

As a self-identified pacifist who abhors violence in most contexts, I hate to see human beings who, being influenced by disparate material conditions and divided into various classes by opposing interests, are thrown onto a collision course with each other. It makes me sad and angry, but most of all it makes me seriously question a system that leads to such class antagonism by the unequal distribution of wealth and power at its very heart.

To be honest, I don't think that a socialist system of production — a system in which collectively owned and democratically controlled production is based on need rather than profit — will solve all of the world's problems, but I do think that it has the potential to help limit the economic and societal conditions that foster things like greed and violence, as well as to give a stronger voice to local populations in areas such as economic planning and its potential environment and social impacts, the utilization of local natural resources and/or the distribution of wealth associated with those resources, etc.

In Peru's case, the balance of power is decidedly tipped in favour of the Peruvian government and the multinational corporations who are interested in exploiting Peru's natural resources — and, not surprisingly, the ones who'll benefit the most from the exploitation of these natural resources — while the people who'll arguably be impacted the most have almost no say whatsoever. That just seems ass-backwards to me, and I dare say that the indigenous Peruvians agree!

That doesn't mean that I think the Peruvian government or the foreign investors are bad people, only that the system in which they operate seems blatantly unfair to the people who, for whatever reason, stand in the way of ever greater profit margins or the culture of unfettered consumerism that's increasingly dominating the industrialized world—a system in which thousands of people have little recourse besides taking to the streets with rocks and spears in order for their voices to be heard.

There's got to be a better way of dealing with these issues. Otherwise, the conflicts that we're seeing in places like the Niger Delta and Peru will not only continue to escalate, they'll likely spread to other, more advanced nation states where such conflicts won't be limited to just spears or guns. This is especially disconcerting when considering the race by Canada, China, Denmark, Norway, Russia and the U.S to claim exploration and drilling rights to the potential oil and natural gas reserves lying just beneath the rapidly melting Arctic ice (Riches in the Arctic: the new oil race).

Sometimes I can't decide whether I'm an optimist or a pessimist. While I'm hopeful that proper planning via radical democracy can potentially alleviate the majority of these conflicts and our impact on the environment by extracting and distributing these resources in a way that's economically, environmentally and socially responsible, I'm less than hopeful that things will change in a meaningful way in time to truly make a difference. I'm afraid if we don't figure out something soon, it’ll be too little too late.

in defense of norman thomas (edited version)

Listening to Ronald Reagan's 1961 LP recording for the Operation Coffee Cup campaign against medicare, or as Reagan called it, "socialized medicine," I'm reminded of the current debate over health care reform and the non-story about Sonia Sotomayor's inclusion of a quote by Norman Thomas on her 1976 Princeton yearbook page. What really bothers me about this, besides the slam of medicare as a danger to democracy and individual liberty of course, is Reagan's characterization of Thomas' political views, which I find unfair and misleading.

To begin with, Reagan starts out with a quote often attributed to Thomas (although I've never been able to find the original source), which is, "The American people will never vote for socialism. But, under the name of 'liberalism,' the American people will adopt every fragment of the socialist program," and then uses that as a segue to discuss another "threat" facing the U.S. that is "with us" and "more imminent"—the imposition of "statism or socialism" by way of medicine.

In a time immediately following the second Red Scare and in the midst of the Cold War when the fear of "socialism" was high, what Reagan essentially did at the onset of the recording by equating Thomas with socialism and socialism with statism was to imply that Thomas himself supported the same kind of oppressive statist policies as Josef Stalin. Furthermore, by equating medicare to "socialized medicine," he was trying to utilize that fear in an effort to discourage support for the passage of medicare by implying that it was nothing but an insidious plot by socialists to take over the U.S.

Besides the fact that single-payer health insurance for the elderly isn't a bad thing, Thomas didn't support Stalin, nor did he desire to transform the U.S. into another Soviet dictatorship. In fact, he actively spoke out against Stalin and the oppressiveness of the Soviet Union. In 1948, for example, he denounced Stalin's Soviet dictatorship as a menace in a private letter to President Truman. And in 1950, he wrote in his book, A Socialist Faith:

At the end of the war, so tolerant was American opinion of Stalin, which whom we had been allied in the fighting, that I felt obliged to spend much energy in speech and writing to elaborate the facts about Stalin's betrayal of the ideals of true socialism. So rapidly did this situation change, however, and so deeply were the American people stirred by the development of the cold war, that it became no longer necessary for me to work out in detail a criticism of communist totalitarianism.

In addition, Thomas wasn't a statist in the sense that I think Reagan meant. Like most socialists, he wanted to take power from the state and give it back to the citizens, especially the workers, which is in direct contrast to the right-wing view of statism promulgated by the likes of Ayn Rand, who heavily influenced conservative ideology throughout the 50s and 60s. In the Objectivist Newsletter, for example, she writes:

A statist system—whether of a communist, fascist, Nazi, socialist or “welfare” type—is based on the . . . government’s unlimited power, which means: on the rule of brute force. The differences among statist systems are only a matter of time and degree; the principle is the same. Under statism, the government is not a policeman, but a legalized criminal that holds the power to use physical force in any manner and for any purpose it pleases against legally disarmed, defenseless victims.

In her view, "any kind or degree of such control, by any group, for any purpose whatsoever—rests on the basic principle of statism, the principle that man’s life belongs to the state," and this is precisely the kind of statism that I think Reagan was referring to. Thomas, on the other hand, knew quite well the dangers posed by such a state. In A Socialist Faith, for example, he points out that, "Lenin did not so much interpret as modify Marxism by his development of the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat." Earlier in the book, he mentions that Marx himself never explains this term, but that much later Engels wrote "the Paris Commune ... was the dictatorship of the Proletariat." Thomas then stresses that the Paris Commune was "concerned to destroy the bureaucratic military machine" and that "[i]t was never a one-party government with stringent controls over working-class freedom of speech and association such as the Bolsheviks later imposed."

Thus, while people like Rand and Reagan associated all forms of socialism with Stalin-esque dictatorship, Thomas himself flatly rejected such a system. As Raymond Gregory notes in Norman Thomas: The Great Dissenter, "Thomas' rejection of 'any sort of coercion whatsoever' made it impossible for him to accept the Bolshevik concept of Soviet control and dominance," and he made this position abundantly clear in his application for membership in the Socialist Party when he wrote:

Perhaps to certain members of the party my socialism would not be of the most orthodox variety ... I have a profound fear of the undue exaltation of the State and a profound faith that the new world we desire must depend upon freedom and fellowship rather than any sort of coercion whatsoever. I am interested in political parties only to the extent in which they may be serviceable in advancing certain ideals and in winning liberty for men and women.

If Thomas supported statism at all, it was one in which the state — geared toward guaranteeing civil rights and providing basic social needs — was in direct control of the people. Like Rand, who equated government power with "the power of coercion by physical force," Thomas feared and shunned an all-powerful state, but he didn't see government itself as the main problem; he saw it as the platform by which change through democratic means was possible.

He was by no means perfect, but he was anything but a threat to the principles of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

(Edited version submitted to the Socialist and the Socialist WebZine.)

in defense of norman thomas

I received an email this week with a link to an LP recording by Ronald Reagan for the Operation Coffee Cup campaign against medicare, or as Reagan called it, "socialized medicine." Although Reagan's speech against "socialized medicine" was originally recorded in 1961, I find it surprisingly relevant to what's happening today with the current debate over health care reform and the non-story about U.S. Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's inclusion of a quote by Norman Thomas, six time Socialist Party presidential candidate, co-founder of the ACLU and fellow Princeton alumi, on her 1976 Princeton yearbook page.

What really bothered me about this, besides the slam of medicare as a danger to democracy and individual liberty of course, is Reagan's characterization of Thomas' political views, which I find unfair and misleading. As it happens, I've just started reading Thomas' A Socialist Faith, so I feel an urge to write a short defense of Thomas.

To begin with, Reagan starts out with a quote often attributed to Thomas (although I've never been able to find the original source, and neither has Snopes.com), which is, "The American people will never vote for socialism. But, under the name of 'liberalism,' the American people will adopt every fragment of the socialist program," and then uses that as a segue to discuss another "threat" facing the U.S. that is "with us" and "more imminent"—the imposition of "statism or socialism" by way of medicine (cue scary sounding music).

While it's true that Thomas was a socialist, Reagan completely misrepresents his politics by utilizing the same socialism = statism straw man argument that almost every conservative propagates to death—as if every extreme form of government intervention in the economy in which production is dominated by an authoritarian political regime or state is equivalent to socialism. For starters, there are many different forms of socialism, but the type of socialism that Thomas represented, the form I think most democratic socialists represent, is nothing like the the authoritarian and militaristic style of socialism that dominated China and Russia. In fact, most socialists wouldn't even consider what they had as socialism. Even Lenin and Trotsky, two Bolshevik Party leaders and revolutionaries, acknowledged that fact.

What Thomas represented was a mass movement towards economic democracy — collectively owned and democratically controlled production based on need rather than profit — and the creation of an egalitarian, classless society. Besides a very brief period just after the 1917 Russian Revolution, there wasn't even anything close to worker owned and democratically controlled production in either country, let alone the creation of an egalitarian, classless society. What places like the Soviet Union and China had was nothing more than an authoritarian form of state capitalism, a system in which the state owns and/or controls the means of production. They were socialist in name only. And this isn't simply some sort of modern reinterpretation of socialism as some like to suggest. In fact, this very point was made by Wilhelm Liebknecht in 1896 when he said:

Nobody has combatted State Socialism more than we German Socialists; nobody has shown more distinctively than I, that State Socialism is really State capitalism!

Frederick Engels also made this distinction a decade earlier when he argued in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific that state-ownership of certain industries isn't the same thing as socialism, nor does it solve the problems inherent in the capitalist system, most notably the exploitation of its working-class citizens.

At the very least, in any form of state socialism, the people must be in control the state in a directly democratic way. As Eric Ruder put it in What is Socialism?, "The critical determining factor of whether state ownership of the means of production (or the means of finance) has a socialist character depends on the answer to a simple question: If the state controls the economy, who controls the state?"

In Russia's case, the working class was decimated on the front lines of WWI and the Russian Civil War, as well as by famine, and the Bolshevik Party basically ended up substituting itself for the working class by taking over its role in the government. After two relatively bloodless revolutions — the first being a spontaneous event that led to the abdication of the Tsar in February of 1917 and the second being the removal of the unpopular and ineffective Provisional Government by the Bolshevik Party in October of the same year — the country erupted into civil war, and the Allied Power's intervention in Russia's Civil War on the side of pro-monarchist and anti-Bolshevik forces didn't help matters any. During this time, the Bolshevik-led government became increasingly more brutal and repressive in an effort to hold on to power amidst the chaos and upheaval. They suppressed rival political organizations and began taking away power from what was left of the directly democratic workers' councils (i.e., soviets) that consisted of worker-elected delegates with both legislative and executive powers. These events paved the way for Josef Stalin's eventual rise to power and the formation of the U.S.S.R.

In a time immediately following the second Red Scare and in the midst of the Cold War when the fear of "socialism" was high, what Reagan essentially did at the onset of the recording by equating Thomas with socialism and socialism with statism was to imply that Thomas himself supported the same kind of oppressive statist policies as Stalin. Furthermore, by equating medicare to "socialized medicine," he was trying to utilize that fear in an effort to discourage support for the passage of medicare by implying that it was nothing but an insidious plot by socialists to take over the U.S. So even though he only mentions Thomas at the beginning and end of the recording, I think this mischaracterization of Thomas' political views is clearly evident when seen within the context of Reagan's entire monologue.

Besides the fact that single-payer health insurance for the elderly isn't a bad thing, especially for the elderly themselves, Thomas didn't support Stalin, nor did he desire to transform the U.S. into another Soviet dictatorship. In fact, he actively spoke out against Stalin and the oppressiveness of the Soviet Union. In 1948, for example, he denounced Stalin's Soviet dictatorship as a menace in a private letter to President Truman. And in 1950, he wrote in his book, A Socialist Faith:

Even democratic socialists like myself, despite fears of dictatorship, viewed the Russian revolution optimistically until the time of Stalin's purges or, in some cases, until his pact with Hitler. The disillusionment was bitter and painful. It drove some of its victims far to the right. Later on, Russian resistance to Hitler's attack brought Stalin widespread confidence and support in the United States even from conservatives. The single speech most uncritically eulogistic of Stalin which I ever heard from a noncommunist was given by Wendell Willkie, titular leader of the Republican Party, after the trip on which he discovered "one world."

At the end of the war, so tolerant was American opinion of Stalin, which whom we had been allied in the fighting, that I felt obliged to spend much energy in speech and writing to elaborate the facts about Stalin's betrayal of the ideals of true socialism. So rapidly did this situation change, however, and so deeply were the American people stirred by the development of the cold war, that it became no longer necessary for me to work out in detail a criticism of communist totalitarianism.

In addition, Thomas wasn't a statist in the sense that I think Reagan meant, and neither are most democratic socialists. Like most other socialists, he wanted to take power from the state and give it back to the citizens, especially the workers, which is in direct contrast to the right-wing view of statism promulgated by the likes of Ayn Rand, who heavily influenced conservative ideology throughout the 50s and 60s. In The Objectivist Newsletter, for example, she writes:

A statist system—whether of a communist, fascist, Nazi, socialist or “welfare” type—is based on the . . . government’s unlimited power, which means: on the rule of brute force. The differences among statist systems are only a matter of time and degree; the principle is the same. Under statism, the government is not a policeman, but a legalized criminal that holds the power to use physical force in any manner and for any purpose it pleases against legally disarmed, defenseless victims.

Nothing can ever justify so monstrously evil a theory. Nothing can justify the horror, the brutality, the plunder, the destruction, the starvation, the slave-labor camps, the torture chambers, the wholesale slaughter of statist dictatorships.

In her view, "any kind or degree of such control, by any group, for any purpose whatsoever—rests on the basic principle of statism, the principle that man’s life belongs to the state," and this is precisely the kind of statism that I think Reagan was referring to. Thomas, on the other hand, knew quite well the dangers posed by such a state, which was why he was so critical of the revolutionary Marxists' theories and practices of Lenin, Trotsky, etc. In A Socialist Faith, for example, he points out that, "Lenin did not so much interpret as modify Marxism by his development of the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat." Earlier in the book, he mentions that Marx himself never explains this term, but that much later Engels wrote "the Paris Commune ... was the dictatorship of the Proletariat." Thomas then stresses that the Paris Commune was "concerned to destroy the bureaucratic military machine" and that "[i]t was never a one-party government with stringent controls over working-class freedom of speech and association such as the Bolsheviks later imposed."

Thus, while people like Rand and Reagan associated all forms of socialism with Stalin-esque dictatorship, Thomas himself flatly rejected such a system. As Raymond Gregory notes in Norman Thomas: The Great Dissenter, Thomas, who was not only a pacifist but a staunch defender of civil rights, was attacked by communists for his dedication to constitutional change rather than violent revolution to achieve socialistic goals, as well as for his rejection of "any sort of coercion whatsoever," which made it impossible for him to "accept the Bolshevik concept of Soviet control and dominance." He made this position abundantly clear in his application for membership in the Socialist Party when he wrote:

Perhaps to certain members of the party my socialism would not be of the most orthodox variety ... I have a profound fear of the undue exaltation of the State and a profound faith that the new world we desire must depend upon freedom and fellowship rather than any sort of coercion whatsoever. I am interested in political parties only to the extent in which they may be serviceable in advancing certain ideals and in winning liberty for men and women.

If Thomas supported statism at all, the type of statism that he supported was one in which the state — geared toward guaranteeing civil rights and providing basic social needs — was in direct control of the people. Like Rand, who equated government power with "the power of coercion by physical force," Thomas feared and shunned an all-powerful state, but he didn't see government itself as the main problem; he saw it as the platform by which change through democratic means was possible. And the only way to achieve such a state was by giving the power back to the people, not taking it away under threats of violence or through the restriction of individual rights. In other words, Thomas saw social ownership as a tool in a movement concerned with the common good, not as an end in itself.

So while I certainly think that it's fair to point out the places where hard-core socialists/Marxists ran amok, I don't think it's fair to categorize all socialists as would-be Stalins, especially Norman Thomas. He was by no means perfect, but he was anything but a threat to the principles of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.