Tue Nov 27, 2007
Venezuela Goes to Hell in a Handbasket
I've written enough stories about Venezuela and Hugo Chavez' slow march towards totalitarianism. I'd been hoping to just let the issue rest for a while and focus on more pleasant parts of the world. Most people seem to have made up their minds about Chavez, either against him or for him despite all the evidence, so they probably aren't listening anyway. But when I start getting news digests from the services I subscribe to and they fill my email with story after story of things going sour in Venezuela, I can't ignore it because no matter how predictable or inevitible, it's news and deserves to at least be noted.
It's already old news that when tens of thousands of student protestors took to the streets of Caracas, Chavez had the army attack them and ultimately had masked chavista thugs gun down 8 students on the university campus in the grand Latin American death squad tradition. This was all because of Chavez' campaign to change the Venezuelan constitution to allow more complete autocratic control. Voters are being urged to approve 69 revisions to a constitution which is already weak and provides too little protection for the Venezuelan people. In addition to a highly publicized provision to allow Chavez to rule indefinitely, changes include authority to shut down all media outlets solely on presidential authority and to arrest citizens and hold them indefinitely without charges.
As part of that campaign in a speech this week Chavez declared that anyone who votes against his proposed constitutional changes in the December 2nd election is a traitor who is "against me, against the revolution and against the people." Clearly implied is the fact that under Chavez' rule those he considers traitors are going to face serious consequences for their betrayal.
Chavez' attempt to threaten his own people seems to have had the opposite of the desired effect as the most recent poll shows likely voters split 49% to 39% against Chavez' proposed constitutional revisions. That might still be enough for a win if Chavez' followers use the same intimidation tactics which have kept opposition voters away from the polls in past elections, but it certainly makes Chavez look bad.
Earlier this month another Chavez speech didn't go so well when the oil princes of OPEC gave a cold and bewildered response to his attempts to exhort them to use oil as a weapon in a grand crusade against imperialism. With comments which sounded like they thought that what Chavez called imperialism was a pretty good thing representatives from the major middle eastern oil producers dismissed Chavez' cry for unity against the US and voted against proposals supported by Chavez and his political allies in Ecuador and Iran. Abdalla el-Badri, OPEC's Secretary General dashed Chavez' hopes when he summarized the view of OPEC's ruling oligarchs: "we are not using the oil we sell to the world as a political weapon."
Yet in many ways the worst news coming out of Venezuela is about economic and social decline the country is going through as a result of the Chavez regime. Draconian policies which may seem well intentioned are leading to problems throughout society, while efforts to reduce poverty seem to have utterly failed. All of the country's vast petrochemical wealth which Chavez promised to use to alleviate the suffering of the pot is instead going into the pockets of a new class of corrupt officials and favored businesses in a system which looks a lot more like fascism than Bolivarian socialism.
The combination of land redistribution and price controls has totally disrupted Venezuela's economy with effects which are particularly bad for the rural and urban poor. Being given land seized from agrobusinesses may seem great for small farmers, but it doesn't do much good if the government sets artificially low prices for basic produce which are so low that you cannot sell staples like milk and eggs without taking a loss. And other farm products aren't worth growing either because importers with government connections can bring those products in from outside the country and undercut the price you'd have to charge. The result is that the shelves of markets in Venezuela are filled with imported luxury goods which the average citizen cannot afford and they don't have basic staples like milk or eggs or other locally produced goods because farmers can't afford to sell them. So the poor go without, the farmers don't farm, once productive land lies fallow and importers grow fat off of government policies.
Despite all of Chavez' claims of reform and wealth redistribution the sad reality is that Venezuela's GINI rating which represents the gap between rich and poor has gotten worse, not better, from .44 to .48 under Chavez' rule. Wealth has been redistributed, just not to the poor. It's been taken from the old bourgeoisie and redistributed to a new ultra-wealthy class referred to as 'Boligarchs' or the 'boliburguesía'. Venezuela's new rich make their money off of government contracts, trade monopolies and pure corruption from within the government. Corruption is widespread, with Venezuela ranked as the second most corrupt nation in the Americas right behind Haiti, and as the 17th most corrupt nation in the entire world. Nothing gets done without a bribe and government officials and their relatives grow fat off of petrodollars and criminal graft.
In this atmosphere of corruption, it's hardly surprising that Venezuela is turning into the organized crime center of the region. Criminal gangs increasingly rule the streets, granted impunity because of their informal alliance with the Chavez regime which needs their strong-arm manpower. Criminal organizations from nearby countries like Colombian drug cartels, gun runners, blood diamond merchants, terrorist groups, white slavers, prostitution rings and kidnap extortionists have all begun to move to Venezuela because it's so easy to buy off the authorities, the ports and borders are wide open, and no one seems to care what you do so long as you bring money into the country and line the right pockets. Since Chavez has been in power the amount of cocaine shipped through Venezuela has increased from 75 tons a year to 276 tons a year. The whole criminal world seems to be flocking there. If you need an Iranian missile, a Chinese AK-47, an illegal African diamond, a Philipino slavegirl for your harem or a kilo of Colombian cocaine, Venezuela is the place to shop for it. In 8 years the Chavez government has shown virtually no interest in controlling internal crime or international criminal traffic through the country and turning a blind eye has made many officials hugely wealthy.
Through all of this, Chavez sails on as a popular demagogue, postureing, making speeches, raising his fist and using threats and hollow promises to bind the people to him as he gradually closes the fist of tyranny on every aspect of life in Venezuela.
Now I expect the usual outraged responses from the usual apologists for tyranny, but as usual they won't be able to refute any of the facts and will just sputter dogma and ad hominems. So I won't even bother to condemn socialism. It can work just fine. But like any form of government, it cannot work effectively when it is run by an autocrat driven primarily by his own ego whose populist promises are just a sop to the international left to cover consolidation of personal power and the plundering of the nation's wealth for himself and his cronies.
Thanksgiving: American Day of Shame
By now it pretty much goes without saying that the United States is the most evil nation on earth. It has surpassed the worst crimes of every past empire, from the Romans to the British Empire to the Third Reich. The nations of the world hang their heads in shame that the ultimate Rogue Empire dominates and enslaves them all with its power built on oppression and exploitation and genocide - the three horsemen of the capitalist apocalypse. The world has become nothing more than a hollow husk being sucked dry of wealth and freedom and justice by the bloated leech that is the United States.
Even in the endless catalog of American outrages some crimes stand out. Dwarfing the genocidal murders of aboriginal Americans, Arabs, Vietnamese, and even 41 million innocent fetuses is the yearly slaughter of 262 million Turkeys, over 45 million of them on a single day, Thanksgiving. A day which, for its infamous association with the exploitation of the native population, as much as for its connection to the deaths of tens of millions of blameless avians, ought to be known as Shamesgiving Day.
What could be more quintessentially symbolic of America's relationship with the rest of the world than the image of millions of bloated American faces stuffed with greasy flesh torn from the bones of noble birds, raised in slavery, slaughtered cruelly and roasted to feed the gustatory greed of the ultimate race of oppressors and exploiters. They suck up the flesh of Turkeys in the same way that their parasite nation sucks up the hopes and dreams of the rest of the world.
Like the heroic turkey, the people of the world want only to wander aimlessly in large crowds, occasionally charging around in mass panic or staring mesmerized at shiny objects. Yet the jingoistic greed of Imperialist America denies them this simple lifestyle and puts them to work in factories which are little better than slaughterhouses at wages which are the human equivalent of turkey feed. To avoid sharing the turkey's gruesome fate the people of the world must turn aside from the path of capitalism and embrace a philosophy of peace, social justice and harmony, working together like a mass of turkeys for the common good.
In what is perhaps the supreme irony of the season, only one nation consumes more turkey per capita than the capitalist gobbler guzzlers, and that is their red-handed henchmen in the criminal Zionist state of Israel where the average citizen consumes almost three whole turkeys a year. They eat so much Turkey there's hardly anything left for humanitarian workers from Hamas to distribute to poor Palestinian refugees driven off their land to make room for more and more of the turkey farms that spread obscenely along the once-green banks of the Jordan river which now runs brown with their offal.
Eat turkey you fat capitalist slavedriver and you might as well be eating the flesh of humanity with a dressing of cruelty and the gravy of greed. At least eat with shame and sorrow for the turkeys and all of their human brothers who have given their all to keep your belly as full as your wallet on America's Day of Shame, and may every bite you eat be as bitter as the tears of a mother turkey when her little gobblers are led away to the slaughter.
Media Bias? Who Cares!
In a highly publicized $100 million lawsuit against her former employers at NewsCorp, Judith Regan has made various seemingly paranoid claims about a conspiracy against her at the publishing giant. The accusations seem to center on her claim that NewsCorp has a political alliance with Rudy Giuliani and has attempted to discredit her so that she can't harm Giuliani through the use of information obtained through her former relationship with Giuliani associate and former NYPD Chief Bernard Kerik.
Regan's accusations have raised some ire in both the new and the old media, both directed at her and surrounding the issue of media bias, trotting out the good old accusations that Fox News is partisan and that they are actively promoting Giuliani for the presidency to the exclusion of other candidates. At Salon.com they've even gone so far as to analyze how much airtime Giuliani has been given compared to other candidates and concluded that he's their chosen golden boy.
Not surprisingly, when an accusation like this comes up, we can turn to the blogosphere for some pretty sophisticated analysis, including Juxtable.com which has compiled a variety of raw candidate exposure stats online and in the media, and Outside the Beltway which has done a detailed breakdown by network and candidate of whom the various networks seems to be giving the most face time to. By this analysis Giuliani does seem to be the FoxNews favorite, but he's only slightly ahead of Fred Thompson. But other networks have their favorites too. MSNBC loves Biden and Dodd. CNN likes Richardson and Hunter. NBC likes McCain and Edwards. CBS likes Obama. ABC likes Edwards. With all the networks taken together McCain and Biden are actually way out ahead on overall exposure. Interestingly, front runner Hillary Clinton gets relatively little exposure in cable news and the broadcast media.
To be entirely fair, it seems an awful lot like the candidates who get a lot of media time are the ones who make themselves most available, handle themselves well in interviews and know it. And it's debatable how valuable all this exposure is, since the two frontrunners are ranked 9th and 12th in overall media exposure, while the rapidly vanishing Joe Biden is ranked second and McCain's top ranking doesn't seem to be catapulting him ahead of Giuliani or even into second place. So the whole issue of Fox News being extra nice to Giuliani may be fairly meaningless if other candidates are getting more overall exposure and all that extra exposure doesn't really help the candidate all that much.
Then there is the question of whether media partisanship is even an issue which we should find controversial. This bizarre idea that news sources are supposed to be impartial is of very recent origin and has always been honored more in the breach than in observance. From the very beginning of American history our news outlets have been overwhelmingly partisan. They have had alliances with specific parties and candidates, they've even been owned by political organizations. In fact, through most of our history, if you had a cause to promote the way you did it was to start a newspaper and then use it to viciously attack your enemies.
In the federalist era the Federalist Party got their political message out through their pet paper The Gazette of the United States where Alexander Hamilton would fill the pages with scurrilous attacks on political opponents under various pseudonyms. In response Thomas Jefferson and his Republicans hired Phillip Freneau to publish The National Gazette while he was on the government payroll to smear Hamilton and the Federalists. These papers took advertising and published news, but their primary purpose for existing was as vehicles of political propaganda.
In the 1830s and 1840s abolitionists like Benjamin Lundy and William Lloyd Garrison started newspapers to promote their cause. Garrison published The Liberator for more than 30 years. The tradition of radical causes publishing newspapers continued throughout the 19th and into the 20th century. One of the most famous examples being the German-American Anarchist/Socialist newspaper Arbiter Zeitung which was published in Chicago prior to World War II. Its major competitor, the New York communist paper The Daily Worker continued to be published until 1958 and even carries on today as the Peoples Weekly World.
As newspapers became better established this pattern of partisanship did not change. When every city had more than one newspaper invariably one would side with one political party and one with the other. Newspaper chains even had political associations. William Randolph Hearst was notorious for promoting particular candidates and policies through his newspapers nationwide. His support could make a political career and he boasted that he could swing the votes of Congress behind any issue. Even today that tradition continues in newspapers despite a veneer of objectivity. Every New Yorker knows that the New York Times is the liberal paper and the Daily News is the conservative paper. Every Washingtonian knows that the Washington Post is liberal and the Washington Times is conservative.
When newspapers were our only real mass media no one thought twice about their blatant partisanship. Their editorial pages endorsed candidates and their news reporting was politically slanted and no one expected it to be any other way. For some reason as new media like radio and television began to emerge journalists became obsessed with the unrealistic fiction of media objectivity. Their role as the 'fourth estate' seems to have gone to their heads and they bought into the egotistical idea that they were protecting some great public trust with a monopoly on truth and honesty.
This idea of expecting neutrality, balance and objectivity from our news sources is relatively recent in origin and seems inherently designed to encourage hypocrisy. Reporting the news factually does seem desirable and there is certainly a need for straightforward news content, but that's not really what news networks are selling. Most of their programming is not pure news, but is more on the order of editorial content and news-based entertainment. Talking head shows with celebrity hosts like Bill O'Reilly, Chris Matthews and Sean Hannity are not reporting the news and they shouldn't be expected to be neutral. These partisan shows are the ones which get the interviews and which provide a welcoming atmosphere for candidates and national political figures, because they see the hosts as sympathetic. These hosts have political preferences just like any other citizen or group, so why not encourage them to be above board and open about their allegiances and give up on hypocritical claims of neutrality or being 'fair and balanced'?
The idea that every issue and every candidate and every perspective should be treated equally is ridiculous. Measuring out airtime to give each political pespective a fair airing is utterly impractical. It's also an idea which seems only to be taken seriously when there's political advantage to be gained from it or a specific target to be attacked, as is the case with the so-called 'fairness doctrine' which is transparently intended to silence talk radio because it's too right-wing while ignoring other areas of the media where left-leaning causes and candidates fare better. The 700 Club features a newscast. Would it be reasonable for the Church of Satan to sue Pat Robertson demanding equal time?
We've got right and left wing media outlets in every format from print to radio to broadcast and cable television. All of them are run by people with political allegiances or driven by successful shows with particular political leanings. They are businesses which have business relationships with politicians and power groups. Maybe it's time to step back, be a bit realistic and stop expecting unrealistically even impossibly high standards of neutrality from the media. Know them for what they are and the faults and biases which they so obviously have, and watch or read the ones you like and take them no more seriously than they deserve. So long as the pure news portion of their programming gets the basic facts right, their editorial slant and their political allegiances ought not to be an issue for contention.
Media bias is a fact of life. Let Fox News be the Rudy Giuliani cheerleader squad while the New York Times tries to figure out whether to deify Hillary or Obama first. Is anyone really so naive that they expect something different from these news outlets? People pick which one to watch or read based on the awareness that they come with a particular bias. Hell, that's a big part of what helps make them popular with their target audience.
Liberty Dollar Raided by Feds
Early Thursday morning federal agents from the Secret Service and FBI raided the Evansville, Indiana offices of NORFED, makers of the Liberty Dollar and other alternative 'barter' currencies of which they claim to have $20 million dollars in circulation. The business, owned by Bernard von Nothaus, mints copper, gold, silver and platinum coinage and produces paper certificates with fixed values based on their reserve of gold and silver.
Their products have become popular with those concerned about the instability of greenback paper currency issued by the Federal Reserve and with the falling value of the dollar relative to foreign currencies. Beyond just providing novelty coinage like their recently minted 'Ron Paul Dollar', the company promotes the idea of moving away from using federal paper money as a medium of exchange and using real-value coinage instead, in what is legally considered a barter system, but basically amounts to an alternative monetary system. They have enjoyed substantial success and sales through the internet, and thousands of businesses nationwide accept their coins and paper money.
In Thursday morning's raid about a dozen agents showed up and seized most of the company's assets, including computers, paperwork and a large amount of gold, silver, platinum and copper including two tons of just arrived copper Ron Paul dollars. They also froze their bank accounts and seized specie being held in a secure location to guarantee their paper money. The warrants which were served along with some information from the company are available on their website. What is not clear from the documents are the exact reasons for the raid, although the warrant cites money laundering, mail and wire fraud. More details are probably in the afadavits associated with the warrants, but they are not yet available.
Von Nothaus' business has skirted the edge of legality in several areas, but in the past he has managed to walk a fine line without arousing the ire of government by using very carefully chosen terminology and not directly challenging the federal monetary system. More information should be available in the next few days, but it seems likely that the raid came as a result of customer complaints because of delayed delivery of the new Ron Paul coinage for which orders were taken in advance. Another concern may be the discrepancy between the nominal face value of the coins and their actual specie value, which is generally somewhat lower, especially on the new copper coinage. Prosecutors may argue that by placing a dollar value on the coins Von Nothaus was defrauding customers because the real value was substantially lower.
A major concern in this situation is the fate of those awaiting delivery of coins ordered recently which are now in the hands of the government, and those holding paper money which ought to be redeemable for silver in the reserve which was also seized. At the very least the government should make sure that the interests of these citizens are protected and that they either get their money back or receive what they are entitled to from the company's assets.
The larger issue which remains to be resolved is whether the government has a legitimate cause of action here in the interest of consumer protection, or whether as many are speculating, they had been waiting for an opportunity to shut the business down because it was seen as a challenge - however small - to the federal reserve system. As the dollar has dropped in value, more and more people have been listening to the message of radical monetarists like Presidential candidate Ron Paul, who want to do away with the federal reserve system. For many using Liberty Dollars was their way of striking a blow for sound monetary policy. This raid may be the government's way of striking back.
Farm Bill Pork Means More Government Cheese
You don't have to be lactose intolerant to be sickened by the Farm Bill currently being considered in Congress, but if you read the bill you'll probably start to feel a little queasy when faced with dairy products in the future.
The new Farm Bill which just passed the House and is headed to the Senate spends $286 billion
50% of the spending in the bill is concentrated on just 7 highly agricultural states with influential representatives and almost half of the spending in the bill goes to support only about 6% of our farmers most of whom work in large agrobusinesses producing certain favored crops. When the bill goes to the Senate it will be in the hands of Sen. David Obey (D-WI), the King of Government Cheese, whose tireless work on behalf of the dairy industry explains some of the worst ideas featured in the bill, including the government's plan to purchase and warehouse over 2 billion pounds of dairy products at an average price of about a dollar a pound.
While taxpayers should object to paying over $50 billion a year for utterly unnecessary regulation, subsidization and massive loan programs, it seems like other groups find plenty to object to in the farm bill for other reasons.
Small farmers represented by the Center for Rural Affairs point out that the loan programs are designed to help large agro-businesses grow larger and force smaller farmers off their land. In his analysis of the Farm Bill, CFRA's Chuck Hassebrook concluded that because it "increases the limitation on direct payments by 50 percent over current law...mega-farms would be subsidized to bid land away from smaller operations – driving up cash rents, narrowing profit margins and tightening the noose on family-size farms struggling to prosper and survive in farming." The Farm Bill will continue the history of US agricultural policy which has been destroying small farms. The CFRA claims that small farmers are literally dying out. In 1978 there were 350,000 farmers under the age of 34. Today there are only 70,000. Young people are just not going into farming because current rules make entry-level farming unprofitable.
Health advocates were looking for reform from this Congress and are not at all happy with the Farm Bill. Dan Inhoff, author of Food Fight observed "We didn't get a food and farm bill, we got a fat bill. It's agribusiness as usual. It's high-fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oil for all, and it's at the expense of the land and the people and the taxpayers." Many groups have raised concerns that the bill subsidizes profitable but unhealthy crops at the expense of healthier alternatives. They're particularly unhappy with the subsidies, price protections and import restrictions for the sugar industry, and the ongoing incentive programs for the production of corn syrup.
Environmentalists are equally dissatisfied, and again the problem is subsidies. The bill underwrites the production cost of certain high-dollar commodity crops which are environmentally destructive at the expense of more sustainable crops which could be grown instead. They had been hoping to see as much as $6 billion diverted from subsidies and applied to land management and conservation programs. The farm bill also raises global issues because subsidies reduce the selling price of US farm products below actual production cost and below the price at which they can be produced in other parts of the world, making farming unprofitable in many emerging economies which could be bolstered by agricultural exports in a free market. The folks at Food and Water Watch promote the idea of 'food sovereignty', where the first focus of agriculture should be to produce for local markets first and export second so that regions will be agriculturally self-sustaining. Seems like common sense to me and the exact opposite of both US agricultural policy as expressed in this bill and the government based food-distribution systems favored by international NGOs and the WTO.
One area in which the bill really falls short despite the inclusion of 'bioenergy' in the title is any meaningful effort to promote existing biofuels and make them more widely available. There are a few million dollars set aside for research on biodiesel and ethanol production, but nothing much to help encourage immediate increase in availability and use of these already viable fuels. There's even a measure to prohibit sugar producers from selling their excess production for use in making ethanol, despite the established fact that sugar from beets or cane is more efficient as a source of ethanol than corn, which continues to receive incentives for ethanol production.
But for me, it always comes back to the dairy programs. Tasty though they certainly are, dairy products are about the most unhealthy foods you can put in your body. What's more, dairy agriculture is incredibly environmentally destructive. Cattle are the single largest source of man-made greenhouse gasses and runoff from dairy farms pollutes groundwater and waterways. i wouldn't want to shut the industry down, but why is the government guaranteeing them billions of dollars of sales at artificially inflated prices so they can stockpile cheese, butter and powdered milk? All this does is encourage increased production and the pollution which goes with it, while keeping prices artificially low to encourage excessive consumption. It makes no sense at all, except that legislators from dairy states are playing pivotal roles in the budgeting process and letting the dairy industry lobbyists have anything they ask for.
As far as I'm concerned most of the Farm Bill could be scrapped. This nightmare of government micromanagement, gratuitous protectionism and outrageous favoritism does nothing positive for the country. It hurts small farmers, hurts consumers and hurts taxpayers. My vision of American agriculture doesn't consist of fewer and fewer small farmers and giant agrobusinesses destroying the environment to produce questionable mutant crops which they sell at artificially controlled prices. I'd like to see food sovereignty inside the US, with small farmers supplying local markets with seasonally appropraite produce at a market-determined price and the agrobusinesses focussed on industrial crops like cotton, biofuels and oils.
There is a movement for a complete overhaul of the Farm Bill led by Senators Dick Lugar (R-IN) and Frank Lautenberg (R-NJ) who are offering an alternative bill called the FRESH Act. It's not perfect, but it does away with most subsidies, reduces costs and sensibly restructures loan programs to be more equitable. Best of all, it includes a grant program for biofuel production, allocates money for conservation programs and does away with the $2 billion dairy boondoggle. It even complies with some of the international trade agreements which the current Farm Bill would violate. The FRESH Act deserves some serious consideration.
President Bush seems to be on the right side of this issue and is threatening a veto of the Farm Bill. The debate in the Senate will carry on next week, so now is the time to take action. If you'd like to see more emphasis on an open market for agriculture and less emphasis on pork and protectionism, write your Senator and demand something better, or write President Bush and urge him to veto the bill and send a strong message to Congress that it's time for less greed and more responsibility. Mention the FRESH Act and see if we can give it a little push.
Anti-Gay Cult Hit With $10.9 Million in Damages
There are so controversial issues surrounding the recent court ruling against millenial cultist leader Rev. Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church that it's hard to know where to begin discussing it. Perhaps the worst part is that it puts me in the position of having to defend a pack of poisonous, inbred lunatics who I wish would just drop off the face of the earth.
For the past 15 years, Phelps and his church members (who are mostly directly related to him) have travelled around the country picketing public events and funerals, promoting their basic message that because of the decadence of American society, particularly in the area of toleration for homosexuality, America is doomed and is going to be targeted by God's judgement for being a modern day Sodom. They started out promoting the idea that AIDS was God's punishment for homosexuality, they moved on to claiming the 9/11 attack was God's vengeance, and most recently they have focused on the idea that the deaths of US soldiers in Iraq is the will of God to punish the immoral nation.
The cultlike church, which no major Baptist affiliation has been willing to associate with, has a overwhelming lust for any kind of media attention no matter how negative. In pursuit of exposure for their message they have discovered that the more outrageous and offensive their conduct the more attention they will get. They really hit paydirt in their campaign to be as obnoxious as possible when they began picketing military funerals bearing signs with slogans like "God Hates Fags," "Thank God for Dead Soldiers," and "You're Going to Hell." Their fanaticism blinds them to the overwhelmingly negative public reaction to their behavior and they remain convinced that their radical methods are an effective way to get their message out. To some degree they are right, because it does get them so much press coverage that they will at least reach the attention of the small population of fellow bigots their message will appeal to.
The protests have generated strong and organized counter-protests, led by a coalition of former Veteran bikers called the Patriot Guard who show up at protests and rev their engines to drown out the protesters. Their intentions are admirable, but the result is usually even more chaos and disruption at the military funerals targeted by Phelps and his followers, contributing to the circuslike atmosphere of the protests.
Albert Snyder, the father of a dead soldier whose funeral they picketed, brought a civil suit against them in US District Court in Maryland. This week a ruling was handed down for $2.9 million in compensatory damages and $8 million in punitive damages, about ten times the total assets of the church and the three church members (Phelps and two of his daughters) specifically named in the suit.
The jury ruling, with damages expressly intended to bankrupt the church and its leaders is an understandable reaction to their offensive behavior. It is well intentioned, but it is not going to be effective and is ot nlegally justifiable.
Fanatics absolutely thrive on persecution, and this ruling allows them to pose as martyrs while they can likely get away with not paying a cent while they appeal the ruling and find ways to hide their assets with other family members. They can parade out their cleancut children as the ultimate victims of the suit and make themselves look like victims of a capricious jury and thereby elevate their cause in the eyes of those inclined to be sympathetic to their cause. The ruling may even generate enough sympathy to help them raise significant amounts of money from outside of their church membership.
Legally the ruling also raises troubling issues. There is a reason why no jurisdiction has been able to successfully prosecute the protesters under criminal statutes for anything but the most minor crimes, and those suits usually don't stick. If they were trespassing or creating a public nuisance, then there are criminal laws which would be violated and they could be hauled off to jail. The problem is that they stick to public property, follow local regulations and limit their protests to skirt the line of the law so that they don't get shut down by the police.
No matter how abhorrent their beliefs, they do have a right to free speech which is protected by the constitution and by state laws. It's a classic example of a situation where we can hate what they say, but we sort of have to stand up for their right to say it, even if it offends. So long as they don't intrude on the funeral itself and disrupt the proceedings or trespass on private property, they're within their rights of free speech and free assembly.
This is exactly why this civil suit exists. When the law protects protesters like this, the only recourse to punish them is through a private suit in front of a jury where many legal protections fall by the wayside. Proof of criminality becomes largely irrelevant and it can come down as it does in this case to nothing more than a jury finding their behavior offensive and ruling on that subjective basis. It feels satisfying at the time, but it's not really justice under the law.
Phelps is likely correct when he says that this ruling will be struck down by the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, and the sad result of that is that ultimately all this suit really does is bring more attention to
Phelps and his traveling freakshow of bigotry.
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Sun Oct 28, 2007
is more than a novel. It is a forceful and very timely political statement presented as a dystopian science fiction novel, but difficult for anyone to mistake for mere fiction. Working with the support of a 
