Washington Post: Pope apologized to Chile abuse victims

In February, I reported on a problem Pope Francis created for himself. While visiting Chile, where the Catholic Church is under intense scrutiny due to accusations that priests had been sexually abusing children for decades, Francis accused victims of a particular priest of slander. What made his remarks highly questionable was the fact that he had received a letter nearly three years earlier from the victims, in which they detailed their accusations.

Today, the Washington Post reports that Francis apologized to several of the victims for not believing them earlier this year:

Juan Carlos Cruz, James Hamilton and Jose Andres Murillo spoke to reporters Wednesday after spending five days with the pope at his Vatican hotel. Their press conference was broadcast live in Chile, a sign of the unprecedented nature of their hours of meetings with the pope.

Cruz said that during his private encounter with Francis, the pope acknowledged: “I was part of the problem. I caused this, and I apologize to you.”

“I believe that he was sincere,” Cruz said.

Cruz said he believed that Francis was simply misinformed about the case of Bishop Juan Barros, whom the three men have long accused of having witnessed and ignored their abuse.

Barros was a protege of the Rev. Fernando Karadima, a charismatic preacher and darling of Chile’s conservative Catholic society who was removed from ministry and sentenced by the Vatican in 2011 to live in penance and prayer for having sexually abused minors.

While it is encouraging to see Francis apologize, it appears the Catholic Church in Chile has a lot of work to do to restore trust in the country:

Cruz had written to Francis after the pope overruled opposition from some Chilean bishops and appointed him bishop of Osorno. Just this week, a former Chilean minister revealed that the Chilean government too had wanted Barros out as the preacher to the Chilean armed forces, and was “surprised” when Francis named him instead to head up Osorno.

Cruz said he didn’t press the pope on what he knew or when. But he said he warned him about the “toxicity” of the churchmen who had “duped him,” naming the current and former archbishops of Santiago, the Vatican’s ambassador to Chile, and members of the Chilean bishops’ conference.

Hamilton said they will probably never know the full truth about what the pope knew, but that the important thing is that the pope now is “very well-informed.” He said he was prepared to wait to see what concrete action he will take.

“Everybody deserves, especially in this case, a second chance,” Hamilton said of the pope.

The three men didn’t say what exactly they want Francis to do. But previously, they have called for Barros and other Karadima-trained bishops to resign, as well as a handful of other Chilean bishops with poor records on dealing with abuse cases.

Francis has summoned the entire Chilean bishops conference to Rome later this month for a dressing down and to plot reforms in the church.

In a statement, the men said they saw the “friendly face” of the church this week, after having been treated for 10 years as “enemies” of the Chilean hierarchy.

But they warned that unless Francis takes concrete action, their talks will be in vain. They said abuse and cover-up are not just sins “but crimes and corruption that do not end in Chile but are an epidemic.”

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Penn Law School scapegoats professor Amy Wax

Amy Wax

A law professor has an opinion the mob doesn’t like. In order to appease the mob, the professor’s employer cut back her work at the school.

That, in essence, is what happened to Amy Wax, a Pennsylvania Law School professor. As Heather Mac Donald of The Manhattan Institute writes in The Wall Street Journal:

The campus mob at the University of Pennsylvania Law School has scored a hit. Prof. Amy Wax will no longer be allowed to teach required first-year courses, the school’s dean announced last week. Now the leader of Black Lives Matter Pennsylvania wants Ms. Wax’s scalp. According to a weekend newspaper report, if she isn’t fired within a week, “he plans to make things on the West Philadelphia campus very uncomfortable.”

Ms. Wax’s sin this time was to discuss publicly the negative consequences of affirmative action. Her punishment underscores again the dangers of speaking uncomfortable truths in a university setting.

The academic left has been gunning for Ms. Wax since last August, when she co-wrote a Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed calling for a return to the “bourgeois culture” of the 1950s. She was branded a white supremacist for advocating personal responsibility, even though the op-ed criticized “the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites.”

But what really got Wax into hot water was a podcast in which she participated with Brown economist Glenn Loury.

The latest outrage arises from a web video Ms. Wax recorded in September with Glenn Loury, an economist at Brown University. Forty or so minutes in, the discussion turned to racial preferences. Mr. Loury noted that, on average, students admitted via preferences “are less academically qualified—by definition!” Ms. Wax brought up the “mismatch” effect: the idea that the so-called beneficiaries of preferences have difficulty competing with peers who were admitted without them. “Take Penn Law School, or some top 10 law school,” Ms. Wax said. “Here’s a very inconvenient fact, Glenn. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class and rarely, rarely in the top half. I can think of one or two students who’ve scored in the top half in my required first-year course.”

Ms. Wax added that she teaches a “class of 89, 95 students” each year, “so I’m going on that because a lot of this data is of course a closely guarded secret.” That is an understatement. Schools pay fanatical attention to the racial makeup of their student bodies, then work just as fanatically to conceal the resulting gaps in qualifications and subsequent academic achievement.

Ms. Wax suggested that preference beneficiaries would do better in colleges where their academic preparation equaled that of their peers. “If they were better matched, it might be a better environment for them,” she said. “We’re not saying they shouldn’t go to college. We’re not saying that. I mean, some of them shouldn’t.” The statement that some college students would be better off in vocational training or work is true for all races, particularly for the millions who drop out before getting a degree.

The video had been online for months before someone at Penn got wind of it. Cue an alumni and student petition protesting Ms. Wax’s “disparaging, false and deeply offensive claims.”

The petition worked. In the campus email last week announcing Ms. Wax’s removal from first-year teaching, [Law School Dean Ted] Ruger denounced her claims as false: “Black students have graduated in the top of the class at Penn law.” At the same time, he insisted that Penn does not “collect, sort or publicize grade performance by racial group.”

Although Ms. Wax’s statements were general, Mr. Ruger accused her of violating the school’s confidentiality policy and conscripting students in the service of her “musings about race in society.” He also accused her of saying that some black law students at Penn shouldn’t “even go to college,” when she was speaking of the mismatch problem more broadly.

What is particularly cowardly about both Black Lives Matter Pennsylvania and Ted Ruger is that while they attacked Amy Wax for her views, however accurate they may be, I am not aware of anyone attacking Glenn Loury for being sympathetic to Wax’s views, if not wholly agreeing with her.

There may be an inconvenient reason for this disparate treatment.

Glenn Loury is black.

What are you clowns going to say NOW???

In other words, they’re attacking Wax not because she deserves to be attacked, but because her characteristics do not prevent her from being attacked.

Notwithstanding this disparity, there appears to be a kernel of truth to Wax’s claims.

Though couched as a subjective perception, Ms. Wax’s casual observations about the mismatch effect at Penn were too sweeping—there have undoubtedly been some black students in the top quarter of the class—and she might want to correct that overstatement. But the mismatch effect is absolutely real, at Penn and elsewhere. In the early 1990s, the Law School Admissions Council tracked 27,000 students at nearly 90% of all accredited law schools. Of the 2,000 students attending the most “elite” law schools, 52% of blacks were in the bottom tenth of their class, compared with 6% of whites. Only 8% of blacks were in the top half of their class. Bar failure rates were also skewed; the LSAC data showed that 19% of blacks graduating from these elite schools failed the bar, compared with 3.5% of whites.

In 1995 UCLA law professor Richard Sander gathered GPA data on first-year law students at 19 law schools, including Penn. Though the number of self-identifying black respondents from Penn was small, the patterns there closely tracked those in the LSAC data set. There is no reason to think anything has changed.

Mr. Ruger has accused Ms. Wax of a “conscious indifference” to the truth. The burden is on him to disclose the data that prove her thesis wrong.

Unfortunately, as I am sure Ms. Mac Donald is aware, those who scapegoat are either unable or unwilling to be even-handed with their target. What is far more important to them is to appease the gods or demons who threaten chaos unless their demands for blood are met.

We may no longer hold primitive rituals in honor of some mythical god. A lot of history and technological innovations have occurred since then.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a human drive to sacrifice an otherwise innocent person so as to “keep the peace”.

Regardless of whether justice is actually being served.

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Is Libertarianism Catholic?

Is Libertarianism Catholic?

Ira Katz explores the question today in LewRockwell.com:

Over the last few months my thinking has been influenced … by my reading of Murray Rothbard’s grand opus on the history of economic thought. In particular, that by far and away more than any other historical source, there has been a fundamental role of Catholic, natural rights philosophy on libertarianism. I am not saying that in all of human history it is only by way of a Catholic culture that a libertarian ethic has been produced, but I am saying that this is essentially what Murray Rothbard had concluded. Also contributing to my thinking has been the Bionic Mosquito blog, where his many posts on culture, libertarianism and the Medieval period have resonated with me, including this observation of pre-Reformation Europe which is especially relevant.

The period in Europe, before the Reformation, offers what I view as the longest-lasting and closest example of a decentralized, libertarian order we have seen in the west…ever.  What has come since has not come close, certainly in terms of longevity – no matter what one believes about the value of the Renaissance, Enlightenment, or Liberalism.  For this, the period is worth examining for anyone interested in libertarianism in this world.

To provide a more contemporary example, Jörg Guido Hülsmann beautifully integrated Catholic moral teaching with Austrian economic analysis in his book The Ethics of Money Production.  In the book, Hülsmann discusses the ethical consequences of paper money and fractional-reserve banking, which arose through government dictat, rather than the voluntary actions of individuals.

Here’s a hint: none of them are good.

I encourage you to read Katz’s essay in its entirety.

 

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Centcom Commander: Assad won the Syrian civil war

Syria

Military.com writes about an amazing admission by U.S. Army General Joseph Votel, the commander of U.S. Central Command:

The commander of U.S. Central Command said Tuesday that the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad, with the backing of Russia and Iran, has essentially won the seven-year-old civil war that has killed more than 400,000, forced millions to flee, and spread sectarian strife throughout the region.

U.S. policy has been that Assad must step down or be ousted, but “from the civil war standpoint, it would appear that the regime is ascendant here,” Army Gen. Joseph Votel said.

Russia and Iran have served as “key enablers” to allow regime forces to defeat a range of rebel groups, including those backed by the U.S., and only pockets of resistance remain in the besieged area of Ghouta, east of Damascus, and in Idlib to the north, Votel said.

At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, asked, “Is it too strong a statement that, with Russia and Iran’s help, Assad has won the civil war in Syria?”

Votel responded: “I don’t think that is too strong of a statement. I think they have provided him the wherewithal to be ascendant at this point.”

When asked if it is still U.S. policy that “Assad must go,” Votel said, “I don’t know that that’s our particular policy at this particular point.”

In the long term, Assad’s victory in Syria will leave the U.S. to contend with increased threats to Israel and Jordan from Iran’s support of Hezbollah forces in Lebanon, he said.

There are several fascinating aspects of General Votel’s testimony.

  • First of all, it has become so rare to hear a public official provide a relatively honest assessment about a given situation, it is refreshing when one comes across it. Granted, it has been clear for some time that the Syrian government has taken control of the civil war. However, the American elite have shown an uncanny ability to avoid the obvious so as to continue whatever fairy tale narrative they wish to push.
  • While General Votel has faced up to uncomfortable facts, that doesn’t mean his assessment is without spin. Clearly there has been increased sectarian strife in the Middle East in general, and in Syria in particular. However, much of that strife is a consequence of the American invasion of Iraq, and the consequent alliance (however informal) with Shia elements in the country. As Iran has increased its power in Iraq (primarily by letting the U.S. inadvertently – for the U.S., that is – clear the way for them), the U.S. flipped and decided to support Saudi and Qatari efforts to strengthen Sunni militias in western Iraq and eastern Syria. The fact that Syria, with Iranian and Russian help, turned back these militias does not alter the previous increase in sectarian tensions.
  • Votel’s remarks that American forces in Syria will now focus on “increased threats to Israel and Jordan” from Hezbollah is breathtaking and raises several questions. Can anyone remind me when Congress authorized sending U.S. forces to Syria? How does Hezbollah directly threat the United States? When did Congress decide that American forces needed to protect Israel and Jordan? While I have no direct evidence to support this, one of the reasons American forces are staying in Syria is bureaucratic in nature: the “mission” may have shifted to something other than the original reason forces were sent there, but at least the Army still has something to do.
  • The vagueness of current American policy in Syria is absolutely fascinating. It’s no longer “Assad must go”, but no one is sure what it is right now. In other words, people are making shit up as they go along. What can go wrong?

In short, while it’s moderately refreshing to observe a U.S. official see the situation in Syria for what it is, there is still a great deal of thrush that needs to be cleared before the American elite can truly see that they have done far more harm than good.

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Is the CIA taking over the American state?

CIA

By now, it is widely known that President Trump has fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Trump also announced that he intends to replace Tillerson with CIA Director Mike Pompeo, and to replace Pompeo at the CIA with Deputy Director Gina Haspel.

There are many creepy aspects about these moves. However, the creepiest aspect of all may be how far the CIA’s tentacles have slithered their way into vast reaches of the American state and media.

After the personnel announcements, Julian Assange tweeted the following:

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Assange’s observations make the meaninglessness of Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp” that much more comprehensive.

After all, Haspel’s reputation as a spook was a known commodity. As the New York Times reported in February 2017:

As a clandestine officer at the Central Intelligence Agency in 2002, Gina Haspel oversaw the torture of two terrorism suspects and later took part in an order to destroy videotapes documenting their brutal interrogations at a secret prison in Thailand.

On [February 2, 2017], Ms. Haspel was named the deputy director of the C.I.A.

The elevation of Ms. Haspel, a veteran widely respected among her colleagues, to the No. 2 job at the C.I.A. was a rare public signal of how, under the Trump administration, the agency is being led by officials who appear to take a far kinder view of one of its darker chapters than their immediate predecessors.

Over the past eight years, C.I.A. leaders defended dozens of agency personnel who had taken part in the now-banned torture program, even as they vowed never to resume the same harsh interrogation methods. But President Trump has said repeatedly that he thinks torture works. And the new C.I.A. chiefMike Pompeo, has said that waterboarding and other techniques do not even constitute torture, and praised as “patriots” those who used such methods in the early days of the fight against Al Qaeda.

Ms. Haspel, who has spent most of her career undercover, would certainly fall within Mr. Pompeo’s description. She played a direct role in the C.I.A.’s “extraordinary rendition program,” under which captured militants were handed to foreign governments and held at secret facilities, where they were tortured by agency personnel.

The C.I.A.’s first overseas detention site was in Thailand. It was run by Ms. Haspel, who oversaw the brutal interrogations of two detainees, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.

Mr. Zubaydah alone was waterboarded 83 times in a single month, had his head repeatedly slammed into walls and endured other harsh methods before interrogators decided he had no useful information to provide.

The sessions were videotaped and the recordings stored in a safe at the C.I.A. station in Thailand until 2005, when they were ordered destroyed. By then, Ms. Haspel was serving at C.I.A. headquarters, and it was her name that was on the cable carrying the destruction orders.

The agency maintains that the decision to destroy the recordings was made by Ms. Haspel’s boss at the time, Jose Rodriguez, who was the head of the C.I.A.’s clandestine service.

But years later, when the C.I.A. wanted to name Ms. Haspel to run clandestine operations, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, then the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, blocked the promotion over Ms. Haspel’s role in the interrogation program and the destruction of the tapes.

To call Trump’s announcements appalling is a vast understatement.

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Bishop Sorondo: China best implements Catholic social doctrine

Bishop Sorondo
Vatican Bishop and chancellor Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, speaks during a master conference in the framework of the XII International Meeting of Economists, on March 1, 2010 in Havana. AFP PHOTO/STR (Photo credit should read STR/AFP/Getty Images)

Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo is chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. While the non-socialist Pope John Paul II established the Academy in 1994, it has taken a clear turn to the left since then, especially since Francis has been Pope.

For example, readers may recall that Bernie Sanders spoke at a Vatican conference in April 2016, during the Democratic primary.

It was Bishop Sorondo who invited him.

In addition to Sanders, the conference included speakers such as:

  • President Evo Morales of Bolivia;
  • President Rafael Correa of Ecuador; and
  • Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, who wrote the book “Challenge of Inequality“.

Thus, it should come as no surprise that one who feels comfortable in the company of prominent socialists would appreciate the policies of a socialist country.

And yet, one would hardly expect a Catholic bishop to praise the policies of a nominally-Communist government as being aligned with Catholic teaching.

The Catholic Herald reports:

The chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences praised the ‘extraordinary’ Communist state.

“Right now, those who are best implementing the social doctrine of the Church are the Chinese,” a senior Vatican official has said.

Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, praised the Communist state as “extraordinary”, saying: “You do not have shantytowns, you do not have drugs, young people do not take drugs”. Instead, there is a “positive national conscience”.

The bishop told the Spanish-language edition of Vatican Insider that in China “the economy does not dominate politics, as happens in the United States, something Americans themselves would say.”

Bishop Sánchez Sorondo said that China was implementing Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’ better than many other countries and praised it for defending Paris Climate Accord. “In that, it is assuming a moral leadership that others have abandoned”, he added.

He accused US president Donald Trump of being “manipulated” by global oil firms, and said that, as opposed to those who follow “liberal thought”, the Chinese are working for the greater good of the planet.

On the surface, Bishop Sorondo’s claims are a noxious combination of being laughable and pathetic. For example:

  • Notwithstanding Sorondo’s naïve claim, the New York Times reported in 2015 that illegal drug use is quite prominent among Chinese youth;
  • Chinese debt, at all levels of society, are at frightening heights. For example, a recent analysis suggests that “Total Non-Financial Credit” in China is in excess of 328% of GDP. In other words, China is pursuing Keynesian policies similar to other Western countries, including the U.S.
  • With regard to climate change, Climate Action Tracker currently rates China’s plans to meet its commitments under the Paris Climate Accord as “highly insufficient”.

Finally, Sorondo’s premise about who is working “for the greater good” is telling. Like a good Marxist, both classical and cultural, what matters to him is not the effects of people’s actions (notwithstanding the tremendous reduction in poverty since the Industrial Age over 200 years ago), but the reason why a person acts.

At the same time, perhaps there’s another reason why a bishop would sing the praises of an otherwise obnoxious country:

The Vatican and China have been holding talks in recent years over the status of the ‘underground’ Church and the appointment of bishops. In November, the Vatican Museums also organised joint exhibitions with China in what was called “diplomacy of art”.

As part of the diplomacy efforts, Bishop Sánchez Sorondo visited the country. “What I found was an extraordinary China,” he said. “What people don’t realise is that the central value in China is work, work, work. There’s no other way, fundamentally it is like St Paul said: he who doesn’t work, doesn’t eat.”

Bishop Sánchez Sorondo concluded by saying that China is “developing well” and now has “many points of agreement” with the Vatican.

“You cannot think that the China of today is the China of [the time of] John Paul II, or Cold War Russia,” he said.

In other words, Catholic leaders need to pretend that they like the officials running policies that have forced countless abortions (thereby leading to tens of millions of bachelors), closely monitors local internet activity, and lead “anti-corruption” campaigns to clear out enemies of those in power. However, even while saying the right things, it appears that the Vatican is close to rolling over and allowing China to designate local bishops. In fact, the New York Times reports that the Vatican has asked two “underground” bishops to step aside in order for “individuals approved by the country’s authoritarian government” to take their places.

Never mind that the Vatican had previously excommunicated the two government-appointed bishops for being consecrated illicitly.

Like a good schoolboy, Bishop Sorondo is saying what he has to say so that the Vatican can establishes relations with China.

But is the cost worth it?

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AP: Pope Francis knew about Chilean sex abuse victims

Chilean sex abuse
Marie Collins, a member of the pope’s sex-abuse commission, hands a letter to Cardinal Sean O’Malley detailing the abuse of Juan Carlos Cruz and a cover-up by Chilean church authorities, at the Domus Santa Marta on April 12, 2015. (AP)

Before discussing the Associated Press’s report (of which I learned thanks to Rod Dreher), it would be helpful to provide some context.

In mid-January, Pope Francis visited Chile and Peru. His visit to Chile was going to be a particularly sensitive visit, seeing that almost 80 members of Chilean clergy have been accused of sexually abusing children.

Chile’s church earned wide respect during the regime of Gen. Augusto Pinochet because it spoke out against the military’s human rights abuses, but it began a downward spiral in 2010 when victims of a charismatic, politically connected priest came forward with allegations that he had kissed and fondled them.
Local church leaders had ignored the complaints against the Rev. Fernando Karadima for years, but they were forced to open an official investigation after the victims went public and Chilean prosecutors started investigating. The Vatican in 2011 sentenced Karadima to a lifetime of “penance and prayer” for his crimes, but the church leadership hasn’t won back Chileans’ trust for having covered up Karadima’s crimes for so long.

“The Karadima case created a ferocious wound,” said Chile’s ambassador to the Holy See, Mariano Fernandez Amunategui. He and others inside the Vatican speak openly of a Chilean church “in crisis” as a result, a remarkable admission of the scandal’s toll on a church that wielded such political clout that it helped stave off laws legalizing divorce and abortion until recently.

Chileans’ disenchantment has even affected their views of the pope himself. A recent survey by Latinobarometro, a respected regional polling firm, found that Chile had a lower esteem for history’s first Latin American pope than 18 other Central and South American countries. Even among Chilean Catholics, only 42 percent approve of the job Francis is doing, compared to a regional average of 68 percent.

Unfortunately, any chance Francis may have had in healing wounds created by the scandal was gutted with remarks that directly questioned the integrity of sexual abuse victims themselves.

Pope Francis accused victims of Chile’s most notorious pedophile of slander Thursday, an astonishing end to a visit meant to help heal the wounds of a sex abuse scandal that has cost the Catholic Church its credibility in the country.

Francis said that until he sees proof that Bishop Juan Barros was complicit in covering up the sex crimes of the Rev. Fernando Karadima, such accusations against Barros are “all calumny.”

The pope’s remarks drew shock from Chileans and immediate rebuke from victims and their advocates. They noted the accusers were deemed credible enough by the Vatican that it sentenced Karadima to a lifetime of “penance and prayer” for his crimes in 2011. A Chilean judge also found the victims to be credible, saying that while she had to drop criminal charges against Karadima because too much time had passed, proof of his crimes wasn’t lacking.

“As if I could have taken a selfie or a photo while Karadima abused me and others and Juan Barros stood by watching it all,” tweeted Barros’ most vocal accuser, Juan Carlos Cruz. “These people are truly crazy, and the pontiff talks about atonement to the victims. Nothing has changed, and his plea for forgiveness is empty.”

The Karadima scandal dominated Francis’ visit to Chile and the overall issue of sex abuse and church cover-up was likely to factor into his three-day trip to Peru that began late Thursday.

Karadima’s victims reported to church authorities as early as 2002 that he would kiss and fondle them in the swank Santiago parish he ran, but officials refused to believe them. Only when the victims went public with their accusations in 2010 did the Vatican launch an investigation that led to Karadima being removed from ministry.

The emeritus archbishop of Santiago subsequently apologized for having refused to believe the victims from the start.

Francis’s move to send an expert to Chile “to investigate a bishop accused by victims of covering up for the country’s most notorious pedophile priest” did nothing to mitigate the outrage his remarks made.

With that background, let us now turn to a potential bombshell of a report by the Associated Press:

Pope Francis received a victim’s letter in 2015 that graphically detailed sexual abuse at the hands of a priest and a cover-up by Chilean church authorities, contradicting the pope’s recent insistence that no victims had come forward, the letter’s author and members of Francis’ own sex- abuse commission have told The Associated Press.

The fact that Francis received the eight-page letter, obtained by the AP, challenges his insistence that he has “zero tolerance” for sex abuse and cover-ups. It also calls into question his stated empathy with abuse survivors, compounding the most serious crisis of his five-year papacy.

The scandal exploded last month when Francis’ trip to South America was marred by protests over his vigorous defense of Bishop Juan Barros, who is accused by victims of covering up the abuse by the Rev. Fernando Karadima. During the trip, Francis callously dismissed accusations against Barros as “slander,” seemingly unaware that victims had placed him at the scene of Karadima’s crimes.

On the plane home, confronted by reporters, the pope said: “You, in all good will, tell me that there are victims, but I haven’t seen any, because they haven’t come forward.”

But members of the pope’s Commission for the Protection of Minors say that in April 2015, they sent a delegation to Rome specifically to hand-deliver a letter to the pope about Barros. The letter from Juan Carlos Cruz detailed the abuse, kissing and fondling he says he suffered at Karadima’s hands, which he said Barros and others witnessed and ignored.

Four members of the commission met with Francis’ top abuse adviser, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, explained their objections to Francis’ recent appointment of Barros as a bishop in southern Chile, and gave him the letter to deliver to Francis.

“When we gave him (O’Malley) the letter for the pope, he assured us he would give it to the pope and speak of the concerns,” then-commission member Marie Collins told the AP. “And at a later date, he assured us that that had been done.”

Neither the Vatican nor O’Malley responded to multiple requests for comment.

In the letter to the pope, Cruz begs for Francis to listen to him and make good on his pledge of “zero tolerance.”

“Holy Father, it’s bad enough that we suffered such tremendous pain and anguish from the sexual and psychological abuse, but the terrible mistreatment we received from our pastors is almost worse,” he wrote.

Cruz goes on to detail in explicit terms the homo-eroticized nature of the circle of priests and young boys around Karadima, the charismatic preacher whose El Bosque community in the well-to-do Santiago neighborhood of Providencia produced dozens of priestly vocations and five bishops, including Barros.

He described how Karadima would kiss Barros and fondle his genitals, and do the same with younger priests and teens, and how young priests and seminarians would fight to sit next to Karadima at the table to receive his affections.

“More difficult and tough was when we were in Karadima’s room and Juan Barros — if he wasn’t kissing Karadima — would watch when Karadima would touch us — the minors — and make us kiss him, saying: ‘Put your mouth near mine and stick out your tongue.’ He would stick his out and kiss us with his tongue,” Cruz told the pope. “Juan Barros was a witness to all this innumerable times, not just with me but with others as well.”

“Juan Barros covered up everything that I have told you,” he added.

Barros has repeatedly denied witnessing any abuse or covering it up. “I never knew anything about, nor ever imagined, the serious abuses which that priest committed against the victims,” he told the AP recently. “I have never approved of nor participated in such serious, dishonest acts, and I have never been convicted by any tribunal of such things.”

For the Osorno faithful who have opposed Barros as their bishop, the issue isn’t so much a legal matter requiring proof or evidence, as Barros was a young priest at the time and not in a position of authority over Karadima. It’s more that if Barros didn’t “see” what was happening around him and doesn’t find it problematic for a priest to kiss and fondle young boys, he shouldn’t be in charge of a diocese where he is responsible for detecting inappropriate sexual behavior, reporting it to police and protecting children from pedophiles like his mentor.

This appears to be clear evidence that he lied about whether victims had come forward to the Vatican to present evidence of abuse. As Rod Dreher observed, to be caught in such a lie fifteen years after the Boston sex abuse scandal is outrageous, and reflects “depraved indifference” on the Vatican’s behalf.

These are damning allegations that Pope Francis needs to confront. Immediately.

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Neo-Feudalism? After restricting the use of cash, India extends welfare to the poor.

Neo-feudalism

Last month, this blog reported that Indians continue to prefer using cash to digital money, despite government efforts against cash.

Now the government has announced plans to increase welfare benefits to the poor. According to The Wall Street Journal:

India announced plans to do more to lift up the lives of the poor, particularly farmers, in its annual budget, the last for Prime Minister Narendra Modi before national elections next year.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said Thursday that New Delhi would guarantee that farmers are paid at least 1.5 times the cost of their crops as part of a program to double farmer incomes by 2022.

“This budget is farmer friendly, common citizen friendly, business environment friendly and development friendly,” said a tweet from Mr. Modi’s official prime-minister account.

The government said it would require banks to lend more to farming businesses and ramp up spending on building homes and improving roads in rural areas.

Mr. Jaitley also announced an ambitious health plan for the poor, under which the government would shoulder up to 500,000 rupees (about $8,000) a year in medical expenses for 100 million poor families.

He reiterated that the government doesn’t consider cryptocurrencies legal tender and that it would take measures to eliminate their use in financing illegitimate activities or as part of the payment system. The government would, however, explore using blockchain technology to promote a digital economy, Mr. Jaitley said.

On the surface, the combination of welfare payments, loans, and health care appear to be designed to “lift up the lives” of the poor. However, such programs rarely do anything other than incentive recipients to stay on welfare for the rest of their lives. Add in the cryptocurrency restrictions, and one could almost be forgiven into thinking that that’s exactly what the Indian government wants to accomplish.

I wonder if this is what Neo-Feudalism would look like, in which the indigent are tied to the state rather than the manor?

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Martin Wolf: The liberal international order is sick

Liberal international order

In light of the World Economic Forum kicking off in Davos, Switzerland, Martin Wolf penned an interesting column in The Financial Times in which he discusses the state of the liberal international order.

Rather than go through the specifics of his column, what struck me was not only the dialectic that he drew between the liberal international order and national authoritarianism, but the naivete with which he draws it.

Wolf quotes a professor to characterize the liberal international order this way:

[T]he “US and its partners built a multi-faceted and sprawling international order, organised around economic openness, multilateral institutions, security co-operation and democratic solidarity”. This system won the cold war. That victory, in turn, promoted a global shift towards democratic politics and free-market economics.

Wolf later characterizes the liberal international order as being “rooted in democratic politics” and “the best way to reconcile global co-operation with domestic legitimacy”.

While he believes in such an order, he calls it sick, and Trump’s election, Brexit, and the rise of authoritarian regimes in Turkey and Hungary, are symptoms of that illness. In particular, Wolf points to a study by Freedom House, indicating that Trump shows sympathy for autocrats abroad and violates norms of democratic governance.

I just find the premises behind what the liberal international order is, and the criticisms of the supposedly rising authoritarianism, somewhat baffling.

First, there is the false dichotomy between democracy and authoritarianism. Just because 51 percent of voters decide to take money from the other 49 percent, that does not make the theft legitimate. In far too many instances, interest groups uses democracy to gain resources at the expense of others. Because votes could be used to justify theft, why democracy should be viewed as the highest expression of political action is beyond me.

Second, much like the European Union appears to mostly benefit Germany, the post World War II international order, not surprisingly, mostly benefits the United States. While a whole bunch of countries appear to be in all of these multilateral institutions, the key figure in all of them is Uncle Sam. While participating countries certainly benefit from American largesse, this global framework benefits liberal internationalist policymakers, multinational companies, and the military-industrial complex, all while American taxpayers foot the bill.

Third, to call the current trade system “free trade” is laughable. What we not have is managed trade, primarily through organizations like the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, and multilateral trade agreements, like NAFTA. Truly free trade would not require the extensive legal and regulatory infrastructure currently in place. Therefore, it should be no surprise if Brexiteers and Trump are able to make headway with communities who have been on the losing end of the managed trade regime.

That’s not to say that Trump actually understands economics. On the contrary, he does not understand the key benefits of trade, particularly with foreigners. Nevertheless, his mercantalist worldview just happens to emphasize different beneficiaries when compared to those that globalists favor.

Finally, the assertion that only Trump has an affinity for authoritarian regimes is completely ignorant of American foreign policy since the end of World War II. The United States has had no problem dealing with nasty regimes, so long as their ideology did not look like those of our enemies at the time. All one has to do is consider the US’s relationship with Saudi Arabia to dispel that ridiculous notion.

In the end, Wolf may be onto something about the problems with the liberal international order. However, part of its problem may be the worldview its adherents have in the first place.

While lofty and abstract ideals may help hide otherwise selfish and ruthless interests, that does not mean that those holding such views are not responsible for the very problems in which they find themselves.

 

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Live-blogging E.J. Dionne’s WaPo column

E.J. Dionne

Scanning through the mainstream media this morning (and pounding far too much coffee to keep myself awake as a result), I came across a gem of a headline. Today’s Washington Post published a column by E.J. Dionne entitled, “Don’t buy the spin. Government works.

Provocative, ain’t it? Let’s see if he makes a convincing case.

Government shutdown follies feed an ideologically loaded narrative that government is hopelessly incompetent and can never be counted on to do much that is useful.

I don’t know how I would put it to E.J., but it’s a little bit more than a mere narrative.

After looking back just the past sixteen years, what other conclusion should I come up with? Among other things:

  • The US’s foreign policy comprises nothing but failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; massive waves of Middle East migrants due to attacks in Syria, Iraq, and Libya; and insistently provoking Russia, China, and Iran for reasons only neocons can articulate;
  • The national debt that has grown from under $6 trillion to over $20 trillion;
  • The Federal Reserve’s balance sheet has exploded from over $700 billion in 2003 to over $4.4 trillion today;
  • A regulatory state has grown so vast so quickly it has throttled America’s entrepreneurial spirit; and
  • Obamacare has single-handedly contributed to the near-collapse of America’s health-care industry.

However, such facts rarely interfere with a liberal’s desire to see government as some benevolent force in society.

President Trump and Republicans should bear the burden for Washington’s disarray because it was Trump’s erratic and uninformed negotiating style (along with his repeated flip-flopping) that made a rational deal impossible.

While I am the last person to defend Trump, he and Democrats are separated from an issue that is central to both of their bases: how to treat illegal immigrants who entered the country through Obama’s executive orders relating to DACA. Therefore, I’m not terribly interested in a partisan’s take on who is to blame on the impasse.

But even if he and his party are held responsible, episodes of this sort have the long-run effect of bolstering the standard conservative view of government as a lumbering beast whose “meddling” only fouls things up. The private sector is cast as virtuously efficient and best left alone.

Ah, one can practically see the straw being gathered up to create the construct that will ultimately be torn down. “The private sector is cast as virtuously efficient” puts a moral veneer to an economic argument. Under that argument, voluntary transactions are preferable to forced transactions, or transactions with conditions that outsiders impose. That’s because people engaged in voluntary transactions are more satisfied with their outcomes than if an outside party imposed conditions neither party had agreed to. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have entered into the deal in the first place. Such transactions are not virtuous so much as forced transactions cannot be virtuous.

The power of this anti-government bias is enhanced by our failure to revisit government’s successes. We don’t often call out those who wrongly predict that activist politicians and bureaucrats will bring on nothing but catastrophe.

What a bunch of malarkey.

The left’s constant criticism of Fox News and other conservative outlets includes chastising them for their predicting bad outcomes of proposed government policies.

Additionally, while it may be unreasonable to expect Dionne to have a long memory, there is a relatively famous (at least in Austrian economics circles) blog post by Keynesian economist Brad DeLong, in which he lambasted Robert Murphy’s expectation that quantitative easing would lead to significant price inflation, which did not occur (and Murphy later acknowledged as a mistake).

After all, if there is anything that can be relied upon, it is the left’s insatiable desire to use any opportunity to find rhetorical high ground so as to castigate non-leftists for their presumably immoral views.

To characterize leftists as not finding sufficient opportunities to confront anti-government bias is ridiculous.

This is why conservatives would like to lock the government rescues of General Motors and Chrysler under President Barack Obama in a memory hole. In the end, taxpayers invested some $80 billion in the effort and recouped all but approximately $10 billion of that. And that does not take into account the taxes paid by workers who might otherwise have been unemployed.

That’s certainly an interesting perspective.

If only it were true.

Notwithstanding Dionne’s characterization of recouping seven-eighths of the bailout as a success, his indignation fails to address:

  • Why taxpayer money should be used to bail out failed businesses at all;
  • TARP, through which hundreds of billions of taxpayer money was used to “rescue” banks, brokers, and mortgage financing companies that made over-sized bets on residential mortgages;
  • Whether protectionist policies incentivized American car companies to continue poor management practices; and
  • Why auto workers, let alone anyone else, should be forced to finance all of these bailouts through the taxes they paid.

The only way Dionne could make the auto bailout look effective is to ignore all of the above. And even that didn’t work, because the government still spent more than it received. Which is, you know, inefficient.

Remember that when this was debated, critics insisted the federal government could not possibly understand a complicated business, and that it would turn the auto companies into some kind of patronage dumping ground.

If the bailout happened, Mitt Romney famously wrote, “you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye.” Rush Limbaugh accused Obama of trying to “take over” the American auto companies in order to turn them into “another industry doing his bidding.” Then-Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) said the bailout would amount to throwing good money after bad. “Just giving them $25 billion doesn’t change anything,” he said in November 2008, citing the estimated upfront cost of saving the companies. “It just puts off for six months or so the day of reckoning.”

In fact, in the most capitalist of terms, the initiative worked spectacularly well. Auto sales rose for seven straight years beginning in 2010, before finally taking a small dip in 2017. On May 29, 2009, GM stock cratered to 75 cents a share — yes, 75 cents. The restructured company went public again in 2010 at $33 a share, and it was trading at around $43 a share on Friday. Fiat Chrysler, the merged company that came out of the government-led restructuring, debuted on the New York Stock Exchange at $9 a share in October 2014 and is now trading at around $24 a share.

Careful readers may notice that the first word in “Fiat Chrysler” is an Italian company. So the American government helped to subsidize the sale of an American car company to a foreign one.

Funny, I don’t see Dionne pointing this out.

As far as auto sales going up, that aspect of the business cycle would have occurred whether the car companies were bailed out or not. All that changed is who sold the cars.

Add in the spectacularly awful “Cash for Clunkers“, the government wasted an enormous amount of other people’s money to solve a problem that can only be resolved through the marketplace.

Although Obama organized the details of the rescue and took the heat for it, former President George W. Bush deserves some credit here. While he was initially reluctant to do so, Bush responded to Obama’s desire to keep the companies open. He eventually fronted GM and Chrysler some $25 billion from the funds that had been set aside for bank bailouts after the economic implosion.

Bush said in December 2008, “If we were to allow the free market to take its course now, it would almost certainly lead to disorderly bankruptcy.” For such a staunch capitalist, it was a candid — one might say courageous — admission that the market, operating on its own, would create chaos.

This just goes to show that the welfare state is not the purview of one particular party: Republicans know how to play the welfare game as much as the other one. The fact that Dionne is deferring to Bush on how the marketplace works shows that neither Dionne nor Bush understand economics.

And this bedlam would have taken a severe human and social toll, as the job losses from that “disorderly bankruptcy” would have hit not only the auto companies themselves but also their suppliers and other enterprises, large and small, that served them.

Dionne is confusing the symptoms of the bust as a cause. Because he has no understanding of economics, let alone the business cycle, he can’t see that even if the car companies and their suppliers had to go into bankruptcy, their assets would be re-allocated in a far more efficient and effective manner than what had been accumulated during the boom. There is no question that such a bust would be painful, but the result would be far more sustainable than what happened through the bailouts, which is kick the can down the road.

Instead, Michigan, along with other parts of the region, has staged an impressive comeback. The state’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate peaked at 14.9 percent in June 2009, fell to 5.1 percent by December 2016 and has continued to drop, to 4.6 percent last November. In Detroit itself, unemployment declined from 28.4 percent in June 2009 to 7.8 percent in November 2017.

If Michigan is doing as well as Dionne makes it out to be, why did the state vote for Trump during the last election? Granted, the margin of victory was incredibly small. However, people don’t vote for a maverick like Trump unless they are deeply unsatisfied with the state of things.

Besides, even if the entire drop in unemployment is attributable to the auto bailouts, which I doubt, what was cost of that drop in terms of employment that could have been retained in other parts of the country?

Dionne cannot even contemplate such a question, let alone address it.

Wages, it should be said, have not fully recovered from the Great Recession. The real median household income in Michigan stood at $57,910 in 2006, sank through 2010, when it hit $50,943, and was at $57,091 in 2016. So there’s still work to do. But imagine what the trends would look like if government had made the irreversible choice of letting GM and Chrysler go under.

I love the dramatic rhetoric closing this paragraph. Imagine the pain and suffering if those Republicans just let those companies die! Only evil people – EVIL!!!!! – would let such catastrophe to occur!

The primary problem behind the rhetoric is that all government does, at best, is redistribute the pain of a bust. After it had become clear that the enormous debts that had been incurred through residential mortgages could not be paid, people responded accordingly. Companies laid off workers, who, in turn, couldn’t buy cars.

American car companies couldn’t survive the downturn because of their high debt levels, high wages, and enormous pension obligations. All the bailouts did was prevent people from re-allocating resources to more productive purposes. The losses incurred by those companies were socialized through the supposed benevolence of politicians, with a little help from the American taxpayer.

This is indicative of the broader socialization of losses that occurred through the bailout of the banking industry. The taxpayer took on the losses, and executives kept their bonuses. Yet Dionne addresses none of this.

The last paragraph of his column is so atrocious, I need to focus on each sentence.

The price of our collective amnesia about the moments when public action kept capitalism from flying off the rails is very high.

Each transaction consists of exchanging money for a good or service. The money supply is directly affected by Federal Reserve policy, primarily through setting short-term interest rates. Regardless, if one-half of each transaction is impacted by a central planning agency, it does not make any sense to blame capitalism on the bust.

Once a crisis is over, extreme forms of deregulation return to fashion, and our political discourse falls lazily into cheap government bashing.

The Obama years saw an extensive expansion of regulation, particularly in the financial services sector. Must he be reminded about Dodd-Frank, let alone Obamacare? There was nothing deregulatory about those years. I can also assure him that any government bashing can be well-substantiated. In many ways, this is a throwaway sentence.

Speaking of throwaway sentences, Dionne closes his essay with this one.

That Trump and Congress make this easy is no excuse for forgetting why government is there.

Dionne’s essay is a cheap rehashing of tired liberal rhetoric extolling the virtues of some magical entity that can come out of nowhere and solve problems no one else can.

It ignores the simple fact that for government to spend money, it has to take it out of someone else’s pocket. It is inherently parasitical.

In other words, government doesn’t work.

That is why the best government for a well-ordered society is no government at all.

 

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