As previously posted, scientists from University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)—including a nationally-respected cancer expert and members of the National Academy of Scientists—are seriously concerned that they do, and now TSA union reps in Boston have cited a “cancer cluster” among TSA workers there.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center has obtained documents under the Freedom of Information Act showing that TSA workers in Boston have reported elevated rates of cancer, and that TSA workers’ requests to wear radiation-detecting badges have been denied. According to this account, TSA workers in Portland and Puerto Rico have also reported higher incidences of cancer.

Given the federal government’s abysmal role in posing serious health dangers in the past (e.g., from the 1940s’ Tuskegee and Guatemalan syphilis tests, to the CDC’s injection of L.A.-area babies with an experimental measles vaccine in the 1990s, and more), reasonable people should demand that the government be held to the same standards for exposing travelers to medical devices (x-ray machines) as the FDA requires for private manufacturers.

In a letter to Dr. John P. Holdren, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, the concerned UCSF scientists last year warned:

Our overriding concern is the extent to which the safety of this scanning device has been adequately demonstrated. This can only be determined by a meeting of an impartial panel of experts that would include medical physicists and radiation biologists at which all of the available relevant data is reviewed.

An important consideration is that a large fraction of the population will be subject to the new X-ray scanners and be at potential risk, as discussed below. This raises a number of ‘red flags’. Can we have an urgent second independent evaluation?

As documented in the Independent Institute book, HAZARDOUS TO OUR HEALTH? FDA Regulation of Health Care Products, and extensively on our website FDAReview.org, the federal government routinely deprives Americans of beneficial devices for years of tests. Yet millions of Americans can be exposed to potentially lethal technology on the say-so of unaccountable federal bureaucrats.

It’s time to loudly echo the calls of Independent Institute Fellow Art Carden and Rep. Ron Paul to abolish the TSA—which is unaccountable and immune from liability should it fail to protect travelers from either terrorist attacks or health hazards—and return airport security to private firms who can and would be held accountable, including for health dangers.

In the meantime, air travelers may wish to carry a copy of the warning letter from UCSF scientists, and copies of these articles (here and here) that cite increased cancer among TSA workers, to hand to the next TSA agent who tries to herd you through a machine only the government says is safe.

Perhaps if I only blog about the positive developments in politics it will save time. Well, here we go. House Republicans are pushing to preclude the government from banning incandescent light bulbs.

This is an idea I can get behind. Incandescent bulbs are a glorious thing. They bring light, the essence of civilization, into our homes at all hours of the day and night. This light is cheap, bright, and, most important, clear and easy on the eyes.

I know I’m not the only one for whom fluorescent light is a bit of a downer. It doesn’t seem to light up the room the way the old-fashioned bulbs do. Reading under the politically correct light gives me a headache after a few hours. And since I often spend eight or so hours a day reading, this can be a problem.

My travails are minor compared to those of others. Some eye drops and a break from reading and I’m fine. A friend of mine stocks up on the classic bulbs because the fluorescent ones give him migraines even after a short time.

There is something soothingly proper about the traditional bulbs. Something that seems to connect us to the past as well as the future. The fluorescent bulbs are not more space-age—that would be cool—but rather seem a bit dystopian, like a historical accident that defines our era but, if social progress is real at all, will eventually fade out of memory.

Of course, those who enjoy fluorescent light should be free to buy the product. But so should those who wish to buy the older variety. In a free society, that’s how it would work. But energy is not dictated purely by the market. The politicians see energy as a national resource, not an economic good to be bought and sold, but one ultimately to be rationed by the central state. This is the problem. In few other cases are we chastised for using too much of a product, for if we pay for it, everyone is happy. With electricity, although we pay for it, the government constantly hectors us for using less. This is a sign that we don’t live with energy liberty and electrical free enterprise. All the energy fallacies we hear about today—war for oil, energy independence, the need to ban glorious incandescent light—spring from the fact that energy is far too socialized and the implicit premise that it should be socialized completely.

How many bad ideas does it take to screw up our light bulbs? Just one. The idea that government knows best.

Federal officials are pointing fingers at one another over a ludicrous plan to infiltrate Mexican drug smuggling groups that went totally awry. Under Operation Fast and Furious, the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Bureau allowed top Mexican drug dealers to purchase weapons, hoping to trace them back to kingpins. They lost track of these weapons, some of which were later found at the scene of violent crimes. The ATF’s chief is blaming the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration for not notifying it adequately of the armed dealers who happened to be informants of the latter two agencies. So we have two federal law enforcement organizations keeping poor tabs on drug dealers with whom they’re in cahoots and another U.S. law enforcement organization allowing these people to get weapons in a totally misguided attempt to find and stop criminal higher ups.

Of course, this only scratches the surface. Under Obama, U.S. financing of the Mexican drug warriors has reached record heights. Obama asked for $15 billion last year—far, far more than was spent under the Bush administration. And it is this overt activity, along with domestic drug war enforcement, far more than the ATF’s covert shenanigans, that is the real problem.

In the last five years, over 37,000 have died in Mexico’s drug violence. And many Mexicans recognize the ultimate cause: Drug prohibition. It was not a big news story in the United States, but a few months ago thousands of Mexicans took to the streets protesting the drug policy being enforced by Mexican authorities and sponsored, actually imposed, by Washington, DC.

From a review of Doug Irwin’s important new book Peddling Protectionism:  Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression (Princeton University Press, 2011):

Hoover had famously received a petition signed by 1,028 economists urging him to veto the bill.  Then as now, economists were held in warm regard by Congress; Senator Samuel Shortridge remarked: “I am not overawed and I am not at all disturbed by the proclamations of the college professors who never earned a dollar by the sweat of their brows by honest labor – theorists, dreamers – I am not so overawed or disturbed by their pronunciamentos ….”

My own experience as a government adviser, many years ago, convinced me that not much has changed. Economists are lauded in Washington when they agree with their political masters, when they provide intellectual cover for the policy fashion of the day. (Exhibit A: Keynes’s General Theory, which offered a sophisticated-sounding rationale for the deficit spending policies already in place in the US and Europe, policies long-favored by political hacks.) Economic advice that challenges the conventional political wisdom ends up in Orwell’s famous Memory Hole.

After our Forbes magazine piece, “Sheila Bair’s Legacy: Bailouts, Secrecy and Power Grabs,” the FDIC found time to respond to our comments. The response was penned by FDIC General Counsel Michael Krimminger, who refers to our editorial as “more personal attack than commentary.”  Let’s make a clear distinction here. Our commentary was entirely based in fact and had an underlying, documented basis.

The following discussion will go through some of the major issues raised by Krimminger and will link the key underlying documents in question, many of which we fought years to be exposed to the light of day through two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits against the FDIC. Readers can judge for themselves the noted policy disagreements and who is right and who is wrong.

McKinley and Fitton are simply wrong in charging Chairman Bair and the FDIC with supporting bailouts—Chairman Bair led the FDIC Board in voting for the bailout of creditors of Wachovia, Citigroup, Bank of America bailouts. These are so-called “Too Big to Fail” interventions, because they were directed to large mega-banks and such interventions are not available for small or medium-sized banks. Compare those board minutes to what was originally released by the FDIC before the McKinley/Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuits: Wachovia, Citigroup, and Bank of America.

These were not simply decisions by the FDIC Board—We did not focus on the other requirements of the systemic risk exception such as approval by the Federal Reserve, Treasury Secretary and President. We only noted that Chairman Bair “led her board in invoking the systemic risk provision” for these bailouts. The FDIC is a key agency in this process as the systemic risk exception is contained in the Federal Deposit Insurance Act.

The new resolution authority was not a “power grab”—The FDIC lobbied heavily both in the press and on Capitol Hill primarily by criticizing the bankruptcy court for its handling of the Lehman Brothers liquidation. As part of this campaign, the FDIC claims its experience in handling the liquidation of a population of mostly small commercial banks somehow makes it qualified to be the liquidator for the next Lehman Brothers.

The Court did not find FDIC’s position on disclosure “baseless”—This is a direct quote from the Court: “Defendant’s argument to the contrary is baseless” (page 7 of Judge Sullivan’s opinion and search “baseless”)  This refers to the FDIC’s argument that the McKinley claim was moot because the FDIC complied with its obligations under the FOIA by producing the requested documents. As can be seen from a reading of the opinion, Judge Sullivan disagreed.

The FDIC has been a leader in transparency in government—That may have been the case during the last financial crisis, when the FDIC readily disclosed documents such as meeting minutes and internal memos during congressional hearings on the Continental Illinois bailout, but it is no longer the case today. The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve has been criticized for its lack of transparency during the recent financial crisis, but in our opinion the FDIC has been much more secretive and much less willing to disclose the details of its deliberations than the Board of Governors. We are well positioned to make that determination as we also have two FOIA cases ongoing against the Board of Governors.

In a criminal trial, the whole weight of the state is pit against an accused individual. The consequence of a guilty verdict for a serious offense is generally time in prison—a dehumanizing government cage. For capital cases, the punishment can be the ultimate penalty: death.

Putting an innocent person to death is a crime of infinite significance regarding that one person. It is as morally degenerate as any other form of homicide, if not worse as it seduces the society at large through its pretensions of legitimacy into accepting the killing of innocent people. Imprisoning an innocent person is as severe as kidnapping an innocent person. A culture tolerant of a government that does such a thing is basking in some of the greatest moral depravities. It should be regarded as a great evil for an individual to kidnap or kill an innocent person. For the state to do so is at least as bad, but it risks multiplying the evil of the individual act through the false sanctification and widespread societal acceptance of great immorality.

An ethical code that countenances incarceration of the innocent, even in a slim minority of cases, is no bulwark whatever against the ghastliest of institutional oppressions. A people who are not profoundly and unwaveringly outraged by the false incarceration of even a single soul are unfit to be a free people. It is often said that it’s better to let ten guilty people free than leave one innocent man behind bars. The ratio should be much higher, for it is metaphysically possible for the guilty to find justice outside of the U.S. legal system, but it is impossible for the innocent to find it within. Thus is the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” of unparalleled importance. There is no word adequate to describe how unacceptable it should be to a civilized people to see an innocent man caged. Every single legal bias should be given to ensure that the prosecution proves beyond a reasonable doubt that a person committed the crime before he be deprived of his liberty or life. If the standard is any lower than that, the prosecution will not only convict innocents in the courtroom, but use the threat of false conviction to obtain plea bargains that unfairly rob the innocent of their freedom. This happens every day in America, because jurors do not take the concept of “innocent until proven guilty” nearly far enough–they assume if the police and prosecutors say something is true, it is true. They assume all the evidence that would demonstrate the client’s potential innocence has been shown them. They assume the state wouldn’t even accuse a person unless it was damn sure the person is guilty. There is an immense literature proving this is not the case. Prosecutors and police frequently lie. But even if they didn’t, even if every last one of them had the moral constitution of an angel sent from heaven, the possibility of honest error should compel jurors to give every single benefit of the doubt to the defense, and to refrain from a guilty vote unless the prosecution really made it’s case beyond a reasonable doubt. Too much hinges on the importance of this principle even to consider casting it aside

For weeks, we have been treated to comic opera in D.C.’s theater of the politically and economically absurd. On the stage, the actors—President Obama, the Secretary of the Treasury, congressional leaders—hop about, shouting moronic lines about the national “default” that will occur unless the government’s statutory debt limit is raised, reciting Chicken Little lines about how such a default will trigger worldwide economic catastrophe. According to a report in yesterday’s Christian Science Monitor,

Facing an Aug. 2 deadline, Congress and the White House are stepping up face time to avert what the Treasury Department has called “catastrophic economic and market consequences” of a default on the national debt.

Think about this statement. Have governments defaulted in the past? Of course, they have, on hundreds of occasions over the centuries. Have these defaults triggered “catastrophic economic and market consequences”? No. When a government defaults, there are consequences, of course, including heightened reluctance of lenders to lend to the deadbeat government in the future or at least to lend at such favorable interest rates. Often partial payments of principal and interest are arranged or debts are restructured. The world keeps spinning.

Now we have yet another potential reason to oppose the Libya war. According to West African governments, Obama’s war is actually empowering al-Qaeda, as the terrorist group is reportedly looting weaponry from Libyan rebels. This is in addition to the fact that U.S.-supported rebels themsleves have admitted to having ties to al-Qaeda.

This would make the undeclared war in Libya only the latest to benefit America’s no. 1 terrorist enemy. The Iraq war, according to many experts, was a great boon for al-Qaeda, which used the massive U.S. military presence as a recruiting tool. There were practically none of these people in Iraq until after the U.S. invaded.

And although the Afghanistan war is widely seen as an anti-al-Qaeda war (it continues on with the rationale that the 100 or so members of the terror group who still reside in that country need to be wiped out, at a cost of about 1,000 U.S. troops and $300 million annually per al-Qaeda fighter) even in Afghanistan, the U.S. response to 9/11 has probably been in al-Qaeda’s interests. As Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA bin Laden Unit argues in his book Imperial Hubris, the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan was always a completely counterproductive strategy in stopping terrorism, since the major way bin Laden rallied material support and manpower for his crusade against America was by pointing out the U.S. occupations of Muslim countries, these occupations being the main impetus behind the terrorism in the first place.

Inspired by Bob Higgs and by Mario Rizzo, I hereby offer some July 4 reflections on patriotism, courtesy of Albert Jay Nock:

What is patriotism? Is it loyalty to a spot on a map, marked off from others spots by blue or yellow lines, the spot where one was born? But birth is a pure accident; surely one is in no way responsible for having been born on this spot or on that. Flaubert had poured a stream of corrosive irony on this idea of patriotism. Is it loyalty to a set of political jobholders, a king and his court, a president and his bureaucracy, a parliament, a congress, a Duce or Fuhrer, a camorra of commissars? I should say it depends entirely on what the jobholders are like and what they do. Certainly I had never seen any who commanded my loyalty; I should feel utterly degraded if ever once I thought they could. Does patriotism mean loyalty to a political system and its institutions, constitutional, autocratic, republican, or what-not? But if history has made anything unmistakably clear, it is that from the standpoint of the individual and his welfare, these are no more than names. The reality which in the end they are found to cover is the same for all alike. If a tree be known by its fruits, which I believe is regarded as good sound doctrine, then the peculiar merit of a system, if it has any, ought to be reflected in the qualities and conditions of the people who live under it; and looking over the peoples and systems of the world, I found no reason in the nature of things why a person should be loyal to one system rather than another. One could see at a glance that there is no saving grace in any system. Whatever merit or demerit may attach to any of them lies in the way it is administered.

So when people speak of loyalty to one’s country, one must ask them what they mean by that. What is one’s country? Mr. Jefferson said contemptuously that “merchants have no country; the mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.” But one may ask, why should I? This motive of patriotism seems to me perfectly sound, and if it should be sound for merchants, why not for others who are not merchants? If it holds good in respect of material gains, why not of spiritual gains, cultural gains, intellectual and aesthetic gains? As a general principle, I should put it that a man’s country is where the things he loves are most respected. Circumstances may have prevented his ever setting foot there, but it remains his country.

The heart of the Declaration of Independence adopted by the thirteen united colonies of British North America on July 4, 1776, is as follows:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security

On these grounds, the colonists took up arms against the long-established state under which they lived, and thousands of them perished in the struggle to secede from the British Empire.

Did the argument they advanced to justify their actions have any force? If it had force then, does it not have equal force today — nay, does it not have a thousand times greater force today than it had then?

To repeat, our ancestors declared that “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.” Do the Americans of today deny that they also possess this right and this duty? And if they do possess this right and this duty, why do they continue to suffer — nay, to affirmatively suppport and celebrate — the rule of a state whose every action mocks their unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and crushes them ever more oppressively under the weight of its presumptuous and mendacious tyranny?