FACULTY | STAFF

Social Policy Ph.D. faculty

:: Core Faculty
Doctoral students work primarily with Core Faculty members drawn from the Government and Sociology departments in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) and with the Social Policy faculty of the Harvard Kennedy School.

:: Affiliated Faculty
While affiliated faculty from other departments hold no formal advising roles in the program, they may offer courses and research opportunities that contribute to students' training in Social Policy.

:: Staff
The administrative offices for the Ph.D. Programs in Social Policy are located at the Harvard Kennedy School.






 
CORE FACULTY     Social Policy Ph.D. Chair Directors of Graduate Study Kathryn Edin, Sociologist,
Harvard Kennedy School


Kathryn Edin, Sociologist,
Harvard Kennedy School

Jennifer Hochschild, Political Scientist, Faculty of Arts & Sciences


Government

:: Ryan D. Enos
:: Claudine Gay
:: Peter A. Hall
:: Torben Iversen
:: Paul E. Peterson
:: Matthew B. Platt
:: Robert D. Putnam
:: Theda Skocpol

Sociology

:: Jason Beckfield
:: Bart Bonikowski
:: Mary C. Brinton
:: Matthew Desmond
:: Filiz Garip
:: Alexandra Killewald
:: Michèle Lamont
:: Orlando Patterson
:: Robert J. Sampson
:: Mary Waters
:: Bruce Western
:: Martin Whyte
:: Christopher Winship


Social Policy

:: Mary Jo Bane
:: George J. Borjas
:: Amitabh Chandra
:: Ronald F. Ferguson
:: Archon Fung
:: Christopher Jencks
:: Alexander Keyssar
:: Jeffrey B. Liebman
:: Jane J. Mansbridge
:: Dani Rodrik
:: Julie Boatright Wilson
:: William Julius Wilson

  FACULTY AFFILIATES IN OTHER DEPARTMENTS     Economics

:: Richard B. Freeman
:: Roland G. Fryer
:: Edward L. Glaeser
:: Claudia Goldin
:: Lawrence F. Katz

Graduate Sch. of Education

:: Thomas J. Kane
:: Jal Mehta
:: Richard J. Murnane




  ADMINISTRATIVE STAFF       Pamela L. Metz
Director

Matt Salesses
Staff assistant

   

P r o f i l e s

Mary Jo Bane
Thornton Bradshaw Professor of Public Policy and Management

Mary Jo Bane is Thornton Bradshaw Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. From 1993 to 1996 she was Assistant Secretary for Children and Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. From 1992 to 1993 she was Commissioner of the New York State Department of Social Services, where she previously served as Executive Deputy Commissioner from 1984 to 1986. From 1987 to 1992, at the Kennedy School, she was Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy and Director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy. From 2006-2011, she served as the Academic Dean of the Harvard Kennedy School. She is the author of a number of books and articles on poverty, welfare, families, and the role of churches in civic life. She is currently doing research on poverty in the United States and international context. She lives in Dorchester, Massachusetts, with her husband Kenneth Winston and enjoys hiking, gardening, and reading novels.
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Jason Beckfield
Professor of Sociology

Jason Beckfield, Professor of Sociology, studies inequality and social policy in the context of globalization and regional integration. His current work investigates the impact of European integration on economic inequality and the welfare state, the evolution of the network structure of international organizations, and the social determinants of health inequalities.
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Bart Bonikowski
Assistant Professor of Sociology

Bart Bonikowski received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University in 2011. He studies ways in which political institutions reflect and shape the cultural models employed by individuals in their daily lives and how these models vary within and between major units of social organization, such as nation-states, racial groups, and socioeconomic classes. His current work in this area examines the sources and political consequences of commonly held conceptions of the nation-state in modern democracies and the transformation of these conceptions over time. He has also published on a variety of topics related to culture, inequality, and social networks, including the impact of ecological competition between musical genres on changes in the distribution of cultural consumption preferences, the use of racial profiling in state counter-terrorism practices, the effects of race and incarceration on labor market inequality (with Devah Pager and Bruce Western), the remunerative consequences of Internet use (with Paul DiMaggio), the demography and network characteristics of entrepreneurial teams (with Martin Ruef), and the social and political significance of voluntary associations (with Miller McPherson).
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George J. Borjas
Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Economics and Social Policy

George J. Borjas is the Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Economics and Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is the recipient of the 2011 IZA Prize in Labor Economics. Professor Borjas is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Research Fellow at IZA. Professor Borjas is the author of several books, including Heaven's Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy (Princeton University Press, 1999), and the widely used textbook Labor Economics (McGraw-Hill, 2012), now in its sixth edition. He has published over 125 articles in books and scholarly journals. His professional honors include citations in Who's Who in the World and Who's Who in America. Professor Borjas was elected a fellow of the Econometric Society in 1998 and a fellow of the Society of Labor Economists in 2004. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University in 1975.
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Mary C. Brinton
Reischauer Institute Professor of Sociology
and Chair of the Department of Sociology

Professor Mary Brinton's research and teaching focus on gender inequality, education, labor markets, economic sociology, Japanese society, and comparative sociology. Her research combines qualitative and quantitative methods to study institutional change and its effects on individual action, particularly in labor markets and in education. Brinton generally engages in primary data collection for her research projects, and has designed social surveys, interviews, and observational studies in Japan and Korea. Brinton studied sociolinguistics as an undergraduate at Stanford University, and earned an MA in Japanese Studies and an MA and PhD in Sociology at the University of Washington.
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Amitabh Chandra
Professor of Public Policy

Amitabh Chandra is an economist and a Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He is a Research Fellow at the IZA Institute in Bonn, Germany, and at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). His research focuses on productivity and cost-growth in healthcare and racial disparities in healthcare. His research has been supported by the National Institute of Aging, the National Institute of Child Health and Development, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and has been published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the New England Journal of Medicine, and Health Affairs. He is an editor of the Journal of Human Resources, Economics Letters, and the American Economic Journal. Professor Chandra has testified to the United States Senate, the National Academy of Science, the Institute of Medicine and the United States Commission on Civil Rights. His research has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, Newsweek, and on National Public Radio. He is the recipient of an Outstanding Teacher Award, the first-prize recipient of the Upjohn Institute's International Dissertation Research Award, the Kenneth Arrow Award for best paper in health economics, and the Eugene Garfield Award for the impact of medical research.
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Matthew Desmond
Assistant Professor of Sociology and of Social Studies

Ronald Matthew Desmond is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Studies (beginning spring term 2012). After receiving his Ph.D. in 2010 from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he joined the Harvard Society of Fellows as a Junior Fellow. His primary teaching and research interests include urban sociology, race and ethnicity, poverty, social theory, organizations and work, and ethnography. Desmond is the author of On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters (2007), which won the Max Weber Award for Distinguished Scholarship by the American Sociological Association, as well as two books on race in America (both with Mustafa Emirbayer): Racial Domination, Racial Progress: The Sociology of Race in America (2009) and The Racial Order (forthcoming). He has written essays on educational inequality, dangerous work, political ideology, race and social theory, and the inner-city housing market. Desmond is the principal investigator of the Milwaukee Area Renters Study, an original survey of tenants in Milwaukee’s low-income private housing sector. His work has been supported by the MacArthur, Ford, and National Science Foundations, as well as by the American Philosophical Society; it also has been profiled in major news outlets such as The New York Times, National Public Radio, Science, and Das Erste. His current project combines ethnographic fieldwork, survey data, and documentary analysis to explore the causes, dynamics, and consequences of eviction among the urban poor and, more broadly, to plumb the inner workings of disadvantaged neighborhoods and the low-cost housing market.
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Kathryn Edin
Professor of Public Policy and Management

Kathryn Edin is Professor of Public Policy and Management at the Kennedy School. Her research focuses on urban poverty and family life, social welfare, public housing, child support, and nonmarital childbearing. Her most recent publication (with Paula England), Unmarried Couples with Children, is an analysis of a four-year study of 50 unmarried couples who shared a birth in 2000. Previous publications include the results of a six-year ethnographic study in eight Philadelphia neighborhoods, Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage (with Maria J. Kefalas), and Making Ends Meet: How Low Income Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low Wage Work (with Laura Lein). Her next book is tentatively titled Marginal Men: Fatherhood in the Lives of Low Income Unmarried Men (with Timothy Nelson and Laura Lein). Current projects include a study nested within the interim evaluation of the Moving to Opportunity Experiment, an evaluation of the Gautreaux Two housing mobility program in Chicago, and Investing in Enduring Resources with the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), a study of EITC allocation among low-income households in Boston and Central Illinois. Edin received her PhD in sociology from Northwestern University in 1991 and has also taught at Rutgers University, Northwestern University, and the University of Pennsylvania.
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Ryan D. Enos
Assistant Professor of Government

Ryan D. Enos is an assistant professor of government and a faculty associate of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science.  He specializes in American politics with an emphasis on the politics of race & identity and voting behavior.  His research focuses on how voting and other political behavior is affected by the context in which a person lives interacting with their identity.  This leads him to an intersection of research in political behavior, political psychology, and geography. His current primary interest is in the effect of residential racial segregation on voter choice and participation.  He earned his AB in political science and history from U.C. Berkeley and his MA and PhD in political science from UCLA. Before entering academia, he was a teacher at Paul Robeson High School in Chicago.
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Ronald F. Ferguson
Senior Lecturer in Education and Public Policy

Ronald Ferguson, Senior Lecturer in Education and Public Policy at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Harvard Kennedy School, is also an economist and Senior Research Associate at the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy. He has taught at Harvard since 1983, focusing on education and economic development. His research and writing for the past decade have focused on racial achievement gaps, appearing in a variety of publications. His most recent book is Toward Excellence with Equity: An emerging vision for closing the achievement gap, published by Harvard Education Press. He is the creator of the Tripod Project for School Improvement and also the faculty co-chair and director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard University. Ferguson earned an undergraduate degree from Cornell University and PhD from MIT, both in economics.
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Archon Fung
Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy
and Citizenship

Archon Fung is Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Citizenship at the Harvard Kennedy School. His research examines the impacts of civic participation, public deliberation, and transparency upon public and private governance. His Empowered Participation: Reinventing Urban Democracy examines two participatory-democratic reform efforts in low-income Chicago neighborhoods. Current projects also examine initiatives in ecosystem management, toxics reduction, endangered species protection, local governance, and international labor standards. His recent books and edited collections include Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance; Can We Eliminate Sweatshops?; Working Capital: The Power of Labors Pensions; and Beyond Backyard Environmentalism. His articles on regulation, rights, and participation appear in Political Theory; Journal of Political Philosophy; Politics and Society; Governance; Environmental Management; American Behavioral Scientist; and Boston Review. Fung received two SBs and a PhD from MIT.
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Richard B. Freeman
Herbert S. Ascherman Professor of Economics

Richard B. Freeman holds the Herbert Ascherman Chair in Economics at Harvard University. He is currently serving as Faculty Co-Chair of the Harvard University Trade Union Program. He is also director of the Labor Studies Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, co-director of the London School of Economics' Centre for Economic Performance, and visiting professor at the London School of Economics. Professor Freeman has published over 300 articles dealing with topics in youth labor market problems, crime, higher education, the growth and decline of unionism, self-organizing non-unions in the labor market, restructuring European welfare states, Chinese labor markets, transitional economies, high skilled labor markets, economic discrimination, labor standards and globalization, income distribution and equity in the marketplace. He is currently directing an LSE research program on the effects of the internet on labor markets, social behavior, and the economy. Freeman has written or edited 25 books, several of which have been translated into French, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese. His most recent books include: America Works: The Exceptional Labor Market (NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007); Working at the Endless Frontier, based on the Yale Okun Lectures, in progress; Visible Hands: Labor Institutions in the Economy (Clarendon Lectures, Oxford University Press, 2008); The Labor Market Comes to China (forthcoming 2008); and What Workers Want, with Joel Rogers. (NY: Cornell University Press, 1999, 2006 updated edition), which was selected as one of the Noteworthy Books in Industrial Relations and Labor Economics, 1999, Princeton University Industrial Relations Section.
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Roland G. Fryer
Robert M. Beren Professor of Economics

Roland Fryer, Jr. is the Robert M. Beren Professor of Economics at Harvard University, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a former junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows — one of academia’s most prestigious research posts. In January 2008, at the age of 30, he became the youngest African-American to receive tenure from Harvard. He has been awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation, and the inaugural Alphonse Fletcher Award (―Guggenheims for race issues). In addition to his teaching and research responsibilities, Fryer served as the Chief Equality Officer at the New York City Department of Education during the 2007–2008 school year. In this role, he developed and implemented several innovative ideas on student motivation and teacher pay-for-performance concepts. He won a Titanium Lion at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival (Breakthrough Idea of the Year in 2008) for the Million Motivation Campaign. Fryer has published papers on topics such as the racial achievement gap, the causes and consequences of distinctively black names, affirmative action, the impact of the crack cocaine epidemic, historically black colleges and universities, and ―acting white. He is an unapologetic analyst of American inequality who uses theoretical, empirical and experimental tools to squeeze truths from data — wherever that may lead. Fryer is a 2009 recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest award bestowed by the government on scientists beginning their independent careers. He is also part of the "2009 Time 100," Time Magazine's annual list of the world's most influential people. Fryer's work has been profiled in almost every major US newspaper, Time Magazine, and CNN’s breakthrough documentary Black in America.
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Filiz Garip
Associate Professor of Sociology

Filiz Garip received her Ph.D. in Sociology and M.S.E in Operations Research & Financial Engineering both from Princeton University. Her empirical research spans the substantive fields of migration, inequality, diffusion, social networks, economic sociology, and development. Her methodological approach is to develop and employ custom analysis techniques that can most effectively answer the substantive question at-hand. She primarily applies quantitative methods and analyzes large survey data, yet supplements the empirical results with insights from qualitative field observation. Besides flexibility with respect to different styles of analysis, her research is characterized by openness to multiple disciplinary viewpoints. Coming from an engineering background, she often combines different approaches, ideas or methods that are typically separated by disciplinary boundaries.
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Claudine Gay
Professor of Government and of African and African American Studies

Claudine Gay is the Director of Graduate Studies and a professor of government at Harvard University. Her research and teaching interests are in the fields of American political behavior, public opinion, and race and ethnic politics. Before joining the Department of Government in September 2006, Gay was an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University from 2000 to 2005, and an associate professor from 2005 to 2006. From 1999 to 2000, Gay was a Visiting Fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California where she conducted research and published a monograph that examined voter participation in minority-dominated congressional districts. Gay earned her PhD from the Department of Government at Harvard University in 1998 and was awarded the department's Toppan Prize for the best dissertation in political science. Gay's research has considered the effects of descriptive representation on citizens' orientations toward their government, the role of neighborhoods in shaping the racial and political attitudes of Black Americans, the roots of competition and cooperation between minority groups, and the effects of concentrated poverty on political engagement. Her work has been published in Political Psychology, the American Political Science Review, and the American Journal of Political Science.
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Edward L. Glaeser
Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics

Edward Glaeser is Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government and of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston. He teaches in microeconomic theory. His work has also examined the causes of hatred and why the U.S. doesn't have a European-style welfare state. He has published dozens of papers on cities, economic growth, law and economics. In particular, his work has focused on the determinants of city growth and the role of cities as centers of idea transmission. He also edits the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Glaeser received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1992.
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Claudia Goldin
Henry Lee Professor of Economics

Claudia Goldin is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University and director of the NBER’s Development of the American Economy program. Goldin’s research is in the general area of American economic history and has covered a wide array of topics, such as slavery, emancipation, the post-bellum South, women in the economy, the economic impact of war, immigration, New Deal policies, inequality, technological change, and education. Most of her research interprets the “present through the lens of the past” and explores the origins of current issues of concern. In the past several years her work has concerned the rise of mass education in the United States and its impact on economic growth and wage inequality. More recently she has focused her attention on college women’s achievement of career and family. She is the author and editor of several books, among them Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women (Oxford 1990), The Regulated Economy: A Historical Approach to Political Economy (with G. Libecap; University of Chicago Press 1994), The Defining Moment: The Great Depression and the American Economy in the Twentieth Century (with M. Bordo and E. White; University of Chicago Press 1998), and Corruption and Reform: Lesson’s from America’s Economic History (with E. Glaeser; Chicago 2006). Her most recent book is The Race between Education and Technology (with L. Katz; The Belknap Press, 2008), winner of the 2008 R.R. Hawkins Award for the most outstanding scholarly work in all disciplines of the arts and sciences. Goldin is best known for her historical work on women in the U.S. economy. Her most recent papers in that area have concerned the impact of “the pill” on women’s career and marriage decisions, women’s surnames after marriage as a social indicator, the reasons why women are now the majority of undergraduates, the history of women’s quest for career and family, and coeducation in higher education. She has recently embarked on a wide ranging project on the family and career “transitions” of male and female graduates of selective universities from the late 1960s to the present. In 2007 Goldin was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences and was the Gilman Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society of Labor Economists (SOLE), and the Econometric Society. In 2009 SOLE awarded Goldin the Mincer Prize for life-time contributions to the field of labor economics. Goldin completed her term as the President of the Economic History Association in 2000. In 1991 Goldin was a Vice President of the American Economic Association. From 1984 to 1988 she was editor of the Journal of Economic History and is currently an associate editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics and a member of various editorial boards. She is the recipient of various teaching awards. Goldin received her B.A. from Cornell University and her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago
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Peter A. Hall
Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies

Peter A. Hall is Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies, a Faculty Associate of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, and Co-Director of the Program on Successful Societies for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Hall is co-editor of Successful Societies: How Institutions and Culture Affect Health (with M. Lamont), Changing France: The Politics that Markets Make (with B. Palier, P. Culpepper), Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage (with D. Soskice), The Political Power of Economic Ideas: Keynesianism across Nations, Developments in French Politics I and II (with A. Guyomarch, J. Hayward and H. Machin), European Labor in the 1980s and the author of Governing the Economy: The Politics of State Intervention in Britain and France, as well as over seventy articles on European politics, public policy-making, and comparative political economy. He serves on the editorial boards of many journals and the advisory boards of several European institutes. He is currently working on the methodology of political science, the political response to economic challenges in postwar Europe, and the impact of social institutions on inequalities in health.
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Jennifer L. Hochschild
Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government, Professor of African and African-American Studies, and Harvard College Professor

Jennifer Hochschild is the Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government at Harvard University, Professor of African and African American Studies, and Harvard College Professor. In 2011, she held the John R. Kluge Chair in American Law and Governance at the Library of Congress.  She holds lectureships in the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Graduate School of Education. Hochschild studies and teaches about the intersection of American politics and political philosophy -- particularly in the areas of race, ethnicity, and immigration -- as well as educational and social welfare policies. She also works on issues in public opinion, political culture, and American political thought..  Professor Hochschild is the author or co-author of numerous books, including the two most recent, Creating a New Racial Order: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics, and the Young Can Remake Race in America, co-authored with Vesla Weaver and Traci Burch (Princeton University Press, 2012) and Bringing Outsiders In: Transatlantic Perspectives on Immigrant Political Incorporation, co-edited with John Mollenkopf (Cornell University Press, 2009). She is also the author of The American Dream and the Public Schools, co-authored with Nathan Scovronick (Oxford University Press, 2003), and other books.  Hochschild currently conducts research on the politics and ideology of genomic science, immigrant political incorporation, and citizens’ use of factual information in political decision-making.  Professor Hochschild was founding editor of Perspectives on Politics, published by the American Political Science Association, and is currently a co-editor of the American Political Science Review.
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Torben Iversen
Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Government

Torben Iversen is Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy at Harvard. His research and teaching interests include comparative political economy, electoral politics, and applied formal theory. He is the author of Capitalism, Democracy, and Welfare (Cambridge UP 2005), Contested Economic Institutions (Cambridge UP 1999), and co-author (with Frances Rosenbluth) of Women, Work, and Power: The Political Economy of Gender Inequality (Yale UP, 2010). He is also the co-editor of Unions, Employers and Central Bankers (Cambridge UP 2000) and has published more than three dozen articles in leading journals and edited volumes. His work has won numerous American Political Science Association prizes including the Victoria Schuck Award, Best Book on European Politics and Society Award, the Luebbert Best Article Award, and the Gabriel Almond Best Dissertation Award. He is a former Guggenheim Fellow and National Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is currently completing a book-length project with David Soskice on the political representation of economic interests in historical perspective.
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Christopher Jencks
Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy

Christopher 'Sandy' Jencks is the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy. He has taught at Harvard, Northwestern, the University of Chicago, and the University of California, Santa Barbara. Earlier, he was a Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC (1963 to 1967) and an editor of the New Republic (1961 to 1963). He is currently a member of the Editorial Board of the American Prospect. His recent research deals with changes in family structure over the past generation, the costs and benefits of economic inequality, the extent to which economic advantages are inherited, and the effects of welfare reform. His books include The Academic Revolution (with David Riesman); Inequality: Who Gets Ahead?; The Urban Underclass (with Paul Peterson); Rethinking Social Policy; The Homeless; and The Black White Test Score Gap (with Meredith Phillips).
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Thomas J. Kane
Professor of Education and Economics

Thomas Kane is professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and faculty director of the Project for Policy Innovation in Education, a new program that partners with states and districts to evaluate innovative policies. His work has influenced how we think about a range of education policies, including test score volatility and the design of school accountability systems, teacher recruitment and retention, financial aid for college, race-conscious college admissions and the economic payoff to a community college. From 1995 to 1996, Kane served as the senior staff economist for labor, education, and welfare policy issues within President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers. From 1991 through 2000, he was a faculty member at the Harvard Kennedy School. Kane has also been a professor of public policy at UCLA and has held visiting fellowships at the Brookings Institution and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
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Lawrence F. Katz
Elisabeth Allison Professor of Economics

Lawrence F. Katz is the Elisabeth Allison Professor of Economics at Harvard University and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research focuses on issues in labor economics and the economics of social problems. He is the author (with Claudia Goldin) of The Race between Education and Technology (Harvard University Press, 2008), a history of U.S. economic inequality and the roles of technological change and the pace of educational advance in affecting the wage structure. Katz also has been studying the impacts of neighborhood poverty on low-income families as the principal investigator of the long-term evaluation of the Moving to Opportunity program, a randomized housing mobility experiment. And Katz is working with Claudia Goldin on a long-term project studying the historical evolution of career and family choices and outcomes for U.S. college men and women. His past research has explored a wide range of topics including the U.S. and comparative wage inequality trends, the impact of globalization and technological change on the labor market, the economics of immigration, unemployment, regional labor markets, the evaluation of labor market programs, the problems of low-income neighborhoods, and the social and economic consequences of the birth control pill. Professor Katz has been editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics since 1991 and served as the Chief Economist of the U.S. Department of Labor for 1993 and 1994. Katz graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1981 and earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985.
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Alexander Keyssar
Matthew W. Stirling, Jr., Professor of History and Social Policy

Alexander Keyssar is the Matthew W. Stirling Jr. Professor of History and Social Policy. An historian by training, he has specialized in the excavation of issues that have contemporary policy implications. His 1986 book, Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts, was awarded three scholarly prizes. His most recent book, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (2000), was named the best book in U.S. history by the American Historical Association and the Historical Society; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Keyssar is coauthor of Inventing America, a text integrating the history of technology and science into the mainstream of American history, as well as coeditor of a series on Comparative and International Working-Class History. Keyssar's current research interests include election reform, the history of democracies and the history of poverty.
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Alexandra (Sasha) Killewald
Assistant Professor of Sociology

Alexandra (Sasha) Killewald is Assistant Professor of Sociology. She received her Ph.D. in Public Policy and Sociology from the University of Michigan in 2011. Prior to her appointment at Harvard she was a researcher at Mathematica Policy Research. Her research takes a demographic approach to the study of social stratification. Much of her work focuses on the work-family intersection. She has published (with Margaret Gough) several articles on the ways in which earnings and employment shape women’s time in household labor. Her current research in this area explores the effect of marriage and parenthood on workers’ wages. Another area of her research examines the influence of parental wealth on adult outcomes, including the role of parental wealth in explaining the Black-White wealth gap. She has also written (with Kerwin Charles and Erik Hurst) on assortative mating by parental wealth.
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Michèle Lamont
Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and Professor of Sociology and African and African American Studies

Michèle Lamont is Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and Professor of Sociology and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and is co-director of its research program on Successful Societies. Lamont specializes in the sociology of culture and inequality, race and ethnicity, symbolic and social boundaries, the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of higher education, and comparative and qualitative sociology. She is the author of Money, Morals and Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class (University of Chicago Press, 1992), The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class and Immigration (Harvard University Press, 2000) and How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment (Harvard University Press, 2009). She has published over eighty peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and has led multi-year collaborative projects that have resulted in collective books (e.g. Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology: Repertoires of Evaluation in France in the United States, with Laurent Thévenot, Cambridge University Press, 2000). Recent book-length publications include Successful Societies: How Institutions and Culture Affect Health (with Peter Hall, Cambridge University Press 2009), “Reconsidering Culture and Poverty” (a special issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, with David Harding and Mario Small, 2010), and Social Knowledge in the Making (with Charles Camic and Neil Gross, University of Chicago Press, due out in August 2011). Lamont is currently working on a large collaborative project on responses to stigmatization in Brazil, Israel and the United States, with the support of the National Science Foundation, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and others. This research is featured in a forthcoming issue of the journal Ethnic and Racial Studies (February 2012). She is also completing Social Resilience in the Neo-Liberal Era (with Peter Hall; due out in February 2012); a comparative study of the conditions of success for interdisciplinary research teams (with Veronica Boix-Mansilla and Kyoko Sato); and a theoretical paper on the sociology of valuation processes (for Annual Review of Sociology).
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Jeffrey B. Liebman
Malcolm Wiener Professor of Public Policy

Jeffrey B. Liebman, Malcolm Wiener Professor of Public Policy, teaches courses in social policy, public sector economics, and American economic policy. In his research, he studies tax and budget policy, social insurance, poverty, and income inequality. Recent research has examined the impacts of government programs such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, Social Security, and housing vouchers. During the first two years of the Obama Administration, Liebman served at OMB, first as Executive Associate Director and Chief Economist and then as Acting Deputy Director. From 1998 to 1999, Liebman served as Special Assistant to the President for economic policy and coordinated the Clinton Administration's Social Security reform technical working group. Liebman received his BA from Yale University and his MA and PhD in economics from Harvard.
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Jane J. Mansbridge
Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values

Jane Mansbridge, Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values, is the author of Beyond Adversary Democracy, an empirical and normative study of face-to-face democracy, and the award-winning Why We Lost the ERA, a study of anti-deliberative dynamics in social movements based on organizing for an Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. She is also editor or coeditor of the volumes Beyond Self-Interest, Feminism, and Oppositional Consciousness. Her current work includes studies of representation, democratic deliberation, everyday activism, and the public understanding of collective action problems.
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Jal Mehta
Assistant Professor of Education

Jal Mehta is an Assistant Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His primary research interests are in understanding the relationship between knowledge and action; substantively he is most interested in the policy and politics of creating high quality schooling at scale. His dissertation, The Transformation of American Educational Policy, 1980-2001, recently received the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the AERA politics’ section. He is a co-author of Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings, which was a finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award. He is currently working on a book charting the growing “rationalization” of American schooling, asking what this shift means for the educational field, for the teaching profession, and for social justice. He is also working on a project, The Chastened Dream, about the limits and possibilities of using social science as a means of achieving social progress. Jal received his Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Policy from Harvard University.
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Pamela L. Metz
Director

Pamela Metz oversees administration of the Joint Ph.D. Programs in Social Policy, whose administrative offices are housed at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. She also manages the Harvard Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality & Social Policy, a National Science Foundation IGERT graduate training program for Harvard Ph.D. students in the social sciences. Prior to joining the Inequality and Social Policy programs, Metz was a Ph.D. candidate in the Harvard Government Department, where she studied international relations, political economy, and Latin American politics. A graduate of Wellesley College, she has been a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow, a Harvard MacArthur Fellow in International Security, and a teaching fellow in the College for various courses in international relations and American foreign policy. In her spare time, she dreams of Downeast Maine—particularly the easternmost town of Lubec.






Richard J. Murnane
Juliana W. and William Foss Thompson Professor of Education and Society

Richard Murnane, an economist, is Thompson Professor of Education and Society at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. In recent years he has pursued three lines of research. With MIT Professors Frank Levy and David Autor, he has examined how computer-based technological change has affected skill demands in the U.S. economy. Murnane and Levy have written two books on this topic. The second line of research examines how increases in family income inequality in the U.S. have influenced educational opportunities for children from low-income families. Murnane and Greg Duncan have co-edited a volume describing four years of research on this topic. The volume, Whither Opportunity: Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children's Life Chances, will be published in September 2011. The third area of research examines the consequences of particular initiatives designed to improve the performance of the education sector. For example, along with HGSE colleagues, Murnane has examined the consequences of providing salary bonuses to attract skilled teachers to high need schools and the impact that exit examination requirements have on the probability that economically disadvantaged students graduate from high school. Murnane and his colleague, John Willett, recently published a book Methods Matter: Improving Causal Inference in Educational and Social Science Research (Oxford U. Press, 2011).
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Orlando Patterson
John Cowles Professor of Sociology

Orlando Patterson, a historical and cultural sociologist, is John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. His academic interests include the culture and practice of freedom; the comparative study of slavery and ethno-racial relations; the sociology of underdevelopment with special reference to the Caribbean; and the problems of gender and familial relations in the black societies of the Americas. He is especially interested in the ways that cultural processes relate to poverty and other social outcomes. Professor Patterson is the author of numerous academic papers and 5 major academic books including, Slavery and Social Death (1982); Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (1991); and The Ordeal of Integration (1997) A public intellectual, Professor Patterson was, for eight years, Special Advisor for Social policy and development to Prime Minister Michael Manley of Jamaica. He was a founding member of Cultural Survival, one of the leading advocacy groups for the rights of indigenous peoples, and was for several years a board member of Freedom House, a major civic organization for the promotion of freedom and democracy around the world. The author of three novels, he has published widely in journals of opinion and the national press, especially the New York Times, where he was recently a guest columnist for several weeks. His columns have also appeared in Time Magazine, Newsweek, The Public Interest, The New Republic, and the Washington Post. He is the recipient of many awards, including the National Book Award for Non-Fiction which he won in 1991 for his book on freedom; the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award of the American Sociological Association; and co-winner of the Ralph Bunche Award for the best book on pluralism from the American Political Science Association. He holds honorary degrees from several universities, including the University of Chicago, U.C.L.A and La Trobe University in Australia. He was awarded the Order of Distinction by the Government of Jamaica in 1999. Professor Patterson has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1991.
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Paul E. Peterson
Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government

Paul E. Peterson is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government, Director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University and Editor in Chief of Education Next, a journal of opinion and research on education policy. He is a former Director of the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University and of the Governmental Studies program at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of the book, Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning (Harvard University Press, 2010). Peterson is also the author or editor of numerous other publications, including The Education Gap: Vouchers and Urban Schools; Charters, Vouchers, and Public Education; Earning and Learning: How Schools Matter; Learning From School Choice; The Politics of School Reform: 1870-1940; School Politics Chicago Style; City Limits; The New Urban Reality; The Urban Underclass; The Price of Federalism; Welfare Magnets; and The New American Democracy. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, he was a professor for many years there in the Departments of Political Science and Education. Peterson chaired the Social Science Research Council's Committee on the Urban Underclass and has served on many committees of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Education and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the German Marshall Foundation, and the Center for Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Most recently he was awarded the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation prize for Distinguished Scholarship, part of its Excellence in Education award program. He has also been appointed to a Department of Education independent review panel to advise the agency in evaluating the No Child Left Behind Act.
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Matthew B. Platt
Assistant Professor of Government

Department at Harvard University. He is primarily interested in the policy consequences of political activity.  Falling under this relatively broad umbrella, his current research projects focus on three questions: 1) Why/how does Congress pay attention to black issues? 2) How do individuals' decisions to become active in politics impact policymaking? 3) Given that the vast majority of bills never become law, why do members of Congress introduce legislation? He teaches courses about Congress, black representation, and agenda setting.  Most of his time is spent developing a new book manuscript -- tentatively titled "From Trailblazers to Tokens" -- on the role that black members have played in advancing black policy agendas from Reconstruction to the present.
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Robert D. Putnam
Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy

Robert D. Putnam is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard, where he teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses. Professor Putnam is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the British Academy, and past president of the American Political Science Association. In 2006, Putnam received the Skytte Prize, one of the world's highest accolades for a political scientist. Raised in a small town in the Midwest and educated at Swarthmore, Oxford, and Yale, he has served as Dean of the Kennedy School of Government. He has written a dozen books, translated into seventeen languages, including the best-selling Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, and more recently Better Together: Restoring the American Community, a study of promising new forms of social connectedness. His previous book, Making Democracy Work, was praised by the Economist as "a great work of social science, worthy to rank alongside de Tocqueville, Pareto and Weber." Both Making Democracy Work and Bowling Alone rank high among the most cited publications in the social sciences worldwide in the last several decades. Putnam's most recent book, American Grace, co-authored with David Campbell of Notre Dame, focuses on the role of religion in American public life. Based on data from two of the most comprehensive national surveys on religion and civic engagement ever conducted, American Grace is the winner of the American Political Science Association's 2011 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for the best book on government, politics, or international affairs. He consults widely with national leaders, including US Presidents Bush and Clinton, British Prime Ministers Blair and Brown, and Ireland's Bertie Ahern. He founded the Saguaro Seminar, bringing together leading thinkers and practitioners to develop actionable ideas for civic renewal. His earlier work included research on comparative political elites, Italian politics, and globalization. Before coming to Harvard in 1979, he taught at the University of Michigan and served on the staff of the National Security Council. He is currently working on three major empirical projects: (1) the changing role of religion in contemporary America, (2) the effects of workplace practices on family and community life, and (3) practical strategies for civic renewal in the United States in the context of immigration and social and ethnic diversity.
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Dani Rodrik
Rafiq Hariri Professor of International Political Economy

Dani Rodrik is the Rafiq Hariri Professor of International Political Economy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University . He has published widely in the areas of international economics, economic development, and political economy. What constitutes good economic policy and why some governments are better than others in adopting it are the central questions on which his research focuses. He is affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research, Centre for Economic Policy Research (London), Center for Global Development, Institute for International Economics, and Council on Foreign Relations. He has been the recipient of research grants from the Carnegie Corporation, Ford Foundation, and Rockefeller Foundation. Among other honors, he was presented the Leontief Award for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought in 2002. Professor Rodrik has published widely on issues related to trade policy, political economy, and economic reform in developing economies. He is the author of "Democracies Pay Higher Wages," Quarterly Journal of Economics, August 1999; “Why Do More Open Economies Have Bigger Governments?” Journal of Political Economy, October 1998; “Distributive Politics and Economic Growth” (with A. Alesina), Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1994; and “Resistance to Reform: Status Quo Bias in the Presence of Individual-Specific Uncertainty” (with R. Fernandez), American Economic Review, 1991; among other publications. His 1997 book Has Globalization Gone Too Far? was called “one of the most important economics books of the decade” in Business Week. His most recent book is In Search of Prosperity: Analytic Narratives on Economic Growth (Princeton University Press, 2003.) His most recent research is concerned with the determinants of economics growth and the consequences of international economic integration.
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Matt Salesses
Seminar Coordinator

Matt Salesses helps coordinate the Inequality and Social Policy Seminar Series. He earned his MFA from Emerson College, where he edited the literary journal, Redivider, recently named one of the top ten literary magazines in New England. He has authored two forthcoming fiction books, Our Island of Epidemics (PANK, 2010) and The Last Repatriate (Flatmancrooked, 2011), and a nonfiction chapbook, We Will Take What We Can Get (Publishing Genius Press). He writes a column for The Good Men Project, and his nonfiction has appeared in journals such as Make, Dewclaw, and The Lifted Brow. Stories of his have or will appear in Glimmer Train, Witness, American Short Fiction, Pleiades, Mid-American Review, The Literary Review, Quarterly West, and over forty other publications.
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Robert J. Sampson
Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences
Director of the Social Sciences Program at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study

Robert J. Sampson served as Chair of the Department of Sociology from 2005-2010 and taught at the University of Chicago for twelve years before moving to Harvard in 2003. He also taught at the University of Illinois and was Senior Research Fellow at the American Bar Foundation. Sampson was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2008 and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Society of Criminology, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Political and Social Science. He is President-Elect of the American Society of Criminology and in June of 2011 he and his colleague John Laub received the Stockholm Prize in Criminology. Professor Sampson's research covers a variety of areas including crime, disorder, the life course, neighborhood effects, collective civic life, urban inequality, ecometrics, and the social structure of the city. He is the author of several books and numerous papers. In the fall of 2011 the University of Chicago Press will publish the culmination of over a decade's research based on the "Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods" (PHDCN), which Sampson served as Scientific Director. For information or to order: Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect
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Theda Skocpol
Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and of Sociology (on leave spring 2012)

Theda Skocpol is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology. From 2005 to 2007, she served as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. During Skocpol’s tenure as Dean, the Graduate School at Harvard reached out to engage faculty in new ways and undertook new initiatives in sharing information, monitoring student progress toward the PhD, improving the funding of graduate education, and promoting interdisciplinary studies. From 2000 to 2006, Skocpol served as Director of the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard, expanding this center from a tiny operation within one department into a broadly interdisciplinary center supporting joint faculty projects and graduate and undergraduate research on all aspects of modern U.S. politics. Skocpol received her BA in 1969 from Michigan State University and her PhD in 1975 from Harvard University. In 1996, Skocpol served as President of the Social Science History Association, an interdisciplinary professional group; and from 2001 to 2003 she served as President-Elect and then President, during it's centennial year, of the 14,000-member American Political Science Association. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Skocpol has also been awarded honorary degrees by Michigan State University, Northwestern University, and Amherst College. In 2007, she was awarded the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science for her “visionary analysis of the significance of the state for revolutions, welfare, and political trust, pursued with theoretical depth and empirical evidence.” The Skytte Prize is one of the largest and most prestigious in political science and is awarded annually by the Skytte Foundation at Uppsala University (Sweden) to the scholar who in the view of the foundation has made the most valuable contribution to the discipline. The author of nine books, nine edited collections, and more than seven dozen articles, Skocpol is recognized as one of the most cited and widely influential scholars in the modern social sciences; her work has contributed to the study of comparative politics, American politics, comparative and historical sociology, U.S. history, and the study of public policy. Her first book, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (1979), won the 1979 C. Wright Mills Award and the 1980 American Sociological Association Award for a Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship. A leader in historical-institutional and comparative research, Skocpol edited Vision and Method in Historical Sociology (1984) and co-edited the influential Social Science Research Council collection Bringing the State Back In (1985). For the past fifteen years, Skocpol’s research has focused on U.S. politics in historical and comparative perspective. Her Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (1992), won five scholarly awards: the J. David Greenstone Award of the Politics and History Section of the American Political Science Association; the Outstanding Book Award of the Political Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association; the 1993 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award of the American Political Science Association, given annually for “the best book published in the United States during the prior year on government, politics or international affairs; the 1993 Allan Sharlin Memorial Award of the Social Science History Association; and the 1993 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award of Phi Beta Kappa, given to honor “a comprehensive study that contributes significantly to historical, philosophical, or religious interpretations of the human condition.” Skocpol’s recent books include Boomerang: Health Reform and the Turn Against Government (1996); Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (2003, winner of the 2004 Greenstone Award); Inequality and American Democracy: What We Know and What We Need to Learn (edited with Lawrence R. Jacobs, 2005); What a Mighty Power We Can Be: African American Fraternal Groups and the Struggle for Racial Equality (with Ariane Liazos and Marshall Ganz), published by Princeton University Press, 2006, which received the 2007 Oliver Cromwell Cox Award presented by the Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities of the American Sociological Association; and The Transformation of American Politics (co-edited with Paul Pierson, 2007). Skocpol's research focuses on U.S. social policy and civic engagement in American democracy, including changes since the 1960s. She has recently launched new projects on the development of U.S. higher education and on the transformations of U.S. federal policies in the Obama era.
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Mary C. Waters
M.E. Zukerman Professor of Sociology

Mary C. Waters She specializes in the study of immigration, inter-group relations, the formation of racial and ethnic identity among the children of immigrants, and the challenges of measuring race and ethnicity. Waters received a B.A. in Philosophy from Johns Hopkins University in 1978, an M.A. in Demography (1981) and an M.A. (1983) and PhD in Sociology (1986) from the University of California at Berkeley . She has taught at Harvard University since 1986, and was chair of the Sociology Department from 2001-2005. Her most current publications are The Next Generation: The Children of Immigrants in Europe and North America (co-edited with Richard Alba), (New York University Press, 2010); Inheriting the City: The Second Generation Comes of Age (with Jennifer Holdaway, Philip Kasinitz, and John Mollenkopf), (Harvard University and Russell Sage Press, 2008); and The New Americans: A Guide to Immigration Since 1965 (with Reed Ueda and Helen Marrow), (Harvard University Press, 2007). She is also author of Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities (Harvard University Press, 1999, paper ed. 2001). This book won five scholarly awards including the Mira Komarovsky Award of the Eastern Sociological Society, the Otis Dudley Duncan Award of the Population Section of the American Sociological Association, the Thomas and Znaniecki Award of the International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association, the Best Book Award of the Section on Race and Urban Politics of the American Political Science Association, and the Best Book Award of the Center for the Study of Inequality of Cornell University. Her other books include Becoming New Yorkers: Ethnographies of the New Second Generation (co-edited with Phillip Kasinitz and John Mollenkopf) (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2004), Social Inequalities in Comparative Perspective (co-edited with Fiona Devine) (Blackwell Press, 2004), The New Race Question: How the Census Counts Multiracial Individuals (co-edited with Joel Perlmann) (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2002, paper 2005), The Changing Face of Home: The Transnational Lives of the Second Generation (co-edited with Peggy Levitt) (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2002), Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (University of California Press, 1990) and From Many Strands: Ethnic and Racial Groups in Contemporary America (with Stanley Lieberson) (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 1988). She is also the author of over 40 articles and chapters on racial and ethnic identity and immigrant assimilation.
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Bruce Western
Professor of Sociology and Director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy

Bruce Western is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Harvard Kennedy School's Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy. Western's recent work has focused on the link between social inequality and the growth of prison and jail population in the United States. He finds that the penal system has become a common presence in the lives of poor Americans, with lasting effects on their life chances. As a quantitative social scientist, Western has also contributed to the use of Bayesian statistics in sociology. Western's first book, Between Class and Market: Postwar Unionization in the Capitalist Democracies (Princeton University Press, 1997), examined the growth and decline of trade unions in capitalist democracies. In this volume, Western argues that unions declined in countries without centralized labor markets, union control over the administration of unemployment policies, and strong working class parties. In his second book, Punishment and Inequality in America (Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), Western asks what role incarceration plays in the increasing economic and racial inequality in America. He finds that rising rates of imprisonment among young black men without college education have caused a rift in African American society, and that those with less education are increasingly separated from those with higher education. The book also studies the social and economic effects of mass incarceration: serving time in prison reduces earnings, skews statistics on wages and employment, and destabilizes families. Western received his B.A. in government from the University of Queensland, Australia, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Before moving to Harvard, he taught at Princeton University from 1993 to 2007. Western was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2005, and a Jean Monnet Fellow with the European University Institute between 1995 and 1996, and is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the James F. Short Jr. distinguished article award, Crime, Law and Deviance Section of the American Sociological Association in 2006 for his article "Black-White Wage Inequality, Employment Rates, and Incarceration." His book Punishment and Inequality in America won the 2007 Albert J. Reiss Award from the Crime Law and Deviance Section of the American Sociological Association and the 2008 Michael J. Hindelang Award for the most outstanding contribution to research on criminology from the American Society of Criminology. He is currently co-chair of a task force on the challenge of mass incarceration for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has served on the council of the American Sociological Association.
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Martin Whyte
Professor of Sociology

Martin Whyte joined the faculty of the Department of Sociology in Fall 2000 after previously teaching at the University of Michigan and George Washington University. Whyte's primary research and teaching specialties are comparative sociology, sociology of the family, sociology of development, the sociological study of contemporary China, and the study of post-communist transitions. Whyte’s most recent writings reflect these divergent interests: an edited volume entitled Marriage in America: A Communitarian Perspective (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000) and an edited collection of papers drawing on a survey project that focused on relations between aging parents and their grown children in urban Chinese families, entitled China's Revolutions and Inter-Generational Relations (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, 2003). One newer research project involves surveys on Chinehttp://cwpp.pdx.edu/content/abigail-scott-duniway-speaker-series-conversation-hon-avel-gordlyse popular perceptions of inequality trends and views about distributive justice issues. A pilot survey for this project was successfully conducted in Beijing in December 2000. A national survey focusing on inequality and distributive justice issues was completed in the summer of 2004 and the results published in Myth of the Social Volcano (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). In the fall of 2009 he and colleagues directed a five-year follow-up national survey of Chinese Popular attitudes toward current inequalities. They will be using data from the new survey to examine whether recent trends,including the global financial meltdown,have made Chinese citizens more or less critical of the market-based inequalities within which they now live, Also, in 2006 Whyte organized a conference at Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies on the rural-urban gap in China, and he subsequently edited the resulting conferenc volume: One Country,Two Societies: Rural-Urban Inequality in Contemporary China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
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Julie Boatright Wilson
Harry Kahn Senior Lecturer in Social Policy

Julie Wilson is the Harry Kahn Senior Lecturer in Social Policy. From 1993-2011, Wilson served as Director of the Harvard Kennedy School's Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy. She is interested in poverty policy, family policy, and urban race relations. Among her recent projects are several case studies on the historical development of poor neighborhoods, studies on adoption from public agencies, and strategies for strengthening families' capacities to parent. Wilson spent three years at the New York State Department of Social Services, where she directed the Office of Program Planning, Analysis, and Development.
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William Julius Wilson
Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor

William Julius Wilson is Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard University. He is one of only 20 University Professors, the highest professional distinction for a Harvard faculty member. After receiving the Ph.D. from Washington State University in 1966, Wilson taught sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, before joining the University of Chicago faculty in 1972. In 1990 he was appointed the Lucy Flower University Professor and director of the University of Chicago's Center for the Study of Urban Inequality. He joined the faculty at Harvard in July of 1996. Past President of the American Sociological Association, Wilson has received 41 honorary degrees, including honorary doctorates from Princeton, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, Dartmouth, and the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. A MacArthur Prize Fellow from 1987 to 1992, Wilson has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Education, the American Philosophical Society, the Institute of Medicine, and the British Academy. In June 1996 he was selected by Time magazine as one of “ America's 25 Most Influential People.” He is a recipient of the 1998 National Medal of Science, the highest scientific honor in the United States, and was awarded the Talcott Parsons Prize in the Social Sciences by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003. He is the author of numerous publications, including The Declining Significance of Race, winner of the American Sociological Association's Sydney Spivack Award; The Truly Disadvantaged, which was selected by the editors of the New York Times Book Review as one of the 16 best books of 1987, and received The Washington Monthly Annual Book Award and the Society for the Study of Social Problems' C. Wright Mills Award; When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor, which was selected as one of the notable books of 1996 by the editors of the New York Times Book Review and received the Sidney Hillman Foundation Award; and The Bridge Over the Racial Divide: Rising Inequality and Coalition Politics. Most recently he is the co-author of There Goes the Neighborhood: Racial, Ethnic, and Class Tensions in Four Chicago Neighborhoods and Their Meaning for America and Good Kids in Bad Neighborhoods: Successful Development in Social Context. In his latest book, More than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City, published by W.W. Norton in 2009, Professor Wilson presents a new framework for understanding racial inequality.
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Christopher Winship
Diker-Tishman Professor of Sociology

Christopher Winship, Diker-Tishman Professor of Sociology and a member of the faculty of the Harvard Kennedy School, was born in Topeka, Kansas and grew up in New Britain, Connecticut. He did his undergraduate work in sociology and mathematics at Dartmouth College and his graduate work in sociology at Harvard, receiving his degree in 1977. After leaving Harvard he did a one year post-doctoral fellowship at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin and a two-year fellowship at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. In 1980 he joined the Sociology Department at Northwestern University. During his twelve years at Northwestern he was Director of the Program in Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences and for four years chair of the Department of Sociology. He was a founding member of Northwestern’s Department of Statistics, and held a courtesy appointment in Economics. From 1984 to 1986 he was Director of the Economics Research Center at NORC. He has been a member of the Harvard department since 1992. Since 1995 he has been the editor of Sociological Methods + Research (SMR). He is a faculty associate of the the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS), the Harvard Science, Technology + Society (STS) program, and Harvard Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, and is currently doing research on several topics: The Ten Point Coalition, a group of black ministers who are working with the Boston police to reduce youth violence; statistical models for causal analysis; the effects of education on mental ability; causes of the racial difference in performance in elite colleges and universities; changes in the racial differential in imprisonment rates over the past sixty years.
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For Immediate Release: Thomas Marshall Penick INDEPENDENT REPUBLICAN U.S. PRESIDENCY 2016 - 2024  SHARES  "DEMAND PROGRESS" BLOG, Thanks The Team: David Segal, Executive Director and David Moon, Program Director per Thomas Marshall Penick  25 DEC 2012  WEST COAST  U.S.A.



Version:1.0 StartHTML:0000000202 EndHTML:0000104029 StartFragment:0000002451 EndFragment:0000103993 SourceURL:file://localhost/Users/thomaspenick/Documents/DEMAND%20PROGRESS%2025%20DEC%202012.doc DEMAND PROGRESS

copypasted from "DEMAND PROGRESS" BLOG - THOMAS MARSHALL PENICK THANKS, SINCERELY, DAVID SEGAL - EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, AND DAVID MOON -PROGRAM DIRECTOR. THIS WAS A HIGHLY INTERESTING DISCUSSION. THANK YOU FOR BRINGING THESE CONCERNS TO MY ATTENTION AS WLLL AS GIVNG ME MORE FOOD TO CONSIDER, PONDER, AND THINK ABOUT AS MY OWN POSITIONS ON ALL OF THESE CRUCIAL MATTERS TAKE FORM SO THAT I CAN CONTINUE TO HAVE THE PERTINENT, CRITICAL ISSUES, AND CONCERNS IN MY MEMORY BANKS AS I PURSUE THE INDEPENDENT REPUBLICAN CANDIDACY OF  PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES   2016 - 2024.

I AM THOMAS MARSHALL PENICK AND I HIGHLY APPROVE OF THIS BLOG BY "DEMAND PROGRESS" AND I AM HAPPY TO DISSEMINATE IT TO GLOBAL CITIZENS WORLDWIDE. WE LIVE IN A DEMOCRATIC WORLD AND NOT A FASCIST, CLOSED STATE.

THOMAS MARSHALL PENICK, CITIZEN GLOBAL
Thomas Marshall Penick
THE CANDIDATE LOS ANGELES CITY COUNCIL DISTRICT 13 HOLLYWOOD
ELECTION TAKES PLACE  5 MARCH 2013

Thomas Marshall Penick
THE  INDEPENDENT REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE PRESIDENCY OF THE UNITED STATES
2016 - 2024


The Team

David Segal, Executive Director. David Segal is a former Democratic Rhode Island State Representative, and served on the Providence City Council as a member of the Green Party. During his eight years as an elected official he oversaw the passage of legislation promoting economic justice, renewable energy and open space, banking reform, affordable housing, LGBT rights, criminal justice reform, and a variety of other progressive causes. He recently ran in the Democratic primary for Rhode Island’s first Congressional seat, supported by much of the netroots and organized labor. His opinion pieces have appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, and in a variety of online publications. He has a degree in mathematics from Columbia University.

David Moon, Program Director. David Moon is a Washington-based policy attorney and political consultant. The former Chief Operating Officer of the election reform group, FairVote, Moon has coordinated numerous advocacy efforts to make our electoral process more fair and accessible. In recent years, he has managed and assisted successful campaigns for progressive Democrats, political action committees and ballot initiatives around the country. His issue portfolio has included work on smart growth and transit issues, criminal justice reform, LGBT rights, women’s rights, civil liberties, and more. He is a graduate of American University’s Washington College of Law and received his bachelors degree from Tufts University.

Aaron Swartz, Advisory Board Director. Aaron Swartz is the founder of Demand Progress. He previously co-founded the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, watchdog.net, Open Library, Jottit, and Reddit.com. He is co-author of the RSS 1.0 specification and helped launch Creative Commons.

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DEMAND PROGRESS

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Demand Progress works to win progressive policy changes for ordinary people through organizing, and grassroots lobbying.  In particular, we tend to focus on issues of civil liberties, civil rights, and government reform.

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Campaigns

Congress Wants To Make Streaming A Felony

The big business lobbyists who are behind the Internet Blacklist Bill are already making the sequel. The “Ten Strikes” bill would make it a felony to stream copyrighted content — like music in the background of a Youtube video, movies and TV shows — more than ten times.

Click here to read the text of the bill and voice your opposition.

Oppose Protect-IP

We knew that members of Congress and their business allies were gearing up to pass a revised Internet Blacklist Bill — which more than 325,000 Demand Progress members helped block last winter — but we never expected it to be this atrocious. Last year’s bill has been renamed the “PROTECT IP” Act and it is far worse than its predecessor.

The new PROTECT-IP Act retains the censorship components from COICA, but adds a new one: It bans people from having serious conversations about the blacklisted sites. Under the new bill, anyone “referring or linking” to a blacklisted site is prohibited from doing so and can be served with a blacklist order forcing them to stop.

More than 50,000 Demand Progress members have already signed our petition opposing the bill, and you can join them here.

Bin Laden Is Dead. Will The Patriot Act Live On?

The Patriot Act was enacted as a supposedly temporary measure in the wake of 9-11. With Bin Laden’s passing, the era of the Patriot Act, of spying on Americans who aren’t suspected of crimes, of heavy-handed abuse of our dearly held civil liberties, must come to an end.

We need to act now to make sure we win this fight. Tens of thousands of Demand Progress members have already urged Congress to fix the Patriot Act. Will you ask Congress and the President to return us to the legal norms that existed before 9-11 and start respecting our civil liberties?

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Tell Facebook: Stop Censoring Political Speech

A range of Facebook users, from political dissidents to technology bloggers, are reporting the sudden blocking of their pages. Facebook provided no prior warning, nor was there a clear process established to restore access to the blocked pages.

Will you fight back?

The best way to get Facebook’s attention is to make the story go viral on their own site.

Tell The DOJ: Investigate Goldman Sachs

Investigators discovered that Goldman traders bragged about selling “shitty” deals to clients and the mega-bank bet against the same financial products it was selling to investors. And they’ve lied about it all the way to the bank.

Millions of Americans have lost their jobs, and small-time homeowners are in jail for mortgage fraud, but no CEOs have been prosecuted for their roles in the financial crisis. It’s time to change that.

Join Senator Levin’s call for accountability by urging the Department of Justice to investigate Goldman Sachs and its CEO Lloyd Blankfein. Sign our petition and we’ll deliver this message above to the DOJ.

Tell Your Lawmakers: Shut Down The New Debtors’ Prisons

Americans are in more debt than ever before, and the banks are going to new extremes to squeeze us for every last penny: If you can’t pay up, they’ll try to get you locked up.

Read more here and add your name. We’ll automatically send an email to your state legislators.

Could the Government Really Shut Down Facebook?

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are out of control. They’ve been seizing domain names without due process: they shut down 84,000 sites by accident last month, arrested a man for linking to other websites, and government officials think ICE and DHS are claiming powers that would even threaten sites like Facebook.

Watch our video — then sign our petition.

Fight Internet ‘Kill Switch’

Are our leaders better than Egypt’s? Across the globe, governments know that the Internet is increasingly the lifeblood of democracy — that’s why Egypt’s oppressive regime just shut down the Internet there.

But even as American politicians condemn Egypt for doing so, they’re pushing legislation to give our government the power to do the exact same thing here at home! The so-called ‘Kill Switch’ would let the president turn off our Internet — without a court even having to approve the decision.

Join over 40,000 in fighting it. Add your name!

Let the PATRIOT Act Expire

The most noxious parts of the USA PATRIOT Act are about to expire — but Congress wants to extend them again. These provisions let the government spy on people without naming them in a warrant, and secretly access your library and bank records under a gag order prohibiting anyone from letting you know.

Join over 60,000 in opposing extension. Add your name!

No Mandatory Internet IDs!

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke just announced that he’s developing virtual ID cards for Internet users — and they could pose a severe threat to our privacy! The program’s called the “National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace” and the draft proposal indicates that we’d be forced to use the IDs for any online transactions with the government, and for online interactions with businesses that use them.

Over 30,000 have told Gary Locke to back off. Add your name!

Protect Whistleblowers at Big Banks

Crimes committed by the big banks helped crash our economy — and WikiLeaks is saying that a whistle-blower has sent them enough evidence to take down Bank of America. So now the big banks are fighting back by trying to get the government to muzzle future whistle-blowers.

Tell the SEC not to listen to them. Add your name!

Don’t Let them Outlaw WikiLeaks!

Politicians are leading the charge to outlaw WikiLeaks and undermine freedom of the press. First Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) successfully pressured Amazon.com to stop hosting the WikiLeaks website and now, as Julian Assange has been arrested in the UK, he’s introduced a new bill changing the law to make WikiLeaks illegal.

More than 30,000 have signed our petition to stop him. Add your name!

Stop the TSA’s Nude Scanners!

Across the country, TSA is replacing airport metal detectors with scanners that take nude photos of you — violating your rights, zapping you with X-rays that could cause cancer, and slowing down the lines. And if you opt-out, they feel up your “sensitive regions.”

Lawmakers in New Jersey and Idaho are trying to stop them. Let’s get a similar bill introduced in every state! Contact your lawmaker!

Stop the Internet Blacklist!

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are out of control. They’ve been seizing domain names without due process: they shut down 84,000 sites by accident last month, arrested a man for linking to other websites, and government officials think ICE and DHS are claiming powers that would even threaten sites like Facebook.

Over 300,000 signers! Add your name!

PLUS: Download our new flyer for our Stop The Internet Blacklist campaign and start a grassroots movement in your area!

DEMAND PROGRESS BLOG

This is a special guest post by actor and civil libertarian John Cusack.  First he shares his thoughts on Obama’s record on matters of war and civil liberties — you’ll find that his views are right in line with those of Demand Progress and our members — and he then interviews his friend, law prof Jonathan Turley.  Please read it and share it — as we know all too well, the concerns Cusack expresses herein rarely find such prominent, outspoken advocates.

Now that the Republican primary circus is over, I started to think about what it would mean to vote for Obama…

Since mostly we hear from the daily hypocrisies of Mitt and friends, I thought we should examine “our guy” on a few issues with a bit more scrutiny than we hear from the “progressive left”, which seems to be little or none at all.

Instead of scrutiny, the usual arguments in favor of another Obama presidency are made:

We must stop fanatics; it would be better than the fanatics—he’s the last line of defense from the corporate barbarians—and of course the Supreme Court.

It all makes a terrible kind of sense and I agree completely with Garry Wills who described the Republican primaries as “ a revolting combination of con men and fanatics— “the current primary race has become a demonstration that the Republican party does not deserve serious consideration for public office.”

True enough. But yet…

… there are certain Rubicon lines, as constitutional law professor Jon Turley calls them, that Obama has crossed.  Not all political questions are equal, no matter how much you pivot. When people die or lose their physical freedom to feed certain economic sectors or ideologies, it becomes a zero sum game for me.

This is not an exercise in bemoaning regrettable policy choices or cheering favorable ones but to ask fundamentally: Who are we? What are we voting for? And what does it mean?

Three markers — the Nobel prize acceptance speech, the escalation speech at West Point, and the more recent speech by Eric Holder — crossed that Rubicon line for me.

Mr. Obama, the Christian president with the Muslim-sounding name, would heed the admonitions of neither religion’s prophets about making war and do what no empire or leader, including Alexander the Great, could do: he would, he assured us “get the job done in Afghanistan.” And so we have our Democratic president receiving the Nobel Peace Prize as he sends 30,000 more troops to a ten-year-old conflict in a country that’s been war-torn for 5,000 years.

Why? We’ll never fully know. Instead, we got a speech that was stone bullshit and an insult to the very idea of peace.

We can’t have it both ways. Hope means endless war? Obama has metaphorically pushed all in with the usual international and institutional killers; and in the case of war and peace, literally.

To sum it up: more war. So thousands die or are maimed; generations of families and veterans are damaged beyond imagination; sons and daughters come home in rubber bags. But he and his satellites get their four more years.

The AfPak War is more H. G. Wells than Orwell, with people blindly letting each other get fed to the barons of Wall Street and the Pentagon, themselves playing the part of the Pashtuns. The paradox is simple: he got elected on his anti-war stance during a perfect storm of the economic meltdown and McCain saying the worst thing at the worst time as we stared into the abyss. Obama beat Clinton on “I’m against the war and she is for it.” It was simple then, when he needed it to be.

Under Obama do we continue to call the thousands of mercenaries in Afghanistan ”general contractors” now that Bush is gone? No, we don’t talk about them… not a story anymore.

Do we prosecute felonies like torture or spying on Americans? No, time to “move on”…

Now chaos is the norm and though the chaos is complicated, the answer is still simple.  We cant afford this morally, financially, or physically. Or in a language the financial community can digest: the wars are ideologically and spiritually bankrupt. No need to get a score from the CBO.

Drones bomb Pakistani villages across the border at an unprecedented rate. Is it legal?

Does anyone care? “It begs the question,” as Daniel Berrigan asks us, “is this one a “good war” or a “dumb war”? But the question betrays the bias: it is all the same. It’s all madness.” One is forced to asked the question: Is the President just another Ivy League Asshole shredding civil liberties and due process and sending people to die in some shithole for purely political reasons?

There will be a historical record. “Change we can believe in” is not using the other guys’ mob to clean up your own tracks while continuing to feed at the trough. Human nature is human nature, and when people find out they’re being hustled, they will seek revenge, sooner or later, and it will be ugly and savage.

In a country with desperation growing everywhere, everyday — despite the “Oh, things are getting better” press releases — how could one think otherwise? Just think about the economic crisis we are in as a country. It could never happen, they said. The American middle class was rock solid. The American dream, home ownership, education, the opportunity to get a good job if you applied yourself… and on and on.

Yeah, what happened to that? It’s gone. The next question must be: “What happened to our civil liberties, to our due process, which are the foundation of any notion of real democracy?” The chickens haven’t come home to roost for the majority but the foundation has been set and the Constitution gutted.

Brian McFadden’s cartoon says it all.

I was thinking all this when I talked to Jon Turley, one of the smartest and intellectually honest authorities on the Constitution:

Jonathan Turley: Hi John.

Cusack: Hello. Okay, hey I was just thinking about all this stuff and thought maybe we’d see what we can do to sort of bring civil liberties and these issues sort of back into the debate for the next couple of months.

Turley: I think that’s great.

Cusack: I don’t know how you can believe in the Constitution and violate it that much.

Turley: Yeah.

Cusack: I would just love to know your take as an expert on these things. And then maybe we can speak to whatever you think his motivations would be, and not speak to them in the way that we want to armchair-quarterback like the pundits do about “the game inside the game,” but only do it because it would speak to the arguments that are being used by the left to excuse it. For example, maybe their argument that there are things you can’t know, and it’s a dangerous world out there, or why do you think a constitutional law professor would throw out due process?

Turley: Well, there’s a misconception about Barack Obama as a former constitutional law professor. First of all, there are plenty of professors who are “legal relativists.” They tend to view legal principles as relative to whatever they’re trying to achieve. I would certainly put President Obama in the relativist category. Ironically, he shares that distinction with George W. Bush. They both tended to view the law as a means to a particular end — as opposed to the end itself. That’s the fundamental distinction among law professors. Law professors like Obama tend to view the law as one means to an end, and others, like

myself, tend to view it as the end itself.

Truth be known President Obama has never been particularly driven by principle. Right after his election, I wrote a column in a few days warning people that even though I voted for Obama, he was not what people were describing him to be. I saw him in the Senate. I saw him in Chicago.

Cusack: Yeah, so did I.

Turley: He was never motivated that much by principle. What he’s motivated by are programs. And to that extent, I like his programs more than Bush’s programs, but Bush and Obama are very much alike when it comes to principles. They simply do not fight for the abstract principles and view them as something quite relative to what they’re trying to accomplish. Thus privacy yields to immunity for telecommunications companies and due process yields to tribunals for terrorism suspects.

Cusack: Churchill said, “The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.” That wasn’t Eugene Debs speaking — that was Winston Churchill.

And if he takes an oath before God to uphold the Constitution, and yet he decides it’s not politically expedient for him to deal with due process or spying on citizens and has his Attorney General justify murdering U.S. citizens — and then adds a signing statement saying, “Well, I’m not going to do anything with this stuff because I’m a good guy.” One would think we would have to define this as a much graver threat than good or bad policy choices- correct?

Turley: Well, first of all, there’s a great desire of many people to relieve themselves of the obligation to vote on principle. It’s a classic rationalization that liberals have been known to use recently, but not just liberals. The Republican and Democratic parties have accomplished an amazing feat with the red state/blue state paradigm. They’ve convinced everyone that regardless of how bad they are, the other guy is worse. So even with 11 percent of the public supporting Congress most incumbents will be returned to Congress. They have so structured and defined the question that people no longer look at the actual principles and instead vote on this false dichotomy.

Now, belief in human rights law and civil liberties leads one to the uncomfortable conclusion that President Obama has violated his oath to uphold the Constitution. But that’s not the primary question for voters. It is less about him than it is them. They have an obligation to cast their vote in a principled fashion. It is, in my opinion, no excuse to vote for someone who has violated core constitutional rights and civil liberties simply because you believe the other side is no better. You cannot pretend that your vote does not constitute at least a tacit approval of the policies of the candidate.

This is nothing new, of course for civil libertarians who have always been left behind at the altar in elections. We’ve always been the bridesmaid, never the bride. We’re used to politicians lying to us. And President Obama lied to us. There’s no way around that. He promised various things and promptly abandoned those principles. So the argument that Romney is no better or worse does not excuse the obligation of a voter. With President Obama they have a president who went to the CIA soon after he was elected and promised CIA employees that they would not be investigated or prosecuted for torture, even though he admitted that waterboarding was torture.

Cusack: I remember when we were working with Arianna at The Huffington Post and we thought, well, has anyone asked whether waterboarding is torture? Has anyone asked Eric Holder that? And so Arianna had Sam Seder ask him that at a press conference, and then he had to admit that it was. And then the next question, of course, was, well, if it is a crime, are you going to prosecute the law?

But, of course, it wasn’t politically expedient to do so, right? That’s inherent in their non-answer and inaction?

Turley: That’s right.

Cusack: Have you ever heard a more specious argument than “It’s time for us all to move on?” When did the Attorney General or the President have the option to enforce the law?

Turley: Well, that’s the key question that nobody wants to ask. We have a treaty, actuallya number of treaties, that obligate us to investigate and prosecute torture. We pushed through those treaties because we wanted to make clear that no matter what the expediency of the moment, no matter whether it was convenient or inconvenient, all nations had to agree to investigate and prosecute torture and other war crimes.

And the whole reason for putting this in the treaties was to do precisely the opposite of what the Obama administration has done. That is, in these treaties they say that it is not a defense that prosecution would be inconvenient or unpopular. But that’s exactly what President Obama said when he announced, “I won’t allow the prosecution of torture because I want us to look to the future and not the past.” That is simply a rhetorical flourish to hide the obvious point: “I don’t want the inconvenience and the unpopularity that would come with enforcing this treaty.”

Cusack: Right. So, in that sense, the Bush administration had set the precedent that the state can do anything it likes in the name of terror, and not only has Obama let that cement harden, but he’s actually expanded the power of the executive branch to do whatever it wants, or he’s lowered the bar — he’s lowered the law — to meet his convenience. He’s lowered the law to meet his personal political convenience rather than leaving it as something that, as Mario Cuomo said, the law is supposed to be better than us.

Turley: That’s exactly right. In fact, President Obama has not only maintained the position of George W. Bush in the area of national securities and in civil liberties, he’s actually expanded on those positions. He is actually worse than George Bush in some areas.

Cusack: Can you speak to which ones?

Turley: Well, a good example of it is that President Bush ordered the killing of an American citizen when he approved a drone strike on a car in Yemen that he knew contained an American citizen as a passenger. Many of us at the time said, “You just effectively ordered the death of an American citizen in order to kill someone else, and where exactly do you have that authority?” But they made an argument that because the citizen wasn’t the primary target, he was just collateral damage. And there are many that believe that that is a plausible argument.

Cusack: By the way, we’re forgetting to kill even a foreign citizen is against the law. I hate to be so quaint…

Turley: Well, President Obama outdid President Bush. He ordered the killing of two U.S. citizens as the primary targets and has then gone forward and put out a policy that allows him to kill any American citizen when he unilaterally determines them to be a terrorist threat. Where President Bush had a citizen killed as collateral damage, President Obama has actually a formal policy allowing him to kill any U.S. citizen.

Cusack: But yet the speech that Eric Holder gave was greeted generally, by those others than civil libertarians and a few people on the left with some intellectual honesty, with polite applause and a stunning silence and then more cocktail parties and state dinners and dignitaries, back the Republican Hypocrisy Hour on the evening feed — and he basically gave a speech saying that the executive can assassinate U.S. citizens.

Turley: That was the truly other-worldly moment of the speech. He went to, Northwestern Law School (my alma mater), and stood there and articulated the most authoritarian policy that a government can have: the right to unilaterally kill its citizens without any court order or review. The response from the audience was applause. Citizens applauding an Attorney General who just described how the President was claiming the right to kill any of them on his sole inherent authority.

Cusack: Does that order have to come directly from Obama, or can his underlings carry that out on his behalf as part of a generalized understanding? Or does he have to personally say, “You can get that guy and that guy?”

Turley: Well, he has delegated the authority to the so-called death panel, which is, of course, hilarious, since the Republicans keep talking about a nonexistent death panel in national healthcare. We actually do have a death panel, and it’s killing people who are healthy.

Cusack: I think you just gave me the idea for my next film. And the tone will be, of course, Kafkaesque.

Turley: It really is.

Cusack: You’re at the bottom of the barrel when the Attorney General is saying that not only can you hold people in prison for no charge without due process, but we can kill the citizens that “we” deem terrorists. But “we” won’t do it cause we’re the good guys remember?

Turley: Well, the way that this works is you have this unseen panel. Of course, their proceedings are completely secret. The people who are put on the hit list are not informed, obviously.

Cusack: That’s just not polite, is it?

Turley: No, it’s not. The first time you’re informed that you’re on this list is when your car explodes, and that doesn’t allow much time for due process. But the thing about the Obama administration is that it is far more premeditated and sophisticated in claiming authoritarian powers. Bush tended to shoot from the hip — he tended to do these things largely on the edges. In contrast, Obama has openly embraced these powers and created formal measures, an actual process for killing U.S. citizens. He has used the terminology of the law to seek to legitimate an extrajudicial killing.

Cusack: Yeah, bringing the law down to meet his political realism, his constitutional realism, which is that the Constitution is just a means to an end politically for him, so if it’s inconvenient for him to deal with due process or if it’s inconvenient for him to deal with torture, well, then why should he do that? He’s a busy man. The Constitution is just another document to be used in a political fashion, right?

Turley: Indeed. I heard from people in the administration after I wrote a column a couple weeks ago about the assassination policy. And they basically said, “Look, you’re not giving us our due. Holder said in the speech that we are following a constitutional analysis. And we have standards that we apply.” It is an incredibly seductive argument, but there is an incredible intellectual disconnect. Whatever they are doing, it can’t be called a constitutional process.

Obama has asserted the right to kill any citizen that he believes is a terrorist. He is not bound by this panel that only exists as an extension of his claimed inherent absolute authority. He can ignore them. He can circumvent them. In the end, with or without a panel, a president is unilaterally killing a U.S. citizen. This is exactly what the framers of the Constitution told us not to do.

Cusack: The framers didn’t say, “In special cases, do what you like. When there are things the public cannot know for their own good, when it’s extra-specially a dangerous world… do whatever you want.” The framers of the Constitution always knew there would be extraordinary circumstances, and they were accounted for in the Constitution. The Constitution does not allow for the executive to redefine the Constitution when it will be politically easier for him to get things done.

Turley: No. And it’s preposterous to argue that.

Cusack: When does it become — criminal?

Turley: Well, the framers knew what it was like to have sovereigns kill citizens without due process. They did it all the time back in the 18th century. They wrote a constitution specifically to bar unilateral authority. James Madison is often quoted for his observation that if all men were angels, no government would be necessary. And what he was saying is that you have to create a system of law that has checks and balances so that even imperfect human beings are restrained from doing much harm. Madison and other framers did not want to rely on the promises of good motivations or good intents from the government. They created a system where no branch had enough authority to govern alone — a system of shared and balanced powers.

So what Obama’s doing is to rewrite the most fundamental principle of the U.S. Constitution. The whole point of the Holder speech was that we’re really good guys who take this seriously, and you can trust us. That’s exactly the argument the framers rejected, the “trust me” principle of government. You’ll notice when Romney was asked about this, he said, “I would’ve signed the same law, because I trust Obama to do the right thing.” They’re both using the very argument that the framers warned citizens never to accept from their government.

Cusack: So basically, it comes down to, again, just political expediency and aesthetics. So as long as we have friendly aesthetics and likable people, we can do whatever we want. Who cares what the policy is or the implications for the future.

Turley: The greatest problem is what it has done to us and what our relative silence signifies. Liberals and civil libertarians have lost their own credibility, their own moral standing, with the support of President Obama. For many civil libertarians it is impossible to vote for someone who has blocked the prosecution of war crimes. That’s where you cross the Rubicon for most civil libertarians. That was a turning point for many who simply cannot to vote for someone who is accused of that type of violation.

Under international law, shielding people from war-crime prosecutions is itself a form of war crime. They’re both violations of international law. Notably, when the Spanish moved to investigate our torture program, we now know that the Obama administration threatened the Spanish courts and the Spanish government that they better not enforce the treaty against the U.S. This was a real threat to the Administration because these treaties allow other nations to step forward when another nation refuses to uphold the treaty. If a government does not investigate and prosecute its own accused war criminals, then other countries have the right to do so. That rule was, again, of our own creation. With other

leading national we have long asserted the right to prosecute people in other countries

who are shielded or protected by their own countries.

Cusack: Didn’t Spain pull somebody out of Chile under that?

Turley: Yeah, Pinochet.

Cusack: Yeah, also our guy…

Turley: The great irony of all this is that we’re the architect of that international process. We’re the one that always pushed for the position that no government could block war crimes prosecution.

But that’s not all. The Obama administration has also outdone the Bush administration in other areas. For example, one of the most important international principles to come out of World War II was the rejection of the “just following orders” defense. We were the country that led the world in saying that defendants brought before Nuremberg could not base their defense on the fact that they were just following orders. After Nuremberg, there were decades of development of this principle. It’s a very important point, because that defense, if it is allowed, would shield most people accused of torture and war crime. So when the Obama administration –

Cusack: That also parallels into the idea that the National Defense Authorization Act is using its powers to actually not only put a chilling effect on whistleblowers, but actually make it illegal for whistleblowers to bring the truth out. Am I right on that, or is that an overstatement?

Turley: Well, the biggest problem is that when the administration was fishing around for some way to justify not doing the right thing and not prosecuting torture, they finally released a document that said that CIA personnel and even some DOJ lawyers were “just following orders,” but particularly CIA personnel. The reason Obama promised them that none of them would be prosecuted is he said that they were just following the orders of higher authority in the government. That position gutted Nuremberg. Many lawyers around the world are upset because the U.S. under the Obama administration has torn the heart out of Nuremberg. Just think of the implications: other countries that are accused of torture can shield their people and say, “Yeah, this guy was a torturer. This guy ordered a war crime. But they were all just following orders. And the guy that gave them the order, he’s dead.” It is the classic defense of war criminals. Now it is a viable defense again because of the Obama administration.

Cusack: Yeah.

Turley: Certainly part of the problem is how the news media –

Cusack: Oscar Wilde said most journalists would fall under the category of those who couldn’t tell the difference between a bicycle accident and the end of civilization. But why is it that all the journalists that you see mostly on MSNBC or most of the progressives, or so-called progressives, who believe that under Bush and Cheney and Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzalez these were great and grave constitutional crises, the wars were an going moral fiasco’s — but now, since we have a friendly face in the White House, someone with kind of pleasing aesthetics and some new poloicies we like, now all of a sudden these aren’t crimes, there’s no crisis. Because he’s our guy? Go, team, go?

Turley: Some in the media have certainly fallen into this cult of personality.

Cusack: What would you say to those people? I always thought the duty of a citizen, and even more so as a journalist, had greatly to do with the idea that intellectual honesty was much more important than political loyalty. How would you compare Alberto Gonzalez to Eric Holder?

Turley: Oh, Eric Holder is smarter than Gonzalez, but I see no other difference in terms of how they’ve conducted themselves. Both of these men are highly political. Holder was accused of being improperly political during his time in the Clinton administration. When he was up for Attorney General, he had to promise the Senate that he would not repeat some of the mistakes he made in the Clinton administration over things like the pardon scandal, where he was accused of being more politically than legally motivated. In this town, Holder is viewed as much more of a political than a legal figure, and the

same thing with Gonzalez.

Bush and Obama both selected Attorney Generals who would do what they wanted them to do, who would enable them by saying that no principles stood in the way of what they wanted to do. More importantly, that there were no principles requiring them to do something they didn’t want to do, like investigate torture.

Cusack: So would you say this assassination issue, or the speech and the clause in the NDAA and this signing statement that was attached, was equivalent to John Yoo’s torture document?

Turley: Oh, I think it’s amazing. It is astonishing the dishonesty that preceded and followed its passage. Before passage, the administration told the public that the president was upset about the lack of an exception for citizens and that he was ready to veto the bill if there was a lack of such an exception.

Then, in an unguarded moment, Senator Levin was speaking to another Democratic senator who was objecting to the fact that citizens could be assassinated under this provision, and Levin said, “I don’t know if my colleague is aware that the exception language was removed at the request of the White House.” Many of us just fell out of our chairs. It was a relatively rare moment on the Senate floor,

unguarded and unscripted.

Cusack: And finally simple.

Turley: Yes. So we were basically lied to. I think that the administration was really caught unprepared by that rare moment of honesty, and that led ultimately to his pledge not to use the power to assassinate against citizens. But that pledge is meaningless. Having a president say, “I won’t use a power given to me” is the most dangerous of assurances, because a promise is not worth anything.

Cusack: Yeah, I would say it’s the coldest comfort there is.

Turley: Yes. This brings us back to the media and the failure to strip away the rhetoric around these policies. It was certainly easier in the Bush administration, because you had more clown-like figures like Alberto Gonzalez. The problem is that the media has tended to get thinner and thinner in terms of analysis. The best example is that about the use of the term “coerced or enhanced interrogation.” I often stop reporters when they use these terms in questions. I say, “I’m not too sure what you mean, because waterboarding is not enhanced interrogation.” That was a myth put out by the Bush administration. Virtually no one in the field used that term, because courts in the United States and around the world consistently said that waterboarding’s torture. Holder admitted that waterboarding’s torture. Obama admitted that waterboarding is torture. Even members of the Bush administration ultimately admitted that waterboarding’s torture. The Bush Administration pushed this term to get reporters to drop the word torture and it worked. They are still using the term.

Look at the articles and the coverage. They uniformly say “enhanced interrogation.” Why? Because it’s easier. They want to avoid the controversy. Because if they say ”torture,” it makes the story much more difficult. If you say, “Today the Senate was looking into a program to torture detainees,” there’s a requirement that you get a little more into the fact that we’re not supposed to be torturing people.

Cusack: So, from a civil liberties perspective, ravens are circling the White House, even though there’s a friendly man in it.

Turley: Yeah.

Cusack: I hate to speak too much to motivation, but why do you think MSNBC and other so-called centrist or left outlets won’t bring up any of these things? These issues were broadcast and reported on nightly when John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzalez and Bush were in office.

Turley: Well, there is no question that some at MSNBC have backed away from these issues, although occasionally you’ll see people talk about –

Cusack: I think that’s being kind, don’t you? More like “abandoned.”

Turley: Yeah. The civil liberties perspective is rarely given more than a passing reference while national security concerns are explored in depth. Fox is viewed as protective of Bush while MSNBC is viewed as protective of Obama. But both presidents are guilty of the same violations. There are relatively few journalists willing to pursue these questions aggressively and objectively, particularly on television. And so the result is that the public is hearing a script written by the government that downplays these principles. They don’t hear the word “torture.”

They hear “enhanced interrogation.” They don’t hear much about the treaties. They don’t hear about the international condemnation of the United States. Most Americans are unaware of how far we have moved away from Nuremberg and core principles of international law.

Cusack: So the surreal Holder speech — how could it be that no one would be reporting on that? How could it be that has gone by with not a bang but a whimper?

Turley: Well, you know, part of it, John, I think, is that this administration is very clever. First of all, they clearly made the decision right after the election to tack heavily to the right on national security issues. We know that by the people they put on the National Security Council. They went and got very hardcore folks — people who are quite unpopular with civil libertarians. Not surprisingly we almost immediately started to hear things like the pledge not to prosecute CIA officials and other Bush policies being continued.

Many reporters buy into these escape clauses that the administration gives them, this is where I think the administration is quite clever. From a legal perspective, the Holder speech should have been exposed as perfect nonsense. If you’re a constitutional scholar, what he was talking about is 0

facially ridiculous, because he was saying that we do have a constitutional process–it’s just self-imposed, and we’re the only ones who can review it.

They created a process of their own and then pledged to remain faithful to it. While that should be a transparent and absurd position, it gave an out for journalists to say, “Well, you know, the administration’s promising that there is a process, it’s just not the court process.” That’s what is so clever, and why the Obama administration has been far more successful than the Bush administration in rolling back core rights. The Bush administration would basically say, “We just vaporized a citizen in a car with a terrorist, and we’re not sorry for it.”

Cusack: Well, yeah, the Bush administration basically said, “We may have committed a crime, but we’re the government, so what the fuck are you going to do about it?” Right? And the Obama administration is saying, “We’re going to set this all in cement, expand the power of the executive, and pass the buck to the next guy.” Is that it?

Turley: It’s the same type of argument when people used to say when they caught a criminal and hung him from a tree after a perfunctory five-minute trial. In those days, there was an attempt to pretend that they are really not a lynch mob, they were following a legal process of their making and their satisfaction. It’s just… it’s expedited. Well, in some ways, the administration is arguing the same thing. They’re saying, “Yes, we do believe that we can kill any U.S. citizen, but we’re going to talk amongst ourselves about this, and we’re not going to do it until we’re satisfied that this guy is guilty.”

Cusack: Me and the nameless death panel.

Turley: Again, the death panel is ludicrous. The power that they’ve defined derives from the president’s role as Commander in Chief. So this panel –

Cusack: They’re falling back on executive privilege, the same as Nixon and Bush.

Turley: Right, it’s an extension of the president. He could just ignore it. It’s not like they have any power that exceeds his own.

Cusack: So the death panel serves at the pleasure of the king, is what you’re saying.

Turley: Yes, and it gives him cover so that they can claim that they’re doing something legal when they’re doing something extra-legal.

Cusack: Well, illegal, right?

Turley: Right. Outside the law.

Cusack: So when does it get to a point where if you abdicate duty, it is in and of itself a crime? Obama is essentially creating a constitutional crisis not by committing crimes but by abdicating his oath that he swore before God — is that not a crime?

Turley: Well, he is violating international law over things like his promise to protect CIA officials from any prosecution for torture. That’s a direct violation, which makes our country as a whole doubly guilty for alleged war crimes. I know many of the people in the administration. Some of us were quite close. And they’re very smart people. I think that they also realize how far outside the lines they are. That’s the reason they are trying to draft up these policies to give the appearance of the law. It’s like a Potemkin village constructed as a façade for people to pass through –

Cusack: They want to have a legal patina.

Turley: Right, and so they create this Potemkin village using names. You certainly can put the name “due process” on a drone missile, but it’s not delivering due process.

Cusack: Yeah. And what about — well, we haven’t even gotten into the expansion of the privatization movement of the military “contractors” under George Bush or the escalation of drone strikes. I mean, who are they killing? Is it legal? Does anyone care — have we just given up as a country, saying that the Congress can declare war?

Turley: We appear to be in a sort of a free-fall. We have what used to be called an ”imperial presidency.”

Cusack: Obama is far more of an imperial president than Bush in many ways, wouldn’t you say?

Turley: Oh, President Obama has created an imperial presidency that would have made Richard Nixon blush. It is unbelievable.

Cusack: And to say these things, most of the liberal community or the progressive community would say, “Turley and Cusack have lost their minds. What do they want? They want Mitt Romney to come in?”

Turley: The question is, “What has all of your relativistic voting and support done for you?” That is, certainly there are many people who believe –

Cusack: Well, some of the people will say the bread-and-butter issues, “I got healthcare coverage, I got expanded healthcare coverage.”

Turley: See, that’s what I find really interesting. When I talk to people who support the administration, they usually agree with me that torture is a war crime and that the administration has blocked the investigation of alleged war crimes.

Then I ask them, “Then, morally, are you comfortable with saying, ‘I know the administration is concealing war crimes, but they’re really good on healthcare?’” That is what it comes down to.

The question for people to struggle with is how we ever hope to regain our moral standing and our high ground unless citizens are prepared to say, “Enough.” And this is really the election where that might actually carry some weight — if people said, ”Enough. We’re not going to blindly support the president and be played anymore according to this blue state/red state paradigm. We’re going to reconstruct instead of replicate. It might not even be a reinvented Democratic Party in the end that is a viable option. Civil libertarians are going to stand apart so that people like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama and others know that there are certain Rubicon issues that you cannot cross, and one of them happens to be civil liberty.

Cusack: Yeah, because most people reading this will sort of say, “Okay, this is all fine and good, but I’ve got to get to work and I’ve got to do this stuff, and I don’t know what these fucking guys are talking about. I don’t really care.”

So let’s paint a scenario. My nephew, Miles, decides that he wants to grow dreadlocks, and he also decides he’s falling in love with the religion of Islam. And he changes his name. Instead of his name being Miles, he changes his name to a Muslim-sounding name. He goes to Washington, and he goes to the wrong organization or meeting, let’s say, and he goes to an Occupy Washington protest. He’s out there next to someone with a speaker, and a car bomb explodes. He didn’t set it off, and he didn’t do anything. The government can throw him in prison and never try him, right?

Turley: Well, first of all, that’s a very good question.

Cusack: How do we illustrate the danger to normal people of these massive overreaches and radical changes to the Constitution?

Turley: I mean, first of all, I know Miles, and –

Cusack: Yes.

Turley: –and he is a little dangerous.

Cusack: Yes.

Turley: I played basketball with him and you and I would describe him as a clear and present danger.

Cusack: I mean, and I know Eric Holder and Obama won’t throw him in prison because they’re nice guys, but let’s say that they’re out of office.

Turley: Right, and the problem is that there is no guarantee. It has become almost Fellini-esque. Holder made the announcement a couple of years ago that they would try some defendants in a federal court while reserving military tribunals for others. The speech started out on the high ground, saying, “We have to believe in our federal courts and our Constitution. We’ve tried terrorists before, and therefore we’re transferring these individuals to federal court.”

Then he said, “But we’re going to transfer these other individuals to Guantanamo Bay.” What was missing was any type of principle. You have Obama doing the same thing that George Bush did — sitting there like Caesar and saying, “You get a real trial and you get a fake trial.” He sent Zacarias Moussaoui to a federal court and then he threw Jose Padilla, who happened to be a U.S. citizen, into the Navy brig and held him without trial. Yet, Obama and Holder publicly assert that they’re somehow making a civil liberties point, and say, “We’re very proud of the fact that we have the courage to hold these people for a real trial, except for those people. Those people are going to get a tribunal.” And what happened after that was remarkable. If you read the press accounts, the press actually credits the administration with doing the right thing. Most of them pushed into the last paragraph the fact that all they did was split the people on the table, and half got a real trial and half got a fake trial.

Cusack: And don’t you think that’s, I mean, in the same way, if you talk to anybody, the demonization, whether rightful demonization, of Osama Bin Laden, was so intense that people were thrilled that he was assassinated instead of brought to trial and tried. And I thought, if the Nuremberg principles were right, the idea would be that you’d want to take this guy and put him on trial in front of the entire world, and, actually, if you were going to put him to death, you’d put him to death by lethal injection.

Turley: You’ll recall reports came out that the Seals were told to kill Osama, and then reports came out to say that Osama might not have been armed when the Seals came in. The strong indication was that this was a hit.

Cusack: Yeah.

Turley: The accounts suggest that this was an assassination from the beginning to the end, and that was largely brushed over in the media. There was never really any discussion ofwhether it was appropriate or even a good idea not to capture this guy and to bring him to justice.

The other thing that was not discussed in most newspapers and programs was the fact that we violated international law. Pakistan insisted that they never approved our going into Pakistan. Think about it — if the government of Mexico sent in Mexican special forces into San Diego and captured a Mexican national, or maybe even an American citizen, and then killed him, could you imagine what the outcry would be?

Cusack: Or somebody from a Middle Eastern country who had their kids blown up by Mr. Cheney’s and Bush’s wars came in and decided they were going to take out Cheney–not take him back to try him, but actually just come in and assassinate him.

Turley: Yet we didn’t even have that debate. And I think that goes to your point, John, about where’s the media?

Cusack: But, see, that’s a very tough principle to take, because everybody feels so rightfully loathsome about Bin Laden, right? But principles are not meant to be convenient, right? The Constitution is not meant to be convenient. If they can catch Adolf Eichmann and put him on trial, why not bin Laden? The principles are what separate us from the beasts.

I think the best answer I ever heard about this stuff, besides sitting around a kitchen table with you and your father and my father, was I heard somebody, they asked Mario Cuomo, ”You don’t support the death penalty…?  Would you for someone who raped your wife?” And Cuomo blinked, and he looked at him, and he said, “What would I do? Well, I’d take a baseball bat and I’d bash his skull in… But I don’t matter. The law is better than me. The law is supposed to be better than me. That’s the whole point.”

Turley: Right. It is one thing if the president argued that there was no opportunity to capture bin Laden because he was in a moving car, for example. And then some people could say, “Well, they took him out because there was no way they could use anything but a missile.” What’s missing in the debate is that it was quickly brushed over whether we had the ability to capture bin Laden.

Cusack: Well, it gets to [the late] Raiders owner Al Davis’ justice, which is basically, ”Just win, baby.” And that’s where we are. The Constitution was framed by Al Davis. I never knew that.

And the sad part for me is that all the conversations and these interpretations and these conveniences, if they had followed the Constitution, and if they had been strict in terms of their interpretations, it wouldn’t matter one bit in effectively handling the war on terror protecting Americans, because there wasn’t anything extra accomplished materially in taking these extra leaps, other than to make it easier for them to play cowboy and not cede national security to the Republicans politically. Bin Laden was basically ineffective.

And our overseas intel people were already all over these guys. It doesn’t really matter. The only thing that’s been hurt here has been us and the Constitution and any moral high ground we used to have. Because Obama and Holder are good guys, it’s okay. But what happens when the not-so-good guys come in, does MSNBC really want to cede and grandfather these powers to Gingrich or Romney or Santorum or whomever — and then we’re sitting around looking at each other, like how did this happen? — the same way we look around now and say, “How the hell did the middle of America lose the American dream? How is all of this stuff happening at the same time?” And it gets back to lack of principle.

Turley: I think that’s right. Remember the articles during the torture debate? I kept on getting calls from reporters saying, “Well, you know, the administration has come out with an interesting statement. They said that it appears that they might’ve gotten something positive from torturing these people.” Yet you’ve had other officials say that they got garbage, which is what you often get from torture…

Cusack: So the argument being that if we can get good information, we should torture?

Turley: Exactly. Yeah, that’s what I ask them. I say, “So, first of all, let’s remember, torture is a war crime. So what you’re saying is — ”

Cusack: Well, war crimes… war crimes are effective.

Turley: The thing that amazes me is that you have smart people like reporters who buy so readily into this. I truly believe that they’re earnest when they say this. Of course you ask them “Well, does that mean that the Nuremberg principles don’t apply as long as you can show some productive use?” We have treaty provisions that expressly rule out justifying torture on the basis that it was used to gain useful information.

Cusack: Look, I mean, enforced slave labor has some productive use. You get great productivity, you get great output from that shit. You’re not measuring the principle against the potential outcome; that’s a bad business model. “Just win, baby” — we’re supposed to be above that.

Turley: But, you know, I’ll give you an example. I had one of the leading investigative journalists email me after one of my columns blasting the administration on the assassin list, and this is someone I deeply respect. He’s one of the true great investigative reporters. He objected to the fact that my column said that under the Obama policy he could kill U.S. citizens not just abroad, but could kill them in the United States. And he said, “You know, I agree with everything in your column except that.” He said, “You know, they’ve never said that they could kill someone in the United States. I think that you are exaggerating.”

Yet, if you look at how they define the power, it is based on the mere perceived practicality and necessity of legal process by the president. They say the President has

unilateral power to assassinate a citizen that he believes is a terrorist. Now, is the limiting

principle? They argue that they do this “constitutional analysis,” and they only kill a

citizen when it’s not practical to arrest the person.

Cusack: Is that with the death panel? Turley: Well, yeah, he’s talking about the death panel. Yet, he can ignore the death panel. But, more importantly, what does practicality mean? It all comes down to an unchecked presidential power.

Cusack: By the way, the death panel — that room can’t be a fun room to go into, just make the decision on your own. You know, it’s probably a gloomy place, the death panel room, so the argument from the reporter was, “Look, they can… if they kill people in England or Paris that’s okay, but they — ”

Turley: I also don’t understand, why would it make sense that you could kill a U.S. citizen on the streets of London but you might not be able to kill them on the streets of Las Vegas? The question is where the limiting principle comes from or is that just simply one more of these self-imposed rules? And that’s what they really are saying: we have these self-imposed rules that we’re only going to do this when we think we have to.

Cusack: So, if somebody can use the contra-Nuremberg argument — that principle’s now been flipped, that they were only following orders — does that mean that the person that issued the order through Obama, or the President himself, is responsible and can be brought up on a war crime charge?

Turley: Well, under international law, Obama is subject to international law in terms of ordering any defined war crime.

Cusack: Would he have to give his Nobel Peace Prize back?

Turley: I don’t think that thing’s going back. I’ve got to tell you… and given the amount of authority he’s claimed, I don’t know if anyone would have the guts to ask for it back. Cusack: And the argument people are going to use is,”Look, Obama and Holder are good guys. They’re not going to use this power.” But the point is, what about after them? What about the apparatus? You’ve unleashed the beast. And precedent is everything  constitutionally, isn’t it?

Turley: I think that’s right. Basically what they’re arguing is, “We’re angels,” and that’s exactly what Madison warned against. As we discussed, he said if all men were angels you wouldn’t need government. And what the administration is saying is, “We’re angels, so trust us.”

I think that what is really telling is the disconnect between what people say about our country and what our country has become. What we’ve lost under Bush and Obama is clarity. In the “war on terror” what we’ve lost is what we need the most in fighting terrorism: clarity. We need the clarity of being better than the people that we are fighting against. Instead, we’ve given propagandists in Al Qaeda or the Taliban an endless supply of material — allowing them to denounce us as hypocrites.

Soon after 9/11 we started government officials talk about how the U.S. Constitution is making us weaker, how we can’t function by giving people due process. And it was perfectly ridiculous.

Cusack: Feels more grotesque than ridiculous.

Turley: Yeah, all the reports that came out after 9/11 showed that 9/11 could’ve been avoided. For years people argued that we should have locked reinforced cockpit doors. For years people talked about the gaps in security at airports. We had the intelligence services that had the intelligence that they needed to move against this ring, and they didn’t share the information. So we have this long list of failures by U.S. agencies, and the result was that we increased their budget and gave them more unchecked authority.

In the end, we have to be as good as we claim. We can’t just talk a good game. If you look at this country in terms of what we’ve done, we have violated the Nuremberg principles, we have violated international treaties, we have refused to accept–

Cusack: And you’re not just talking about in the Bush administration. You’re talking about

–

Turley: The Obama administration.

Cusack: You’re talking about right now.

Turley: We have refused to accept the jurisdictional authority of sovereign countries. We now routinely kill in other countries. It is American exceptionalism – the rules apply to other countries.

Cusack: Well, these drone attacks in Pakistan, are they legal? Does anyone care? Who are we killing? Do they deserve due process?

Turley: When we cross the border, Americans disregard the fact that Pakistan is a sovereign nation, let alone an ally, and they insist that they have not agreed to these operations. They have accused us of repeatedly killing people in their country by violating their sovereign airspace. And we just disregard it. Again, its American exceptionalism, that we –

Cusack: Get out of our way or we’ll pulverize you.

Turley: The rules apply to everyone else. So the treaties against torture and war crimes, sovereign integrity –

Cusack: And this also speaks to the question that nobody even bothers to ask: what exactly are we doing in Afghanistan now? Why are we there?

Turley: Oh, yeah, that’s the real tragedy.

Cusack: It has the highest recorded suicide rate among veterans in history and no one even bothers to state a pretense of a definable mission or goal. It appears we’re there because it’s not convenient for him to really get out before the election. So in that sense he’s another guy who’s letting people die in some shithole for purely political reasons. I mean, it is what it is.

Turley: I’m afraid, it is a political calculation. What I find amazing is that we’re supporting an unbelievably corrupt government in the Karzai administration.

Karzai himself, just two days ago, called Americans “demons.” He previously said that he wished he had gone with the Taliban rather than the Americans. And, more importantly, his government recently announced that women are worth less than men, and he has started to implement these religious edicts that are subjugating women. So he has American women who are protecting his life while he’s on television telling people that women are worth less than men, and we’re funding –

Cusack: What are they, about three-fifths?

Turley: Yeah, he wasn’t very specific on that point. So we’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars. More importantly, we’re losing all these lives because it was simply politically inconvenient to be able to pull out of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Cusack: Yeah. And, I mean, we haven’t even touched on the whole privatization of the military and what that means. What does it mean for the state to be funding at-cost-plus private mercenary armies and private mercenary security forces like Blackwater, or now their names are Xe, or whatever they’ve been rebranded as?

Turley: Well, the United States has barred various international rules because they would allow for the prosecution of war crimes by both military and private forces. The U.S. barred those new rules because we didn’t want the ability of other countries to prosecute our people for war crimes. One of the things I teach in my constitutional class is that there is a need for what’s called a bright-line rule. That is, the value for bright-line rules is that they structure relations between the branches, between the government and citizens.

Bright-line rules protect freedom and liberty. Those people that try to eliminate bright- line rules quickly find themselves on a slippery slope. The Obama administration, with the Bush administration, began by denying rights to people at Guantanamo Bay. And then they started to deny rights of foreigners who they accused of being terrorists.

And eventually, just recently, they started denying rights to citizens and saying that they could kill citizens without any court order or review. It is the fulfillment of what is the nightmare of civil liberties. They crossed that bright line. Now they’re bringing these same abuses to U.S. citizens and changing how we relate to our government. In the end, we have this huge apparatus of the legal system, this huge court system, and all of it has become discretionary because the president can go ahead and kill U.S. citizens if he feels that it’s simply inconvenient or impractical to bring them to justice.

Cusack: Or if the great O, decides that he wants to be lenient and just throw them in jail for the rest of their life without trial, he can do that, right?

Turley: Well, you’ve got Guantanamo Bay if you’re accused of being an enemy combatant. There is the concept in law that the lesser is included in the greater.

So if the president can kill me when I’m in London, then the lesser of that greater is that he could also hold me, presumably, without having any court involvement. It’d be a little bizarre that he could kill me but if he held me he’d have to turn me over to the court system.

Cusack: Yeah. We’re getting into kind of Kafka territory. You know, with Bush I always felt like you were at one of those rides in an amusement park where the floor kept dropping and you kept kind of falling. But I think what Obama’s done is we’ve really hit the bottom as far as civil liberties go.

Turley: Yet people have greeted this erosion of civil liberties with this collective yawn.

Cusack: Yeah, yeah. And so then it gets down to the question, “Well, are you going to vote for Obama?” And I say, “Well, I don’t really know. I couldn’t really vote for Hillary Clinton because of her Iraq War vote.” Because I felt like that was a line, a Rubicon line –

Turley: Right.

Cusack: — a Rubicon line that I couldn’t cross, right? I don’t know how to bring myself to vote for a constitutional law professor, or even a constitutional realist, who throws away due process and claims the authority that the executive branch can assassinate American citizens. I just don’t know if I can bring myself to do it.

If you want to make a protest vote against Romney, go ahead, but I would think we’d be better putting our energies into local and state politics — occupy Wall Street and organizations and movements outside the system, not national politics, not personalities.

Not stadium rock politics. Not brands. That’s the only thing I can think of. What would you say?

Turley: Well, the question, I think, that people have got to ask themselves when they get into that booth is not what Obama has become, but what have we become? That is, what’s left of our values if we vote for a person that we believe has shielded war crimes or violated due process or implemented authoritarian powers. It’s not enough to say, “Yeah, he did all those things, but I really like what he did with the National Park System.”

Cusack: Yeah, or that he did a good job with the auto bailout.

Turley: Right. I think that people have to accept that they own this decision, that they can walk away. I realize that this is a tough decision for people but maybe, if enough people walked away, we could finally galvanize people into action to make serious changes. We have to recognize that our political system is fundamentally broken, it’s unresponsive. Only 11 percent of the public supports Congress, and yet nothing is changing — and so the question becomes, how do you jump start that system? How do you create an alternative? What we have learned from past elections is that you don’t create an alternative by yielding to this false dichotomy that only reinforces their monopoly on power.

Cusack: I think that even Howard Zinn/Chomsky progressives, would admit that there will be a difference in domestic policy between Obama and a Romney presidency.

But DUE PROCESS….I think about how we own it. We own it. Everybody’s sort of let it slip. There’s no immediacy in the day-to-day on and it’s just one of those things that unless they… when they start pulling kids off the street, like they did in Argentina a few years ago and other places, all of a sudden, it’s like, “How the hell did that happen?” I say, ”Look, you’re not helping Obama by enabling him. If you want to help him, hold his feet to the fire.”

Turley: Exactly.

Cusack: The problem is, as I see it, is that regardless of goodwill and intent and people being tired of the status quo and everything else, the information outlets and the powers that be reconstruct or construct the government narrative only as an election game of ‘us versus them,’ Obama versus Romney, and if you do anything that will compromise that equation, you are picking one side versus the other. Because don’t you realize that’s going to hurt Obama? Don’t you know that’s going to help Obama? Don’t you know… and they’re not thinking through their own sort of self-interest or the community’s interest in just changing the way that this whole thing works to the benefit of the majority.

We used to have some lines we wouldn’t cross–some people who said this is not what this country does …we don’t do this shit, you had to do the right thing. So it’s going to be a tough process getting our rights back, but you l now Frankie’s Law? Whoever stops fighting first – loses.

Turley: Right.

by segal | No Comments »           

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For Immediate Release: Thomas Marshall Penick INDEPENDENT REPUBLICAN U.S. PRESIDENCY 2016 - 2024  SHARES  "DEMAND PROGRESS" BLOG, Thanks The Team: David Segal, Executive Director and David Moon, Program Director per Thomas Marshall Penick  25 DEC 2012  WEST COAST  U.S.A.