There has been a fair amount of conservative opposition to Common Core standards, nationally imposed educational standards. Four states have yet to implement the standards.

 

It appears the biggest fear of conservatives in these states is the “Big Brother” federal government seizing control of education, a prized local jurisdiction.

 

Yet, the Common Core standards very minimally restrict the autonomy of local school districts. Their national specifications on curriculum run only along the broad lines of concepts such as geometry or sentence structures, allowing local school districts a great deal of wiggle room within those subjects.

 

Even if the Common Core standards were to give the federal government complete control of education, so what? The fear of conservatives that a large federal government can be turned on the people seems far-fetched and contradictory to the conservative belief in expanding the military and its autonomy.

 

Federal government control of education would only further improve the standardization of the Common Core standards. Ironically, it would help students in the poorest regions of America, those that tend to be most conservative, the most.

 

Standardization would bring up education standards in these areas and ensure that these students are more prepared to get a quality college education. Doing so would also prevent unfair discrimination by state in the college admissions and job admissions process. This ensures a fundamental belief of Americans in justness. Would it not be better to preserve this positive right to fairness in the education system rather than combatting a fictitious negative right to prevent the federal government from expanding?

 

It is true that the writers of the American constitution set out a deliberately weak federal government to prevent the excesses of federal government under Great Britain that had caused the American Revolution in the first place. However, it has been over 200 years since then and the federal government has never abused its power. As such, it is safe to assume that allowing the federal government more power in education will produce few detriments.

 

Additionally, the Constitution in itself should never be a justification.  After all, nearly all post-revolutionary societies favored a weak federal government. However, most of these nations changed their interpretations of their Constitutions based on changing times. Americans need to go beyond justifying stalemate and stagnation by the Constitution and instead work to justify why those measures are in the Constitution in the first place and, if unable to do that, work to repeal those clauses. Doing so is the only way that conservatives will stop preventing progressive measures such as the Common Core standards that are in the best interest of the nation from passing.

Israel’s latest military strike on missiles flowing from Iran to Lebanese militant group Hezbollah via Syria provoked no response. Luckily. In the future, though, Israel’s luck may soon run out. Launching military strikes on arms flowing to Hezbollah in the future may soon prove detrimental.

 

While any country should protect its defense interests, Israel appears to be overstepping the national sovereignty of its Middle Eastern neighbors. How can Israel, or any other country for that matter, justify destroying the military

capabilities of its neighbors without launching a full out war?

 

The simple fact is that Israel cannot keep up this contradiction. Especially now. Hezbollah’s rise in militancy means that Hezbollah will be more likely to strike Israel if provoked. To compound the issue, al-Assad, feeling increasingly vulnerable with rebels taking over the capital city of Damascus, may turn to a strike on Israel as a last ditch attempt to increase his popularity to avoid being overthrown. Moreover, Iran, increasingly hostile to any display of Israeli military might given the tense nuclear situation, may capitalize on further Israeli strikes as a solid justification for military response.

 

Israel, and more importantly the United States by implicitly supporting it in such actions, must realize that the Middle East today is not the Middle East of the past; there are far greater threats and opposition to displays of Western military aggression now than perhaps ever before.

 

The United States must make it clear to Israel and the international community as a whole that not only will it refuse to cooperate in further strikes on arms flowing to Hezbollah but it will also outright condemn them.

 

Doing so and cutting foreign aid to Israel will impel Israel to end the strikes and will therefore improve relations between Israel and its Middle Eastern neighbors.

 

The United States cannot take even the smallest chance of allowing Israel to plunge itself headfirst into a war with the Middle East. Doing so, after all, would have catastrophic consequences for the United States. As Israel’s strongest ally, the United States would thus be forced into either abandoning its strongest ally in the Middle East or supporting, either economically or militarily, supporting Israel in a fight against Iraq, a nation vital to the United States’ oil interests. 

Obama’s recent calls for shutting down Guantanamo Bay brings back memories of his promise to shut down the facility within 1 year during his 2008 presidential race. The situations have not changed since Obama’s first term; Obama still lacks any plan to try the Guantanamo Bay detainees and assimilate them into U.S. prisons. Yet, Obama has three things on his side: the hunger striking gaining increasing support day by day, the supposed failure of Guantanamo Bay, and the economic climate of America.

 

Currently, over a hundred of Guantanamo Bay’s 166 detainees are on a hunger strike, protesting the dubious legality that puts them in an infinite waiting period before a trial which will likely never take place. Recent movies such as Zero Dark Thirty have also awoken the nation’s consciousness to the brutal conditions of the camp. While Americans have been willing to sacrifice individual rights in the fight on terrorism, many Americans have increasingly been unwilling to overlook the clear violations of democratic principles occurring in Guantanamo Bay on a daily basis.

 

Thus far, there have been no major connections in the minds of Americans between the Guantanamo Bay facility and the War on Terror. Although undoubtedly the “enhanced interrogation” techniques used at Guantanamo Bay have helped nab criminals, the secrecy surrounding the facilities prevents Americans from fully comprehending its success. This contributes to a view of Guantanamo Bay as a waste of valuable taxpayers’ money.  

 

Yet, perhaps more important even than the moral argument in the minds of Americans is the economic impact of Guantanamo Bay, the factor that has a greater bearing on taxpayers. Many Americans, stunned by figures presented by the White House, are unable to understand why terrorists cannot assimilate into maximum security federal prisons which cost about $60,000 to $70,000 per inmate per year. The cost of Guantanamo Bay, estimated at over $2 billion since the facility was opened in 2002, amounts to nearly $1 million spent per terrorist held there per year. While the cost of $2 billion is quite insignificant in the overall budget, the fact of the matter is that even small government programs are facing cuts. If those $2 billion cannot be justified, Guantanamo Bay certainly deserves to be the next in a series of cuts. Although many Republicans have defended Guantanamo Bay and suggested that the terrorists held there are too dangerous to be held in U.S. prisons, they have failed to defend or substantiate this claim. After all, maximum security prisons are designed to hold the worst of the worst criminals, including domestic terrorists. There is no difference in the scope or effects of the terror of Muslim terrorists and domestic terrorists. The religion of a criminal or suspected criminal should by no means determine the prison conditions they face.

 

The combination of these factors will make it easier for Obama to get support in closing down the detention facility. But only if Congress plays along. It would truly be a shame if, as in the case of gun reform, Congress were to defy the mandate of the American people and the will of the president simply because of partisanship. 

A recent poll of the approval ratings of the military of young voters conducted by the Institute of Politics indicates that young Americans may be misled on the running of government.

 

It is surprising that the younger generation continues to support the military. The military of late, alongside the related intelligence organizations CIA and FBI, has unfortunately been able to seize increasing power and autonomy from the other branches of government.

 

The positive is that it enables military commanders, those with maximum knowledge of battle strategies and defense capabilities, to take the final decisions on events that can impact the nation’s security. On the flip side, though, military commanders tend to be far more war hungry, impulsive, and free from bureaucracy than Congress or the president. It would be unfortunate if the whims of a single man, regardless of how experienced he was, could direct policies extremely crucial to national security.

 

Perhaps even more importantly, though, is the low approval ratings of Congress. Congress is barely hanging on to double digit approval ratings. Reports of Congressmen failing to read the bills they are voting on and concocting grand strategies to stalemate Congress justify the disillusion with Congress. The problem, though, lies when these isolated acts of Congress are adopted as broad generalizations of the acts of this essential branch of government.

 

Congress is most often attacked on its bureaucracy. While there is perhaps more bureaucracy in Congress than is absolutely necessary, Americans should recognize that Congress’ bureaucracy is necessary to its operation. In fact, it is this bureaucracy that allows Congress to check the powers of the president to rashly make decisions.

 

Congress recently was attacked when Senate struck down a bill to increase background checks on gun purchases, a measure supported by 85% of Americans. However, if Congress’ role was to directly mirror the interests of the people, referendums would replace Congress. Congress is meant to represent the long-term interests of the people and will therefore on occasion violate the direct will of the people. Also, the Senate is meant to give small states power and given that small states tend to be more conservative, Senate will always be conservative leaning.

 

Approval ratings of different branches of government is more important than it seems at first glance. Branches of government with increased approval will inevitably seek increased power and be more able to resist change while those with low approval ratings will be forced to reform and use only the minimum amount of power allocated to them under the Constitution. Therefore, Americans must get a better sense of the true effectiveness of each branch of government in order to force the changes of government that best match their interests. 

U.S. companies have long been blamed for their sweatshops- manufacturing centers abroad with poor working conditions and salaries. However, the corporate social irresponsibility of European companies in Bangladesh goes far beyond that of any U.S. corporation.

 

In the past, European companies have been content to sit beyond a wall of subordinates. They have been ready to pass blame on the Bangladeshi manager, the Bangladeshi government, and the Bangladeshi inspectors without taking charge and admitting that they are responsible for all the workers employed by their corporation regardless of their level on the corporate ladder. Now, though, after a series of factory collapses in Bangladesh, European companies are increasingly being held responsible.

 

European companies have also been hiring employees at as low as $38 per month while requiring them to work 12 hours a day or more. This has come under fire amidst the scandals of the safety of factories. The Pope has claimed that these wages are unlivable wages and that the Bangladeshis employed at the factories, mainly women, are essentially being used as slave labor. However, the cost of living in Bangladesh is much lower and comparable salaries in Bangladeshi companies would be even lower.  However, this provides no justification. Increasing salaries to $100 per day would have a minimal impact on the profits of companies but would have a massive impact of the standard of living of the factory employees.

 

There are two issues with this theory. Firstly, how can companies be incentivized to provide livable wages for workers. The simplest explanation is public image. Although many apparel companies are to blame for employing sweatshops, Nike in particular has come under fire for its low wages and poor working conditions in places like Indonesia. This has cost Nike much more profit loss than would have been caused from higher wages for employees. If non-profit human rights groups can bring light to companies that offer poor working conditions, companies will be shamed into reforming and placing people above profits.

 

The other issue is that the intent behind this theory can be taken too far. After all, creating minimum wages that are too high leads companies to either downsize or higher more skilled workers. After all, if the unskilled Bangladeshi workers were being paid the same wages as European minimum wage workers (around 15 dollars per hour), it would make far more sense for companies to higher domestically. Thus, in order to help workers in poorer nations such as Bangladesh, a balance should be struck.

 

I would propose that top apparel companies reach an agreement with one another to both increase wages for foreign workers and improve working conditions and workplace safety for their workers all around the world. Of course, this will cost the company a share of their profits. However, they can regain some of these profits in the form of positive public image. Additionally, even if these policies cut into their profits, companies have a certain corporate social responsibility and the cost of such measures is so low that it would be justified to implement them for the betterment of society. 

The United States has called for the release of U.S. Citizen Pae-Jun Ho recently sentenced arbitrarily to 15 years of hard labor in North Korea for crimes unknown. Many suspect that he angered North Korean law enforcement officials when he took pictures of starving North Korean children that the regime feared he would use to put North Korea in a bad light. Regardless of the unfairness of this case, the U.S. government should try to distance itself from the case as far as possible.

 

The United States has to respect the laws of other nations. Although North Korea’s legal system is completely based on the whims and fancies of Kim Jong-un and thus is completely unjustified, the U.S. must recognized its decisions. After all, similarly arbitrary decisions take place on a daily basis in the DPRK involving North Koreans. So why should an American be exempt from the same legal code?

 

Pae Jun-Ho would have known the risks involved in traveling to North Korea. After all, many foreigners, including American citizens have been seized in recent years. Considering the political situation between the Untied States and the DPRK currently, Pae would have known that he was at heightened risk to be used as a bargaining tool.

 

It appears that is exactly what Pae is- a bargaining tool. North Korea could hold his release contingent on the United States recognizing Kim Jong-un as rightful leader of North Korea or recognizing the DPRK as a legitimate nuclear state.

 

The United States should not fall into this trap. Negotiating with North Korea would send the wrong message to Kim Jong-un and North Korean party elites that they can get concessions from America simply by stirring up trouble. This very reasoning is why the United States has stopped negotiating with terrorists. Yet, in recent years, the United States has been negotiating with North Korea and appeasing it. For example, North Korea can almost count on the United States to provide them grain or rice aid whenever they launch a nuke. The leverage over the United States that North Korea has been able to gain is unhealthy and this trend should be reversed with all immediacy possible. Additionally, the concessions North Korea would likely demand, including the U.S. recognizing North Korea as a nuclear state and cutting sanctions could allow North Korea to develop further nuclear weaponry which could leave tens if not hundreds of thousands of Americans dead. While it is tough for the United States to risk the life of even one innocent civilian such as Pae, the United States should realize that Pae, sorrowful as it sounds, is a necessary sacrifice for the greater good of taming North Korea and its leveraging skills.

 

 

A new sales tax code for internet companies such as Amazon and eBay has been devised. This new code favors small businesses by requiring companies to only file one set of tax returns for each state in which they had a financial transaction. This law is very effective in meeting its said goal; the amount of resources devoted to tax accountancy in small businesses is far more as a percent of revenue than in large businesses. However, the question should be asked: why is the government favoring small businesses? Small businesses have been almost universally supported by U.S. voters for so long that many Americans have forgotten why they supported small businesses in the first place.

 

Small businesses bring to mind hardworking, backbreaking Americans. Small business is almost synonymous with the American Dream of upward mobility in the minds of many Americans.

 

In reality, though, supporting small businesses may not be economically wise. Many cite the fact that small businesses employ half of workers to suggest that the government should support them. However, this figure on its own means absolutely nothing. After all, big businesses also employ a huge percentage of the workforce. Moreover, if small businesses were supported less than large businesses, large businesses would have less competition, larger profits, and thus more funds to employ workers.

 

In fact, it may be better for the government to support large businesses instead of small businesses. The risk to the economy of a large business crashing is far greater than that of a small business; after all, small businesses go out of business all the time. Almost 3 in 4 small businesses, in fact, are forced to close their doors. When a small business goes out of business, 50-100 people may be out of a job. When a large bank goes out of business, hundreds of thousands of Americans may lose their income source and the domino effect could be devastating.

 

The propensity of small businesses to go out of business makes supporting small businesses less attractive. Small businesses are overly reliant on market conditions meaning that during recessions, small businesses will go out of business more easily and more people will join the unemployment lines.

 

Moreover, small businesses are less efficient than large businesses. Both small and large businesses have similar start-up costs. Thus, revenue from large businesses disproportionally feeds profit. With more profits, large businesses can hire far more workers than can small businesses, even if a small business is more successful.

 

Of course, small businesses do benefit the economy more than large businesses in many ways. For example, small businesses make the economy more competitive, driving down prices for consumers. Additionally, in good economic times, they can grow far faster than can large banks and businesses. Nonetheless, the detriments of small businesses are great enough that the government should prioritize large businesses over small businesses or, at the very least, put the two at a level playing field instead of continually supporting small businesses. 

Colorado’s Court of Appeals has ruled that, although marijuana smoking is legal, employers can legally choose to fire workers for testing positive for marijuana.

 

This highlights the long list of unresolved issues regarding Colorado and Washington’s recent voting initiatives.

 

First of all, Colorado and Washington made the mistake of using a referendum to decide this issue. This referendum to legalize marijuana showed that a majority of Colorado and Washington residents believe that marijuana is less dangerous than other banned drugs. However, the government’s job in a representative democracy like the United States is not to represent the intent of the voters. That, after all, is the goal in a direct democracy. Instead, in an enlightened representative democracy, the government should represent the good of the people. The difference between the intent of the voters and the good of voters is that often voters are too short-sighted to understand what is in their best interests and this is the case in the issue of legalizing marijuana: while in principle the individual liberty to use marijuana may appeal to voters, the long term consequences make it a mistake.

 

Now, even if Colorado and Washington are to insist that the referendum was justified, they have both failed to enforce the law based on the intent of voters who had voted in favor of the referendum. Allowing employers to be fired solely for smoking marijuana, despite the fact that this substance is now legal, clearly violates the intent of those who believed marijuana was not dangerous enough to be illicit.

 

An additional unresolved issue pertaining to the marijuana referendums is that these decisions can be overruled by a federal law banning. Obama has said that he will not tackle these state initiatives and will allow the decision of the state referendums to prevail, but what will happen after Obama? The status quo would allow future presidents opposed to the use of marijuana to overturn the law on the grounds that it contradicts federal laws.

 

Clearly, the Colorado and Washington state referendums to legalize marijuana were mistakes. Firstly, the premise on which they were based, that marijuana is not dangerous enough to be labeled an illicit drug and that marijuana is too hard to regulate, were flawed. Moreover, even if those premises were correct, the violations of federal law that these laws carried and the flaws in their enforcement provide evidence that the laws deserve to be struck down immediately. 

The recent case of Germany’s penalty on Google’s privacy violations, set at $189,225, highlights the issue of corporate accountability. This figure represents an insignificant fraction of a percent of Google’s annual profits. Unfortunately, this is no isolated case. In recent history, companies have not been doesn’t justice in their wrongdoings, largely because the government feels it is unfair to penalize stockholders for corporate irresponsibility.

 

 To be fair, this penalty was near the maximum allowed in Germany for such cases. Why, though, does Germany have such a low maximum on the crimes for corporate irresponsibility. More importantly, what steps can be taken to deter companies from violating their corporate social responsibility other than imposing fines that to many multinationals are simply a given in the cost of doing business. Clearly, there is an issue when it is cheaper for companies to act irresponsibly and pay fines when due than for them to abide by the law in the first place.

 

One possible solution is to hold individuals rather than companies as a whole accountable to violations of the law.

 

Individuals have no deterrent to abide by the law in financial transactions. Given the bureaucracy of a company, it is almost impossible to single out individuals as perpetrators of fraud and other major white collar crimes. Individuals in corporations get far more rewards from skirting the law and making big profits than they get punishment for getting caught and landing the company in trouble. This is because it is so easy to blame issues like this on superiors. As Kennedy said after the failed Bay of Pigs coup, “victory has a hundred fathers, and defeat is an orphan.”

 

Further transparency must be created in the corporate world to make it easy to identify those involved in white collar crime. This will allow the government to put public need above private greed, the mandate of an enlightened government. After all, people will be less likely to act in careless disregard of laws if they are held responsible not through the veneer of a multinational corporation but rather at an individual level.

 

Ultimately, the goal of a justice system is to be proportional. Unfortunately, because big corporations bring much needed jobs and revenue to the economy they are often exempt from this proportionality. Clearly, punishing companies is not the solution. The solution lies in individual punishment. This will, in theory, create deterrent for individuals that will lead to far less white collar crime.

The United States is often held as the standard for individual rights. However, with the recent fear of terrorism, many impressions of the rights Americans and those residing and being convicted in the United States have been disproven.

 

The case of Tsarnaev, the Boston bombing suspect, is a huge step against individual freedoms. Till date, Tsarnaev has not been read his Miranda rights, including the rights to a lawyer or to remain silent. At the same time, anything he says can be used against him in court. While his physical state has been given as an explanation for this, it is possible that these rights will never be read to him. As a domestic terrorist, it is highly possible that Tsarnaev could be labeled as an enemy combatant which would allow him to be detained and tortured in Guantanamo Bay. This case would by no means be the first case in which Miranda rights were not read out. However, this case is groundbreaking in that Tsarnaev is a U.S. citizen. Prior to this point, the potential of questioning Americans without their supposedly “natural” rights was little to none.

 

This case, as with many in recent history, has been solved with the aid of security cameras. The United States today is by no means a “Big Brother” state. Americans are not being spied on in their homes nor are they being constantly surveyed in public. However, precedent is the main fear. If the government is imposing measures that years ago would have seemed to draconian and these measures are proving successful in their goal of catching terrorists, how far with the U.S. government continue to go to this end.

 

There is no doubt that these steps greatly help law enforcement officials in catching criminals, especially those that pose greatest risk to Americans. However, the question must be raised: how far are Americans willing to go to compromise individual rights in the pursuit of safety of society. By no means is the United States on track to be an Orwellian state but should it head down that track? If Americans are as worried about the threat of terrorism as they appear to be following the Boston bombings, camera surveillance, phone and e-mail monitoring, and court rights of innocent until proven guilty should be removed in order to make it so difficult for domestic terror to strike that is simply does not strike at all.

 

At the end of the day, the question is whether Americans prefer living in a safe society where the government is viewed as a protector of the society or in a more libertarian society where the government is viewed as a protector of individual rights.