Opinion
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
4 — Friday, December 6, 2019

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MAX STEINBAUM | COLUMN

Well-faring farewell

Two truths and a lie: Cheney, Iraq and viral memes

O

n a Monday morning in 
September 1796, readers 
of 
the 
Philadelphia 
newspaper the Daily Advertiser 
learned that George Washington, 
after having served as president 
for eight years, would not seek 
re-election for a third term. The 
news that Washington, former 
commander of the Continental 
Army, president of the Constitutional 
Convention and first President of the 
United States – in short, an American 
demigod – would be stepping down 
probably overshadowed the content 
of his farewell address. The letter, 
first published by the Advertiser 
and soon reprinted by newspapers 
nationwide, also contained words 
of counsel for the fledgling republic. 
One noteworthy piece of advice 
Washington offered concerned the 
recent rise of a party system, which 
pitted Hamilton’s Federalists against 
Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans. 
Washington warned that a party 
system could threaten popular 
democracy, but he acknowledged 
that the advent of an adversarial 
system of partisanship structure 
was perhaps inevitable. “This spirit, 
unfortunately, is inseparable from 
our nature,” Washington wrote, 
and it manifests itself “under 
different shapes in all governments.” 
Despite his visions for non-partisan 
government, Washington worried – 
and correctly so – that factionalism 
would take root in the District of 
Columbia.
The party system framework 
established by the Federalists and 
Democratic-Republicans still exists 
today. While the names have changed 
and third parties have occasionally 
experienced swells in popularity, 
the two-party system has dominated 
the American government for over 
two 
centuries. 
That 
American 
democracy has survived this whole 
time with a two-party system would 
seem to indicate that Washington’s 
concerns were ill-founded — but it 
also doesn’t mean that his cautions 
against partisanship were without 
usable wisdom.
In fact, Washington’s advice 
reflects present public sentiments 
about our current system. A March 
NBC/WSJ poll found that 38 percent 
of Americans “think the two-party 
system is seriously broken,” the 
highest public share since NBC/
WSJ first posed the question in 1995. 
Only one in 10, feel that “the two-
party system works fairly well.”
The two-party system is so 
deeply entrenched in our political 
landscape that it’s safe to say 
Washington’s non-partisan visions 
will never be achieved. That said, 

the two-party system, while it is the 
U.S.’s traditional model, is perhaps 
not suited for our hyper-polarized 
times. 
Though 
a 
multi-party 
system is a feature of many modern 
democracies, it has only a few 
historical precedents in the United 
States. On occasion, third parties 
have enjoyed fleeting popularity 
– sometimes even displacing a 
pre-existing party – but prevailing 
currents have traditionally borne 
American politics back to a two-
party equilibrium. But such an 
electoral arrangement is not entirely 
alien to American political thought; 
it was actually promoted by James 
Madison, our fourth president and 
the chief author of the Constitution.

To counter the consolidation of 
power in the hands of a few, Madison 
advocated in Federalist Paper No. 
10 the development of multiple 
“factions,” or parties, to represent the 
interests of a diverse populace. Like 
Washington, Madison recognized 
that 
non-partisan 
government 
was a pipe dream, as splintering 
into political groups is “sown in 
the nature of man.” Accepting 
this reality, the most realistic way 
to address Americans’ political 
interests would be to have a range of 
factions catering to them — thereby 
also diffusing power between a 
greater range of the population.
Like 
Washington, 
Madison’s 
visions did not come to national 
fruition. 
Madison 
feared 
the 
consolidation of power in the hands 
of a single party, which our two-party 
system has been largely successful 
in avoiding. That said, increasing 
numbers of Americans feel their 
voices aren’t represented through 
the two options that dominate our 
political scene.
The Democratic and Republican 
parties — presently at their most 
polarized in living memory — 
just aren’t cutting it. Two weeks 
before the 2016 election, 61 percent 
of Americans said neither party 
represented their beliefs. A natural 
remedy for this, of course, is the 
introduction of additional parties 

to the U.S.’s political stage. And 
a majority would be in favor: 
According to a 2018 Gallup poll, 57 
percent of Americans reflected a 
desire “for a third, major political 
party.”
Our election system can be 
described 
as 
winner-takes-all: 
The congressional candidate who 
receives the most votes wins their 
district, and the presidential hopeful 
who receives the most votes gains 
all of a state’s electoral votes. The 
emergence of a major third party 
under such an arrangement is 
unlikely, because a vote for a third-
party candidate is often perceived as 
a “wasted vote.” As such, a majority 
of voters hold their noses and go with 
the party that more closely reflects 
their interests, but leave the ballot 
box unsatisfied.
Encouraging 
the 
emergence 
of third parties, and in doing so 
providing the public with more 
viable political options to represent 
it, necessitates a reconfiguration 
of 
our 
election 
system. 
A 
proportional system — wherein 
splits in the electorate’s voting 
are proportionately reflected in 
government — would allow far 
greater freedom in one’s choice of 
party without the current risk of 
“throwing away” one’s vote.
Say you’re a Republican, but you 
worry that the party is becoming 
too conservative, and you’re sick 
of inane partisan bickering. Under 
a proportional system, you could 
vote for the moderate party that 
would inevitably emerge (parties 
of all stripes exist in countries with 
such an electoral system). If the 35 
percent of Americans who identify 
as moderates were to vote with you, 
the “Centrist Party” would receive 
35 percent of seats – perhaps enough 
to constitute a plurality.
The Founding Fathers were wise 
men who devised an electoral system 
that has functioned, even thrived, 
for over two centuries. They were 
also not infallible. By design, they 
left their American progeny with a 
malleable Constitution to be altered 
in accordance with changing needs. 
The Democratic and Republican 
parties are becoming increasingly 
polarized, and on their divergent 
trajectories leave more and more 
ideological real estate between 
them. It does not take a political 
oracle to recognize that this trend is 
unsustainable. If we are to improve 
American democracy, we must be 
receptive to propositions that will 
ensure its preservation.

ALLISON PUJOL | COLUMN

Max Steinbaum can be reached at 

maxst@umich.edu.

B

efore the exciting new 
world of TikTok, before 
we could enjoy its “For 
You” page’s random, entertaining 
15-second videos and long before 
the proliferation of VSCO girl 
jokes, there was Vine. Most young 
people in the United States keeping 
an eye on the internet are already 
well aware of one of Vine’s most 
iconic memes, “Dick Cheney made 
money off the Iraq War.” The 
brief, seemingly tongue-in-cheek 
video of the original Vine of a guy 
repeating this sentiment into the 
camera has received hundreds of 
thousands of views and seems like 
a snapshot of millennial humor, but 
the history of private war-making 
in U.S. politics is long and brutal. 
Private 
military 
contractors 
— 
essentially, 
multinational 
corporations that hire professional 
mercenaries to participate and aid 
in wars abroad — are an ideal tool 
to ensure the human and emotional 
costs of war remain largely hidden 
from the American public. In her 
book “The Lonely Soldier”, author 
Helen Benedict details the overlap 
between 
private 
corporations 
who engaged in war-fighting and 
the government officials who 
supported the conflict in Iraq. As 
the book and other sources detail, 
the corporations involved in the 
Iraq War included those such as 
Blackwater Worldwide. But the 
largest corporation by far was KBR, 
a subsidiary of the Halliburton 
corporation, of which Dick Cheney 
had been the CEO before entering 
the White House. In the first 
year of the Iraq War alone, then-
President Bush and Vice President 
Cheney handed over $39.5 billion 
over 10 years in noncompetitive 
contracts to KBR to provide 
anything from food and water to 
vehicles and weapons for soldiers 
in Iraq. Suspicions of Cheney’s 
war profiteering seem even more 

credible given The Guardian’s 
report that Cheney was paid an 
extra $1 million by Halliburton 
during the time he served as vice 
president. The Washington Post 
has also reported extensively on the 
large bonuses that KBR received 
during the time of the conflict. 
One would assume that the 
massive amount of money pouring 
into private military contractors 
during the Iraq War would have 
translated into the efficiency and 
the desired results often associated 
with the private sector. But the 
use of private defense contractors 
has yielded mixed results abroad, 
and this is particularly true 
in Iraq. Indeed, an archived 
2011 report from a bipartisan 
government commission tasked 
with investigating potential abuse 
of funds in the Iraq War estimated 
that there was a $60 billion total — 
or $12 million/day — loss or waste in 
fraud via funds allocated from the 
government to private contractors 
since 2001. 
Though Cheney’s involvement in 
the conflict seems troubling as well 
as financially motivated, it would be 
inaccurate to suggest that corporate 
greed was the sole contributor 
to the U.S.’s involvement in Iraq. 
This is not necessarily a uniquely 
American phenomenon — the U.K., 
for example, also has a booming 
industry for private war-fighting. 
What 
is 
uniquely 
American, 
though, is the breadth of other 
justifications for U.S. involvement 
and deployment, which is not more 
reassuring than the assertion that 
Cheney’s greed facilitated the 
conflict itself. President George W. 
Bush’s claim that Iraq possessed 
chemical and/or biological weapons 
of mass destruction revealed itself 
to be a lie. Many in policy circles 
also believed that the U.S. would 
be welcomed as a benevolent 
global power that could restore the 

American-led deterrence in the 
Middle East (a blatant falsehood, 
as U.S. forces entering the region 
quickly realized). But one of the 
darker reasons later suggested for 
the war is that the United States 
needed the conflict — that the post-
9/11 power vacuum necessitated 
an 
international 
leader 
to 
demonstrate it could fill the 
void of liberalism, that the U.S.’s 
invasion of Iraq would “reassert 
and demonstrate (U.S.) strength 
in no uncertain terms to a global 
audience, crown itself king of the 
hill, and reestablish generalized 
deterrence.” 
It’ll be years before we can see 
what the Bush administration’s 
motivations might have been, after 
White House documents become 
declassified or leaked. But we 
can see fragments of this policy 
at work today in Donald Trump’s 
presidency, despite the White 
House’s 
repeated 
isolationist 
stances 
toward 
international 
engagement. 
Daniel 
DePetris, 
a 
fellow 
at 
security-focused 
think tank Defense Priorities, 
has written about how Trump 
has 
repeatedly 
characterized 
military engagement in the Middle 
East as hopeless: The president 
argued that “Iraq was a disaster; 
Afghanistan was a tragic waste of 
lives of resources; Syria was a land 
of ‘sand and death’; and the nation-
building campaigns in the Middle 
East were a sad joke.” And yet, for 
all of Trump’s insistence on the 
futility of spending resources in 
the Middle East, his rhetoric has 
not aligned with reality. Recent 
increases in U.S. military spending 
seem to indicate that the drive for 
American militarism has certainly 
remained intact and has every 
intention to accelerate. 

Allison Pujol can be reached at 

ampmich@umich.edu.

In the last six months, New 
York Gov. Andrew Cuomo 
followed through with a plan 
to plant 500 police officers in 
the subway and bus systems 
of New York City to combat 
a rise in fare evasion and 
worker attacks. The policy 
will fine fare evaders $100 
 
— but with increased police 
presence in public spaces, 
heightened 
surveillance 
from new security cameras 
and $249 million spent to 
make these changes, New 
Yorkers across the boroughs 
are protesting these changes 
that will disproportionately 
impact 
poor 
communities 
and people of color. This 
crackdown on fare evasion 
criminalizes 
these 
groups 
instead of succeeding with 
any 
greater 
MTA 
claim, 
costing the city more than 
just the millions spent to 
“better” it. 
State Sen. Jessica Ramos, 
D-N.Y., put it best: “Say we 
had $249M and we could 
do anything we wanted to 
improve the subway system, 
what 
would 
you 
want 
to 
see 
prioritized?” 
The 
MTA lacks funding for its 
programs 
and 
desperately 
needs 
infrastructure 
fixes 
that could benefit all New 
Yorkers. Tracks and stations 
themselves 
are 
defunct 
with constant delays and 
maintenance issues, causing 
a steady ridership decline. 
What residents really want 
is to be able to get to where 
they’re going quickly and 
safely — something that could 
be fixed with a dedication 
to upgrades and efficient 
construction plans. 
From the perspective of 
the everyday commuter, fare-
beater crackdowns seem like 
a misinformed judgment call 
by authority figures detached 
from the subway itself. The 
problems most riders have 
with public transit are the 
inconsistent train times and 
crumbling 
infrastructure. 
Danny Pearlstein, the policy 
and communications director 
for 
the 
nonprofit 
Riders 
Alliance, when speaking with 
AM New York said, “The fare 
evasion conversation overall 
is a red herring. When the 

governor talks about fare 
evasion, he’s throwing the 
subway’s problems back on 
riders.” 
Further, the recent MTA 
fare crackdown follows a 
pattern of harmful policing 
policies, 
such 
as 
“stop-
and-frisk” 
policing, 
which 
disproportionately 
targets 
Black 
and 
Latinx 
youth. 
Just 
like 
“stop-and-frisk”, 
the crackdown is already 
impacting people of color, 
with 84 percent of Brooklyn 
fare evasion arrests being 
Black and Latinx.

Even though nearly 40 
percent 
of 
subway 
riders 
evade fares at least once 
a 
year, 
African-American 
and 
Latinx 
communities, 
especially those that are low 
income, have the greatest 
likelihood of arrest for fare 
evasion. The MTA crackdown 
is 
representative 
of 
the 
larger burden of policing 
that low-income and POC 
communities face all across 
the country. Just as other 
policing policies and tactics, 
the discretionary nature of 
police power leads to the 
unjust and racist targeting of 
communities of color. 
To be clear, the policing 
and criminalization of fare 
evasion 
is 
costly 
— 
and 
not just financially. Over-
policing and policies such 
as 
“stop-and-frisk” 
erode 
trust 
between 
the 
police 
and the communities they 
are supposed to be serving. 
The MTA claims these new 
anti-fare 
beater 
policies 
will increase rider safety, 
but crime in the subways 
is actually down to around 
one crime per million riders 
— an estimated 86 percent 

drop 
from 
1990. 
Despite 
arguments that criminalizing 
fare evasion makes transit 
safer, the reality is that 
criminalizing petty offenses 
destroys communities’ faith 
in the police to keep their 
communities safe. 
So far, the introduction 
of 500 police officers into 
the subway system has been 
a cause for concern. In a 
city already grappling with 
cases 
of 
police 
brutality 
and 
unreasonable 
arrests, 
the criminalization of fare 
evasion is furthering tensions 
between all parties. After 
videos showed young Black 
teenagers 
being 
tackled, 
tased and beaten over the 
$2.75 
fare, 
riders 
have 
started a “Swipe it Forward” 
campaign, and movements 
like “Decolonize this Place” 
have organized mass fare 
evasions similar to those in 
Santiago, Chile. Fare evasion 
is not a violent crime and 
criminalizing it only stands 
to undermine any attempts 
of 
understanding 
and 
communication between the 
police and citizens — two vital 
components to maintaining a 
safe environment. 
It is time that we as a society 
learn from our past policy 
failures. The MTA crackdown 
is only one of a long-standing 
pattern 
of 
discriminatory 
police practices that have 
consequences 
for 
people’s 
individual 
and 
collective 
societal futures. 
The 
Michigan 
Daily 
Editorial Board stands with 
protesters and believes the 
New York City government 
should 
stop 
using 
tactics 
that do nothing to resolve 
the issues within the subway 
system and, instead, only 
further harass communities 
of color. The money being 
funneled 
into 
increasing 
police presence in subways 
and installing cameras to 
catch fare evasion should be 
put toward the plethora of 
other issues the MTA faces 
rather than being used to 
intimidate 
marginalized 
people. With the thoughts of 
guerrilla MTA signs in mind, 
we implore you, in more ways 
than one: Don’t snitch. Swipe.

FROM THE DAILY

Don’t snitch — swipe

T

he Metropolitan Transportation Authority of New York City is 
cracking down on fare beaters. This crackdown is costing the 
city millions, damaging subway culture and disproportionately 
impacting a number of historically disenfranchised groups. 

61 percent of 
Americans said 
neither party 
represented their 
beliefs

Criminalizing 
petty offenses 
destroys 
communities’ 
faith in the police

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