Tom Glenn's Blog, page 40

Executions (2)

I know of no justification for the continuing use of executions in the U.S., but they are continuing. Arizona, for example, plans to execute Frank Jarvis Atwood on Wednesday, June 8, 2022, at the Central Unit of the Arizona State Prison Complex in Florence, Arizona. Sixty-five-year-old Frank is convicted of murdering eight-year-old Vicki Lynne Hoskinson on September 17, 1984, in Tucson, Arizona. Atwood has until May 19 to choose between the gas chamber or lethal injection as the method of his execution. Either is horrifying to me.

We have evidence by the pound that execution does not deter criminals including murderers. Many Americans, myself included, find the death penalty egregiously immoral—no government has the right to take a citizen’s life. And execution is far more expensive than life imprisonment. Some estimate that it costs U.S. taxpayers between $50 and $90 million more per year (depending on the jurisdiction) to prosecute death penalty cases than life sentences. In Texas, one death penalty case costs the state about $2.3 million. That’s is three times higher than what it would cost to imprison one inmate in the highest security prison cell available for 40 years.

So we have no justification for continuing the barbaric practice of state killing.

It’s time for us to speak out and work for change.

Executions

The civilized world is moving away from the death penalty. While 55 countries still retain the executions for ordinary crimes, 108 countries have completely abolished the death penalty for all crimes, and 28 countries have effectively abolished the death penalty by not executing anyone over the past ten years. Only 20 countries were known to have carried out judicial executions in 2018, the most recent year for which I could garner statistics. Amnesty International recorded at least 690 executions worldwide in 2018, a 31 percent decline from the 993 executions it recorded in 2017 and 58 percent below the 25-year-high total of 1,634 reported executions in 2015.

The country that executes the most of its citizens is China. Because China refuses to make public the number of people it kills, we can only estimate; authorities suggest that number is more than a thousand a year. Other leading execution countries are Iran, Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia; the numbers killed range from a few dozen to hundreds.

Among the civilized democracies of the world, the U.S. is the only one that still puts people to death. It is the only G7 country to still execute people. In 2020, the U.S. executed 22 people.

By way of background: The Group of Seven (G7) is an inter-governmental political forum consisting of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

More next time.

“Annamese” Awarded

The Human Relations Indie Book Awards just informed me that my novel Last of the Annamese (Naval Institute Press, 2017) has received their 2022 Gold Winner for Historical and Realistic Fiction award. That makes Annamese my most awarded book. Eric Hoffer and the Maryland Writers Association both conferred honors on the book in years past. The novel is set during the fall of Saigon, from which I escaped under fire after the North Vietnamese were already in the streets of the city.

Annamese is fiction in name only. Every event related in the story really happened. But because the book is a novel, I attributed the actions taken to fictional characters rather than to myself and people I know.

I am honored that the story of what I and others endured during the fall of Saigon is being recognized and commended. After the years when Vietnam was considered a shameful war and I made no mention of my role in it (between 1962 and 1975, I spent more time in Vietnam than I did in the U.S.), I am now able to join my fellow Vietnam vets in pride in our contributions, even though it was the first war the U.S. ever lost.

Who’s Who Recognition

I am humbled and honored to report that the Who’s Who of both Marquis and the Strathmore just informed me that they are including me as an author in their 2022 list of luminaries. Both sent me a plaque that now shares an honored wall space with my “Last Man Out” award given me by my 43 subordinates after Saigon fell and I got them and their families out safely.

I am grateful and humbled.

Medical Debt

I’ve written here before about my sense that the U.S. needs to join the rest of the civilized world by turning medical care into a government service for citizens. Instead, we, the capitalists of the world, make medicine a business, a way to make money.

The result is that those of us who can afford it have medical insurance to pay our medical bills. But, according to a 2021 survey conducted by West Health and Gallup, almost 10 percent of us, some 31.1 million people, lack health insurance. And a staggering 46 million people—nearly one-fifth of all Americans—cannot afford necessary healthcare services. One result is that many go without medical care; another is that medical debt among our population is huge. According to Small Town American Media, “Nearly 20 percent of Americans have some form of medical debt. Medical debt amounts to some of the greatest debt American’s hold. In total, Americans have about $141 billion in medical debt.”

When will we grow up, follow the model of the advanced democracies of the world, and treat medical care as a right instead of as a service for sale?

Trump’s Classified Damage

The possibility that Donald Trump may have severely damaged U.S. security by revealing U.S. classified information to hostile foreign governments remains a concern among those of us who have served as government employees working with classified material. Because our intelligence and other classified operations depend on secrecy for their success, ordinary citizens may never know what losses we suffered.

Trump’s affection for the Russians and Vladimir Putin started before his election in 2016. The Russians, anxious to exploit his partiality, went out of their way to bolster his election and made no secret of their fondness for him. Trump has continued to favor the Russians and recently described Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as “genius” and “savvy”—citing the invasion, Trump said “Oh, that’s wonderful.”

We know that in May 2017 Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador. U.S. officials said that Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State. The data Trump gave the Russians was reported to have been codeword, one of the highest levels of classification. Its source was reported to be another country who had not given us permission to share the secret information with a third nation.

We also know that Trump illegally moved classified documents to his residence in Florida when he left the White House after his defeat in 2020. The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration reported to Congress that it had recovered 15 boxes of classified material.

Trump makes no secret of his disdain for the law and his willingness to endanger U.S. security. We’ll never know the extent of harm done because the government depends on secrecy to protect its sources and methods. And Trump goes unpunished. Had I, as an ordinary government employee, given classified information to the Russians or stolen 15 boxes of classified documents, I would have been arrested, tried, convicted, and imprisoned.

Why does the U.S. government not arrest Trump?

Flea Market Reminder

A quick reminder: I’ll be hawking and autographing my books at the Hawthorn Center Flea Market in Columbia, Maryland on Saturday, May 14. Here’s the flier:

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Hope I’ll see you all there.

More Words, Words, Words (2)

Back to it again: words and their derivation and meaning. To remind the reader: I am a fulltime and devoted writer. Therefore, words are my bread-and-butter. So that’s where I begin: bread-and-butter: according to Merriam-Webster, it means being as basic as the earning of one’s livelihood.

That brings me to a far more complex term, sycophant. Merriam-Webster has a lot to say about that word: “In ancient Greece, sykophantēs meant ‘slanderer.’ It derives from two other Greek words, sykon (meaning ‘fig’) and phainein (meaning ‘to show or reveal’). How did fig revealers become slanderers? One theory has to do with the taxes Greek farmers were required to pay on the figs they brought to market. Apparently, the farmers would sometimes try to avoid making the payments, but squealers—fig revealers—would fink on them, and they would be forced to pay. Another possible source is a sense of the word fig meaning ‘a gesture or sign of contempt’ (as thrusting a thumb between two fingers). In any case, Latin retained the ‘slanderer’ sense when it borrowed a version of sykophantēs, but by the time English speakers in the 16th century borrowed it as sycophant, the squealers had become flatterers.”

I’ll close with one more word: vanguard, meaning a group of people leading the way in new developments or ideas. The term comes from the Middle French, avant-guarde (forward guard). My understanding is that the word specifies those out in front of a movement, blazing new horizons.

More next time.

Voter Suppression Laws

Because Democrats outnumber Republicans, the GOP is working hard to suppress voting in hopes that restricting Democratic power in the voting booth will help Republicans to win elections. That Democrats outnumber Republicans is obvious in the statistics: On December 17, 2020, Gallup polling found that 31 percent of Americans identified as Democrats, 25 percent identified as Republican, and 41 percent as Independent. A more recent Gallup poll (undated) finds that 49 percent of Americans consider themselves Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents, while 40 percent consider themselves Republicans or Republican-leaning independents. I suspect that given the atrocious record of the Republicans starting with Donald Trump’s election in 2016, running through the mob attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 that Trump incited (which the Republicans now refer to as “legitimate political discourse,”), and Trump’s great lie that he won the 2020 election despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, more and more Americans will be siding with the Democrats against the Republicans.

So now Republicans led by Mitch McConnell are trying to improve their election prospects by passing 489 voter suppression bills in 49 states. And it’s getting worse: as of January 14 of this year, legislators in at least 27 states have introduced, pre-filed, or carried over 250 bills with restrictive provisions, compared to 75 such bills in 24 states on January 14, 2021. Worst of all, these bills disproportionately impact voters of color. And the Republicans justify the introduction of bills suppressing the vote by claiming widespread voter fraud; all available evidence proves the opposite.

I suspect that these and other measures taken by the Republicans will over time reduce their popularity to the degree that the GOP will cease to be a major player in American politics. In the meantime, current polls favor the Republicans in the 2022 elections. As I have written here before, I suspect that the polls are misleading. We’ll find out in November.

Putin’s Nuclear Sabre Rattling

As terrifying as the nuclear threats coming from Russian President Vladimir Putin are, we Americans need to put them in context. While Russia’s ability to strike with nuclear weapons against the west is considerable, it is nothing compared to that of the U.S. Put differently, Russia could inflict great damage on the west and the U.S. with nuclear strikes, but Russia would be destroyed by the response, bombed back to the stone age. And there’s no doubt that Putin and his oligarchs would be instantly killed.

Putin does, of course, know the threat. So do his fellow despots. So as long as Putin and his associates are acting rationally, we can rest assured that they will not resort to nuclear strikes against the U.S. But evidence that the rulers of Russia are not sound in their thinking is manifest, especially in their decision to invade Ukraine in the first place. The fact that the war has gone against them in so many ways shows how poorly they understood their own military vulnerability. And we can’t rule out the use of small-yield tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield if the war continues to go against Russia.

So Russia’s nuclear threat continues. We and other western nations, including Ukraine, must counter Russia’s military threat and make it unmistakably clear that resort to nuclear means will be ruinous for Russia. That might mean assuring that tactical nuclear weapons are available to Ukraine in the event that Russia resorts to them.