On Snowden, Putin and Trump

The ACLU is behind a campaign to prompt President Obama to pardon National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden. As Snowden told the Guardian, he knows he violated “laws on the books,” but “that is perhaps why the pardon power exists — for the exceptions, for the things that may seem unlawful in letters on a page but when we look at them morally, when we look at them ethically, when we look at the results, it seems these were necessary things.”

Snowden shows an understanding of the president’s pardon power. Still, I have a few questions I would want answered before I would sign onto the notion that the ex-NSA contractor acted morally and ethically — and deserves clemency. To wit:

How did a guy who’s against authoritarian governments that spy on their citizens end up in Vladmir Putin’s Russia? (Snowden blames the State Department for revoking his passport after he left Hong Kong, but why is he in Moscow? His residence belies his rhetoric.)

If Snowden wanted to stop the NSA’s practices in 2013, then why didn’t he, as former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell suggested in his book “The Great War of Our Time,” simply copy a couple of documents and mail them to the Washington Post instead of downloading 1.7 million documents and taking them to China?

If Obama pardons the biggest leaker of all time, then won’t he also have to pardon others — Chelsea Manning, former CIA chief David Petraeus — who also shared classified information? If Obama pardons Snowden, then how does the intelligence community keep secrets in the future?

Director Oliver Stone’s “Snowden” came out last week — which gives immediacy to the ACLU’s effort, as does the calendar countdown on Obama’s ability to absolve Snowden. Photogenic and self-deprecating, Snowden fits the central casting image of a reluctant hero.

In Laura Poitras’ documentary “Citizenfour,” Snowden repeatedly urges others not to make the NSA story about him — which of course Poitras does. Better to make this a morality play than a hard-boiled look at the cost of these leaks to U.S. intelligence and America’s allies.

Snowden has bravely committed — under his own name — what he frames as an act of civil disobedience. But if Snowden truly is who he says he is, let him come home and face the criminal charges against him before a jury of his peers.

As long as Snowden remains holed up in Moscow, he might as well be Donald Trump, who is so smitten with Putin’s praise that he compliments him in turn. Trump and Snowden share a willingness to live in Putin’s thrall, but at least Donald Trump doesn’t live under Vladimir Putin’s thumb.

President Obama should not pardon Edward Snowden.

Ordinarily, it is not a good idea to base how you vote on one issue. But if black lives really matter, as they should matter like all other lives, then it is hard to see any racial issue that matters as much as education.

The government could double the amount of money it spends on food stamps or triple the amount it spends on housing subsidies, and it will mean very little if the next generation of young blacks goes out into the world as adults without a decent education.

Many things that are supposed to help blacks actually have a track record of making things worse. Minimum wage laws have had a devastating effect in making black teenage unemployment several times higher than it once was.

In my own life, I was very fortunate when I left home in 1948, at age 17 — a high school dropout with no skills or experience. At that time, the unemployment rate of black 16- and 17-year-old males was 9.4 percent. For white males the same ages, it was 10.2 percent.

Why were these unemployment rates so much lower than we have become used to seeing in later times — and with very little difference between blacks and whites?

What was different about those times was that the minimum wage, established in 1938, had been rendered meaningless by a decade of high inflation. It was the same as if there were no minimum wage.

In later years, as the minimum wage was repeatedly raised to keep up with inflation, black teenage unemployment from 1971 through 1994 was never less than three times what it was in 1948, and ranged as high as more than five times the 1948 level. It also became far higher than the unemployment rate of whites the same age.

The relations between the police and the black community are another issue that has gotten a lot of attention, and produced counterproductive results. After all the rhetoric and all the efforts toward more tightly restraining the police, the net result has been that murder rates have soared in cities where that policy has been followed — and most of the people killed have been black.

The one bright spot in black ghettos around the country are the schools that parents are free to choose for their own children. Some are Catholic schools, some are secular private schools and some are charter schools financed by public school systems but operating without the suffocating rules that apply to other public schools.

Not all of these kinds of schools are successes. But where there are academic successes in black ghettos, they come disproportionately from schools outside the iron grip of the education establishment and the teachers’ unions.

Despite all the dire social problems in many black ghettos across the country — problems which are used to excuse widespread academic failures — somehow ghetto schools run by KIPP and Success Academy turn out students whose performances match or exceed the performances in suburban schools whose kids come from high-income families.

What is even more astonishing is that charter schools are being opposed, not only by teacher unions which think that schools exist to provide guaranteed jobs for their members, but also by politicians, including black politicians who proclaim that “black lives matter.”

Apparently the futures of black children do not matter enough for black politicians — including the president of the United States — to stand up to the teacher unions, which produce big bucks in campaign contributions and big voter turnout on election day.

Any politician, of any race or party, who fights against charter schools that give many black youngsters their one shot at a decent life does not deserve the vote of anybody who really believes that black lives matter.