My email to Paul Craig Roberts: Paul, how are we going to wake up? Newly noticed horror (thanks to TSA): male police think nothing of frisking females

Paul,
Horrified by stories of TSA agents enhanced frisking females (not too infrequently at small airports?) I researched the legality of such on the net. Didn't need to look far as a widely distributed AP story about proliferating scanners included (without any special notice) how a "quick frisk" by a named male officer discovered a label backing in the rear pocket of a named female (must have been a pretty heavy "back of the hand" on her backside to discover something so thin).

Internet forums are replete with comments from male officers asserting they may frisk a female just as legally as a male pretty much if no female officer is handy -- even assert that if both gender officers are present it is not up to the female to choose who will do the frisk -- even tell of using the front of the hand (my department doesn't give me a bad time about it). Even found a video from a young future police recruit club (supervised by cops) in which what looks to be an 18 year old boy is practicing a palms down frisk all over what looks to be an 18 year old girl. (http://www.booads.com/videos-stop-and-frisk-%5BW1-dcSUDPE8%5D.cfm)

That is how casually they take violating the number two taboo -- after murder of our society.

Some of us agonize over 200,000 children being paddled in the South every year. If the average of 35,000 (at times) New York City male police officers frisk a woman only every two months that makes 200,000 women sexually groped by cops every year -- in one city! Somebody has to come up with a number for across the nation.

BTW, I am not that dark and down about government intrusion -- at least not as in irresistible force. The real problem is alluded to in your question: the American people as oh, so movable objects. I do motivations (you don't have to salute the flag; you shouldn't have to rise when a judge walks in :-]). These intrusions would never happen in continental Europe (maybe in Britain with it's hanging over class system -- but that is the point) simply because Europeans expect to be seen to properly. Americans will take anything.

At core is the question of "social democracy." In the "people's republic" of California -- sexually wild as we get -- DAs threaten inappropriate touching by airport security (not very meaningfully but they mean well). In laissez faire Chicago -- as straight laced as we get -- Cook County courthouse uses the same strip search scanners on free men, women and children that now do the prisoner stripping at our county jail.

Social democracy hardly equals socialism. Was instituted by very anti-communist, very Roman Catholic German politicians (are you old enough to remember Conrad Adenauer? :-]) post war to tamp down labor demands so barely post fascist industrialist could invest more in rebuilding (Britain did not follow and fell behind).

The core of social (and economic) democracy: legally mandated, sector wide labor agreements. Line up all similarly working owners on one side and all similarly employed workers on the other side and you keep either from having an unfair (and inefficient) advantage over the other. Free health and education on the side pose no moral hazard.

Raise the minimum wage in the US to $15/hr and you would give half the country a raise (median wage $15/hr -- up 20% as average income upped 100% since 1968) -- at a cost of living increase of an almost below visibility 3% (worked out [2]% from $7.25 to $12.50 here: http://ontodayspagelinks.blogspot.com/2008/08/3-cost-of-gdp-output-and-inflation.html). Repeat: half our workforce could be raised to today's median wage with 3% inflation: we are obviously doing something quite wrong.