— American Airlines uses bankruptcy to ward off debtors and renegotiate labor contracts. Donald Trump’s businesses go bankrupt without impinging on Trump’s own personal fortune. But the law won’t allow you to use personal bankruptcy to renegotiate your home mortgage.
— If you run a giant bank that defrauds millions of small investors of their life savings, the bank might pay a small fine but you won’t go to prison. Not a single top Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for Wall Street’s mega-fraud. But if you sell an ounce of marijuana you could be put away for a long time.
The above is the key issue in the 99% versus 1% fight now going on in the US. There is a "justice" for the poor and a "justice" for the rich. There is a government for the rich and the poor have no voice in government. In fact the US Supreme Court has made it official with its Citizens United case: corporations are "people" with no limits on their political donations, while real living and breathing human beings are limited -- by law! -- in their donations. So the "person" of a corporation is above the law that applies to "mere persons" as represented by the bottom 99%.
Here is the reality of today:
... the four hundred richest Americans, whose total wealth exceeds the combined wealth of the bottom 150 million Americans put together, pay an average of 17 percent of their income in taxes. That’s lower than the tax rates of most day laborers and child-care workers.
In one of the more severe judicial ass-whippings you’ll ever see, federal Judge Jed Rakoff rejected a slap-on-the-wrist fraud settlement the SEC had cooked up for Citigroup.
I wrote about this story a few weeks back when Rakoff sent signals that he was unhappy with the SEC’s dirty deal with Citi, but yesterday he took this story several steps further.
Rakoff’s 15-page final ruling read like a political document, serving not just as a rejection of this one deal but as a broad and unequivocal indictment of the regulatory system as a whole. He particularly targeted the SEC’s longstanding practice of greenlighting relatively minor fines and financial settlements alongside de facto waivers of civil liability for the guilty – banks commit fraud and pay small fines, but in the end the SEC allows them to walk away without admitting to criminal wrongdoing.
This practice is a legal absurdity for several reasons. By accepting hundred-million-dollar fines without a full public venting of the facts, the SEC is leveling seemingly significant punishments without telling the public what the defendant is being punished for. This has essentially created a parallel or secret criminal justice system, in which both crime and punishment are adjudicated behind closed doors.
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Judge Rakoff blew a big hole in that practice [the SEC’s longstanding practice of greenlighting relatively minor fines and financial settlements alongside de facto waivers of civil liability for the guilty – banks commit fraud and pay small fines, but in the end the SEC allows them to walk away without admitting to criminal wrongdoing] yesterday. His ruling says secret justice is not justice, and that the government cannot hand out punishments without telling the public what the punishments are for. He wrote:
Finally, in any case like this that touches on the transparency of financial markets whose gyrations have so depressed our economy and debilitated our lives, there is an overriding public interest in knowing the truth. In much of the world, propaganda reigns, and truth is confined to secretive, fearful whispers. Even in our nation, apologists for suppressing or obscuring the truth may always be found. But the S.E.C., of all agencies, has a duty, inherent in its statutory mission, to see that the truth emerges; and if it fails to do so, this Court must not, in the name of deference or convenience, grant judicial enforcement to the agency's contrivances.
Notice the reference to how things are “in much of the world,” a subtle hint that the idea behind this ruling is to prevent a slide into third-world-style justice.
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Here’s a clip of me talking about the ruling last night on Countdown with Keith Olbermann.
Since Obama and his Attorney General aren't willing to treat crime seriously, hopefully the courts will step up and give the American people some justice.
Here is an attempt to hold an "assembly to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" on the steps of the Supreme Court. But you get arrested there despite what the US First Amendment says:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
So... the Constitution says you have a right to petition, but the "laws of the land" say not here, not there, and not over there. You have a right, but if you try to exercise that right, you get arrested! Here was an attempt to exercise a Constitutional right and it got the protesters arrested:
The joke is:
The Constitution gave no "rights" to corporations, but the Supreme Court has empowered things to be "people" by giving corporations more rights than people have. Corporations don't need to petition their government because they simply buy the politicians they need.
The reason why the founders of the US put in the First Amendment was that they knew that people would not have the power individually and had to have a mechanism to get the attention of their government. But the government, through laws and legal decisions, has systematically shutdown all access except to those with the money to buy access. The Supreme Court has participated in this farce by twisting the Constitution to ignore facts and make up "new realities" that cater to the very rich in the very process that has corrupted the system!
It is starting to look like the people are going to claw back a voice in government. After 50 years of being marginalized by politicians bought and sold by lobbyists, there is a force in the streets with Occupy Wall Street that looks like it may grow to the point where numbers will finally overcome money.
It remains to be seen whether the Occupy Wall Street protests will change America’s direction. Yet the protests have already elicited a remarkably hysterical reaction from Wall Street, the super-rich in general, and politicians and pundits who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent.
And this reaction tells you something important — namely, that the extremists threatening American values are what F.D.R. called “economic royalists,” not the people camping in Zuccotti Park.
Consider first how Republican politicians have portrayed the modest-sized if growing demonstrations, which have involved some confrontations with the police — confrontations that seem to have involved a lot of police overreaction — but nothing one could call a riot. And there has in fact been nothing so far to match the behavior of Tea Party crowds in the summer of 2009.
Nonetheless, Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, has denounced “mobs” and “the pitting of Americans against Americans.” The G.O.P. presidential candidates have weighed in, with Mitt Romney accusing the protesters of waging “class warfare,” while Herman Cain calls them “anti-American.” My favorite, however, is Senator Rand Paul, who for some reason worries that the protesters will start seizing iPads, because they believe rich people don’t deserve to have them.
Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor and a financial-industry titan in his own right, was a bit more moderate, but still accused the protesters of trying to “take the jobs away from people working in this city,” a statement that bears no resemblance to the movement’s actual goals.
And if you were listening to talking heads on CNBC, you learned that the protesters “let their freak flags fly,” and are “aligned with Lenin.”
The way to understand all of this is to realize that it’s part of a broader syndrome, in which wealthy Americans who benefit hugely from a system rigged in their favor react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is.
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And then there’s the campaign of character assassination against Elizabeth Warren, the financial reformer now running for the Senate in Massachusetts. Not long ago a YouTube video of Ms. Warren making an eloquent, down-to-earth case for taxes on the rich went viral. Nothing about what she said was radical — it was no more than a modern riff on Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous dictum that “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.”
But listening to the reliable defenders of the wealthy, you’d think that Ms. Warren was the second coming of Leon Trotsky. George Will declared that she has a “collectivist agenda,” that she believes that “individualism is a chimera.” And Rush Limbaugh called her “a parasite who hates her host. Willing to destroy the host while she sucks the life out of it.”
What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is.
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So who’s really being un-American here? Not the protesters, who are simply trying to get their voices heard. No, the real extremists here are America’s oligarchs, who want to suppress any criticism of the sources of their wealth.
This is what the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations are about: social justice. The bottom 99% have been fleeced and squeezed and abused. They have finally risen up and demand a better deal. America has seen a New Deal, a Fair Deal, a Great Society, and it is asking for a Just Society with a fair deal for the bottom 99%.
Here is a nice animation to let you take a roller coaster ride through just over a century of house price data gathered by Case Shiller:
As you arrive at the 2000s in this animation keep telling yourself "the Wall Street banks got the ratings agencies to stamp AAA on mortgage-backed securities because the risk modelers data showed that house prices only go up and never down".
Watch the video and then tell me there was no fraud, no crime, on Wall Street when it sold trillions in securitized paper based on these "financially engineered" instruments that blew up and went from AAA-rated to junk status in a matter of months in 2007-8.
I didn't expect George Bush to arrest any of his Wall Street buddies over this crime of the century. But I'm really, really outraged that Barack Obama has decided to shield the financial manipulators of Wall Street from the long arm of the law.
Where is the justice for the tens of millions of Americans whose savings have been cratered, who have lost their homes, and who are now unemployed and will stay unemployed for most of a decade? Where is the justice?
Most American's can't recognize their own face in a mirror. Pay attention at 1:50 in the video:
I love the fact that Dan Ariely designed the chart testing people's knowledge of their own society. He is a psychologist who looks at how you can use your understanding of your own irrational inner nature to help you be more rational. His books Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality are well worth reading.
The problem is that almost everybody has drunk the Kool-Aid of the right wing ideologues:
government is the problem, not the solution
work hard and you get ahead
the problem with America is the welfare moms driving around in Cadillacs not the Wall Street Banks that got a $700 billion gift (bailout) from the taxpayers
deregulate, deregulate, deregulate (which is exactly while the Wall Street banks blew up, why there was corruption in the dot.com era (Enron, Worldcom, Global Crossing), why the Savings & Loans blew up in the late 1980s, etc.
the rich are "job creators" and you don't want to tax them
trickle down economics is how you grow wealth (just wait for those rich to let the crumbs off their table shower down on your head)
America is great because it is free, the land of opportunity (in fact it has less social mobility than almost any other country except the undeveloped dregs of the world)
YouTube has reinstated access to a graphic, horrifying video of Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, a 13-year-old child who is reported to have been tortured, castrated, and killed by Syrian government thugs after being separated from his mother and father at an April protest against the Assad regime. A link to the video is here; it is extremely disturbing and not appropriate for viewing by children. The video was apparently blocked by YouTube due to its shocking content, then unblocked after reporters and human rights advocates petitioned YouTube administrators.
The boy's corpse was returned to his family a month after his arrest. As The Nation reports, they "risked their lives to produce the video."
But the remains themselves testify all too clearly to ghastly torture. Video posted online shows his battered, purple face. His skin is scrawled with cuts, gashes, deep burns and bullet wounds that would probably have injured but not killed. His jaw and kneecaps are shattered, according to an unidentified narrator, and his penis chopped off.
The US is willing to go after Gaddafi, but not Bashar al-Assad. It is clear to me that Assad has now killed & tortured about 20 times as many people as Gaddafi. But the US has not changed its attitude toward Assad. Assad helped the US by being the “outsource centre” for torture when the US wanted to question supposed al Qaeda operatives. Think of Maher Arar, the totally innocent Canadian sent off by the US for torture in Syria. The US still refuses to admit that this was a mistake or to punish anybody in the US for this grotesque crime.
The US government is tired of sending summons to citizens and waiting for them to appear in court. The country has decided to get serious.
No more nice summons in the mail. Now they will imprison you and subject you to unlimited strip searches to make sure you are properly "motivated" to testify in court cases that the the police have decided are "serious". And of course the US Supreme Court fully agrees with this new vigorous interpretation of a citizen's "duty"...
The Supreme Court ruled today that former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft cannot be personally sued over his role in the arrest of an innocent American citizen, a Muslim man who was never charged with a crime. From the Associated Press:
By a 5-3 vote, the court said Ashcroft did not violate the constitutional rights of Abdullah al-Kidd, who was arrested in 2003 under a federal law intended to make sure witnesses testify in criminal proceedings. Al-Kidd claimed in a federal lawsuit that the arrest and detention violated the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures.
He was held for 16 days, during which he was strip-searched repeatedly, left naked in a jail cell and shower for more than 90 minutes in view of other men and women, routinely transported in handcuffs and leg irons, and kept with people who had been convicted of violent crimes.
I can't wait to find out what the new court policy is on parking tickets. Maybe kill your first born if you don't pay promptly? Sell your wife and family off into slavery? I'm sure that these new "patriots" in the judicial system in the US will come up with something appropriate because they are serious, the mean business, and they are "getting tough" on slackers who don't take "justice" as seriously as they do.
Here is a good interview on RT (Russia Today) that gives Matt Taibbi twelve good minutes to go into details about the financial corruption and where we are at in cleaning up the mess:
I like the point that Taibbi makes when he says that politicians don't understand or feel what the great majority of people are undergoing right now. He doesn't mention it, but they are mostly multi-millionaires and move in social circles that isolates them from the life of the working class and even the middle class.
I completely agree with Taibbi's assessment of Obama.
I like his assessment of the media: it is a nihilistic "for the money" enterprise not really interested in civil society or justice.
Bottom line: I'm not as cynical and pessimistic as Matt Taibbi. I do believe that democracy works. It just works very poorly. As Churchill pointed out, it is the "worst" of all forms of government "except for all the rest", i.e. eventually the public will wake up and throw out the rascals (but then be seduced by a new bunch of rascals). That is sad, but that is the best you can get. It isn't as hopeless as Taibbi paints it, but it is very poor, very ineffective, very slow. But it is the best we have.
You were in Russia for several years working for The Exile. Are we beginning to resemble the Russian class system? The wealthy oligarchs who rule everyone yet no one does anything about it?
I think there’s an argument to be made that we’re heading in that direction. That’s certainly not an idea that’s original to me.
It’s just more apparent now.
Sure, sure. There’s a guy at MIT, Simon Johnson, who used to be an IMF executive. He worked with developing third world economies and dealt with the whole issue of third world corruption for a long time. He wrote—from personal experience—about what he saw then and what he sees now with the financial services industry, and he basically says that we’re going down the same path. He sees a lot of the same things happening, such as the co-opting of the mainstream media and the corporate regulatory capture where you have former financial services industry employees running the regulatory agencies. I don’t think it’s on the same scale, but there are characteristics of it for sure.
Your opinion and, quite frankly, your distaste with your subjects comes through very strongly in your writing.
Right. Some journalists think you shouldn’t bring your personal feelings to a story. I definitely see that point of view and that approach, but I don’t follow it. I think one of the ways you can help a reader understand a topic is by first letting them know who you are and what your values are, and then showing them how you respond to the material. So me writing about how much X, Y, or Z pisses me off helps readers understand what’s important and what isn’t.
Do you still follow Russian politics? They’re gearing up for an election. I tend to envision Putin placing Medvedev on a platter and eating him on live television, or something of the sort.
They’re just your basic third-world kleptocracy—which is where everybody is headed. Well, everybody who still has a functioning government.
Elaborate.
I think people are going to realize what a blip on the radar American-style democracy in the 20th century was. A big middle class that had a huge powerbase, financial interests, bosses giving benefits… all those things. It’s just a little blip in history. For the most part, concentrated wealth will make all the decisions and everybody else is dictated to. It’s going to be like that to varying degrees. The more corrupt it is the more it’s heading in that direction, and clearly a place like Russia is a very corrupt place.
I don't share this bleak perspective. I'm an a pessimistic optimist. I believe in democracy in the sense of Churchill: it is a bad system but better than all the rest. I think that with democracy the people will ultimately arise and "throw the bums out". It just takes a long time for a large mass of people to be aroused to the point of anger. It took about eight years for Americans to become disgusted with the Vietnam war. It has taken about thirty years for Americans to become disgusted with Reaganomics "trickle down" theories. That is far too slow for the impatient types. But all "faster" means of change result in worse government, more vile dictatorships of right and left. Only maddeningly slow democracy has a built-in lethargy that has the best promise of ultimately saving individual rights and delivering a true civil society based on justice and dignity and rule of law.
Meanwhile, we – me, included – get lost in the weeds of how this one madman was killed. The official story from the Pentagon changed four times in the first four days! It went from OBL firing on the troops with one hand and using his wife as a human shield with the other, to, by the fourth day, not single person in the main house, including bin Laden, being armed when killed. Instantly, this created a lot of suspicion about what really happened, which itself was a distraction.
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In a perfect world ... I would like the evildoers to be forced to stand trial in front of that world. I know a lot of people see no need for a trial for these bad guys (just hang 'em from the nearest tree!), and think trials are for sissies. "They're guilty, off with their heads!" Well, you see, that is the exact description of the Taliban/al Qaeda/Nazi justice system. I don't like their system. I like ours. And I don't want to be like them. In fact, the reason I like a good trial is that I like to show these bastards this is how it's done in a free country that believes in civilized justice. It's good for the rest of the world to see that, too. Sets a good example.
The other thing a trial does is, it establishes a very public and permanent historic record of the crimes against humanity. This is why we put the Nazis on trial in Nuremberg. We didn't do it for them. We did it for ourselves and for our grandchildren so that they would never forget these horrors and how they were committed. And we did it for the German people so they could see the evidence of what their elected leaders had done. Very helpful. Very necessary. Very powerful.
And for those who wanted blood back then – well, the majority of the Nazis all hanged in the end. So, it doesn't mean the bad guys get away – they still swing from the highest tree.
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Hideki Tojo killed my uncle and millions of Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos and a hundred thousand other Americans. He was the head of Japan, the Emperor's henchman, the man who was the architect of Pearl Harbor. When the American soldiers went to arrest him, he tried to commit suicide by shooting himself in the chest. The soldiers immediately worked on stopping his bleeding and rushed him to an army hospital where he was saved by our army doctors. He then had his day in court. It was a powerful exercise for the world to see. And on December 23, 1948, after he was found guilty, we hanged him. A killer of millions was forced to stand trial. A killer of 4,000 (counting the African embassies and USS Cole bombings) got double-tapped in his pajamas. Assuming it was possible to take him alive, I think his victims, the future, and the restoration of the American Way deserved better. That's all I'm saying.
Good riddance Osama.
Come back to your ways, my good ol' USA.
Michael Moore makes a number of other points about celebrating a killing, turning into the state that Al Qaeda wanted, and how to properly bring the endless "war on terrorism" to a proper end. Go read the whole article.
Here is Ed Broadbent, a famous leftist Canadian politician, introducing a talk by Richard Wilkinson given in Canada on income inequality:
I like the bits where he explains that life expectancy isn't correlated well with the average income of a country. But it is well correlated with relative income (social status, social position). This underlines that a society works only if everybody feels like they "belong" and a valued reasonably well compared to others.
I like the quip: "If Americans want to live the American dream, they should move to Denmark or Finland." Those are societies where greater equality means that the offspring of the poor have a better chance to improve their income, status, health, etc. Those societies have greater social mobility.
Here's a bit from an interesting article in the New York magazine about a federal prosecutor going after some Wall Street crooks. He is doing a good job but he's only going after low level fish, not the big fish, not the ones at the top who did the trillion dollar damage to the economy:
Bharara and the Galleon case say much about the state of Wall Street justice—or the lack of it—today. Working in the tradition of the last sheriff of Wall Street, Eliot Spitzer, and out of the same Southern District office where Rudy Giuliani went after Milken and Boesky, Bharara has made a name for himself as the crusader of the moment against white-collar crime. In less than two years on the job, the 42-year-old India-born Bharara has charged 46 defendants with insider-trading offenses and procured 30 guilty pleas. The Galleon case is the crown jewel of his work to date. And yet …
To collect those scalps, Bharara has, some say, played rough. He doesn’t grandstand or steamroll the way Giuliani or Spitzer did—in fact, he maintains an assiduously, perhaps even cannily, low profile—but he’s by no means shy about pursuing his marks. To build his cases, he’s used unusually aggressive investigative methods for white-collar crimes, like wiretaps and search warrants. “It’s not that wiretaps hadn’t been used before, but never in this broad a sweep,” says one prominent white-collar defense lawyer and former Southern District attorney. “A lot of these highfliers never would have imagined that someone would be listening in on their calls. He’s got everyone scared.” Where Giuliani hauled bankers from the trading floors and Spitzer browbeat companies into settlements, Bharara has treated the public to the spectacle of Fortune 500 executives turned like mob stool pigeons, a Goldman director calling Rajaratnam seconds after sitting in on a confidential phone call with Blankfein, and one hedge-fund executive allegedly trying to chew to bits the SIM. card of his prepaid cell phone.
But hovering above all of this is the question of whether Bharara is fighting the right war. Three years after Lehman Brothers collapsed, no one responsible for the greatest financial calamity since the Great Depression has gone to jail, and a meaningful remedy for the transgressions of 2008 clearly isn’t forthcoming from Congress or the White House. Bharara may be winning his share of insider-trading battles, but unlike Giuliani or Spitzer, he doesn’t seem to be hauling in the biggest bad guys of his time. Whatever satisfaction comes from seeing Rajaratnam and company squirm, and possibly go to jail, there is still a sinking feeling that they’re only the most expedient, not the biggest, targets. “Preet’s smart,” says one friend and fellow prosecutor. “White-collar cases are difficult. The one area where they’re less difficult is insider-trading cases.”
Something is better than nothing, but it really galls me that the big fish are still dancing free. The only way to stop crime is to go after the kingpins. The guys lower down the food chain can always be replaced easily. It is the big masterminds that are harder to replace so taking them down does leave a dent. And... it puts a real scare into the criminal class.
Here is a criminal with a long history of crime, serious crime, who hit a pedestrian, dragged him down a block until he turned the car and that threw the dead body off, then raced to elude citizens in pursuit. He rammed the pursuing cars. Sounds like a bad dude. You would think the system would throw the book at just a callous guy with no regard for human life. Well... think again. In British Columbia courts that kind of behaviour is good for only 4 months in jail!
Counter that with a story of a guy who tied a dog to his car to "exercise" him and dragged the dog about. That guy got many months in jail and a 5 year driving license suspension. (I can't find the video... but if I do, I will post it.)
Does this make sense? Both people are thugs and criminals, but you give a guy more time and more serious consequences for hurting a dog than for killing a doctor? What kind of topsy-turvey legal system is that? That's the BC "justice" system. I figure if you kill over 50 people they give you a heroes parade and a pension for life. But if you spit on the sidewalk you can expect to spend life in the slammer. That's "justice" in British Columbia... go figure!
Obama is more concerned about "grand strategy" and "American interests" than in this...
As I think of Americans so busy trying to figure out their "strategic interests" and where they can leverage their billions in bribes to Middle Eastern thugs, I keep thinking of a saying by Jesus that it is easier for a rich man to go through the eye of a needle than to get into heaven. The rich and powerful are so busy looking after "their interests" that they never notice that the "little people" are in the trenches, living crippled lives, so that the rich and powerful can feast and strut about.
It is ironic. The bottom 90% of the population have only their bodies to put on the line in facing Mubarak's thugs. Mubarak can use the billions in blood money he got from America to buy the best, most cruel, most depraved thugs (his police!) to terrorize the streets of Egypt. This is what the "great leader" brings to his people when they turn their back on him and refuse to let him pass on his "presidency" to his son as a "patronage".
Obama must sleep happily tonight knowing that he has helped keep this monster in power.
I think this is funny. Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist, thinks he is constructively working to solve America's deficit problem by finding a way to cajole the rich into paying enough taxes to cover the deficits. His solution? Curry favour with the rich! He thinks that is a "new solution" but I find it as old as the hills.
It's useful to keep in mind how the rich are different. When you are poor, you are willing to trade your time to earn money. When you are rich, you trade your money to get more time. For example, the rich hire people to clean their homes, and they don't waste time shopping for bargains. In business school I learned that when people have different preferences, you can usually find a way to engineer a deal.
Suppose we change the tax code so that in return for higher taxes on the rich, we figure out a way to give the rich some form of extra time. The bad version is that anyone who pays taxes at a rate above some set amount gets to use the car pool lane without a passenger. Or perhaps the rich are allowed to park in handicapped-only spaces.
Ridiculous, you cry! Remember, this is the bad version. And if the rich are only a tiny percentage of the population, they would have almost no impact on the traffic in car pool lanes or the availability of parking spaces for the handicapped. You wouldn't even notice the difference.
You could imagine a host of ways the government could trade time for money. Suppose all government agencies had a mandate to handle the affairs of the rich before everyone else. You wouldn't even notice that your wait at the Department of Motor Vehicles was 2% longer.
As a bonus, what happens to the economy when the people who are most skilled at making money suddenly have extra time? My bet is that they stimulate the economy by spending more or by earning more.
Funny... these are exactly the "rules" that apply in third world countries. I remember how Saddam Hussein's two rich sons we able to abduct and rape women at will. Is Scott Adams willing to contemplate that? I'm sure that some young sons of multi-billionaires are ready and willing to sign up "get out of jail free" cards for a program of rape and torture.
Maybe we can bring back the "good old days" when the knights of the land used serfs for targets to hone their skills. You know, turn loose the young lads of the peasantry and let them try to scurry for safety while the knights went out with broadsword or lance to practice picking them off to ensure that their skills were up-to-date.
Go read the Scott Adams piece to get a feel for how slimy the future will soon be if this "treat the rich special" idea catches on:
Everyone loves power. I'm guessing that the rich like it more than most people, on average. Another bad idea is to give the rich two votes apiece in any election. That's double the power of other citizens. Why stop as 2 votes? Under the current lobby system, if you are sufficiently rich, you can throw your weight around as if you counted for a hundred thousand votes or more. Poor Scott Adams is showing he hasn't rubbed elbows with enough really ultra-rich lately.
Suppose the government makes it a condition that anyone applying for social services has to write a personal thank-you note to a nearby rich person who, according to a central database, hasn't lately received one. Yeah, like if you lose your job, a requirement that before you can apply for unemployment you have to write a groveling letter to the local baron or lord so curry favour. If you want an idea of this world, go look at the preface of any book written in the 16th, 17th, and 18th century where writers groveled before the monied class.
All of Scott Adams' suggestions are a wonderful way to bring back the "good old days" when our "betters" lorded over us, literally lorded over us.
What I find astounding is the idea that there is a crisis. America today is more wealthy than it was 20 years ago and vastly more wealthy than it was 60 years ago when it was dealing with the incredible debt from WWII. But you didn't hear people crying that there was no solution other than bribing the rich to be willing to participate in society and pay their fair share of taxes. Back in the 1950s, the rich paid 94% of their income as tax (in the high brackets after you allowed low tax on the first X number of thousands of income). I don't recall the rich in revolt over this "burden". But today, when America is fantastically wealthy compared to the late 1940s/early 1950s, suddenly the wealthy are "burdened" with a 30% tax rate and simply can't be asked for more. Ridiculous!
If you want to eliminate the deficits and the accumulating debt: raise the taxes! The rich has stolen the government and re-written the tax laws to let them frolic while the society around them falls into shambles. This is ridiculous.
From Salon.com comes this story of "American justice" and the provision of education as a "level playing field" in which the disadvantaged get a chance to compete with the elite...
A poor black woman broke the law to send her children to a rich white school. Is her punishment really justice?
AKRON, Ohio – A Summit County woman will spend 10 days in jail after she was found guilty in a school residency case that could set a precedent for Ohio school districts.
Judge Patricia Cosgrove also placed 40-year-old Kelly Williams-Bolar on two years of probation and ordered her to complete 80 hours of community service.
On Saturday, a jury found Williams-Bolar guilty on two counts of tampering with records. She was also facing one count of grand theft, but the judge declared a mistrial on that charge after the jury couldn't reach a verdict.
"I felt that some punishment or deterrent was needed for other individuals who might think to defraud the various school systems," Cosgrove told NewsChannel5 after the sentencing.
Prosecutors said Williams-Bolar lived in Akron, but falsified enrollment papers in the Copley-Fairlawn School District so her two girls could attend schools for two years.
Prosecutors said the lies cost the district about $30,000. Copley-Fairlawn does not have open enrollment and out-of-district tuition is about $800 per month.
There are myriad responses to this case, ranging from the impassioned response of Boyce Watkins to the "fraud is fraud" response by Bob Dyer of the Beacon Journal. Titles all over the Internet have proclaimed "MOTHER IMPRISONED FOR SENDING KIDS TO WRONG SCHOOL!" implying that the only thing wrong was simply enrolling where she shouldn't have. Under the current laws of Ohio, Williams-Bolar committed a crime. This can't be argued. What can be argued is whether the actions by the court are right and appropriate for the defendant's situation.
You threaten somebody with 5 years in the slammer for trying to give her kids a fair shake at life? That reminds me of when I was an adolescent and heard about a guy in the early 1960s finally being freed from jail for having stolen an apple during the Great Depression. Yep... hunger was illegal in America in the 1930s. You were supposed to not complain and simply crawl into a corner and die and not bother the other citizens with your distress. It is up there with the Scott sisters who got life sentences for a minor robbery of less than $200 of which their share was $11. Nobody was shot or killed. It was a robbery. For this they got life sentences in prison.
So... Obama is promising to make America strong through "improving education". Meanwhile, down on the ground, at the local authority level, people are being jailed if they try to move their kids from a run down urban school which is a glorified baby sitting institution to a suburban school where teachers and kids actually focus on education (at least some of them). For this, you get a sentence of 5 years in the slammer in the US. Looks like Obama's rhetoric and the reality on the ground have a bit of a gap that needs to be closed before America is ready to compete for the 21st century!
It is amazing how blind "justice" can be. Here's a cop in San Antonio who manages to wrangle a life sentence down to one year.From a Hearst newspaper San Antonio site, here's the key bit:
A former San Antonio police officer accused of raping a transsexual prostitute while on duty was ordered Tuesday to spend a year in jail.
Attorneys for Craig Nash, 39, had asked state District Judge Lori Valenzuela for deferred adjudication probation during the brief sentencing hearing, pointing out that he otherwise had been commended for his service during his six years with the department.
Prosecutors sought the maximum one-year sentence for the official oppression charge, which is a Class A misdemeanor.
As part of a plea agreement, Nash waived an indictment last month and pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor. In exchange, prosecutors agreed not to pursue a felony charge of sexual assault by a police officer, which had a maximum sentence of life in prison.
I love the bit about "commended" for his six years of service. Yeah sure. Let me guess. He probably did this before but hid behind his badge and uniform and only got caught after six years. So much for "commendable" service. In the same category is Canadian Colonel Russell Williams who got loads of commendations and raised through the ranks despite being a serial rapist and killer. These snakes are everywhere but usually slither away when the heat gets turned up. Craig Nash will be back on the street in a year and probably ready to "step up" his life of crime from simply beating up and raping prostitutes to something more "satisfying". Thanks to the legal system for looking out for the public. I wonder... does that judge have a daughter. Is he going to be happy when her rapist gets a year in the slammer?
You can tell the "quality" of justice in Texas when you read this bit:
Nash was arrested last February after the victim — currently serving time in a male state jail facility for prostitution — reported that she had just been held captive and raped by the officer.
She had been picked up by Nash at Guadalupe and Zarzamora streets early that morning and handcuffed in the back of the patrol car, she told police. She then was then told to lie down as Nash drove to an unknown location, where she was forced to commit multiple sex acts, she reported.
DNA taken from a rape kit later linked Nash to the complainant, according to court records. The woman picked Nash out in a police lineup and GPS tracking of his patrol unit was consistent with what she said, documents state.
Two days after the officer's arrest, a second person came forward to say he had also been raped by the officer in 2008. As part of the plea agreement, prosecutors won't pursue the second allegation, according to court documents.
Prosecutors opted to pursue the misdemeanor charge against Nash instead of the felony as they began looking ahead to trial and contemplating “additional issues we'd have to deal with,” said Adriana Biggs, chief of the district attorney's white-collar crimes division. She declined to elaborate.
The public likes to laud those who "do the right thing" but the public rarely thinks about what this means to the life of a whistleblower, his family, his future, even his own self esteem. In short, it is easy to picture yourself as "a hero" but it is much harder in the real world to make the decision to destroy your life to "do the right thing".
The offshore bank account details of 2,000 "high net worth individuals" and corporations – detailing massive potential tax evasion – will be handed over to the WikiLeaks organisation in London tomorrow by the most important and boldest whistleblower in Swiss banking history, Rudolf Elmer, two days before he goes on trial in his native Switzerland.
British and American individuals and companies are among the offshore clients whose details will be contained on CDs presented to WikiLeaks at the Frontline Club in London. Those involved include, Elmer tells the Observer, "approximately 40 politicians".
Elmer, who after his press conference will return to Switzerland from exile in Mauritius to face trial, is a former chief operating officer in the Cayman Islands and employee of the powerful Julius Baer bank, which accuses him of stealing the information.
He is also – at a time when the activities of banks are a matter of public concern – one of a small band of employees and executives seeking to blow the whistle on what they see as unprofessional, immoral and even potentially criminal activity by powerful international financial institutions.
Along with the City of London and Wall Street, Switzerland is a fortress of banking and financial services, but famously secretive and expert in the concealment of wealth from all over the world for tax evasion and other extra-legal purposes.
...
"What I am objecting to is not one particular bank, but a system of structures," he told the Observer. "I have worked for major banks other than Julius Baer, and the one thing on which I am absolutely clear is that the banks know, and the big boys know, that money is being secreted away for tax-evasion purposes, and other things such as money-laundering – although these cases involve tax evasion."
...
Elmer has been hounded by the Swiss authorities and media since electing to become a whistleblower, and his health and career have suffered.
"My understanding is that my client's attempts to get the banks to act over various complaints he made came to nothing internally," says Elmer's lawyer, Jack Blum, one of America's leading experts in tracking offshore money. "Neither would the Swiss courts act on his complaints. That's why he went to WikiLeaks."
That first crop of documents was scrutinised by the Guardian newspaper in 2009, which found "details of numerous trusts in which wealthy people have placed capital. This allows them lawfully to avoid paying tax on profits, because legally it belongs to the trust … The trust itself pays no tax, as a Cayman resident", although "the trustees can distribute money to the trust's beneficiaries".
Now, Blum says, "Elmer is being tried for violating Swiss banking secrecy law even though the data is from the Cayman Islands. This is bold extraterritorial nonsense. Swiss secrecy law should apply to Swiss banks in Switzerland, not a Swiss subsidiary in the Cayman Islands."
Rudolf Elmer has set up his own web site where he has posted documents. The most significant is an article to be published by the CFA Institute, the official organization of the CFA (Chartered Financial Accountants) Institute which has 100,000 members belonging to 136 societies in 57 countries. The CFA Magazine is published by the CFA Institute and the Jan/Feb 2011 issue has an article on Julius Elmer entitled "Blowing It". Here are some key bits from this article:
In the real world whistleblowers aren’t always celebrated as champions of truth and justice for blowing the cover off illegal or unethical conduct and corporate malfeasance. Instead, they can be ostracized and defamed, and their efforts to do the right thing may cost them their careers.
...
In light of the corporate scandals of the late 1990s and the early 2000s (as well as passage of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002, which imposed tougher corporate requirements), TIME magazine celebrated two corporate whistleblowers for their courageous actions: Sherron Watkins, formerly vice president and managing director of corporate development at Houston-based energy company Enron, and Cynthia Cooper, former vice president of WorldCom. (The magazine also honored a government whistleblower: Coleen Rowley, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation agent who accused her superiors of ignoring terrorist warning signs.) But few whistleblowers are ever rewarded with high praise or even a pat on the back, and many find the aftermath to be very different from what they expected.
Even the much-lauded Enron whistleblower has regrets.
“With the benefit of hindsight, I do not regret that I went to Ken Lay [Enron’s chairman] to alert him to accounting irregularities at Enron, but I do regret that I went alone,” says Watkins. “I should have realized that when speaking truth to power, one has to try to change the balance of power. If five of us vice presidents/managing directors had met with Lay, then he could not have dismissed my concerns as just that of one voice, one opinion.”
...
Rudolph Elmer is the whistleblower at the center of a recent and still controversial case. He spent 15 years working for the Swiss investment giant Bank Julius Baer, most recently in the Cayman Islands. Elmer alleges that he became aware of his employer assisting several American clients and others with tax evasion, including his own firm’s attempts to avoid paying taxes to the Swiss government, among other illegal activities. “After having tried, in-house, to solve the issue, I was fired,” Elmer tells CFA Magazine.
Julius Baer has a different version of events. The bank claims that Elmer expressed concerns only after being denied a promotion and further alleges that he subsequently stole internal bank documents, an action for which he was dismissed. In a public statement, a representative of the bank depicted Elmer as a disgruntled former employee who didn’t receive the financial settlement he was seeking.
It took two years for Elmer to get the attention of the proper Swiss authorities. He filed a suspicious-transaction report, but a question of jurisdiction (Cayman Islands versus Switzerland) complicated the matter. He also talked to tax authorities in the United States. Although they were interested in the data, they offered no personal protections, according to Elmer. In 2005, Elmer says he was arrested in Switzerland and jailed for 30 days on suspicion of violating bank confidentiality laws. Three years later, he turned to WikiLeaks.org to get his story out. “Public attention is a kind of security,” Elmer says. To protect his interests, he also hired a lawyer based in Washington, DC, who specializes in legal cases involving money laundering and offshore tax evasion. Elmer will get his day in court in January 2011 when his case, the first whistleblower case to be heard in a court in Switzerland, will begin.
The idea of "whistleblower" brings to mind the case of Erin Brokovich to most people. This was dramatized by Julia Roberts in the epoynymous film Erin Brokovich. That film made clear the difficulties of going up against a powerful corporate interest.
Another classic case of a whistleblower is Jeffrey Wigand, the research scientist, who broke the multi-decade wall of silence and exposed the illegal activities of the tobacco industry. Here on is his own web site where you can read and view material he has posted that documents the struggle to get the truth out and the kind of vindictive punishments the industry threatened and carried out to suppress the truth. Wigand's revelations cost him his marriage and a destroyed career.
The classic case of a whistleblower who pays the ultimate price was Karen Silkwood who died trying to expose illegal activities by her employer. As Wikipedia notes:
She died under mysterious circumstances after investigating claims of irregularities and wrongdoing at the Kerr-McGee plant.
I certainly hope that Rudolf Elmer does not become another person who pays a heavy, heavy price in helping the public by whistleblowing.
And... here is MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan's take on this story:
Here is a bit from a post by Kevin Mitchell on his Wiring the Brain blog. This wasn't written with Loughner in mind, but it got me thinking. Loughner probably has schizophrenia. But he may have an issue with impulse control. What I like about the following is that it is written by a scientist to let the lay audience get a sense of the state of research. You start to appreciate the complexity of the issue and the sophistication of current research:
If some guy spilt your beer by accident, would you punch him in the face? If he was unapologetic, you might at least consider it – you might in fact feel a pretty strong urge to do it. What stops you? Or, if you’re the type who acts on those urges, what doesn’t stop you? New research has found a mutation in one gene that may contribute to these differences in temperament.
Self-control is the ability to inhibit an immediate course of action in the pursuit of a longer-term goal or to consciously override a base urge. Some people show far more inhibitory control than others. This trait is very stable – indeed, inhibitory control in children, which can be assessed using the famous “marshmallow test”, is predictive of their score on scales of impulsivity as adults. (The marshmallow test must go down as one of the cruellest experiments in psychology – it involves asking four-year olds not to eat a lovely yummy marshmallow for five minutes, after which they will be given another one to go with it if they have resisted. The videos of these poor kids as they struggle to resist this urge are priceless). Impulsivity is also partly heritable – that is, more closely related people are more similar in this trait.
This is generally true of all personality traits, suggesting they are influenced by genetic variation. However, the specific genes involved are almost entirely unknown. Indeed, a recent study that failed to find any such genes was interpreted by many (e.g., 1, 2) as evidence that either personality was not really genetic or that measures of personality traits were effectively meaningless. In fact, this was a gross misinterpretation of the results of this study.
Go read the original to get the rest of the posting as well as to access the embedded links.
... researchers from the National Institutes of Health and from Helsinki have done in a new study that led to the identification of a mutation in the Finnish population that apparently affects impulsivity.
And this...
The scientists found one mutation that had never been seen in any other population – in the gene HTR2B, which encodes a receptor for serotonin. The mutation completely abolishes the production of the protein, so that people who carry one copy of this mutant version of the gene have only half the normal amount of the receptor protein. The mutant version was found to be greatly over-represented (7.5% frequency) among a set of 228 violently impulsive subjects, compared to 295 controls from the general population (1.2%). Among family members of the violent offenders who carried the mutation there was also an increased rate of the psychiatric disorders listed above, specifically in those relatives who also inherited the mutation.
These findings therefore suggest that this mutation increases the risk of this kind of violent, impulsive behaviour. It must only be one factor, however, as most of the 1% in the Finnish population who carry it are not violent criminals. Being male and alcohol abuse are two other likely risk factors.
This got me to thinking about Loughner and the fact that he was known to use Salvia as well as other drugs. Loughner is an example of all the complicating factors: he probably had an existing mental condition (schizophrenia), this might have been the expression of a genetic flaw (see above), but he exacerbated the problems by his drug taking and by the family life (neighbors way he was not allowed to interact with other children). Humans are complex. A lot of things went into Loughner's behaviour. But ultimately the legal system needs to cut through all that and use the concept of "free will" to convict him of his crime. It does no good to try and excuse behaviour because of your genes, your personality, your psychological state, prior child abuse, or drug taking. If you go down that path nobody can be held responsible for anything. So our legal system focuses on free will and makes judgements based on presumed moral responsibility.
Courts will exonerate if you are legally insane. But apparently Arizona won't exonerate, it allows a "guilty, but insane" verdict which puts you into a mental institute until you are judged sane, at that point you are moved to a prison to finish out your punishment. I actually think this is better than "innocent by reason of insanity". From Wikipedia:
If the person has a mental illness and it is determined that the mental illness interfered with the person's ability to determine right from wrong, and other associated criteria a jurisdiction may have, and if the person is willing to plead guilty or is proven guilty in a court of law, some jurisdiction have an alternative option known as either a Guilty but Mentally Ill (GBMI) or a Guilty but Insane verdict. The GBMI verdict is available as an alternative to, rather than in lieu of, a "not guilty by reason of insanity" verdict.[5] Michigan (1975) was the first state to create a GBMI verdict.
Sadly Jared Louhner apparently has no interest in explaining his actions. He is using the legal shields (protection from self incrimination) to refuse to discuss and explain his actions. That is profoundly upsetting because, as humans, we like to understand our world, have it make sense. I suppose that over time the enigma of Jared Loughner will be unraveled. In the meantime that one person has left so much death and destruction in his wake. He is like a parasite. A society can struggle on so long as the parasite load is modest, but once parasite proliferate, the healthy population collapses. The US can withstand the occasional Jared Loughner, but above a certain level and the society collapses as violence and mistrust spreads.
The obvious solution, from a Canadian perspective, is to adjust the balance between individual rights and group rights. The individual has a right to freedom, but a group has a right to security. Removing guns from the population would move the balance more toward group security. But fanatics in the US, the NRA in particular, refuse to consider that. They have construed the Bill of Rights to provide an unrestricted right to citizens to arm themselves. But in fact the Constitution was addressing the rights of states to raise militias to protect themselves. This fundamental confusion between individual rights and group rights is behind all the suffering which a case like Loughner's assassination brings to the US.
