We finally have our Kennedy Moment in the current political climate. Saturday, January 8th, 2011, is likely to go down as exactly that in the “Where were you when?” canon. On that day, Jared Lee Loughner, age 22, went on a shooting rampage at a supermarket parking lot in Tucson,…
Recently, Justice Antonin Scalia shot his mouth off about another bit of “social” judicial opinion and managed to be correct to a fault again. Here is the article. Basically, he is of the opinion that if a specific term or phrase does not appear in the Constitution, then that subject is simply not covered. Most famously, this goes to the continuing argument over privacy. There is, by Scalia’s reasoning (and I must add he is by no means alone in this—it is not merely his private opinion), no Constitutionally-protected right to privacy. As far as it goes, this is correct, but beside the point. The word “private” certainly appears, in the Fifth Amendment, and it would seem absurd to suggest the framers had no thought for what that word meant. It refers here to private property, of course, but just that opens the debate to the fact that there is a concept of privacy underlying it. The modern debate over privacy concerns contraception and the first case where matters of privacy are discussed is Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965. That case concerned the right of a married couple to purchase and use contraception, which was against the law in that state (and others). The Court had to define an arena of privacy within which people enjoy a presumed right of autonomous decision-making and into which the state had no brief to interfere. Prior to this, the Court relied on a “freedom of contract” concept to define protected areas of conduct. Notice, we’re back in the realm of property law here. People who insist that there is no “right to privacy” that is Constitutionally protected seem intent on dismissing any concept of privacy with which they disagree, but no doubt would squeal should their own self-defined concept be violated. Therein lies the problem, one we continue to struggle with. But it does, at least in Court tradition, come down to some variation of ownership rights—which is what has made the abortion debate so difficult, since implicit in it is the question of whether or not a woman “owns” her body and may therefore, in some construction of freedom of contract, determine its use under any and all circumstances. [More . . . ]
William K. Black previously worked as an investigator of financial institutions during the S&L crisis. In a detailed article at Huffpo, Black laments the almost total lack of criminal prosecutions related to our recent financial meltdown. Here's the problem in a nutshell: "What has gone so catastrophically wrong with DOJ, and why has it continued so long? The fundamental flaw is that DOJ's senior leadership cannot conceive of elite bankers as criminals." Here's what we need to do about it:
Our best bet is to continue to win the scholarly disputes and to continue to push media representatives to take fraud seriously. If the media demands for prosecution of the elite banking frauds expand there is a chance to create a bipartisan coalition in Congress and the administration supporting prosecutions. In the S&L debacle, Representative Annunzio was one of the leading opponents of reregulation and leading supporters of Charles Keating. After we brought several hundred successful prosecutions he began wearing a huge button: "Jail the S&L Crooks!" Bringing many hundreds of enforcement actions, civil suits, and prosecutions causes huge changes in the way a crisis is perceived. It makes tens of thousands of documents detailing the frauds public. It generates thousands of national and local news stories discussing the nature of the frauds and how wealthy the senior officers became through the frauds. All of this increases the saliency of fraud and increases demands for serious reforms, adequate resources for the regulators and criminal justice bodies, and makes clear that elite fraud poses a severe danger. Collectively, this creates the political space for real reform, vigorous regulators, and real prosecutors.
What do you do when you cannot any longer find a scientist to support your government's self-destructive policies? You declare that you don't want any further scientific input. That's what the UK has done regarding the idiotic "war on drugs." No scientists are stepping up to lend support that the "war on drugs" is a good idea. Therefore, who needs scientists?
The Lame Duck Congress has ended the year with a Marathon of Epic Legislation. I can't help being impressed. Obama said he wanted Congress to do with Don't Ask Don't Tell, to repeal it legislatively, and not have it end up as a court-mandated order. I can understand this, especially given the rightward shift of the judiciary. But the way in which he went about it seemed doomed and certainly angered a lot of people who thought he was breaking a campaign promise. (The puzzling lunacy of his own justice department challenging a court-led effort must have looked like one more instance of Obama backing off from what he'd said he was going to do.) I am a bit astonished that he got his way. A great deal of the apparent confusion over Obama's actions could stem from his seeming insistence that Congress do the heavy lifting for much of his agenda. And while there's a lot to be said for going this route, what's troubling is his failure to effectively use the bully pulpit in his own causes. And the fact that he has fallen short on much. It would be, perhaps, reassuring to think that his strategy is something well-considered, that things the public knows little about will come to fruition by, say, his second term. (Will he have a second term? Unless Republicans can front someone with more brains and less novelty than a Sarah Palin and more weight than a Mitt Romney, probably. I have seen no one among the GOP ranks who looks even remotely electable. The thing that might snuff Obama's chances would be a challenge from the Democrats themselves, but that would require a show of conviction the party has been unwilling overall to muster.) The Crash of 2008 caused a panic of identity. Unemployment had been creeping upward prior to that due to a number of factors, not least of which is the chronic outsourcing that has become, hand-in-glove, as derided a practice as CEO compensation packages and "golden parachutes," and just as protected in practice by a persistent nostalgia that refuses to consider practical solutions that might result in actual interventions in the way we do business. No one wants the jobs to go overseas but no one wants to impose protectionist policies on companies that outsource. Just as no one likes the fact that top management is absurdly paid for jobs apparently done better 40 years ago by people drawing a tenth the amount, but no one wants to impose corrective policies that might curtail what amounts to corporate pillage. It is the nostalgia for an America everyone believes once existed that functioned by the good will of its custodians and did not require laws to force people to do the morally right thing. After a couple decades of hearing the refrain "You can't legislate morality" it has finally sunk in but for the wrong segment of social practice. [More . . . ]