Richard Grossman, a noted political activist in the United States of America, died this November 22, 2011. Richard was known for his criticism of for-profit corporate control of the American (and global) political system, economy, and culture. Richard had no issues with criticizing other dissidents who did not agree with him on strategy and tactics. To honor his memory, I will not refrain from criticism (as is typical in a requiem) while I share my personal experiences about Richard.
Richard tried to influence the discourse of American environmental and pro-democracy dissidents, with varying degrees of success. I had never heard of him until my wife, Jan Edwards, began working with Alliance for Democracy and made herself the first modern crusader against the legal doctrine of corporate personhood (c. 1999). I could not say exactly when Richard came into the mix, as I was never "wowed" by him or his organization, POCLAD (Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy).
But at some point, when Jan was determined to get the City of Point Arena to pass a law against corporate personhood, I became aware that she was talking on the telephone to one Richard Grossman, among others. Richard never really adapted to computers (he was born on August 10, 1943), but large packages of xeroxed copies of old articles about corporate power began arriving at our house.
Jan had a fixed idea that corporate personhood was the central evil of the modern era. Richard did not agree with that; he tried to expand her attention to other issues of corporate power. But he did provide us with a lot of material about corporate personhood, notably Personalizing the Impersonal: Corporations and the Bill of Rights by Carl J. Mayer [Hastings Law Journal, Vol. 4, March 1990] and a series of articles from the 1950's by Howard Jay Graham. These were fine, but too much, too fast to serve as introductory material.
No one at POCLAD had written anything substantial about corporate personhood. Jan, assigning duties to our small local team of activists, decided I should write the first modern introduction to the topic. This resulted in Santa Clara Blues: Corporate Personhood versus Democracy.
With a million things going wrong in the world, do-gooders argue among themselves about priorities, strategies and tactics. Richard stated, strongly, that he thought the environmental and social justice movements were taking the wrong approaches. He believed that because of corporate power activists might win an occasional point (the Clean Air Act, or temporarily protecting an individual habitat) but were regularly losing ground on the whole.
Richard Grossman wanted to challenge fundamental legal doctrines that (with money) are the foundations of corporate power. These include, but are not limited to, corporate charters being treated as contracts, the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution, limited liability, and the ability of corporate money to influence elections.
The question activists asked, in return, was how was that to be done? What was to be sacrificed (streams, mountaintops, oceans, human beings) in the meantime if activists stopped what they were doing and all ran to law libraries and spent a half-century arguing for legal reform?
Richard's point was not to train more environmental or social justice lawyers. They are plentiful enough, so much so that many can't earn a living, or even end up being employed by corporations. He did not want to fight corporations within the law. He wanted to change the law.
Changing the law really happens in only one of three ways. You can win Supreme Court cases. You can change the law with legislation. Or you can have a revolution and write the law anew.
The Revolution never came in Richard Grossman's lifetime. This is the sad fate of most revolutionaries. I cannot fault Richard for trying, and for thinking outside the usual boxes.
Knowing a little history, however, makes one wonder if Richard ever deserved to be the intellectual leader of American dissidents, as was clearly his wish. Richard moved from being the executive director of Greenpeace in the 1980's to a messenger of the nature of corporate power.
It was not a new message. You probably did not know old-time American Communist Party members, but they talked a lot about corporate power. It tied in well with their strategy of radicalizing labor unions so that the working class (or at least its authoritarian vanguard) could come to power in this bastion of capitalism. Anarchists, too, long pre-dated Grossman in their analysis of the System, but did not care to try to change obscure doctrines like corporate personhood. They wanted, and want, to go straight to building a new society out of the ashes of the old.
Without the legal framework of corporate power we would most likely just have private ownership of large businesses, much as is the case in the Soviet Union today.
How do you de-power the ruling class when they can buy politicians and courts and, yes, can even divert activist organizations simply by strategic donations of money? Richard could never answer that question. Perhaps simply raising taxes on the rich, in particular with estate taxes, would do the trick. Taxes could break up the growing "title of nobility" that the Constitution warns against in Article I, Section 9.
Perhaps with a third party. Perhaps with the tactics being practiced by CELDF or MoveToAmend (both groups spawned by Grossman). Perhaps by anarchists, or communists, or social democrats, or revolutionary environmentalists. Why, it is not absolutely impossible that reforms could come from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
No one knows. Richard Grossman's greatest trait was his willingness to revise his views. He kept revising them until the day he died. Maybe if more people did more thinking outside their usual boxes, we might collectively find a solution that can transition us to an environmentally sound, ecologically sustainable, and culturally rich world.
Showing posts with label law. Show all posts
Showing posts with label law. Show all posts
Monday, December 5, 2011
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Professors Barack Obama, Newt Gingrich, and Woodrow Wilson
This week Newton Gingrich has become the Republican Party Presidential primary candidate best positioned to beat front-runner Mitt Romney. Before he was a politician Newt was a History Professor. President Obama was a Law Professor before he became a politician. When you look at the history of American Presidents, college professor is not a very common occupation. The other exception was Woodrow Wilson, who was a professor of Political Economy at Princeton.
While Newt has not been, and may not be President, he did hold what I believe should be a more important office, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives (from 1995 to 1999).
There is a saying that if you can't do, teach, but teaching is an important human activity. College professors also usually do some research and writing. How good is that as preparation to be President of the United States of America?
Woodrow Wilson served as President of the United States from 1913 until the beginning of 1921. Before that he served as governor of New Jersey from 1911. He is typically portrayed as a progressive President who also showed his spine by siding with the British Empire and the French Empire against Germany in World War I.
While Wilson did support some needed reforms like women's right to vote, on the whole he was a romantic reactionary. Most notably, he was a racist. When he ran for President in 1912, as a Democrat he could depend on the "Solid" racist, south, where Negroes (a respectful term then) were not allowed to vote. He made campaign promises to Negro voters in northern states, gaining many of their votes. Then he presided over segregation of the federal government, even instructing Post Offices to set up racially segregated windows to serve customers. He also fired most black federal employees and appointed white southerners in the places.
In other words, although Wilson was able to break with the past on some issues, his mind was not unusually far ranging. He lectured the nation and Congress, but all too often his lectures had no basis in human experience. I would argue that Wilson was a disaster, and that disaster echoed through the 20th century, adversely affecting not just Americans, but people around the globe.
For instance Woodrow Wilson thought no one should drink alcohol. Is that progressive or conservative? He refused to serve it at the White House, and on January 16, 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified, making "intoxicating liquors" illegal throughout the United States. Certainly consumption of alcohol has some bad effects. But Prohibition did not stop the flow of alcohol. Instead it created black markets and attendant crime and political corruption. Just like Barack Obama's attacks on medical marijuana clinics are doing today.
Imperialism was a big issue in the 1912 elections. The United States had become an imperialist system in the late 1800's. Both Democratic Party farmers (the nation was not yet mainly urban) and reformers were against imperialism, and candidate Wilson said anti-imperialistic things, just as Barack Obama would hint he was an anti-war, anti-defense spending candidate in 2008. But Wilson invaded more nations that any other President, not even counting World War I. He invaded Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Mexico. For good measure he bought the Virgin Islands. In the super-hypocrisy department he signed the Jones Act in 1916, which promised independence to the Philippines. The Philippines did not get independence until the Japanese granted it to them during World War II.
For Wilson the idea was more important than the deed. Because he thought the South should have won the Civil War, he supported the idea of what we would now call national autonomy. Back then it was called national self-determination. But, after World War I, when the Japanese asked that Asia be de-colonized, Wilson vetoed that idea. Self-determination, he made clear, was for white people, not subhumans, which is how he regarded non-white ethnic groups. This insult to the Japanese and the people of Asia would result in the disintegration of China, a number of colonial wars, World War II, and then more colonial wars, ending only when the British Empire, a bastion of autocratic governance unparalleled in history, ceded Hong Kong back to the nation of China.
Barack Obama, too, is better at speaking than at getting things done. That is probably a good thing, considering the blow back the U.S. is getting from his attempts to boss around Islamic people. If Barack does not get a second term, at least his acts are unlikely to cause as much damage in the 21st century as President Wilson did in the 20th.
Which brings us to Newt Gingrich. If you compare Newt to Wilson or Obama, he is clearly the more competent guy. Even though I disagree with his policies, his strategy and tactics in the 1990's were brilliant.
The problem with Newt is not that he does not know history. I grant him a knowledge of history. His problem is that his mind filters out all the facts that do not match his pre-determined conclusions about how America and the world should be governed.
He has not even learned the lesson of the Great Depression, and a whole string of forgotten depressions earlier in U.S. and world history: capitalism destroys itself, left unchecked. Another lesson: too much concentration of wealth leads to poorly performing national economies. Another lesson: empires that spend too much on their militaries suffer economic collapse.
I am forced to conclude that electing former professors to be President is not, in general, a good idea. There could be exceptions, of course, but neither Mr. Gingrich nor President Obama is one of them.
While Newt has not been, and may not be President, he did hold what I believe should be a more important office, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives (from 1995 to 1999).
There is a saying that if you can't do, teach, but teaching is an important human activity. College professors also usually do some research and writing. How good is that as preparation to be President of the United States of America?
Woodrow Wilson served as President of the United States from 1913 until the beginning of 1921. Before that he served as governor of New Jersey from 1911. He is typically portrayed as a progressive President who also showed his spine by siding with the British Empire and the French Empire against Germany in World War I.
While Wilson did support some needed reforms like women's right to vote, on the whole he was a romantic reactionary. Most notably, he was a racist. When he ran for President in 1912, as a Democrat he could depend on the "Solid" racist, south, where Negroes (a respectful term then) were not allowed to vote. He made campaign promises to Negro voters in northern states, gaining many of their votes. Then he presided over segregation of the federal government, even instructing Post Offices to set up racially segregated windows to serve customers. He also fired most black federal employees and appointed white southerners in the places.
In other words, although Wilson was able to break with the past on some issues, his mind was not unusually far ranging. He lectured the nation and Congress, but all too often his lectures had no basis in human experience. I would argue that Wilson was a disaster, and that disaster echoed through the 20th century, adversely affecting not just Americans, but people around the globe.
For instance Woodrow Wilson thought no one should drink alcohol. Is that progressive or conservative? He refused to serve it at the White House, and on January 16, 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified, making "intoxicating liquors" illegal throughout the United States. Certainly consumption of alcohol has some bad effects. But Prohibition did not stop the flow of alcohol. Instead it created black markets and attendant crime and political corruption. Just like Barack Obama's attacks on medical marijuana clinics are doing today.
Imperialism was a big issue in the 1912 elections. The United States had become an imperialist system in the late 1800's. Both Democratic Party farmers (the nation was not yet mainly urban) and reformers were against imperialism, and candidate Wilson said anti-imperialistic things, just as Barack Obama would hint he was an anti-war, anti-defense spending candidate in 2008. But Wilson invaded more nations that any other President, not even counting World War I. He invaded Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Mexico. For good measure he bought the Virgin Islands. In the super-hypocrisy department he signed the Jones Act in 1916, which promised independence to the Philippines. The Philippines did not get independence until the Japanese granted it to them during World War II.
For Wilson the idea was more important than the deed. Because he thought the South should have won the Civil War, he supported the idea of what we would now call national autonomy. Back then it was called national self-determination. But, after World War I, when the Japanese asked that Asia be de-colonized, Wilson vetoed that idea. Self-determination, he made clear, was for white people, not subhumans, which is how he regarded non-white ethnic groups. This insult to the Japanese and the people of Asia would result in the disintegration of China, a number of colonial wars, World War II, and then more colonial wars, ending only when the British Empire, a bastion of autocratic governance unparalleled in history, ceded Hong Kong back to the nation of China.
Barack Obama, too, is better at speaking than at getting things done. That is probably a good thing, considering the blow back the U.S. is getting from his attempts to boss around Islamic people. If Barack does not get a second term, at least his acts are unlikely to cause as much damage in the 21st century as President Wilson did in the 20th.
Which brings us to Newt Gingrich. If you compare Newt to Wilson or Obama, he is clearly the more competent guy. Even though I disagree with his policies, his strategy and tactics in the 1990's were brilliant.
The problem with Newt is not that he does not know history. I grant him a knowledge of history. His problem is that his mind filters out all the facts that do not match his pre-determined conclusions about how America and the world should be governed.
He has not even learned the lesson of the Great Depression, and a whole string of forgotten depressions earlier in U.S. and world history: capitalism destroys itself, left unchecked. Another lesson: too much concentration of wealth leads to poorly performing national economies. Another lesson: empires that spend too much on their militaries suffer economic collapse.
I am forced to conclude that electing former professors to be President is not, in general, a good idea. There could be exceptions, of course, but neither Mr. Gingrich nor President Obama is one of them.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Supreme Court: No Right to Class Action
The gruel of law is getting ever thinner for poor consumers. The Supreme Court of the United States ruled on April 27, 2011, in AT&T Mobility LLC v. Conception et ux., that businesses (mostly corporations) can protect themselves from class action lawsuits and arbitration by simply including a clause to that effect in contracts they force consumers to sign.
Justices Scalia, Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito voted for AT&T, while Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan sided with consumers on this issue (5 to 4 in favor of corporations v. real people).
What does this mean? It amounts to a license to steal, if by "steal" one means to take unjustly, rather than to take illegally.
Here's how it works. You want to buy a product or service, but Xample Corporation, like all corporations, requires you to sign a Supreme-Court approved contract to make the purchase. The contract says you cannot sue, you must arbitrate if you have a complaint, and you must arbitrate alone. You cannot join in a class action arbitration to spread the costs of an attorney over a large number of your fellow customers of the Xample Corporation.
Xample has your credit card, and you discover that Xample has charged it $30 more than you thought you were supposed to be charged. You complain to Xample, but they refuse to refund the $30. Your option under the gruel of law? You can call the police, but they will judge this a civil, contractual matter, because the criminals at Xample got incorporated before they over charged you.
You can fire bomb Xample corporate headquarters, but that seems extreme over $30, it does not get your money back, makes you a criminal (the police react differently when they get a call from Xample about trouble makers), and could get you killed.
You can report it to the Better Business Bureau, who will listen to you and then find Xample is in the right. When other people look up Xample at BBB, they will see that "all complaints have been resolved" and Xample gets their highest rating.
You can hire a lawyer. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal expenses later, you might get your $30 back. On the other hand, you might lose in court (after all, its the same court system headed by the Supremes), and be ordered to pay for Xample's army of lawyers, which almost certainly include former DA's who should have protected you in the first place.
Or you can eat it. 99.9% of consumers will eat it. A smallish local business that rips off 1000 customers this way will net $30,000. They might be held in check by the idea of 1000 local people angry at them.
But suppose you are a cellular telephone company and you did this to say, 10 million people during the course of a fiscal year (maybe tucking in $3 or so per monthly bill). That is a tidy $300 million in profits handed to you by Scalia, Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito. Send the boys a gift basket. Xample stockholders will be happy, and the CEO will get a $45 million bonus for his efforts.
What should be the rule of law is really the gruel of law, and it is getting thinner all the time.
So be careful what you buy, and what contracts you sign, and if you want the full protection of the Law, and something better than gruel to eat, be sure to be born into the ruling class of these United States of America.
See also:
Supreme Court Allows Contracts that Prohibit Class-Action Arbitration [by Adam Liptak, New York Times]
Friday, April 1, 2011
Coffin Ships, Deregulation, and Al Gore
Samuel Plimsoll was born in Bristol, England, on February 10, 1824. He became a businessman, but of the sort who cared about his fellow humans. In his business, the coal trade, there was a dark secret. Ship owners found they could maximize their profits on their oldest vessels by stopping maintenance, overloading them with goods, using fewer sailors than was safe, and over-insuring them. A ship that made its voyage was profitable. A ship that sank was profitable too, because of the insurance payment. Never mind the dead sailors. Such ships were known as coffin or death ships. Plimsoll pleaded with the British Parliament to outlaw these practices. Parliament did nothing. Plimsoll ran for and was seated in Parliament in 1868. It took him until 1876 to get his Merchant Shipping Act passed. He is known to history as "the sailor's friend."
Regulation good, de-regulation bad? Democrats good, Republicans bad? Not so fast.
Regulations can be bad, often depending on your point of view. The devil is in the details, and the details, all too often in modern times, are written by corporate lawyers. Laws and regulations about business practices are yet more grist for the gruel of law.Regulations can make people safer, but they can also kill beneficial industries by failing to take into account that a degree of danger is inherent when any human wakes up in the morning, and to some extent even when they sleep at night. Many regulations, however, are not about safety, but about some other government set goal. Regulating fishing, for instance, is (supposed to be) about preserving enough breeding fish each year so that fishing will be just as good next year, or ten years from now. Thus they should benefit business and workers alike.
Laws and regulations, like cholesterol, tend to accumulate and choke the life out of things at times, even if they are well-intentioned. As a public school board member in California I saw this effect. Over the decades whenever something went wrong at a public school the state legislature, or the office of education, or even the Federal government, wrote a law (usually added to the Education Code) in response. Often, to ensure compliance, some paperwork was added: an annual certification that the school complied with the regulation. Over the decades, to ensure compliance, which is necessary to get funding, the ratio of administrative support staff to teachers grew.
I have no problem with the idea of periodically purging unnecessary regulations. The problem is, who picks? Too often, business lobbyists choose to leave in regulations that help them fend off ruinous competition, while getting rid of regulations that protect workers, consumers, and the environment.
Which brings us to Al Gore, former Vice-president of the United States of America, now known as a flaming liberal because of his anti-global warming posturing. For no particular reason I started reading Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair's Al Gore: A User's Manual, printed back in 2000. The section I am in is how Gore led the deregulators when he was vice-president. He pushed the Clinton administration for REGO, his reinventing government program. It would please any Tea Party activist or corporate Republican. It was sold to the public as a waste-eliminator, but in fact opened the doors of government to business predators, while gutting departments that did useful public service [pages 172-187]. Gore topped this with his attack on the federal welfare system [pages 188-209]. Gore's ability to completely alienate any Democratic Party politician or voter who still believed in the New Deal or Great Society was the reason he lost his campaign to become President in 2000.
But people have short memories. Particularly, apparently, do voters. And journalists. So raise a glass to Samuel Plimsoll, one of the rare good politicians.
Remember, too, the glory that was Imperialist America, but don't expect the paychecks to be as good during our post-imperial decline and fall.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Speedy Trials and the Gruel of Law
What would the Constitutional Fundamentalists at the Tea Party think?
On July 12, 2010, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of the Southern District of New York United States District Court in Manhattan ruled that suspects can be held over six years and still get a speedy trial.
You may remember the U.S. Constitution has a Sixth (VI) Amendment stating: "In all criminal prosecutions the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial."
Apparently Judge Kaplan can't read at grade level, or thinks he is not obligated by the U.S. Constitution, or is just plain corrupt. Or maybe he believes in "judge made law." He appears to have set a new standard for speedy trial. "Speedy" does not mean in a short period of time. It is all about the alleged criminal's ability to defend himself. If that does not decrease in the pre-trial period of time, then the trial is speedy. Even if it takes six years to get around to it. Or, as Kaplan wrote in his opinion "There is no persuasive evidence that the delay in this prosecution has impaired Ghailani’s ability to defend himself in any respect or significantly prejudiced him in any other way pertinent to the speedy trial analysis."
Get prepared, America. Forget the assumption you are not guilty until proven to be. You can be held in jail for six years. And apparently interogated (aka tortured) by the CIA. Then, you get a trial.
The suspect, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, is accused of having some role in bombing American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Maybe he deserved a long prison sentence. On the other hand, the case is one of many that brings to the forefront the United States government's extending of its legal arm to foreign soils. Should not Mr. Ghailani be tried in Kenya and Tanzania? Or perhaps President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton should be tried in Afghanistan for all the Afghans they have killed?
This is how liberty is engineered into oblivion. The government picks a case where the alleged criminal will have no public sympathy. It uses collaborating judges like Kaplan, and often arranges for a weak defense attorney for the victim. Maybe the ruling is appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, where if upheld it sets a precedent for the entire nation.
Once the precedent is set, the old interpretation of the word "speedy" is erased from the U.S. Constitution. It is replaced by the right of the government to delay trial as long as a judge can be persuaded that the defendant has not had his defense capability impaired. In the case of the majority of poor people, they have little ability to defend themselves as it is, so there can't be much erosion.
Or, again quoting Kaplan: "The Sixth Amendment guarantees "a speedy ... trial," but it nowhere defines speedy."
I did not know the U.S. Constitution included a dictionary. Most of the words in the Constitution are not defined in the Constitution. So words means whatever judges say they mean?
Today a guy who is labeled an Islamic terrorist. Tomorrow, a Tea Party or militia guy, or perhaps a Socialist or environmentalist trouble maker. Maybe just a whistleblower. Once a precedent is set, whoever controls the apparatus of state and judicial power has a mighty weapon against their enemies.
Again, we have a good illustration that we are subject to the Gruel of Law. Rich people will doubtless continue to get speedy trials, and acquittals if there is any doubt as to their guilt. The poor, and especially those who oppose the U.S. government's attempt to boss everyone in the world around, will get whatever swill American judges dish out.
See also United States of America vs. Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani
On July 12, 2010, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of the Southern District of New York United States District Court in Manhattan ruled that suspects can be held over six years and still get a speedy trial.
You may remember the U.S. Constitution has a Sixth (VI) Amendment stating: "In all criminal prosecutions the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial."
Apparently Judge Kaplan can't read at grade level, or thinks he is not obligated by the U.S. Constitution, or is just plain corrupt. Or maybe he believes in "judge made law." He appears to have set a new standard for speedy trial. "Speedy" does not mean in a short period of time. It is all about the alleged criminal's ability to defend himself. If that does not decrease in the pre-trial period of time, then the trial is speedy. Even if it takes six years to get around to it. Or, as Kaplan wrote in his opinion "There is no persuasive evidence that the delay in this prosecution has impaired Ghailani’s ability to defend himself in any respect or significantly prejudiced him in any other way pertinent to the speedy trial analysis."
Get prepared, America. Forget the assumption you are not guilty until proven to be. You can be held in jail for six years. And apparently interogated (aka tortured) by the CIA. Then, you get a trial.
The suspect, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, is accused of having some role in bombing American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Maybe he deserved a long prison sentence. On the other hand, the case is one of many that brings to the forefront the United States government's extending of its legal arm to foreign soils. Should not Mr. Ghailani be tried in Kenya and Tanzania? Or perhaps President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton should be tried in Afghanistan for all the Afghans they have killed?
This is how liberty is engineered into oblivion. The government picks a case where the alleged criminal will have no public sympathy. It uses collaborating judges like Kaplan, and often arranges for a weak defense attorney for the victim. Maybe the ruling is appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, where if upheld it sets a precedent for the entire nation.
Once the precedent is set, the old interpretation of the word "speedy" is erased from the U.S. Constitution. It is replaced by the right of the government to delay trial as long as a judge can be persuaded that the defendant has not had his defense capability impaired. In the case of the majority of poor people, they have little ability to defend themselves as it is, so there can't be much erosion.
Or, again quoting Kaplan: "The Sixth Amendment guarantees "a speedy ... trial," but it nowhere defines speedy."
I did not know the U.S. Constitution included a dictionary. Most of the words in the Constitution are not defined in the Constitution. So words means whatever judges say they mean?
Today a guy who is labeled an Islamic terrorist. Tomorrow, a Tea Party or militia guy, or perhaps a Socialist or environmentalist trouble maker. Maybe just a whistleblower. Once a precedent is set, whoever controls the apparatus of state and judicial power has a mighty weapon against their enemies.
Again, we have a good illustration that we are subject to the Gruel of Law. Rich people will doubtless continue to get speedy trials, and acquittals if there is any doubt as to their guilt. The poor, and especially those who oppose the U.S. government's attempt to boss everyone in the world around, will get whatever swill American judges dish out.
See also United States of America vs. Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani
Saturday, September 12, 2009
The Gruel of Law (on the Rule of Law)
The "rule of law" is usually portrayed in the United States of America (and in Great Britain and many other nations) as a lofty ideal, to be treated with the reverence due the Constitution, Democracy, the Founding Fathers, and the automobile. Some of us, however, may want to look at what ideas we are being fed before let them poison our lives.
The rule of law in the United States does not feed all people equally. The rule of law for wealthy Americans is a smorgasbord of delights. For the upper middle class it has some variety and is wholesome enough as long there is no attempt to sneak over to the table of the rich. For working and middle class families, it is poor fare indeed. At the lower end of the economy, where the "middle class" starts looking suspiciously like slightly modernized serfs, what you get fed as the rule of law is a thin gruel, with nasty tidbits floating in it.
I'll call it the gruel of law. Gruel is an old-fashioned word. My dictionary gives its primary as: "thin easily digested porridge," essentially oat, barley, or corn meal cooked in water. As a secondary British meaning we have "punishment." Grueling means "exhausting." Meals of gruel are associated with prisons, orphanages, work camps, and the kind of pay that leads to the slow starvation of working families.
Ah, but the rule of law is supposed a fine thing, because it is opposed the the "rule of persons," (and lawlessness, which I won't discuss here). The rule of persons refers to systems of government where officials have the authority to make decisions without reference to written laws. So that a policeman might choose to arrest one person for almost any action, while other people are allowed to act with impunity. Taxes might be waved for members of a senior official's extended family; government land might be sold to some speculators for pennies, while not being for sale to others (like indigenous people who once lived there) at any price.
The rule of persons is not, however, always a bad thing. The Chinese, over a long period of time, worked out an elaborate system that tried to ensure that the rule of persons was carried out only by persons who were just in their judgments. However, for the purposes of this essay, I will allow that the rule of persons has usually proved to be an undesirable system of government.
Still, we should take a look at the gruel we are being served. In American law the gruel comes it two big varieties. One is called criminal law, the other civil. Don't be fooled by the names of the gruel. What is really meant by this division is that the government pays for lawyers to prosecute, and police (with jails and electric chairs) to enforce the criminal law, or criminal gruel. Civil law, or gruel, is brought before government courts, but each party must pay for its own lawyers.
Take a currently talked about example where the gruel is about to be improved. Consider an insurance company that accepts health insurance payments from a well person for a period of years, promising to pay for medical services when the insured becomes sick. Instead, when the insured needs an expensive or chronic therapy, the insurer "drops the policy." What has happened here is fraud, a form of theft. But it does no good to call the police, or prosecutors. They will say this is a bad thing, but what you have is a contract problem. Civil gruel. You must hire an attorney to make the insurer pay you what is due. And the courts may rule that the insurer did nothing wrong in taking tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars from you, and in returning insuring you as long as you did not get sick.
But if the same amount of money were stolen in only a slightly different fashion, by different persons, it would be theft. Suppose, for instance, that you had put the equivalent of the medical insurance payments in a safe. When you finally need the cash, and are counting it out to take to the hospital to pay your bills, a crooked relative steals the money. Now, strangely, you can call the police, and your cousin will probably be sent to jail if you press charges. At no expense to you; you won't need to hire the lawyer.
In this example (and I could give a thousand more) the gruel of law looks astonishingly similar to the gruel of people. Why is the insurance company treated as a privileged person?
I am not just talking about the kinds of defects in the system that at times send an innocent man to jail and set a guilty man free. People lie, and the crime detection process is fallible. Even in the most just, least corrupt systems errors will be made.
The gruel of law is not errors in a basically just system. It is a system constructed to be unjust. It is a set of sieves that sifts the good things in life away from some people and piles those things up for the rich people to hoard.
The gruel of law has both evolved and been designed, in its large and small scales, over the centuries to suit the needs of the law-giving class. The law-giving class corresponds closely, most of the time, to those who are able to fund political campaigns, lobbyists, and lawyers. In America anyone can play, but it is rare that a political candidate can convince a hundred thousand people to donate $10 each to his campaign so that he can defeat a candidate who really represents a hundred people who gladly give $10,000 each to their candidate. For the rich political contributions are an investment. They like the rule of law. They are happy to pay for laws that work to their advantage. And if the rule of law happens to go against them, they can use their wealth for a tempory bit of rule of persons. The rich are only in danger from the law when they are fighting with other rich people.
Occasionally ordinary people get tired of the gruel they are being served and revolt. Women were once served different gruel than men. Now they are served the same gruel, which has worked out nicely for rich and upper-middle-class women. For middle class and poor women, it has simply allowed them to fight over the poor gruel served to the men of their class. The same has come true for African-Americans in the last half-century.
Some people and organizations (Ralph Nader, etc.) work tirelessly to improve the gruel of law served to the lower classes in the United States. In my lifetime I have seen no overall improvement in the gruel. For every reformer there are a hundred paid lobbyists seeking better gruel for their employers, which means worse gruel for the rest of us.
Before suggesting how to change the gruel of law to something more resembling justice for all, we need to understand both the law and the system that produces it better. While not the main focus of this Natural Liberation blog, it is an important issue which I will return to in future essays.
More:
The standard rap on the rule of law at Wikipedia
The rule of law in the United States does not feed all people equally. The rule of law for wealthy Americans is a smorgasbord of delights. For the upper middle class it has some variety and is wholesome enough as long there is no attempt to sneak over to the table of the rich. For working and middle class families, it is poor fare indeed. At the lower end of the economy, where the "middle class" starts looking suspiciously like slightly modernized serfs, what you get fed as the rule of law is a thin gruel, with nasty tidbits floating in it.
I'll call it the gruel of law. Gruel is an old-fashioned word. My dictionary gives its primary as: "thin easily digested porridge," essentially oat, barley, or corn meal cooked in water. As a secondary British meaning we have "punishment." Grueling means "exhausting." Meals of gruel are associated with prisons, orphanages, work camps, and the kind of pay that leads to the slow starvation of working families.
Ah, but the rule of law is supposed a fine thing, because it is opposed the the "rule of persons," (and lawlessness, which I won't discuss here). The rule of persons refers to systems of government where officials have the authority to make decisions without reference to written laws. So that a policeman might choose to arrest one person for almost any action, while other people are allowed to act with impunity. Taxes might be waved for members of a senior official's extended family; government land might be sold to some speculators for pennies, while not being for sale to others (like indigenous people who once lived there) at any price.
The rule of persons is not, however, always a bad thing. The Chinese, over a long period of time, worked out an elaborate system that tried to ensure that the rule of persons was carried out only by persons who were just in their judgments. However, for the purposes of this essay, I will allow that the rule of persons has usually proved to be an undesirable system of government.
Still, we should take a look at the gruel we are being served. In American law the gruel comes it two big varieties. One is called criminal law, the other civil. Don't be fooled by the names of the gruel. What is really meant by this division is that the government pays for lawyers to prosecute, and police (with jails and electric chairs) to enforce the criminal law, or criminal gruel. Civil law, or gruel, is brought before government courts, but each party must pay for its own lawyers.
Take a currently talked about example where the gruel is about to be improved. Consider an insurance company that accepts health insurance payments from a well person for a period of years, promising to pay for medical services when the insured becomes sick. Instead, when the insured needs an expensive or chronic therapy, the insurer "drops the policy." What has happened here is fraud, a form of theft. But it does no good to call the police, or prosecutors. They will say this is a bad thing, but what you have is a contract problem. Civil gruel. You must hire an attorney to make the insurer pay you what is due. And the courts may rule that the insurer did nothing wrong in taking tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars from you, and in returning insuring you as long as you did not get sick.
But if the same amount of money were stolen in only a slightly different fashion, by different persons, it would be theft. Suppose, for instance, that you had put the equivalent of the medical insurance payments in a safe. When you finally need the cash, and are counting it out to take to the hospital to pay your bills, a crooked relative steals the money. Now, strangely, you can call the police, and your cousin will probably be sent to jail if you press charges. At no expense to you; you won't need to hire the lawyer.
In this example (and I could give a thousand more) the gruel of law looks astonishingly similar to the gruel of people. Why is the insurance company treated as a privileged person?
I am not just talking about the kinds of defects in the system that at times send an innocent man to jail and set a guilty man free. People lie, and the crime detection process is fallible. Even in the most just, least corrupt systems errors will be made.
The gruel of law is not errors in a basically just system. It is a system constructed to be unjust. It is a set of sieves that sifts the good things in life away from some people and piles those things up for the rich people to hoard.
The gruel of law has both evolved and been designed, in its large and small scales, over the centuries to suit the needs of the law-giving class. The law-giving class corresponds closely, most of the time, to those who are able to fund political campaigns, lobbyists, and lawyers. In America anyone can play, but it is rare that a political candidate can convince a hundred thousand people to donate $10 each to his campaign so that he can defeat a candidate who really represents a hundred people who gladly give $10,000 each to their candidate. For the rich political contributions are an investment. They like the rule of law. They are happy to pay for laws that work to their advantage. And if the rule of law happens to go against them, they can use their wealth for a tempory bit of rule of persons. The rich are only in danger from the law when they are fighting with other rich people.
Occasionally ordinary people get tired of the gruel they are being served and revolt. Women were once served different gruel than men. Now they are served the same gruel, which has worked out nicely for rich and upper-middle-class women. For middle class and poor women, it has simply allowed them to fight over the poor gruel served to the men of their class. The same has come true for African-Americans in the last half-century.
Some people and organizations (Ralph Nader, etc.) work tirelessly to improve the gruel of law served to the lower classes in the United States. In my lifetime I have seen no overall improvement in the gruel. For every reformer there are a hundred paid lobbyists seeking better gruel for their employers, which means worse gruel for the rest of us.
Before suggesting how to change the gruel of law to something more resembling justice for all, we need to understand both the law and the system that produces it better. While not the main focus of this Natural Liberation blog, it is an important issue which I will return to in future essays.
More:
The standard rap on the rule of law at Wikipedia
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Nancy Price v. 10,000 Demon Lawyers
My wife, Jan Edwards, was talking to an activist friend today, Nancy Price of the Alliance For Democracy. Nancy is known (and should be better known) as a water activist. So she gets asked to speak about water issues (especially who owns it and how it should be distributed). But what she really wants to speak about, she says is an extension of NAFTA called the SPP (Security and Prosperity Partnership).
Basically, the SPP is going to globalize parts of the United States. Globalize in the sense of ridding these areas of local control, including environmental and labor regulations. Apparently workers who are not U.S. citizens will be brought to these zones to work for sub-minimum wage.
SPP sounds horrible for people and the planet. It is based on the principle that economies must always expand. It was created with no input from 99.9% of the citizens of the U.S., Mexico, or Canada. It is corporate rule, international corporate rule, pure and simple.
So why don't people know about this? Sure, citizens in the U.S. are used to being ruled like sheep without consultation, but usually once something this big is set up, the New York Times and other hyenas that pretend to be a free press in this country gloat about it, if only in the Business section.
I read the financial pages every day. I have for years. I don't read every article, but I look at the headlines at the New York Times and CNN/Money online. I read The Economist, in the paper edition, every week.
Not only did I know little about SPP (though I did know about the Canada to Mexico superhighways they are building), I did not even know that in 2006 Congress passed, and George W. Bush signed, a law allowing the Federal Reserve to pay interest to banks for the money they are required to keep in reserves. I found this out yesterday because the Fed is thinking of actually implementing this option. It is an outrageous scam. But I'll have to write more about this later, because I want to present an even larger scale picture of our social-economic-political-environmental problem.
The rich people and their corporations have an army of lawyers, lobbyists, consultants and their demonic helpers to pass treaties and legislation, and to litigate in the courts. We have Nancy, an unpaid, volunteer activist. Nancy is a formidable person. In a fair fight I'm sure she could take on 10 spawn of Stanford Law School and defeat them. And there are a few more Nancies in the U.S., and even some paid activists in groups like Public Citizen.
But my side loses, over and over again, because of the Armies of Hell. The campaign donations. The phony "progressive" candidates for high office. Highly paid lawyers who can scare the brave and creep quietly like deadly fungi into the very fabric of American government.
We need to take their money away, first and foremost. By any means necessary. Money has always been the root of their power. Leave them with their money and nothing is safe.
I am tired of hearing from aging ex-corporate lawyers, generals, CIA agents and politicians that the system is bad and they wished they had not done the dirty deeds they did.
If we are going to save this planet and a scrap of dignity for ordinary human beings, it is time to declare war. We seem to be incapable of seizing the government; the two-party system is designed to prevent that. I suggest that we make America ungovernable by the parasitic elite.
You don't have to be a lawyer to disrupt a lawyer. You just have to put in the effort.
People have hopes for Barack Obama. Let us use that hope. Let us give Barack, or Ms. Clinton if she wins, and even John McCain if we wins, a to do list with some deadlines. And if they can't meet the deadlines, let's fire their asses. The whole lot of them. Let's burn their wicked laws and issue new law that is healthy and wholesome.
Six months, I think, is sufficient to dash any reasonable hope. So here is what I demand, and suggest that you demand, that Barack Obama and Congress sign into law within 6 months of Barack's inauguration:
1. All U.S. troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan (except the customary guards at U.S. embassies).
2. A single-payer health insurance plan for all Americans.
3. A required 40 mpg highway fleet average for new non-commercial automobile/SUV sales.
4. Repeal of NAFTA and the WTO trade agreements.
5. An 80% income tax on all persons' income of over $50 million a year, with all securities held by people in this category marked to market for tax purposes.
Of course my list could be longer and more detailed, but if they achieve those five things, I'll be very impressed and have to shut up for a while about what a bad lot the Democrats are.
If I were a betting man, I'd bet 5 to 1 that not a single one of these goals will be achieved by the deadline, and 2 to 1 that none of them will be achieved during Barack's four years in office.
For more of my opinion, visit my Politics page.
Basically, the SPP is going to globalize parts of the United States. Globalize in the sense of ridding these areas of local control, including environmental and labor regulations. Apparently workers who are not U.S. citizens will be brought to these zones to work for sub-minimum wage.
SPP sounds horrible for people and the planet. It is based on the principle that economies must always expand. It was created with no input from 99.9% of the citizens of the U.S., Mexico, or Canada. It is corporate rule, international corporate rule, pure and simple.
So why don't people know about this? Sure, citizens in the U.S. are used to being ruled like sheep without consultation, but usually once something this big is set up, the New York Times and other hyenas that pretend to be a free press in this country gloat about it, if only in the Business section.
I read the financial pages every day. I have for years. I don't read every article, but I look at the headlines at the New York Times and CNN/Money online. I read The Economist, in the paper edition, every week.
Not only did I know little about SPP (though I did know about the Canada to Mexico superhighways they are building), I did not even know that in 2006 Congress passed, and George W. Bush signed, a law allowing the Federal Reserve to pay interest to banks for the money they are required to keep in reserves. I found this out yesterday because the Fed is thinking of actually implementing this option. It is an outrageous scam. But I'll have to write more about this later, because I want to present an even larger scale picture of our social-economic-political-environmental problem.
The rich people and their corporations have an army of lawyers, lobbyists, consultants and their demonic helpers to pass treaties and legislation, and to litigate in the courts. We have Nancy, an unpaid, volunteer activist. Nancy is a formidable person. In a fair fight I'm sure she could take on 10 spawn of Stanford Law School and defeat them. And there are a few more Nancies in the U.S., and even some paid activists in groups like Public Citizen.
But my side loses, over and over again, because of the Armies of Hell. The campaign donations. The phony "progressive" candidates for high office. Highly paid lawyers who can scare the brave and creep quietly like deadly fungi into the very fabric of American government.
We need to take their money away, first and foremost. By any means necessary. Money has always been the root of their power. Leave them with their money and nothing is safe.
I am tired of hearing from aging ex-corporate lawyers, generals, CIA agents and politicians that the system is bad and they wished they had not done the dirty deeds they did.
If we are going to save this planet and a scrap of dignity for ordinary human beings, it is time to declare war. We seem to be incapable of seizing the government; the two-party system is designed to prevent that. I suggest that we make America ungovernable by the parasitic elite.
You don't have to be a lawyer to disrupt a lawyer. You just have to put in the effort.
People have hopes for Barack Obama. Let us use that hope. Let us give Barack, or Ms. Clinton if she wins, and even John McCain if we wins, a to do list with some deadlines. And if they can't meet the deadlines, let's fire their asses. The whole lot of them. Let's burn their wicked laws and issue new law that is healthy and wholesome.
Six months, I think, is sufficient to dash any reasonable hope. So here is what I demand, and suggest that you demand, that Barack Obama and Congress sign into law within 6 months of Barack's inauguration:
1. All U.S. troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan (except the customary guards at U.S. embassies).
2. A single-payer health insurance plan for all Americans.
3. A required 40 mpg highway fleet average for new non-commercial automobile/SUV sales.
4. Repeal of NAFTA and the WTO trade agreements.
5. An 80% income tax on all persons' income of over $50 million a year, with all securities held by people in this category marked to market for tax purposes.
Of course my list could be longer and more detailed, but if they achieve those five things, I'll be very impressed and have to shut up for a while about what a bad lot the Democrats are.
If I were a betting man, I'd bet 5 to 1 that not a single one of these goals will be achieved by the deadline, and 2 to 1 that none of them will be achieved during Barack's four years in office.
For more of my opinion, visit my Politics page.
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