Law

Gentrifying Tacky Sac: not bad if you can stomach the corruption and iniquity

muricaderp Economics, Law, Liberty

A few months ago, I lit into the Capital Area Development Authority, or CADA, for redlining a significant portion of Midtown Sacramento to exclude poor and middling tenants. What I find particularly objectionable about this redlining is that it is done as a matter of deliberate government policy, since CADA is a joint powers authority chartered by the Sacramento municipal and California state governments, and that there seems not to have been any pushback from local activists or the courts.

CADA administers a huge amount of residential property to the east and south of the Capitol, enough to unilaterally set housing policy on a number of blocks. Some of the conditions that it sets for tenants are draconian, among them, open lines of credit with on-time payment histories, high credit scores, stable, long-term tenancies with landlords who are not friends are relatives, and absolutely no negative references from past landlords. These conditions are objectively discriminatory against poor applicants, who are often forced to rely on makeshift living arrangements with friends or relatives, unable to pay bills on time because they simply lack the money, and preyed upon and retaliated against by systematically criminal slumlords. The question is not whether discrimination against the poor is taking place here, but whether or not it is morally and legally acceptable.

There’s another question that really muddies the waters: is discrimination against the poor practical? Having spent quite a bit of time in Midtown and Downtown over the past few months, I have no doubt that CADA has done a lot to clean Midtown up. Midtown doesn’t have anything like the hordes of shambling homeless mentally ill, patina of grime, and trails of trash that one finds on the K Street light rail mall, or, as it’s lovingly called by its marketeers in the (posh) drinking industry, “The Kay.” The 16th Street light rail station has a bit of that dysfunction going on, but it’s safe to assume that CADA’s redevelopment activities, some of them only a block to the north, have brought some degree of improvement to the station by increasing the sheer number of non-derelict passengers using the station at off-peak hours. If this is the case, it has to have marginally improved the quality of life for the disproportionately poor passengers who change trains there. (16th Street is the last station leaving downtown before the Gold and Blue Lines split, the former east towards the dodgy neighborhoods of Rancho Cordova, the latter south towards the much scarier ghetto sector of inland South Sacramento.)

CADA’s territory in Midtown is more or less free of the malt liquor bottle shops, intractable pants-on-the-ground al fresco alcoholics, undermedicated long-term outpatients, and criminal underclass elements that plague many parts of Sacramento and its suburbs. These things have been driven out by clean and orderly businesses and the sort of clean and orderly people who patronize them, who are also the sort of people one is not scared to encounter on the streets late at night. I’ve come to the conclusion that, questions of equity aside, CADA is clearly doing something right.

This still leaves troubling questions of civics. I would have much weaker objections to a private developer applying such conditions to prospective tenants at a luxury apartment complex that was built entirely on the free market, i.e., completely without eminent domain, weaselly tax-break inducements, or other government favors. (These conditions are met disgustingly less often than developers would like us to believe). At a high enough level, any residual objections I might have to the abuse of credit rating inquiries or other background investigations would be moot anyway, since serious high-rollers in real estate consider cash on the barrel head the offering that covers a multitude of sins, a most fitting sacrifice of first fruits.

The problem is that draconian tenancy conditions are applied most heavily against those who can least manage to meet them. Many rental markets are monopolies or oligopolies controlled by slumlord thieves who steal tenants’ security deposits as a matter of course. In these markets, the idea of tenants of limited means being able to exercise a right of free association to find better landlords or some sort of roommate arrangement sounds like a cruel joke. On the whole, American housing law is de jure equitable but de facto a dual system of high and low justice.

The proper role of government intervention in such a market is to enforce equity standards on landlords, many of whom are easily shown to be in willful and material violation of federal racketeering law. As a matter of equity at law, government agencies have absolutely no business helping unethical and often criminal landlords and banks entrench themselves as private tyrants by allowing them to help redline the poor out of apartment complexes that are tantamount to public housing.

One of the great intellectual frauds of agencies like CADA is their false promotion as civic and community organizations. CADA is more accurately described as a regulatory capture apparatus operating at the behest of neighborhood business interests. A huge amount of what passes for community civics in the United States is in fact business marketing strategy enforced through government policy. This is classic regulatory capture. What business owners want in these cases is to flood the neighborhood with their target demographic. Sure enough, CADA’s rental conditions are perfectly designed to flood Midtown Sacramento with yuppies and their disposable incomes.

This is a point that cannot be made clearly enough: the purpose of CADA’s draconian rental conditions is NOT to ensure that its tenants are orderly, peaceable, acceptable risks to their landlord, and capable of improving community life through their presence; it is to ensure that they’re moneyed enough to patronize the local yuppie joints at a suitable price point. These conditions are patently not designed just to screen out risky applicants who have trashed previous rental units, worked crack territories on Hella South Stockton, held meth bake sales in Rancho Cordova, or had regular 3 am bruiser sessions with their live-in lovers and the Sheriff’s Department’s night watch. They are also designed to screen out perfectly peaceable and civic-minded applicants who brew their own Sanka at home and eat pork and beans out of a can instead of dropping thirty dollars a day on lattes and Thai food. Some of these people are exactly the types whose eyes are good to have on the street. Do we want maternal 7-Eleven clerks and home health aides from the trailer parks and the ghettos moving into the neighborhood to keep their eyes on the streets? As a matter of civics, we do. As a matter of economics, it probably depends on whether they’ll buy their pork and beans at the Midtown Safeway or trek out to the Rancho Cordova Grocery Outlet, but the answer is: No, they’re poors.

And no, this is not being done so that these mother hens will continue to grace their old neighborhoods with their wisdom and supervision. Any self-described progressive who says otherwise is concern-trolling the Sacramento banlieue with suggestions that the crabs all work to keep each other safely within the barrel. If anyone in charge of policy at CADA gives a shit about Rancho Cordova, I’m Mother Teresa.

It isn’t about high civics; it’s about marketing through government policy, a much crasser proposition. Many elements in the business community do their level best to elide the difference between civics and business, but it’s a real and serious one. CADA’s class-based redlining is effective policy, but it is not equitable or ethically sound policy. Don’t think for a split second that they’re the same thing.

Breaking Bad Policy of Drug Prohibition (spoiler alert).

Audrey Redford Current Events, Economics, Law , , , , ,

I would argue that the only positive thing that has come out of the War on Drugs is awesome TV. From The Wire to Breaking Bad, illegal drug markets have brought us entertaining and groundbreaking television, but at what cost? As Breaking Bad has sadly come to an end, I would like to look at how things might have been different for Walter White and friends in a world without the drug prohibition. While I loved the adrenaline rush I experienced watching every episode, the violence and death highlighted in the show is indicative of a major problem.

Let’s assume for a moment that prior to the creation of the show, the U.S. government ended drug prohibition. Unlike what many paternalistic politicians would like you to think, the world would not descend into utter chaos or come to a grinding halt. How would this effect the show? Well, first and foremost, there would be no DEA (high five, hell yes)… thus Walter would have never gone on the ride-along that ultimately led him to a reunion with Jesse Pinkman. It is also likely that Walt would never consider drug manufacturing as a means to solving his money problem for cancer treatment. Why do I say this? The profit margin of the caliber in the show would not likely exist in a world outside of drug prohibition. In the illegal markets, the cost and risk associated with engaging in illegal activity and possibly getting caught serve as very costly barriers to entry. There are also sizable costs associated with self-regulation in illegal markets because the court system is not an available outlet for settling disputes. This drastically limits the number of producers willing to participate in the market.

Consider the circumstances surrounding the murder of Combo (Jesse’s friend that was shot by that young kid for selling on the wrong turf). There was an implicit contract that highlighted who could sell where, and at the urging of Jesse’s quest to build his empire, Combo started selling in neighborhoods that “belonged” to a rival drug gang. In illegal markets, how do you set an example that your turf cannot be taken? You resort to violence to make an example of what will happen to anyone who tries to disregard your jurisdiction. Furthermore, the legal recourse in a murder associated with other illegal activity is complicated. Jesse could not simply go to the police and explain that Combo’s death was a result of a drug turf dispute without implicating himself in a slue of crimes. However, if the drug prohibition component was absent from this equation, the rival gang would have not have used murder in order to solve the problem. For example, do you hear of a CVS owner shooting a new-to-the-area Walgreen’s owner for opening a new location? But even in the unlikely event that this happens, because there is not any illegal activity taking place outside of the act of murder, all parties involved can provide the necessary authorities (ideally private policing companies… but that is a blog post for a later time) the information needed to bring the murderers to justice without fear of being punished. This would allow Jesse to use the court system to punish the rival drug gang members rather attempting to murder them himself (and successfully killing them thanks to Walt’s fatherly instinct and his Pontiac Aztek).

Absent that extensive (but not exhaustive) list of costs brought on by the nature of illegal markets, many potential drug producers can move into enter the market. This forces the price of the goods sold to decrease, lessening the profits available to each drug producer. Thus, the sizable profit margin that led Walt down the road of methamphetamine production would not be as high in a world with legal production (at least on the scale of production consisting of Walt and Jesse in a trailer… However, if he started his own pharmaceutical company specializing in meth, that would be a different story… one that I hope to elaborate on soon, highlighting how ending the War on Drugs is only part of the battle).

Another situation that could have been avoided was the virtual enslavement of Walt and Jesse by Gus Fring. Once again, the hold that Gus had over Walt and Jesse (knowledge and proof of their involvement in countless felony-crimes) would be a non-issue outside of a prohibition state. The same could be said about the situation when Tuco initially refused to pay Jesse for his product. Breaking Bad is full of the issues associated with the limited ability for individuals to establish, execute, and enforce contracts. With substantially better defined property rights and access to a court system to settle disputes without fear of being punished, drug producers would not need to engage in violence to settle these disputes.

So where does this leave us? Well, it would leave us with a rather boring TV show where the most exhilarating dilemma is which daycare Skyler & Walt will choose for baby Holly. No more train heists, no more wheelchair bombs, and no more car trunk machine guns. Though I do love my fellow Richmonder’s directorial and writing brilliance (Vince Gilligan, you are the man), I would be willing to trade it any day for a freer state devoid of the devastating effects inflicted on all of our lives (directly or indirectly) by the War on Drugs.

Was I too Rash on Juries and Nullification?

henrymoore Comments, Law , , , , , , , ,

I made a certain statement (a status update, not a comment) on Facebook, and in retrospect maybe it would have been better to have made it more intelligible (okay, and less harsh as well). Now instead I must go through the statement line by line and clarify and defend it. I don’t know if it is good blogging etiquette or not to drag Facebook into it, but this started out as a clarification for the Facebook crowd and transformed into something to big to post there. We’ll see, I guess. Here is the statement I made:

Idiots (to speak kindly) who call others cowards for trying to get out of jury duty, thereby eliminating the less than 0.00001% chance that that person might have to actually “help their fellow man” are perhaps no less dull and collectivist-minded than the feverish nationalist buffoons who make similar statements about “serving” overseas. The purpose of today’s “defense” system is to murder innocents abroad. The purpose of today’s “justice” system is to incarcerate innocents at home. Any person who wants no part in this is not only not a coward, that person is a hero. Anyone who says otherwise should put their money where their big, loud mouths are. How brave and principled are you really, huh tough guy? Quit yer bitchin’ and show me! Get the hell off of Facebook and the comments sections of blogs and put your own life and livelihood on the line.

This all started when a Facebook friend (a very well-known person in certain circles, but I guess I won’t bring up his name) mentioned he had been “conscripted” for jury duty. This interested me at the time because it was just days after I had sent in my own paperwork for jury duty (this would be the second time, click here for my thoughts on the first). As is usually the case with this particular person’s statuses, the comments section was on fire. But the debate was at least a little more civil than the one that took place in the comments section of a blog post that someone linked to in this Facebook thread. It was an article by the estimable Douglas French of  Laissez-Faire Books and the Mises Institute recounting how he had gotten out of jury duty by telling the lawyers in the voir dire process, and later the judge, that, if made a juror, even if he thought the defendant guilty, he would not convict. That even if he was the only such person, he would hang the jury and nullify a bad law.

To my surprise he was accused in several comments of being a hypocrite and a coward because he chose not to perjure himself in order to get on the jury so that he might actually nullify, rather than do as he had done by merely telling off the judge and the attorneys. Sure, some of these commenters concocted clever ways whereby Mr. French could have (hindsight is 20/20) spoken ambiguously in order to get on the jury and then nullify without technically committing perjury but doing this would have required not only premeditation, but also that the person (in this case a humble economist) perfectly answer any objection brought up by the two (three, if you count the judge) cross-examining lawyers in the voir dire process. This would be like expecting the Oakland Raiders to beat the New York Yankees. In Yankee Stadium. Playing baseball. That’s nothing if not an “undue hardship.” Despite having this explained to them (on both the blog and on Facebook) there were those that persisted in their stupidity and their rudeness. Their argument at the end of it all amounted to, “so what, you’re still a coward.”

Now let me explain what I meant by my original statement, line by line:

Idiots (to speak kindly) who call others cowards for trying to get out of jury duty…

These specific people really are idiots in my estimation. Not because they think jury duty might be a good way to help your fellow man, but because they readily abuse others who don’t think it is all it’s cracked up to be, and because, even after the latter view point has been soundly defended, still won’t make room for the fact that other people might have more important obligations (or even trivial druthers) than being at some magistrate’s beck and call all week, pressured into agreeing with 11 other people on something that might be worth disagreeing on.

…thereby eliminating the less than 0.00001% chance that that person might have to actually “help their fellow man”…

I am referring here not to pronouncing a “not guilty” verdict on falsely or mistakenly accused innocents (which is why juries ever came about in the first place, I believe, and is a very admirable thing to do), but specifically to hanging a jury thereby nullifying bad law. In order to even get on a jury to do this you basically have to lie in voir dire, which is perjury. The 0.00001% may or may not be exaggerated, but you don’t exactly hear about jury nullification every day so I bet it’s not too far from the mark. If I had been talking about mere “not guilty” verdicts this would be way off. That number is probably more like 50%.

…are perhaps no less dull and collectivist-minded than the feverish nationalist buffoons…

These jury-shamers I am talking about appear to be primarily libertarians, a group of people who seem to pride themselves on being bright and individualist-minded, so comparing them to those they despise the most (basically various shades of Neoconservatism, but in a pinch, Democrats who think Obama deserved his Nobel Peace Prize will do nicely) is the ultimate dig.

…who make similar statements about “serving” overseas.

The kinds of statements I am referring to in my comparison of jury-shamers to Neocons/Obama-Peacers are analogous to jury nullification, not analogous to “not guilty” verdicts. So maybe I’m talking about a person who admits in some cases that innocent people die even in the United States’ wars, but for the most part it’s just the bad guys. And then maybe, as if that didn’t make them look foolish enough, they make some statement to the effect of, “You can disobey immoral/unethical orders without being accused of insubordination, then court-martialed and punished.”

Note that these immoral/unjust orders might still somehow be lawful, or that even if they are unlawful, there is still pressure from command and your peers to carry them out. But let’s not be coy: just because something is done by the book does not mean it is right or correct or even excusable. Having rules of engagement may be better than having no rules, but they are no substitute for not invading and occupying in the first place.

The purpose of today’s “defense” system is to murder innocents abroad.

Collateral damage is murder, so even if these wars are motivated by good intentions, that’s what’s going on. However, I don’t think we should give the same exact Powers That Be that we accuse of being malevolent at home the benefit of the doubt by assuming that they are somehow benevolent abroad.

The purpose of today’s “justice” system is to incarcerate innocents at home.

This is somewhat different than saying that the “defense” system’s purpose is to murder innocents abroad. While there may be collateral damage of sorts, that is not what I am talking about. Here, I am talking about bad law. You may be “guilty” of breaking the law, so in that sense the purpose of the “justice” system is to incarcerate the “guilty”, and not as I said, the innocent. But this assumes that the laws in question are all good.

That is quite an assumption to make about the government of the supposed freest nation on earth that happens to have the highest incarceration rates in the world. The elephant in the room here is the Drug War. Most of us can agree that drugs are generally bad news, and that the violence associated with drugs is even worse news, but far too few seem to realize that this is just the natural result of prohibition. Surprise! It didn’t work with alcohol, which, according to some metrics, is FAR MORE DANGEROUS than certain hard drugs, but somehow these people thought it was going to work with pot and heroin? In a post-1960s world?! What were they smoking?

Any person who wants no part in this is not only not a coward, that person is a hero.

Freedom of conscience. That’s all this is. Would we want to live in a world where people are led to believe that exercising this right somehow makes them spineless (again, we can all agree on something, that just having your conscience tell you something doesn’t make that something right)? Well then, just open your eyes. Look out the window. Turn on the TV (the only channel immune to this might be the Weather Channel). People with an actual conscience or actual principles are laughing stocks. They are the ultimate fools in the eyes of the world. And for that, yes, even the ones I disagree with, they have my respect.

Anyone who says otherwise should put their money where their big, loud mouths are.

Here I’m only applying the same standards to the accusers that the accusers are applying to the accused. Judge not, that ye be not judged…Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye…Therefore, all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them…Physician, heal thyself…He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.

How brave and principled are you really, huh tough guy? Quit yer bitchin’ and show me! Get the hell off of Facebook and the comments sections of blogs…

Well, it sounded good at the time. But as a wise guy once told me, “vulgarity is no substitute for wit.”

…and put your own life and livelihood on the line.

In the case of “defense” and the military, especially in time of war, your life is on the line. No one disputes that. In the case of jury duty, especially when you perjure yourself in order to nullify bad law, it could very well be your livelihood that is threatened. But even where there is no perjury or nullification going on, there is still a case to be made that your livelihood is in danger.

I understand it is the situation in probably most states that your employer cannot fire you (and may even be made to remunerate you in some way) for taking time off for jury duty. Were it not for this law (which places burdens on employers that arguably shouldn’t be there), there’s at least the possibility that you would not be retained/paid for this “time off”, especially if your employer was not particularly fond of the unjust and immoral incursions of the government into everyday life. And why shouldn’t your employer be able to look out for his own best interests, even if it means firing your sorry behind? Does he “owe” you your job, indefinitely, no matter what? If it wasn’t for our crummy system and you were to be fired or lose pay because of jury duty, would your instinct really be to blame your employer? Not the people who conscripted you for jury duty in the first place? Or not the people who made life so miserable for some so-called criminal that you felt it was your duty to aid that person by nullifying the bad law he was being tried for breaking?

Additionally, since jury duty, unlike the military (these days at least) is something the state compels people to do (ultimately backing up their threats with actual guns, prisons, and larceny), telling these loud mouth accusers to put their livelihood on the line needn’t mean they have to serve on a jury (something they cannot do unless called upon). It could very well mean instead that they go out and agitate through means of civil disobedience: resisting arrest, harassing magistrates and LEOs, and so forth. Don’t act so surprised by these seemingly bizarre suggestions; we are talking about libertarians here, after all. And civil disobedience, though not quite so much as actual violent acts (only justified in self-defense, need I remind you?), can very well land you in the slammer and/or ruin your reputation as a good cog in the machine. If that doesn’t threaten your livelihood, I don’t know what does.

Separation of Church and State (More Islamophobia!)

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Law, Religion , , , , , ,

…Malaysia’s appeal court ruled Monday [10/14/13 – JD] that a Roman Catholic publication can’t use the term ‘Allah’ to refer to the Christian God, despite its widespread use among Malay-speaking Christians.

…
The dispute dates back to 2007. After Syed Hamid Albar, then the home minister, prohibited the church’s Herald newspaper from using the word ‘Allah’- arguing it should be solely for Muslims….

From Gangopadhyay and Fernandez in WSJ 10/15/13, p. A13.

Technical note: “Allah” is a foreign word to all Malaysians. It’s an Arabic word. All Malaysians’ native tongues are unrelated to Arabic.

Yes, there may be more there than meets the eye. So? Try imagining a US court – state or federal- or a French court, ruling that Calvinists may not legally use a given foreign word, that the particular word is reserved for the use of Roman Catholics!

Not that the court ruling in Malaysia is that unfamiliar. They used to do stuff like that in Europe. It was some time ago, a long, long time ago, actually.

Financial Armageddon; Hello Mongolia; Hello, Uganda!

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Economics, Law, Politics , , ,

Today, this blog has had a hit from Mongolia and one from Uganda. I have no way of knowing whether any of these hits correspond to someone actually reading an item. WordPress, the sponsor of this blog, does not keep this kind of numbers. And, perhaps, it’s just as well. Visitors from outside North America are very welcome on this blog. They are also welcome to make requests. And I prize their rare comments.

This is the Nth day of federal government so-called “shutdown.” The American Left, the Obama Administration, various international pundits, have been predicting world financial Armageddon because of the shutdown and because of the budget battle that will probably follow. Instead the most common stock index, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, was up 62 points today. That’s not much but it’s not nothing. It’s up, not down. It’s not quite half a percentage point up (.42%). The French CAC40 was also up. Up is not down, no matter how you look at it.

The coming federal budget showdown (don’t confuse with “shutdown”) is about the executive branch borrowing money. It’s not borrowing money because it’s facing some extraordinary expense. It’s become routine. The belief that the federal government cannot operate within its financial means has become deeply anchored without ever being presented to the people for a vote or even for a talk. Conservatives object.

Many conservatives affirm that government borrowing should never occur except under dire and exceptional circumstances. Me, I am a wishy-washy moderate conservative. I could be convinced that federal borrowing is virtuous but I want the discussion to take place in the open. We are working on it.

There is a small technical thing that bothers me around talk of government “defaulting.” Perhaps, something can help me with this. Suppose I own government debt; suppose I own a Treasury Bond for $1,000 coming due on October first. If the federal government fails to give me my money on October 1st but, instead hands me on an IOU confirming it owes me $1,000 that it will pay soon, how worried should I be? Is my landlord not going to accept the IOU? Is the bank going to toss it into the waste basket?

And would the executive branch of government do something illegal, unconstitutional by issuing such an IOU?

Misunderstanding freedom of the press

Tibor Machan Current Events, Law, Liberty , , , , ,

Katherine Rushton of The Daily Telegraph wrote a column trying to embarrass those in America, like Republican lawmaker Kieran Michael Lalor, who oppose bringing in Al Jazeera television on to the American television news market. Ms. Rushton feels such opposition is a kind of ethnic prejudice, not sound journalism. Dubbing Al Jazeera “Al Jihad,” such efforts may well be over the top but not necessarily.

Suppose Americans had opposed making room for Pravda and Izvestia in America or some Nazi or fascist broadcasters in the past. Would this prove them to be prejudiced, unfair, biased? I personally object to NPR (National Public Radio) and PBS (Public Broadcasting Service), not at all because I am prejudiced but precisely because I consider it dangerous to treat government funded and supported “journalism” and “entertainment” as if it were just like some private outfit such as HBO, The New York Times or Time magazine.

When governments fund news outfits, they go astray in several ways. They take money by force from citizens to support what those citizens may well not want supported! They enjoy a competitive advantage as against those who do not use taxpayers’ resources. And when it comes to Al Jazeera, there is no other government-owned – it is owned by the Qatari government(!) – service pretending to be journalists instead of propagandists. (Not everything on Al Jazeera has to be tainted by government bias for one to be justified in being suspicious of the content of its broadcasts.)

Frankly, even the venerable BBC is a misguided institution and its reputation rests mainly on its traditional commitment to straight newscasting, not on its official restraint. Ms. Rushton complained that “Meritocracy is all well and good for certain ethnic minorities.” But evidently not for those with Middle Eastern or Islamic ties.

Maybe not so. Maybe what bothered Kieran Michael Lalor has nothing to do with ethnic ties but with evident enough efforts by Al Jazeera to cast jihadists in a favorable light. I don’t know this for sure but if so, that would certainly justify skepticism about Al Jazeera’s credentials and a bona fide news-broadcasting organization. Whenever I check out Al Jazeera, I sense that jihad is treated with kid gloves.

Genuine freedom of the press has no government involvement of any kind. Competition among newspapers, broadcasters, magazines, etc. arises from the initiative of entrepreneurs! Otherwise we are back to Pravda and the like, which should not be treated as agents of a free market of newscasting.

Standard Oil, Like a Phoenix Rising from the Ashes (Bust the Trusts! The Right Way for Once!)

henrymoore Economics, Law , , , , , , , , , ,

What is it with me and bashing evil corporations of late (not necessarily on this blog, though I’m sure if you look through the archives…)? I hope it’s not habit-forming.

Well, could be that some of them, at least at some point in their history, became what they are with special thanks to the government. Could also be that some of them have been grandfathered in and are protected from competition from those who haven’t been grandfathered in. Might also have a little something to do with the fact that some of them have benefitted from foreign policy meddling and institutionalized theft committed by the state. But other than that, I have few complaints. Here’s a comment I left (since edited) at the end of a survey that sparked this article:

“I like surveys that have political and societal relevance. I believe in the desirability and functionality of free markets. And Exxon Mobil is a great company all things considered. However, they could not have gotten to where they are today without a little outside help. Some of this came from the consumer, to be sure. But some of it came from the state through the virtual cartel status granted to all major [US, Dutch, and British, at least] oil companies going back at least to the 1953 [CIA instigated] Iranian Coup… [This] greatly benefitted the Seven Sisters oil companies (a number of which [were Standard Oil descendants that later] merged to become Exxon Mobil) and is one of the main causes of unease in the Middle East and around the world today. They, like all oil companies, great and small, foreign and domestic, have also benefitted from oil’s status as de facto commodity backing for the US dollar. The world reserve currency known as the Federal Reserve Note is denominated in crude oil. The oil companies have a vested interest in maintaining this corrupt arrangement.”

Federal Reserve Octopus

What say you? Are some/most/all big corporations what they are today more thanks to competition or more thanks to monopoly? Here’s one for extra points: what about “small business,”? Aren’t they also protected from competition, in certain industries more than others, by regulations that keep newcomers out and by subsidies that keep competing technologies down?

For the record, anti-trust legislation actually has the effect of restraining competition, thereby securing monopoly, so when I say “bust the trusts” I don’t advocate anti-trust legislation, I simply want to let free market competition give some of these bigger guys a run for “their” money! The burden of proof is on them to show that they would really be as big as they are today were they under a system of laissez-faire capitalism. I guess you could say I’m with the left-libertarians on this one (except for the fact that I dared to use the word “capitalism”).

Standard Oil Octopus

Also, Brandon and I had our little chat on conspiracy theories. The collusion of big businesses (usually involving the state at some level) to form cartels (take note that Standard Oil, known to us today as Exxon Mobil and Chevron, was owned by John D. Rockefeller, who also had a hand in creating the Federal Reserve; I wouldn’t say everything that has happened in regards to these two was meticulously plotted, but I wouldn’t call it mere coincidence, either) happens to be one of the ones that I subscribe to. I think Adam Smith can back me up on this one. And unlike some who use the quote to support anti-trust legislation, I’ll give you more than just the first two sentences in order to show why such laws are not the best conclusion:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.

Monopoly Octopus

An Exemplar of Governance: The United States and Chinese Citizens

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Law, Liberty, Politics , ,

I’ve briefly pointed out the penchant of Chinese citizens to look to the US as a role model for governance before. As Dr Foldvary has argued, it’s about governance, not government. Foreign Policy‘s Passport blog takes a look at how the recent government shutdown in Washington is viewed by citizens of the Chinese state:

[…] both China’s state-run and private-but-state-supervised mainstream media outlets have thus far reacted with restraint. Meanwhile, users of the country’s bustling, often candid, often profane social web have found a silver lining in the political paralysis that would surprise many Americans […] In Chinese social media, meanwhile, the government shutdown became an opportunity to criticize the Chinese government […]

Some veiled their critiques. Xu Jilin, a professor of history at East China Normal University in Shanghai, wrote, “The government has shut down, but the country is not in disorder — now that’s what you call a good country where people can live without worry.”

The gridlock itself, decried by most commentators in the U.S., struck many Chinese as a sign of lawfulness. As one user remarked, “A government that can shut down, no matter how big the impact on everyone’s lives, is a good thing. It shows that power can be checked, and the government can’t spend money however it wants.” […] Others took more direct aim at their own government. As one user noted, “Comrades, no need to worry that the same thing will happen in our country!  In any event, delegates in our National People’s Congress [China’s […] legislature] cannot cast dissenting votes, haha.” Another wrote, “I wish China’s government would shut down and let corrupt officials have a taste of it.”

I think these admittedly anecdotal reactions are simply a testament of the age-old, distinctly human problem of confusing society with state. The Chinese people themselves don’t have beef with the US or its people. The American people themselves don’t have beef with Beijing or its people. However, both governments are engaged in a power struggle, and as a result, people suffer. Perhaps the most heartening development can be found in this statement:

The growing connections between China and the United States mean that no issue is strictly domestic for either country.

While some no doubt view the growing interdependence of the two societies with unease, I cannot help but see a future of peace, prosperity and harmony. This does not mean I see an absence of conflict, but only that such conflict will be handled according to rules and procedures that have been laid down in the past and that can be altered so long as it is done so in a manner conducive to yet another round of rule-following and procedures.

Statists applaud death of unarmed mother amidst faked Gov’t shutdown

L. A. Repucci Current Events, History, Law, Liberty, Politics , , , , , , , ,

Bedlam in Goliath.

Commentary by:  L.A. Repucci

Shots were fired in the Capitol today after a lone female fled a checkpoint in her car.  A child was in the woman’s vehicle, now presumably orphaned by law enforcement fatally shooting her dead outside of the black sedan, used to ram a newly-erected ‘Barrycade’ in Washington, DC.

House Majority Leader John Boehner praised the courage of the Fed’s security for gunning down the unarmed woman with an infant on the threshold of the halls of congress.  Shoot-to-kill seems to be increasingly the only tactical response for law enforcement, from the unarmed Tsarnaev brothers now to a weaponless, unstable mother, clearly outside of the vehicle she was driving.

Could ‘shoot-to-kill’ be a federal-level directive aimed at preventing the voice of dissent from surfacing in the media?

Police have yet to confirm rumors that the suspect is Miriam Carey a 34-year-old Stamford (CT) Dental Hygienist with ‘mental health’ issues.  It would seem the political landscape is saturated with partisan rhetoric to the point that the proverbial chickens are coming home to roost in the Capitol faster than ever before.

Ultimate Party Hacker.

The partisan theater that is the current government shutdown has apparently struck a chord with a public increasingly suspicious of government, rather than one party or the other.  The abuse of power and authoritarian statism may have finally hit a pitch pushing the electorate from the customary partisan vitriol to a new, holistic hatred and mistrust of not just a particular government, but of governance in general.

This blog isn’t intended to assign blame to the ham-fisted-yet-impotent GOP or to the openly manipulative Democrat party — there are the usual pundits and party hacks more than willing to play the left-right game on this (and every other issue), and point the finger across the aisle.  In fact, it’s probable that the usual partisan coverage of one national crisis after another likely whipped the woman into the frenzy that resulted in her behavior and subsequent public death-by-firing squad.  Looking at the current national political climate of deepening partisan divides, it would seem this sort of thing is indeed inevitable.

From a libertarian perspective, it is evident that whether the woman is a dyed-in-the-wool leftist or a red-blooded conservative, the simple truth is that it is the false dichotomy of the two party system within the larger construct of a Goliath Government* that is fueling the schism among the current American political zeitgeist.  Libertarian ideals have found more support within the GOP than the Democrat party, but with the political landscape quickly evolving with left-leaning progressives increasingly autocratic and hawkish, and the right continuing to be the party of ‘smaller’ behemothic, socially-oppressive government, libertarian-influenced politicians may need to re-evaluate their alignment with the GOP and assert their own space on the political spectrum.

*The Mars Volta do not endorse this blog, the US Government, or governments anywhere, so far as I know.

By distancing themselves from the GOP, this current crisis could be the moment at which the principles of limited government and personal liberty fix in the minds of the electorate as the sole territory of the libertarian philosophy.  Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Rand Paul…the nation awaits your voices.  Use this opportunity to point out the stark failure of the current junta to fix problems with the force of statism.  Point out the fact that a ‘government shutdown’ seems to consist of closing parks and monuments that require little if any state management to simply exist as they do, and furloughing non-essential personnel easily replaceable with simple automation and elimination of redundancy.  Draw attention to the fact that of the 700,000-or-so suspended government functionaries are eligible and filing for unemployment benefits, drawing income from the same stolen tax revenues which are used to ‘pay’ them usually — and paying them not to work may be preferable than paying them to do their jobs, if the goal is shrinking the size of the state.  Be sure to reference the 1.2-or-so million bureaucrats that continue to serve the public by stealing their wealth and threatening their lives and safety with the full force of a statist totalitarian regime and a monopoly on violent oppression.

Government employees carrying firearms aren’t furloughed, nor are the three-letter agencies that spy on the public unconstitutionally and ‘appropriate’ our money as taxes.  The IRS isn’t really furloughed, despite reports to the contrary — they are needed (including their 16,000 gun-toting new recruits — yes, IRS agents carry firearms) to run Obamacare as ‘navigators’, who are paid on commission per signup to the new compulsory, unconstitutional insurance law.

In conclusion, if the Authoritarian government continues to fan the partisan flames with more political theater, they can expect a multitude of Miriam Careys to continue to go postal and throw themselves against the bulwark of the evil machine that has wrested liberty away from a free people.  You called down the thunder, politicians — now you will reap what you’ve sown for decades.  US foreign policy has been breeding terrorists for decades, and now it’s domestic policy will begin to do the same.  Maybe it’s time to rethink the ‘shoot-to-kill’ mentality…

Pax Humana,

–L.A. Repucci

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Around the Web: Harvest moon over Uranus

muricaderp Economics, Law, Links

Why? Because it’s Friday. My workweek this week happens to start (and hopefully not also end) on Saturday, a circumstance that would totally blow the minds of drive-time radio hosts across the land. Nevertheless, for everybody else, it’s Friday, one of the great days of Lenten fasting at the opposite time of the year, or so we’re instructed, but statistically a day to puke in gutters from Manayunk to the Gaslamp Quarter just like we did last week. Let’s get vulgar.

1. Books are good. Books are edifying. Books encourage us to slow down, focus, develop an attention span longer than that inculcated by lolcat videos, hone our intellects, and increase our funds of knowledge. Books like Boris the Shitting Buffalo.

The same author also maintains a blog, and Good Lord of the High Plains Hunt, the man is shrill. By his reckoning, picking crops commercially apparently isn’t enough to offset the great deficit of manliness that I incur by not being totally head-up about gubbyment taking my money to give food stamps to freeloaders, like the freeloaders who worked alongside me in a bee-infested blueberry patch earlier this month. I and my SNAP-addled colleagues all failed Aaron Clarey’s great manosphere political shit test, although it probably stood to reason for the two women in our group.

As it happens, I heard about Clarey through:

2. Roosh, a STEM dropout who makes a living, or pretends to make a living, by writing about his sex life, or maybe his imagined sex life, crowd-sourcing the sexual attractiveness of random women by posting their photographs on Twitter, deploying sexual slurs against ideological adversaries, and defending crashing long-term at his dad’s place when he isn’t traveling the world bedding its hotties.

A couple of fine self-serious chaps, I say.

3. More proof that any attempt to describe Charles Carreon will fall short of the glory of Charles Carreon:

In a 30-minute phone interview with Ars on Wednesday, Carreon lamented that, as a result of this entire sordid affair, his professional reputation has been damaged—or as he calls it, “rapeutated.” In fact, Carreon has a colorful website at Rapeutation.com that includes an elaborate chart with a new, long, and extensive list of all the so-called “rapeutationists,” including yours truly and two more Ars staffers. If you’d like to see a picture of Carreon’s critics—including an Ars Technica writer—spewing fecal matter out of their mouths, that too can be accommodated.

Quoth the avowed Buddhist:

“It’s an insoluble problem,” he continued. “It’s is not remediable. As long as you keep punching ‘Charles Carreon’ into Google, there’s just more stories about this nonsense. How can anyone get their message through? I’ve written hundreds of works. You can’t find them. Is that helpful? No. Now it’s difficult for prospective clients to see that I’m a relatively erudite person. Since then, some Amazon reviews of my books have, in bad faith, been given one star—I don’t sell many books anymore. Now it’s highly unlikely that anyone would say that Charles Carreon is a pretty bright guy.”

In the third person, no less. Carreon’s Buddhism isn’t compelling him to let go of his desires by making a concerted effort to pay the judgment already secured against him by his rapeutationists, but realize that he’s from Arizona (because, pursuant to his poetry, you don’t mess with the man from Tucson) by way of Ashland, Oregon, a city whose religious syncretism has never been the self-effacing kind. (Don’t ask me for details. I’ll be up all night if you do.)

4. Quick! Find the most efficient way to aggregate all manosphere tropes in a single essay!

4A. Miley Cyrus as symptom and cause of third-wave feminism.

Alternate explanation: Miley Cyrus, daughter of Billy Ray “Achy Breaky Heart” Cyrus, as vector of second-generation suck.

4B. Our boy Roosh again, in his capacity as patron of the preceding Return of Kings doubleheader:

Women and homosexuals are prohibited from commenting here. They will be immediately banned.

Oh yeah, a no homo manstuff pledge. This guy is as manly as Ted Haggard. And if his demeanor is any indication, he would have us believe that kings, he being among them, are effete, condescending, endlessly intoning about stupid hobbyhorses, and hyperlecherous misogynists.

Come to think of it, it’s served the Kennedy family well enough. God save the King from his flying, driving and skiing habits, or not.

Why Roe v. Wade isn’t nearly as relevant as you’d like if you’re a grating ideological drone

muricaderp Current Events, History, Law, Liberty, Links, Politics, Religion

Titles like that are why I don’t cater to ideologues, except to troll them. One side swears that the least regulation of women’s access to abortion throughout their pregnancies is the work of the bastard love child of Anthony Comstock and Jack the Ripper, the other side swears that women’s lawful recourse to abortion as individuals under the post-Roe regime is tantamount to the gas chambers of Birkenau (often with helpful illustrations of the Nazi genocide infrastructure), and the silent majority has another pint of Franzia, since any other response would be futile. 

How does one even try to reconcile competing, irreconcilable policy interests? How can the self-determination of women facing unwanted pregnancies be squared with the welfare of the babies they are carrying or the demographic health of society? Maybe by attaching felony penalties to Godwin’s Law (everything else is already a federal felony, after all). If nothing else, we can remember that even in times of darkest derp, demographic statistics abide, although maybe not so much in the debate about abortion itself, because that frothy milkshake brings all the braying nuts to the yard.

To wit, from a Nazi-allusion-free article not about abortion at the Demo Memo: 

Baby Bust Update: 8% Birth Decline

 
According to preliminary estimates for 2012, the baby bust continues but the decline is slowing. The nation’s 2012 fertility rate was 63.0 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44, the lowest on record and 9.4 percent below the 2007 high of 69.5. The fertility rate of women under age 30 is at a record low, but the rate among women aged 30 to 34 climbed slightly between 2011 and 2012 as those who had been postponing childbearing played catchup.

Overall, 3,952,937 babies were born in 2012. This was 8.4 percent below the 4,316,233 born in the peak birth year of 2007. So far, the Great Recession baby bust is not as deep as the 10.7 percent Great Depression bust, and it’s not likely to reach that level because the decline is slowing. For some perspective, keep in mind that the decline in births from the peak year of the baby boom in 1957 to the trough year of the baby bust (Generation X) in 1973 was a much larger 27 percent.

Did you notice that? It was subtle. In the course of not yelling about misogynistic sex scolds or murdered babies, Cheryl Russell mentioned that dreadful watershed year of 1973. That was the year in which American women started killing their own flesh and blood en masse with the government’s blessing and disposing of it as medical waste, except for the part about their finally starting the next year to carry more babies to term after nearly a generation of deliberate barrenness. 

It appears that what Roe really did as a policy (in contrast to its excellent service as a lodestone for acrimonious derp unto ages of ages) was to regularize a common medical procedure that had proven impossible to eliminate, even with criminal penalties. There aren’t reliable records of abortions in most states for several decades prior to Roe because no prudent physician would have documented a procedure that could have subjected him and his patient to felony prosecution. As birth records from 1957 show, sex was invented at some point prior to 1973, and for purposes of demographic analysis, it’s reasonable to assume that a constant, and very high, percentage of women of childbearing age was sexually active. That’s why Russell used data on live births per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44.

These are rough bounds, but they’re accurate enough for demographic purposes. In demographic terms, the celibate minority of adults is static, mere background noise obstructing the thumpy signal of the rumpy-pumpy. The clerical celibates (sic?), of course, are especially noisy. The vulgar truth is that you and me, baby, ain’t nothing but mammals, although personally, I prefer Nature documentaries, and I find bears to have the most dignified and heartwarming mating practices this side of the quaking aspen. 

That paragraph was kind of gross. So is pretty much the entire debate on abortion in the United States since 1973. It takes a special kind of person to insist that late third-trimester abortions present no ethical or existential concerns and are totally cool. It takes a really special kind of person to march down the National Mall with a sign showing a photograph of a fetus next to one of Dachau. Centrists do not enjoy hanging out with such people. Bring out the grrrrrrlll power wimminz in shoddy crew cuts and Randall Terry with a gas chamber picture, and the substantial portion of the silent majority that doesn’t have a prurient interest in the macabre spectacle, the people who should be asserting themselves as policy stakeholders, shrink into the woodwork at warp speed. 

To a great extent, this four-decade abortion shouting match is a major front in the war between K-strategic libertines and r-strategic authoritarians for the demographic soul of the nation. Neither of these factions should be given a voice as stakeholders in the childbearing decisions of individuals. Granting legitimacy to either faction as an arbiter of individuals’ reproductive decisions is collectivist madness.

Both sides have developed a habit of becoming insufferable concern trolls. The barren libertine left concern-trolls women who genuinely want to raise families on the basis that they aren’t devoting enough time and energy to the stuff of feminist liberation. The authoritarian breeder right concern-trolls poor, defenseless babies, and at its shrillest extremes unimplanted embryos, with no thought to the gruesomeness of the alternative means of population control that eventually will assert themselves: consistently some combination of war, disease and famine. (If they think American women’s attitudes towards their infants in utero are amoral, they should consider a famine afflicting a burgeoning population. A failed wheat crop never cares.)

Neither extreme really wants competent individuals to make their own free, informed decisions, because have it all/children are annoying and le hard/baby murder!/invading proliferative Muslim hordes. Do it in the name of Carrie Bradshaw, or do it in the name of Charles Martel, but whatever you do, don’t make your own decision; make ours. 

The Eagle wept. 

Oh hell yes, Philadelphians being racist, corrupt and belligerent again

muricaderp Current Events, Law, Politics , , , , , ,

Of course this happened in Philadelphia. It’s a derpfest: an immigrant from Uganda running a dive bar and getting behind on his taxes, yuppies moving into the neighborhood and then expressing shock, shock! that there’s a dive bar in their part of West Philadelphia, probably some selective law and code enforcement, and accusations of racism.

No party to this mess is holy. Just look at who they are: Noel “I want to pay my taxes if I have the money” Karasanyi; a bunch of whiny SWPL agitators who colonized Karasanyi’s neighborhood on the bizarre expectation that, being in West Philadelphia, it would be clean and orderly; the Philadelphia Police, Streets, Licenses and Inspections, and Revenue Departments; the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board and its investigative arm in the State Police. The Karasanyi bar empire is a tar baby; all who touch it will be licking sticky off their fingers for years to come, and it will be just as pretty a sight as the New 3rd World Lounge. This is high quality, multilevel sleaze in one of America’s most delightfully vulgar cities.

My guess is that racism is only one of two major components to this donnybrook. The race of Karasanyi’s clientele must put the white neighbors on edge, but they’d be awfully sore about the local Irish bruisers if they had instead colonized White Kensington and found themselves trying to abate their dive bars. I know some raunchy Irish girls from the Northeast, and believe me, they are NOT bashful about pissing in the streets. It’s just one of those things that seems reasonable and expedient at the time, kind of like decking one’s boyfriend because he was being a lying cheating douchebag again. These things are a lot more reliable than access to toilets in Philadelphia’s rundown neighborhoods, but let’s not dwell on structural contributors to the filth. It’s obviously less gross when bougies do that kind of thing in Old City and Manayunk. For they, and as a consequence their favorite clubs, have lots of money, a solvent much more universal than urine.

This Karasanyi/Spruce Hill Association spat isn’t just about racial fears and animosities. It’s also about abatement of the poors. The Spruce Hill activists bought into a very depressed and dilapidated housing market in a very poor neighborhood, knowing full well that their new property was in the midst of a miles-wide swath of decay and dysfunction stretching into the suburbs (Karasanyi’s current hometown, Yeadon, is pretty crappy itself), and now they’re sore that Karasanyi’s dive bars are getting in the way of their efforts to inflate their real estate prices. If anyone in that part of the roaring forties had adverse possession of the neighborhood, it was Karasanyi and his clients. They were there first. The Johnny-come-lately SWPL aren’t happy about this, but colonists never are happy when there are natives squatting on their land.

Here’s why I say that this spat isn’t just about race. Some family friends who lived in East Falls at the time were involved in a prolonged effort to abate their own local nuisance bar, the Four Horsemen. As far as I know, every party to the fight over the Four Horsemen was white, except for Michael Nutter. Nutter was drawn in because he was then the city councilor representing East Falls. Ed Rendell and Arlen Specter were drawn in as powerful politicians who happened to live just up the hill, in a much nicer part of East Falls. All three of them came down on the Four Horsemen and demanded that its owner clean house so that its customers weren’t spilling out at 2:30 am, yelling obscenities at the top of their lungs, leaving trash all over the neighborhood, kicking in the windows of strangers’ cars because they were mad at their girlfriends, that kind of thing. Nutter, Rendell, Specter and the PLCB couldn’t do anything about Lunchbox, the dimwitted neighbor kid who stumbled into cars all the time when he played football in the streets, but they were able to scare some sense into the Four Horsemen, and into its protectors in the Philadelphia Police Department’s 39th District.

Kind of. Your activist friends never had as much fun with “intersectionality” as the 39th District did when its notoriously crooked cops were hired to moonlight at a bar named after four of their former colleagues who had been drummed out of the department for official corruption and brutality. The real Four Horsemen were some of the PPD’s worst. These guys were so bad that they went to prison for police misconduct, and were subsequently honored with their very own dive bar.

One of the police commanders who was assigned to the 39th District in the midst of this mess, a Captain Glenn, tried to nip the snitching against the Four Horsemen in the bud by using a Neighborhood Watch volunteer contact information sheet to call one of our family friends at home and harass him for bringing state authorities into the fray. It seems that Captain Glenn wasn’t so much in the pocket of the Four Horsemen as he was annoyed by the barrage of correspondence from and meetings with people more powerful than he over a nuisance bar. So he got this friend of ours on the phone and menacingly told him, “I’m getting heat from above, and I do not like getting heat from above.”

Our friend put the Captain in his place: “You listen to me: I’m a lieutenant in the United States Army, and you DO NOT talk to a lieutenant in the United States Army that way!” The commanding officer of one of the city’s dirtiest police districts was reduced to gibberish by a guy he was trying to intimidate over the phone. Philadelphia is a city of piss and vinegar.

Vinegar in its citizens’ blood.

Piss in its subway concourses.

Secession Within the US?

Brandon Christensen Law , , , , ,

“Yeah, why not?” would be my answer to this question.

Apparently, it’s a question being asked more and more lately in some states. I wouldn’t mind seeing a federal republic with twice or even three times as many states as we have now.

Conceptually, this would be no different from secession within the EU or any other federal or confederal arrangement.

Can anybody answer my answer (which is actually a question)? That is to say: what are some objections you can think of to more decentralization of power within the US?

A Problem with Political Authority

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Law, Politics , , , , , ,

As a libertarian with deep anarchist leanings, I have plenty of problems with political authority myself. Nevertheless, I find the society in which I live to be libertarian enough, and that any deviation from the rules and procedures in place can be considered to be a threat to my freedom. With this being said, the Wall Street Journal has a great editorial out on the Obama administration’s increasingly authoritarian and cavalier approach to the political process. What I like best about this editorial is that it focuses on one of the Obama administration’s less well-known attempts at consolidating power: that of granting regulators powers that they don’t actually have. Observe:

In re: Aiken County is another episode in the political soap opera about spent-fuel storage at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, an Energy Department project that requires the approval of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission […] Yucca has since been infamously stop-and-go amid opposition from the green lobby and not-in-my-backyard Nevadans and Californians. This particular application was submitted to the NRC in June 2008.

Mr. Obama promised to kill Yucca as a candidate and the Energy Department tried to yank the license application after his election. But an NRC safety board made up of administrative judges ruled unanimously that this was illegal unless Congress passed a law authorizing it. Mr. Obama then teamed up with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada to stack the NRC with anti-Yucca appointees.

Although Congress appropriated money to conduct the review, the NRC flat-out refused, in violation of the three-year statutory deadline.

The explanation continues:

A federal court is stating, overtly, that federal regulators are behaving as if they are a law unto themselves. Judge A. Raymond Randolph notes in a concurrence that former NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko, who has since resigned, “orchestrated a systematic campaign of noncompliance.” If Mr. Jaczko worked on Wall Street he’d be indicted.

Judge Kavanaugh then offers some remedial legal education in “basic constitutional principles” for the President who used to be a constitutional law professor. Under Article II and Supreme Court precedents, the President must enforce mandates when Congress appropriates money, as well as abide by prohibitions. If he objects on constitutional grounds, he may decline to enforce a statute until the case is adjudicated in the courts. “But the President may not decline to follow a statutory mandate or prohibition simply because of policy objections,” writes the court.

That is especially notable given that ObamaCare’s employer-insurance requirement and other provisions are precisely such unambiguous statutory mandates, with hard start dates […] All of this highlights that Mr. Obama is not merely redefining this or that statute as he goes but also the architecture of the U.S. political system.

Indeed. Dr Delacroix has suspected the Obama administration of authoritarianism from the beginning, and it looks as if time has proved him right (which is a good thing for him, given his penchant for missing the mark in foreign affairs). Stay tuned. This blog is just warming up.

The Snowden Reset

muricaderp Law, Politics

Edward Snowden seems to have successfully hit official Washington’s Achilles’ Heel. The political and public responses to his disclosures are still in flux, so I’m hesitant to speak with any confidence as things currently stand, but the pushback against the surveillance state seems to be at or near critical mass.

Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA), one of the most prominent members of California’s Congressional delegation, has publicly said that Snowden committed crimes with his disclosures but should be pardoned because he is a whistleblower who exposed wholesale subversion of the Fourth Amendment and that he should be answering questions about the surveillance state at home, not abroad. McClintock seemed to imply that he would like Snowden to testify before Congress. As I alluded to, the response to this scandal is growing by the week, so Snowden is conceivably on the verge of simultaneously being under federal criminal indictment for leaking state secrets and under Congressional subpoena to testify about the same state secrets as a whistleblower, not a defendant. This could easily put the Department of Justice in effective, or even official, contempt of Congress for obstructing the sworn testimony of a subpoeanaed witness.

If more members of Congress join McClintock, Justin Amash, Ron Wyden and company in demanding answers, and if the answers that they demand include sworn testimony from Snowden, my guess is that Eric Holder will be a couple of wrong moves away from impeachment. Prior to Snowden’s indictment, much of the Republican Caucus was steaming mad at Holder over the “Fast and Furious” gun-running debacle, and a smaller (and certainly less organized and vocal) contingent of populists from both parties was disgusted with him for failing to prosecute bank executives for fraud in the subprime mortgage meltdown. If Holder continues to vindictively keep Snowden in exile (he almost certainly will) at a time when Congress has called Snowden to testify in person (by no means assured, but likely enough given the rapidly shifting Congressional response to the NSA scandal), the vendetta against Snowden could be Holder’s last major project as Attorney General and an ignominious capstone capstone to his legacy. I’d be highly surprised if Holder manages to talk his way out of that sticky wicket.

On a brief sidenote, I’d say that Tom McClintock is now bar none the strongest prospective challenger to either Barbara Boxer or Dianne Feinstein. California’s Republican primary voters have taken to nominating nobodies to challenge their state’s entrenched US Senators, and much of the state’s Republican establishment at all levels is buffoonish and bloodthirsty. Boxer and Feinstein (especially Feinstein) are authoritarian nightmares, but they have on their side inertia and a hapless opposition; McClintock is in a strong, and probably unique, position to singlehandedly destroy these advantages if he chooses to run for the US Senate.

Snowden’s supporters in Congress amount to a dissident faction trying to subvert the Politburo. The official response from the State Department, the Attorney General’s Office and the White House has been a clusterfuck. The sputtering rage at an exiled dissident has become so extreme and pervasive that the Washington press corps, normally prone to flatter the subjects of its coverage in exchange for access, is barely trying to spin the official response into anything rational. These high officials and spokespeople insulted, in succession, the sovereignty of Hong Kong (for allowing Snowden to lawfully enter and leave its territory in accordance with Chinese immigration law), China (mostly for unrelated geopolitical grievances that were irrelevant on account of Beijing’s delegation of political control in Hong Kong to the territory’s British-style parliamentary government), Ecuador (for offering Snowden asylum), Bolivia (again, for offering asylum, and additionally by grounding the country’s presidential plane to search for Snowden as President Evo Morales returned from official business in Moscow), several Western European countries (by intimidating them into closing their airspace to Snowden), and most recently Russia.

Washington’s belligerence towards Moscow has been especially foolish. The State Department effectively made Snowden stateless by revoking his passport while he was holed up in the Sheremetyevo Airport international transit zone. Moviegoers may remember Tom Hanks in a similar predicament. State decided to reenact Airport, but in another country’s airport. Then various shrill officials took it upon themselves to publicly berate the Kremlin, one of Washington’s most celebrated adversaries, for not deporting a US citizen from a transit zone specificially set up for foreigners who did not intend to clear Russian immigration, for allowing that US citizen to hold a press conference in the transit zone and providing incidental logistical support to escort members of the press through passport control, for even thinking about granting this fugitive dissident asylum, and finally for granting him temporary asylum. Washington is now in the embarrassing position of having an American citizen and political fugitive freely and lawfully living in Russia without a valid US passport but with a valid Russian residency document under the odd name of “Snouden Edvard Dzhozef.” Washington could easily have avoided this embarrassment. It took a month of shrilly berating the very nationalistic government of a major military power, adversary, and oil and gas exporter to get Mother Russia to finally embrace the young man. One does not simply end up with Russian documents.

Notice, too, how calm Vladimir Putin has remained throughout the mess. Jay Carney yelling at a KGB Zen master was never auspicious, and indeed it has been fruitless. Putin was reticent in his public comments, initially calling Snowden a patriot, then describing the tar baby that the Snowden incident had become with a classic Putinism about shearing a pig (“a lot of squealing but little hair”), and keeping mum when, all but certainly on his explicit approval, Snowden was granted temporary asylum. Putin is continuing to let Washington officials do the talking about the White House’s cancellation of one-on-one talks that he was scheduled to have with Barack Obama next month, talks that have admittedly been canceled in part to punish Putin for granting Snowden asylum.

This is nuts. My country’s highest officials are acting like toddlers. For the last two months, they’ve been picking fights with any foreign government that dares cross them by showing or even considering showing mercy to a whistleblower whom they want to jail for exposing unconstitutional wholesale domestic spying. They’re cavalierly destroying goodwill with any country that thwarts their effort to persecute one of their own citizens for embarrassing them and trying to hold them accountable for secret subversion of the Constitution.

Comparisons to the Brezhnev-era USSR are appropriate. Snowden was a refusenik for a month, and the reason he is no longer one is that a moderately autocratic regime centered around a neotsarist personality cult gave him asylum at a time when he was stranded in one of its airports, forsaken by his own government.

We have a balance of powers again. This can’t be the “reset” of relations that Hillary Clinton and Sergei Lavrov sought. Russia is again welcoming American dissidents, much as the Soviet Union welcomed unemployed laborers and disaffected black activists in the 1930s. Angry US officials demand that Russia hand over a political fugitive, Russian officials calmly refuse, and the US officials build up an even stronger head of steam. We’re approaching the point at which Obama bangs a shoe on the podium while Putin quietly smirks and, if he says anything about the outburst, says something unimaginably crude and yet eloquent.

Ed Snowden isn’t exactly a loose cannon, either. Washington picked the most sympathetic whistleblower imaginable to target with its unprecedented campaign of smearing and intimidation. Snowden hasn’t been silenced like Bradley Manning, and he isn’t eccentric like Julian Assange. He’s as normal as they come, and the public knows it. The public also knows that his critics are overwhelmingly a bunch of amoral Beltway careerist freaks.

This huge mess may get resolved a lot more quickly and thoroughly than I had feared.