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 Friday, July 26, 2002
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A Bankrupt System
Congress was given the power in Article I of the Constitution to establish "uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies." America has traditionally been the place that made it easy to start over. That is supposed to be the flip side of our marketplace economy - the market punishes bad ideas, bad implementations, or just bad luck, but it doesn't punish people for trying. If they try and fail, they get to start over. Well, not any more.
The House of Representatives is set to pass the Consumer Bankruptcy Act, which will make it much harder for a lot of people to get a complete discharge of their debts - instead it will make them pay back credit card companies over 5 years under court supervised plans. I wonder what happens if the debtor falls behind in the court ordered repayment plan? Does s/he go to jail? Have we revived debtors' prison? The credit card companies have spent the last twenty years pushing extremely high fee and interest rate credit cards at people who were bad credit risks, but now they are not willing to reap what they sowed. The credit card companies have spent the last 5 years lobbying for this change to the bankruptcy law for years, and have spent tons of money in campaign contributions to get it to happen. It looks like they will get it. The NYT has a decent editorial about it, entitled " A Bankrupt Bill."
By contrast, at the same time, the court supervising the WorldCom bankruptcy has forbidden WorldCom to pay its laid-off employees the severance pay they were promised. Apparently, bankruptcy law forbids more than $4,600 in severance by a company in bankruptcy. Unless of course the employee had a contract with the company, in which case they are a creditor. Guess what kinds of "employees" have employment contracts?
Who is this system set up to benefit? Who is is set up to screw?
Our political system seems increasingly corrupt, when this kind of change slides through almost without comment, at the behest of a few large financial institutions. This in the same year as corporate agriculture was given its biggest handout ever, and at the same time it becoming clear how the executives of many companies enriched themselves at the expense of their stockholders, customers, and employees.
As my friend Tony recently said, corruption has been part of our republic since its inception. Sometime I feel like Andy Jackson campaigning against the Bank of the US in 1820. Still, it seems like we have recently had a qualitative transformation in institutionalized corruption in our system, and I think it stinks.
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Torture: Must the US stoop so low? Does it even work?
The Christian Science Monitor reports that the US is arranging for AL-Queda prisoners to be shipped to Jordan, Syria, and Egypt, so that they can be interrogated using torture. While I know that "this is how the world works," I find this reprehensible. Furthermore, there is a lot of evidence to say that torture doesn't work - people who are tortured generally say what they think that their torturers want them to say, Regimes that use torture seem to find it an addictive method of repression and terror, and its supposed information gathering purpose quickly gets lost.
The article also reports that the US tried to block a vote in the UN this week on the UN Convention Against Torture, which it has signed and ratified. "The US is concerned that a new protocol in the convention could allow international and independent visits to US prisons and to terror suspects held in Cuba."
Our government is becoming as bad as what it is fighting against. Torture is as reprehensible as terrorism.
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Chocoholics' delight
I took a tour of the Scharffen Berger chocolate factory in Berkeley today. It's a neat operation, the tour is very informative, and you get as much great chocolate as you can eat in one sitting. I'm not sure that I would drive across the Bay for the tour, but if you are planning to be in Berkeley, it makes a nice addition to a day of wandering through bookstores or visiting the shops on 4rth Ave. You are supposed to book the tours in advance, and can do so online, but it seemed like a pretty relaxed operation, with people signing up in person at the last minute. Recommended.
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Betrayer of Constitution gets Pentagon spy job
A great and scary web page about John M. Poindexter's appointment as Director of the Pentagon's Information Awareness Office.
Remember Poindexter from Reagan and the Iran-Contra scandal? He was found guilty of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and the destruction of evidence in 1990, but his conviction was overturned on appeal because of concerns that his public testimony before Congress while under a grant from immunity essentially made it impossible to fairly prosecute him. I can understand the legal decision, but it makes me furious that someone who violated their oath to the Constitution of the United States, but escaped jail time because of legal technicalities, is back in an office of trust. Essentially, he is being rewarded with a Pentagon job for having protected Reagan by lying.
And what is he doing? Well, check out the official site with the eerie logo:
"focusing on the development of: 1) architectures for a large-scale counter-terrorism database, for system elements associated with database population, and for integrating algorithms and mixed-initiative analytical tools; 2) novel methods for populating the database from existing sources, create innovative new sources, and invent new algorithms for mining, combining, and refining information for subsequent inclusion into the database; ..."
So this is the man who is figuring out how to spy on us more effectively using technology. Scary.
Whoever put together the Poindexter site also put together a great James Baker site as well. Recommended.
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In no one we trust
James Surowiecki is my favorite business journalist. His one page gems in the New Yorker are one of the best things to happen to that magazine in a long time. Unfortunately, his stuff isn't always easy to get to online. He really outdid himself this week with his brilliant piece IN NO ONE WE TRUST. Highly recommended. An excerpt:
"Trust reduces the friction in an economy. Without it, the gears grind to a halt. To establish trust, you need to be able to identify those who are undeserving of it. [What happened in the 90's was that] In effect, investors stopped watching the watchmen, and the watchmen stopped watching, too. ... The independent knowers told investors that they could trust corporate America. Corporate America did not reciprocate. And now we're all paying for it."
There is a saying, I forget the exact wording, to the effect that one of the measures of a person's intelligence is how much they agree with you. By that rank James Surowiecki is a genius. One of the consistent themes of this weblog, reflected in its motto, "who will guard the guardians" is the need to counterbalance power. It was a fundamental principle of the American Constitution, and it has frequently served us well, but people are always arguing that "things are different now, because [the new economy, the war on terrorism, we are the good guys, etc], so we can get rid of those wasteful hindrances to [capitalism, business, going after terrorists, etc]. Ancient and recent history shows that isn't true.
Tip o the hat to annleslie for the link.
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© Copyright 2002 Tim Bishop aka Geodog.
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