Brief History Of Jubilees

from economist Michael Hudson, who is on the blogroll.  Starting with the ancient Sumerians, of all things.

It’s readable even though it’s kind of dense stuff, which is a tribute to Dr. Hudson’s rhetorical skills.

Highly recommended.  Especially for lawyers.

It’s The Central Problem..

…of litigating on behalf of disfavored litigants.  Meaning personal injury plaintiffs and criminal defendants.  Meaning they are disfavored by judges, of course.

In John Grisham’s fictional legal world, judges are always fair and yield to the evidence, so Grisham just by-passes this problem as if it didn’t exist.  The only well known courtroom drama that portrays judges as they really are is Barry Reed’s “The Verdict”, and in the movie version the judge character is, I have to say, rather brilliantly portrayed by Irish stage and character actor Milo O’Shea.  In fact, his judge character, corrupt and biased as he is, is a considerable moral improvement over real life judges.

In order to give us a dramatic story and a happy ending, though, The Verdict – having decided to show judges as they really are – has to employ an entirely fictional plot device so that at the end, the jury gets to decide the case in favor of the Plaintiff.

That’s not how it goes in real life.

In real life, the corrupt judge who wants to protect the favored litigant and the big law firm, like the judge character in The Verdict does, simply dismisses the case before it ever gets to a trial.  And in real life no one other than the Plaintiff cares.  There is no public outrage, no news articles, no one inquires how it happens that the Plaintiff doesn’t get her day in court.  The beloved “system” just moves on to its next patsy.

Mockery

I don’t know which aspect of this puff piece is more stunning:  the stupefying dishonesty of Tom Moran indicating his utter contempt for the truth, not to mention the public; or the thoroughly fawning character of the article itself, when there are probably hundreds of credible stories any “reporter” could readily obtain that would challenge the self serving drivel of his subject.

Moran never “won” any elections.  He has never had an opponent, including for State Supreme Court.  This might have something to do with the fact that because Moran has always been a rogue cop and then a rogue DA, any opponent might wind up on the wrong end of a criminal prosecution – which can be entirely fabricated, of course.  He’s been sucking the public tit his entire adult life.  He barely knows what it’s like to have an actual client, to even know someone in trouble who needs help.  He is much more often the source of trouble and misery than the protector from it.

Thus for anyone who knows anything about him, this is just laughable:

“There is an awful lot of emotional currency that you expend in this job and I think there comes a point in time when if you’re going to do it and you’re going to do it right you have to have that emotional currency to spend and you have to want to spend it,” Moran said in a 13WHAM News interview on Monday.  “I’m still ok, I still love what I do, I still have it to expend but I don’t want to be here some day and say you know what I can’t give somebody the kind of care or attention or concern that they deserve…”The most rewarding times have almost always been the most difficult times because you’re able to lend support and emotional assistance to people at their just worst,” Moran said.  “What we do is very difficult stuff; it’s death, it’s destruction, it’s pain, it’s anguish, it’s hurt, it’s evil and if you can help in anyway that’s very rewarding.”

The truth about Tom Moran is more like this.  And this.

And this, this and this.

And something else is really troubling here:  everyone in a position to know Tom Moran knows the truth about him already.  Eric Schiener, his own assistant.  The lawyers in Livingston County.  Patricia Marks.  The judges on the Appellate Division.  The members of the Attorney Grievance Committee.  All of the law enforcement establishment in Livingston County.

And – if they read their mail – the State Attorney General and the Governor.

What does it say about them, that as this blight upon the integrity of the law and the judiciary and the legal profession occurs so openly they not only do nothing but say nothing?  Moran is a bully and a thug and a psychopath, but what’s their excuse?

In fairness I suppose I should mention that the lawyers in Monroe County at least said something, though of course it wasn’t very specific.  Still, it’s a measure of the servility of the local press to “law enforcement” – and the contempt in which they hold the opinions of lawyers – that the little Monroe County Bar Association thing didn’t even come up in their puff piece.

Tom Moran becoming a judge is simply the triumph of force over reason and sanity, extended deep into western New York’s  judiciary, where it is increasingly supplanting the last vestiges of the rule of law.

It is a shameful thing.  Or would be, if many of the officials involved were even capable of shame any longer.

Saving The World, Revised Edition, Part III

Continuing with our revised proposal, then:

3.  A one year moratorium on taxation of any kind.  The government(s) will retain a sizable portion of the monetary wealth of the nation:  in the US, 10% of the available gold would remain with the federal government under what I have proposed, and another 10% would be distributed pro-rata to the state governments.  Thus, between them, the governments will start out with 20% of the dollars in existence.  They know how many “dollars” they have, in other words, and they can easily determine from there what they will need to make it through a year of operations assuming no new revenue from taxation.

This, then, is what the governments must do.  The private economy will have endured such an incredible shock from the jubilee event that it will need time to recalibrate, free from the concern that it must fund the government as well through the payment of taxes.

Also, there is an important corollary effect of the government’s determinations regarding how it will fund itself for a one year period out of a finite pool of money with no new revenue coming in:  the dollar numbers the government comes up with will suggest – not dictate, obviously, but suggest – beginning wage and price levels in the wider economy.

So in that sense, this is another important public service the government can perform in monetary matters, to ease uncertainty and facilitate trade and commerce generally.

And continuing on to the last two steps:

Saving The World, Revised Edition, Part II

The law can do all these things.  But it would have to be the most fundamental and unarguable kind of law:  in the US, for example, it would mean a constitutional amendment.  But in any case, these things can be done only by the most undisputed authority, whether king or pope or constitution.

1.  Universal debt jubilee:  This remains the centerpiece of the proposal.  Don’t let the word “jubilee” fool you.  It’s not all partying and celebration.  The vast majority of people will probably gain, or at least gain as much as they lose if a jubilee occurs.  But there are some people who would not gain while at the same time losing a great deal, and so many things that people are used to relying upon would disappear:  pensions, social security, bonds, t-bills, the entire derivative architecture, however many trillions or even quadrillions it “nominally” is.

All gone.

The only exceptions to the debt cancellation are bank deposits and government currency, what most people think of as being “money” proper.    Conveniently, the “dollar” (or any other nominal unit of account in any other country with a central bank) amounts of both can be determined with near absolute certainty.

Now.  Why does a debt jubilee need to be done this way?

If you wish to review, see here and here, along with some following explanatory posts.  We have to do it for the children.  Of course.

Briefly, though, we have to exempt the currency and bank deposits because otherwise they would be cancelled too, and there would then be no existing money, since money that actually circulates is pretty much always debt, paper or (in more modern times) electronic.

You see, it is misleading when people derisively refer to “paper” money or even “debt” money.  Neither of those is the problem in and of itself.  The problem is that the debt or paper or computer digit – that is, no matter what form it takes – is irredeemable.  That can never be the case, not even for the government.

Saving The World, Revised Edition, Part I

Well, somebody’s gotta do it.

I’m kidding, of course.  Well, half kidding anyway.  I’ve been making proposals all along, really, that have half serious components like offing the Secretary of the Treasury if he acts in bad faith.  I hope people don’t get carried away.  That’s part of the point, of course.

But let’s review.

The “financial crisis” is really a “rule of law” crisis and as such it is a crisis of civilization itself.  It’s not like nothing works, and for that we should be grateful:  the trains run more or less on time, there is food in the grocery stores.  People shopped and bought this Christmas.  Things could be worse.

Of course, they’ll get worse if something isn’t done. And they are far worse than they appear, at least to people whose information on events in the wider world comes from officially approved sources.

The year 2011 saw the first major manifestation of what is an increasingly brutal reality underneath it all:  the so-called “occupy” movement.  This movement is an early and relatively benign form of civil unrest.  Such movements rarely remain benign when they continue.

That’s one problem.

At this writing the occupiers have been rousted by the powers that be from their downtown tent cities that cropped up in major urban areas all over the United States.  But they have not disappeared.

Merry Christmas

to all readers, commenters and guests.  And please take a moment to remember those who are unfortunate and have no home or other comforts during this often very lonely season.

 

Nature Of Money, Steve Keen, Chartalism And Lawyers

Vox Day is having the same kind of problem with Robert Wenzel and the Economic Policy Journal that I had just about one year ago:  it appears that Wenzel and his troop are fundamentally confused about the nature of money, which is why they have been so consistently wrong in anticipating “inflation” due to “money printing by the Fed”, as if currency was the only, or indeed even the primary, form of money.

I think the questions involved are just too abstract for most people, even most very bright people.  Money is such a tangible, useful mundane and everyday thing it’s hard to believe that understanding its roots and origins is an intellectual exercise comparable to medieval metaphysics.

And yet this is true.  Read this if you don’t believe me (pdf.).

I was looking at that pdf article in connection with some correspondence I was having with Steve Keen – also on the blogroll – who I had read somewhere was a “chartalist“, which is a branch of economics that, well….I don’t know.  I mean wikipedia has a description, but I’m not quite sure what it means and I don’t know if anyone else is either.

Get Deployed To Iraq…

Return to the US to find your home has been repossessed by the bank while you were gone, in violation of federal law.

How can that happen?  Judges let them.

The US Treasury is conducting a “civil investigation”, even though it is criminal conduct.  If it were food stamp fraud, of course, someone would be going to jail.

Doing Kafka Proud

As he often does, Radley Balko chronicles the latest and greatest outrage of police abusing their power.  This time, there is the additional twist that the courts, which are the bulwark against governmental abuse of power, facilitate it through disingenuous rulings predicated upon dubious “fact findings” that are obviously made in bad faith, simply to achieve the desired result.

The desired result is, of course, to favor the government and do its bidding.

Once the “fact finding” is made, it’s as if it had been written in stone, no matter how ludicrous it is compared to the actual evidence.  Once again we confront the mindset that there is really no such thing as a “fact”; there is only the power to declare facts while pretending to “find” them.

Radley sums it up nicely, from this case called Crossland:

Latest Max Keiser

Very interesting stuff about JP Morgan being under investigation by the New York State Attorney General:

 

 

More Steve Keen

Obviously, I’m going to have to catch up with him.  Here’s an interview with the BBC from late November:

Obviously, it is quite courageous for an economics professor anywhere in the world, even Australia, to start talking about debt jubilees.  So my hat’s off to him.

On the other hand, he doesn’t seem to want to go all the way, referring to an “intelligent, modern jubilee”.  Thus he has very quickly run into the first unavoidable problem that is presented as soon as any kind of partial debt forgiveness is proposed:  who gets left out (HT is the BBC interviewer)?

HT: Somebody, under your solution, is coming in and saying that’s a good debt, that’s a bad debt?

SK: No. If we try to do it on an individual basis, we’ll be here forever and we’ll feed lawyers more than ….

HT: Who’s making the decision about the broad sweep?

SK: That’s why it has to be an intelligent modern jubilee. We can’t say: Worthy borrower, unworthy borrower. We have to have a systemic approach because fundamentally households did not make the bad decisions. The bad decisions were made by the banks to lend in the first place.

HT: Accepting what you identify as the problem and trying to understand what the solution is, in this new system that we’re replacing the current bad one with, who’s deciding who gets the debt write-off and who doesn’t?

SK: I wouldn’t say it was a case of making a choice between one individual and another. It has to be a systemic process by which we reduce the level of debt-finance money in the economy and increase the amount of government-created money. Because we have two sources of money in a capitalist economy. The banks can create money by extending loans. The government creates money by running a deficit. Now back in the early 60s the ratio of government created money to the overall money supply was 15%. It’s fallen so far that we’ve got an entirely debt-based system which has driven speculation. We need to create the government money to balance out the credit. So I’d actually have a government creation of money system approach to try to rebalance the system and reduce the private debt.

HT: The government, the central bank, prints money to pay off people’s debts? What I’m wondering is, you say, “Write off debts.” And it’s basically private debt that you want written off. Mortgages, companies’ debt. How is that working?

I like how “feeding lawyers” is assumed to be a bad thing.

In any case, it’s apparent that Steve doesn’t really have a good answer as yet.

He needs a lawyer.  Even if he has to feed him.

Rule Of Law Crisis

It’s an ongoing thing.  But lawyers and judges, having (with some exceptions, of course, such as dedicated CDL’s) largely abdicated their important socio-political role in favor of going along, are content to let their own crisis be thought of as a “financial crisis”.

That way, economists can deal with it and we don’t have to.

“Fore!” – Judges say this on the golf course.  Probably the only time most of them ever tell the truth.

“Hello, dear, I’m home from the office.  I can’t believe how much paper work these foreclosures cause.  I had to sign off on hundreds today and almost got writer’s cramp.  Some moron showed up to contest and said something about “robo-signing”, though.  I looked at the clerk and told her that’s something we need to look into right away.  What’s for dinner?”

Somehow I missed this a couple of months ago.  Steve Keen, who’s “debtwatch” blog appears on my blogroll, was interviewed by the comely Lauren Lyster of RT television as he advocated, of all things, a “debt jubilee”:

But a debt jubilee cannot be accomplished by economists.  Only the law can do it.

As I’ve indicated – indeed, it should be intuitively obvious – a debt jubilee, while at this point necessary and a nearly unambiguously Good Thing, has many and far reaching consequences that would have to be addressed.  Keen mentions one of them, an idea he probably got from me, that bank deposits – which are debts from the banks to the depositors – would have to be exempted.

The way I proposed to do that?  At the same time as the debt jubilee takes effect, the gold standard is restored, and the government’s gold is distributed so as to cover the bank deposits.  Everybody still has their “dollars”.

But what would those dollars mean in tangible terms?  What would they buy?  Not much gold, but so what?  You can’t eat gold, but you have to eat.  Which means that food has to be produced, among other things.  Which means that people have to be paid.

What do you pay them?  I mean, how much, how many “dollars”?

I’ve had a thought or two about this, given the debt jubilee/gold standard solution.  Next post.

 

Casey Anthony – A Frustrated Ritual Sacrifice

In individuals, wallowing is regarded as a character flaw.  But when the giant collective does the same thing, it somehow becomes sanctified, imbued with religious fervor.  And the flock adores its priests.

The frustration of the powerful but primitive urge to obtain expiation through the ritual sacrifice of a scapegoat is an unholy transgression.  Those responsible are infidels, heathens.  Like the scapegoat itself, despised for cheating the faithful out of salvation through their rightful slaughter, they are outcasts.  Anathema.

Seriously.  How else can this phenomenon possibly be interpreted?  If this had anything to do with truth or falsehood, evidence, knowledge, crime, punishment, due process, justice – or even such lesser concerns as winning and losing, as if the whole thing were some highly choreographed ego contest – the losing prosecutor wouldn’t be cashing in and the winning side wouldn’t be shunned.  But that is what is happening.  Even Scott Sternberg in Hollywood can’t unload the hot potato.

Occupy Port Shut Down (Updated)

The plan, apparently, is to shut down every port on the west coast of the US and Canada.  Very ambitious.  It’s supposed to be today, but I haven’t seen any news coverage of it.

The video is well done, albeit the people depicted lean very, very heavily left:

Still, ideology aside.  People are not taking it lying down, and I think that’s a good thing.

Update:  Here’s a good link to regularly updated news regarding occupy goings on.