Mailvox: Republican hatred of Ron Paul

Stickwick wonders why conservatives react in such a stereotypically liberal manner to Ron Paul:

I have a question about the conservative perception of Ron Paul. Rachel Lucas seems like a reasonable right-of-center person whose political views are moving towards libertarianism. In fact, she now refers to herself as a libertarian. However, she still hangs on to the idea of American interventionism. In a recent post she criticizes McCain for his criticism of Rand Paul and for his overly-interventionist policy, but agrees with Ace that *some* interventionism is necessary:

I don’t agree with it, but at least their position is stated reasonably. What I find odd is how her commenters are using this as an opportunity to dump all over Ron Paul. Here’s a typical example:

“For the record, I cannot STAND Ron Paul. Fiscally he makes sense, but in every other conceivable way he’s a senile, batshit crazy old fuck.”

Why do some right-of-center people get so vitriolic about Ron Paul? They go right past “I strongly disagree with his ideas on foreign policy,” and straight to “crazy old fuck.” This is exactly the sort of thing they denounce when the left gets personal in its attacks or calls right-of-center ideology a “mental disorder.”

Why do conservatives call Ron Paul crazy instead of just disagreeing with him? Would you shed some light on this?

It’s not at all hard to understand why so many conservatives hate Ron Paul with all the fury of a thousand suns.  The reason is that he shames them for their hypocrisy.  He reveals the inconsistency in their non-conservatism.  He forces them to confront the fact that they are not the proponents of small government and liberty they believe themselves to be.

Big government, international interventionist, and monetarist “conservatives” hate Ron Paul for exactly the same reason the Pharisees and Sadducees hated Jesus Christ.  Because he exposes their intrinsically false nature to themselves.  And the reason they dismiss him as crazy instead of responding rationally to the arguments he presents is because they know they cannot do so without losing.

Can’t say we weren’t warned

Some find significance in symbols:

Oh, dear. This is probably not the symbolism the White House wanted.

Hours after CIA Director John Brennan took the oath of office—behind closed doors, far away from the press, perhaps befitting his status as America’s top spy—the White House took pains to emphasize the symbolism of the ceremony.

“There’s one piece of this that I wanted to note for you,” spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters at their daily briefing. “Director Brennan was sworn in with his hand on an original draft of the Constitution that had George Washington’s personal handwriting and annotations on it, dating from 1787.”

Earnest said Brennan had asked for a document from the National Archives that would demonstrate the U.S. is a nation of laws.

“Director Brennan told the president that he made the request to the archives because he wanted to reaffirm his commitment to the rule of law as he took the oath of office as director of the CIA,” Earnest said.

The Constitution itself went into effect in 1789. But troublemaking blogger Marcy Wheeler points out that what was missing from the Constitution in 1787 is also quite symbolic: The Bill of Rights, which did not officially go into effect until December 1791 after ratification by states. (Caution: Marcy’s post has some strong language.)

That means: No freedom of speech and of the press, no right to bear arms, no Fourth Amendment ban on “unreasonable searches and seizures,” and no right to a jury trial.

How … symbolic?

It could be.  I find it more intriguing that Obama took both his oaths of office in private ceremonies after the first, public one was fluffed.

The lobotomy factories

One has to wonder what the argument for public school is supposed to be when four out of five of the GRADUATES of a major public school system can’t read, write, or do math:

It’s an education bombshell. Nearly 80 percent of New York City high school graduates need to relearn basic skills before they can enter the City University’s community college system.

This doesn’t even account for the dropouts, who account for at least 12.1 percent of the city’s students even if we take the more generous “current methodology” at face value.   “Since 2005, when the State began using its current methodology to
calculate graduation rates, New York City’s graduation rate has risen by
40.9 percent. In that same period, the dropout rate has fallen nearly
10 points from 22 percent to 12.1 percent.”

If we assume that the dropouts have similarly failed to learn the basic skills, that means that about 17.6% of the students in the New York City public school system are learning basic skills.

The public schools aren’t useless, they are worse than useless.  Forget online education and homeschooling, children would probably learn more from playing video games all day for 12 years.  And it would cost a lot less to provide every “student” with a PlayStation and a new game delivered every month.

UPDATE: It’s not just New York City and its vibrant community that are failing.  Consider Minnesota, which spends $12,966 per year per public school student

  • 23% of Minnesota students are not proficient in reading
  • 38% of Minnesota students are not proficient in math
  • 52% of Minnesota students are not proficient in science

By the way, the Minneapolis public schools spend $23,020 per student and 42.6% are not proficient in reading and 60.4% are not proficient in math.

    Tyler Durden does the math

    More debt buys fewer jobs:

    The media’s ecstatic read through of today’s Nonfarm payroll beat can barely end: after all, a print of 236k on expectations of 165K, why that has to be great. Well, it is. Until one looks to the number from February 2012, which happens to be 271,000. And even the Keynesian will agree that February follows January, which in 2013 was a downward revised 119K. January 2012? 311,000. In other words, the first two months of 2012 saw a 582,000 increase in non-farm payrolls. In 2013: 355,000.

    But something else happened between February 29, 2012 and February 28, 2013… Oh yes, the US government issued some $1,198,397,883,967.30 in debt. Oh, and the Fed monetized about half of this amount, and virtually all of the Treasuries issued to the right of the ZIRP period (i.e., risky debt). To summarize: $1.2 trillion in debt buys the US…. 61% of the jobs created a year ago.

    The Z1 report for Q4 2012 also came out today.  I’ll do a more detailed post on it this weekend, but here are the highlights.  Keep in mind that I keep track on an ongoing basis, so this ignores the quarterly revisions.

    Households, State and Local Governments almost insignificantly down.  Financial up, Federal up, Corporate up big at 3.56%, the third biggest quarterly increase since 2004.  Total credit market debt outstanding up 1.76%, still shy of the 2.36% 60-year historical average.

    Q4 2012 credit gap: $333.8 billion
    2012 credit gap: $3.1 trillion
    Post-2008 credit gap: $27.3 trillion

    Translation: debt-disinflation continues.

    Inflation vs Deflation VII

    In his post entitled Fiat or Shenanigans, Nate contested the idea that US money is credit money and not fiat money with the characteristics of credit money:

    Remember I said our money was fiat money… with characteristics of credit money.  Right?  Vox says I am wrong about that.  And… while I considered rushing off to donate some money to an unrelated charity in his name and make a video about it…  instead… I just decided I would address his well made point like an adult…  mostly…

    Vox said: “Nate’s first mistake is the identification of credit money as fiat money, even though he clearly has his suspicions concerning the problematic nature of the distinction as it applies to the US monetary system.  That this distinction is false can be demonstrated in two ways, first with a legitimate appeal to authority and history, and second by the money creation process.”

    He then provides a quote from Mises, that I agree, does indeed say that fiat money doesn’t yet exist and probably hasn’t existed.  Vox appeals to Mises who appeals to history.   And Nate points out… well shit…  this book was written in 1912…  it appears we have some more history to investigate before that holds water doesn’t it?  Well lets look at this new history then… especially… recent history.

    Say what does our buddy Murray have to say about fiat money?

    “Under a fiat money standard, governments (or their central banks) may obligate themselves to bail out, with increased issues of standard money, any bank or any major bank in distress. In the late nineteenth century, the principle became accepted that the central bank must act as the “lender of last resort”, which will lend money freely to banks threatened with failure. Another recent American device to abolish the confidence limitation on bank credit is “deposit insurance”, whereby the government guar­antees to furnish paper money to redeem the banks’ demand li­abilities. These and similar devices remove the market brakes on rampant credit expansion.”

    While the quote from Mises does date back to the 1912 text, Mises himself lived until 1973 and witnessed all of the innovations mentioned, even the removal of the convertibility to gold by President Nixon.  I am not aware of any point at which he changed his opinion on this matter, nor does Nate suggest that he did.

    Given the fact that the FDIC’s deposit insurance observably does not take the form of paper money being furnished to redeem the failing banks’ demand liabilities, but rather transfers those liabilities to other banks in the system without any paper money at all being furnished to anyone, I think it is safe to conclude that Murray does not have a sufficient grasp on the difference between fiat money and credit money for his statements to be relevant here.  Moreover, the statement that the central bank is “the lender of last resort” itself tends to underline the fact that the “deposits” are, in fact, credit and not pure fiat.  The central bank is not actually “lending money” to banks under duress, it is merely inflating the amount of credit at their disposal.

    Recall that when you make a payment from your ebanking account, the bank declares it will make the payment “provided there is sufficient credit” on your account.  It’s all credit, both in electronic form and paper form.

    Nate continues:

    Are we done?  No… no no no… we’re along way from done.   Remember.. Mises characterized fiat money by legal privilege.  Legal Privilege?   Consult the MisesWiki!  According to Hülsmann, there are four groups of legal privileges granted by the state (usually more than one is granted):

    1. legalized counterfeiting – the promises of banks are allowed to be more “elastic”. For example, a coin marked “an ounce of gold” will be allowed to have any amount of gold or none, and can have any meaning. Banknotes were named “promises to pay”, but were obscure on the details.
    2.  monopoly – only some monetary products may be produced by law, like a specific metal; or only the banknotes or coins of a certain bank. This limits the freedom of choice of users of money and benefits the producers and first recipients at the detriment of others.
    3. legal tender is a money, that must be accepted in exchanges under a predefined price. Some monies may be driven out of the market due to Gresham’s Law.
    4.  legalized suspension of payments allows banks to avoid paying their obligations, while receiving payments from their debtors. If a bank is freed from contractual obligations to redeem its money and it is also legal tender, its banknotes become genuine paper money. With legal privileges are the banks allowed to behave more irresponsibly, which increases moral hazard.

    Here we get to the crux of Nate’s error.  Nate is correct to point out that the Federal Reserve’s credit money is declared to be legal tender and is legally privileged by the federal government.  In this sense, he is correct in saying that the US monetary system is fiat money.  However, this only is the wider sense in which the Mises Institute defines the term:

    Often called paper money, fiat money is in a wider sense any money declared to be legal tender by government fiat (ie law). In the narrower sense used here, fiat money is an intrinsically useless good used as a means of payment and a storable object.

    The narrower sense of fiat money is clearly the sense Mises was using the term when he declared “most of those kinds of money that are not commodity money must be classified as credit money” and questioned whether fiat money had ever existed.  And that narrower sense cannot possibly apply to the Federal Reserve notes, as most “dollars” are a) not a good, useless or otherwise, b) not a storable object, and c) not a risk-free convertible claim to real money.

    Nate would be correct to claim credit money is fiat money in the wider sense, but then, I completely agree with that.  I am simply declaring that US currency is credit money that is not fiat money in the narrower sense.  Nate is incorrect to say that it is fiat money in the narrower sense, which is the sense that most people believe it to be.  Nate continues:

    Now are we done?  Well… not really.  Because what I’ve done here isn’t intellectually honest, in the sense that I have not represented the whole of Vox’s point.  The reason I hated Chapter three is not because of confusing terms like fiduciary media.  Its because Credit Money itself is a category error.

    Credit money is a description of leverage. But…  Leverage can be applied to all types of money….  Thus… Credit Money… is a subcategory.  Credit Money is what happens when you take money of any other type.. and then leverage it up for lending purposes….  Leverage is something that happens to Money Types.  It isn’t a money type itself.  Its like including cancer cells in a discussion of  human  cells because they form in the human body.  Cancer cells aren’t human cells.

    We must always go back to competition.

    Money is money because of the constant commodity competition   Every day the competition is on going… and every day one commodity is winning.  that one commodity that is winning… is the money.   The money types… are explanations of WHY the competition is being won.  Fiat money is fiat money because the government helped it win artificially and it wouldn’t have won otherwise.  Take away the government advantage… and its not the money anymore. Commodity money types?  Well they have no artificial government advantage.

    That is the true definition of sound money.

    Its money that wins the competition… every minute of every day…  the on going competition… not some past competition .. on its own without aid of the government.

    All modern paper currencies are fiat money.

    The bits that are loaned into creation from thin air?  Those are credit money too… but it is dishonest to ignore the fact that it is fiat money as well.  Loans may have created the individual dollar bills… but those dollar bills wouldn’t be money… if it wasn’t Fiat.

    May God have Mercy on my soul…   Ludwig Von Mises… was wrong.  You cannot disregard the fiat nature of the original money… just because most of it was created through leverage.

    So Fiat?  Shenanigans?

    The answer is both.  Not one.  Not the other.   Both.  To fail to grasp that… will totally blind you to the inherit problems of our current economic system.  The money is fiat money and credit money.. because much of which was created via leverage… but also much of it was created through counterfeiting.   This is why I created the word “clusterfutastrophe” while attempting to parse the US money supply.

    Nate is stumbling towards the truth here, which is that credit money is fiat money in the wider sense but not the narrower one, but is still stumbling.  He is still hung up on the basic concept of credit money, which is why he erroneously calls it a category error.  What he is failing to grasp is the central importance of credit in the monetary process, one which precedes the role that government plays in either guaranteeing the credit claims or establishing the legal privilege of those claims.

    “When all exchanges have to be settled in ready cash, then the possibility of performing them by means of cancellation is limited to the case exemplified by the butcher and baker and only then on the assumption, which of course only occasionally hold good, that the demands of both parties are simultaneous. At the most, it is possible to imagine that several other persons might join in and so a small circle be built up within which drafts could be used for the settlement of transactions without the actual use of money. But even in this case simultaneity would still be necessary, and, several persons being involved, would be still seldomer achieved.

    These difficulties could not be overcome until credit set business free from dependence on the simultaneous occurrence of demand and supply. This, in fact, is where the importance of credit for the monetary system lies. But this could not have its full effect so long as all exchange was still direct exchange, so long even as money had not established itself as a common medium of exchange. The instrumentality of credit permits transactions between two persons to be treated as simultaneous for purposes of settlement even if they actually take place at different times”
     – Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit, p. 282

    The important aspect of credit is not its ability to be leveraged, which is a consequence of the characteristics of money rather than an integral aspect of credit, but rather its ability to transcend time.  It is the fact that the credit is a claim to money rather than to some other commodity that permits its expansion beyond the existing money supply.

    “A person who has a thousand loaves of bread at his immediate disposal will not dare to issue more than a thousand tickets each of which gives its holder the right to demand at any time the delivery of a loaf of bread. It is otherwise with money…. The fact that is peculiar to money alone is not that mature and secure claims to money are as highly valued in commerce as the sums of money to which they refer, but rather that such claims are complete substitutes for money, and, as such, are able to fulfil all the functions of money in those markets in which their essential characteristics of maturity and security are recognized. It is this circumstance that makes. it possible to issue more of this sort of substitute than the issuer is always in a position to convert.  And so the fiduciary medium comes into being in addition to the money certificate. Fiduciary media increase the supply of money in the broader sense of the word; they are consequently able to influence the objective
    exchange-value of money.”
     – Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit, p. 267

    Note that the credit aspect not only predates the broader fiat aspects, but is, in fact, intrinsically necessary for the eventual expansion.  Nate concludes with a question

    Its not that there is no money.   I already explained that there is always money.  Money…is like energy.  It cannot ever be destroyed.  It can change forms… its velocity can change.  But it cannot be destroyed.  The problem is… our system is so screwed up through fiat and leverage… that we can’t even measure the money supply any more.  Come Vox… be sensible… you’re absolutely right to point out that the leverage can’t be ignored… but you were wrong to suggest that the fiat aspects can.  Now tell us Vox…  What IS the best way to measure the abomination posing as the US money supply?  He asked knowingly…

    First, I’ll point out that since we have a system “in which the actual transfer of money has been completely superseded by fiduciary media”, it doesn’t matter that we can’t measure the money supply anymore.  Because we’re no longer using actual money, we are merely using possibility of money in order to support the extensive system of potential claims to theoretical future money.  Or, as Nate rightly calls it, a financial abomination.  As strange as this sounds, it was anticipated at least 101 years ago, as Mises notes:

    “Use is made of money, but not physical use of actually existing money or money substitutes. Money which is not present performs an economic function; it has its effect solely by reason of the possibility of its being able to be present.”

    In answer to Nate’s question, the best way is to measure the sum total of all the current outstanding claims.  This is approximated in the Federal Reserve’s Z1 Flow of Funds Accounts, specifically the L1 credit market debt outstanding report.  And it is the expansion of this supply, though not strictly speaking “inflation” per se, that effects exchange value and therefore the prices of goods and services.

    Mailvox: rabbits gonna rabbit

    And Asher’s gonna asher:

    “He’s not dumb but when I point out that without science and
    philosophy everything that makes his art media possible wouldn’t exist.
    It doesn’t even register with him.”

    It clearly runs in the family.

    “The most obvious possibility is that the “it” refers to science being a necessary condition for various art media used by my brother. However, the reference doesn’t make any sense given the context which is that I am aware of the scientific advances that make my brother’s visual art possible.

    The other possibility for Vox’s “it” is that “things” don’t register for me. Fine, but that is, in itself, an empty reference. What things? Everything? Some things? If not everything then what set of things? Vox doesn’t make this clear, and, in doing so he ends up sounding like Amanda Marcotte.

    Yes, science being a necessary condition for various art media is clearly the most obvious possibility.  And yes, I sound EXACTLY like Amanda Marcotte.

    “Your “it” has no clear object of reference.”

    It is sufficiently clear to the sufficiently intelligent.  I often find Asher’s take on things to be more than a little fascinating.  It’s rather like watching a retarded Spock in action.  His attempts at ad hominem are the best; they resemble someone attempting to trash talk in a language they’ve studied for three semesters in college.

    “And I suppose you your mother find sex response to attract, yes?”

    How not to be SFWA president

    Three-time and outgoing SFWA President John Scalzi appears to want to bring his period of amateurish misrule to an end on a fittingly diplomatic note:

    THIS IS A HORRIBLE AWFUL TERRIBLE APPALLING DISGUSTING CONTRACT WHICH IS BAD AND NO WRITER SHOULD SIGN IT EVER. Yes, I’m aware I’ve already said this. It bears repeating. It doesn’t matter whether it’s from Alibi, Hydra or anyone. Run away from it, as fast as you can, arms flailing like a Muppet’s. It’s the only rational response.

    I will note that at the moment I have in my email queue a letter from Random House, written in a “more in sorrow than anger” style, which expresses disappointment that I (for one) didn’t talk to them before writing my piece on their terrible regrettable insulting Hydra deal terms, and waxing rhapsodic about their bold new business model. It’s profit sharing, you see, not like apparently any of those other book contracts out there, which comes as a surprise to me, considering how much of Tor’s and Subterranean’s profits I’ve shared in over the years.

    I am speaking for myself and only for myself when I say that I looked at the letter that the folks at Random House sent me and wondered just how incredibly stupid they must think I am to believe that just because they sent a letter that read as all reasonable and nice sounding, that would somehow change the fact that the business model of their new eBook imprints is predicated on preying on writers — and preying on the writers most at risk for being preyed upon, the new and the desperate.

    This must be more of that smart diplomacy of which we heard so much in the recent presidential elections.  It’s hardly a joking matter, but it is a little amusing in light of expressed concerns regarding my ability to get along with the major publishers.  But while I may have been personally attacked by a pair of Tor editors and been guilty of asking questions concerning the number of Nebula nominations won by Tor Books, it can honestly say it never occurred to me to publicly assail a major publishing house’s basic business practices or make assumptions concerning its views of its authors.

    I am not saying the business model of Random House’s ebook imprints is ideal or even fair.  But these are issues best raised privately, not shrieked from the mountaintops.  Despite Scalzi’s hysterical whining – no, Johnny, they’re not “fucking kidding you” – there is absolutely nothing wrong with the no-advance model; I prefer it myself because it reduces the amount of risk to the publisher and costs the writer nothing while simultaneously providing him with a considerably higher share of the upside.  The shared risk model is a good one; why should the publisher have to gamble and assure the writer of revenue that may never be realized?

    And the publisher’s risk is real.  I’ve been paid “advances” on three books from two different publishers that I didn’t even have to write due to various reorganizations and turf wars inside the publishing houses.

    Instead of jumping up and down and screaming “it’s not fair”, the SFWA president should be speaking quietly with Random House, and explaining what aspects of the contracts are reasonable and which are not.  That’s not only the best way to address situations like these, it is the only way, because SFWA is not about to win a pissing match with a major publisher facing a declining market and a genuine need to revise its traditional business model.

    As an SFWA member, I’m embarrassed by the juvenile behavior of the president and appalled that the introduction of new contracts for the new medium appear to have taken the organization by surprise.  I’ve stated that the status quo leadership of the recent past has been amateurish in the extreme; this incident is only the most recent evidence of that.  And, needless to say, if I am elected president, these matters will be handled in a considerably more professional manner.

    UPDATE: Publisher’s Weekly is on it, complete with a copy of the letter to Scalzi and the SFWA:

    After the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) came out swinging on Wednesday, with its president saying that it would not allow authors publishing with Random House’s e-only science fiction imprint Hydra to use that achievement as a credential for membership, the publisher has responded.

    PW’s Genreville blog ran a post about the SFWA’s decision, but Random House said the organization never gave it the opportunity to address the issue at hand, namely royalty rates and overall contract terms. (The SFWA said the main reason for its decision is that Hydra “fails to pay authors an advance against royalties, as SFWA requires, and has contract terms that are onerous and unconscionable.”

    In a letter to the SFWA, Random House’s digital publishing director Allison Dobson said that while it respects the organization’s stance “we strongly disagree with it, and wish you had contacted us before you published your posts.” The letter went on to say that Hydra “offers a different–but potentially lucrative–publishing model for authors: a profit share,” and that “as with every business partnership, there are specific costs associated with bringing a book successfully to market, and we state them very straightforwardly and transparently in our author agreements.”

    Genotribes and superracism

    Steve Sailer not only points to one of the fatal flaws of the evolutionary model but manages to lay the foundation for a new form of scientific super-racism:

    Thus, there have been, last I checked, a couple of dozen different definitions of species put forward by biologists. Ernst Mayr proposed the simplest: interfertility defines a species. That’s something you can wrap your head around. But there are problems. What about species that reproduce asexually? Among sexually reproducing species, how can you tell whether or not two of the 400 different types of mussels are interfertile or not? As we know from pandas, captive breeding programs are tricky. And what about types of animals who are interfertile but seem worth differentiating, such as dog, wolves, and coyotes?

    Indeed, it was while I was thinking about the Endangered Species Act and
    the issues surrounding specieshood during the biodiversity debates of
    the 1990s kicked off by Edward O. Wilson’s campaign to save the
    rainforests that led me to try to ground the study of human biodiversity
    in something less woozy than the notion of race as subspecies. Instead,
    I reasoned, something we know exists for every human is a
    genetic family tree and a biological extended family. If we go back to
    thinking about racial groups as extended families, one given a higher
    degree of coherence and endurance by partial inbreeding, then we have a
    stronger, broader concept that can be used in vastly more human
    situations than in just trying to differentiate continental-scale racial
    groups by skin color in the post-1492 world.

    If I, as a confirmed scientific sub-speciesist, am considered to be a racist on the basis of my acceptance of the current state of biology, then what words can possibly suffice to properly condemn one who would divide humanity on even more substantive grounds than mere genetic science?

    But what could we call these extended families with higher degrees of coherence and endurance by partial inbreeding?  One would be tempted to suggest the term “genotribes” were it not for the fact that we are reliably informed that tribalism is the root of all human evil.

    Too big to jail

    Karl Denninger considers the Attorney General’s recent admission that the big banks are above the law:

    The Rule of Law works and guides a just society only because it applies to everyone.  Nobody gets to rape, rob, pillage or murder.  If you do, no matter who you are, you face the same punishment, the same process, the same sentence.

    We all know there are disparities in the process and always have been.  But there’s a difference between the foibles of mankind — everyone has their bias, and there is no such thing as a human process that is flawless — and intentional, designed-in or willful refusal to prosecute certain people for acts that land others in prison.

    The latter is the defining action of a dictatorship.

    A dictatorship can only exist by declaring war upon the people.  When a certain subset of the population is given license to pillage or worse that is the very definition of “diktat” from which the term “dictatorship” comes.

    Fast and Furious, incidentally, falls into this category as well.

    This is an extraordinarily dangerous state of affairs and must not be permitted to continue.  The government and its actors have lost all moral and ethical appeal to fair play and the rule of law — by exempting certain people they have declared both themselves and those they exempted beyond the protections that exist in a civilized society.

    I’ve previously pointed out that there is no longer “law” as such, in the United States any more.  Everything about the “nation”, which is no longer, properly speaking, even a nation anymore, is fraudulent, from its “money” to its system of “justice”.  Even something as simple and basic as openly fighting a “war” is now beyond its bloated, cancerous make-believe structure.

    I wouldn’t call the present system a dictatorship myself.  Dictatorships are more open and direct.  It is better described as a simulatorship, which is to say, rule by pretense.  It is remniscent of the latter days of the Soviet empire, when the Russian people pretended to work and the Soviet government pretended to pay them.  In the latter days of the US empire, the federal government pretends its actions are within the limits set by the U.S. Constitution and the American people pretend to believe them.

    If a corporate entity is too big to fail or too big to jail, then logic dictates it must be cut down to a size that permits both.  Remember, corporations are not capitalism, they are creations of government and if they can’t reasonably be imprisoned, they can certainly be “executed”.  And if real American people can be “legally” executed at the order of the president, then can there really be any doubt that artificial American people are also liable to termination on command as well?

    This section of the American Banker article particularly struck home:

    Many are still angry about the 2008 bank bailouts, and they now have an
    on-the-record confirmation from Justice’s top official that the
    department is treating big banks softly just because they are large.
    Compare it to how law enforcement typically treats American citizens
    when they break the law — often times by throwing the book at them — and
    it’s easy to understand how that anger could grow into more popular
    support for a big bank breakup.

    For example, my father was imprisoned for 12 years after being accused of evading $1.6 million in taxes, penalties, and imaginary “interest” despite having paid something like $75 million in state and federal taxes over the previous 20 years and forcing the State of Minnesota to admit that its agents knowingly lied when they falsely claimed he was a resident and seized his house for not paying taxes he didn’t owe. Meanwhile, Congressional investigators estimate that the big US banks launder about $250 billion in drug money every year in addition to their $12 billion in estimated annual mortgage fraud.  When caught, they occasionally pay a monetary penalty calculated at a rate which, in my father’s case, would have amounted to about a $20,000 fine.

    So, I can understand why many Americans support a big bank breakup and seeing corporate criminals treated with the same severity as actual human beings.  But it’s not going to happen, because the entire financial system is already on the verge of collapse and all of the insiders know it.  That is why the banks will continue doing whatever they want and the regulators and politicians will continue to look the other way, until the moment when a critical node fails and the entire system breaks down in a manner that can’t be blamed on anyone in particular.

    Kicking it old school

    I have to admit, I rather like the cut of Paul the Younger’s jib:

    In a rare, traditional filibuster, Sen. Rand Paul vowed to speak on the Senate floor “as long as it takes” to draw attention to his concerns about the Obama administration’s policy regarding the targeted killing of American terrorism suspects.

    The Kentucky Republican took to the floor before noon Wednesday to block an expected vote on the nomination of John Brennan to lead the CIA, with aides saying he could continue for hours. Paul, beginning his remarks, said he would continue “until the alarm is sounded from coast to coast that our Constitution is important.”

    “Are we so complacent with our rights that we would allow a president to say he might kill Americans?” Paul asked. “No one person, no one politician should be allowed … to judge the guilt of an individual and to execute an individual. It goes against everything we fundamentally believe in our country.”

    Paul is absolutely right.  And it does not speak well of the Republican Party that so few of his fellow Senators are joining him in taking what should be the obvious position that the President of the United States cannot simply murder any American he wants whenever he wishes, without trial, sentencing, or even a warrant.