I already wrote this today, but hell, let’s make it a recurring theme: Welcome to liberal fascism, citizen. Take a seat. We’ll be with you when we’re with you:
We know for a fact that enormous sums of money legally off limits have disappeared into the maw of disgraced Senator John Corzine’s gambling counterparties, all of whom seem to have taken the oath of omerta. We know that Corzine personally asked employees at MF Global, the financial firm he headed until recently, to transfer the funds. We know that his underlings balked at signing false statements attesting the transfers to be legal. So how is it that the man ultimately responsible for this brazen theft and spectacular bankruptcy gets away with performing a perfunctory Sergeant Schultz “I know nothing” routine in front of his old Senate buddies, after which he is left free to walk out the door without handcuffs?
Meanwhile, marine biologist and whale watching ship captain Nancy Black faces 20 years in prison, not for “harassing” whales (which believe it or not is a crime), but because she has been charged with lying to Justice Department prosecutors investing allegations that some of her crew members whistled at a whale to keep it hanging around their boats.
You can’t make this stuff up.
Title 18, Section 1001 of the United States Code is the successor to the False Claims Act of 1863, originally intended to punish crooked Civil War contractors. It has since metastasized into an all-purpose bludgeon that federal prosecutors routinely use to squeeze fines and plea bargains out of anyone unfortunate enough to become ensnared in one of the hundreds of thousands of regulations that govern everything from selling goldfish to the volume of your toilet flush.
As Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg characterizes it, Section 1001 has conferred “extraordinary authority” for prosecutors to “manufacture crimes.” That is because Section 1001 charges are both entirely discretionary and subsidiary to any primary charges, making every indictment an act of selective prosecution. In fact, Section 1001 prosecutions are so selective that primary charges are not even necessary, meaning you can go to jail even if there is no underlying crime. Ask Martha Stewart about that.
This is a horrendous misapplication of justice. But as long as it has become the norm in federal law enforcement whenever prosecutors are directed by their political masters to send a message about policy, why haven’t Section 1001 charges been thrown at John Corzine? How long do we have to wait for the feds to collect evidence from the hapless employees on whom Corzine has tried to pin the blame before the big fish gets hauled in for the perp walk?
Are prosecutors even trying to get their man or have friends in high places waved them off? Why haven’t Corzine’s gambling counterparties been squeezed to turn over evidence in return for immunity from prosecution – as well as the first pick in next year‘s draft of who gets to rotate back out of government service to return to one of the firms they used to regulate? It’s not as if prosecutors couldn’t bring all manner of securities cases against companies that did business with MF Global until they found someone willing to throw the mendacious Senator under the bus.
With all the securities regulations we now have on the books – from Sarbanes Oxley to Dodd Frank – and politicians incessantly bloviating about the importance of bringing Wall Street miscreants to justice, what are the rest of us supposed to think if the befuddled whale watcher gets hauled off to prison while the Willie Sutton of derivatives brokers hops in his limo and rides off into the sunset to collect his Senator’s pension?
Who has set the priorities at the Justice Department that is allowing this to happen, and why? How can an SEC that can’t catch a Bernie Madoff before he blows himself up or nail a guy like John Corzine after his hand, arm, neck, and head are caught in the cookie jar be expected to professionally, effectively, and impartially enforce the thousands of regulations inflicted on the rest of us?
But woe to anyone who messes with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s rules on harassing marine mammals. Or runs afoul of the Environmental Protection Agency when their backyard is declared a wetland. Or gets in a Davis Bacon labor dispute with a powerful union. Or fails to file accurate Affirmative Action Plan paperwork. Yet it seems that if you‘ve got the right Washington connections you can pick your clients’ pockets and even burn the economy to the ground without suffering any consequences.
This is more than just justice gone awry. It is the systematic destruction of the rule of law and its replacement by shameless cronyism.
A government big enough to imprison you for whistling at a whale — or rather, for supposedly lying to DOJ prosecutors about an alleged whale whistle infraction — is a government that has grown at once too big and too insular. A “living” rule of law is not a rule of law at all: instead, it is tyranny dressed up in the trappings of impartial justice rigged to aid the connected and punish the “masses” under the capricious heel of an out of control Leviathan.
And the sad part is, there’s such “comity” on the GOP side of the governing aisle — a kind of deference to others within the ruling class, regardless of political party — that Republicans not only won’t make use of Corzine’s thievery, they likely won’t even mention it for fear of having Obama tether it to Wall Street Romney.
Just another perk of nominating a slightly more conservative Democrat as the Republican candidate for President.
Who knew whale whistling was a crime? Now I’m going to have to stop hanging out in front of Lane Bryant at the mall, watching the cute chubby girls shop…;-)
Oh, and fuck Corzine, he should have been perpwalked right into the worst hardcore pen in Jersey, as an object lesson for the rest of the grifters…
Mitt Romney 2012: At least he’s not a commie.
I believe that we should take immediate steps to exstinctify any animal that can be significantly harmed by the un-amplified whistle of a human being.
They just don’t deserve to live.
The adverts for whale watching are really pretty.
Di, I heard that bit on Beck’s show, and I almost wrecked my truck laughing…
Di, I heard that bit on Beck’s show, and I almost wrecked my truck laughing…
It’s especially fun when they add “as we’ve said all along…” when they totally haven’t.
When she’s all toted up, I’d bet that Obama’s unconstitutional ObamaCare will have poured more money down the mooty-moot-mooted drain than Corzine stole altogether, likely a multiple of Corzine’s take. And of course no one will put these politician bastards in jail, nor even hold them reasonably accountable for their imprudent waste of the public capital, outside possibly refusing to reelect them (and even that’s in doubt).
For fuck’s sake, the Federal govern’t is determined to spendwaste staggering sums of money even now — in the knowing face of the
potentialprobable annihilation of this stinking law in the Supreme Court. And damn proud of it too.For these types, the private sector is where you steal your money from, you get your friends THEIR money when you are in government…
At $1.2 billion Corzine is in the big leagues of thieves but is only a rounding error for the Federal Government’s wastrels.
At some point there is going to be a Fort Sumter moment and when that happens, it will become very dangerous for government officials to try and enforce such asinine laws.
I really never believed for a second that anything would happen to Jonny boy.
This being a ‘nation of laws’….
and ‘equal justice under the law’….
and where ‘all men are created equal’…
and all that jazz.
“All is proceeding as I have foreseen.” — Friedrich Hayek
Joe Jackson sez:
This really is a pretty scene but I’m happy I don’t live here.
Hey what’s the matter with the waiter’s face?
Can you say it in English?
’Cause we’re the Jet Set, get out of our way.
Don’t be messin’ with the Jet Set, get out of our way.
We’ve got a lot of things to see.
I keep waiting for Corzine to say he left that $1.2 billion in his other pants and blame the dry cleaner for taking it.
Look you guys.
Citizen’s United is the problem. I have proof.
Here, here, here, here, here, and here.
I decided not to respond when I saw that our Venn diagrams of How The World Works didn’t intersect at any level.
Gertrude Himmelfarb, Civil Society Reconsidered: ” Civil society has a venerable philosophical lineage, but it is social science that brought it to the forefront of attention in America. In 1979, Nathan Glazer, in an essay in the Public Interest, “On Subway Graffiti in New York,” demonstrated the unfortunate effects of what seemed to be so trivial a matter as graffiti. While Norman Mailer was celebrating graffiti as a new art form, Glazer saw them as a persistent threat to urban society, assailing millions of New Yorkers every day with the sight of vandalized subway cars, and giving them a sense of willful predators capable of any kind of violence or criminality. As a subway rider himself, Glazer shared that experience, and as a sociologist inquiring into the problem, he examined the serious but ineffectual attempts of the police and other authorities to curb that problem.”
How about we should think of crap law and crap law enforcement as we would subway graffiti? What assaults are these and what detrimental effects on public spiritedness would we expect to result from them?
Human beings both shape their political orders and are shaped by them, in a manner chicken and egg question-like.
Dicentra, I see from that exchange, Mr. Diaz does not get the concept that an all powerful central government controlling everything means there is no escape.
Section 1001 has conferred “extraordinary authority” for prosecutors to “manufacture crimes.”
What else is the function of government and law but to manufacture crimes? Crimes are the subject of law, made by men. When men decide that law and rights are open to endless postmodern interpretation, and we have no polestar to guide our ideas of justice and liberty, what else could happen?
Plus, think of the advantages accruing to Leviathan when you make every an a criminal.
advantages accruing to Leviathan when you make every man a criminal.
Mr. Diaz does not get the concept that an all powerful central government controlling everything means there is no escape.
Course he does. That’s a feature, not a bug.
Ooop. Ack.
Messieurs Smith and Wesson beg to differ.
Blake, now I know exactly how Cassandra felt.
I’ve been saying for years that the only way to rein these people in is to make them more afraid of us than the people who give them their orders. That a Civil War 2.0 was inevitable. That no tyranny has ever been rolled back except by armed resistance.
The general response, even on this blog, was that I was a violent whackjob who just hadn’t given peace a chance.
And now I just sit here watching exactly what I predicted come to pass.
And I weep.
Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
Mao Tse-Tung*
SDN, you misspoke. I think you meant we just haven’t given our pieces a chance. As in Pablo’s little friend(s).
Welcome to the Violent Whackjob Guild. Although I am merely an apprentice.
Of course, I just finished Enemies Foreigh and Domestic and probably should remember that somebody, somewhere, is taking notes.
“Hey, Note Takers. I keed, I keed.”
SDN, I think a lot of people hope that the problems of the US can be solved politically. In fact, count me as one of them.
I’ve thought long and hard about the best way to counter this kind of crap and my reluctant conclusion is that even passive resistance won’t make a difference, because too many people are happy to be jailers and too many people much prefer going along to get along.
dicentra,
I missed what you were getting at. I thought you were debating someone ostensibly on our side.
Or, I completely missed everything, which is even more likely.
Walked into a pub last night; there were two large girls drinking at the bar.
I noticed they had strange accents so I said to them: “Hi. Are you girls from Scotland?”
One of them then screamed at me, “It’s Wales you idiot… Wales!!
So I immediately apologized and said, “Are you two whales from Scotland?”
And that’s when the trouble started…
Well said Jeff. I linked you…
newrouter, that farmer should have had a 500-lb cratering charge under the driveway.
With respect to the pig farmer, it’s not like the state sprung a surprise on him. The DNR order was signed in December 2010, became effective in October 2011, with enforcement actions to start April 2012. It’s hardly an accident that he had an abundance of very cute piglets to slaughter and put on YouTube when the enforcement date came.
Occupy could learn a thing or two from this guy.