Some rough numbers on Northern Rock

The Government has bailed out Northern Rock by supplying them with £25bn loans. This is corporate welfare at the worst I can think of. A few rough numbers.

• 29.5 million tax payers in 2006-07.
• Each individual tax payer will loan £847.50 to the Rock.
• A rough estimate is the loans value to around £1bn subsidy outright. That is £33.90 each tax payer has given the rock.

Jan 5th Economist faking stats

[1968] ended with almost 60% of Americans voting for either Richard Nixon or George Wallace, a Southern segregationist [40 year itch, p39 in pdf edition]

In the 1968 Presidential Election 56.9% of those who voted, voted for Nixon and Wallace. According to the US Census there were around 116 million eligible to vote. 41.6 million voted for Nixon and Wallace. That's near 36% of eligible Americans voting for Nixon/Wallace or 20% of Americans.

In the words of Dean Baker, it would have been useful to inform the readers of this information.

Gaza Violence

Astounding quote by Shlomo Dror today

"It's unacceptable that people in Sderot are living in fear every day and people in Gaza are living life as usual."

Life as usual, living in an open prison. Thought experiment: how about we swap the two sides?

The Pursuit of Profit

Whenever I read critique's of corporate power, I always see Ford vs. Dodge get a mention. That is the case that famously decided that a corporation has no goal but the pathological pursuit of profit for shareholders. In the case Mr. Ford wanted to give his workforce a bonus, the shareholders filed suit and won. Thus the common critique from the left is radical judicial activism has caused this psychopathic pursuit for profit. [find citations] and this is a core principle of Anglo-American corporate law.

Indeed it is a core principle, however there are also plenty of other legal obligations a corporation has. The genesis of the Tort of negligence is an example of that. Companies have a duty of care to make sure their products do not harm consumers (Donohogue v Stevenson), they also have innumerable obligations under environmental law. However these are less often followed, despite them having the same normative force as the decision in Ford vs. US. The main reason why the normative force does not result in substantive changes is due to the lack of enforcement, which is a structural problem of capitalist societies. i.e. powerful groups can enforce their legal rights, the right to exploit the environment for profit. They have white shoe and magic circle law firms for that. However, the majority cannot enforce their environmental rights due to lack of either standing in court lack of funds or under staffed and overworked enforcement bodies. However, it does also seem to be as Friedman said, a core of human nature - to profit. Well, human nature of elites and power centers.

Ford vs Dodge is not the reason we live under corporations pathological pursuit of power, that argument seems to me to reverse the chronology and ignore the rest of the innumerable legal obligations corporations are under and hugely overstate the importance of a single case. Corporations are required by law to peruse profit, but that's irrelevant, they're also required to follow environmental regulations and they rarely do. The problem is not Ford, the problem is formal equality necessarily leading to substantive inequality. A critique that usually holds accurate for all of law.

On Brainwashing

I often here that suicide bombers are brainwashed morons. Whether this be from a guy at the pub, friends, family, respected political commentators or politicians. Lets make no mistake, they are but it's far more understandable than our brainwashed armed forces. Unlike 'them' 'we' are rich, we're not being constantly bombed, occupied, starved and treated like vermin. An elementary moral truism is with with privilege comes culpability. We are millions of times more privileged than the people we occupy and slaughter. Even those in the slums of Harlem, LA or Brixton.

Our armed forces are far more brainwashed than any suicide bomber. Worse than killing in the name of religion, we kill on command for a state. We take 18 year olds, usually straight of high school with no other prospects, enlist them, put them through grueling boot camps that have no athletic or training goal but to break one's spirit so they blindly follow commands. We then equip these boys with M-16's, M1 Tanks, we equip our pilots with B-52s and tell them to slaughter on command thousands of innocent villagers below. We tell them to purposely target dams so they can starve the population by flooding their lands. We tell them to inflict gruesome, sadistic 'interrogation' methods on their fellow men, because they are designated the 'bad guy' without any evidence, without a court of law reviewing the case. All this because we defer to authority. I recall the most ironic thing back in 1999, there were loads of people whining about Kosovars (or as the locals say 'Kosvans') coming into England and stealing shit. That is astounding. We go round bombing their country, causing a pogrom against them and we have the audacity to complain about them stealing ? I was working with a guy from Nigeria recently, he said something damn funny: "you guys whine about people wanting to come here, yet you go about bombing other countries, keeping others down. Of course people are gonna come here. It's nice here". Another example I can whittle off is the minor £37 million given to Asslym Seekers to go back home, pennies in budget. This sparked outrage in the press and pubs alike. Yet the government gives tens of billions of tax payers money to Northern Rock, a large corporation, money it may never get back. I've not heard one person whine about this.

I think the scene in The Bourne Ultimatum where Bourne's trainer instructs him to kill on command, without any knowledge of his victims crimes is a perfect image of our armed forces. As Emma Goldman put it

The military spirit is the most merciless, heartless and brutal in existence. It fosters an institution for which there is not even a pretense of justification. The soldier, to quote Tolstoi, is a professional man-killer. He does not kill for the love of it, like a savage, or in a passion, like a homicide. He is a cold-blooded, mechanical, obedient tool of his military superiors. He is ready to cut throats or scuttle a ship at the command of his ranking officer, without knowing or, perhaps, caring how, why or wherefore. I am supported in this contention by no less a military light than Gen. Funston. I quote from the latter's communication to the New York Evening Post of June 30, dealing with the case of Private William Buwalda, which caused such a stir all through the Northwest. "The first duty of an officer or enlisted man," says our noble warrior, "is unquestioning obedience and loyalty to the government to which he has sworn allegiance; it makes no difference whether he approves of that government or not."

I wonder how brainwashed we all are.

More lulz from Bush

Apparently he was on the phone to Musharraf and told him, "You can’t be the president and the head of the military at the same time". I wonder if Musharraf informed him that is precisely what the president of the United States is, as commander-in-chief the US Constitution provides the president shall be:

shall be Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United
States, and of the Militia of the several States,
when called into the actual Service of the United States

Bush is not ignorant he's CIC. As he constantly goes on about, the nation is at war, you don't change CIC's at a time of war. This is indeed epic lulz.

Furthermore, this is not just of academic importance. The substantive effect of the president being CIC has enabled the executive to effectively unilaterally declare war without Congressional approval, evidenced by a long bloody history in Latin America and Indochina that is so obvious it doesn't even need to be discussed. In the words of Dean Baker, it would have been useful to point this out to readers.

Prototypical example of a lack of empiricism in jurisprudence

Guido Calabresi, in his paper on the roots of Tort law distinguishes criminal and contract law as such:

Contract law reflects the most libertarian set of relationships, in which – once
an entitlement has been given or recognized by the polity – that entitlement can
only be transferred if the parties themselves agree to do so at an individually
determined price. Regulation/criminal law represents the most collective set of
relationships in which the State not only decides who owns what, but determines,
under pain of criminal sanction, when that entitlement can be removed,
transferred or abrogated.

In all of legal theory this is just a given, it is beyond debate. It is seen as a fundamental axiom from which all other theories derive. However as I constantly bang on about, this just isn't the case. There is hardly a distinction between the two when we consider what it means in reality for the majority of the world. Perhaps jurists should consider reading the history of the United States as a great example of what the sanctity of contract meant in reality for the working class, rather than reading hundreds of pages of judgments and law journals.