As the Republicans in Congress once again threaten a government shutdown, I’d like to post again what I wrote in January. It is at least as relevant now as it was then:
As we march happily around another Fiscal Cliff and toward threats of another government shutdown, it’s time to look at a different a way of doing things..
There is no alternative to capitalism, argued Margaret Thatcher often. Are we to believe “that an economic system with endlessly repeated cycles, costly bailouts for financiers and now austerity for most people is the best human beings can do?” asks Richard Wolff. There are, of course, alternatives: “[e]very society chooses – consciously or not, democratically or not – among alternative ways to organize the production and distribution of the goods and services that make individual and social life possible.”
So how does this system with no alternative work? We all live in such a system, and it so ingrained in us we hardly think of how it works. In Capitalism
private owners establish enterprises and select their directors who decide what, how and where to produce and what to do with the net revenues from selling the output. This small handful of people makes all those economic decisions for the majority of people – who do most of the actual productive work. The majority must accept and live with the results of all the directorial decisions made by the major shareholders and the boards of directors they select. This latter also select their own replacements.
Capitalism thus entails and reproduces a highly undemocratic organization of production inside enterprises. [There is no alternative] believers insist that no alternatives to such capitalist organizations of production exist or could work nearly so well, in terms of outputs, efficiency, and labor processes.
For example, when you walk into a department store, they have a limited amount of merchandise for sale, most of which you have no interest in. They, however, have decided that this is what the current “style” is, and your options are fairly limited unless you know how to produce your own clothes. It’s possible you walk out of the store with exactly what you were looking for; there’s a distinct possibility you walk out of the store frustrated with your inability to find something, or even frustrated with what you have bought. Either way, you have almost no input into what is produced or what is “in style,” unless you’re willing to organize a massive and prolonged boycott.
There is, in fact, an alternative to capitalism. Arrasate-Mondragon, a city in the Basque region of Spain, is the headquarters of the Mondragon Corporation, a corporation which is “composed of many co-operative enterprises grouped into four areas: industry, finance, retail and knowledge. In each enterprise, the co-op members (averaging 80-85% of all workers per enterprise) collectively own and direct the enterprise. Through an annual general assembly the workers choose and employ a managing director and retain the power to make all the basic decisions of the enterprise (what, how and where to produce and what to do with the profits).” Mondragon Corporation “worker-members collectively choose, hire and fire the directors, whereas in capitalist enterprises the reverse occurs.” The Corporation “limits top-paid worker/members to earning 6.5 times the lowest-paid workers,” whereas in Capitalist America CEOs can expect to be paid 400 times an average worker’s salary. Is the Corporation viable? It has existed since 1956. The workers choose to be a part of it, as opposed to the government-imposed austerity in Spain, which has created almost 25% unemployment. The system is not perfect – the managers and workers both agree that “theirs is a co-operative business with all sorts of problems: ‘We are not some paradise, but rather a family of co-operative enterprises struggling to build a different kind of life around a different way of working.’” Nonetheless, it sounds like a refreshing idea to believe that workers have some input in their work.
At the same, time, though, Capitalism is so widely ingrained in our international economic system that local fixes will not solve a massive problem. Economic scandals have come and gone with such rapidity in recent times that the recent LIBOR scandal of six months ago is all but forgotten. The London Interbank Offered Rate [LIBOR] involves a group of bankers who set a daily interest rate affecting trillions of dollars of transactions around the world. Your home mortgage, your college debt, your credit card fees could be affected by Libor. Well, when you give a banker a cookie, his instinct is to make two cookies out of it. There’s nothing wrong with that – except that he wants both cookies for himself. How does LIBOR work? As a banker
[y]ou were supposed to look at various factors, what your recent transactions were, what other transactions are, what the market conditions are. You can use judgment. You don’t have to tag it exactly to a transaction.
But using judgment, and have a potential bias in judgment is profoundly different from open collusion with other banks to lowball or highball the rates to profit. I mean, these [internal] emails [at banks] quite acknowledge that they were trying to manipulate the rate to benefit their trading position. And what’s ironic is the trading desk of these banks were probably hurting the part of the bank that does the bread and butter lending.
As Sheila Blair, a former head of the FDIC – and a financial conservative – said in July (and it still appears to be true) we don’t know all the facts yet. “But certainly we do know that from 2005 to 2008 there were documented instances of Barclays according to Barclays traders colluding with other banks to influence the Libor rate. I think just that by itself shows a culture of greed, of people feeling they’re above the law, above ethical standards, basically justifying anything to make a buck.” She doesn’t want government setting the interest rates, but she does “want government regulation of how the market sets interest rates. And there were red flags about Libor back in 2008 and then the simple fix would have been to say that if you submit a rate to Libor it has to be based on an actual transaction that you actually borrowed money at that rate not your best guess, you know, today what I’m going to pay.”
There’s nothing terribly surprising about any of this, and it has become far too common and expected, but that should not excuse the lack of moral outrage over simple gaming of our system. The government, which has the ability to regulate the markets, should be able to prevent – or at least, regulate – a good deal of this behavior. Perhaps the arc of the economic universe is long but bends toward justice. In a process that sometimes appears to be ten steps forwards and nine steps back the government alternately passes and repeals laws which regulate the morally outrageous behavior of the financial sector.
The Dodd-Frank Act, in 2010, created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the primary goal of which “is to make markets for consumer financial products and services work for Americans — whether they are applying for a mortgage, choosing among credit cards, or using any number of other consumer financial products.” In the middle of 2012, a year after it began work, the CFPB brought its first public enforcement case against CapitalOne, the people who want to know what’s in your wallet. CapitalOne’s “third-party vendors engaged in deceptive tactics to sell ancillary products to the company’s credit cards.” Customers “were wrongly led to believe they needed to buy the services [offered] to activate their cards or that debt protection or credit monitoring was free, while others were left with the impression that the purchase would improve their credit scores. Some customers were simply not eligible, but got billed anyway.” As restitution, if you can call it that, CapitalOne paid “between $140 million and $150 million in restitution to 2 million customers and pay an additional $60 million in penalties — $25 million to the CFPB and $35 million to the [Office of the Comptroller of the Currency].”
It’s important to remember why we need a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. After the amazingly deregulated period of the 1920′s, which literature celebrates as “The Roaring ’20′s,” the market crashed in 1929 and America experienced massive and unprecedented unemployment. In response – a very slow response – The Glass-Steagall Act was passed in 1933. After about sixty years of doing what it was intended to do, which was to regulated the behavior of the banks, Glass-Steagall was repealed by the somewhat less pleasant Act called the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. There is, after all, very little point in having legislation which does what it is designed to do. I hardly need to remind you what happened next. We had a widely-hailed but perhaps very accidental period of boom, where the internet and housing markets created a great time of prosperity, followed immediately by a realization that this boom ended as the unregulated market gave out from under itself as consumers were convinced by the markets that all they needed was to spend a little more money the market knew the consumer didn’t have (but the market didn’t care). In a manner that was only surprising to people with their eyes shut, the market collapsed, and the government decided some regulation might be good.
The housing market needs fixing as desperately as the banking industry. When last I checked, a plan is still being considered in an area “[d]esperate for a way out of a housing collapse that has crippled the region, officials in San Bernardino County are exploring a drastic option — using eminent domain to buy up mortgages for homes that are underwater (worth less than they are mortgaged for). Then, the idea goes, the county could cut the mortgages to the current value of the homes and resell the mortgages to a private investment firm, which would allow homeowners to lower their monthly payments and hang onto their property.” (this leads to the NYT. Quotes from the same article can be read at RollingStones.)
As RollingStones reports, a company called Mortgage Resolution Partners would help “raise the capital a town or a county would need to essentially ‘buy’ seized home loans from the banks and the bondholders (to use eminent domain to seize property, governments must give the owners ‘reasonable compensation, often interpreted as fair current market value).” Once the town or county seizes the loan, it would then be owned by a legal entity set up by the local government – San Bernardino, for instance, has set up a JPA, or Joint Powers Authority, to manage the loans.” The JPA then owns the loan. It would then approach the homeowner with a choice. If the homeowner likes the current situation, he can simply keep making his same inflated payments to the JPA. This isn’t likely, but the idea here is that nobody would force homeowners to do anything. This only works – if it works at all – if Mortgage Resolution Partners makes profits off the whole deal, by getting funding from the local government to act on the government’s behalf. If there’s no profit incentive, this otherwise virtuous system doesn’t work. While they openly admit many problems to their system, we can only imagine what system, perhaps not based on economic incentives, Spain’s Mondragon Corporation might produce as a solution.
Thus far, it is obvious only that there is something inherently wrong with our system, and seen only that small fixes, either based on profit-induced motives or regional attempts to try something other than Capitalism, can be applied to the system. Is there anything more that can be done? Other than Bob Black’s radical, interesting, and ultimately unattainable suggestion that we abolish all forms of work (not ‘production,’ just ‘work’) there appear to be only consuming and difficult efforts that can be made, all of which require (appropriately, but this is what makes it challenging) people-power. While Mayor Booker has found that it takes more effort to hate than to tolerate it is, in fact, harder to fight for something than against something. It takes more effort to maintain rights than it takes to deny them.
Because rights are granted to a collective group of people — “all men,” “all white men,” “all adults,” etc. — it is easy to stand by and expect that someone else will defend those rights, which have been given to them as well, for you. There’s no reason for you to put in the effort. “The Charter of the Forest” once allowed people in England to use for forest, and all the food and fuel in it, for the common good. But “The Charter of the Forest” was repealed, which meant that “[w]ith the commons no longer protected for cooperative nurturing and use, the rights of the common people were restricted to what could not be privatized.” The result? “The rise of capitalist practice and morality brought with it a radical revision of how the commons are treated, and also of how they are conceived. The prevailing view today is captured by Garrett Hardin’s influential argument that ‘freedom in a commons brings ruin to us all,’ the famous ‘tragedy of the commons’: what is not owned will be destroyed by individual avarice.” That is certainly one way of looking at it. If you want to encourage greed, tell people they are greedy.
Massive public relations efforts by those interested in destroying the common, and along with it the common good, tell us that this “New Spirit of the Age” is all the rage. These efforts are “dedicated to what the great political economist Thorstein Veblen called ‘fabricating wants.’ In the words of business leaders themselves, the task is to direct people to ‘the superficial things’ of life, like ‘fashionable consumption.’ That way people can be atomized, separated from one another, seeking personal gain alone, diverted from dangerous efforts to think for themselves and challenge authority.” It is worrisome, at the very least, that the ‘progressives’ — who are indeed more progressive than the regressive conservatives — such as Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann “who praised ‘the manufacture of consent’ as a ‘new art’ in the practice of democracy.”
Is the gateway to autonomy, and the avoidance of becoming one of the masses, available through education? Hardly, according to Noam Chomsky. “One particular concern was to introduce better controls over the institutions ‘responsible for the indoctrination of the young’: the schools, the universities, the churches, which were seen as failing that essential task. I’m quoting reactions from the left-liberal end of the mainstream spectrum, the liberal internationalists who later staffed the Carter administration, and their counterparts in other industrial societies. The right wing was much harsher. One of many manifestations of this urge has been the sharp rise in college tuition, not on economic grounds, as is easily shown. The device does, however, trap and control young people by debt, often for the rest of their lives, thus contributing to more effective indoctrination.” We are stuck between the Catch-22 of being educated, which costs a great deal, and being uneducated; as the saying goes, though, ‘if you think education is expensive, try ignorance.’ Moreover, Chomsky notes that “we see that the destruction of the Charter of the Forest, and its obliteration from memory, relates rather closely to the continuing efforts to constrain the promise of the Charter of Liberties.”
Clearly there is very little most of us can do about whether the government avoids the Fiscal Cliff, or whether Republicans will attempt to shutdown the government. There is, at the moment, very little most of us can do about controlling the market, deciding what the ‘style’ this season should be, or how much a CEO makes compared to the average worker. There is, at the moment, though, choices we make both collectively and individually that decide whether we should have a government that regulates the financial market, the housing market, and provides for the common good.
Hello, and my apologies for the lack of blogs.
My last post was in April. As you may remember, I was finishing up my first semester of law school. Devoting my efforts to study (I hope), I did not post any more social commentary. … Well, I finished that semester well enough, and started the second semester.
The problem in life is that we can’t focus on one thing at a time. We have to multi-task, and devote out energy to more than one task. While I was studying I was also looking for a place to live. I was burning all my energy, and, to be honest, I may have been not taking in enough energy.
I was going to write this post in the past (once I learned to write again) – and this post is a struggle, (as it may become clear), but for lack of energy, lack of words, lack of knowing what to say and lacking to want to write this, I have not written. I was going to name this post “Life Changing;” instead it is called The MELAS Game. The reason will be clear.
At the end of May, in the second or third week of my second semester, I had a stroke. More specifically, I had a minor, non-vascular stroke (not a blood clot). It hit, if I am correct about the area of the brain, my left temporal lobe, which controls language. I couldn’t read, write, or speak without great effort. Being stubborn, my first thought was that I was sick, and I made no effort to go to the ER. It took a couple days of being unable to communicate that I went to the ER with assistance – what convinced me to go was a pounding headache.
As I said, what happened was a stroke. It took an ER trip and an ambulance ride to San Francisco to tell me that what happened to me seemed random and the solution (if I can call it that ) was baby aspirin, which is a blood thinner. My stroke was not a vascular stroke, so baby aspirin may not be the answer. (In fact, use of aspirin and aleve (and perhaps Tylenol – things we all use at some point – may have caused my 10 day hospitalization for an ulcer).
I left the hospital to put my things in storage and return to living with my parents. But before the 800 mile trip to home my mom decided that I couldn’t swallow and was having trouble. Whether I could swallow or not was debatable – I thought I could, but after a stroke I was no position to argue. I returned to the hospital in San Francisco for another four day stay.
I have made it home. I have had at least one more stroke, which hit both my right hand and my right eye. If you ever have a incredibly strong headache and lose your bodily function in your hand or your eye or some other extremity, it is likely you had a stroke. If so, I will use a phrase I never before believed in – go to your doctor (actually, go to the ER). I have spent, according to one count, 24 days in the hospital since the end of May; I have as a patient been admitted to the hospital seven times; I have gone from healthy to unhealthy to healthy to near death (I have heard from concerned parties) to healthy, and back and forth again.
It is time to explain why. A passionate ER doctor who who was not responsible for my care visited me in the hospital after my first stroke. He surmised correctly, that I have a disease called MELAS. It is in fact more than a disease: it is a genetic mitochondrial disorder. It is, as its names implies, a mitochondrial disease/disorder that causes, among other things, random strokes. It also produces lactic acidosis – the lactic buildup that athletes suffer.
Many people, I know, want to know how I’m doing. I’d like to inform everyone interested how I am at any particular time, but it’s not that easy. There is no email list going out to inform people that now I am well or that now I don’t feel well. There is no energy to create such a list; my ability to write has returned but my day is now dedicated to survival and appointments; my parents dedicate their time to me, and there is no time to inform the world how I am.
Let’s return to MELAS. There is no known cure that I know of. The plethora of specialists I have visited look up their information on google, and admit they don’t have an answer. They refer from one specialist to the next, as if climbing a ladder and somewhere at the top will be the expert of all experts, but his name will never be revealed. There is no predictability to MELAS … after having a first stroke, I had a second a month later. Since that second stroke, I seem to have had no stroke in the intervening two months. There is no literature I know of that says I may have a stroke every month, or every blue moon, or only every couple years. No one knows.
I know I’m not the only one with MELAS – if I was it wouldn’t have a name. But the research is minimal and the discussion hard to find.
MELAS has taught me about the (in)efficiency of our health care system. It has taught ( or reminded) me about our fallibility, and that we are not as physically perfect as we would have ourselves believe we are. It has taught me that if you are in the hospital or feeling sick the thing to do is to get up and see that there is a world out that, that some people have it worse of than you do, and that there is a world to return to.
What does MELAS mean to my life? It means that the predictability of life is gone. I had a goal to make it through law school. For health reasons, I don’t know if I ever will. It means that I don’t know when my next sickness will be, and I no longer trust my body to stay healthy for a long period of time. It means that I returned to live with my parents (at) until I am well – and there is no knowing when that will be. It means that other people are in charge of, or spending great effort on, my care. I was successfully navigating the world and was mostly independent for a short time.
There is no definitive statement about how I am doing. It changes every day, as it does for so many of us. At the moment, about ten days after a bleeding ulcer (never have internal bleeding!) , and two months after the last stroke I know of, I feel fine. The goal is to keep it that way.
Thirty years ago the pharmaceutical giant Merrill-Dow did the world a favor by taking Bendectin off the shelves. Now Bendectin is returning under a different name, Diclegis; just as Blackwater became Xe became Academi, you can now sleep much safer in your beds at night, unless you might suffer from morning sickness.
As a doctor informs us, nothing better has been developed over the last thirty years, so let’s try this again!
There’s nothing wrong with the idea of getting rid of morning sickness. And there’s nothing wrong with Bendectin’s main components – vitamins. But there must be a reason Merrill-Dow stopped producing something that millions and millions of people bought.
Excessive cost of litigation. As Daubert v. Merrill Pharmaceuticals (Ct. of Appeals, as opposed to the preceding Supreme Court case) tells us, more than seventeen million women used Bendectin between 1957 and 1982. Bendectin had a habit of causing increased abnormalities in the children of the mothers that consumed it. This isn’t a definite, because none of us are perfect, and some children are born with defects. But the scientific method tells us to look at things and say “hey, I notice a pattern here!”
A doctor may well be right in saying that in the past thirty years we have come up with no better idea than Bendectin. But that isn’t a justification for returning the sale of Bendectin.
Merrill-Dow, or whichever company the FDA has now approved to sell Diclegis, must operate under the same assumption as Blackwater, which found that a name change was necessary.
Before you begin to Diclegis yourself, though, the doctors have good advice:
Doctors advise trying some other steps before turning to medication for morning sickness: “Eat protein snacks before bed. Nibble crackers or sip ginger ale before getting out of bed. Eat frequent small meals. Avoid nausea-triggering odors. When that doesn’t work, vitamin B6 alone helps some women. His next step is the B6-and-antihistamine combination that will form Diclegis. A next-step option includes the drug Zofran, normally used to treat nausea from cancer therapy.”
Politics engenders instinctive approbation and animosity. It is therefore with visceral like or dislike that people view President Obama, and his compatriots such as Chuck Hagel, the new Secretary of Defense. Those who hold great power in this country act with no less inherent response and with no more reason in their approval of personages or sound policy decisions. To say that Hagel’s nomination in the Senate — an august body on which he once sat — for the position of Secretary of Defense would be filibustered would be to state the obvious.
It was, however, a surprise that there was an actual filibuster and not only a procedural threat of one. Rand Paul made a brave move of breaking with the recent, but out-of-place tradition of merely threatening a possibility of a filibuster and therefore shutting down the whole nomination process. He instead performed the requisite functions of a filibuster by talking on the Senate floor for twelve hours — about anything he wanted to talk about, although he actually showed up with facts. Politically I am naturally antithetical to Paul, but he gains my approval for arriving on the floor to talk about policies we should all object to, such as the use of drones. We may have high approval of our leaders while simultaneously disagreeing with blighted policies; while I highly approve of President Obama I fail to understand his international policy, especially in regard to drones.
The name of this article is based on the classic case In re Neagle (On behalf of Neagle); a not-very-exiting legal decision, but a great story involving a Federal Judge, chases on trains, and a murder.
Having successfully avoided the Fiscal Cliff we walked right into the sequester. Our two-party system, in which the majority cannot tyrannize the minority — and the minority can control the majority — enables us to successfully get nothing done. Time and time again. When you’re in the majority, and your will has been thwarted by the minority, the easy thing to do is to lay blame. And, being biased, I say the blame lies with minority, I say the blame lies with the party who created the idea of the sequester and kicked the can down the road.
That’s not the only can that was kicked down the road. The ambidextrous minority Republican Party was able to kick the Voting Rights Act down the road. More correctly, the Republican Party was able to kick the seminal Voting Rights Act of 1965 over to the Supreme Court so it could investigate whether Section 5 of the Act was constitutional. “Under Section 5, jurisdictions covered by these special provisions could not implement any change affecting voting until the Attorney General or the United States District Court for the District of Columbia determined that the change did not have a discriminatory purpose and would not have a discriminatory effect.” So says the Justice Department. Why? Anti-discrimination laws were not – are not – sufficient to prevent anti-discriminatory behavior at the voting booths. Anti-discrimination of who? Your classic ‘minorities,’ all of whom voted in the plurality for Obama, who “won 93 percent of African-Americans, 71 percent of Hispanics, and 73 percent of Asians. He took 55 percent of the overall female vote” in 2012.
So the Voting Rights Act was kicked over to the Supreme Court. “On Wednesday, Feb. 27, the court heard oral arguments in the case of Shelby County v. Holder, in which elected officials of Shelby County, Ala., contest the requirement under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act — first enacted by Congress in 1965, and renewed in 2006 — that certain states with a history of racial discrimination must receive pre-clearance from the Justice Department before making any changes to their voting laws.” Here’s what discrimination in the South was like in the 1960’s, according for a friend, who by virtue of his age and birth was present:
In the early and mid 1960’s when I was a young teenager, I was involved in the voter registration drives in Roanoke Virginia. At personal risk, I was out knocking on doors encouraging people to register, helping to arrange rides to take them to classes so they could prepare them for the tests and even helping with the prep classes. Negroes could be fired by their employees for registering. And in those days in many places, employers were notified if a Negro even attempted to register. In some places, not Roanoke, people were attacked, houses burned and some people killed for exercising this right.
Little would I imagine that almost fifty years after the 1965 Voting Rights Acts was signed there would be new attempts to disallow Blacks and now Latinos their right to vote.
The US stands as watchdog over other countries and yet a Supreme Court Justice from the bench refers to the protection of this RIGHT as a ‘perpetuation of racial entitlement.” And of yet, no leading Republican has spoken out against this.
What I know is privilege will always do everything to protect privilege. No nasty dishonest trick is low enough. And from people who profess that honesty is a supreme value.Having grown up in one of the most extreme system of privilege, I can smell it, see it and hear it even when folks think they are being subtle. A few people ask why I am always calling it out. They think it being oversensitive and divisive. I know that one technique of privilege also – let’s try to silence you and pretend that it doesn’t exist.
If the court overturns Section 5, I will be even louder in a whole lot of places starting in South Carolina and in Washington. Like a tree that’s planted by the water, we shall not be moved.I wasn’t afraid to do the right thing for human rights when I was a young teen and hell if I am now. As Janis Joplin sang “Freedom is Just another word for nothing else to lose.”
I could continue to talk about racial discrimination. I wrote my lengthy thesis for my Political Science B.A. on the effects location and race on education and other measurements of prosperity. Or you could look around you and agree there’s still discrimination. In a democracy the role and goal of government is to provide opportunity for all its citizens, or else the theorists are lying.
Politics being politics there is more to kick around. The Violence Against Women Act “written by Joe Biden in 1994, has been reauthorized twice in its history without dispute. Negotiations around a third renewal reached an impasse at the end of the [112th] Congress when House Republicans accused Senate Democrats of “moving the goal posts” by adding a Native American provision. The provision in question holds that non-Native American men accused of domestic violence on tribal lands can be prosecuted in tribal courts.
House Republicans unveiled their own version of the bill [at the end of February], excluding parts of the Native American provision, as well as certain protections for gay, bisexual, or transgender victims. The House version came under immediate and intense scrutiny as several Democrats took to the House floor to urge Republicans to pass the Senate’s bill.”
It is comforting to know that the Act only took about two months to resolve and that women have some protection under the law.
It remains to be seen whether Voters have any protection under the law.
Enjoy the sequestration because it has not been resolved.
In recognition of Valentine’s Day let’s stop a moment to see who Valentine is. The great, if simplistic, work on history titled ‘Life In the Year 1000″by Robert Lacey has a good paragraph (and nothing more) at the end of the chapter on February. I believe a partial paragraph of a book can be quoted for education and information purposes. Valentinus was a third century priest martyred in Rome during the reign of Emperor Claudius. “The details of St. Valentine’s life are obscure, and ecclesiastical experts have been unable to discover any reason why he should have become the patron saint of romance. Historians note that mid-February was the occasion of the licentious Roman fertility festival of Lupercalia, when women sought cures for sterility, while folklorists trace the modern orgy of card-sending and candle-lit dinners back to the old country belief that birds commenced coupling on February 14.” There is no definitive answer.
Happy day of Valentinus!
What is the purpose of law? Some think it is there only to try to stop you from doing the really fun things. Some think that it exists to be broken. Some think that it is there to create order. Is it there to exact punishment? Is it there because lawyers and lawmakers are sadistic? It exists, perhaps, to punish “antisocial behavior” — behavior someone, somewhere, thinks is against the interest of society. There are laws that we that we cannot stand and laws that we cannot understand. There are laws in our favor and in our disfavor.
There are various forms of law. Criminal Law. Contract Law. Torts. These are the subjects that law students form a love-hate relationship with (which, in itself, often results in either a crime or a tortious act). These are subjects that law students love because the students are studying law for a reason. These are the subjects that law students hate because they are hard to comprehend, they never end, and (to finish the rhyme) they get stuck in the head.
Criminal law exists to discourage antisocial behavior. These acts are either mala in se – evil in name – or mala prohibitum – bad only because we say so, such as zoning ordinances. There will always be laws that society calls mala in se that we do not agree with, or are iffy about. Take, for instance, assisted suicide. The person wants to die, they go to someone who can help them die, and the person assisting the death is charged with murder. Why? Because. (Which is to say, because we want to dissuade others from helping people commit suicide, which is only a reason because we say it is.)
Contracts is a wonderful reminder how frequently we engage in both formal and informal contracts, or appear to do so, without ever thinking about it. Every purchase you make is some sort of contract. Every deal you have with a company involves a contract or a rejection of a contract.
Unless you know your law when I said “Torts” is a subject you said “huh?”. Tort, the word, is derived from the Latin “twisted,” which gives you some idea of the subject, and, if you are averse to the subject some idea of the study involved. Torts involve twisted, or, more commonly referred to as ‘negligent’ acts. The lady who sued McDonalds because her hot coffee was hot? That was a tort – on the part of McDonalds. McDonalds was found to be negligent for not informing her that a hot liquid was hot.
I do not own a restaurant chain but Torts has nonetheless reminded me of how frequently (and, just as frequently, accidentally) we do something that can result in negligence. Be careful where you swing your golf club or your baseball bat. Be careful not to skip the stone in the water if there’s someone out there. Be careful not to wave your arms about in excitement and hit someone in the face. Although I tend to mind my own actions I am now made more aware of each act (or, in some cases, lack of action) that I do that could result in negligence. While whatever I do would have to be quite unreasonable I am now even more aware of the many things we all do throughout the day that could, even (especially) result in battery, which, in the land of Torts, is “harmful or offensive touching.” If that were to happen, I would be forced to plead the third, which would not be advisable in a courtroom.
From the wonderful xkcd:
There is a certain reality in being a member of The One Percent that those who are outside The One Percent cannot know, but in this case, most definitely should. In politics the creation of an us/them dichotomy is advantageous for whoever can wield more political power in demonizing the ‘other’ group. I’m sure that it’s creation of the same dichotomy in a very different setting is meant to be much more benign. National Residence Hall Honorary (NRHH), an affiliate of NACURH, creates a dichotomy between the “top 1% of student leaders living on [college] campuses” and all those who are not part of The One Percent. I am an alumnus of NRHH (which is to say that I’m part of the 1%), and, by virtue of having once been a chosen member of NRHH, I will always be an alumnus.
I was involved in what is euphemistically called “leadership” at college, and for a lack of better word, “leadership” it was. Who did we lead? That’s a challenging question, because we leaders – most of us at one point became a member of the NRHH 1% – seemed to have no followers. It appeared to me that we mostly led each other, and, being members of The One Percent, were naturally reluctant to be led. Nonetheless, there was actual leadership and inspiration involved, leading people to make tough life choices choice for themselves, and even more difficult decisions about the lives of others.
I had the privilege, which not everyone can afford, to volunteer for four years in the Residential Community at my public university. In the second year I was president of the organization that represents the residential students. I say that there is actual leadership and inspiration involved, and a considerable portion of that is developed by NACURH conferences (the National Association of College and University Residence Halls). The president’s ability to preside ends at conferences, where the National Communications Coordinator (my job for the third and fourth years) represents their school in legislation, energy, and exchange of ideas. There are several hundred schools with residential communities, and Canadian and Australian schools join Americans for a yearly conference. There are eight regions, each with a yearly conference; these regional and national conferences are so full of life and energy that it is necessary to have a third conference — appropriately called no-frills, since there is no school spirit involved — which is dedicated to legislation and decisions.
Among the many challenges we face in life, few are as difficult as making decisions about other people’s future. For at least six of the ten conferences I attended I was in charge of deciding which applications to accept, and which to reject. Most of the applicants were freshmen or otherwise new to me, and I’d met them each briefly as they attended a meeting or two to hear about the excitement of conferences and as they handed me their application. I didn’t know them, and my job was to judge their future based on an application. Many of those who attended a conference (or, consequently, many conferences) went into the field of Residential Life, while many of those who had applied with as much enthusiasm never again committed themselves to “leadership” with the same energy they might have had. There are responsibilities The One Percent must shoulder that are not pleasant.
To say that being a leader at, and attending, a conference is exciting and fun is a vast understatement. It is a gathering of the 1% (and those who might make it into the 1%) and there is a joie de vivre that is unrivaled in any other experience. In politics and sports there may but a great energy, but the opposition has the same energy rooting for the opposite outcome. Not so in a gathering of the 1% of leaders. There are always petty squabbles, disagreements, and personality differences, but there is an energy that descends when more than two thousand (or, even at the regional level with a mere several hundred) very energetic young people gather with a purpose of showing, rather than hiding, their energy. A conference of this sort is one of the few times I looked around and was interested in meeting every person — all two thousand of them — at the conference. I regret to say I failed.
Besides the short-term excitement of the conferences there is a long-term benefit for people who attend. As I’ve mentioned, it has an influence on the career choices of more than a few people. These leaders, these people who are mostly in The One Percent of their respective communities, will also be your future teachers, bankers, academics, lawyers, and general leaders of society. What the conference teaches, implicitly and explicitly, is more than an fun-filled, spirited, weekend. I would hesitate to comment on the political make-up of the two thousand or so attendants, except to say that they represent every part of the country and every view to be expected. But those who attend are more socially liberal than the rest of the country. These are twenty-year olds from academic communities, meeting with a diverse group of people. There is at least one likelihood: the people who attend the conferences, and who can say they are part of NRHH’s 1%, have the time – and, more importantly, the money or economic support – to be able to attend. These are students who can volunteer their way through college. The conferences show respect for diversity, an appreciation for ideas from all parts of the country, and a dedication to social justice that would do the rest of the country well to emulate.
A happy third anniversary to this blog! Thanks for reading and commenting.
In celebration, a poem by A.A. Milne about a three year old:
James James
Morrison Morrison
Weatherby George Dupree
Took great
Care of his Mother
Though he was only three.
James James
Said to his Mother,
“Mother,” he said, said he;
“You must never go down to the end of the town, if
you don’t go down with me.”James James
Morrison’s Mother
Put on a golden gown,
James James
Morrison’s Mother
Drove to the end of the town.
James James
Morrison’s Mother
Said to herself, said she:
“I can get right down to the end of the town and be
back in time for tea.”King John
Put up a notice,
“LOST or STOLEN or STRAYED!
JAMES JAMES
MORRISON’S MOTHER
SEEMS TO HABE BEEN MISLAID.
LAST SEEN
WANDERING VAGUELY
QUITE OF HER OWN ACCORD,
SHE TRIED TO GET DOWN TO THE END OF
THE TOWN – FORTY SHILLINGS REWARD!James James
Morrison Morrison
(Commonly known as Jim)
Told his
Other relations
Not to go blaming him.
James James
Said to his Mother,
“Mother,” he said, said he,
“You must never go down to the end of the town with-
out consulting me.”James James
Morrison’s Mother
Hasn’t been heard of since.
King John
Said he was sorry,
So did the Queen and Prince.
King John
(Somebody told me)
Said to a man he knew:
“If people go down to the end of the town, well, what
can anyone do?”(Now then, very softly)
J. J.
M. M.
W. G. du P.
Took great
C/o his M*****
Though he was only 3.
J. J.
Said to his Mother
“Mother,” he said, said he:
“You-must-never-go-down-to-the-end-of-the-town-if-
you-don’t-go-down-with ME!”
The Dole Blog 