Time
To Hold The Lawyers Accountable
During the 2000 election
campaign, it was said only half in jest about his business ventures, that
George W. Bush had been a failure at everything he had put his hand to, but was
always bailed out by his father’s friends.
Unfortunately, bailing the United States out of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan or the world out of the current economic crisis is beyond the
capability of Papa Bush’s friends. It is
certainly clear, in retrospect, that the lawyers on the Supreme Court, starting
with Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, who overrode
the will of the voters by misunderstanding the constitution, should now resign,
before they do any more damage. The
constitution is not a compact of the states. The preamble begins, “We the
people.” Garry Wills book Lincoln at Gettysburg is the best book
for understanding the constitution and the people’s role in government.
I have been listening to the podcast of a three day
symposium on The Decline and Rise of Public Spaces from the Hertie
School of Governance in Berlin. http://uc.princeton.edu/main/index.php/component/content/article/28-all-videos/4217-the-decline-and-rise-of-public-spaces
The destruction of public space is one of the major
overlooked reasons for the current economic crisis. All financial systems are
based on trust, and trust is engendered in public spaces. The privatization of public space has had the
unintended consequence of destroying public trust. Check out the symposium for yourself. Download it to your mp3 player and turn
drudge tasks into fascinating activities.
The
most popular movie in the United States is It’s
a Wonderful Life. That is where most
Americans learned about economics. No
bank or financial institution can satisfy the demands of all its depositors if
they all demand their money simultaneously. The modern financial system can
only function if there is trust. And
trust in America has been destroyed by the lawyers.
Lawyers have become technicians, helping their clients to
skirt the law, and have turned the legal process into a luxury only the very
wealthy can afford. The legal opinions
justifying torture at Guantanamo are just the latest example.
Last
year, the superintendent of the Keansburg, New Jersey school system, retired
with a payout of about $750,000 from bonuses and unused vacation and sick
days. Everyone was outraged (no wonder
New Jersey is bankrupt.) Keansburg is an
“Abbott” district, meaning that most of its money comes directly from the state
because the community is poor and the students perform badly. The legislature rushed through new rules
hamstringing all the districts in New Jersey with draconian new fiscal
restrictions and oversight.
“Who was the board attorney who advised the board on this
contract?” I said to myself, as we drove through Keansburg on the way to the
beach, last summer. State Senator John
O. Bennett III, who not only was a sitting legislator, but he was also the
board and municipal attorney for several other governmental bodies. Furthermore, almost his entire family was on
the state payroll. Only in New Jersey do
sitting legislators collect paychecks from other governmental bodies. And with all the other lawyers in the
legislature of both parties, has no one noticed the inherent conflict of
interest in representing two different branches of the same government?
The real problem is that we are a capitalist country that
has not had any venture capital for the past thirty years. Instead, the financiers used the capital to
create new instruments that resulted in a river of money into which they dipped
their buckets for purely personal consumption.
After bailing out these financial institutions, taxpayers want limits on
the pay of the executives who created this debacle. But what about the lawyers who helped them
skirt the financial regulations and create these imaginary products? Shouldn’t they be brought to account, too?
Meanwhile, the lawyers and legislators have created a
legal system where innovation is illegal (especially in copyright law.) So, the new
businesses and jobs that should have been
created over the past few decades that
would then have been ready to hire the workers and take up the slack when the
current system collapsed, are nowhere on the horizon. Improving someone else's widget has always been
the engine of progress. This is now
impossible because of the lawyers’ misuse of the copyright, property right and
trademark laws.
The lawyers have used the instrumentalities of the laws to
get results opposite to the intent. The
purpose of the copyright law is to encourage creativity and to see that the
fruits of that creativity eventually get into the public realm. Fourteen years protection is the figure
mentioned in the constitution. Now, the
congress has increased that number to the life of the author plus 70 years,
just because the entertainment industry, a big campaign contributor and
lobbyist, wants it. But 70 years plus
life means that the information will never come into the public domain, for all
practical purposes.
The same is true with government statutes. Teacher certification and curriculum contents
standards are touted as guarantors of quality and accountability for taxpayer
dollars. Instead, they have become
statutory impediments to innovation.
Everyone knows the schools are failing to educate about one-third of
their students, but every attempt to inject new blood into the classroom or new
material into the courses is illegal.
We are in for a long, ugly haul.
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