Bhopal. A WSJ story does a round-up on the verdict: The Gulf Spill. Jacobinism, cont. This NYT article illustrates the continuing Jacobin demand that all normal life must be set aside in the face of whatever the media define as an all-consuming crisis. Inevitably, this psychology must lead either to a greater and greater hysterial pitch, or else to a “Thermidorian reaction,” in which people say: Enough.
hopes will help stem the thousands of barrels escaping from its damaged well in the Gulf of Mexico, an amount that scientists said could be as high as 60,000 barrels a day. The company is siphoning the oil through a series of pipes and hoses to a ship, which will then clean and burn the oil and gas mixture in a processing device.”
According to Lynnley Browning’s story in the NYT, Switzerland has agreed to hand over information about bank accounts at UBS that may be used by Americans avoiding taxes. Inasmuch as I do not condone tax cheats, I should not care about this. And yet I find that I do. On one level, lawbreaking is just lawbreaking. And I favor the rule of law. People who disagree with laws should work to overturn them, not violate them.
Victimless Antitrust? Wasn't the original idea of antitrust that people could be harmed, economically, by acts that did not amount to coercion, most particularly when “monopolists” engaged in “anticompetitive behavior”? Of course, with the rise of the “law and economics” movement, the Left faced sophisticated opponents who were prepared to argue that in many cases no harm was being done to consumers. Solution? Eliminate the harm requirement. That, apparently, is the genius idea behind the Obama administration’s attempt to “reinvigorate” antitrust.
Like the pastoralists’ suit against the Industrial Revolution, Comer v. Murphy, the paternalists at the Ralph Nader–spawned Center for Science in the Public Interest [sic] have launched a bizarre lawsuit against parenthood, based on similar Rube Goldberg–reasoning. “By advertising that Happy Meals include toys, McDonald’s unfairly and deceptively markets directly to children. When McDonald’s bombards children with advertisements or other marketing for Happy Meals with toys, many children will pester their parents to take them to McDonald’s. Once there, they are more than likely to receive a meal that is too high in calories, saturated fat, added sugars, and sodium, and devoid of whole grains. Developing a lifelong habit of eating unhealthy meals is likely to promote obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and other life-threatening or debilitating diet-related diseases.”
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. William McGurn offers the basis for a presidential speech on the subject: “Think of these bad loans as a nasty leak polluting our financial system.” The Gulf Spill. A federal district judge has blocked the administration’s six-month drilling ban. At a quick glance, it appears that the judge is saying that “the precautionary principle” is not a valid basis for such an action.
Al Gore’s Praise for Capitalism. If you want to hear it, why here it is . Personalizing Responsibility. Google and YouTube win a lawsuit against Viacom. A federal judge says it is enough that they strive to remove copyright-infringing material when they are made aware of it and ban infringers after three offences. The companies are not liable for providing a service that allows people to infringe copyright.
The big news of the day, clearly, is that the U.S. Supreme Court has struck down the current, extremely broad interpretation of the "honest services" doctrine, under which Conrad Black and Jeff Skilling were convicted. Congratulations to our friends at the Pacific Research Institute (Timothy Sandefur) and the Cato Institute (Timothy Lynch), who filed an amicus brief in the case. A lot more comment tomorrow.
Royalist Trust-Busting Annually on this date, the Justice Department honors the founder of the FBI: Charles J. Bonaparte--yes, those Bonapartes (he was the great-nephew of Napoleon I). As Attorney General under Theodore Roosevelt, Bonaparte was an ardent trustbuster. This anti-business alliance of American and French aristocracy reminds us of the truth the anti-bourgeois movement is very often a movement ostensibly for plebians but led by patricians. Surprise: Demonizing business is bad for business Tad DeHaven of the Cato Institue takes note of a Washington Post editorial that seems to flirt with the concept of “regime uncertainty.” That is the view that says: When you h
Brooke Sopelsa (CNBC) writes that “about 6,000 claims have now been filed against BP since its massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and hundreds of them have been filed by Robert Gordon, chief trial lawyer for Weitz & Luxemberg, on behalf of fishermen affected by the spill.” Gordon is quoted as saying: “It may be a generation before they’re able to go out and fish the way they were before.”
Apparently, the SEC has been investigating certain financial relationships between Dell Computer and Intel Corp. All that is being reported (by Miguel Helft of the NYT ), and his sources are mostly anonymous, is that the matter relates to “how Dell accounted for payments and rebates that it had received from Intel.”
Were there compelling factors—other than improving aviation security—at work in the passing of the Aviation and Transportation Security Act (ATSA) of 2001? Yes, says attorney James Slepian, who as a law student in 2003 penned the first legal analysis of three key sections of the act, including the little-known “Section 108.” (James is the son of Charles Slepian.) The responsibility for federalization fell to the newly-formed Transportation Security Administration (TSA). By 2003, some $12 billion had been spent on the hiring and training of 60,000 new federal workers. Slepian observes that by setting the hiring bar low, individuals who worked as screeners before 9/11 could be re-hired under the supposedly elevated standards.
UK “Office of Fair Trading” to investigate IPO offerings. According to a story by Erik Larson (of Bloomberg.com): “Britain’s antitrust regulator plans to investigate fees charged by investment banks for arranging initial public offerings and rights offers, work that generated 2 billion pounds ($2.9 billion) for securities firms last year. “The probe, which will start later this year, will include fees, rights issues and other types of equity-raising following complaints of “dissatisfaction” from corporations, the U.K. Office of Fair Trading in London said today in a statement. “
I do not think I am indulging in the broken window fallacy to call attention to this story by Nicole Norfleet of Associated Press regarding the improved prospect that the Gulf oil spill has brought to non-Gulf shrimpers. The broken window fallacy says that destruction is economically advantageous because it gives work to those who must restore the former infrastructure. In the case of the Gulf oil spill, the broken window fallacy would be involved if one cited the economic benefit now being given to those employed in stopping the oil leak and cleaning up its consequences.
For Once, Thomas Frank Gets It Right. Commenting on Joe Barton’s description of Obama's demand for an escrow fund, WSJ columnist Frank wrote : “And this, in turn, is merely an expression of the permanently upside-down political universe of the right, in which the law is criminal, cynicism is a form of idealism, and bleeding-heart liberals are really soulless monsters in love with the power of the state for the same reason that gangsters are fond of their Uzis: because it is the weapon that allows them to plunder and loot the productive members of society.” I could disagree with a word choice here or there: For “law” substitute “politician’s arbitrary demand” and for “cynicism” substitute “the virtue of selfishness.” But other than that, yeah: basically correct.
The Washington Post reports that “corporate CEOs and trade groups are asking their lawyers the same question: How can we get our companies involved in this political election season without leaving tracks?” Well, if that is how CEOs feel about the fight for political freedom, I hope they do not get involved, much less “leave tracks” on the battlefield of liberty. They would only sully holy ground. How are we to understand the socio-economic generalization that ‘capital is a coward”? The generalization is true: When threatened capital simply flees. Such pragmatism has its economic advantages, no doubt. But it cannot be the basis for a restoration of economic liberty in the United States.
According to a story at Bloomberg.com:“ Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s ex- Chief Executive Officer Richard Fuld asked a judge to dismiss a lawsuit accusing him and his colleagues of failing to disclose Repo 105, a financing method allegedly used to conceal billions of dollars of debt, according to court records.” While the BRC does claim this case represents an anti-business animus, it clearly bears watching: Lehman’s auditor, Ernst & Young LLP, claims that its work was sound and has also asked the judge to dismiss the lawsuit, which was filed April 23 on behalf of several goverenment retirement funds.
The case of Comer v. Murphy began bizarre and went downhill from there. Several landowners in Gulfport, Mississippi, sued a huge number of energy and chemical companies for damages resulting from Hurricane Katrina. Their argument , if you can call it that, was that the companies’ emission of greenhouse gases contributed to global warming, thereby causing sea levels to rise, thereby intensifying Katrina, thereby exacerbating the damage from it. The companies responded, naturally enough, that one might try to indict the Industrial Revolution for global warming but the connection to their operations was tenuous. In 2007, U.S. District Judge Louis Guirola Jr. dismissed the suit.
John McDonnell, running to succeed Gordon Brown as head of the British Labour Party, said in a speech at the GMB Union Congress that he wished he could “go back to the 1980s and assassinate [Prime Minister Margaret] Thatcher." (The GMB Union was formerly the General, Municipal, Boilermakers and Allied Trade Union.)
According to this June 1 NYT article : “The Obama administration said [today] that it had begun civil and criminal investigations into the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. . . . Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in New Orleans that he planned to ‘prosecute to the fullest extent of the law’ any person or entity that the Justice Department determines has broken the law in connection with the oil spill. . . . Mr. Holder’s comments, which echoed those of Mr. Obama earlier in the day in the Rose Garden, reflected deepening frustration within the administration at the inability to stop the spill. . .”
