[HN Gopher] Federal judges or their brokers traded stocks of lit...
___________________________________________________________________
Federal judges or their brokers traded stocks of litigants during
cases
Author : colinprince
Score : 164 points
Date : 2021-10-23 05:37 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| ramesh31 wrote:
| The US needs a blanket federal law, perhaps even a constitutional
| amendment, that precludes any publicly elected official or
| appointee at any level from directly owning individual stocks.
| How could anyone possibly argue against that?
| noja wrote:
| Why make it so confined? Do not allow them to profit from their
| position.
| elvischidera wrote:
| Naive question: If you preclude a politician from owning
| stocks, can't they execute such trades via an off-the-radar
| friend? And receive profits via "gifts".
|
| I imagine this is already illegal? But isn't it harder to prove
| if done right?
| mchusma wrote:
| No business owner could be in office? Like someone who owned
| stock for 20 years with no plans to sell couldn't run? Seems
| harsh. I think limited trading is what you mean (buying and
| selling).
|
| Insiders at companies have limited windows to trade. Makes more
| sense.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I don't need the local dog catcher to be blocked from owning
| shares in Apple if they want to.
|
| I don't want my local Google employees to be prohibited from
| running for city council or school committee.
| lisper wrote:
| I can think of at least three plausible counter-arguments:
|
| 1. That's overly restrictive. Why not let them own individual
| stocks in, say, a blind trust?
|
| 2. It's a free country. It's up to the voters to decide if they
| want to elect someone who profits from their position. What is
| needed is a law requiring public disclosure, not prohibition.
|
| 3. If you force people to divest their portfolios before taking
| public office you will reduce the pool of people willing to
| serve.
|
| This is not to say that I disagree with the policy position,
| only that it's not the slam-dunk you seem to think it is.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| "3. If you force people to divest their portfolios before
| taking public office you will reduce the pool of people
| willing to serve."
|
| Great! America needs politicians whom are not wealthy boys,
| and girls.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| A lot of high-powered jobs come with strong restrictions and
| controls around stock ownership/trading. Does not seem to
| dissuade people from pursuing careers in banking or strategy
| consulting, for example.
|
| They are not blanket total bans in most cases, but single
| name stuff is often very restricted, broad market less so.
| Also does come with transparency requirements.
| csee wrote:
| 2. Think of it like term limits. We don't let people sit in
| office forever just because it's a free country. No, these
| are constraints implemented democratically by voters to
| protect against bad outcomes that aren't well addressed by
| future direct voting.
|
| 3. You would reduce the pool of people who have corrupt
| intent. Owning individual stocks isn't more profitable than
| owning ETFs.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Owning individual stocks (even temporarily or unvested) is
| a substantial fraction of compensation of many people that
| I want to be able to participate in local politics.
| csee wrote:
| Owning individual stocks is the same expected value than
| owning ETFs for almost all retail investors who are non-
| corrupt. Studies have looked at this and shown that
| regular investors in single stocks consistently
| underperform. So there's no real financial reason (in
| expectation terms) to do so unless they have corrupt
| intent. Of course someone that just got rich off NIO or
| GME probably differs but that doesn't speak to expected
| value which is all that matters for decision making.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Many FAANG(-N) employees receive more in compensation in
| the form of shares of an individual company than they do
| in cash. I don't want to force them to quit their job (or
| cut their comp by more than 50%) if they want to
| contribute in local politics.
|
| If this were broadly adopted, companies would be forced
| to switch to all-cash offers, to create long-term
| incentive plans that don't use something the legislation
| defines as shares, or just be content to exclude
| politically active people from being employees. Some
| might be happy with that last outcome.
| DFHippie wrote:
| The original phrasing wasn't "contribute in local
| politics" but "take public office". Presumably if you
| take public office you give up your FAANG employment. I
| don't think anyone is saying you can't vote or petition
| government for the redress of grievances if you own
| individual stocks.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Unless it's been edited in the meantime*, the text above
| is "precludes any publicly elected official or appointee
| at any level from directly owning individual stocks".
|
| Many publicly elected or appointed roles are part-time
| (school board/committee, city council, etc.) Even MA
| state legislators make only $70.5K/yr and MA is one of
| the highest-paying states for that job. Many of them
| maintain another full-time job.
|
| https://ballotpedia.org/Comparison_of_state_legislative_s
| ala...
|
| * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28966192 (edit
| window is 2 hours)
| csee wrote:
| Yeah, you make a good point. I'd be pretty happy if they
| just implemented it for full time office holders only
| (senate, congress, judges) which aren't going to be
| having jobs on the side that pay equity.
| indymike wrote:
| I own my own company. That is a very specific stock and
| you are saying I can't own my business and run for
| office? Stocks aren't just for trading on the nyse.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >If you force people to divest their portfolios before taking
| public office you will reduce the pool of people willing to
| serve.
|
| Dissuading the wealthy from seeking office sounds like a
| feature, not a bug to me.
| unmole wrote:
| > Dissuading the wealthy from seeking office sounds like a
| feature, not a bug to me.
|
| Around 55% of Americans own stock.
| murphyslab wrote:
| "The wealthiest 10% of Americans own a record 89% of all
| U.S. stocks" -- CNBC
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/18/the-wealthiest-10percent-
| of-...
|
| If you aren't one of that "wealthiest 10%" it would not
| be difficult to divest your stock holdings in exchange
| for an index fund.
| PeterisP wrote:
| I would presume that _almost everyone_ qualified to be a
| federal judge to be among the wealthiest 10% - the median
| lawyer income is approximately 90-th percentile, and I
| would presume that the seniority and skills needed for
| such a position would disqualify most of the less
| experienced and /or weaker lawyers.
| DFHippie wrote:
| Income is not the same as wealth. They are correlated,
| but you're blurring lines. The wealthiest individuals
| accrue a negligible amount of their wealth from income.
| And the power law relationship between wealth and stock
| ownership doesn't end when you cross the 90th percentile
| either.
| mattficke wrote:
| That includes things like index funds. The vast majority
| of people do not own individual equities.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| Well...
|
| 1. Too bad. There are plenty of other good investments out
| there.
|
| 2. Too bad. The removal of incentives to do slimy things like
| the ones that are subject of this article is the greater good
| here.
|
| 3. Too bad. Maybe those people who choose to serve will be
| those who aren't in it to fleece the system of every dollar
| they can.
|
| I'm not sure you'd find my "counterarguments" any more
| persuasive than I find yours. I'm more interested in what the
| systemic consequences of such a policy would be, and, it
| seems to me that they tip in a direction that removes
| incentives to be corrupt, which sounds pretty darn good to
| me. I care a lot less about the effects on people who are
| currently in the position to exploit the system.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| 1. There is no way for a fairly normal person working a
| fairly normal job (probably service industry) to verify any
| of the blind trust stuff and past politicians have helped
| make a mockery of the whole thing. To be fair, though, there
| are other ways. You can reform things so that there are
| minimum holding times for stocks alongside rules that make
| selling stocks take more time. If you need to hold onto the
| stocks for 6 weeks after you say you want to sell, you are
| going to have a harder time selling. You can also restrict
| times officials can sell.
|
| 2. Again, how is a normal person - say, a retail employee -
| ever going to find out about this? Even with public
| disclosure, all folks need to do to hide their doings is to
| make the language in the disclosure full of technical jargon
| instead of everyday language.
|
| 3. That's a bonus, not a feature. Maybe it'll encourage
| normal folks to take office more often - but of course, we'd
| have to do other changes to make that happen.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| One argument that I can think of is talented people will
| instead gravitate towards private industry and are
| disincentivzed to become public servants. Not owning invidual
| stock can be common shares is pretty broad. Or otherwise we
| would have to define what class of investment instrument should
| be banned. Do we also prevent buying private company shares?
| What about other financial derivates such as options and
| futures where you technically don't own the underlying stock?
| Do we limit real estate investments as well? If they earn a
| salary, where could they invest their savings? If we allow real
| estate investment, then public servants (1.8M US Citizens)
| would blow up the real estate market. There are so many
| secondary and tertiary effects, that would have major
| consequences to the economy and the functioning of the
| government. Not allowing any investment opportunity means they
| would sucuumb to the inflation rate and cannot retire.
| irrational wrote:
| Have you even seen the kind of people who become public
| "servants"? Who exactly would you classify as talented?
| markvdb wrote:
| Both my bosses. They each head a public art academy. Both
| are incredibly talented, motivated people. They serve the
| public as best as they can. The same goes for several of my
| colleagues.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| My father, my grandfather, my brother, many of my
| friends...
| closeparen wrote:
| Just as soon as we prohibit homeowners from serving in local
| governments.
| topspin wrote:
| > How could anyone possibly argue against that?
|
| Arguing against that is easy.
|
| The elite have so many better ways to profit from their
| positions that outlawing stock ownership is laughably naive.
| Trading stocks against knowledge you obtained from your
| government position is an easy way to get busted, so you may
| assume the people caught up in this represent merely the
| profoundly stupid; the smart elites don't get nabbed in such
| simple minded schemes. Yes, there are very stupid federal
| judges; their appointments are a product a political haymaking
| that has their actual competence _way_ down the list of
| priorities.
|
| So the best reason I can think of to oppose your plan is simply
| that it's a futile waste of time. If you're serious about
| meaningful efforts to hinder corruption think in terms of
| transparency. Give the electorate the means to know who is
| bought and paid for by whom. Without that you're wasting your
| time.
| DFHippie wrote:
| > So the best reason I can think of to oppose your plan is
| simply that it's a futile waste of time.
|
| Time is a pretty small consideration here.
|
| One can and should apply many means to lessen corruption.
| Transparency is certainly important, but no means is going to
| cover all cases or be 100% effective. Reduce the possibility
| of conflict of interest _and_ increase transparency.
|
| The problem with transparency, if you're relying on democracy
| to do the rest, is that any sufficiently clever corruption
| scheme is simply not going to be understood by the public
| you're relying on to oppose it. If you give them an
| explanation in detail they mostly see simply that it's
| detailed. It looks no different from a conspiracy theory to
| most people, who will barely be following the issue anyway.
| Most voters are low information voters. The information they
| need is which party backs which position. They in effect vote
| as they're told, not because they're stupid but because none
| of this interests them.
| indymike wrote:
| > How could anyone possibly argue against that?
|
| The very basis of self government (citizens being in charge) is
| allowing people to run for office who are every day people.
| This idea would require anyone who is even a part owner af a
| tiny business to divest in order to run. Additionally, a lot of
| common small businesses have no real value if the owner doesn't
| come with the business (a solo law practice is an example)...
| oh, and trusts are corporations... so this idea sounds
| wonderful but is very exclusionary.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| If we just get the people who write and enforce the laws to
| pass a law that stops them from being corrupt the corruption
| will end.
| m0zg wrote:
| Guess who writes the laws? People who are neck deep in insider
| trading to the point where the speaker of the House outperforms
| some of the best performing hedge funds. Don't hold your breath
| on this one. And the law would need to be signed by a dude
| whose son "sells art" for $75K apiece and takes jobs he himself
| admits are only offered to him because he has the right last
| name. And finally, if by miracle such a law were to be passed
| and signed, to enforce it you'd need to go to a judge who's
| also corrupt as fuck and trading stocks from the bench, and
| whose mortgage on his third beach home would be jeopardized if
| he was to agree with you. It's rotten all the way through now.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| The husband of the person you mentioned was already well off
| before she was in politics.
|
| Better yet, it was because her husband success that she
| worked for 20 years for free for the party.
| m0zg wrote:
| He's much better off now. A genius grade trader. It's a
| goddamn miracle. Warren Buffet doesn't even come close to
| such prowess. What's funny is everyone knows these are
| pretty damning facts that are not good for the country in
| the long term. And yet my posts will be flagged anyway.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Waren Buffet doesn't even invest in tech.
|
| Something her husband did before she was speaker and he
| already had much success before.
| m0zg wrote:
| He does. Berkshire owns a ton of Apple (114 billion
| dollars worth) and some other tech/pharma companies. But
| hey, if you think insider trading is so wonderful and
| ethical, let's make it "fine" for everyone and abolish
| stock trading windows at major corporations, as well as
| restrictions on execs. Why should only congresspeople be
| able to partake?
| craftinator wrote:
| Not only unhinged, but whiney too. A true Renaissance
| man!
| dataflow wrote:
| Ban trades while they have the position, not ownership. If they
| had it long before they got the position they shouldn't have to
| sell it just for the sake of serving the country.
| markvdb wrote:
| As others have said, a blanket stocks prohibition might make
| the public sector uncompetitive.
|
| Blind trusts seem to be quite a bit too permissive to me.
|
| Offer them the performance of a stock index fund on their stock
| holdings, for the duration of their public mandate.
| web2sucks wrote:
| This is why small government is so important.
| adrr wrote:
| Small government isn't immune from corruption. City level has
| some of the worst corruption.
| [deleted]
| tzs wrote:
| How about treating judges and legislators as if they were
| insiders of every public company and applying Section 16 of the
| Securities Exchange Act of 1934 to them?
|
| Section 16 currently applies to officers, directors, and anyone
| who holds 10% of the stock of a company.
|
| These people have to disclose all of their trades, and they are
| not allowed to make any profitable "short-swing" trades in the
| stock. A trade is a short-swing trade if it occurs within 6
| months of a trade in the opposite direction.
|
| Section 16 is brilliant in how it is enforced. It allows any
| shareholder to sue the short-swing trader. The plaintiff does not
| have to have been a shareholder at the time of the trade. They
| only have to be a shareholder at the time of the suit.
|
| If the plaintiff wins the trader has to return all short-swing
| profits to the company and pay the plaintiff's attorney fees.
| Because the people covered by Section 16 have to report their
| trades, and because there isn't really a defense for short-swing
| trading, it is an open and shut case.
|
| The data is available from the SEC in electronic form, and there
| are lawyers who get it and do automated checks to find short-
| swing trades. Then it is an easy matter for them to buy a share
| if they don't already have one, sue the short-swing trader,
| trivially win the open and shut case, and collect attorney fees.
|
| If that wasn't enough to discourage insiders from short-swing
| trading, Section 16 provides more discouragement by being brutal
| in how it defines profit from a short-swing trade. Consider this
| sequence of trades by a Section 16 insider: Jan
| 1: buy N shares at $100/share Feb 1: sell N shares at
| $90/share Mar 1: buy N shares at $80/share Apr 1:
| sell N shares at $70/share
|
| The person is clearly a terrible trader. That sequence of trades
| has lost them $20/share.
|
| But Section 16 doesn't look at the overall results. It just looks
| it individual trades and tries to match them with individual
| trades going the other way within 6 months (before or after) and
| if the sell is higher than the buy that is short-swing profit.
|
| Section 16 sees the above trades as a short-swing profit of $10 x
| N from the purchase on Mar 1 and the sale on Feb 1.
|
| The net result then for the insider who made those ill conceived
| trades is that they lose $20/share on the trades themselves, and
| they end up having to pay an additional $10/share to the company,
| and pay the attorney fees of whoever managed to file first to sue
| them.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| Okay, but first send the judges and politicians who did this to
| gitmo.
| nerdponx wrote:
| I love this idea.
| h2odragon wrote:
| They do this whole ritual about Jury Selection, you can't be a
| Juror if you've got family in law enforcement, etc etc.
|
| Could we have a Jury, once assembled, apply those same rules tot
| he rest of the Court? "Your Honor have you ever held ownership in
| the companies involved in this case? Ever been married or
| intimate with any of the parties in this case?"
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| There are ethics laws for lawyers and judges. The problem is:
| the enforcer of those ethics laws are partially the judges
| themselves. It's the same issue with cops breaking the law;
| cops don't rat on/arrest other cops.
| h2odragon wrote:
| It seems like we have a lot of social problems like that; we
| _have_ laws about them, but the enforcement became spotty
| somehow... _Some_ people can start an online bank, or have a
| "taxi app"; and it's OK; but everyone else has the laws
| against it enforced.
|
| Perhaps some of the conspiracy theorists talking about the
| undermining of the prosecutor and court systems since the
| 90's have been onto something.
| stevespang wrote:
| Title should be: OBVIOUS CORRUPTION: Federal Judges or Their
| Brokers Traded Stocks of Litigants During Cases
| lordnacho wrote:
| The real problem is you have a culture where people think the law
| is the edge of what is acceptable. Whether it is legal or not, I
| would not be punting on stocks that I was a judge for, it simply
| stinks and shouldn't be done.
|
| There's probably a lot of things that are formally legal but
| corrosive to society.
| lend000 wrote:
| It's nice to be able to blame something on a culture, but the
| reality is that some percentage of people are somewhere on the
| spectrum of morality where they are prone to doing this. I
| don't imagine judges are a particularly amoral group, despite
| being lawyers, but politicians certainly are. I'm always
| dumbfounded when people want to give politicians more power.
| lixtra wrote:
| >> think the law is the edge of what is acceptable. >
| particularly amoral group, > but politicians certainly are.
|
| To be fair, if all politicians were always morally rooted in
| the center of the law, nothing would ever change. No
| marijuana, no gay marriage.
|
| Or more appropriate: There's a certain overlap of laws (and
| constitutional rights) that blur the edge of law (here:
| pursuit of happiness for the judge's vs. corruption of
| justice).
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| > There's probably a lot of things that are formally legal but
| corrosive to society.
|
| Plus the process of corruption is slow and creeping. A
| generation doesn't know whats it like growing up a generation
| or two before, so the current state of affairs is taken for
| granted. At some point, the idea of a high-trust society where
| people don't need to lock their doors and children can just
| roam the neighbourhood freely becomes a faint memory and unreal
| utopia. Starting a family in their twenties, the prospect of
| home ownership, and being able to do so on a single income has
| already become unimaginable.
| sokoloff wrote:
| The latter is not unimaginable to (and done regularly by)
| millions of people living in lower cost areas of the country.
| harry8 wrote:
| Matt Levine has noted in modern America everything is securities
| fraud; the most egregious of crimes are being prosecuted as
| securities fraud rather than whatever the actual crime was.
|
| How does security fraud apply to this? Or is that why it happens?
| You can't point to a "shareholder loss" and all other
| stakeholders in the company, the legal system and society don't
| get enforcement when they are the victims of this kind of crime?
| The company can't be held responsible if a corrupt judge acts
| corruptly (or impersonates someone who is corrupt displaying a
| stupidity that should bar them from any position of
| responsibility), if that judge did not involve the company
| directly in that corruption.
| Jerry2 wrote:
| Everything's corrupted. Pretty much every branch of government is
| rife with corruption. Even the enforcement is corrupt. Money has
| infiltrated everything and justice is now truly blind.
|
| And if by some miracle you're tried and found guilty, you can
| even buy your way out of serving any time and you can even buy a
| presidential pardon and have your crime expunged.
|
| If you're rich, vast majority of laws simply don't apply to you.
| Yet there's so many laws on books and many of those laws are so
| vague that an average person commits several felonies every day.
| [1]
|
| [1]
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704471504574438...
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Kenneth Lay, Bernie Madoff, Martin Skreli, and countless others
| served hard time.
|
| There is no such thing as a corruption-free government because
| it is made of human beings but I think that the US Govt has
| definitely trended in the right direction over time. I hope the
| trend continues, more transparency is a good thing.
| goldenkey wrote:
| You've got it backwards. Shkreli served time because of
| public opinion and the things he revealed about the medicare
| drug pricing [1,2,3]
|
| Shkreli's case shows the partiality, politics and bias
| embedded in our justice system. He was unable to even serve
| the remainder of his sentence under house arrest as very
| reasonable covid safety precautions despite his crime being
| entirely nonviolent.
|
| The justice system is in many ways the government's
| instrument of vengeance. You can clearly see this with O.J.
| Simpson's 33 year sentence in 2008 for armed robbery.
| Essentially, a new fluff case was used to dole out an
| improportionate sentence. as retribution for the murder of
| Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman. [4,5]
|
| The truth is that Shrkeli pissed off a lot of people in
| powerful places. None of the investors wanted him tried
| because he ended up making them all a lot of money.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/L-U1MMa0SHw
|
| [2] https://youtu.be/2PCb9mnrU1g
|
| [3] https://youtu.be/hjAQOWSP3Cc
|
| [4] https://youtu.be/BB4ss7q5X08
|
| [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O._J._Simpson_robbery_case
| sam2426679 wrote:
| Agreed. Shkreli was dumb/honest enough to say "this is what
| I've done with your broken system." If he had pulled a
| Sackler-style, "I did this for your own good" lie (complete
| with the requisite bribes/speaking_fees for industry
| "experts"), he wouldn't have earned the same ire from the
| media or regulators, imo.
| goldenkey wrote:
| Indeed, moreso pride and lack of wisdom. Perhaps a bit of
| martyrdom. Shkreli liked playing around with these people
| who literally wanted to slay him. I don't think he
| understood how seriously evil and petty boomers can be,
| and how most judges are from that generation. He took one
| for the team in a sense, showing how the justice system
| serves as the instrument of vengeance for the executive
| and legislative branches. He's by no means dumb [1,2] but
| yes, honest to the point of being blunt. Very much in the
| spirit of Mike Tyson who is also extremely intelligent
| but often portrayed as a dolt. [3,4,5]
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/VI_riscmviI
|
| [2] https://youtu.be/poyf3Cnb-MQ
|
| [3] https://youtu.be/B9abU6r80P4
|
| [4] https://youtu.be/OOhdx1TLutw
|
| [5] https://youtu.be/KaMb3GqKXb0
| ralusek wrote:
| It's not just money, it's also ideology. Rule of law is
| increasingly looked at with distain in favor of rule by
| arbitrary authority. At some point deontological liberalism has
| been overtaken by utilitarian pragmatism. The thing is that
| deontological rule of law is the exception throughout human
| history, and utilitarian pragmatism is the norm among
| unremarkable populations. It's not exactly easy to reclaim.
|
| When I hear people around me thinking it's a good thing when a
| judge rules in a way that nets the outcome they want,
| regardless of whether or not it was done so in accordance with
| the law, it hurts. Somehow, people fail to realize that rule of
| law is the single greatest defense against tyranny that we
| have. Short sighted pragmatism.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| > Rule of law is increasingly looked at with distain in favor
| of rule by arbitrary authority.
|
| This happens right here on HN. It seems that nobody here
| wants trials for Snowden or Assange for instance.
| FpUser wrote:
| Laws are imperfect and often there are situations when
| applying the law as written / by precedent will ruin person's
| life in very humanely unjust way. In this case if I was a
| juror I would say fuck the law and go with the nullification.
| Unfortunately it does not happen often enough.
|
| Also I think if every law was strictly enforced the
| functioning of society would stop. This tells something about
| the whole system. Some fixing is required.
| ralusek wrote:
| Bad laws should be fixed by legislation, not by arbitrary
| judicial authority.
| FpUser wrote:
| That is a nice theory that sometimes work and sometimes
| does not
| ralusek wrote:
| Same is true for arbitrary judicial authority.
| bluejekyll wrote:
| > people fail to realize that rule of law is the single
| greatest defense against tyranny that we have.
|
| This purist view ignores the fact that not all laws are good.
| Many laws are in fact bad, and it's important for them to be
| challenged.
|
| As an example, many here would agree that the DMCA is a bad
| law. It's a law that is generally only enforceable by wealthy
| players.
|
| There are many bad laws on the books. Those laws do not get
| equally applied to everyone in society. The fact that we have
| bad laws, implies that applying them will lead to bad
| outcomes. This is partly why having an unbiased appellate
| court to review the laws and throw out the bad ones is so
| important. Sadly much of the appellate court has also become
| corrupted, but at least the system is there to ideally
| correct bad laws and allow for blind application of justice.
| ralusek wrote:
| Blind application of justice _is_ rule of law. And nobody
| is saying there aren 't bad laws; there are plenty. We just
| have a system in place which dictates where the law is
| created, where the law is modified, and where the law is
| carried out. Our legislative branch is writing the code,
| theoretically downstream from our democracy, theoretically
| constrained by the meta layer that is the constitution. I
| don't want my code to be compiled only for the execution
| layer to suddenly decide that the code I wrote isn't what I
| meant. What if the execution layer is a racist? What if
| they stand to benefit financially from a particular ruling,
| as the OP says? What we should want is the judiciary acting
| like a compiled executable. If we're going to argue that a
| law is fair or not, let's do it with our democracy through
| some pull requests, and not give our executable the leeway
| to decide if they personally like the code they're meant to
| carry out.
| saurik wrote:
| > ...justice is now truly blind.
|
| (I think you are misunderstanding this metaphor, as Justice
| being blind is actually supposed to be good: it means Justice
| makes decisions without bias or regard for who the parties are,
| only able to analyze the facts. A corrupt court that benefits
| some people over others based on connections or group
| affiliation would imply Justice _not_ being blind.)
| jwatt wrote:
| Indeed. See also
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Justice#Blindfold
| Aethylia wrote:
| Time to start popularising 'Justice is 20/20' then!
| grecy wrote:
| > _Money has infiltrated everything_
|
| Worse, money is protected speech, and using it to buy influence
| is protected by the law!
| refurb wrote:
| Exactly! Bloomberg spent $1B on his nomination for president
| and... it failed entirely.
| plebianRube wrote:
| I don't think he had any expectation or interest in
| winning. He bought his way in to divert votes from other
| nominees. Spend a billion to save 10 billion.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| How would he save money?
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Hardly evidence of anything... It's one thing to spend
| money, another thing entirely to spend it properly.
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| When that happens, people will have even less recourse
| against media, internet and social media companies using
| their power to influence.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| What do you mean, "when that happens"? It's the law today.
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| I must have intended to reply to one of the replies to
| you calling for it to be outlawed.
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| The negative influence of Big Money in politics has been
| proven to be vastly overblown. Small dollar donations ar much
| more dangerous as they tend to come from the most engaged &
| partisan members of society and encourage pols to be much
| more extreme in their rhetoric
| Frost1x wrote:
| Where is the proven evidence of this? I find this very
| difficult to believe, otherwise.
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| Big money pulled their donations from the GOP after 1/6.
|
| Look at [Marjorie Taylor Greene's
| fundraising](https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-
| congress/marjorie-tay...)
| akudha wrote:
| Are you not watching Sinema and Manchin? Two people (maybe
| another half dozen, quietly) holding up legislation that
| much of the country wants to pass
| rsj_hn wrote:
| It's very radical and divisive legislation opposed by
| much, if not the majority of the nation.
|
| Blocking this type of radicalism is why the Senate
| exists. You saw the same thing happen during President
| Trump's administration, when an extremist tax bill was
| proposed, and much of the radicalism in _that_
| legislation was removed by the same senate, with the same
| howls about obstructionism being levied at moderate
| Republican senators from the GOP base.
|
| Basically go down the line of the major legislative
| efforts and you see extremist stuff being passed by the
| house, and then toned down or dropped in the Senate. And
| not only legislative efforts, but the entire history of
| the two bodies, the Senate is usually the moderating
| force.
|
| Thank God for the Senate.
| akudha wrote:
| Can you explain what is radical and divisive about the
| legislation?
|
| Negotiating drug prices is bad? Asking corporations (that
| are making record profits) pay their fair share of taxes
| is radical? Two years of free community college is
| divisive? Including dental, vision in medicare is bad?
|
| Can you point out and explain what parts of the bill is
| divisive and bad? And why?
|
| And please don't say the amount is too high. 3.5T is over
| _10 years_ , the US govt spends 750B on military, in a
| _single_ year.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| > Negotiating drug prices is bad?
|
| No, that's fine. It's the 3.5 Trillion in pork and
| expansion of government powers that's the problem.
|
| > Asking corporations (that are making record profits)
| pay their fair share of taxes is radical?
|
| This is a weird soundbyte. Please stop it with "pay their
| fair share". Increasing IRS snooping powers on all bank
| accounts of private citizens is bad and does nothing to
| promote corporations "paying their fair share". There are
| lot of orwellian aspects to this reform. A simple VAT tax
| and elimination of corporate taxes would be more fair and
| also less intrusive. That would also bring us more inline
| with a european style tax system and eliminate corporate
| tax avoidance. It's also a proven system that works well
| in Europe.
|
| One thing the left needs to understand is that corporate
| taxes are basically sales taxes. So if you are going to
| be applying a national sales tax, do a VAT. That will
| immediately solve your foreign tax shelter problems
| because you are taxing sales and not "profits", which are
| subject to all sorts of accounting gimmicks. Sales are
| clear and they happen in a specific geographic area. Just
| tax sales net of domestic input costs. This is actually
| one of the policies floated in the Trump administration
| but was of course never adopted seeing as how
| corporations opposed it (for obvious reasons).
|
| > Two years of free community college is divisive?
|
| It's terrible policy. We need to cut government subsidies
| of higher education in half and finally open up a system
| of trade schools for the majority that shouldn't attend
| college. Trade schools, and not two years of community
| college, is what we need.
|
| The problem with US education spending, like with US
| healthcare spending, is that we are spending twice as
| much as the OECD (as a share of GDP) and _still_ the
| private sector is left with huge bills. And we have _bad
| outcomes_ , graduating students without marketable skills
| and that do not match the needs of our economy. Again,
| here we should follow the European model rather than
| giving more subsidies to our system.
|
| That means free higher education and free trade school,
| and this can be funded by slashing university budgets by
| 2/3 and diverting funds towards the establishment of
| trade schools, banning schools from charging anything to
| students if they accept government vouchers. Each voucher
| should be for 11K/year. Students must complete their
| degree in three years, and standards should be raised so
| only qualified students attend university rather than
| teaching remedial subjects in our expensive university
| system. Non-academic staff should be reduced from the
| current levels of 3 non-academic staff per academic staff
| to 3 academic staff per non-academic staff. That
| reduction in non-academic staff and reduction in required
| courses would allow for a massive slashing of university
| budgets, bringing them inline with what is spent in
| Europe. And we'd get smaller class sizes and free
| universal education to boot. None of that requires a
| dollar of extra spending beyond current levels.
|
| But merely subsidizing a bad system now entrenches it and
| makes it harder to reform in the future. You have the
| same problem with healthcare.
|
| > And please don't say the amount is too high. 3.5T is
| over 10 years,
|
| It's not the amount, it's that it's all deficit spending
| and the actual programs are mostly harmful rather than
| helpful.
|
| One problem with the left is they think it's always 1933.
| The only economic model in their mind is one where there
| is deflation and millions of unemployed with nothing to
| do, so they always call for a "New Deal". Well, we are in
| a tight labor market and an inflationary economy, so now
| is not the time to run expansionary fiscal policy. You
| would think this would be obvious, but alas it doesn't
| stop anyone from calling for projects that create "more
| jobs". Now if you want to reduce defense spending and
| increase spending on something else, we can discuss that.
| I'd like to reduce defense spending as well, but another
| 3.5 Trillion in stimulus is a terrible policy in the
| current economy, and the objects of this spending are the
| corrupt bureaucracies that need to be cut, not increased.
|
| So yeah, it's really a terrible bill that takes us in the
| wrong direction. I'm OK with negotiating for cheaper
| drugs, and few other things, but the actual spending of
| money and most of the policies are just awful.
|
| Now I understand that a lot of my proposals are also
| radical. But we need radical reform. And I also
| understand you can't get a radical bill passed when you
| have only a three seat majority in the house and a 50-50
| Senate. It's insane to think you can. You won't be able
| to. So in this current stalement it's much better to pass
| no bill than to pass a bad stimulus bill in an overheated
| economy. At least passing no bill would avoid making
| things worse, which is what this bill does. The reason we
| do not have education or healthcare reform is because
| there are too many people employed in these industries
| who wield too much political power and are able to block
| reform. Therefore I oppose anything that increases
| employment in already bloated fields, as it makes the
| reform problem that much harder.
| sedivy94 wrote:
| I learned a lot from this comment. Thank you.
| Jotra7 wrote:
| You learned one person's unproven assertions.
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| You think they're the only two Democratic Senators or
| house members that don't want this legislation?
|
| I don't. They're cover and the lightning rods for other
| reps in swing states.
|
| Also, a large chunk of the country does not want this
| legislation to pass (I'd even go as far as to say
| potentially a majority).
| akudha wrote:
| _Two people (maybe another half dozen, quietly)_
|
| No, I believe it is more than two democratic senators, I
| don't know how many. That is why I put half dozen, in
| parenthesis.
|
| Poll after poll shows the legislation is popular, even in
| Manchin's own state. Same in Arizona. What provisions of
| the bill do you disagree with?
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| Individual components polling well does not necessarily
| mean the package as a whole will poll well. Also
| Americans are incredibly fickle (look at polling
| associated with remaining in Afghanistan).
|
| I don't support expansion to medicare or medicaid
| (although the ability to negotiate on drug prices seems
| reasonable). We are already facing a looming funding
| crisis for social security & medicare and I don't think
| it's reasonable to put even more debt on future
| generations.
|
| If the US wants a European style social safety net, the
| US middle class is going to need to help pay for it which
| I don't think they're willing to do.
| Jotra7 wrote:
| Lol. No. The rich need to start paying up.
| EastOfTruth wrote:
| bribes/lobbying should be illegal... please get a referendum
| going on this subject
| TheFreim wrote:
| Lobbying is essentially a constitutionally protected right,
| right? Comes from the right to petition our government.
| grecy wrote:
| The challenge that the USA faces is the people who have the
| power to change it are the very ones who benefit the most
| from it.
|
| There are MANY established institutions in the USA that
| will fight tooth and nail not to change, because the
| established players are getting exceedingly rich the way
| things are now, to the detriment of everyone else.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Yeah. How is change supposed to come when they control
| the system that's supposed to bring it about? If you try
| to fix things outside the system, you essentially become
| a terrorist and the government gives itself license to do
| unspeakable things to you.
| trollski wrote:
| revolution. does not mean blood on the streets. like
| soviet block circa 1989-1990.
| jimktrains2 wrote:
| Why do you want to make it illegal for me to contact my
| representative and voice my opinion on upcoming legislation
| -- that's also lobbying.
| FpUser wrote:
| As long as id does not involve money direct or indirect
| between "lobbyist" and the official sure go and convince
| your rep. Just do not promise cushy job later or for
| relatives or any other creative ways to buy your
| politicians.
| bitwize wrote:
| It's time to repeal the First Amendment. It's probably time
| to repeal the entire Bill of Rights, and replace it with a
| framework that allows the government to restrict the exercise
| of rights when and as much as required to protect public
| safety or the mechanism of democracy.
|
| All functioning democracies (which the USA is not) have such
| a framework in place. In Canada it's famously called the
| Notwithstanding Clause.
|
| Well, maybe not all. We can keep the Third Amendment as a
| souvenir.
| FpUser wrote:
| In case your message is not sarcasm - The way
| Notwithstanding Clause was used and / or threatened to be
| used by Ford for example had nothing to do with the
| democracy but everything with the Government pushing their
| agenda.
| eloisius wrote:
| I can't tell if this is sarcasm. The solution to corruption
| in government is to give even more powers to the government
| to restrict the exercise of rights?
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| The fact that they're suggesting we keep the Third
| Amendment (which is, for all intents and purposes,
| useless), but get rid of the rest leads me to believe
| it's sarcasm. If someone was serious about "repealing"
| the Bill of Rights, they probably haven't read it and
| don't know anything more than the First and Second.
| bitwize wrote:
| Oh no, I think the entire Constitution actually needs to
| be rethought if we intend to do something about
| corruption in the system. It's clear that the USA is a
| failed state -- the Constitution hampers the government
| from doing good, necessary things (like implementing
| universal health care, strong consumer and worker
| protections, protecting against hate speech, etc.) while
| allowing corruption to run rampant. It needs to be
| replaced. Something like a proportional representation,
| multiparty parliamentary system. While we're at it we may
| as well rejoin the Commonwealth, because the Crown has
| one non-ceremonial power that can be used to fight
| corruption, that no person or body has in the U.S.
| government: the power to disband the government and force
| the institution of another by democratic means.
|
| If you think this sounds familiar, you're right: New
| Zealand is practically an ideal model of how to form a
| modern, practical, democratic government that reasonably
| respects personal freedom _and_ public safety and
| security. Their example should be followed elsewhere,
| especially in the USA.
| mlindner wrote:
| Hyperbole doesn't contribute to the discussion.
| CapitalistCartr wrote:
| None of the prior comment is hyperbole. Everything has
| happened, multiple times that we know of.
|
| "Three Felonies a Day"
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-
| Innocent/dp...
| tonmoy wrote:
| Technically these judges should have recused themselves, but is
| it really a big deal that the judges (or their families) had
| financial advisors or stock brokers held shares in companies they
| were probably not even aware of was a defendant? The real
| question would be how much did these judges make by buying or
| selling those stocks during the cases compared to rest of their
| portfolio. I would imagine it'd be negligible
| heythere22 wrote:
| https://archive.md/j7Tkh
| aomobile wrote:
| Needs to be regulated Asap. Corruption is cancer.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-10-23 23:02 UTC)