The Supreme Court, like European courts, has long recognized that corporations have constitutional rights, ever since its 6-to-1 decision in Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819). But left-wing ideologues have falsely claimed that corporate constitutional rights are a recent invention by right-wing Supreme Court justices, in response to the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which ruled that corporations and unions have the right to criticize politicians even when doing so involves spending money (that case involved a non-profit ideological corporation that wanted to air a film critical of Hillary Clinton and to advertise the film during television broadcasts. In response, the government argued that it could not only restrict such paid expression, but also restrict even books critical of politicians during an election campaign).
Although the Citizens United decision did not say that corporations are “people,” some of its critics have claimed that it did, and they have drafted something called the “People’s Rights Amendment,” which would permit the government not only to censor corporate speech, but also to seize and nationalize corporate property without compensation, under the theory that corporations are not people and thus have no constitutional rights at all. (The People’s Rights Amendment takes away the rights of non-profit corporations, which include most churches, colleges, charities, political parties, and campaign committees. Most newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters today are corporations, unlike back in 1789, when the press was not incorporated.)
Amazingly, three state legislatures — Vermont, Hawaii, and New Mexico — have passed resolutions in support of the People’s Rights Amendment, which is worthy of a Communist People’s Republic. And 28 members of the House of Representatives (all but one of them liberals) are sponsoring the People’s Rights Amendment in Congress. (Citizens United was not even the first Supreme Court decision to rule in favor of a corporation’s challenge to a speech restriction. Earlier cases like First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti had done so, without controversy.)
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In a column for the FT today, Wolfgang Munchau lays out what may be the only plausible solution to the Eurozone crisis – for governments like Greece to “default into” the European Stability Mechanism. The ESM could then issue bonds, thereby mutualizing the bad debt of the defaulting governments. The Euro survives, the PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain) get their debt off their books and can rebuild without having to do distasteful things like reform their labor markets, and the Euro project continues with its new Banking Union.
Except…
The great unasked and unanswered question with all of these schemes is: where is the money coming from? That’s not the same as the question who will buy this debt. Banks will, of course, if they have a clear idea of where the repayment and yield will come from. If it looks like the debt might not get repaid, they will require too high a yield, and the problem starts again. So who is the ultimate guarantor of this scheme? Together, the PIIGS supposedly contribute 37 percent of the ESM’s cash-flow, but that’s now, before the defaults which will require a much bigger capacity than the ESM’s current E500 billion capacity. France, which contributes 20 percent, is likely going to face similar problems given its likely electoral direction this year (Socialist President elected yesterday, socialist-communist-fascist dominated Parliament likely later in the year). So the answer will be, once again, the German taxpayer.
So the ESM banking union option once again collapses into the basic question — will the German taxpayer stand paying not just for the debts but the ongoing fiscal health of the profligate PIIGS nations? All indications seem to be no. So, despite being a seemingly plausible solution, the ESM banking union solution is probably doomed to failure too.
Of course, that doesn’t mean they won’t try it.
Like whistleblowers, inspector generals often tell the government things it does not want to hear, or let the public know about how government agencies have wasted their money or violated the law. Recently, an NBC reporter in Indianapolis chronicled how the IRS has likely paid out billions in refundable tax credits to undocumented immigrants for dependents they cannot legally claim for this purpose, such as non-citizen nieces and nephews back in Mexico, and has refused to do anything about the problem. As the reporter noted, the IRS ignored warnings from a whistleblower and Inspector General for Tax Administration Russell George. (In one case, a household with $14,000 in income paid no taxes, and got back a refund of $10,000 due to child tax credits. In another case, 20 dependent children were listed for a single address in Indiana, claiming $1,000 for each child. Such payments are many times more common today than they were in 2009.) The Obama administration is not interested in doing anything about these abuses.
The inspector general who warned about these abuses, Russell George, was appointed to his position in 2004, after previously working for Steve Horn (R-Calif.), one of the most moderate (and socially liberal) GOP members of the House. I wonder if Inspector General George feels uncomfortable right now, knowing that another inspector general hired during the Bush administration, Gerald Walpin, was summarily fired by President Obama (and falsely depicted as senile) after he exposed wrongdoing and fraud by a California politician who staunchly backed Obama.
As I noted earlier, the Obama administration has left an unprecedented number of inspector general positions vacant, thus eliminating potential watchdogs against waste, fraud, and wrongdoing at federal agencies. (The recent GSA scandal involving blatant waste and misuse of taxpayer dollars was uncovered by that agency’s inspector general.)
One final note: there is nothing illegal about an undocumented immigrant tax-filer claiming a personal exemption for kids in Mexico or Canada, which is expressly permitted by IRS rules for kids located in those two countries (although such dependents’ eligibility may effectively be impossible to verify, since they lack social security numbers). It’s the additional refundable child tax credit for such non-citizen children that they aren’t eligible for. (Other refundable credits, such as the EITC, are also subject to significant rates of fraud — amounting to billions of dollars annually – which is one reason that many economists dislike refundable tax credits in general.)
At Point of Law, Ted Frank of the Manhattan Institute criticizes the Obama Administration’s demand for de facto racial quotas in school discipline:
Seventy percent of African-American children are born to single mothers. Moreover, children growing up in the African-American community face the peer pressure of gangsta culture: success in school results in ostracism for “acting white.” With such dysfunction in the African-American community one would expect African-American children to have more disciplinary problems than average. And indeed they do: “black students were three and a half times as likely to be suspended or expelled than their white peers”. These problems are certainly difficult: how do you change the culture?
Unfortunately, the Obama administration is proposing counterproductive policies that would reduce personal responsibility.
According to the Obama administration, the disparity in discipline is a “civil rights” issue of “equity.” The Department of Education is threatening “disparate impact” inquiries on school districts that discipline blacks more than whites or Asians. School districts could only comply by failing to discipline poorly-behaving African-American students; disciplining well-behaving whites to get the numbers up will just result in lawsuits. The consequences would be disastrous. Poorly-behaving African-Americans are most likely to be attending majority-minority schools. The ultimate effect is a wealth transfer from well-behaved African-American students trying to learn to thugs interfering with that process, only adding to the dysfunction in public schools and the African-American community.
Racial quotas in school discipline will indeed “result in lawsuits,” as white and Asian students sue over being disciplined for conduct that triggered no discipline when committed by a black peer (unless the school manages to conceal from the public the fact that it is applying a de facto quota). In People Who Care v. Rockford Board of Education, 111 F.3d 528, 534 (1997), the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit declared that racial quotas and racial-balance requirements in school discipline are unconstitutional, and also stated that it is unconstitutional to use racial preferences to offset “disparate impact” (that is, statistical disparities not caused by the school’s racism). Moreover, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal statute banning racial discrimination in schools, Title VI, does not even prohibit unintentional “discrimination” such as “disparate impact,” in its Alexander v. Sandoval decision.
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Washington Examiner columnist Conn Carroll refutes President Barack Obama’s attempt to blame the nation’s ongoing economic problems on his predecessor. In a recent interview, Obama tried to portray the Bush administration as a deregulatory free-for-all. The reality, however, is that Democrats and Republicans are not that far apart in their shared failure to restrain the federal regulatory behemoth.
Love him or hate him, Bush did not preside over some great era of deregulation. Quite the opposite, in fact. During Bush’s term, money spent by regulatory agencies increased 44 percent, from $27 billion in 2001 to $44.9 billion in 2007. The number of people employed by federal regulatory agencies rose by 41 percent from 172,000 in 2001 to 244,000. And the Code of Federal Regulations grew by more than 4,500 pages.
According to the Small Business Administration, in 2000, the regulatory burden inflicted on businesses was $4,463 per employee. By 2008, that number had almost doubled to $8,086. Whatever caused the financial crisis, it wasn’t Bush-era deregulation.
Unfortunately, Bush wasn’t the first president to let regulatory agencies run wild, and Obama won’t be the last, as CEI’s Wayne Crews shows in his annual survey of the federal regulatory state, 10,000 Commandments. The 2012 edition is due out soon. (Spoiler alert: The growth of government continued unabated last year.)
If you ever needed additional proof that the politics of Washington are not just broken, but soaked with gasoline and set ablaze in a ditch near Baltimore, take a look at Congress’s recent highway bill dog and pony show.
The Senate passed the obnoxiously titled Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century (MAP-21) bill on March 14 in a 74-22 vote. While ostensibly passed in a bipartisan fashion, it soon became clear most of the Senate Republicans who voted for MAP-21’s passage had no clue what was in the bill and how it would be paid for.
Gary Hoitsma, a transportation analyst who previously served as a senior aide to Senate Environment and Public Works Committee ranking member James Inhofe (R-Okla.), has done yeoman’s work in his analysis of MAP-21’s funding provisions. Despite the bipartisan rhetoric enabled by Sen. Inhofe — who admits he is a fiscal conservative on everything other than infrastructure and national defense — Hoitsma’s analysis shines a much-needed light on some of the jaw-dropping fiscal gimmickry contained in MAP-21.
For instance, rather than attempting to fix the revenue-outlay imbalance that is driving the federal Highway Trust Fund into insolvency, the two-year, $109-billion MAP-21 relies on a series of one-shot revenue transfers that, once used, cannot be relied upon again. This includes a multi-billion dollar general revenue transfer, redirecting revenue from tariffs on imported foreign automobiles, and nearly emptying the Leaking Underground Storage Tank Trust Fund of its $3.6 billion.
Since this is merely reallocating spending from other federal programs to the Highway Trust Fund, MAP-21 crafters were supposed to find “budget neutral” offsets. Unfortunately, the bill’s backers failed not only in finding the necessary offsets, they used every last-ditch funding trick available to preserve their excessive level of transportation spending. Again, once these tricks are used, they cannot be used again. Assuming MAP-21 becomes the highway law of the land, this means that finding revenue for outlays beyond FY 2013 will be all the more difficult. The Senate’s bill, rather than resolving the very serious fiscal issues facing the Highway Trust Fund, merely kicks the can down the road for 18 months.
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Senators “will let legislation on domestic violence” known as the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act “pass the upper chamber despite having concerns about its constitutionality,” reports The Hill newspaper. That includes a provision backed by Democrats “empowering American-Indian tribal authorities to prosecute” non-Indians.
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), a member of the Judiciary Committee, said he was “really taken back by some of the changes in laws dealing with Indian reservations,” calling it “unacceptable and very bad policy.”
A Republican aide cited a Congressional Research Service report that warned expanding the prosecutorial power of tribal authorities could violate constitutional guarantees on due process and double jeopardy.
UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh yesterday raised additional civil liberties problems with the Violence Against Women Act reauthorization, arguing that the changes made to the existing VAWA statute by Senate Democrats violate First Amendment free speech guarantees [first, second posts]. Volokh is one of the law professors most frequently cited by federal judges and America’s law reviews, and the author of two First Amendment textbooks, The First Amendment and Related Statutes (4th ed. 2011), and The Religion Clauses and Related Statutes (2005).
William Creeley of FIRE, and former ACLU Board member Wendy Kaminer, say that the Senate reauthorization bill drafted by Senator Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) would undermine due process on college campuses. Lawyer John Hinderaker raised additional civil-liberties objections to the bill’s expansion of tribal court jurisdiction. I earlier discussed some pitfalls of the bill here at this link.
Even the original 1994 version of the Violence Against Women Act had flaws. It contained a provision later struck down by the Supreme Court in United States v. Morrison (2000), and declared unconstitutional, because it exceeded Congress’s powers under the Fourteenth Amendment and the Interstate Commerce Clause. That invalid provision created a tort remedy for gender-motivated domestic violence that largely duplicated state laws (all states ban domestic violence, and take such crimes seriously). The statute’s crowd-pleasing title (no one wants to be accused of being in favor of “violence against women”) diverted attention away from its constitutional flaws. Lawyers and judges who raised valid federalism objections to this provision were ridiculed by people like Joe Biden, who falsely depicted them as ignorant. VAWA’s title continues to prevent dispassionate analysis of its provisions, and potentially opens the door to new constitutional violations being added to it.
Republican senators like Charles Grassley of Iowa have also objected to the lack of safeguards against fraud in the law and the misuse of millions of dollars in taxpayer money that should have been used to help victims of domestic violence. (Even if the Senate reauthorization does not pass the House, programs set up by the 1994 VAWA law will continue to operate.)
The Washington Post cited my blog post, “Severe Shortage of Skilled Factory Workers As Government Encourages Students to Pursue White-Collar Jobs,” in a thoughtful commentary by Jennifer Rubin. But it linked to the entire collection of my blog posts by mistake. The Washington Post was attempting to link to this item.
Here is an excerpt from it:
The government has encouraged people who once would have become skilled and valuable factory workers to instead go to college and work in white-collar jobs, contributing to a severe shortage of the skilled workers needed by manufacturers. The Washington Post reports today on this problem:
Unemployment hovers above 9 percent. . . . It is a platitude that this industrial hub, like the country itself, needs more manufacturing work. But as the 2012 presidential candidates roam the state offering ways to “bring the jobs back,” many manufacturers say that, in fact, the jobs are already here. What’s missing are the skilled workers needed to fill them. A metal-parts factory here has been searching since the fall for a machinist, an assembly team leader and a die-setter. Another plant is offering referral bonuses for a welder. And a company that makes molds for automakers has been trying for seven months to fill four spots on the second shift. “Our guys have been working 60 to 70 hours a week, and they’re dead. They’re gone,” said Corey Carolla, vice president of operations at Mach Mold, a 40-man shop in Benton Harbor, Mich. “We need more people. The trouble is finding them.”
In recent years, government officials have depicted white-collar jobs for college graduates as the way to go. President Obama has advocated sending every high-school graduate to college or some form of higher education, while denigrating training for blue-collar industrial jobs. He has sought to increase spending on colleges, while slashing spending on more useful vocational education that could lead to work in manufacturing. [See this July 10 New York Times story]. . . As The Washington Post notes, as senior skilled factory workers are retiring, no one is taking their place, since “many of the younger workers who might have taken their place have avoided the manufacturing sector because of the . . . stigma of factory work.” . . .
Meanwhile, 12.8 million people are unemployed, many of them people with economically-useless college degrees . . . Growing government subsidies have encouraged colleges to raise tuition at a rapid rate, and to dumb down their courses to attract marginal students . . . Federal financial aid programs have helped cause skyrocketing tuition increases. Meanwhile, college students learn less and less with each passing year. “Thirty-six percent” of college students learned little in four years of college, and students now spend “50% less time studying compared with students a few decades ago, the research shows.”
Increasingly, ordinary people get prosecuted for trifles, while politically connected people get a pass for the exact same crime, or far worse behavior.
A whale-watcher is being criminally prosecuted merely for lying about whistling at a whale. But former New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine, a big Obama booster who “stole” $1.2 billion, is not being prosecuted, despite his investment firm’s massive diversion of funds from client trust accounts, a crime that Corzine “personally” ordered.
Meanwhile, a dairy-farming family in Maryland is getting prosecuted by the federal government for “structuring” — breaking up bank deposits into deposits of less than $10,000 at a time to avoid scrutiny. But former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer got a free pass for the very same offense, even though he (unlike the hapless dairy farmers) used the practice in order to hide criminal activity, making his actions much worse. As Walter Olson notes, “structuring” is “the federal criminal offense of splitting up bank deposits so as to keep them under a threshold such as $10,000 above which banks have to report transactions to the government. Structuring is unlawful whether or not it occurs in conjunction with any other legal offense . . . Nor is there any requirement that the person be aware that there is a law banning structuring; someone who gets wind that transactions over $10,000 are reportable, and decides ‘What’s up with that? I’ll just make $9,000 deposits’, has broken the Bank Secrecy Act.”
Increasingly, the federal government persecutes the innocent and punishes whistleblowers, while turning a blind eye to the guilty.
In the auto bailouts, non-union retirees, pension funds, and bondholders got ripped off, while the powerful UAW union, which endorsed Obama, got special, preferential treatment and a big chunk of the automakers’ stock.
In primitive societies, people blame their misfortunes on witchcraft and other imaginary phenomena. The American Left blames the Koch brothers for everything, with equally little basis in reality. (One of my uncles, who once volunteered for Obama, told me that to him, the Koch brothers are like “the devil.”) The Kochs are routinely blamed by progressives for pushing all sorts of legislation that the Kochs have absolutely no interest in, and that would not financially benefit them or Koch Industries one bit. To be responsible for all the activity attributed to them by leftists, the Kochs would have to have supernatural energy and powers, much like the witches of primitive mythology.
A recent example of legislation falsely attributed to the Koch brothers is Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, which the Koch brothers had nothing to do with at all. The Stand Your Ground laws that exist in two dozen states were not invented by or advocated by the Koch brothers, nor did these laws radically change when people are allowed to use firearms in self-defense, as I explained earlier. (As the San Francisco Chronicle’s Bob Egelko and others have noted, Stand Your Ground laws took the definition of self-defense that had long been used in court rulings in states like California for up to 150 years, and formally codified them into state law, slightly broadening the definition of self-defense in those states that previously imposed more of a duty to retreat before using force in self-defense.)
Karen Finney, guest hosting for MSNBC’s Martin Bashir, blamed Charles and David Koch for the Trayvon Martin shooting, which she sought to link to Florida’s Stand Your Ground law (despite the fact that the Stand Your Ground law did not change Florida self-defense law very much, and the fact that homicide and crime went down in Florida after the state’s Stand Your Ground law was enacted):
Who was the Typhoid Mary for this horrible outbreak? It’s the usual suspects the Koch brothers…the same people who stymied gun regulation at every point who funded and ghost write these laws.
Finney, a Democratic operative, had absolutely no basis for this claim about the Koch brothers, and simply made it up, as a Minnesota lawyer pointed out. In response to demands for a correction, MSNBC has not cited any evidence for this baseless claim, because there just isn’t any. It’s completely baseless. In fact, the only lobbying on firearms issues the Koch brothers ever engaged in “in Florida was in opposition to the National Rifle Association’s support for a bill that mandated employers must allow employees to bring firearms onto company property.”
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