The Northern Review

One call that’s all the young guy with the phone in his hand says on television and on signs all over town.  Who is this guy?  He’s a lawyer and he is the head dog or the front for a lawyer operation which has a purpose.  What is it you ask?  It is this, and just this.  He or his operation want cases.  They want cases which deal with traffic accidents.  They want your case to review.  My guess is that if they think your case has merit (probably a lot of merit) they will take it on a contingentcy fee of 30% to 40%.  That means they are going to get that much of the recovery you get on your claim.

What sort of cases do they take?  My experience tells me they cases they take are cases where there is clear liability for the injuries and the injuries are clearly compensible.  That is to say, no tough cases will be taken.  No claims for justice.  Just claims which can be reduced immediately to money.

Maybe that is why the TV commercials are seemingly tied to people who advertise to buy your claim even before you file it and who will give you some money for it.  Ya gotta love the law!

Here is a piece in the New York Times about Sara Jane Olson, a woman involved in bank robbery, death, and the attempted bombing of police. She’s spending her time on parole coming out of prison in California at her home in St. Paul, Minnesota.

The case highlights for me the double standard of our judicial system and its punishments. Seems people like Mrs. Olson, generally white people, connected people, people who have conformed to a societal elite, seem to do better in their experience than would one who does not have such worldly credentials.

Another example of this double standard is the recent jury acquital (nullification of the law) by a Spokane jury of Police Officer Jay Olsen, a man who left a gay bar in downtown Spokane very late one night or early one morning and took shots at Shonto Pete, a Native American, who was well away from Olson and running for his life down a steep bluff. For more go to The Spokesman-Review.

One wonders whether these phenomenon are examples of class war.  Maybe they are examples of criminals able to convince us that they are just like us, and that by gosh, “all I did was make a mistake and I am better now.”  If the American judicial system is going to do these things — go easy on some people, maybe it should start going a bit more easy on others who may not be like the people who make up the establishment of the system.   

The Soviet Union “fell” some years ago.  The USA was full of itself when it did.  It said it fell because of something the West (the USA) had done.  Really, the Soviet Union feel because it imploded.  It just feel apart because it could not continue as it was constituted.

Over the last few months the West has fallen.  Capitalism has imploded.  It has fallen apart because it could not continue as it was constituted. 

Unregulated capitalism allowed for a economic system based upon the buying and selling of assets which were not really assets at all.  They were “financial instruments.”  They were bought and sold.  The banks and financial institutions became drunk trading the instruments — aggregations of other instruments. 

To make the whole thing work, the instruments had to be “insured.”  So enter AIG.  It sold “insurance” in the form of “credit default swaps.”  This insurance was not regulated and the insurance carrier, AIG, had no reserves to make good on the insurance if and when it was called. 

Now calls were made and are being made.  AIG still cannot meet the demand to perform.  So the United States federal government stepped in and backed up AIG.  Why? Because there were so many insurance contracts and so much insured that the entire banking economy of the West was based upon the viability of the insurance, the the “credit default swaps.”  Western capitalism became drunk on illusory “instruments” — the so-called assets. 

But, all the backup of the US Treasury will not work.  There really is no backup (it is based on smoke and mirrors)  because the United States Government is merely printing money.  There are no hard assets backing up the dollars breezing out the windows of the Treasury) will not work. 

What the United States is doing will not work.  Western capitalism as we know it is about to implode.

And, why would one want  Western capitalism as we know it to survive?  Are we to have a new government in the United States?  One which rewards fraud?  The fraud is the United States Government “bailout.” 

The United States is an idea.  Supporting fraud is not part of the idea. 

The American taxpayers have given hundreds of billions to AIG in the last few months.

What is AIG?  It is an insurance company with billions and billions worth of “insurance” on the values of mortgages — aggregated and turned into vast complex super-securities bet on minute by minute by the managers of “hedge funds” (sophisticated gambling schemes). 

All insurance is sold on the basis of there being reserves held by the insurance company to meet the risks of the insurance obligations.  The masters of AIG, with the United States government looking the other way, made fortunes.  They were paid, and to be paid, on the basis of percentages of premiums paid. 

The whole insurance product arrangement was a basic fraud.  Under no circumstances would AIG be able to meet its insurance commitments.   There were no reserves.  No internal structure was set up in AIG to provide the insurance which it sold, not in a real sense.

The masters of AIG have been paid $165 million in bonuses.  Bonuses based upon the sales of insurance products which were not insurance at all because the company was never able to meet the demands of the insurance policies, not in the main, if the “economy” began to move in another direction which it inevitably would (the economy of America, and indeed the world, has never, ever, not been subject to cycles).

So what have our leaders done?  They have watched the AIG “bailout money” be used for $165 million in bonuses.  They stood by and did nothing.  Our leaders say there is nothing they can do.  “The masters were entitled to the money under employment contracts with AIG,” they say.  Our leaders say “we are a country based upon the ‘rule of law.’”  In the same breath they say, “a contract, under the law, has to be fulfilled.  The government supports the rule of law.”

Our leaders are using paeans to the “rule of law” to justify a vast fraud and to actually give millions to those who were the masters of it.  They have actually become aiders and abettors of the fraud.

So, what is really happening?  The government under the leadership of the Republicans did not have the courage to see.  The government under the Democrats does not have the courage to see.  The people who pay the taxes will, in very short order, begin to see that government as we know it today cannot be trusted.  But, moreover, the people who pay the taxes will finally cease to think that our leaders have powers beyond their human souls.

The leaders of our country, Democrat and Republican, are planting the seeds of revolution.

The man, Bernie Madoff, pled guilty today to 11 or so counts.  There were probably many, many more.  The basic crime?  Conducting an elaborate Ponzi Scheme.  It would not have happened and Bernie would not be in the fix he is in but for the greed of people who thought one could get money for nothing.  They thought Bernie would get this money for nothing so they invested and they invested.  The returns were too good to be true, at least too good to be true as far as those mythical Americans who actually thought it right to make money by actually earning money rather than gambling for it.  Was Bernie at fault?  Sure, but who else is at fault.  The investors.  To be sure.  And, who else.  The whole American mystic that there is somewhere a way to make it rich by not doing anything and knowing the right people. 

Today I heard news of an effort to provide public financing of judges to the Washington Supreme Court.  What is of interest to me is that people tend to focus on the Supreme Court.  But, for the most part, the real supreme court is the Washington Court of Appeals and its separate and geographical divisions.  The cases which make it to the Supreme Court are cases the court wants to hear and certain other cases it must decide such as cases involving the discipline of attorneys.  See the Olympian article.

Michel de Montaigne in the 16th Century wrote this:

It is evident to me that there is no enmity like the Christian. Our zeal does marvels when it seconds our bent for hatred, cruelty, greed, and rebellion. But when it comes to kindness and moderation, our religion will neither fly nor walk: it is not there, unless carried along almost miraculously by some unusual quirk. Our religion was made for uprooting sins; instead, it hides them, nurses them, and incites them.

In this what we know today is affirmed.  We know that our righteous zeal is really not righteous at all.  It is used so as to allow us to express our instincts of aggression and death — “our bent for hatred, cruelty, greed, and rebellion.” 

Our understanding of the world would increase dramatically were we to get past our self-righteousness and begin to understand how human instincts play out and animate all of our relations with other nations and peoples and their relations to us.  It is as if we simply do not want to see what is really happening, what is in fact driving all confrontation.

What would prevent these great Ponzi Schemes we are witnessing? Puting the Madoffs and Stanfords in jail for thier lies serves a purpose to be sure. But it seems to me every investor in their operations is culpable. Culpable in the sense that they should have known that the returns they were seeking were unrealistic. Every Ponzi scheme is the same. The people in first are hoping to take advantage of the people who come last. They had to know the “returns” were unrealistic. Seems there could be advanced at some legislative level (for future Ponzi schemes) some sort of misdemeanor liability at least against all investors. Just a thought. Having witnessed several Ponzi schemes out here on the frontier (including a perpetual energy machine scheme!) I cannot help but recall that I thought, in each case, the investors were as much at fault as the guy leading — heading up the scheme.

One of the current pundits of our time,  Richard Posner, asserts “that it is a depression, and not a mere recession, that the country is in–that a depression is a political rather than just an economic event.”  I suspect Posner is going to tell us that the downturn of world economic affairs is due not to a failure of the basic priniciple of supply and demand, economics, but rather is due to political reasons and political causes.  I look forward to the book he says he has authored and is having published.  His title is A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ‘08 and the Descent into Depression.

I hardly know what to think about people like Posner.  He is an intellectual, a scholar, a writer, a judge.  He does not make anything.  He does not lend money for the making of anything.  He does not make a living in the real world of making and selling and managing and providing.  He lives within the upper reaches of our society, our economy.  His income is derived from the economy of which he is not a part, not in any real sense.  He is one of those lucky people who have incomes from talking about what other people do in the actual world.  He is a person who is on the “pundit circuit.”  There is something quite “effete” about it all.

So, does he have anything to tell us?  I really do not know.  I am suspicious.  Yet, I am going to read what he has to say.  But, in doing so I am going to read his work as if it were fiction from which one might gain insight.

The Independent starts off an article with this:

In what could turn out to be the greatest fraud in US history, American authorities have started to investigate the alleged role of senior military officers in the misuse of $125bn (£88bn) in a US -directed effort to reconstruct Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The exact sum missing may never be clear, but a report by the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) suggests it may exceed $50bn, making it an even bigger theft than Bernard Madoff’s notorious Ponzi scheme.

A ‘fraud’ bigger than Madoff: Senior US soldiers investigated over missing Iraq reconstruction billions,
By Patrick Cockburn in Sulaimaniyah, Northern Iraq

US law came to Iraq.  In the process the US invested billions in reconstruction efforts.  Over $50 billion is missing.  Missing!  Simply missing.  America may well be awash in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi Ethic.  The American electorate is a great lumpen of illusion and gullibility.