Thursday, June 11, 2009

The Private Sector is in a Bullfight

And it's the bull. So far, Obama's picadors and toreadors have stabbed, slashed, and otherwise compromised the bull of American capitalism. Don't kid yourself: they're going for the kill. Most of the crowd is cheering, but a few are starting to figure out that when this bull is gone, there is no more meat, ever. Moreover, a few are actually starting to worry about what it will be like to be the next "bull" when this one is gone---because there will be another bull.

The unbelievably idiotic and dangerous decision of the United States Supreme Court to deny the Chrysler bondholder claims---and thus reverse the holdings that have stood for almost two centuries in the Dartmouth case, whereby a contract is a contract---is just one more example of the reality that there can be no compromise with any branch in this current government group. We need a thorough housecleaning, including the Court, beginning with this racist Sonya Sotomayor. If I, as a professor, dared say publicly that because I'm a white male I'm "wiser" than all those black folk (or "them Jews" as Rev. Jeremiah Wright called them yesterday), then I'd rightly be out on my ear. The fact that she is even being considered for this position is deeply troubling, and old and ailing Ruth Buzzie Ginsburg will be the next to retire, allowing Zero to stick in an even more radical woman/lesbian/black/homosexual/Hispanic/whatever.

Be afraid. Be very, very afraid. Or, better yet, get active. Get very, very active. We truly don't have much time.

8 comments:

  1. To borrow a favorite term of the leftists, their approach to the economy is not "sustainable." The question for us is how long will they be allowed to continue on their fools mission. Will we begin to turn this around now, by calling, writing, and protesting to legislators, federal, state, and local, where we can apply some pressure? Will this have to wait until the next big state and federal elections (November, 2010)? Perhaps the next presidential election (2012), or failing there, the election of 2016? One thing is clear, socialism has never worked before and it won't work this time either. It can never fulfill its utopian dreams and so must either make greater and greater promises or it must protect its power by force. As we saw in the USSR and Eastern Europe, even that approach can't work forever. I hope (and pray every day) that we come to our senses sooner versus later. BTW, if you worry about this but don't stay up on these issues and express your opinions to elected officials, well, shame on you.

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  2. Yeah, I agree Tom. It's not yet clear when the reaction will come---whether in a specific election, or in some mass demonstrations that carry over to action.

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  3. The biggest problem we have with the common "swing right" after out latest swing left is that too many voters have been bred in school to think that left is all there is. Too many don't understand the conservative principles upon which we were founded.

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  4. The defining quote regarding Judge Sotomayor comes from Ronald Cass, Boston University School of Law Dean Emeritus...
    "The essence of the rule of law is that identity doesn't matter. The law means the same thing regardless of the identity of people applying the law or subject to it. We don't have one law for Jews and another for Catholics, one for Italian-Americans and another for Hispanic-Americans. We don't need to know who the judge is to know what the law is."

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  5. Tim or Publius: do either of you have any inkling what Sotomayor has ruled relevant to contracts and markets?

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  6. Larry... I summarized a few comments from different souces regading contracts...
    Sotomayor’s philosophy of judicial experimentation has yielded a slew of questionable decisions in business cases. In Dabit v. Merrill Lynch, she ignored the clear language of the Securities Litigation Uniform Standards Act of 1998, the purpose of which is to establish a set of uniform national standards for security litigation in order to avoid the unpredictable application of varying state laws. In her ruling, she allowed a contracts claim under state law that the legislation had specifically pre-empted, an “experimental” decision that was unanimously overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.

    In 1994, in Bolt Electric v. City of New York, she allowed the city government to throw out its contract with a private construction vendor because some aspects of the contract violated the state’s administrative code — even though compliance is not a requirement of a valid contract. She was overruled by the Second Circuit.

    The ruling for which Sotomayor is best known, her 1995 injunction that effectively ended a crippling baseball strike, involved two parties — wealthy Major League Baseball owners and their stable of wealthy players — who are anything but ordinary. But the case hinged on whether the owners could unilaterally impose a new set of rules on free agency and arbitration without negotiating with the players' union, whose contract covered both.
    Sotomayor became known as the judge who "saved baseball." But she did so by saving the very idea that a labor contract cannot be summarily broken by management. "This strike has placed the entire concept of collective bargaining on trial," she said then.
    Two 2006 cases present more problems for Sotomayor advocates, but they're on subject matter that could come off to the public as dry and remote: Merrill Lynch v. Dabit, where she held that state courts could entertain certain securities lawsuits notwithstanding the preemptive effect of federal law (reversed 8-0 by the high court), and Knight v. Commissioner, on the deductibility of certain trust fees, in which the court upheld her result but unanimously rejected her approach as one that (per Roberts) "flies in the face of the statutory language."
    Issues of business law don't come across as Sotomayor's great passion one way or the other, so it's hard to know what all this portends for the high court's direction on business issues should she be confirmed. . . .

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  7. Was Sotomayer on the Court that issued this decision against Chrysler bondholders? How many of these Justices were appointed by Democrats?

    I think you're advocating revolution, not merely changing an administration.

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