Daily Archives: 8 March 2013

The Racism of the Supreme Court

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During oral arguments concerning Shelby County v. Holder, a case that asks whether the several states and lesser jurisdictions must, in accordance with Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, continue to submit their voting plans to Federal supervision and prior permission, came these shocking remarks:

Justice [Elena] Kagan: “Under any formula that Congress could devise, it would capture Alabama.”

Never mind that under any other formula that Congress could devise, it would not notice Alabama at all.  Formulae of this sort find what their developer want found—it’s the purpose of the formulae.  Kagan knows this.

Justice [Sonya] Sotomayor: “It’s a real record as to what Alabama has done to earn its place on the list.”

True enough.  It’s also a real record as to what Alabama has done to earn it way off the list.  Sotomayor knows this.

Justice [Stephen] Breyer: “Imagine a state has a plant disease, and in 1965 you can recognize the presence of that disease. … Now it’s evolved. … But we know one thing: The disease is still there in the state.”

Once a racist, always a racist.  Because we know.

These liberal…Justices…need to look in a mirror.

Police Surveillance

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Little Rock, AR, is expanding the surveillance capability and power of its police patrols:

A police car with a device that photographs license plates moves through the city and scans the traffic on the streets, relaying the data it collects to a computer for sifting. Police say the surveillance helps identify stolen cars and drivers with outstanding arrest warrants.

It also allows authorities to monitor where average citizens might be at any particular time. That bothers some residents, as well as groups that oppose public intrusions into individual privacy. The groups are becoming more alarmed about license plate tracking as a growing number of police departments acquire the technology.

More (worse?) [emphasis added]:

Little Rock Police Chief Stuart Thomas said the law enforcement benefits outweigh any concerns about possible abuse of the information, which, as a public record, is legally available for anyone to see.  He said the department may get more of the devices.

No irony there at all.  Nosirree.  Thomas went on:

Should that potential of misuse therefore eliminate the capacity of law enforcement to collect data which has a legitimate purpose for the safety of our officers or the appropriateness of enforcement actions?  I don’t think so[.]

But he misses the point.  This isn’t a private citizen, for whom prior restraint constraints are properly illegal—there has to be a crime committed (of which conspiracy is one, but which requires probable cause to interrupt).  This is a government, which is hard enough to control.  Prior restraint of government is a necessary precondition for freedom.  It’s why probable cause and warrants are a for restraining governments.

There are other dangers of the police—the government—creating this particular database, also pointed out in the article.

[City Director Ken] Richardson said he didn’t hear about the device until after it had been collecting data for months.  He said he said he hasn’t heard many complaints.

“It’s hard for you to have a problem with something if you don’t know it’s going on,” he said.

So, Chief, why all the secrecy, if it’s so innocuous?

And as [Catherine, of the New York American Civil Liberties Union] Crump points out,

Given how few rules are currently on the books to protect our privacy, it’s plausible that private investigators and data-mining companies could acquire this location data[.]

And nefarious individuals posing as those.  This is a neat-sounding idea that’s highly dangerous.

Market Indexes and Economic Strength

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The Dow Jones Industrials closed at a new high last Tuesday, running over 14,250.  This performance is being touted as having put the vicissitudes of the Panic of 2008 behind us.

Certainly, the stock market has been good for investors like me, which I hinted at a while ago.  And guys like Chief Investment Officer Jack Ablin, of BMO Private Bank, which manages about $66 billion think so, too.

It really does represent an achievement that we have climbed out of this crater.

There is a dangerous misapprehension in this, though.  In fact, the damage done by the Panic remain with us in our failed recovery:

  • unemployment remains near 8%, and higher than when President Barack Obama took office
  • total lack of employment, in which term I include underemployed and those who’ve given up, remains near 14%
  • our labor force participation rate 63.8% which is down from 65.8% in Dec 2008
  • 12 million Americans remain without jobs, an historic high for “recoveries” as old as this one
  • 4.7 million Americans remain long-term unemployed; this is 38% of our total unemployed
  • nearly 48 million Americans are on food stamps today, a 70% increase over the roughly 28 million of us in Dec 2008
  • Americans below the poverty level number 46 million, or 15% of us, as of 2011, compared with 13%, or 39.5 million, at the end of the pre-Obama years
  • $6 trillion have been added to our national debt

And so on.

The failed recovery, the damage from the Panic, the real economy of real Americans are all still with us.  Pay no attention to the market behind the curtain.

Update: Today’s jobless report has the unemployment rate falling to 7.7%, the lowest in nearly five years.  Looking behind this number, though, the labor force participation rate, which governs the denominator in the unemployment rate calculation, fell to 63.5%.  This represents a loss of 130,000 Americans from that participation rate.  The fall in the unemployment rate seems a smaller drop when put in context.