工商法 » behavioral.principles

Well, I sort of missed out on the whole sum-up post to close out 09. It was an interesting year, that’s for sure.

What 2009 should be most remembered for, however, is quite simple: it was the year where the rule of law regressed and became more decadent and dishonest than ever before. And if you know anything about the history of for-profit incarceration (well, not to mention war) you may realize the serious fault-lines between public justice and private profit. At the most basic level, everyone knows there are people that can ‘lose your file’; the problem is how to build a system with lasting integrity.

2009 was a year where the crimes of the Bush Administration were swept under the rug, where Gonzo got screwed but torture-lover Yoo just went back to Berkeley to teach Admin law. Where we shouldn’t be ‘backward-looking’ much like the crooked cop doesn’t look back while his business partners are doing their work.

Millions of dollars got funneled around, millions in no bid contracts, millions lost and stolen and ‘mis-appropriated’. And somehow the ‘legal community’ is still back wrestling with the issue of criminal immunity for these contractors. Since when was the flexible, organic system I learned about in law school so incapable of calling a halt to honoring these mandatory arbitration clauses? Since when did a private contract trump criminal law?

We have to go back in the story, at least until Enron, to see how things have gone. There, massive fraud was carried out upon the government and individuals, and nothing was done about it. Couple people went to jail, and all those workers lost out on their pensions while shareholders got screwed, too.

Then of course we had our illegal president, whose people walked roughshod over legal principals and rule of law in favor of their plenary power concepts and fancy arguments. Unfortunately, they also had a good part of the judiciary as well, in the form of the Federalist Society, so there was little pushback…

Which concepts, of course, they abandoned the second they lost the executive branch, which is why usually we shouldn’t end up in this position unless we have a corroded system, because both parties are supposed to understand that they risk future abuse at the hands of the other party through the granting of such extraordinary power. Duh. Its not rocket science, some would even (irrationally, I might add) argue that such an outcome is impossible because it is too irrational, but anyway here we are.

The excessive abuses of the Bush Administration, while some may refrain from calling crimes, must be investigated fully, or Rule of Law will have been dealt a mortal blow by its most vocal supporter for decades.

How can US and international law be ignored, sneered at in fact, with no response?

Only a dead thing behaves this way…