Today, the United States will do something which it hasn’t done since the New Deal: it will nationalize a corporation.  Bear Stearns is the new Tennessee Electric Power Company.

After a weekend of intense negotiations, the Federal Reserve approved a $30 billion credit line to help JPMorgan Chase acquire Bear Stearns, one of the biggest firms on Wall Street, which had been teetering near collapse because of its deepening losses in the mortgage market.

In a highly unusual maneuver, Fed officials said they would secure the loan by effectively taking over the huge Bear Stearns portfolio and exercising control over all major decisions in order to minimize the central bank’s own risk.

President George Bush is responding to the disasters of one of Wall Street’s most reckless firms by echoing the actions which he has so passionately criticized in Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez.  When the high-stakes financial gamblers of derivatives trading are exposed, the true face of Bush Republicanism has been revealed: they are nothing less than communists.

In 1917, the legal prostitution district of New Orleans, the infamous “Storyville“, was shut down over the strong objections of the city by the Federal government.  In response, New Orleans Mayor Martin Behrman said “You can make [prostitution] illegal, but you can’t make it unpopular.”

The Governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer, recently demonstrated that ninety years of nearly universal prohibition of prostitution in this country has done nothing to make Behrman’s prophecy untrue.

The New York Times op-ed page has become all too often a haven for the worst writing and opinions America has to offer.  Naturally, with prostitution in the news, they found a horrible opinion piece to publish.

The article begins with a deliberate misinterpretation of a simple notion, that of a victimless crime.  A victimless crime is simply put, a “crime” where each party to the crime is engaging in the crime consensually, as opposed to the standard crime victim, who is involuntarily subjected to the crime in question.  To say, for example, that the drug trade is a victimless crime means nothing more than that both parties in a drug deal engage in it voluntarily.  That hardly means that no one suffers due to the drug trade.  However, the op-ed tries to use this term to pretend that victimless means that everyone involved is in no way suffering, a ludicrous claim.

The op-ed then goes into unsubstantiated and pointless digression:  

But most women in prostitution, including those working for escort services, have been sexually abused as children, studies show. Incest sets young women up for prostitution – by letting them know what they’re worth and what’s expected of them. Other forces that channel women into escort prostitution are economic hardship and racism.

Is anyone suggesting that incest in victimless?  Or for its legalization?

The paragraph coming shortly afterwards, however, is stunningly laughable:

Telephone operators at the Emperor’s Club criticized one of the women for cutting sessions with buyers short so that she could pick up her children at school. “As a general rule,” one said, “girls with children tend to have a little more baggage going on.”

Have the authors ever met anyone with a job before?  Few employers are enthusiastic about workers who cut out early to pick up their children.  And generally speaking, employer bias against parents is well-documented.  But the authors actually try to convey the attitude that employer dislike of employees cutting work short to pick up children is a shocking act, which is evidence of the victimization of sex workers.

Those of us who have campaigned for the legalization of sex work, along with other “victimless crimes”, are not doing so because we consider these activities beneficial or beatific.  We do so because we believe, as the evidence clearly shows, that forcing certain trades into the black market does nothing to prevent the activity and does considerable harm to both the workers in such industries and to society at large.  This idiotic and offensive op-ed does our cause harm, both by pretending that it is answering any of the arguments for the legalization of sex work and by sloppy and unsubstantiated claims which do not address any meaningful issue.

The Times should know better than to publish such garbage.  But I hope at least that I can help readers here not be taken in.

When you choose one way out of many, all the ways you don’t take are snuffed out like candles, as if they’d never existed.  At the moment all Will’s choices existed at once.  But to keep them in existence meant doing nothing.  He had to choose, after all.

~Phillip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass – His Dark Materials Book 3

Reading the His Dark Materials trilogy, the oddest thing about it to me is how as characters learn that Lord Asriel’s plan is to attempt to storm heaven and overthrow God, every character who learns about it finds it natural and is immediately willing to do what they can to help.   I find this shocking, as people in general are quite willing to find most governments to be evil, including their own, but instinctively recoil from any attempt to overthrown not only their own government, but nearly all governments.

This is today’s quote for discussion.  

The head writers of HBO’s The Wire, which I consider possibly the greatest achievement in television writing, have an excellent and important message in the latest issue of Time:

“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right,” wrote Thomas Paine when he called for civil disobedience against monarchy – the flawed national policy of his day. In a similar spirit, we offer a small idea that is, perhaps, no small idea. It will not solve the drug problem, nor will it heal all civic wounds. It does not yet address questions of how the resources spent warring with our poor over drug use might be better spent on treatment or education or job training, or anything else that might begin to restore those places in America where the only economic engine remaining is the illegal drug economy. It doesn’t resolve the myriad complexities that a retreat from war to sanity will require. All it does is open a range of intricate, paradoxical issues. But this is what we can do – and what we will do.

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will – to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun’s manifesto against the death penalty – no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest. If some few episodes of a television entertainment have caused others to reflect on the war zones we have created in our cities and the human beings stranded there, we ask that those people might also consider their conscience. And when the lawyers or the judge or your fellow jurors seek explanation, think for a moment on Bubbles or Bodie or Wallace. And remember that the lives being held in the balance aren’t fictional.

In addition to being the head writers of The Wire, David Simon is the author of Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets; Ed Burns is a twenty-year veteran of the Baltimore City Police; Dennis Lehane is the author of Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone; George Pelecanos is the author of Hell to Pay and The Night Gardener; Richard Price is the author of Clockers and Freedomland.

This is a both hilarious and sad illustration of why we are losing the “war on terror”:

Whitey Bulger has found himself at the center of another “mandatory kill,” though this one was ordered by a photo agency seeking to delete an image from their archives. The alert was prompted by the F.B.I.’s admission that they misidentified a German couple vacationing in Sicily as the reputed Boston crime boss and his girlfriend, Catherine Greig.

Despite no apparent problems with the law, the couple somehow evaded the F.B.I.’s global manhunt for months. Indeed, they delivered themselves to the authorities after seeing themselves on Aktenzeichen XY … ungelöst, a German show about fugitives that preceded “America’s Most Wanted.”

After seeing one of their best leads dissolve, the F.B.I. remained determined. “We’re going to continue our worldwide media outreach to arrest Mr. Bulger and his companion,” Gail Marcinkiewicz, a spokeswoman, told The Boston Globe. An alleged audio clip of Mr. Bulger speaking on the phone to “Tammy,” who dialed the wrong number, and others was released in January.

Emphasis added.

For those of you who don’t know, James “Whitey” Bulger is the Boston crime boss who served as the basis for Jack Nicholson’s character in “The Departed”.

What can you say?  The F.B.I. misidentified a random German man as one of its ten most wanted criminals, and then couldn’t find this innocent German man who wasn’t trying to hide from them for six months, and only eventually found him because he turned himself in.

At this point, I’m thinking we’re going to find the Lindberg baby before Osama bin Laden.

The time you won your town the race

We chaired you through the market-place;

Man and boy stood cheering by,

And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,

Shoulder-high we bring you home,

And set you at your threshold down,

Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away

From fields were glory does not stay

And early though the laurel grows

It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut

Cannot see the record cut,

And silence sounds no worse than cheers

After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout

Of lads that wore their honours out,

Runners whom renown outran

And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,

The fleet foot on the sill of shade,

And hold to the low lintel up

The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head

Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,

And find unwithered on its curls

The garland briefer than a girl’s.

~ A.E. Houseman, “To an Athlete Dying Young”

If I had money enough to spend

And leisure to sit awhile

There is a fair maid in the town

That sorely has my heart beguiled

Her rosy cheeks and ruby lips

I own she has my heart enthralled

So fill to me the parting glass

Good night and joy be with you all

Oh, all the comrades that e’er I had

They’re sorry for my going away

And all the sweethearts that e’er I had

They’d wish me one more day to stay

But since it falls unto my lot

That I should rise and you should not

I’ll gently rise and softly call

Good night and joy be with you all

~The Pogues, “The Parting Glass”

OK, so first of all, I know this isn’t the most important issue in the world.  But having just gotten to the end of one labor dispute, seeing this post today brought up issues which are several of my pet peeves.

After four postseasons and two Cy Youngs, all of which made tons of money for the Pohlad family, Santana, could, with one more year’s work, reap the fruits of his labor and do what all too many major leaguers never do and hit the open market.

It was this set of circumstances caused that Jim Pohlad to utter the statement: “There’s loyalty and wanting to stay in Minnesota, and it varies from player to player.” What did Pohlad mean by this? In all practical terms in meant that Santana’s loyalty should translate into accepting less money than he is worth in baseball’s marketplace.

If Santana accepted this route, what would happen in the grand scheme of things-who benefits? Will the savings cause prices to watch Twins games to go down?

No.

Will it reduce the costs of going to games in the new park?

No.

Will your cable/satellite package that carries Twins games go down?

No.

Will the extra money be ploughed back into the roster?

Possible, but the Pohlad family’s track record indicates otherwise.

What then happens to the money Santana forgoes?

It goes right back into the pockets of the Pohlad family.

What the Pohlads are saying in effect is that the loyalty means that a kid from Venezuela who worked at his profession for 14 years to get to this point in his life should subsidize one of the wealthiest men in one of the richest countries on the planet.

To the honorable Senator Schumer,

Hello sir!  It is unlikely that you know who I am, although I have written to you before and even once had the pleasure of working with your daughter.  But I hope you will take a moment to hear what I have to say.

Like many other of your constituents, I wrote to you asking that you vote against the confirmation of Michael Mukasey as Attorney General of the United States.  You chose instead to support his confirmation, which led directly to his being appointed to the office.  You did so saying to us that he was not “my ideal choice,” but that you were “confident that this nominee would enforce a law that bans waterboarding.”  

The following is what I wish Rep. Ron Paul would say, in what is surely soon to come, his concession speech as he withdraws from the race for the Presidential nomination of the Republican party:

“My fellow Americans, each of us, myself included, is here because of a lie.  The most immediate of these is the lie that the war our government is currently waging in Iraq is one which is necessary and vital to our national security.  I have sought the nomination of my party for the office of President of the United States because this lie is both outrageous in its sheer falsehood, and one which has helped contribute to the continuing decline of both the Republican party and the conservative movement in America.  

Despite the fact that now the overwhelming majority of Americans have come to agree with us that the war in Iraq is an illegal and abysmal failure, the powers that be of the party and the media have strived to silence and belittle this view, along with my campaign for the nomination.  They do so in a large part to perpetuate the many lies they have given to justify their failed and failing policy in the Middle East, but also because they have a bigger lie to protect.

Our nation’s so-called leaders have long been struck with a terrible affliction.  While composing paeans to our democracy, they adore the power they wield and fear the people, who might take it away from them.  They seek to concentrate more and more power at the federal level of government, giving the smallest number of your representatives the greatest power over your lives.  Under the leadership of our own party, they have decided that granting near-absolute power over us in the federal government is not enough, but that even greater power over each and every American should be granted to an unaccountable “Unitary Executive”  They seek to grant that executive power to imprison Americans without trial, spy on them without warrants, and torture them to compel them to give evidence against themselves.  They seek to wrest the power to declare war away from the Congress, and to put it in the hands of a single person, who you elect in a process allowed only once every four years.

There is no depth to which they will not descend in this quest.  They go so far as to claim that these powers, which King George the Third could never have dreamed having at his disposal, are in the Constitution of the United States.

Implicit in all of these actions are two messages, which cannot be denied.  The first is that you, the American people, cannot be trusted.  Our nation, which supposedly is governed by we the people, is simply too important, they claim, for you to be allowed to be made aware of its administration.  From the secrecy with which they attempt to conceal their multi-million dollar earmarks to that which they use for even the legal arguments supposedly justifying their spying on you, they show their distrust and contempt of the American citizen.  The current leader for the nomination of our Republican party is a man who has not only stated but had written into a law bearing his name that you cannot even be trusted to not be swayed by political speech.

As sure as these people are that you are fools and traitors, they are sure that you will believe that they are trustworthy and benevolent in all things.  At every turn, they suggest that you need not worry, that you can allow them to run your lives by fiat, and that they would never deceive you or harm you.  Even when their lies are laid bare, when their lies about the war and terrorism, about the economy and their own spending are right there for everyone to see, they continue to insist that you simply take them at their word.

What they did not count on was the American people they despise.  We remember the legacy of our founders, who questioned a ruler who declared that the people were fools.  We remember that they taught us to question our government, and that we had the right to decide its actions for ourselves.  And what they forgot what that they left us a blueprint for how to create such a society: the Constitution of the United States of America.

They will hope that this quest for the nomination of the Republican party was not merely a battle, but the entirety of the war over the nature of our country.  They are wrong.  While this fight is over, the true battle is only beginning.  We know that we are a good nation of reputable citizens, and that they are the brigands and liars.  And we will not surrender this nation to the likes of them.

We will do this by trusting our fellow citizens and refusing to accept the empty promises of known miscreants and liars.  We will do this by reclaiming the legacy our forebears left to us: our Constitution.  

I cannot thank all of you, who have supported my campaign in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, nearly enough for all that you have done.  What I can do is promise you that this is not the end of our journey, but merely the end of its beginning.  

This nation belongs to us: the American people.  Our message has been stated loud and clear: we are coming to take it back!”