Psychopolitik 2.0

Look who the latest person is to realize capital punishment is pointless:

The nation’s longest-serving Supreme Court justice, John Paul Stevens, on Wednesday declared his formal opposition to capital punishment.

Stevens, 87, was part of the court majority that reinstated the death penalty in America in 1976. But in a concurring opinion to Wednesday’s ruling that Kentucky’s use of lethal injection is constitutional, Stevens wrote that the death penalty no longer served a legitimate social function. He is the first justice to openly oppose capital punishment since Harry Blackmun in 1994.

His words came as some comfort to death penalty opponents on a day when they suffered a setback at the hands of the justices. Within hours of the 7-2 ruling, Virginia and Florida announced their intention to lift a moratorium on executions, and several other states were expected to follow suit. In California, executions could begin again by the end of the year.

But Elisabeth Semel, a law professor and director of the Death Penalty Clinic at UC Berkeley who helped bring the challenge to Kentucky’s lethal-injection procedures, said the court’s opinion made it clear that states can be forced to institute alternative lethal-injection procedures if they can be proven to alleviate a substantial risk of severe pain to the inmate.

That may have been one reason that Stevens, in a sense, threw up his hands and said “enough” even as he concurred with the majority in the Kentucky case. Stevens wrote that when the court agreed to hear the Kentucky challenge, he “assumed that our decision would bring the debate about lethal injection as a method of execution to a close. It now seems clear that it will not.”

Then he went further, saying the death penalty was no longer meeting any of the societal aims the court laid out when it reinstated the sanction in 1976 after a four-year pause. “State-sanctioned killing,” he said, is becoming “more and more anachronistic.”

I personally thought the “does it cause pain?” question was a deflection — well damn, you’re killing them anyway! Safe to say you no longer care about that persons wellbeing!  — but at least he comes around. There’s no self-defense argument in executions, as the person has already been caught & removed from the population; it just amounts to a lame attempt at a violent salve to the collective psyche.

So, you’re probably thinking right now “ok…where’s the bad part?”. Well, consider Stevens’ position and the power he holds, especially the fact that matters of life, death and liberty itself come down to him & 8 other people and what political “tribe” they happen to align with, and ask yourself the following: how often do these kinds of decisions lean pro-liberty & pro-reason rather than against?

In the context of the true operation of the Supreme Court, Stevens figuring this out is lightning striking the same spot twice. Depending on the judgment of a few in the long run never works.

It was only a matter of time.  Someone actually said to themselves “y’know what would make this cocaine even better?  Fruit & candy flavors!”, then did something about it.

What?  If they can have chocolate flavored tobacco…

In an attempt to more efficiently enforce what in practice is unenforceable — income tax law — the federal government contracted out tax debt collections. Hilarity ensues:

The Internal Revenue Service expects to lose more than $37 million by using private debt collectors to pursue tax scofflaws through a program that has outraged consumers and led to charges on Capitol Hill that the agency is wasting money for work that IRS agents could do more effectively.

Since 2006, the agency has used three companies to go after a $1 billion slice of the nation’s unpaid taxes. Despite aggressive collection tactics, the companies have rounded up only $49 million, little more than half of what it has cost the IRS to implement the program. The debt collectors have pocketed commissions of up to 24 percent.

Now, as Americans file their 2007 taxes, Democratic leaders want to end the effort.

“This program is the hood ornament for incompetence,” said Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.), a leading critic who has introduced a bill to stop the program. The measure has 23 co-sponsors, all but one of them Democrats. “It makes no sense at all to be turning over these tax accounts to private tax collectors that end up costing the taxpayers money.” (emphasis mine)

Two tears in a bucket, not even break even money. Nice…

Of course, Dorgan shows the typical statist-progressive tendency to hiss “privatized!” at any screw-up not kept 100% in house. I’ve gotta say, I’ve seen lots of blatantly self-contradicting statements come from the mouths of “our” politicians, but this is Grade A: “Back taxes aren’t coming in fast enough? I blame the free market!” Pity he didn’t consider who actually runs this program…

After years of lobbying by the private collection industry, the Republican-controlled Congress created the program in 2004. The goal was to use collection agencies to close the relatively easy cases the IRS said it did not have the staff to handle: instances in which the taxpayer is not disputing the debt and in which the amount owed is relatively modest. Supporters hoped that the program would eventually be expanded to take over more of the agency’s debt-collection duties, and the IRS predicts that the program will break even by 2010.

Three firms were awarded contracts: Pioneer Credit Recovery, based in the western New York district represented by Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds (R), who supported the program and recently announced his retirement; the CBE Group of Waterloo, Iowa, the home state of Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R), who helped create the program; and Linebarger Goggan Blair and Sampson, a law firm based in Texas, home to President Bush.

Republican lobbyists got Republicans to sign off on this & give contracts to Republican connected companies in Republican strongholds. This arrangement is about as “private” as an oil company in China.

Shorter Brad Reed: “If you have a chance in hell of political power, you are part of the elite.  Calling other elites ‘elitist’ is horseshit.”

Of course they’re the elite.  For the most part they generally come from the same narrow spectrum of US life, and operate as if no other people exist — or worse, as if those other people just need to be beaten into submission for their own good.   By definition the average Joe has no say, because 1) there’s really no such thing in a functional sense (blahblahopinionsdifferblah) & 2) whatever else non-elites disagree on, they tend to agree on general grounds of fairness that their sweat should benefit them & not people who happen to be friends with elite types.

So…why do the elites have authorization to use force to get their way again?  I forgot that excuse.

If they have a kid, get them this for their birthday.

Props.

As an unfortunate side-effect of our UNfree trade policy, global markets are setup like a huge string of dominoes.  You know how that goes — flick over the one at the end, and everything else starts to fall.  That domino effect is now hitting people who, quite frankly, had enough problems already:

The International Monetary Fund’s steering committee directed the fund and its sister organization, the World Bank, to work together to ease the burden of surging commodity prices on poorer countries.

“A number of developing countries, especially low-income countries, face a sharp rise in food and energy prices, which have a particularly strong impact on the poorest segments of the population,” the 24-member International Monetary and Financial Committee said in a statement at the end of a meeting today in Washington.

“The committee urges the fund to work closely with the World Bank and other partners in an integrated response through policy advice and financial support.”

Food inflation has emerged as one of the main issues at this weekend’s meetings of the 185-member IMF, competing for discussion time with the global credit crisis. Food prices have soared 48 per cent since the end of 2006, a “huge” increase that threatens to erase the gains the international community has made in reducing poverty in recent years, IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said earlier this week. (emphasis mine)

Needless to say, having the IMF address soaring food & energy costs in 3rd world countries is like hiring Lil Jon to teach a creative writing class.

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Re: the whole subprime-mortgage, debt-as-commodity mess:

It seems to me that heading this off would’ve been as simple as making it so that if a bank that gave a loan wanted to pass it around like that they’d have to get permission from the people that owe them on the loan first — who would obviously overwhelmingly opt for “no”.  Besides, these rules for the most part are conjured up from thin air anyway, much of the scandal surrounds regulatory accidents spawning an entire pyramid scheme that wouldn’t exist otherwise.  Weren’t changes to previously agreed upon contracts supposed to be consented to by both parties anyway?

Oh, wait, that kind of transparency is for commoners w/o government backing.  My bad…

Moving sucks.  Heavy stuff long distances…

More coming soon, I’z back.