Category: Society

Posted on

Equities and Ironies: Trump, Law & Politics

[Note to Readers:  In this era of wayward ‘truths,’ the field of play for irony has both spread and thickened.  Every now and then, it is worth noting the spawn of this fertile soil, for the record.]

Let’s begin with this one.  In the same week that a former US president is being tried in a criminal court for the first time in history–for the alleged crimes of falsifying business records in his effort to hide incriminating sexual evidence from his voters a scant few weeks before the 2016 presidential election–he is  fleecing these same voters with a new stock scam meant to support financially his deepening legal fees and his 2024 campaign to return to the White House. Continue reading “Equities and Ironies: Trump, Law & Politics”

Posted on

The US Supreme Court Cannibalizes Its Own Legitimacy

On February 28 the Supreme Court of the United States did what many legal experts thought  improbable:  it decided to consider Donald Trump’s arguments that American presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for any acts committed while they are in office.

That is, in effect, that presidents’ behaviors while in office are beyond the reach of our laws, that the Rule of Law–the bulwark of our democracy that asserts that laws apply equally to everyone without fear, favor, or position–is simply suspended for the most powerful individuals in the nation, that in fact presidents do enjoy the rank privileges of monarchs and despots.  The nation’s founding generation fought a war to ensure against this result.

One would think that the Court’s justices would cringe at such a notion, not least because it suggests that they themselves could be vulnerable to the punitive machinations of an angry president.  As the old boxing saying goes, protect yourselves at all times, men and women of the Court! Continue reading “The US Supreme Court Cannibalizes Its Own Legitimacy”

Posted on

Notes on an Historic Indictment

Yesterday the U.S. Department of Justice indicted former president Donald J. Trump on four felony accounts associated with his attempts to overturn the legitimate 2020 presidential election.  After watching the various investigations into his misconduct play out through two impeachments and alleged crimes in both federal and state jurisdictions over the past few years, the following observations come to mind. Continue reading “Notes on an Historic Indictment”

Posted on

Mass Shootings and Insanity

Saturday, May 6, 2023, a mall in Allen, Texas:  eight dead, including children, and at least seven more injured.  In America we don’t need the headline above to know what happened there.  It is only the latest event in an epidemic, a plague of guns, a monsoon of bullets.

In just the past two weeks there have been mass shootings–defined as events in which at least four people are shot–in Cleveland, Texas (five killed), outside Tulsa, Oklahoma (six killed), and Atlanta, Georgia (one killed, four injured).  It is only spring, but already this year there have been at least 202 mass shootings, more than the number of days so far in 2023.  Last year, there were at least 647 of them.

Shootings are now the top cause of death of children and teens in the greatest nation on earth. Continue reading “Mass Shootings and Insanity”

Posted on

Is the Rule of Law a Chimera?

The term “chimera” has come to describe . . . anything composed of disparate parts or perceived as wildly imaginative, implausible, or dazzling.  Wikipedia

We are hearing about the Rule of Law quite a lot these days in the nation’s political dialogue.  I am wondering how the phrase is hitting the American ear.  Is it properly understood?  Is it considered important?  Why are we hearing it now only from one side of the political aisle?  Does it matter?  Does it exist?

The basic premise of the Rule of Law is easy to understand.  No one is above the law.  Everyone is equal under the law.  The law plays no favorites.  More dramatically, the Rule of Law is a sine qua non of democracy itself, of the people’s self-rule.  Without Law’s Rule, there can be no democratic form of government.  If any person or group is above the law, then by definition there is no democracy.  There is either autocracy or totalitarianism. Continue reading “Is the Rule of Law a Chimera?”

Posted on

In the Eye of Concrete Crime

Note to Readers:  The events described here occurred well before I knew I would spend my working career investigating and writing about white-collar crime.  Perhaps these events played a subconscious role in my career arc.  Personal names in this story have been changed to protect privacy.  The photos are stock photos, not from my time on the job.

I will not forget my last summer job during my college years.  Ever have to work a job that appeared to carry the risk of being thrown into the Mississippi River in a pair of concrete boots?

Worker smoothing new concrete on street

I was working for the City of Minneapolis as a “paving test aide.”  Not exactly an evocative title, nor a particularly illuminating one.  Still, it is a rather precise name for the role.  With several other young college men, I was a quality control inspector for materials being used to pave the city’s streets in concrete.  It was a civil service job that paid well.  Most of my young summer colleagues were engineering students at the University of Minnesota.  I was a journalism major, but I had studied enough science in college to pass the civil service examination in chemistry that was required for the job.

It was my third summer in the job at the City’s Paving Test Laboratory.  The first two summers I worked exclusively in the Lab, putting sample concrete cylinders from our various street construction sites under pressure to see how much they could take before they would crack (to ensure the concrete being poured at the jobs met strength standards), and testing samples of rocks and sand from the City’s stockpiles to see that they did not contain too much moisture before being added to the cement and water to make concrete.  Too much moisture in the concrete mix weakens the concrete.  The work was quiet, routine, and relaxed.

I started again in the Lab at the outset of my third year, but about a month in I was transferred to the other wing of the role:  supervising actual construction of streets in the field.  And this is where I ran into trouble. Continue reading “In the Eye of Concrete Crime”

Posted on

Whither the Supreme Court? Notes on Law, Abortion and Religion

For more than 30 years I taught the sociology of law to both undergraduate and graduate university students.  We considered how American law developed, how it was applied to persons and groups, and with what effects on them and on the broader society.

When discussing the U.S. Supreme Court, I emphasized that the traditional law school approach to its decision-making was wrong.  There, students have been commonly trained that legal reasoning is a learned skill much like that in scientific work.  It is based on principles of deduction, according to which judges make decisions about laws by logically figuring out how the principles established in earlier court decisions–precedents–apply to the current dispute before them.  In this perspective, judicial decision-making–especially in the higher courts with the best trained lawyers–is a matter of technique.  It produces the correct legal answers based on facts and reason, free of bias and personal belief.  Competent practitioners, therefore, should reach the same, right, answers.

Although the American legal establishment placed a lot of faith in this account, and asked the nation to do the same,  it was never a true story.

Of course, if it were, how could the Supreme Court issue so many decisions with 5-4 votes?  More dramatically now, how could it be that today’s Supreme Court appears to be little more than a radical Right redoubt, one on the verge of retracting a basic right finally granted to women by the Court almost 50 years ago? Continue reading “Whither the Supreme Court? Notes on Law, Abortion and Religion”

Posted on

The GOP Is Ground Zero for American Racism

For a while there have been versions of this saying:  Not all Republicans are racist, but if you are a racist the Republican Party is the party for you.

Now this may be taken in either of two ways in terms of the GOP.   The less consequential–even somewhat anodyne–meaning is that American racists are attracted to the Republican Party because it has long favored tough-on-crime policies and low taxes/small government policies, which have always translated into harsh punishments of and weak federal support for poor people, among whom minority populations figure disproportionately.  This view can seem to insulate the Party itself from charges of racism and racial animus.

The other way of reading the statement is not only less forgiving–it is condemnatory.  This view asserts that the Party itself is racist at its core.  Its basic principles and fundamental operations are racist.  They are dedicated to the protection and strengthening of white dominance–and domination–in the United States.  They are racially exclusionary.  Today, in the 21st century, the Republican Party is the nation’s beating heart of systemic racism at both the national and state levels.  It is the principal mechanism of institutional discrimination against minorities of color.  As a result, whether or not individual Republicans feel that they are racist, supporting today’s GOP while remaining silent on its racist policies is itself a racist act.

Sadly, there is no plausible argument against this second reading.  There is no rational or factual way to challenge this conclusion.  There is only the denial of truth, something else that the GOP has adopted as a routine part of its operations that serves its racist purposes. Continue reading “The GOP Is Ground Zero for American Racism”

Posted on

Will Freedom Kill Liberty?

You may recall the now-iconic phrase that emerged during the Tea Party rise in our national politics around the 2010 elections:  “Take your government hands off my Medicare!”   Now there was a valid point to it–Republicans in Congress were threatening to pass a budget that would end “Medicare as we know it.”

But the directive also betrayed a deep confusion about the role of the national government in citizens’ lives, suggesting that a major social safety net program was not a program of government.  Indeed, political science research published in 2010 found that 40 percent of Medicare recipients surveyed denied that they had ever benefitted from a government social program.

Laughable as this level of civic ignorance struck many of us at the time, in fact it poses a significant threat to the stability and security of American society.  If citizens badly misunderstand their basic relationships with government, then they are more vulnerable to the distortions and appeals of demagogues. Continue reading “Will Freedom Kill Liberty?”

Posted on

Whither Racism in the Land of the Free

He enrolled in my seminar on law and society as a graduate student.  Being in his 50s, he was an unusual enrollee, but his experiences could not have been more relevant to such a course.  He was a long-serving, full-time police officer in the oldest police department in the nation, the Boston Police Department, and he had patrolled some of the city’s highest crime rate districts.  He was also African American, serving in a city long troubled by racial animus.  This animus wasstranger-fruit especially evident in the 1970s hostilities around the effort to use busing to integrate students in the city’s public schools, and later appeared in the Charles Stuart murder case in 1989-90, in which Stuart–who was white–framed a black man for the murder of Stuart’s wife, whom he himself had killed.

I will call the police officer “Hal,” not his real name.  Because the seminar combined undergraduate students with graduate students, every week I asked the grad students to come to my office after class to further discuss the day’s assigned topics with me.  Walking to my office after one seminar meeting, Hal offered that he really loved the reading we had been discussing in class.  The reading by an eminent sociologist of law had argued convincingly that, everywhere and always, law enforcement has come down more punitively on members of lower status groups than on those of higher status groups, even if the offenses were the same.

As we entered the office I asked Hal why he loved the reading.  He answered, “Because (the author) is right,” he replied.  That alone was very interesting to hear from an experienced police officer.  But I wanted to delve further, so I presented Hal with a scenario.  I said, “So if you confronted a young black male who had committed a minor crime (a misdemeanor), and later a young white male who had done the same thing, would you be more likely to arrest the black male and take him in, and more likely to take the white male home to his parents or give him a warning and let him go?”  And Hal said, “Yes.”  I asked why so, and he replied, “Because that is what the community wants.” Continue reading “Whither Racism in the Land of the Free”

Verified by MonsterInsights