Timely Objections Blog

What the Drone Memo Means

By R. Tamara de Silva

February 7, 2013

[W]e are heirs to a tradition given voice 800 years ago by Magna Carta, which, on the barons' insistence, confined executive power by "the law of the land."  Justice Souter and Justice Ginsburg, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld 542 U.S. 507 (2004)

       On February 5, 2013, a Department of Justice memo ("Drone Memo") was released to NBC justifying the President's killing of Americans by lethal force, such as by drones.[1]  The targeted killing of Americans as justified in this memo gives the Executive Branch a power over American lives that is at once unprecedented and terrifying in scope.   The idea of a government unilaterally assassinating its citizenry is fundamentally at war with America's Constitutional legacy, which was established with separate and equal branches of power specifically to limit the possibility of an abuse of government power or outright tyranny.  The issues presented in the memo have Constitutional implications that cease due process rights based upon what may be unsubstantiated accusations and go against traditions of justice dating back to the Magna Carta.  Americans need to understand what is at stake.  The Drone Memo justifies the assassination of Americans by the Executive Branch based on the equating of terror (a term and concept that is not defined in the memo) with war and making Americans into enemy combatants without any due process of legal proceedings for actions and associations that are similarly ill-defined.  This memo does outline an enlargement of Executive power over due process that is without historical precedent in American history.  It bears note, that the Drone Memo asserts for the first time in American history, the power of a President to assassinate Americans, unchecked and unanswerable to anyone, including the Judiciary and the Legislature.

       The legitimacy of a government that would kill its citizenry has been portrayed and accepted by many Americans as merely a political issue the idea being-if our guy is doing it, we must stand by him because after all he's not the other party's guy.  After all, the same people who once complained bitterly about renditions and enhanced interrogation techniques have no objection to mass killings by unmaned drones-with civilian and child casualties in the hundreds.  But this is not a political issue and looking at it in simplistic tribal terms will prevent the public from understanding its import to them.  It may be an unwritten rule to fall in line behind your party's line, but this is one instance worthy of exception.  According to a senior legal official in President George W. Bush's administration, no other President of any political stripe has ever before authorized the targeted killing of Americans.[2]  The import of this memo, on the heels of the Patriot Act, and the NDAA's striving for a permanent suspension of habeas corpus, among other recent laws, is nothing less than the crossing of a legal Rubicon that would now permanently allow for the suspension of the due process of law.  At a minimum, this memo strips Americans of the protections of Fifth Amendment and in so doing, alters what it means to be an American.  This administration's authorization to use deadly force upon Americans without any legal safeguard of due process has a legal and moral significance that is difficult to comprehend or quite honestly, believe.

       Never before have an American president and his Attorney General openly stated that the Executive Branch can bypass Due Process of law to kill an American-if they (solely at their discretion), think they have a good enough reason because they have invented something called, "Executive Due Process."  It is the Executive Branch, boldly asserting an absolute power to suspend a significant portion of the Bill or Rights, unchecked by any other branch of government and unfettered in the scope or protocols used in the exercise of this new power.

       It is not as I write this that I do not understand first principles.  A nation must exist before it can provide its citizens any rights, liberties or anything.  A nation must also be allowed broad latitude to protect its citizens.  Security was a large part of the bargain described by Hobbes for leaving a state of nature and war to enter into a social contract.  It is the function of the Executive Branch to protect the security of Americans.  Terrorism remains a tremendous threat and after two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it would be naïve to think that the sentiments behind terror groups like Al-Qaeda have diminished because of our war on terror-there is evidence to suggest the opposite case. 

       As the late Allan Bloom often remarked, the first principle of any nation state was no different from that of any individual's-it is and must always be, self-preservation.  With this understood, most Americans have accepted an implicit tradeoff and the loss of some civil liberties and privacy for the sake of national security.   However, what the Drone Memo does is give away two entire Amendments and the bedrock of the freedoms that are uniquely American.  It is as if Americans have become so cowered of terrorists after 9/11 that we would as a country surrender the soul of America and its most deeply held values for the promise of a hope of a bit more security.  

        But in giving absolute authority to kill an American to any one man, President, CIA director or intelligence officer, unfettered by the United States Constitution's prohibition of such, we are making America into a country of rule by the men who would wield this power-no longer is it a country of rule by law.  We cannot just rest on knowing we are protected by a Bill of Rights- we now have to hope for the good characters of those we elect because we have surrendered the laws that would have kept their power over our freedom in check.   In America, the protections of the Bill of Rights were never to be handed over to an elected official with whom we were told to just "trust" them.  This is not America- nor is it consistent with the historical point of the American experiment in the first place.

       In fact, the United States Supreme Court in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld ruled that we are not required to "just trust" the government in matters of indefinite detention either.  The Court in Hamdi reiterated the principle that the Executive Branch cannot detain an American citizen without some form of due process.[3]   Hamdi was a United States citizen arrested in Afghanistan and taken into the custody of a military prison in Virginia.  From there he filed a petition for habeas corpus that ended up in the Court, which ruled that Mr. Hamdi did have a right as an American to be heard before an impartial judge.  President George W. Bush's administration had argued that Mr. Hamdi had no rights as an enemy combatant and that it could dispense with Hamdi as they saw fit.

       Ironically, it is the decision in Hamdi on which much of the Drone Memo relies.  This is a spectacle of legal gymnastics whose logic is ephemeral.  The Obama Administration's lawyers try to make the case that Hamdi is distinguishable because he was detained-that it was feasible to detain him.  The Drone Memo asserts a right to kill an American if he cannot feasibly be detained, because he cannot feasibly be detained.  They are wrong.  If the Supreme Court believes an American has the right to appear before an impartial fact-finder before being deprived of his liberty, then that American should at least have that right before being deprived of his life. 

       The Fifth Amendment guarantees on all Americans the right to due process of law before the taking of life or liberty.  The taking of an American's life by the government legally, as common-sensically, demands a higher level of due process than being imprisoned or detained--not less. Does the separation of powers doctrine require federal courts to defer to Executive Branch determinations that an American citizen is an "enemy combatant"?   Not according to the Court in Hamdi,

Finally, even if history had spared us the cautionary example of the internments in World War II, even if there had been no Korematsu,  there would be a compelling reason to read §4001(a) to demand manifest authority to detain before detention is authorized. The defining character of American constitutional government is its constant tension between security and liberty, serving both by partial helpings of each. In a government of separated powers, deciding finally on what is a reasonable degree of guaranteed liberty whether in peace or war (or some condition in between) is not well entrusted to the Executive Branch of Government, whose particular responsibility is to maintain security. For reasons of inescapable human nature, the branch of the Government asked to counter a serious threat is not the branch on which to rest the Nation's entire reliance in striking the balance between the will to win and the cost in liberty on the way to victory; the responsibility for security will naturally amplify the claim that security legitimately raises. A reasonable balance is more likely to be reached on the judgment of a different branch, just as Madison said in remarking that "the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other-that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights." Hence the need for an assessment by Congress before citizens are subject to lockup, and likewise the need for a clearly expressed congressional resolution of the competing claims.[4]

       Societies have normative values and also ones that are pre-textual--designed to mask far baser values.  Historically, one nation that has effectively used the pretext of danger to the state to imprison all who would criticize it is the Soviet Union.  All societies have normative values and at times some of them are pretextual-designed to mask much baser values.  Security was a value with which the Soviet system used to hide the interests of its leaders from Nikita Khrushchev to Vladimir Putin.  A pretextual interest in security is used to control not only an entire population but also its public opinion.  Vladimir Putin has his own record of repressive psychiatry and the imprisonment of anyone whose only crime appears to be the insult of his vanity.

       America was established to guard against the assertion of pretextual values on the people by any one branch of government.  The American system of government has several ingenuous structural safeguards such as having three branches of government where each is in theory at least powerful enough to keep the other in check.  In writing down what rights a people had and suggesting the existence of many others, unenumerated like the right to privacy or to travel-America's founders established a system of rule by law and not men.  If for example a tyrant came into power, his power would be curtailed at the boundaries of the rights retained by the people, subject of course to Constitutional amendment, within the Constitution and specifically, the Bill of Rights.  In theory, as long as you could freely associate and assemble and speak, and your life and liberty were still protected by due process of law, there would be very real checks on the harm to be caused by any one elected official with pretextual values.  It is specifically because of our legal system and Constitution that we have, within our own borders, enjoyed being the freest people in the world.  The greatness of America and its attraction to so many immigrants has in large part always been its core values, tracing back to the Magna Carta, of human dignity, freedom of expression and individual liberty.

       America was the birthplace of sedition.  Born out of the fury and ideals of those who were then considered religious kooks, fanatics, terrorists and worse.  Not surprisingly, we became a nation, the envy of the world, where unlike everywhere else, you could say anything and not be locked up as a political prisoner because you have annoyed someone in elected office.  The First Amendment protects your speech and the Fifth Amendment guarantees that your life and liberty cannot be dispensed with just on the whim of someone in power.

       Due process of law is the most American of all civil liberties-it is nothing less in the American law to civil liberty than everything.  It is only because of the Fifth Amendment that you have a presumption of innocence.  Governments mean well and are filled with honorable prosecutors who care deeply about civil liberties.  However, they also make mistakes.  We have jailed people for decades only to find them exonerated by DNA evidence-we have even made erroneous executions.  If the justice system, with all the protections of due process intact can make mistakes, what can one man or two do without any check on their judgment and without affording the alleged target, any due process or notice whatsoever?  Is it possible that the Executive Branch can err in declaring someone an enemy combatant?  Why are its determinations unchecked by any other branch of government, as the Drone Memo would have them be?  Is this not in itself for such an enormous power claimed, so obviously at odds with the principle of a separation of powers? 

       Targeted killings of non-Americans have proven themselves to hit wide of their marks.  CIA Director, John O. Brennan once stated that there were no civilian casualties in drone strikes and then admitted that there were casualties but then stated that they were "exceedingly rare."  Many independent sources confirm over 3,000 militants and civilians have been killed by drones. Drone strikes have killed over 176 children in one country alone and unless this was the Administration's intention, how can it be argued that drone strikes do not make mistakes?  

       The Drone Memo also uses terms like "associated forces" and "imminent threat" that are nowhere defined and capable of shifting interpretation depending on who is using them and to fit what purpose.   What constitutes being an associated force?  Is intention required, or mens rea required or is this a crime that can be stumbled into?  For example, if an American is a social acquaintance of someone who looks at a website that is later considered to offer, "material support" (again a term undefined) by expressing opinions, does that American become an associated force of the offending American?  Are his family also in danger?  If they can be killed without any due process, these questions will never be answered.

       What about the shifting definitions of terrorism?  Is it that difficult to envision the power to kill Americans without due process being abused?  If you think so, then you may not be aware of whom the Department of Homeland Security considers a likely terrorist.

       In a study by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism entitled, "Hot Spots of Terrorism and Other Crimes in the United States, 1970-2008," which was funded by the Department of Homeland Security, terrorists are likely people, "reverent of individual liberty...suspicious of centralized federal authority or anti-government," including people who are extremely liberal or extremely conservative.  What about people who belong to the NRA or are against gun control-at what point do their convictions constitute a resistance that is deemed intolerable to their government?[5] 

       The Drone Memo asserts that questions about definitions like enemy combatants and imminent harm are the exclusive province of the Executive Branch, that they are not legal matters and hence not subject to judicial review of the courts.  The Supreme Court made it abundantly clear in Hamdi that the Executive Branch, despite the exigencies of the War on Terror, did not have a blank supra-Constitutional check, nor did get to violate the separation of powers,

In sum, while the full protections that accompany challenges to detentions in other settings may prove unworkable and inappropriate in the enemy-combatant setting, the threats to military operations posed by a basic system of independent review are not so weighty as to trump a citizen's core rights to challenge meaningfully the Government's case and to be heard by an impartial adjudicator.

    In so holding, we necessarily reject the Government's assertion that separation of powers principles mandate a heavily circumscribed role for the courts in such circumstances. Indeed, the position that the courts must forgo any examination of the individual case and focus exclusively on the legality of the broader detention scheme cannot be mandated by any reasonable view of separation of powers, as this approach serves only to condense power into a single branch of government. We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation's citizens. Youngstown Sheet & Tube. Whatever power the United States Constitution envisions for the Executive in its exchanges with other nations or with enemy organizations in times of conflict, it most assuredly envisions a role for all three branches when individual liberties are at stake.....

    Because we conclude that due process demands some system for a citizen detainee to refute his classification, the proposed "some evidence" standard is inadequate. Any process in which the Executive's factual assertions go wholly unchallenged or are simply presumed correct without any opportunity for the alleged combatant to demonstrate otherwise falls constitutionally short.....[6] 

       The targeted killing of Americans poses an unprecedented threat to due process.   Fortunately, I am convinced the arguments advanced in the Drone Memo would not pass Constitutional muster with the same Supreme Court that ruled in Hamdi.  But it has to get there and if it does not, Congress and the American people must act.  Congress should clarify what this memo means and identify the protocols in which it will be used with enough specificity so that the awesome power it assumes is not abused-and it is at least checked. The argument advanced in the Drone Memo is that the government should be taken at its word that it will be rigorous about identifying terror targets, which are American.  This is not a legally sufficient basis for eliminating due process for American citizens because the Executive Branch is not unbiased and as such it cannot be expected to be an impartial check on itself.  We were established as a nation of laws and not of men.  There is ample historical precedent against trusting any one branch of government or ruler with absolute power to take the lives of its citizenry-by the way, America was established in part to avoid the type of government in which such a power would be exerted unchecked upon its citizenry- remember?@

R. Tamara de Silva

February 7, 2013

Bob Costas' NFL Gun Speech Deconstructed

December 3, 2012

By R. Tamara de Silva

"This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilised nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!"

                                  Adolf Hitler

"Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest."

                    Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi 

       Bob Costas used the incident of Kansas City Chief's Linebacker, Jovan Belcher's murder of the mother of his three-month-old daughter on Saturday before taking his own life as call for more gun control.  In Chicago, eight people also died from gun violence over the weekend. 

       The causes of murder and suicide, especially inner-city violence are numerous and complex.  The causes of gang related shootings involve suboptimal societal and economic factors that have no easy remedy.  What is predictable and easy, is to blame the guns used either by a low-life gang-banger or a cold-blooded murderous NFL linebacker.  It is easier than blaming the parents of the murderer, his family, teachers, pastor, genetics, mental illness, economic factors, cultural influences, randomness or societal failure in raising yet another psychopathic killer.  As is often the norm, whatever the premeditation, mental illness or depravity of the murderer, we shift our blame towards the object used by the murderer-the gun.  It happens after almost every publicized shooting, and with a high degree of predictability.  Politicians clamor, as they do in Cook County, to abridge the plain language and intent of the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution, to appear like they are "doing something" and to ostensibly express their profound empathy for the victims of murderers by imposing yet more regulations on gun ownership and taxes.

       True to the playbook, yesterday, NBC's ubiquitous sports commentator Bob Costas used the half-time segment of the Sunday Night Football to call for more gun control, "In the coming days, Jovan Belcher's actions and their possible connection to football will be analyzed. Who knows?  But here, wrote Jason Whitlock, is what I believe.  If Jovan Belcher didn't possess a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today."  Or he would have found another way to kill her...but this would not have been newsworthy.  Blaming an inanimate object also subtly removes a layer of culpability and provides an easier answer, as if the problem of the existence of the murderer and his intent would be erased just as particles in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle appear and then disappear on the quantum scale- in this instance somehow leaving the presence of the more culpable gun.

       According to a report by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, guns were involved in roughly over 65% of violent crimes in 2008.[1] There are in the aggregate of all municipal, state and federal gun regulations, well over 14,000 to 19,000 gun regulations on the books.  Gun ownership is well regulated.  The United States has the highest gun ownership rate in the world but is 28^th in the world in the rate of murders committed by firearms.[2] Most people that own guns never commit gun violence.  Do all these regulations have the effect of reducing deaths by gun?

       In Illinois, the answer would be resoundingly in the negative.  Illinois is arguably the most gun restrictive state in terms of the sheer number and nature of its gun regulations.  Chicago is also, in 2012, on track to being the nation's murder capital.  Do we have too few gun regulations or too many murderous criminals? 

       There is an unwritten law in politics at any level, if you are going to bring up a problem, pretend you can solve it-certainly at least say you know how.  There is no profit for any candidate running for elective office in Chicago or anywhere else to simply say that we have too many really nasty unsocial people in Cook County and that they will kill you and there is almost nothing, short of moving and trying to avoid these people, that would save you from them and their unsocial behaviors, in all their possible iterations.   In order to win tell Logic: drop dead.  Blame the gun. 

       Costas could have blamed Blecher and the fact that athletic ability is prized more than character or psychopathic temperament in the NFL but then again he is hosting an NFL half-time show and this may have been tantamount to going to a dinner party and denigrating all the food.  He could have said that if you are one of the statistically improbably gifted athletes that can play at the level of the NFL, and attract the sponsorship revenue of a prime-time NFL game, when you murder your daughter's mother, someone will offer to blame the gun you used. 

       However, there are problems with the "but for" theory of gun accountability.  Its principal problem is a failure of its logic.  We cannot blame knives and forks for the epidemic of obesity that caused the greatest toll on our health care system or can we?  But for, the knife, a 300 lb, 5"10 man would not have eaten so much because he would have lacked the means to eat so much macaroni and cheese.  But for the glass manufacturer, some would never have become alcoholics and destroyed their families.  But for cars, we would be perfectly protected from DUIs.  But for cars, we would also be unable to have traffic accidents.  But for the sale of paint, we would not have graffiti.  But for the Internet, we would not have online pornography.  When you think upon it, inanimate objects, were you to suspend logic, are pretty nasty social actors-albeit in varying degrees of accompanying passivity.

Statism v. Individual Responsibility

       The Government can and does legislate desirable social behavior already-often using inanimate objects.  For example, Mayor Michael Bloomberg banned the sale of super big sugary soft drinks like super-sized purple Slurpees.  He had good reason-they are very sugary and excess sugar causes weight gain, diabetes and associated and resultant health problems. 

       If the government could rely on you to act rationally at all times, poor Mr. Bloomberg would not have had to bother to make a law to prohibit you from ingesting larger sized Slurpees.

       His was not a novel idea.  From mortgage deductions to marriage deductions to restrictions on the purchase of guns, the government already tries to engineer what it considers socially more acceptable behavior through the tax code.  But the evidence of its efficacy is mixed, at best.  For example, Canada does not have a mortgage interest deduction and yet more Canadians own their homes than Americans.  Cook County Illinois proposed a gun tax to prevent in part the "illegal use of guns in murders."  Murder is already illegal-at the state and federal level.  Also, it is not likely, though possible, that gang bangers would be so off-put by having to pay a tax on gun ownership that they would switch to machetes.  Were the politicians in Cook County a more thoughtful and upstanding cross-section of the populace than their tendency to commit crime (we do after all have and have had more alderpeople, commissioners, and governors in jail than any other North American city), and take to graft, to engage in bribery and other creative means of "pay for play," to refine the art of nepotism- as they do would suggest they are, (albeit a counterfactual hypothesis)--they would realize that people inclined to murder other people in gangs are simply not going to think about the silly tax that has theoretically been imposed upon them.

       The other silent but more massive cost to the governments' various attempts to engineer social behavior either by the tax code or by threat of imprisonment, is that individual freedom and government regulation of social behavior are to a great extent a zero-sum game.  The more authority the government aggregates to itself to get into the private lives and lifestyles of its citizens, even to promote "good" and rational individual behavior, the commensurately less choice the citizen has in choosing how to live. 

       Conceivably, I ought to have a right to be irrational.  I may simply prefer pizza to broccoli and may wish to drink single malt scotch everyday over kale juice.  My enjoyment value in ingesting French fries everyday may outweigh the utility I place in living to be a skinny octogenarian.

        It is not meaningful what opinion a sportscaster has about a right guaranteed by the Second Amendment any more than it matters what Mr. Costas thinks about positron emission tomography's alleged ability to produce an accurate "picture" of the human brain.  What is troublesome is that Mr. Costas, like so many politicians who would offer simple solutions to seemingly insolvable problems, is that he has a pulpit to propagate false solutions and impoverished notions.

       This comes at a time when all branches of government in America today, more than at any time in its brief history, are determined to assault the Bill of Rights-because your fundamental liberties as an American cannot defend themselves, now is not the time to be silent.  My father is a history professor and I learned the value of history early on.  But in studying human nature more directly, I also learned that history, whether read or not, will repeat itself.

       It was not that long ago that the governments of Nazi Germany, Socialist Russia and Fascist Italy disarmed their citizenry.  There was no one to defend themselves, their old, their minorities or their children and neighbors from the atrocities that followed.  Were we to utter that the odds of this scenario ever repeating itself were greater than nil, we may be called right-wing extremists or "nuts."  Yet just seventy years ago, disarming the people was exactly what the governments had engineered, ostensibly in some cases, for the goal of greater safety and social stability.  A trade-off no thinking person ought to acquiescence to ever again. @

R. Tamara de Silva

Chicago, Illinois

The First Amendment of Brandon Raub

By R Tamara de Silva

August 22, 2012

       The point of demarcation between political expression and dangerous dissent is being discerned in much the same manner the Romans augured the future by looking at the entrails of birds.  Enter social media, which has been flexing its muscles on the topic even managing to draw the somnolent Media to bring national attention to the odd arrest and detention of a 26 year old former combat Marine, Brandon J. Raub.  Brandon, who had served his country in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2005-2011, was taken from his home by this same government in the form of the FBI, Secret Service and police agents for what looks to the outside world as his expression of his First Amendment right to criticize his government and his President. Is he the first known victim of the National Defense Authorization Act or Virginia's involuntary commitment statute? 

       One of my favorite people at the University of Chicago was the late Allan Bloom.  He once suggested that the First Amendment was a grand waste- no longer needed in America.  He said this because he observed that most people simply have nothing to say.  Most people may have opinions about many things but they are merely repeating what someone told them seeming to be incapable of forming a worthwhile thought on their own.  He was right in that as he went on to say, peoples' opinions are about as distinct and undifferentiated as the individual Kleenex are in a tissue box. 

       Social media bears this ought.  Except Brandon Raub was not using his Facebook account to post the perfunctory braggadocio or a travel itinerary.  Or the equally common antipode of the plea of a starving third world child- a picture of a full plate of food with an introduction about how good it is.  Brandon's posts were not so excruciatingly dull, as to be entirely devoted to self aggrandizement or the scatological- but they have all the marks of seditiousness in a Soviet Russia or Hussein's Iraq.  But in America, Brandon, like many Americans was expressing his discontent at the state of his country and its government.  Like many other of his countrymen, intellectually engaged in matters of governance, Brandon Raub used Facebook for what is inarguably its highest use-a gargantuan virtual public square.   Used this way, Facebook is not an ode to the elevation of the miniscule and mundane but a truly interesting and potentially important phenomenon.  Important because it is perhaps also a guardian of liberty in every way the Fourth Estate has been. 

       Opinions expressed in a public square can be diverse and some may even be out there.  However, were the American Revolutionaries alive today and speaking of sedition as they did then, they would not be called Patriots as history has called them-they would today be called terrorists.    This country was the birthplace of sedition and the refuge of many people the Crown considered way too "out there"-a remote place across a vast ocean fitting for the lunatic fringe. 

       The concerns of many about young Brandon are that free speech must be protected especially when what rights we were given by the Constitution have come under an onslaught of multiple new assaults like the monitoring of online computer searches, indefinite detention, indefinite detention without any due process of law [Mr. Eric Holder's invention of something called "Executive due process," which provides for a kind of due process and judgment but with no lawyer, no court of law and no trial] regular warrantless taping and tapping of all cellphone calls, the tracking and sale of customer information via credit card use, and the Department of Homeland Security's tracking of social media and all use of the internet,  tracking of all online activity, tracking of all financial transactions, the National Defense Authorization Act ("NDAA"), etc.-with all this, the willingness to still speak at all is a singularly brave but crucial act.  The law has not kept up with technology and most people are unaware of what their rights are in its wake.  The First Amendment safeguards that one act, speech, which may be one of the few gossamer threads that yet binds together our fragile and aging civil liberties. 

       Admittedly, some of Raub's postings were outside of mainstream thought in that he cited conspiracy theories related to 9/11 being an inside job and appeared to post a threat when he wrote that he would, "Sharpen up my axe; I'm here to sever heads"-repeating the words of a song called, "Bring Me Down."[1] 

       Were his posting lyrics to this song tantamount to a national security threat?  After the Colorado shootings and the shootings at Virginia Tech, many would argue it makes sense to preemptively lock people up for communications that are even ambiguously threatening.   The problem with this line of thought is that it is a slippery slope and it vests a dangerous amount of discretion in the hands of the government that can easily be abused.   It is also profoundly un-American. 

       When faced with any crisis or a 24 hour news-media human interest story, we seem to think it best to make more laws and invest the government with even more authority to "fix it" -never fully understanding that powers so eagerly bestowed can be abused and turned against their bestower.  As Benjamin Franklin famously wrote and anyone with even a cursory reading of history will understand, "those who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty not safety."

       One nation that has effectively used the pretext of danger to the state to imprison all who would criticize it is the Soviet Union.  All societies have normative values and at times some of them are pretextual-designed to mask much baser values.  Security is a value of the Soviet system used to hide the interests of its leaders from Nikita Krushchev to Vladimir Putin, to control the population and public opinion.  Putin's record of repressive psychiatry and the imprisonment of anyone who would insult his distastefully enormous opinion of himself belies any claim that he has divested himself fully of Khrushchev's repressive regime.  Police psychiatry allows for the routine imprisonment of dissidents in mental health institutions effectively silencing all dissidents and protestors from Garry Kasparov and Andrei Sakharov to current human rights lawyers.   Before we magnanimously proffer up parts of the First Amendment on the altar of security, we should imagine living in any one of the many parts of the world where the expression of dissent is met with death, a Soviet labor camp or more typically imprisonment in an asylum.  America must never strive to be a Soviet Union.

       There is little evidence if any, to suggest that Brandon Raub is being detained or was taken into custody for violation of the NDAA.   By all appearances Brandon Raub was involuntarily taken into custody and detained under Virginia's civil commitment law.[2]  Most states have some variant of this law by which on the word of someone in the mental health profession, or a doctor, a nurse or even a social worker, a person can be locked up if they are deemed either a threat to themselves or others.  The standard of proof the person wishing to have someone else locked up under must meet is the presence of "clear and convincing evidence" at an hearing before a magistrate at which the accused is not provided an opportunity to have an independent mental health expert rebut or evaluate the evidence offered.  

       The problems with this are numerous.  Judges and lawyers are ill equipped to evaluate mental illness.   The concept of mental illness itself is a bit like ether, "[M]ental disorder is such a vacuous phrase that the law should consider dispensing with it as an independent criterion for intervention and instead simply identify as precisely as possible the types of mental dysfunction it wants to treat specially."[3]  Social workers and mental health professionals may have no basis by which to discern the difference between sincere political protest and the condition of "dangerousness to society."   Unfortunately for those involuntarily committed by other people, the clear and convincing standard is not difficult to overcome because it is not objective when applied to cases of civil commitment. 

       The Diagnostic and Statistical Manuel of Mental Disorders ("DSM") is used to categorize mental disorders but its categorizations are constantly being revised and subject to debate within the mental health field.   The authors of the DSM themselves warn against using the DSM for legal proceedings because of the danger that the diagnostic descriptions contained within it will be misunderstood and misused.   Of course, I do not mean to presume that the social worker or health care person calling for involuntary commitment has read the DSM.

       The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution prohibit the government from taking from taking away a person's "life, liberty or property" without due process of law.   Civil commitment hearings perform an end run around due process-taking away liberty without the protections given to a criminal defendant.

       This all begs the question what was it about Brandon Raub's Facebook posts that the FBI and Secret Service considered a threat?   Several of Brandon's posts expressed concern about an elite ruling class, the Federal Reserve, and the enormity of the Federal government.  He must be insane for being critical of the government in the following post written on his Facebook wall on November 11, 2011,

The Truth 
by Brandon J Raub on Friday, November 11, 2011 at 10:00 am

America has lost itself. We have lost who we truly are. This is the land of the free and the home of the brave.

This is the land of Thomas Jefferson.

This is the land of Benjamin Franklin.

This is the land of Fredrick Douglas.

This is the land of Smedley Butler.

This is the land John F. Kennedy.

This is the land of Martin Luther King.

This is the land where the cowboy wins. This is the land where you can start from the bottom and get to the top. This is the land where regardless of you race and ethnicity you can succeed and build a better life for you and your family. This is the land where every race coexists peacefully. This is the land where justice wins. This is the land where liberty dwells. This is the land where freedom reigns. This is the land where we help the poor, and people help each other. This is land where people beat racism.

The Federal Reserve is wrong. They have designed a system based off of greed and fear. They designed a system to crush the middle class between taxes and inflation. This is wrong, and it is unjust. It is wrong.

We have allowed ourselves to be deceived and seduced by the powers of the printing press. It is not a good system. It discourages saving: the foundation for all stable economic activity. The Federal Reserve is artificially manipulating interest rates and creating phony economic data.

This thing has deceived our entire nation.

They created it in 1913. They also created the income tax in 1913. They encouraged the growth of debt so they can tax you on it. There is interest on the debt. Your government is in bed with these people. They want to enslave you to the government so that they can control every aspect of your lives. It is an empire based on lies. They operate of greed and fear.

There is a better way. It's called freedom. Freedom is called a lot of things. But there is a true meaning. It means very simply that you have the right to do whatever you want as long as you are not infringing on the freedoms of other people.

I firmly believe that God set America apart from the other nations of the world. He saved a place where people could come to to escape bad systems of goverment. This system we have created works. It really works.

There is evil going on all around the world. The United States was meant to lead the charge against injustice, but through our example not our force. People do not respond to having liberty and freedom forced on them.

Men and Women follow courage. They follow leadership, and courage. Our example has paved the way for people all around the world to change their forms of government.

Force is not the way because liberty is a powerful concept. The idea that men can govern themselves is the basis for every just form of government.

We can govern ourselves. We do not need to be governed by men who want to install a one world banking system. These men have machine hearts. Machine and unnatural hearts.

They have blocked out the possibility of a better world. They fear human progress. They have monopolies on everything.

This life can be free and beautiful. There are enough resources on this earth to support the world's population. There are enough resources on this earth to feed everyone. There is enough land for everyone to own their own land and farm, and produce their own energy.

These people have been hiding technology. There are ways to create power easily. There is technology that can provide free cheap power for everyone. There are farming techniques that can feed the entire world.

The Bill of Rights is being systematically dismantled. Men have spilled their blood for those rights.

Your sons and daughters, your brothers and sisters, and Americas best young men and women are losing their limbs. They are losing their lives. They are losing the hearts. They do not know why they are fighting. They are killing. And they do not know why.

They have done some extraordinary acts. Their deeds go before them. But these wars are lies. They are lies. They deceived our entire nation with terrorism. They have gotten us to hand them our rights. Our Rights! Men died for those rights!

September Eleventh was an inside job. They blew up a third building in broad daylight. Building 7.

Your leaders betrayed you.

You elected an aristocracy. They are beholden to special interests. They were brainwashed through the Council on Foreign Relations. Your leaders are planning to merge the United States into a one world banking system. They want to put computer chips in you.

These men have evil hearts. They have tricked you into supporting corporate fascism. We gave them the keys to our country. We were not vigilant with our republic.

There is hope. BUT WE MUST TAKE OUR REPUBLIC BACK.[4]

       President Andrew Jackson was also critical of the central bank and would most certainly be detained as a lunatic or worse were he alive today by both political parties and the pundit class,   

"Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves."

       The Department of Homeland Security would consider Brandon a potential terrorist as they would also consider most of the people that express views critical of the government as potential terrorists.   According to a study by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism entitled, "Hot Spots of Terrorism and Other Crimes in the United States, 1970-2008," funded by the Department of Homeland Security, terrorists are likely people, "reverent of individual liberty...suspicious of centralized federal authority or anti-government," including people who are extremely conservative or extremely liberal.[5] 

       Do not depend on some judge or lawyer to protect your First Amendment rights.  Too often I have observed judges and lawyers slavishly reciting precedence and statute with the Constitution being but a tertiary concern.  Law review articles about involuntary civil commitment regurgitate a parade of judicial affronts on due process.   Given this way or reasoning, which is the absence of reasoning but mere recitation of the past as authority binding on the future, un-Constitutional decisions have a theoretically infinite half-life.  We need to pay attention to Brandon Raub's fate just as much as John Bradford observed the fate of fellow going to the scaffold from the Tower of London and remarked, "there but for the grace of God, goes John Bradford."  The scaffold is still there and the tower remains claiming many inhabitants who thought they would certainly never reside there.@

R. Tamara de Silva

Chicago, Illinois

August 22, 2012

R. Tamara de Silva is a securities lawyer and independent trader

Oligarchy and Its Discontents-What Money Buys

By R Tamara de Silva

August 20, 2012

            "The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The      pessimist fears it is true."

                                                J. Robert Oppenheimer

       Last week it was announced that the United States Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission would not seek any criminal charges against Goldman Sachs or for that matter the executives of MF Global including its CEO, former United States Senator Jon Corzine.  This likely surprised many people who still read the news, but actually infuriated no more than three people among them... and they were probably on the verge of becoming unhinged anyway.  Most people realize that while economists look for optimized states whose existence is perfectly beyond dispute within their own models...optimized models of the actual economy and democracy for that matter, exist only in the Great Books... and many other books.  In point of fact, the discontents of oligarchy are numerous.  While economists may not spend much time successfully modeling the real world-perhaps in part because there are no repercussions for their being in error, catastrophic events happen in the real world and are not modeled or anticipated by any economist.   Recent events like the decision to give Jon Corzine and MF Global a pass are legitimate examples of the role of money in politics and in the law. 

       Henry Adams sort of foresaw the events of last week.  Henry Adams had a privileged perch from which to view the dilemmas of American democracy as he was the great grandson of the second American President John Adams and grandson of our sixth President, John Quincy Adams.  There are certain scathing critiques of politics that have always attracted me to Henry Adams-in the same way I was drawn as child to the diatribes of Cato the Elder.  For example, he regularly wrote about the mortal danger to American democracy manifested by the role of money, especially corporate influence and how its tendency to corrupt the political system, would be the country's ultimate undoing.  In writing about the corruption of the Erie Railroad for the Westminster Review in 1870, he described corporate influence growing to the point of being unchecked,

          "swaying power such as has never in the world's history been trusted in the hands of mere private citizens,...after having created a system of quiet but irresistible corruption-will ultimately succeed in directing government itself. Under the American form of society, there is now no authority capable of effective resistance."

       He was also disturbed by the party system of politics in America and saw it to be willing to sacrifice principle for accommodation.   This theme comes out in his book, Democracy.  In Democracy the idealistic and hyper-principled heroine, Madeleine Lee is courted by the far more practical and ambitious Senator Silas P. Ratcliffe.  Madeleine decides not to marry Ratcliffe though it seems that he gets the better of her in almost all their arguments about politics.  Ratcliffe has aspirations to the White House and argues that moral authority comes from his political party the party with which he will on principle never disagree, "that great results can only be accomplished by great parties, I have uniformly yielded my own personal opinions where they have failed to obtain general assent."  

       Many of the books exchanges between Madeleine and Ratcliffe find Madeleine losing the argument.  She prefers to remain single and reject Ratcliffe and Washington at the end of the novel as she is determined to return to her philanthropic works saying, "The bitterest part of this horrid story...is that nine out of ten of our countrymen would say I had made a mistake."  And they still would.   I confess I see myself in Madeleine but one who must stay, without leaving, just out of an insatiable curiosity to observe all that will happen.

Citizens United v. FEC and the Judiciary

       Money has always played a role in politics.  Any discussion of the role of money in politics, judicial elections or law enforcement in 2012 has to consider the United States Supreme Court's January 2010 decision in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission in which the Court ruled that political spending is a form of protected speech under the First Amendment.  Citizens United allows corporations and unions to spend money to support or denounce candidates in elections through ads.  This is a titan of a case, perhaps unrivalled in its potential to alter the face of representative government in the United States because of the way that most people who vote decide on a candidate-they watch or listen to broadcast media advertisements.   However, Citizens United did not alter much of the McCain-Feingold campaign law, which still regulates corporate donations to political parties and candidates.  Nor does the case affect political action committees or PACs, which can contribute directly to candidates.

       Perhaps the greatest impact of the Citizens United decision will be in the election of state judges.  Judicial independence at one time meant independence from the Crown.  Since then the term judicial independence has come to mean the expectation (however well grounded or not) that when dealing with the justice system, a person can expect a member of the judiciary free from the appearance of personal, monetary or political bias in the outcome of the case.  This mirrors the all important principle stated in Article 40 of the Magna Carta, "To no one will we sell, to one will we refuse or delay right of justice."    

       More money spent on judicial elections, it is feared, will give rise to the impression that justice is for sale very much reminiscent of John Grisham's book, "The Appeal," wherein a billionaire CEO buys himself a state supreme court justice who rules in favor of his company on an appeal.  Grisham's book is eerily like the true story of Supreme Court of West Virginia Justice Brent Benjamin who ruled in favor of the $3,000,000 campaign donor, Don Blankenship, the CEO of A.T. Massey Coal in a case involving a $50,000,000 verdict.  The United States Supreme Court ruled that Justice Benjamin ought to have recused himself in the case Caperton v. Massey.

       There is however one place where Citizens United may have a salutary effect on the judicial system.  In Chicago's Cook County, Illinois the slating of judges is militantly political and based not on merit per se but on a candidate's payment of $25,000 to one of the members of the Judicial Slating Committee of the Cook County Democratic Party.  Judges that are slated, almost invariably win.  Citizens United cannot but have a salutary effect here because it is difficult to imagine a worse system for picking judges anywhere.

The Imperial Presidency and Money

       James Madison was a staunch advocate for the separation of powers between all three branches of government.  The authors of a recent book, "The Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic," by sitting Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner and an Adrian Vermeule from Harvard Law argue that the separation of powers is a relic of the past and largely beside the point.  Without getting into questions of judicial activism and the phenomenon of hyper-opinionated sitting justices, they are actually right from an anthropological perspective.   They are right in so far that the Executive Branch has become, with the passage of the Administrative Procedure Act and sweeping acts of legislation such as Dodd-Frank and now the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the most powerful branch of government.  The Executive has created so many branches, departments and agencies under its purview, most with rule-making ability-that its power has become tantamount to that of an imperial monarchy.

       However, Justice Posner because he seems only to view the world through the lense of a relentlessly pragmatic cost-benefit, economic analysis, draws at times predictable but disturbingly simplistic conclusions.   In their book, Justice Posner and Dr. Vermeule acknowledge the relative impotence of the other branches to keep up with or check the Executive and go on to assert that this does not much matter because Presidents are checked by elections, "liberal legalism's essential failing is that it overestimates the need for the separation of powers and even the rule of law."  

       In other words, just because Presidents are above the law, it does not matter because they will be checked by the rule of politics-they will be voted out.  This is startling simplistic and weak logic because it assumes an efficient marketplace, with equal participants and perfectly symmetrical information.  It also allows for the interpretation of the Constitution based upon a pragmatic economic analysis completely at  war with the absolute first principles and "inalienable rights" held sacred by the Founding Fathers and all the state legislators that ratified the Constitution. 

            This is also where money comes in.

       In his run for President in 2008, President Obama spend over $730 million and is expected by Reuters to raise $1 billion for 2012.  Spending for the 2012 election for all parties and candidates could, according to one estimate, top $9.8 billion in large part because of spending by super PACs.   Yet almost 25% of super PAC money comes from just five donors, Harold Simmons (pro-Romney) , Sheldon Adelson (pro-Romney), Peter Theil (pro-Ron Paul), Bob Perry (pro-Romney now) and Jeffrey Katzenberg (pro-Obama).[1]

       If money affects voting and elections, then according to Posner's logic, the people who will actually exercise the rule of politics and check the Executive Branch are to be these handful of businessmen and others like them.   According to the Center for Responsive Data, 3.7% of the contributors to super PACs account for 80% of the money raised-46 donors have given in excess of $67,000,000.[2]

Money and Prosecutions

       In the case of MF Global and Jon Corzine, Jon Corzine has been one of President Obama's elite bundlers in 2011 and 2012.  He campaigned heavily for President Obama when he was governor of New Jersey and has held private fundraisers for President Obama in his home even after MF Global went bankrupt and $1.6 billion of customer funds went missing in October 2011.  It was announced last week that he is unlikely to face any criminal charges.

       Contrast this to the Department of Justice's handling of the same violation of the Federal rule requiring the segregation of customer funds in the matter of Peregrine Financial Group.  $215 million of customer funds were discovered to be missing from customer segregated accounts in July 2012 at Peregrine Financial Group.  Russell Wasendorf Sr was arrested and criminally charged later that month.   Same act-missing customer funds-but far disparate prosecution. 

       Remember that in the futures industry, the key difference between futures commissions merchants ("FCMs") like Peregrine and MF Global and securities brokerages is that FCMs, unlike securities brokers, are required by law to keep their customer funds segregated from the FCM's own funds.   It is in this way that FCMs have been able, with comparatively few exceptions, to ensure that customer deposits are completely protected from all losses an FCM may incur due to its own proprietary trading.   Before MF Global, the requirement that FCMs segregate customer funds completely from their own funds largely prevented FCM customers from losing money due to an FCM bankruptcy

       In my first article on MF Global, I suggested that the $1.2 billion missing from customer segregated funds may have been incurred due to over-leveraged positions in European sovereign debt that coincidentally took a dramatic turn for the worse (as they did in fact as yield curves doubled rapidly in some issues) during the last weeks of October, and that funds were transferred to cover margin in customer funds held in European debt.   There is a scenario that nothing illegal would have occurred because CFTC Rule 1.25 had been amended to permit the investment of customer segregated funds in foreign sovereign debt.  Keep in mind that this rule was amended by Jon Corzine's lobbying of Commodity Futures Trading Commission ("CFTC") Chairman Gary Gensler, who is a friend and colleague of Jon Corzine.

        An alternate illegal scenario is that MF Global may have engaged in some late stage embezzlement of customer funds that were supposed to be segregated from MF Global's accounts and never commingled with any other funds.[3] One way this may have occurred is if the funds were transferred out of customer segregated funds for a legal purpose but without the customers' meaningful consent or, more likely, with an intent to deceive the customer.  

       If MF Global transferred customer funds out of segregated accounts as a loan to MF Global to cover margin calls in existing positions in sovereign debt, (perfectly legal)[4], it may however, be fraud and intent to deceive on its part if MF Global knew it could not repay the money.  This fraud may have occurred if MF Global knew (and it would be interesting to argue how it did not) that it sought to legally borrow from customer funds, knowing that it was de facto insolvent and could not replace the money.   

       During Senate and House hearings on MF Global, Terrance Duffy, the CEO of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange contradicted Corzine's testimony and stated that the CME's investigation of the MF Global matter revealed the existence of emails between MF Global's assistant treasurer and Jon Corzine.  These emails where contrary to what Corzine told Congress and suggested that Corzine had in fact authorized the transfer of customer funds out of customer accounts-the funds that went missing.   We also know that while Jon Corzine claimed he knew nothing about the financials at MF Global, he was peddling them to Interactive Brokers as he was trying to broker a last minute sale of MF Global to Interactive Brokers--in other words, he had to have been extremely familiar with MF Global's financials during the exact time period he claims to Congress to know nothing of what was happening.

       We still do not know everything that really happened at MF Global because the Department of Justice has not yet decided to grant any immunity to the one person who would be their chief witness in the matter, the Assistant Treasurer.  The Assistant Treasurer is represented by Reid H. Weingarten, who is as luck would have it, is one of United States Attorney General Eric Holder's best friends.   Some could say they agreed to let the clock run out on this one. 

       From a purely economic cost benefit analysis, Jon Corzine's raising in excess of $500,000 for President Obama in 2012 alone was the smartest money he ever spent and appears to have bought him justice in the sense of a reprieve from the CEO of Peregrine's fate.

      What about Mr. Adelson?  The billionaire casino magnate is being investigated for possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, money-laundering and bribery.  Perhaps contributing by some accounts close to $100 million towards Mr. Romney's election would ensure a stop to the pesky Federal investigators.  If so, this would be money entirely worth spending.

       This brings us to the last bit of news from last week that Goldman Sachs would not be investigated for criminal wrong-doing in connection with mortgage crisis and certain deals like ABACUS. 

       This Justice Department  and SEC have gotten many investment banks to execute settlement agreements with them including Goldman and Citigroup-essentially selling "get out of jail cards." Are these settlement agreements, as the Judge Rakoff and Bloomberg's Jonathan Weil have asked, merely considered the "cost of doing business" or some part of a transaction tax on offending financial titans?[5]   

       If it were in the public's interest to prevent fraud upon the market, then fines should be significant enough to actually deter illegal conduct.  If not, prosecutions should be endured and convictions gotten.    The historic role of punishment in the criminal justice system has not been just punishment, but deterrence.  Having Citigroup or GS pay $285 million is pin money to banks with quarterly revenue in the billions of dollars-the "cost of doing business" is not a deterrent to anyone but more like the cost of a municipal parking sticker to the average Joe.

       What is problematic about bank settlements is that smaller market participants cannot afford to pay for "get out of jail cards" and because the costs of prosecuting anyone other than an investment bank are less, smaller participants are actually prosecuted and do get jail time.   Peter Boyer and Government Accountability President Peter Schweizer have written about how justice is for sale in Mr. Eric Holder's Department of Justice pointing to the fact that despite President Obama's claims to represent the 99%, Department of Justice "criminal prosecutions are at 20 year lows for corporate securities and bank fraud." [6]  Given the correlation between campaign contributions (admittedly protected speech) and selective prosecutions, the 20 year low in bank fraud prosecutions is unlikely to change  with either political party.

       Consider the money.  Goldman Sachs employees were the second largest single contributor to President Obama in 2008 contributing $1,013,091.[7]   Goldman's employees are the largest single contributor to Mr. Romney in the 2012 election cycle having donated $636,080 by the end of the last quarter.[8]   Goldman Sachs is also one of the largest clients of Mr. Eric Holder's lawyer firm Covington & Burling.

       Money has always played a part in politics and it is rational for everyone with a stake in the political process to participate.  But not all participation is equal-not even close.  The odds of one vote ever making a difference in a Presidential election are between 1 in 10 million and 1 in 100 million-depending upon the state in which you live.  Voting only matters in the aggregate but money seems to matter more in terms of affecting action after election.    Above all, justice must never be for sale because as Cato the Elder and many others have pointed out throughout history the selling of justice, like the selling of indulgences, is an attribute of a decaying and dying political system.

       What is disconcerting is that mere principles, be they the adherence to ideas like freedom and individual liberty or the idea that you are secure in the sanctity of your own home, are always bound to be under-represented in the electoral process and as such destined to play the underdogs.   At one point in Democracy, Madeleine asks the impressive Ratcliffe, "Surely...something can be done to check corruption.  Are we for ever to be at the mercy of thieves and ruffians?  Is respectable government impossible in democracy?"  Ratcliffe's reply is haunting, "No representative government...can long be much better or much worse than the society it represents.  Purify society and you purify the government.  But try to purify the government artificially and you only aggravate failure. @

R. Tamara de Silva

Chicago, Illinois

August 20, 2012

R. Tamara de Silva is a securities lawyer and independent trader

Today a divided Supreme Court held that the individual mandate within the Affordable Care Act ("ACA") is Constitutional (567 U. S. ____ (2012))[1] . The 193 page opinion contains an excellent discourse on the Commerce Clause, state rights, un-enumerated rights and what are supposed to be the limits of the Federal government's power, making the jist of the ruling all the more extraordinary, if not ironic. The decision is remarkable because it is the first time in our history that it has been held that the United States Constitution permits a financial penalty for non-performance of an economic act to be treated as a tax. According to Chief Justice John G. Roberts, "The Affordable Care Act's requirement that certain individuals pay a financial penalty for not obtaining health insurance may reasonably by characterized as a tax...Because the Constitution permits such a tax, it is not our role to forbid it, or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness." As of this writing I cannot think of another example where the non-performance of an act results in the levying of a Federal tax. Federal tax is generally levied on such things as income, investment income and the consumption of certain goods like alcohol, gasoline guzzling cars, telephones, duck stamps, et. al.

In writing about President Obama's healthcare law earlier in the year, I pointed out that the Supreme Court would rule upon the Constitutionality of the ACA based upon three criteria, the Commerce Clause, the Taxing Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clauses within the United States Constitution.[2] Like most others, I dismissed the possibility that the Supreme Court would utilize the Taxing Clause to uphold the individual mandate of the ACA because the mandate is a penalty or punishment rather than a tax, and the purpose of taxes has historically always been to raise revenue - not to be punitive. Apparently I was completely in error.

Commerce Clause Preserved

The Supreme Court's decision was always to be of monumental importance to either keeping the Government's powers under the Commerce Clause checked, or allowing them to be let upon the nation, unfettered, limitless and absolute. The Supreme Court correctly stated that were the ACA to be upheld under the Commerce Clause it, "would open a new and potentially vast domain to congressional authority." The Framers knew the difference between regulating commerce and using the power of the Commerce Clause to coerce commerce and every act that may in the aggregate of all people performing it, have any impact on commerce. Had the Supreme Court upheld the ACA under the Commerce Clause, Congress would be able to regulate absolutely everything in America under its ability to regulate commerce.

Chief Justice John Marshall wrote almost two hundred years ago in Gibbons v. Ogden, 22 U.S. 1 (1824), that Congress' power under the Commerce Clause is the power, "to prescribe the rule by which commerce is to be governed. This power, like all others vested in Congress, is complete in itself, may be exercised to its utmost extent, and acknowledges no limitations, other than are prescribed in the Constitution." [3] Congress has long had the power to regulate insurance and as such and to some degree, health insurance. [4] Chief Justice Roberts rejected the Government's argument for the individual mandate based on congressional use of the Commerce Clause because he stated that Congress had a power to regulate commerce not to create it. In all five Justices rejected the argument that the individual mandate of the ACA would pass Constitutional muster under the Commerce Clause, Chief Justice Roberts, Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito.

The ACA was meant to help the over 50 million or so Americans without health-care coverage, and to ensure that those with health insurance coverage do not lose it. Much of the most politically broad based support for healthcare reform is based on legitimate concerns over runaway health-care costs. Many opponents of the ACA, while acknowledging problems with the current health care system have suggested alternatives to a national health care plan but their solutions place them squared against two of the most powerful lobbied interests in Washington, insurance companies and tort lawyers. Advocates for private sector solutions like opening up the health care market to allow individuals to purchase insurance across state lines and to select only the type of coverage they need, argue that these two solutions alone would automatically make health care more affordable to a majority of Americans by driving insurance premiums down. It is difficult to argue that medical tort reform, curtailing frivolous medical malpractice suits, and the curbing of medical drug class action suits (plaintiffs for which are shamelessly solicited on every channel during every day of prime time television) would not help the entire medical industry-though who will take on the tort bar?

Those who do not have health insurance and use the emergency room or public hospitals when sick (what are called "cost-shifters") shift an immense economic cost on those who have health insurance and the insurance industry as a whole. Ironically what today's Supreme Court ruling does not address, because it is not addressed in the ACA, is that fact that the largest cost-shifters, illegal aliens (who account of $8.1 billion in health care costs) and low-income persons (who are already covered by Medicaid, at the cost of $15 billion per annum) will be exempt from the mandated health care regime of ACA. The most important feature in the over 2,700 page ACA is its individual mandate because this was always intended to shift some of the costs of health care to the healthy and the voluntarily uninsured -requiring that these groups, and ironically not the costliest cost-shifters, purchase private insurance.

Mandate as a Tax But Not a Penalty?

The purpose of taxation is to raise revenue. The purpose of penalties is to punish and deter unwanted behavior-sometimes, as in the case of the individual mandate, with the promise of criminal prosecution. The two have historically been distinct though with some overlap. For example, there are legal penalties for speeding (below what rises to the charge of reckless driving), streaking, violating the copyright laws or removing stickers from mattresses. Some of these penalties carry fines but the purpose of these fines is not to raise revenue so much as it is to deter conduct. In essence, no where even in the labyrinth of the IRS Code are streaking or removing mattress labels "taxable events."

Chief Justice Roberts, joined by Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, Kagan and Sotomayor agreed with the Government's argument that the individual mandate within the ACA constitutes a tax on people who do not buy health insurance and is permissive under Congress' taxing power. Here is where the logic of Justice Roberts' opinion gets tougher to follow.

How can the individual mandate, which imposes a financial penalty upon anyone who does not purchase health insurance after 2014, and is not exempt from doing so, be called anything other than a penalty? Chief Justice Roberts states that what the mandate is called (Congressional Democrats and the White House have referred to the mandate as a penalty and not a tax-ACA itself refers to the mandate as a penalty) is not determinative of what it is. His opinion states that the individual mandate is distinguishable from a penalty because, "the mandate is not a legal command to buy insurance,"-it is a requirement that people who do not purchase insurance pay the IRS a fine. If this seems like a distinction without a discernable difference-you would not be alone in thinking so. Chief Justice Roberts argues that the failure of an individual to purchase health insurance would not, while subjecting that person to an IRS fine, be unlawful. If this is true, I do not advise passing this along as a defense if the fine is not paid...

Congress may have stumbled upon a new way to mandate every type of behavior the Court correctly forewarned against it using the Commerce Clause to mandate, by use of the Taxing Clause. Losing the distinction between penalties and taxes may prove a slippery and dangerous slope-one that institutionally empowers the lawmaker and makes mincemeat of the ability of the hapless individual to any longer avoid doing any number of things-such as not purchasing any number of items that she simply does not want. Thinking through the potential abuses for Court's reasoning in this instance is disturbing. There is more to the Court's opinion deserving of analysis but the use of the Taxing Clause to uphold the ACA's individual mandate, is a legal and historical first.

Ultimately, like so many things that happen in American life and political discourse, the jury of public opinion will come down on the Court's decision as it does on so much else-along deepening political battle lines between current iterations of liberalism and progressivism. Not everything must be about politics but perhaps it must when the country seems deeply divided within itself about the role of its government. Divided between those who want the government merely to assure equal opportunity to all and those who seek a far more idealized realization of fairness, and even a greater equality of outcomes. What we are lacking is a jury fixed merely on preserving the freedoms and institutions of the Constitution.@

R. Tamara de Silva

June 28, 2012
Chicago, Illinois

R. Tamara de Silva is an independent trader and lawyer

Footnotes:
1. http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/11-393c3a2.pdf
2. http://www.timelyobjections.com/2012/03/difficult-legal-issues-in-the-healthcare-case-before-the-supreme-court.html
3. Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803). at pp. 196
4. Think of ERISA, CORBRA, HIPAA, et. al.

Much ado is being made about J. P. Morgan's disclosure of over $2 billion in trading losses and one hopes the media and regulators do not use this as yet another opportunity to completely miss the point. Wall street must not rely exclusively on its present risk models that are based exclusively on VaR and variations of VaR-it must learn to think outside its own box and anticipate worse case scenarios. We cannot afford to have many more systemic crises that threaten to bring down the financial system simply because yet again, the unexpected and un-modeled occurs.

Chief Executive Jamie Dimon's public self-flagellation aside, this loss compromises merely 20% percent of J. P. Morgan's pretax profit for the first quarter of this year. Put another way, J. P. Morgan has a market capitalization of $137.4 billion of which $2 billion comprises a bit more than 1 percent--hardly fodder for anyone's angst against quasi-public Wall Street juggernauts that seem to privatize profit and publicize loss being 'too big to fail." Mr. Dimon is wrong to assert that the trading losses were the result of hedges. It would be more wrong for lawmakers on either side of the aisle to call for hasty regulations on an industry they have never really understood and from whose pockets they are lobbied and receive the heftiest campaign contributions. A cursory look at what has happened to the Volcker Rule illustrates this point. The real lesson of J. P. Morgan's $2.3 billion loss is that Wall Street must once and for all adjust the way it manages and understands risk.

Risk management is the difference between success and ruin in the financial markets and its failure is felt around the world by even those hapless individuals who have never sold a credit derivative. No where is the importance of risk management better illustrated than to recount our most recent crises, which according to Wall Street's most prevalent measurement of risk, Value at Risk (VaR), were never supposed to happen: The market crashes of 1987 and 2000, Long-Term Capital Management, the collapse of Bear Stearns, the Savings and Loan Crisis, the crash of 1929, the collapse of Northern Rock, the Russian Debt crisis. Understanding risk is the single most important consideration for any participant, from the independent trader to the juggernaut of a Goldman Sachs.

But what does Wall Street understand by the term risk? There are many discussions of what constitutes "risk" in the financial markets but not surprisingly, there is no one definition. Typically, discussions of risk revolve around the concepts of Value at Risk (VAR), beta, delta, the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) and the Black-Scholes options pricing model (BSM). All these ways of quantifying risk are based on inarguably faulty assumptions.

This is where a refresher on the Gaussian Bell Curve enters any discussion on Wall Street's risk models. There are really only two things worth knowing about a Gaussian Bell Curve this is also taught to the legions of business school graduates who go on to write risk models as analysts and traders on Wall Street. The first is that a Gaussian Bell Curve assumes events occur in a normal distribution. What this means is that in a Gaussian Bell Curve, if events or occurrences were plotted, they would occur in the largest numbers at or towards the very center of the bell curve. All these events, plotted on a chart would take the shape of a bell curve, hence the name. Events which occur less frequently would occur towards the edges of the curve. The further the event was from the center of the bell curve, the more improbable it is to occur. This is called a normal distribution. The second thing one should know about the Gaussian Bell Curve, perhaps less well taught is that it does not predict market events very well at all.

Analysts at investment banks make models of reality with predictive capability-it is called modeling. J. P. Morgan invented Risk Metrics in 1994 as a set of financial models that were to be used by investors to measure portfolio risk. Risk Metrics like financial modeling in general, attempts to take a certain set of variables or causes and isolate them as being the very variables that account for change in financial markets. This is a bit simplistic but works reasonably well when reality happens within the fat center of a bell curve. Financial models seek to replicate financial reality much like economic models and models of human behavior that have become extremely popular in the social sciences writ large. Financial risk models like social science models suffer from all the weakness and frailty of over-simplifying reality and selectively isolating causal variables. In sum, financial risk models fail catastrophically when worse-case scenarios or even the genuinely unexpected occurs.

This does not mean we have a reasonable alternative to risk models as we humans do not like indeterminacy. We do not like to make decisions or look back in hindsight and think we made decisions by tossing a coin. On the contrary, we like to find reasons for why we made decisions and why events occurred. We tend to think we can. We have at times an irrational belief in the rational. But as Pascal once stated, nothing is more rational than the abdication of reason itself. The ability of social scientists or investment bankers to explain events through the actions of rational human actors appeals to our psyche. It is appealing simply to think we can.

Models of the financial markets like models of the human behavior in the social sciences have serious limitations. To start, they have to simplify reality. One of the ways that modeling simplifies and in a sense, falsifies reality is by making assumptions about human beings, which are not true. For example, modeling tends to assume that humans, whether in a marketplace or in a poker game are rational and that they act at all times in accordance with their best interests. This is not borne out by reality. Any cursory historical account of human behavior belies that humans act rationally. Human beings are emotional actors as much as they are rational actors.

The supremacy of emotions to the human story is only matched by our social scientists willful neglect of them. However, given a choice, time and again, we often act on our emotions and against our rational interests. Our strongest emotions keep us awake at night, they cause us physical pain, they have helped our race to achieve beyond all expectation when at other times they have left us paralyzed. We think wishfully when we rationally should not. The markets are replete with examples of irrational exuberance, traders who act out of hope, fear and greed as much as they act out of a consistent rational interest in maximizing their profits. Markets historically at tops and bottoms have betrayed the irrational mob mentally of the masses of its participants.

If humans were truly rational, we simply would not have addictive behaviors like gambling, drug addiction, drinking or any self-destructive behavior. We may not even have much ill-health, skin cancer, road-rage, or obesity because knowing we should take care of ourselves, we would-this is rational. We may never purchase luxury items or clothes. We may not care so much about how our neighbors live because we would not feel envy, jealousy, sympathy or pity. The pursuit of leisure and charitable activities may well be quite different. So many of Tocqueville's observations about American life would not hold water.

But in reality, half of our brains are devoted to pure emotion. And this half has expressed itself as the stuff of life. We cannot seem to choose our emotions one at a time either. If we were, we would want to be able to love without being vulnerable to grief, to experience the wings of hope without putting ourselves in danger of experiencing disappointment or the failure of our hoped-for event. As a race, we have spent most of our time acting on our emotions and being in their grip as is borne out in our history, our mythologies, culture, our wars and literature. It is in every sense human to be irrational or at least to experience emotion. To argue that humans are rational actors is at a minimum to simplify things, but really it is not a valid assumption.

Modeling also suffers from faulty assumptions about the ability of human participants to gather, assimilate and react to information. Most models are sensitive to information. Information causes the rational actor in a model to act a certain way, presumably in a way that will maximize that actor's interests. In the real world, information is not perfect. There is misinformation. Rumors, false tips, erroneous analyst reports are example of misinformation. Some information that is available to a rational actor is false information. Even if we assumed that all the information available to market participants was correct and no false or misinformation was available, market participants would process and assimilate the information differently and at different rates. One example of misinformation and information assimilated at different times is the discovery of a report in 2008 on the internet that United Airlines was facing bankruptcy. This report was over a year old but it caused the price of the stock to drop by over 40% in a single day, before it was discovered that the report was old. In the real world, individually and collectively, we have different intellectual and ideological frameworks, we also have different levels of intelligence, among other factors that allow us to reach very different conclusions when faced with the same information. My neighbor may react to rising gasoline prices years faster than I would by immediately cutting down on his driving or purchasing a hybrid vehicle. Market participants react to identical information at various rates. One person may react quickly to too little information and another may wait much longer accumulating much more information. Sometimes waiting to act while accumulating and digesting information is not a good thing like waiting to liquidate a losing position before your losses wipe you out when acting sooner would have allowed you to cut your loss without going broke.

Another problem with financial models is that they do not account for insider information or conflicts of interest. A good idea for anyone with a year to spare would be to write a volume chronicling conflict of interest in the financial world. One of the inherent conflicts in investment banks has been the Chinese wall that is supposed to separate the investment banking and sales functions of the investment house from the research and analysis side. Some have argued that this Chinese wall did not always exist. There is an inherent conflict between the need to sell the investment banking services of a bank to the same customer who is being covered by the bank's analysts. There is an enormous and still unresolved conflict of interest in the functions of credit ratings agencies. The credit ratings agencies are paid by the issuers (their clients) of the securities they were supposed to evaluate, creating an inherent conflict of interest. If the analysts or agencies are too harsh in their coverage, then the ability of the bank to sell its investment banking services may suffer or the agencies will lose their clients.

What about the potentially insider information that the analysts obtained in covering a company and the danger that this information would travel across the room to the trading floor of the investment bank? Another conflict of interest certainly, but it is also an example of a market participant having insider information or simply information that other market participants do not have, before they have it.

Another fallacy with financial modeling is that models are required to isolate a fixed amount of causal variables. In other words, a financial model that was designed to predict the risk of an investment portfolio would be comprised of say twenty factors or variables, each of which or a certain number of which would affect a change in measure of risk to the investment portfolio. What if in reality, it was one hundred or ten thousand different variables or things that would change the riskiness of the portfolio?

The financial models of investment bank analysts and traders assign likelihood to the possibility of certain events occurring. Financial models assume a normal distribution (a bell curve) of asset returns or risk. Using a normal distribution, events that diverge from the mean or center of the bell curve, by five or more standard deviations, known as a five-sigma event, are very rare and ten-sigma events are nearly impossible. However, the 1987 market crash represents a change of 22 standard deviations. The odds of such a 22 standard deviation event occurring are so low as to deemed impossible.

In the real financial markets, events considered nearly impossible by financial models assuming normal distributions of events, not only are possible, they are occurring frequently. There have been multiple fluctuations greater than five standard deviations in our most recent past. Events that according to a Gaussian Bell Curve are supposed to occur only once every one hundred thousand years, if at all, are occurring in certain cases, several times in a decade. Dramatic market events or fat tails do occur in a greater frequency than is possible assuming normal distributions suggesting distributions are not normal. Since the 1998 Russian debt crisis, the global financial markets have experienced at least 10 events, none of which were supposed to occur more than once every few billion years.

The financial services industry is full of at least two generations of analysts, investment bankers, statisticians and of course economists, who have been indoctrinated through college, their masters and MBA programs to believe in the bell curve and normal distributions-it is beyond time that they learned to think outside the box. Alternatively, to the extent that any regulations are enacted, they should seek to once more separate investment banking from commercial banking so that as long as Wall Street relies on one VaR number, they are allowed to fail and their losses are never again shared by the public. @
R. Tamara de Silva

May 14, 2012
Chicago, Illinois

R. Tamara de Silva is an independent trader and lawyer

It not typical in the course of oral arguments for a Federal Judge to assign the Department of Justice and the Attorney General a homework assignment. Yesterday, the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit heard oral arguments involving the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act ("ACA" or "Obamacare") when something extraordinary happened. The Court was hearing oral arguments on an appeal by the Physicians Hospitals of America and Texas Spine & Joint Hospital, Lts, for the dismissal of an action they had filed for declaratory and injunctive relief against Kathleen Sebelius, as Secretary of the United States Department of Health and Human Services to prevent enforcement of Section 6001 of the ACA. During the Appellee's arguments, Judge Jerry Smith, interrupted the Department of Justice's lawyer, Dana Lydia Kaersvang to ask her whether the Department of Justice, an arm of the Executive Branch, agreed with statements made by President Obama that seemed to indicate that the Executive Branch did not believe the Judicial Branch had the power to overturn laws it found violated the Constitution.

"Judge Smith: Does the Department of Justice recognize that federal courts have the authority in appropriate circumstances to strike federal statutes because of one or more constitutional infirmities?
Ms. Kaersvang: Yes, your honor. Of course, there would need to be a severability analysis, but yes.
Judge Smith: I'm referring to statements by the president in the past few days to the effect...that it is somehow inappropriate for what he termed "unelected" judges to strike acts of Congress that have enjoyed -- he was referring, of course, to Obamacare -- what he termed broad consensus in majorities in both houses of Congress.
That has troubled a number of people who have read it as somehow a challenge to the federal courts or to their authority or to the appropriateness of the concept of judicial review. And that's not a small matter. So I want to be sure that you're telling us that the attorney general and the Department of Justice do recognize the authority of the federal courts through unelected judges to strike acts of Congress or portions thereof in appropriate cases.
Ms. Kaersvang: Marbury v. Madison is the law, your honor, but it would not make sense in this circumstance to strike down this statute, because there's no...
Judge Smith: I would like to have from you by noon on Thursday...a letter stating what is the position of the attorney general and the Department of Justice, in regard to the recent statements by the president, stating specifically and in detail in reference to those statements what the authority is of the federal courts in this regard in terms of judicial review. That letter needs to be at least three pages single spaced, no less, and it needs to be specific. It needs to make specific reference to the president's statements and again to the position of the attorney general and the Department of Justice." [1]

On Monday President Obama stated that, "I am confident the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress." The President's statement is false in that he discounts over two hundred years of the Federal Court exercising its power of judicial review to do just that.

The Judicial Branch's power of judicial review arises out of Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803), wherein Chief Justice John Marshall established the United States Supreme Court's power of judicial review. In this case, Justice Marshall pointed out that the Constitution is "the fundamental and paramount law of the nation" and that "an act of the legislature repugnant to the constitution is void."[2] The Constitution is the nation's highest law and when an act of Congress conflicts with it, that act is to be held invalid.

To be fair, the words of the President, keeping in mind he is the head of the Executive Branch, attacking the power of a co-equal branch of government, in this instance the Judicial Branch, are not unprecedented nor constrained to one political party. President George W. Bush criticized "unelected judges" and their power to go against the will of the people. Both conservatives and liberals reliably point to the hand of judicial activism when things do not go their way. Some so-called Supreme Court experts go so far as to assert that a Supreme Court justice will ever only view any given issue of law through either a Democratic or Republican prism-ruling out any allegiance or oath to the Constitution or the complexity of Constitutional law-of course to many of these experts, there is no complexity to the law or other matters, other than what falls between bold ideological demarcations.

Perhaps the most famous Supreme Court skeptic was President Franklin D. Roosevelt. President Roosevelt displayed a contempt for the Supreme Court calling it the Court of "Nine Old Men" because in 1937, six of the justices were age 70 or more and the youngest one a mere 61. When the Supreme Court held the Railroad Retirement Act of 1934, and the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 un-Constitutional, President Roosevelt famously complained that the plainly archaic court had applied "the horse-and-buggy definition of interstate commerce." In order to remedy their apparent senility or his belief that they would only continue to strike down several parts of the New Deal, he came up with a plan in the form of a bill that would require all Supreme Court Justices to retire at 70 or have the President appoint a younger justice to serve alongside them.

Since Roosevelt, Presidential candidates from George Wallace to Newt Gingrich have run on platforms promising to rein in the Judiciary in the way they think appropriate.

Somehow, the Founding Fathers managed a design that would anticipate even the hyper-politicization of the present day. A powerful reason for the Constitution's establishment of three equal and separate branches of government was to ensure that each branch would serve as a check and balance on the others-in theory not permitting one to become too powerful. Unelected judges were intended to be removed from shifting political tides and ensure that political mobs and their demagogues would not overrun the basic protections of freedom guaranteed by the United States Constitution. The law of the land would not be held hostage to it's the shifting agendas of political parties or vain ideology. To anyone but an ideologue, the unelected nature of Supreme Court judges and the lifetime tenure of Federal Court judges are not bad things.

Judge Smith's asking the Department of Justice to clarify whether the words of its boss were those of the Attorney General and the posture of the Department of Justice is extraordinary. Many would argue that Congress, politicians of every stripe and Presidents violate a respect and regard for the other branch of the government by routinely criticizing the Judiciary and politicizing everything. All pretense of a kinder gentler discourse on matters of public policy may have gone the way of the Dodo to be replaced by discourse at the lowest common denominator. So perhaps Federal judges should be above the fray and not get sullied by stepping into political brawls. A counter-argument might be that if I make one legal argument to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals during oral arguments and the moment I walk outside the building contradict what I have just said by making another legal argument, the Court of Appeals would have a right to inquire what my position really is. Perhaps because President Obama is essentially a litigant in the appeal and his suggestion of judicial review being unprecedented, radical enough a legal posture, Judge Smith's query of the Department of Justice is reasonable.@
R. Tamara de Silva

April 4, 2012
Chicago, Illinois

R. Tamara de Silva is an independent trader and lawyer

Footnotes:
1. http://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/OralArgumentRecordings.aspx?prid=257465
2. 5 U.S. 137 (1803)

Update- Department of Justice Responds to the Court:
April 5, 2012: Attorney General Eric Holder responds to Judge Jerry Smith-the full text of his letter is here: AG letter to 5th Circuit .pdf
Mr. Holder states that his letter should not be taken as a supplemental brief and does not concern the arguments before the Court but points to the presumptive Constitutionality of Federal statutes and quotes two Federal judges who did not find Obamacare to be violative of the Constitution.

Footnotes:
1. 11. 5 U.S. 137 (1803)

Yesterday, Standard & Poor's relieved the Eurozone's bail-out fund, the European Financial Stability Facility ("EFSF") of its AAA credit rating, possibly hampering the fund's ability to contain the European debt crisis. This comes on the heel's of the S&P stripping both France and Austria of their triple-A rating in favor of a rating of AA+.[1] The effect of the S&P downgrade may be negative. Ratings agencies exist to level asymmetries in information and evaluate risk but one of their inherent oddities is that they seek to compare things whose differences in scale make them incomparable. Ratings agencies also have conflicts of interests, they often evaluate financial products (like collateralized debt obligations) that they do not understand, they seem to lack fixed ways to measure absolute risk, and they are at times, catastrophically wrong.

Elephants and aardvarks

Downgrades should not be considered in a vacuum. When the ratings agencies equate economies based upon ability to repay debt, they artificially equate countries disregarding factors such as size, geo-political risk and political infrastructure that make their comparisons odd.

S&P announced on August 5, 2011 that it would downgrade the credit rating of the United States. Interestingly it announced during the last day of this same month that while the world's only superpower and largest economy would now get only a AA+ rating, securities backed by sub-prime home loans, the same type of investments that led to the worst financial debacle since the Depression (and one from which we have not yet arguably recovered) would receive its once coveted triple AAA rating...unlike the United States.

There is no question that the United States will be able to repay its debts, we will continue to print more money-the larger issue is the continual erosion in the Dollar over time. Although a currency cannot be devalued ad infinitum without catastrophic results, at least for the time being, there is no credible replacement for the Dollar continuing to be the world's reserve currency. No other nation has the assets to back up being the world's reserve currency.

Looking at the S&P's downgrade of the United States in a vacuum, one would think that it is more prudent (according to all three ratings agencies), to prefer Austria, Denmark, Norway, France, Germany, Singapore, Luxemburg, the Swiss or even Finland. There is no consensus by all three agencies on countries like Hong Kong, Australia and the Isle of Mann. Yet other than ratings, the similarity ends there. Comparing the United States, the largest and most analyzed economy in the world with relatively petite nations like Luxemburg and Finland are like comparing the teeth of an otter and an elephant-one is so remarkably larger than the other that a comparison seems problematic. Admittedly both animals have teeth. Or like comparing the speed of an elephant and an aardvark.

To put the utility of comparison between the United States, which has a GDP of $14.657 trillion, in perspective, here are the GDPs of some of the remaining triple AAA rated countries in 2010 according to the IMF [2] :

• Luxemburg has a GDP of $52.43 billion,
• Germany's GDP is $3.314 trillion (largest in the EU)
• France $ 2.582 trillion,
• United Kingdom $2.172 trillion
• Lichtenstein $4.83 billion
• China $10 trillion (largest behind United States)

Comparing the largest most innovate, most scrutinized economy in the world to a nation like China is humorous because in terms of actual accounting standards, any meaningful transparency, the complete absence of a stable democracy or political freedoms-China is a peasant country. When the United States is downgraded, there is no other United States to compare it to, so to some extent, the rating downgrade may not be absolutely everything the media proclaims it to be.

Effect of downgrade on United States so far

When the markets opened on the first Monday after S&P's downgrade of the United States, the benchmark 10-year Treasury bond's yield dropped to 2.5%. Price, which is inverse to yield in bonds, has continued to increase even approaching all-time historic levels. This past August, the 10-year yield dropped almost 60 basis points, piercing below 2% (lower than their historic all-time low in 2008 when Lehman Brothers collapsed). The demand for United States' Treasuries has increased dramatically immediately following the S&P downgrade.

If the United States were deemed less credit worthy (less likely to pay its creditors), then investors and bond holders would demand higher returns for buying any U.S. debt/bonds. The very ability of the United States to borrow money by issuing bonds would be jeopardized. The market has ruled against this logic and to a large extent against S&P-justifiably so.

Remember a government bond is a debt instrument issued by a national government denominated in that government's currency. United States Treasury securities are valued in US dollars-their price is in United States Dollars.

A risk-free interest rate is the nominal rate of return for an investment with no risk (no credit risk) [3] of financial loss. The risk-free rate of return for almost all this century was the yield of United States Treasuries.

graph.pdf

Why would the market seemingly disregard the opinion of S&P? Perhaps because many people remembered that during the housing bubble, sketchy loans (once again I proffer this as a new legal term of art) were repackaged by investment banks into investment pools and other mortgage backed securities and received the gold standard of financial ratings, the coveted and in theory elusive, AAA rating by the largest credit ratings agencies, including S&P and Moody's. S&P's granting of triple AAA ratings to companies and investment vehicles that turned into junk ratings caused $2 trillion in losses to everyone that relied on them-basically, everyone. No one else seemed to find it ironic that this same agency told the United States by how much it thought its debt should be lowered.

Conflicts of interest and fraud

But back to the credit ratings agencies... Not that long ago, in August 2010 and again in July of 2010, the SEC threatened to charge all three ratings agencies with fraud. Some would say better late than never. During the housing bubble, sketchy loans (I use this as a new legal term of art) were repackaged by investment banks into investment pools and other mortgage backed securities and received the gold standard of financial ratings, the coveted and in theory elusive, AAA rating by the largest credit ratings agencies, including S&P and Moody's. The agencies' granting of triple AAA ratings to companies and investment vehicles that turned into junk ratings caused billions if not trillions of dollars in losses to everyone that relied on them-basically, everyone. The credit ratings agencies are paid by the issuers (their clients) of the securities they were supposed to evaluate, creating an inherent conflict of interest. They were the game's referee and one of its players at the same time.

The SEC report on Credit Ratings Agencies from June 2007 identified another problem other than having the referee in a match being paid by one of the sides, (not the investors or the public's side mind you), that prevented the agencies from giving accurate ratings. The agencies could not give accurate ratings of many of the instruments involved in the housing bubble and credit crisis because of the complexity of the transactions involved and the inability of agencies to understand what they were analyzing.

One could argue that the agencies were not engaging in a deliberate (alright not a horribly deliberate) fraud, that is having a public position of trust, being paid and knowing they cannot do what they are assigned to do but pretending to do it anyway. Mind you, if anyone else had engaged in this behavior, they would have likely been indicted for fraud and possibly RICO.

What may let the agencies off the hook is that they relied on the issuers' (the clients again, usually investment banks) audit committees. Audit committees cannot seem to be comprised of Chia Pets in human dimension. The fact that these committees represented having signed off on the financial instruments in question should mean something-if not, why have these corporate committees?!

Furthermore, one could argue that the credit ratings agencies must not be held responsible for their ratings because they did not and could not have understood the trading transactions taking place at the investment banks because they had to rely on the information they were given which was not itself transparent.

A possible longer term solution to the conflict of interest driven nature of the credit ratings agencies is to take away the compensation structure of the credit ratings agencies and deregulate them completely in-order to discourage inherent conflict of interest or use the Credit Spread Market-problem solved! Take away what is essentially a government-sponsored monopoly of credit ratings agencies and allow investor paid credit ratings agencies, which could open up the market and privatize the ratings industry. Without credit ratings agencies, the market will determine value more efficiently than the analysts at the agencies. A problem with this approach is that there might be variance between the ratings of twenty agencies as opposed to just three, causing the rating on any one agency to mean less and to make more work for risk managers.

No liability

S&P has somehow avoided to this very day, all criminal and civil liability for its part in the most recent financial crisis. If the agencies had some liability for their ratings, they may have a better incentive for assuring that they got them right. Neither the Justice Department nor the SEC (which has itself managed to miss all the major financial debacles of the past five years) has ever charged S&P with criminal conflict of interest (as they in practice do and would do to any number of much smaller economic participants with a much smaller fields of damage). Neither the Justice Department nor the SEC has gone after S&P for admitting before Congress in 2008 and 2009, that their being paid by the issuers (their clients) of the securities they were supposed to evaluate, created an inherent conflict of interest and did in fact wrongly influence their ratings.

Nobody has charged the S&P with criminal fraud or fraud on the marketplace for taking money from issuers in simple bad faith (playing the part of the referee and judge in a boxing match after being paid by one of the boxers) for rating securities, they admitted in sworn testimony they did not understand!

This sordid tale has no end. According to Bloomberg, S&P is giving its self-coveted triple AAA rating to junk,

and not the United States of America.

Relatively speaking

Size matters. Pension funds and many of the largest institutional investors have rules about what investments they may invest in and these rules are based on the ratings given to investments by the credit ratings agencies. Consider that Australia, Andorra, Bermuda, Canada, Cook Islands, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom retain their triple-A ratings.[5] These countries represent less than 21% of the world's collective GDP...my math may be slightly off. If investment funds were limited to investing in triple-A products, it would be preposterous to think that less than 21% of the economy of the world would fund the remaining 79%.

Another weakness of the credit ratings agencies is that there is no set standard employed for measuring absolute risk. What I mean by absolute risk is the measure in gambling parlance, of the risk of ruin. Wall Street and regulators have, in the example of a bank lets say, no better way other than asking for capital ratios to ascertain a bank's risk or ruin. Other factors, like the value of assets and counterparty transactions lack still, even in 2012, transparency.

Because the credit ratings agencies share this problem of being unable to objectively ascertain absolute risk, they lag the markets' own detections of absolute and relative risk. For example, the agencies did not foresee the Latin American debt crises, the European debt crisis, AIG, the Credit Crisis, Enron, Worldcom, or even MF Global. In this sense, credit ratings agencies look backwards better than they can look ahead. Arguably, there are extremely few economists or market participants that can look ahead-this may be a wholly unfair criticism...except this is part of the reason for having the ratings agencies.

The most obvious problems with the existing regulatorily instituted regime of three credit ratings agencies is that they have no competition, no real accountability because they have to be utilized even when wrong, and no liability. This oligopoly ought to be dismantled and the private sector should be allowed to get into the ratings game in the same way that analysts exists in the financial markets for every other type of investment. Doing so would eliminate the existing conflicts of interests within the credit ratings agencies and allow investors to pay the private ratings agencies for their research. Competition will have to drive the caliber of research and ratings upward.

Sadly, nothing in the gargantuan 2,300 page Dodd-Frank Act or that has been discussed in the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs addresses the problems with the credit ratings agencies...the same ones that contributed to our recent financial crisis.@

R. Tamara de Silva

R. Tamara de Silva is an independent trader and securities lawyer

Footnotes:
1. The EFSF's ratings are derived from its backers and France and Austria were two of the largest guarantors behind Germany. S&P's downgrade of the EFSF will mean the fund has 440 billion less in Euros than before the downgrade.
2. These numbers are adjusted by PPP (purchasing power parity), basis-this takes into account, relative cost of living and inflation rates, rather than just exchange rates.
3. There are other risks like inflation risk (the principal returned on a debt instrument upon maturity would have less purchasing power) and currency risk (the Dollar could as it has, decline in value relative to other currencies).
4. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-31/subprime-mortgage-bonds-getting-aaa-rating-s-p-denies-to-u-s-treasuries.html
5. http://www.standardandpoors.com/ratings/sovereigns/ratings-list/en/us?sectorName=null&subSectorCode=39&filter=E

"If someone who is very wealthy comes in and takes over your company and takes out all the cash and leaves behind the unemployment? I don't think any conservative wants to get caught defending that kind of model." This quotation, which could have been from David Axelrod or President Obama, was actually from Newt Gingrich. In other words, conservatives cannot defend capitalism if it means that people will lose jobs.

Some history is helpful. Job creation and job retention are not the primary motivations for innovation and industry in the United States, they have never been. Job creation gained traction in the public discourse when it used as a justification for the government spending TARP funds-the rationale being that the government's spending would create a soft landing for the economy, lessen the economic impact of the recession and Credit Crisis and create (albeit often temporary and expensive) jobs. Yet it is not job creation that has motivated this country's most celebrated capitalists but profit motive or sometimes the pursuit of excellence expressed as an idea. Henry Ford did not start building his own self-propelled vehicles that ran on gasoline in order to create jobs any more than Steve Jobs began building personal computers to create jobs.

Hard Edges

We may not be in an economic crisis but a period of economic change. Capitalism has hard edges, especially in periods of extremely rapid economic change. Failure and obsolescence are the sina qua non of capitalism. What Mr. Gingrich's statement is missing is the possibility that America and the rest of the developed world are in the midst of period of rapid flux.

Almost without exception, most neo-classical economic theory holds that crises do not persist indefinitely, because economic systems revert to some equilibrium or balance. Perhaps, America and Western Europe as seen by the possible collapse of the European monetary union, may by in as much a period of economic change as it is in crisis. The distinction is important because if we are in a period of rapid economic change, things may not get better exactly as we expect them to-they will change.[ 2 ]

We may be in the midst of another economic revolution akin to that of the Industrial Revolution. Alternatively, we may be seeing disruptive technologies change the world and create economic upheaval (the hard edges) in the form of extreme wealth and extreme poverty as we saw in the close aftermath of the steam engine, the internal combustion engine, the railway and the utilization of electricity.

The world has never been, not at any time since mastery of the seas meant dominance in trade-not even during the silk trade--as interconnected as it is now. Technologies like the Internet and information technology have been both disruptive and creative at once, and at a breathtaking pace. The face of manufacturing, as we have recognized it for most of the twentieth century has itself changed, so has its importance as a percentage and engine of economic growth. It has been replaced by other sectors including and perhaps infamously, the financial services sector described by the term financialization. Just as what happened one hundred years ago, politicians lobbied for groups that were nearing obsolescence, but were unable to stop change itself. We see changes in the countless examples of relatively lower skilled, high paying jobs that have been erased and may never return. In periods of rapid economic change, settled patterns of work are upended. Another factor is the creation of disparate wealth between wealthy superclasses (robber barons) and everyone else, including the newly displaced.

Bain Capital, Private Equity and Venture Capital

It is easiest to extol the virtues of free markets and capitalism when able to toss in Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Thomas Edison or Henry Ford as stunning examples of its success- but to be fair, these people are eight sigma events. Most capitalists are hardly this glamorous, they never make magazine covers, and their stories and personages are decidedly more bland if not just boring-fitting very well into the fat middle of a normal bell curve. Mitt Romney has been roundly accused of being unpardonably bland but this is not an economic transgression. Attacks on his career at Bain Capital are misplaced because both the private and venture capital business models provide extremely important social and economic functions.

Romney and Bain Capital are charged with making too much money, having businesses fail and alternatively, causing some of the most sympathetic people in North America to lose their jobs. The fallacy of these arguments are legion.

Bain Capital is primarily a private equity firm that also has a venture capital arm. Private equity firms invest by buying ownership of companies where they see the potential for a return for themselves, a return they capture by later selling the company at a profit to another party or parties either in the private or public markets (they sometimes retain acquired companies). Private equity investors can be more sophisticated than other corporate governors and in theory be better managers- thereby using their unique vantage point and experience to create wealth for investors.

Venture capitalists take a lot of risk, often investing their own money in start-ups and the new companies of entrepreneurs in the hopes of finding the next Google, or Apple. Both private equity and venture capitalists are rewarded for being able to recognize the best entrepreneurs, the best ideas, and helping to bring them to market by financing them, so that the world profits from the next iPhone, the next life-saving technology or Google.

No one in either industry risks their own or their investors' money expecting to fail. They would not stay in business if they did.

Sometimes, as the bi-partisan critics point out, people in companies acquired by private equity lose their jobs. One of the reasons for this is that private equity turns companies around by making them more efficient. This is often accomplished by getting rid of excess layers of management, unnecessary employees and generally, "bloat." It is important to remember that what is considered "excessive" in layers of management or how "bloated" a company may look-is largely subjective. Profit motive is the engine of capitalism, not job retention.[3 ]

When we introduce terms like "looting" which is a loaded term it is important to keep in mind that this is also a subjective term. Romney's critics are looking at Bain in hindsight...with some not insubstantial measure of bias. Also consider, that the world may be changing at a rapid place and some degree of job displacement may be the norm.

Investing in companies and trying to turn them around is not as easy it is sounds. It also involves an appetite for risk that most people do not have. A majority of businesses fail within two years of sooner after their inception (even if they are not distressed to start before being acquired by a Bain Capital).

Taking risk is nonetheless commendable. Taking huge risks can lead to catastrophic failure or success. I read somewhere that Thomas Edison failed well over 1,000 times before successfully creating the lightbulb. But he made in well in excess of 1,000 attempts and had the stomach to endure that much defeat-this is not common. Facebook, and Google were not guaranteed to successes. There is only one Mark Zuckerberg and only one Steve Jobs. If a high failure rate did not come with taking significant risks, there would be a 100,000 Bill Gates as opposed to just one. Looking at Bain's record, I am reminded of the Pareto Principle or 80/20 rule--that 80 percent of the effects are the result of 20 percent of the causes.

Overall, venture capitalists do well and their importance to the economy cannot be disputed. Venture capital is responsible for 12.1 million private sector jobs or about 11% of total private sector jobs that collectively generate $2.9 trillion in revenue.[4 ] Private and venture capital firms are responsible for most jobs in the software, telecom and semiconductor industries.[ 5]

Slavery and Principles in Opposition

The Founders has a very odd notion for their time, the idea that people were born with natural rights-not granted by a monarch or a government but actually born with rights, rights inherent to all individuals. This was a radical idea!

While there is no pure form or capitalism, capitalism is more conducive to individual freedom and human rights than any other system.[6 ] It simply trumps all alternatives. Capitalism promotes the opposite of slavery and is conducive a core principle deeply held by the Founding Fathers - that human beings have human rights. Self-ownership, the opposite of slavery is one of them.

This also comes with the harsh reality that some people will not succeed and must fail in a capitalist system. Because in a larger sense, it really makes no difference whether capitalism works perfectly or not-it is the legally instituted economic system most opposite of slavery.

Candidates for the Presidency, including the incumbent, like all politicians crave power so much that they must feed populist tendencies which, are based on emotion regardless of whether they cannibalize this country's core principles. All of the arguments against Bain Capital are populist ones designed to enrage, and excite anger and envy. They seek to alter the capitalist system by selectively identifying what parts of a free market are acceptable at a moment in time and what are not--and to suggest improper conduct where there is no evidence of any illegality (other than profit) by imposing the same arbitrary values-envy not being a great value by the way.

Some principles have to be above populist tendencies or we will have no principles standing. Steve Jobs and Henry Ford are good examples against these populist arguments-their motivations were never job creation or job retention but their economic enrichment-in pursuing these narrow goals they changed the world. Insisting that job creation or retention trump the motive of wealth creation, is something entirely other than capitalism.

Adam Smith's first great work before The Wealth of Nations was The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which made the case for sympathy as a foundation for human relationships in a civil society. Politics plays a large role in human relationships especially when it is used as lever to ignite class warfare and to institutionalize envy. Populism must never be used as a political campaign, however convenient or effective, because it ultimately enrages and divides a nation at its core, and sometimes these divisions cannot be healed.

Instead of attacking Bain Capital, all the candidates from both parties ought to address what harms capitalism (other than themselves obviously). If it were just Adam Smith's animal spirits competing and the fiercest winning, we would not have government subsidies, tax breaks and bailouts--all selectively doled out for a few-not all. Not even a Fed giving free money to some (a preferred very few)-not all. Or maybe we would because many of those that succeeded the most would always use their resources to create cartels, monopolies and buy political influence. Bribery and policy for vote getting- have no place in a purely capitalist system and their presence has...at least this is my guess-given capitalism a bad name.@
R. Tamara de Silva
Chicago, Illinois
January 14, 2012

R. Tamara de Silva is an independent trader and securities lawyer

Footnotes:
1. Class War? What Americans Really Think About Economic Inequality, Lawrence Jacobs.
2. Of course economists that guess correctly and point out a plausible causal variable will appear brilliant but there again, only in hindsight. We cannot really know if we are in a crisis or in a period of dramatic change but it cannot hurt to be aware of the possibility of the latter.
3. The profit motive cannot be selectively excised from capitalism in favor of job retention, as many of Romney's critics suggest. It was not that long ago that the USSR boasted of full-employment but could never match the sheer volume of innovation produced by its arch rival.
4. http://uvc.org/why-private-capital-backed-companies/#jobGenerators
5. Id.
6. There is no purely capitalist system and may have never been-in the sense of a laissez-faire system because the State is always and in some manner involved.