Top 10 Ways to Celebrate Your President’s Day

Every year children giddily await the arrival of their favorite holiday. The night before visions of bull-mooses and powdered wigs dance in their heads.  Yes, after a year’s worth of anticipation President’s Day has finally arrived. Here is a list to bring Presidential Cheer to all!

10.) Turn your manly beard into a Chester A. Arthur paradise! See an example on the right.

My awesome friend, Joe Shearer honoring President's

9.)Take advantage of this opportunity to make an “Enemy’s List”, make sure you list has-been actors like Paul Newman.

8.) Buy a Stove Pipe Hat and attempt to liberate every worker you run across at WalMart

7.) Answer every question with, “No, no…it wouldn’t be prudent.”

6.) Try and find one person who knows who Millard Filmore was.

5.) If you happen to get hired for a job this day, tell your employer, “don’t worry I’m not going to go all William Henry Harrison on you”

4.) Book a relaxing evening away from all the politics of the world at the glamorous Washington D.C. Watergate Hotel.

3.) Bake a cake in the shape of James K. Polk’s head

2.) Find a set of monocle style glasses and attempt to sway Hell’s Angels bikers to join your group of “Rough Riders” by saying that you’ll have a “bully good time”.

1.) Chop down every cherry tree you come across then say, “hey its what our founding founders would have wanted!”

Law in the News: Cleared of all charges…yet still in jail

I caught this article on the front page of Yahoo! today and remembered that I wrote something about it a year ago…good to know that someone is still fighting for justice. Anyways I decided to repost my article and you can read the Yahoo! article by clicking here. 

On February 22, of this year [2011], 62 year-old, Philadelphia man Domingo Negron was accused of murder for shooting a man in 1973. Only this is not a cold case. In 1973, Domingo Negron got into a gang fight with Joseph Kwiatkowski and shot him causing him to be paraplegic the rest of Kwiatkowski’s life. Domingo Negron was charged and convicted for shooting Kwiatkowski and served a one year prison sentence for assault with attempt to kill (akin to modern day attempted murder).

In 2009, Kwiatkowski died due to an infection of the 36 year-old bullet still lodged inside of him. The Prosecution summarized the medical examiner’s synopsis stating, “He was very clear and concise in his testimony that there was no intervening causes based on his review of all the medical records, and that the gunshot wound was a direct cause of the death”.  However, to convict someone of criminal charges you must prove their guilt, “beyond reasonable doubt”, which if one had to assign an actual percentage, it would be somewhere around 90% sure (courts have been hesitant to assign an actual percentage of surety). However, can a jury really say that after 36 years, beyond reasonable doubt that there is no possible intervening causes of death?

A similar case was also brought in Philadelphia in 2007. William Barnes shot a police officer in the course of a robbery in 1966 and also permanently paralyzed him. Barnes, differing from Negron, has already served 20 years for attempted murder of the police officer. The officer died in 2007 for the infection of the bullet, after 41 years since the incident. Barnes was held for murder at the age of 74, and the jury eventually held not guilty. I believe that every competent jury should hold that such a conviction does not get past the standard of beyond reasonable doubt, after 40 years how could one determine that a bullet was the sole cause for death?

While technically holding such a defendant once for attempted murder and then 40 years later for the same death for murder is not double jeopardy. Two different charges for the same crime. However, the Domingo Negron’s attorney stated, “This is akin to double jeopardy – this is at least moral double jeopardy,” he said. “It’s unfortunate that we’re proceeding with a case that was already decided.” I agree.

The Philadelphia DA has shown his indifference to such potential by charging two men for murder 40 years after an incident occurred. Further demonstrating this is the fact that even though William Barnes has been declared innocent, he is still behind bars for “violating his parole”. While on trial, Barnes was on parole and failed to tell his probation officer that he had a cell phone and his car keys on him, for this reason the probation officer has held he is not ready to return to society. At 74, William Barnes is still sitting in a jail cell for a crime he was declared not guilty of. Lets pray the same is not the fate for Domingo Negron.

Such things make me lose faith in the legal system.

References:

Domingo Negron Case

William Barnes Case

William Barnes Parole

Economic Time Machine: Europe, a window into the Economic Future

My friend Jesse the time traveler

Sorry its been so long since my last post…school caught up with me. But anyways, I’m continuing my blog series on Debt and why it matters. In the last post I wrote about how the financial system collapsed in 2008. As with anything, the origins of the financial disaster went way beyond 2008. The same can be said for the rest of the world. In particular about Europe, who took the promises of easy credit and sprinted….

Staring  at our future: 

I wish I could say that all these ideas I’m about to spout off were original; that I alone studied these factors, but I can’t. Much of my study on the European Union Recession (and possible dissolution) comes from the book Boomerang: Travels in the Third World by Michael Lewis. You may know Michael Lewis’s name as the guy who wrote The Blind Side and Moneyball but what you probably didn’t know is that he got his start as a financial journalist. Most of Michael Lewis’s work deals with interesting financial studies. The Blind Side was a lone departure from the economic realm and Moneyball sort of bridged the gap between Sports and Economics. But you can fairly say that Michael Lewis’s bread and butter is economics. To spare you from reading the book itself I’ll break it down for you.

The book begins with Michael Lewis finishing up his previous book (The Big Short which I cited in my last post). While researching his previous book about the 2008 financial meltdown he met an unusual conservative who successfully predicted the 2008 meltdown. Lewis admits that this Texas businessman hit the cutting room floor when he began revealing his theories about an eventual European collapse…that is until the country of Iceland went bankrupt. An entire country went bankrupt…how could that be? So Lewis returned to this odd Texan to dig further into his mind…he then illuminated to Lewis that the whole European Union system was broken and that Greece would be the next to go…and so it appears it will. So Lewis set out to the economically troubled nations of Europe to find out what was going on. These are his results:

ICELAND: 

The first stop on Lewis’s financial disaster tourism is to Iceland. In Iceland the first thing Lewis’s notices is that his posh hotel that once housed world leaders and financiers is largely empty. Lewis explores how a nation who’s primary economic staple was fishing for centuries and all of a sudden in 2003, Iceland decided to become a financial hub for the world. Picture a nation of about 300,000 people getting straight out of the fishing boats and walking straight into the bank for a job.

Iceland was being touted as a natural country for financiers in the early 2000s and the world never stopped to question if the country actually knew what it was doing. Lewis explains that the fishing culture of going for the big catch translated into their financial philosophy, thus putting all their eggs in financially risky bets. The bigger the risk the bigger the pay off right? Lewis even explains that the rest of the world even took advantage of this stupidity…when no one else would buy loans and bonds, Iceland would! Thus stupidity and greed sank Iceland.

So what does bankruptcy look like in Iceland now? The job market has shut down and other countries have ceased loaning to it… Lewis writes it the best when he says, “In the end, Icelanders amassed debts amounting to 850 percent of their GDP. (The debt-drowned United States has reached 350 percent.)” Today, you don’t want to live in Iceland….not that you would have anyways.

Greece:

As for Greece, you’ve probably heard about them on the news. Why? Well they are the “contagion” spreading across Europe. Lewis puts it well when he says,

“Oddly enough, the financiers in Greece remain more or less beyond reproach. They never ceased to be anything but sleepy old commercial bankers. Virtually alone among Europe’s bankers, they did not buy U.S. subprime-backed bonds, or leverage themselves to the hilt, or pay themselves huge sums of money. the biggest problem the banks had was that they had lent roughly 30 billion euros to the Greek government–where it was stolen and squandered. In Greece the banks didn’t sink the country. The country sank the banks.”

Lewis goes on to explain how Greece went bananas giving out entitlement programs, saying “[the Greeks turned] their government into a piñata stuffed with fantastic sums and [wanted to] give as many citizens as possible a whack at it.” Some candy that fell out of the Greek government was, that the Public sector jobs paid almost three times as much as the Private. An example of that was the national railroad that grossed 100 million euros annually but cost 400 million euros to pay for it. The average railroad worker in Greece made the equivalent of $65,000 a year. Lewis pointed to a quote by a Greek business man who said, “it would be cheaper to put all Greece’s rail passengers into taxicabs.”

Another example of a Greek piñata swing was the public education system. The Greek education system ranked dead last in the European Union yet paid 4 times the average teacher salary of the EU’s highest ranked public education system (Finland). Another piece of government candy was the fact that in Greece you could retire at the age of 55 for men and 50 for women if you worked a job classified as “arduous”, such “arduous” jobs included, “hairdressers, radio announcers, waiters, musicians…” These are just some of the things that Lewis lists as Government extravagance in Greece. Furthermore, it is all exacerbated by the fact that in Greece, not paying your taxes is the equivalent of jay walking. Lewis goes on to discuss how in Greece that tax collectors are frequently bribed and those who try to strictly enforce paying them in the Greek IRS are shown paper duty.

At this point its pretty easy to say that Greece is a broken country and needs the rest of Europe to bail them out. However, Lewis points that the Greeks have no intention of changing their entitlement society ways.

IRELAND:

Ireland too is on the verge of bankruptcy. Lewis traveled to the stout-toasting Irish isle. What he found there was a nation devastated by an over-reliance on a product. In Ireland, Lewis writes that the housing and building market took off, Ireland in the 2000s had become a construction based economy. Banks would give loans to Construction companies to build buildings, thus driving up the stock and value of these Construction companies, the banks would like this and so they continued to finance just about every project. The only problem is that Ireland out-built itself. In an economy literally “built” on the housing market; the economy was based on a need that was finite. At some point, when everyone realized that many building had diluted the value of the market…that they were just building buildings for the sake of it, it would all come crumbling down. And so it did as economic advisors lured by the desire to grow…ignored basic principals of supply and demand.

GERMANY: 

The last country that Lewis goes to is Germany. Germany who had remained essentially risk free throughout the 90′s and the 00′s, choosing instead to take steady growth, low-risk loans remained stable after the crash of 2008. The only problem was that Germany had entered into a monetary system with those who didn’t take their financial duties so seriously. See above. Now Germany was left with the false choice of either bailing out these countries, who shared their monetary system (the Euro) in order to make sure the euro retained value or let these countries go bankrupt. By the way, when Germany joined the EU, they were promised they would never have to bail out another country. So the choice was to absorb others bad debt in the hope that they would get their act together or immediately take the economic hit of entire countries defaulting. Well, Germany offered one set of bailouts and nothing changed…this is where we are today. Lewis predicts that Greece, Italy, and Ireland will either be cut out of the Euro (which itself may devalue the Euro) or the Euro will completely fall apart.

BOOMERANG:

So here is the title of the book. The whole point was to show the errors of others in order to understand our own. Lewis in the end comes back to the worst US culprit, California. Lewis investigates the enormous amount of debt that California has piled up through the use of the vices in the all the countries listed above. Stupid banking? Yup. Government Piñata? Yup. Ignorance of Supply and Demand? Yup. Government absorbing debt? Yup.

While showing how all of California is really deep in a hole by demanding benefits and no taxes to pay for them, Lewis zeroes in on California’s worst, the city of Vallejo. Lewis describes entering into Vallejo as this,

WELCOME TO VALLEJO, CITY OF OPPORTUNITY, reads the sign on the way in, but the shops that remain open display signs that say, WE ACCEPT FOOD STAMPS. Weeds surround abandoned businesses, and all traffic lights are set to permanently blink, which is a formality, as there are no longer any cops to police the streets. Vallejo is the one city in the Bay Area where you can park anywhere and not worry about getting a ticket, because there are no meter maids either. …Back in 2008, unable to come to terms with its many creditors, Vallejo declared bankruptcy.

The town of Vallejo California was so bad that it owed government employees and other benefits of $500 million to just 1,013 people and only $6 million in the budget to do it. Yeah, government out of control. Lewis describes this insatiable human desire to take more than is good for us by astutely saying,

“The human brain evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in an environment defined by scarcity. It was not designed, at least originally, for an environment of extreme abundance. “Human beings are wandering around with brains that are fabulously limited,” he says cheerfully. “We’ve got the core of the average lizard.” Wrapped around this reptilian core, he explains, is a mammalian layer (associated with maternal concern and social interaction), and around that is wrapped a third layer, which enables feats of memory and the capacity for abstract thought. “The only problem,” he says, “is our passions are still driven by the lizard core. We are set up to acquire as much as we can of things we perceive as scarce, particularly sex, safety, and food.” Even a person on a diet who sensibly avoids coming face-to-face with a piece of chocolate cake will find it hard to control himself if the chocolate cake somehow finds him. Every pastry chef in America understands this, and now neuroscience does, too. “When faced with abundance, the brain’s ancient reward pathways are difficult to suppress,” [...]. “In that moment the value of eating the chocolate cake exceeds the value of the diet. We cannot think down the road when we are faced with the chocolate cake.”

Because of Vallejo’s massive deficit, the entire city was granted bankruptcy and paid a measly 5 cents for every dollar owed. Needless to say no one will give them money…as Lewis points out, its probably better that way.

SO WHATS THE POINT?

So all this is to say, if we don’t look to Europe or at least even California and see our future awaiting, we will surely crash as well. Yes, the United States is a huge nation and this would still take some time, but it can happen to us. As we sit right now, Lewis is proving right…California is set to run out of money in March. Greece is ready to tank and Europe appears unable to stop it. This may appear terrible and gloom and doom. But it is only a doomsday message to those who fail to listen.

SOURCES:

You can read all Lewis’s work on the subject online free (legally) below:

Iceland

Greece

Ireland

Germany

California

Its the Economy Stupid Part II: The Mortgage that Mortgaged the Future

In the last post I set up this series of posts I’m doing on the economy and why debt is such a crucial issue. In the last post I analogized the economy and debt to a car driving 100 mph toward a cliff. The car being the economy and the cliff obviously being the debt. I basically made the case that any collateral damage that occurs while veering from the cliff was necessary to avoid total destruction. While, yes it would be prudent to avoid as much collateral damage as possible in turning from our debt, the most cataclysmic event in the end is still the debt. In a future post I will eventually get to why debt is so dire, but one step at a time. This post is about how we got to where we are today.

Recession for Dummies: How Did We Get Here?

Obviously the first step in explaining anything is understanding the issue for yourself. Like most of you, I could rattle off a few things here and there that caused the financial meltdown of 2008. For example, “Fannie Mae”, “Freddie Mac”, “Sub-prime mortgage”, “Wall Street”, “bailout”, “Obama”, “Bush”, “Barney Frank”, “Bill O’Reilly bursting an artery while yelling at Barney Frank”, etc… But what does that all mean? Well I set out to finally piece the details together. (I know… it took me only 4 years) Warning: what follows is the 2008 Financial Meltdown for Dummies version; if you already understand this please either stop reading or provide useful insight to make my post more accurate.

Like an earthquake, the fault lines for the 2008 economic meltdown were buried and ready to rumble long before 2008. The source can be traced back as early as the 1980s, when easy credit began to become more widely available. With the help of easier credit, the US began to climb its way out of a devastating 1970s and early 80s recession. While credit has been around as long as bartering has, the credit card was a new commodity for most Americans, especially for the average American.

Easy credit was the ultimate temptation for many Americans…it provided instant gratification and the ability to pay it off later. To quote Jimmy Stewart from “It’s a Wonderful Life” when confronting Mr. Potter about crediting his friend Ernie with the money to buy a decent house,

“You, you said, what’d you say just a minute ago? They had to wait and save their money before they even ought to think of a decent home. Wait! Wait for what? Until their children grow up and leave them? Until they’re so old and broken-down that they, do you know how long it takes a working man to save five thousand dollars?”

Now, obviously Jimmy Stewart is the hero and Mr. Potter is the villain in that movie and obviously credit in the hands of hard working and diligent Americans was beneficial to the economy. However, like most things, credit needed to be wielded wisely. The longer easy credit was around, the more easily attainable it became. Thus credit was being lent to less and less dependable people. By the early 2000s credit cards companies like Citi were even going after college students with absolutely no credit history. Do you remember the days when you could sign up for a credit card with just the enticement of  free pizza and a t-shirt? I do, and have the t-shirt to prove it. Notice these stupid offers are gone now. Anyways, as credit cards and credit in general became more widely available so too did America’s propensity to spend grow…along with it its inability to pay it back. However this alone would not be able to sink the American economy.

Complicating things further:

Along with people’s personal growing credit card debt was the willingness to buy new and nice houses. Just as credit became more and more available so too did people’s ability to obtain mortgages to buy homes…you know the American dream. Now a big difference between mortgages and simple credit card debt was that a home can easily cost over $100,000. Many average Americans even were paying for homes easily valued (at the time) over $200,000. They called it their dream home. However, this dream eventually turned into a nightmare for many Americans as they lost their jobs or were unable to pay for it.

You see, like credit cards, home mortgages were originally only offered to dependable people (as proven through a credit rating), but as time went on banks realized that they could still make money on unreliable people. (Great Business move!) The banks realized that they could get an unreliable person to take a mortgage but require high interest. This tactic was called subprime mortgage lending. The idea, which later proved its insanity, was based on the idea that some people would actually pay off their debt while paying high interest rates, thus making lots of money and offsetting those who didn’t. Plus… even those who didn’t pay it off would still pay the high interest rates for a period of time and then the bank would get possession of the house (foreclosure) and theoretically would easily sell it off to someone else. (When the Housing Bubble burst this also put the clamps on the banks to sell the homes) So win-win scenario right? The insanity continues…

Could things get more complicated?

The answer is yes it did. On top of all the acquiring of debt by Americans (both credit card and home mortgage) large investment companies decided that they were going to make bets on who and who wasn’t going to pay off their debt. Obviously a brilliant idea. So anyways, this is where it gets really complicated so stick with me.

The way big investment companies were able to bet on American mortgages and credit card debt was like this. When you get a mortgage or incur credit card debt you owe money to your creditor. So if you have a mortgage (basically a loan to buy a house) you owe the bank money until you pay off that loan. Lets just say you buy a $180,000 house. If you paid the bank monthly (without interest) over the next 30 years, you’d owe the bank $500 a month. Well, most banks don’t want to sit around for 30 years for you to pay it off, even if you are paying interest on top of that (which most certainly you would). So what happened is that large investment companies (basically guys with a lot of money….think Romney’s Bains Capital group) would pay the bank up front $150,000 for the right to receive your payments over the next 30 years that would eventually lead to a $30,000 profit. ($180,000- $150,000 = $30,000) The banks like this because even if they take a little loss they are still making a lot of money up front. And the investment groups (or even larger banks) like this because they are making money without really doing anything.

Now this happened a lot to the point where large investment companies (and large banks) would buy up hundreds or thousands of such rights to mortgage payments and then package them together (picture them putting it all in a shoebox) and then sell it to an even larger investment company  or bank using the same strategy. However, when you have so many mortgages bundled together like this its hard to know what it is exactly you’re buying. This is where Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac come in. You might have heard of them.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are a Frankenstein of Private Business and Government involvement. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who were supervised by Congress and in particular Barney Frank–their goal was to keep interest rates artificially low by getting in on the subprime mortgage phenomenon, thus themselves buying up unreliable loans. Additionally, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac provided grades to these bundles of debt (they have other supervisory roles of the subprime mortgage industry but this is the big one here). So, for example, a group of mortgages that were likely to be paid off might receive a AAA rating (which is good!), while a group of mortgages that are not likely to be paid off would receive simply an A rating (not so good). However, for the sake of easily understanding it though, lets just stick with the familiar school grading system , A+ being the best and F being the worst.

This is where everything begins to come full circle. As I said before, credit and mortgages began to become easier and easier for Americans to get, so people less reliable and less reliable began running up huge debts that they could never pay off. Generally, Americans liked that credit and mortgage was easy, as I said before, because it encouraged the American dream. However we let it get too far.

Even further down the rabbit hole, getting more complicated by the fact that banks purposely began marketing to the unreliable, with the idea that they would make money anyways…and this risk was eventually passed on to the large investment firms and large banks. Finally, in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s glee that the American dream was being lived out they began to mis-label a lot of the mortgages with their true values both to their detriment and the investment and banking community as a whole. So for example, a F mortgage might have been given a B+ rating. Thus screwing things up even further. In the end, large investment firms had spent a ton of money (think companies like Citigroup that had to be bailed out…we’ll get to that more in a minute) acquiring the rights to thousands and hundreds of thousands of mortgages, many of them worthless. Only, companies like Citigroup were the last to know.

Normally in a capitalist society when a company does stupid things, its their just desserts to reap what they sow. This didn’t happen here. What happened is that investment groups and large banks like Citigroup had grown fat getting unreliable people to sign up for credit cards and mortgages and bought bad mortgages from smaller banks for years. Companies like Citigroup, Bank of America, just to name a few, had rigged the game against themselves. They sold cheap credit to those who didn’t deserve it and made it appear that they were acquiring wealth rapidly . For example it would show on their books that the $180,000 hypothetical house you bought was owed to them…making it appear impressive and driving up their stock prices, while in reality they would never see that money. And when the world finally realized this, that people couldn’t pay their credit cards and their giant mortgages, the card house came crashing down. The big problem was that groups, like Citigroup, had grown so large that to let them go broke would do the same for the American economy. For example, low credit would instantaneously disappear because the big lenders were gone and thus stop our spending in its tracks…shutting down the economy.

The government saw this in 2008, under President Bush, and saw a Depression on the horizon. He wasn’t wrong, a Depression would have came. But just like every American who incurred large amounts of debt with the instant gratification mentality, the American government sold out our long term prosperity to make sure we had what we wanted now. The American government bailed out the big banks, thus transferring all the debt upon Uncle Sam’s shoulders. In other words, the American Government is now carrying all the debt of every American citizen who got a credit card and couldn’t pay it off, for every mortgage that wasn’t paid, for every company that declared bankruptcy (or would have), and this heavy weight is now resting with our government.

This is where we are today and how we got here. I will discuss in my post next week the consequences of this heavy debt…in particular by pointing to three recent examples of Debt’s destruction. Greece, Ireland, and Iceland….its not looking good ahead….

Sources:

Wikipedia’s take 

Lewis, Michael. The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010.

Link to Michael Lewis talking about his book on the Daily Show

It’s the Economy Stupid: Why Debt Matters

Popular image circulating the internet

This image above has been making its rounds through facebook, stumbeupon, and the internet in general. You’ve probably seen it. Some are rather quick to point out its over-simplification of a delicate and complicated issue. Perhaps. However, I dedicated my winter break (about a month) in trying to understand this financial mess. I didn’t feel confident just taking others words for it or relying on my own personal feelings. Although I’m certainly no mathematical guru or economic whiz (those who went to school with me can attest to that), I believe I was somewhat able to pull back the curtain on political rhetoric and overused buzz words like “99%”, “class warfare” or “trickle-down economics”. 

I originally attempted to put everything into one post on my blog but quickly realized that there was too much to say. So over the next few weeks I’m going to write 4 or 5 posts on the economy, debt, and where we should go from here. Please interject if you feel I’m missing anything because my honest sole intention was to find the truth. After all what good is political ideology if it isn’t true? But anyways I guess I’ll start from the top.

In the summer of 2011, the New Hampshire legislature made harsh austerity measures to the State budget. The point was to balance the budget and curb growing New Hampshire debt. The cuts to the budget were painful. I was affected. What happened was the New Hampshire hospital system was set up to receive money from the State to pay for Medicare and Medicaid patients (patients who can’t afford healthcare) and the New Hampshire legislature decided that it ended here. The legislature in total cut $250 million dollars that would have gone to the State’s hospitals for reimbursement for Medicare and Medicaid patients, now the Hospitals were left with the bill.

Many in New Hampshire screamed that this is not only dangerous but will end up resulting in some dying from the hospital’s inability to pay for care. A few hospitals even completely shut down. Even the State’s leading Republican Newspaper, the Union Leader, turned on the Republican led legislature. After all, Republicans were elected to save jobs not destroy them. Hospitals across the states were cutting hundreds of jobs to compensate for the sudden increase of financial liabilities. Many nurses and doctors fled state lines to nearby Massachusetts for job security. My wife, who is a nurse at a nearby hospital, was a potential victim to layoffs as well, her hospital laying off more than 80 nurses. Needless to say it was a stressful time for many in New Hampshire, including myself.

D.J. Bettencourt (Blue tie)...NH House Majority Leader

I myself became highly critical of it, I mean how could you not when your own livelihood was on the line. It so happened, that I am friends with the NH House Leader, D.J. Bettencourt, and I even told him that I thought these moves were unwise. Well, D.J. if you are reading this please accept my apology. What I didn’t see at the time was how corrosive debt can be. How it is debt that is ultimately killing our economy. Of course the State Legislature didn’t take pleasure in cutting jobs and defunding hospitals (and that wasn’t the only cuts made), but they did so to ensure New Hampshire did not go into debt. Oh and my wife didn’t lose her job. And the hospitals have more or less adjusted 6 months later.

What I didn’t see was that New Hampshire, was like a shiny corvette (buffed up with a new speaker system) going 100 mph straight for a crevice the size of the Grand Canyon. There wasn’t much time left so the brakes were hit hard in order to avoid careening into the chasm. In the process of hitting the breaks the car spun out of control, perhaps even damaging the car some…but it avoided total destruction of plummeting over the cliff. The economy and the debt is like this.

The United States as a whole has the same issue. The European Union too is currently  frantically braking to not head into the ravine (some aren’t sure they won’t go in). Yes, by hitting the brakes hard there will likely be some damage but there won’t be total destruction. You see the economic crash of 2008 was not the cause of our financial mess but a symptom (which I’ll discuss more in upcoming posts). As Bubbles in different sectors continue to burst we will keep finding ourselves in this situation, yes we may temporarily get better (as if swerving left and right temporarily takes the cliff from view) but unless we completely turn around, an ultimate much worse economic fate awaits us….

In upcoming posts I’ll get into the “proverbial weeds” of this…but I figured this is a good introduction.

FURTHER READING ON NH BUDGET CRISIS:

Union Leader Criticism 

D.J. Bettencourt comments on the issue

Lincoln v. Pierce: Laws Higher than the Constitution

Probably not the best President to be looking up to

Franklin Pierce: the 14th President of the United States. I bet that’s all you know about him…if that. In case you didn’t know, Franklin Pierce is New Hampshire’s only President…he has a few things named after him here and there (my law school used to be for instance), and he has this nice statue (above) remembering his existence. But thats largely it. New Hampshire does not celebrate the life and Presidency of Franklin Pierce. Even to the New Hampshire-ites he is a footnote in history. I, myself, wasn’t too concerned with his historical neglect, that it is until History found me.

As it turned out, Franklin Pierce was not only the former name of my school (now University of New Hampshire School of Law), but he would have been my neighbor, give or take a hundred and fifty years or so. On a crisp fall day I went for a jog from my apartment (my first year in law school), I headed down the street and by an old cemetery. I decided to cut through it and noticed a particular tombstone, (larger than most but not too out of the ordinary) decorated with some decomposing flowers and an American Flag. I decided to check it out. It read, “Franklin Pierce, 14th President of the United States”, then listed the years of his life. No quote. No “in loving memory”. Just his name, and on the side the name of his wife and kids. Just a marker that he existed.

Franklin Pierce's Tombstone

I found this interesting. Here was a tombstone to an American President in a largely forgotten and dilapidated cemetery a few blocks from my house. No sign post directed towards it, just a slightly larger tombstone in the midst of several ordinary ones. As I said before, there is a statue of Franklin Pierce outside of the Capital Building, but even that is outside the court yard of the Capital Building, the center piece statue is a famous Senator named Daniel Webster. Franklin Pierce is an afterthought of historical figures here in New Hampshire.

So what gives? Probably the fact that Franklin Pierce was indecisive in a decisive time and came just two Presidential terms before another President, Abraham Lincoln (Pierce being the 14th President and Lincoln being the 16th). Franklin Pierce was elected to the Presidency in a landslide in 1853. He was well-liked at the time and even called “handsome Frank”. Unfortunately for Franklin Pierce, and the United States at the time, Franklin Pierce failed to lead. Pierce followed the letter of the Constitution and not its spirit. Generally, this needs to be the guiding principal of any Presidency, but there was one issue that alluded our founding document…slavery.

The major piece of legislation under Franklin Pierce was the Kansas-Nebraska Act. It repealed the Missouri Compromise. Now in case your history is as rusty as mine was, the Missouri Compromise guaranteed that slavery would stay in the South and wouldn’t penetrate the North. The Kansas-Nebraska act, veiled in a guise of democracy and the Constitution, declared that new territories could choose for themselves whether they would be a Free State or a Slave state. Pierce bowed to the wishes of a then-popular Senator named Stephen A. Douglas (famous from the later Lincoln-Douglas debates). On the face of this issue, the Kansas-Nebraska Act seemed as American as Apple Pie, Americans choosing their freedoms as should be done in a Democracy. However, the results told a different story.

Because, the issue was left open the people, it caused hoards of Americans, both pro and anti-slavery to overflow the Nebraska and Kansas territories in order to ensure that their will was carried out in the states. Fights and riots ensued in the states, leading to the events of “Bleeding Kansas” and other pre-Civil War fights. Ultimately this stirred the hornets nest that became the Civil War. Pierce saw that the Constitution (prior to the 13th -15th amendments passed post-Civil War) ensured states sovereignty to make their own decisions, in his mind even to decide whether or not Slavery was allowed by law. Pierce believed this right so much that he even enforced the Fugitive Slave Act, sending escaped slaves in the free North back to their owners in the South. Pierce upheld State’s rights and individual property rights as stipulated by law at the time. While this seems absurd to us today, the irony is that Franklin Pierce was actually upholding the Constitution as it was written then.

Franklin Pierce's house, note the railroad that runs right through his property now...

Abraham Lincoln, elected four years later couldn’t be any more different than Pierce. Lincoln was ugly, unpopular, and held beliefs that would alienate half the country. Furthermore, Lincoln departed from the written law of the Constitution at the time. President Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus and ended property rights of Slave holders in the South through the  Emancipation Proclamation. He even forced states to comply by rifle point (otherwise known as the Civil War, duh). Not surprisingly, Pierce even criticized Lincoln during the Civil War for suspending Habeas Corpus and further stated, “the true purpose of the war was to wipe out the states and destroy property.” Pierce was even right, property was taken away from the South and power shifted from the States to the Federal government (read about the 14th Amendment). In fact, one could very easily argue that under the Constitution at the time, Pierce upheld it far better than Lincoln did. (remember pre-13th -15th amendments)

So why do we regard Lincoln as the greatest President of all time (routinely ranked #1 or #2 in almost any Presidential Ranking), while Pierce is routinely ranked last or second to last. Why? Wasn’t Pierce better at upholding the Constitution? As the President swears by at the time of his inauguration? What Pierce missed is that, while the Constitution is the highest law in the land and should be respected and upheld at high costs, there are laws greater than even the Constitution. John Locke wrote that God gave man three unalienable rights, “Life, Liberty, and Property”, Thomas Jefferson later amended this famously in the Declaration of Independence as “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”. In other words, these three rights no man can take away, not even by Constitution. Also, I personally believe the order in which they are listed is crucial to understanding the importance of when these rights clash. For example, slavery could not continue because Liberty trumped the right to Property. Martin Luther King Jr. nailed it 100 years later when he said,

“A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.”

With that said, I believe there are few laws and few rights to rise to this position, however Slavery was one of them. I believe there is one such right out there today, not honored by the Constitution, and it is not Health Care. I’ll let your deductive reasoning let you figure out which one that is. So in conclusion, Franklin Pierce, though he abided by democracy and the Constitution, missed this important caveat to the Constitution. Abraham Lincoln did not.

Sources:

Franklin Pierce video featurette on History.com

Wikipedia History of Franklin Pierce

John Locke

Law in the News: Castle Doctrine

About a year ago I wrote an article on the Castle Doctrine. The basic idea of the Castle Doctrine is that you don’t have to retreat or use reasonable means of protection if someone enters your home uninvited. In other words, if someone comes into your home at night, you can shot him in the face and ask questions later, legally. When I wrote my article a year ago, some states like Ohio had already adopted rules about it, others like Pennsylvania were in the process. Well, since then PA has adopted its own Castle Doctrine under Gov. Tom Corbett (which by the way I think is generally a fantastic governor for PA). 

I bring this up because I caught in the news today that the Castle Doctrine made the front page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. For time’s sake, I copied the article and pasted it, although you can read the original by clicking here.

Somerset County District Attorney Jerry Spangler will not charge a man who fatally shot another man with a bow and arrow, saying today that changes in the state’s Castle Doctrine factored into his decision.

Mr. Spangler said the unidentified 38-year-old Center City man who confessed to shooting Tony L. Bittinger on Oct. 10 claimed he did so in self-defense.

Mr. Bittinger was found shot through the chest with an arrow near the front steps to the man’s house.

The Castle Doctrine was amended this summer to expand a homeowner’s right to use deadly force against intruders, Mr. Spangler said.

The new Castle Doctrine expands a homeowner’s “castle” to include porches and eliminates the owner’s duty to retreat before attacking an intruder.

Mr. Spangler said the man might not have been charged under the old statute, but the new law “makes it much clearer” that the shooting was justified.

Trooper Joseph Drzal said Mr. Bittinger, who had been romantically involved with the man’s wife, made several threatening phone calls to the man before driving up to his home to confront him. There, he threatened the man with a heavy wooden club.

The man told him to leave repeatedly. When Mr. Bittinger attempted to come up the stairs, the man shot him in the chest with an arrow. He died before first responders arrived.

Anyways, I think its an interesting issue with its pluses and minuses. In this case the force was arguably necessary. And the intruder was warned. However, the law does not stipulate that you must warn someone first. I attached the article I wrote about it below….Let me know your thoughts on the Castle Doctrine…

————————–

Here’s a riddle for you. What does Clint Eastwood and your legal rights have in common? The Answer? The “Make My Day” Doctrine. This of course comes from the famous Clint Eastwood film Dirty Harry. In 1985, the state of Colorado passed a law that permitted homeowners to defend their homes if it’s invaded. Another nickname for this law is the “Castle Doctrine”, coming from the phrase, a “man’s home is his castle”. These statutes permit deadly force to protect your home, if the resident believes they are in peril.

Such legislation has its roots in Common Law, law created by judicial decision that “interpret the law”. The traditional common law term was called, ” Stand Your Ground Doctrine”. The original case establishing this doctrine was over 100 years ago in a 1895 case named, Beard v.U.S. In this case the Supreme Court held,

“where he had the right to be” when he came under attack and “…did not provoke the assault, and had at the time reasonable grounds to believe, and in good faith believed, that the deceased intended to take his life, or do him great bodily harm…was not obliged to retreat, nor to consider whether he could safely retreat, but was entitled to stand his ground.”-U.S. Supreme Court Beard v. U.S. Opinion

Today such doctrines are a point of debate and each State possesses varying views and laws on the subject. Some people see it as advocating for homeowners to unnecessarily kill an intruder in an instance where the intruder would have likely fled or given up had they known the homeowners was present. However, despite this, 31 states have some version of legislation that legalizes this form of self-defense. The state of Ohio extends such protections to your car. Here’s an example of such legislation, Ohio’s Castle Doctrine:

(B) (1) Subject to division (B)(2) of this section, a person is presumed to have acted in self defense or defense of another when using defensive force that is intended or likely to cause death or great bodily harm to another if the person against whom the defensive force is used is in the process of unlawfully and without privilege to do so entering, or has unlawfully and without privilege to do so entered, the residence or vehicle occupied by the person using the defensive force.

(2) (a) The presumption set forth in division (B)(1) of this section does not apply if the person against whom the defensive force is used has a right to be in, or is a lawful resident of, the residence or vehicle.

(b) The presumption set forth in division (B)(1) of this section does not apply if the person who uses the defensive force uses it while in a residence or vehicle and the person is unlawfully, and without privilege to be, in that residence or vehicle.

So what do you think? Are such laws helpful to homeowners and the protection of their families? Or does it make a likely scenario of abuse of excessive force?

Resources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_doctrine

Happy Festivus! (For the Rest of Us)

History Channel’s Depiction of the History of Festivus

After a series of rants and tirades on my blog of my political leanings, I thought I’d back off a little and write something a little funnier. Anyways, last December (2010) the great Holiday of Festivus made its way in the halls of legaldom. A convicted drug dealer in California’s Orange County (go figure) declared that he wanted a kosher meal, and double the portions for dinner in prison. The prison told him no and that he would get the same portions and the same meal as every other prisoner. I mean after all, even in California the State prisons are not all you can eat buffets. In order to get his way, the prisoner stated that the prison was infringing upon his religious beliefs, against the devout religion of “Healthism”, he said.

So, the prisoner found a lawyer and took it to court. If it were true, that the prisoner’s religious beliefs required him to eat double portions of a Kosher meal, the judge would have to enforce it under the 1st Amendment. The 1st Amendment states,

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The two relevant portions of the Freedom of Religion section of the First Amendment are at odds with each other. On the one hand, the government shall not make a law respecting (i.e. endorsing) the establishment of religion, however conversely the government may not prohibit the freedom to exercise religion (making laws adverse to it). Through various cases, the Court has basically held that the government shall make reasonable efforts to accommodate religious activity while not endorsing it. In other words, if eating Kosher meals and double portions were actually a part of a religious activity, its likely the prison would have to make reasonable efforts to accommodate him.

So, anyways back to the story. The prisoner took his Kosher-double meals religious complaint to court. The lawyer stated that his religion of “Healthism” made it necessary for the meals. The Judge, knowing the law (which I’ll discuss below) held that “Healthism” wasn’t a real religion or wasn’t a real religious belief. However, apparently the Judge was in a good mood that day because he called the lawyer to the bench and basically said, “pick a real religion and I’ll uphold it” (remember this is California). The quick-thinking lawyer said, “Festivus!”, apparently the Judge is also a big fan of Seinfeld because he upheld the ruling because of the Prisoner’s “deeply” held beliefs of Festivus. Because of this, he now got a double-portioned Kosher meal. Thus George Costanza made himself immortal in the halls of the Orange County judicial system.

Legal Analysis: 

Just so you don’t walk away after reading this and think to yourself, maybe Newt Gingrich was right (read my last article), I’ll give a Reader’s Digest legal analysis of the Orange County Judge’s decision. As I said earlier, the two aspects of Freedom of Religion are a bit at odds with each other, and has led to lots of debate. In fact, even the Founding Fathers disagreed what it meant, Roger Williams intended it to keep the government from corrupting the church, Thomas Jefferson wanted to stop the church from corrupting the government, and James Madison saw religion as one of many different factions that existed and needed to be preserved. So the answer isn’t always an easy one.

George Costanza

While there are lots of different Freedom of Religion issues, the main one here is “What is a Religion” and how does the government chose what to protect? The Court has generally not defined what is and what is not a religion, rather keeping it a broad standard. After all, it is the first right amongst the Bill of Rights, therefore the freedom must be protected dearly. However, limits should apply otherwise you could cite religion as a reason to do almost anything. In a case upholding a ban on the use of Peyote for religious beliefs, Justice Scalia held,

“To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.” (Employment Division v. Smith (1990))

In other words, while this amendment’s liberties are broad, they are not infinite otherwise it would lead to anarchy. Anyways, through various cases, the Court has provided us with steps in determining what is and what isn’t religion,

1. The first step is whether or not it meets this broad criteria of protected religion. The Court held that religious belief is, ” sincere and meaningful [and that] occupies a place in the life of a possessor parallel to that filled by the orthodox belief in God of one who clearly qualified for the exemption.” (from United States v. Seeger (1965)).
2. A second layer to this is that the sincere and meaningful belief need not be rational or its validity provable, but only that the individual genuinely believes it. (United States v. Ballard (1944)).
3. The third step is to determine whether or not they truly believe it. Such things that you look at include but are not limited to, the prevailing doctrine of a larger group (although it has been held that religion is inherently personal, so this can’t be the only factor, see Thomas v. Review Board (1981)), the consistency of your actions, proof that your life abides by this belief, etc…(in other words, courts don’t look kindly upon “recent converts” who have something to gain from said conversation.)

So to apply this criteria to the case at hand, believe it or not Festivus might  be declared a religion if its practice could be proven to be sincere and meaningful to the point it becomes parallel to the position of the orthodox God. However, I believe if this case is decided in most any other state, Festivus doesn’t become a religion, in California it’s a toss-up. However, in my opinion, there is no way that this guy could prove that Festivus was a religion both sincere and meaningful to him. This case wasn’t appealed, indeed it wasn’t all that important. However, if it was, no doubt it would be overturned,( even in California) because even if Festivus could somehow be declared a religion, no way could it be held that he sincerely believed it. Indeed, his lawyer just came up with it while talking to the judge.

But since it hasn’t been overturned, have a Happy Festivus to the rest of us, and if I’m in a California prison I’m becoming a convert. (just kidding).

Sources:

The California Festivus Case

Another Link if you Still Don’t Believe Me that this was a real Case

United States v. Seeger

Why I can’t support Newt Gingrich

To fully understand the question he is answering, which is unfortunately not in this video, Fox’s Megyn Kelly asked Newt,

“You have proposed a plan to subpoena Judges to testify before Congress about controversial decisions that they make, in certain cases you advocate impeaching judges or abolishing courts altogether, two conservative former Attorneys General have criticized your plan saying it alters the checks and balances of three branches of government, they used words like “dangerous”, “outrageous”, and “totally irresponsible”. 

Unfortunately I’m just getting to this issue now, I was studying for a Tax final the night this debate aired, but I wanted to get this out there. Anyways, as you can see in the video above, Newt deflects such criticism and basically says its necessary to stop bad decisions. However, as intelligent as Newt is I do believe he is missing the forest for the trees. To put it more bluntly, his proposal is crazy. Crazy. I completely agree with the former Attorneys General. This would drastically upset our balance of power between the three branches.

Newt was no doubt tapping into a Conservative electorate that has seen terrible decisions like Roe v. Wade (both legally and socially) become law due to a few activist judges. They are right when they see terrible decisions like Dred Scott as well. However, the solution to a messy house is not to blow it up but rather clean it up. Newt’s proposal takes power out of life-time termed Judge’s hands (who were chosen by a democratically elected President), and places them in the hands of politicians. The problem with this is that law becomes subject to the whim of the population. Or, in other words, Congressman who have a large interest in getting re-elected and not seeing that the law is interpreting correctly are in charge.

Me and New Hampshire's Original Copy of the Bill of Rights

Newt claims he is a historian, if that were so I am amazed that he never researched why our Founding Fathers didn’t just make a straight up Congress-run government. Our founding fathers saw it fit to write a Constitution in order to ensure the rights of a minority at the hands of a majority. We are blessed to have such wise founders that could foresee this. For example, imagine if Islam became the majority religion in this nation and they wished to forbid Christianity, under our Constitution, upheld by the Supreme Court this would not be possible. However, in Newt’s proposal, rights guaranteed by the Constitution could be blotted away as if they were never guaranteed at all.

I would also like to add that Newt’s criticism of bad decisions is weak. He cites to the 9th district which is a court out of California. This jurisdiction is pretty notorious for bad decisions. What Newt doesn’t tell you is that this district is constantly overturned by the US Supreme Court. In other words the system is functioning as it should.

I realize that the Supreme Court is not perfect, however some bad decisions are the price we pay for having far more legal and Constitutional ones. Unfortunately, the way our society works, we only hear of the bad decisions (even thought they are rare) and never the millions of good decisions handed down daily across the country. Newt’s proposal is an overreaction to a problem, Newt’s proposal would eat our Constitution alive, not uphold it. (As a side note, I also point out that he says all lawyers are arrogant- while this is certainly true of me –I know Congress and Newt are both extremely humble entities) Sorry, about the rant but I had to get my opinion out there, I’ll go back to writing legal analyzes with my next post.

How to make an “Unforgettable” Lawyer Ad

 

Even though this is a fake commercial…the sad part is that there are some lawyers commercials that aren’t far off…