Thursday, December 27, 2012
Slaughters' Solutions
Such as do build their faith upon
Holy text of pike and gun.
— Samuel Butler, Hudibras, pt.I
The NRA showed the importance of a thoughtful response to the tragic events in Newtown by maintaining a respectful silence until December 21, 2012 when it sent its beloved Wayne LaPierre to meet the press. Earlier in the week the organization had issued a compassionate response saying: “[W]e were shocked, saddened and heartbroken by the news of the horrific and senseless murders in Newtown. Out of respect for the families, and as a matter of common decency, we have given time for mourning, prayer and a full investigation of the facts before commenting. The NRA is prepared to offer meaningful contributions to help make sure this never happens again.” The full investigation to which the NRA referred took one week since exactly one week after the murders Mr. LaPierre held a press conference.
At the press conference Mr. LaPierre offered a solution to the problem of mass slaughters in schools that was radically different from others that had been heard. He suggested that all schools should have armed guards in place to protect the students. This was a creative solution that no one else had proposed.
According to the Center for Education Reform, as of 2010 there were 132,656 K-12 schools in the United States. 5,714 charter Schools, 28,220 private schools, and 7,400 Catholic Schools for a total of 173,990 schools needing protection. At this point it is impossible to know how many armed guards each school would need. There are probably no school buildings that have only one door and large schools have many doors. For this discussion we can assume that each school could limit the number of open entrances to five and thus only 5 guards would be needed for each school. Of course if one fears a gunman who shoots through a locked door as happened in Newtown, many more would be needed. Ignoring that, however, a force of 869,950-armed guards would be required.
The need for security at 2-year, 4-year and non-degree granting colleges is no less than the need for security in K-12 schools, as the Virginia Tech massacre, among others, demonstrated. According to the National Center for Education Statistics there were 11,237 such institutions in the year 2009-2010. Since many of those institutions have scores of buildings with many entrances it is impossible to know how many armed guards will be required but it is safe to assume it is at least as many as would be required for K-12 schools. Thus, the total needed to protect all educational institutions in the country would be a least 2 million armed guards and probably considerably more. Although the NRA has addressed only educational institutions, it would surely agree that there should be armed guards in all movie theaters in the country and, given the recent shooting in a shopping mall in Portland Oregon, at all shopping malls. When fully implemented our security will be guaranteed by local militia comprising at a minimum 4 to 5 million armed citizens, a militia two to three times as large as the armed forces. We won’t need more guns, however, since there are already in excess of 300 million guns owned by safety minded individuals in the United States. With the militia in place there will be no need for them in the home and they can, and probably will, be donated to the newly created militia by owners happy to obtain a charitable deduction on their taxes for their donations.
Some may wonder who is going to pay for such a militia. The cost of the militia will be paid by school districts, (and indirectly by the taxpayers) and in the case of other venues, the proprietors of the protected properties will pay and pass the cost on to their customers.
As soon as the foregoing has been fully implemented there will almost certainly be no more slaughters in the protected venues. Of course, there will be the occasional exception such as the shooting at the Columbine school where notwithstanding the protection provided by two policemen guarding the school, 12 students and one teacher were killed and 21 students were injured.
The new United States will still suffer the occasional casual death attributable to the gun. During the 12 days following the Newtown shooting 222 deaths in the United States were attributed to guns and that is not unusual. The average number of people killed in the United States each day through gun related activities is 24. That is an unfortunate fact that the NRA proposal does not address (except insofar as gun owners donate their weapons to the militia) but it does not detract from the merit of its proposal. Instead of carping, we should all be grateful to the NRA for offering a solution that insures that all of us who don’t accidentally get killed by the rogue gun or by being participants in a slaughter notwithstanding the presence of armed guards, can look forward to long, peaceful lives.
Thursday, December 20, 2012
Banks and Persons
My object all-sublime,
I shall achieve in time-
To let the punishment fit the crime.
— Gilbert and Sullivan, The Mikado
It was just an unfortunate coincidence that the reports were almost juxtaposed-the reports of the punishment given Stephanie George and that given HSBC and UBS. Stephanie, of course, was not the first.
William James Rummel has been imprisoned since the late 1970s and will be there for the rest of his life. That is because he was convicted of three crimes. He used a credit card to obtain $80 worth of goods and services, a crime for which he served 3 years in jail. When he got out he passed a forged check in the amount of $23.86 which bought him 4 years in jail. He ended his career as an air conditioning repairman, charging a customer $120.75 for a repair with which the customer was not satisfied. He refused to return the money and was convicted of obtaining money under false pretenses. Since that was his third conviction he was sentenced to life in prison. In reviewing his sentence the U.S. Supreme Court said his life sentence did not constitute cruel and unusual punishment. Commenting on the Court’s finding Justice Rehnquist said: “We all of course, would like to think that we are ‘moving down the road toward human decency. . . .’ Within the confines of this judicial proceeding, however, we have no way of knowing in which direction that road lies.” Some legal cartographers could probably have helped the Justice out.On December 12, 2012 the New York Times described the plight of Stephanie George. Her boyfriend stashed a lockbox with a half-kilogram of cocaine in her attic and when the police found it she was charged with its possession even though she claimed not to have known of its presence in her house. The judge said he thought the sentence unreasonable but he was compelled by governing statutes to sentence Ms. George to life in prison. In contemplating their fates Ms. George and Mr. Rummel (and many others) may well wonder how things could have come out differently for them. The answer is, they should have been banks. Banks don’t go to jail even though they are persons and even when their offenses involve billions of dollars.
On the same day that Ms. George’s plight was described, HSBC agreed to pay $1.92 billion for worse things than failing to properly repair an air conditioning unit or store a bit of coke. According to the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations in a ”:http://www.hsgac.senate.gov/subcommittees/investigations/media/hsbc-exposed-us-finacial-system-to-money-laundering-drug-terrorist-financing-risksreport issued in July 2012, the bank “exposed the U.S. financial system to a wide array of money laundering, drug trafficking, and terrorist financing risks due to poor anti-money laundering controls.” The banks’ conduct enabled Mexican drug cartels to launder tainted money through the American financial system, and the bank worked closely with Saudi Arabian banks linked to terrorists.
The bank is a person for purpose of making political contributions to assorted candidates but it is not a person for purposes of being charged with criminal wrongdoing or going to jail. A criminal indictment of either the bank person or a human person, we are told, might place the institution at risk of collapse. Critics can take comfort in knowing that the bank did not get off scot-free. In addition to paying $1.92 billion to settle the charges against it, it will enter into a deferred prosecution agreement that suggests if it or a human person doesn’t mend its ways criminal charges might yet be brought. Lanny Breuer, the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division said that: “HSBC is being held accountable for stunning failures of oversight-and worse-that led the bank to permit narcotics traffickers and others to launder hundreds of millions of dollars through HSBC subsidiaries, and to facilitate hundreds of millions more in transactions with sanctioned countries.” Having described its actions he nonetheless defended the punishment saying it was a “just, very real and very powerful result.” He’s right. $1.92 billion is a lot of money and it means that instead of HSBC having a 2011 profit of $22 billion it will only have a profit of about $20 billion.
December 19 we learned that UBS had settled with U.S. and British regulators for having manipulated LIBOR rates. (LIBOR is the interest rate banks charge each other for inter-bank loans. Depending on what time period one is examining the bank was either reporting artificially high rates or artificially low rates in order to deceive regulators and/or make money.) According to the Wall Street Journal, its review of a federal report suggests Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may have lost more than $3 billion as a result of the manipulation of LIBOR. UBS is not facing criminal charges since they might endanger its stability. Its Japanese branch “has agreed to enter a plea to one count of wire fraud relating to the manipulation of certain benchmark interest rates, including Yen Libor.” The bank is not going to jail for the same reason HSBC is not going to jail. Federal Regulators said if criminal charges were brought the bank’s stability would be threatened.
Mr. Rummel and Ms. George greatly regret the fact that they were not banks. Their incarceration has greatly affected their stability.
Thursday, December 13, 2012
Crimes and Convents
Get thee to a nunnery.
— Shakespeare, Hamlet
The Lord works in mysterious ways. So does the Catholic Church and it is probably as confusing for the nuns as it is for the casual observer. On the one hand nuns are in bad odor in the Vatican and are being investigated by a bunch of men. On the other hand the Vatican seems to view them as correctional institutions when such institutions are needed. Although the events described occurred some time ago, the conviction of Bishop Robert W. Finn of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph on one misdemeanor count and the resulting schism in the diocese brings it to mind again.
In April the Vatican began cracking down on the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), an organization representing about 80 per cent of the nuns in the United States. The Vatican’s “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, an organization comprising only men, said that LCWR has focused its efforts on serving the poor and disenfranchised, while remaining virtually silent on issues the church considers great societal evils: abortion and same-sex marriage.” One of the leaders of the move to investigate the LCWR was Cardinal Bernard Law who had actually spent some time with one group of nuns known as the Sisters of Mercy of Alma following his resignation in disgrace as Archbishop of Boston.
Cardinal Law was Archbishop of Boston from 1984 to 2002 during which time many priests engaged in inappropriate conduct with children. The Archbishop was aware of many instances of the conduct and said that when a priest was accused of a sexual offense it was his practice to consult with psychiatrists, clinicians and therapists in residential treatment centers to determine whether the priests accused of sexually abusing children should return to the pulpit. Reporting the criminal conduct of priests to the civil authorities was not something that occurred to Archbishop Law. In reporting on the sex abuse scandal the Massachusetts attorney general said that “the Archdiocese has shown an institutional reluctance to adequately address the problem and, in fact, made choices that allowed the abuse to continue.” The attorney general observed that since priests were not required to report sexual abuse until 2002 (when the law that required reporting was enacted) Cardinal Law had broken no laws.
In order for Cardinal Law to contemplate the error of his ways in tolerating years of sexual abuse of children by his minions, he went to live among women, serving as the chaplain to the Sisters of Mercy of Alma, a post he held for two years before moving to Rome where the Pope rewarded him by making him the archpriest of St. Mary Major Basilica, a post he left in 2011. Archbishop Law was not the only prelate who went to live among women in order to contemplate the error of his ways involving sex. The most recent is the Reverend Shawn Ratigan. His transgressions were recently the focus of news stories not as a result of what he had done but as a result of what his superior, Bishop Finn of Kansas City, had not done.
In 2010 Bishop Finn learned that the Reverend Ratigan, in addition to his priestly duties, was an amateur photographer and had on his computer hundreds of pornographic pictures of young girls that he had taken in his capacity as photographer rather than priest. Although Bishop Finn knew of the priest’s photographic pursuits, he did not share his knowledge with the civil authorities. The authorities only learned of them in 2011 when a church official, reportedly without the Bishop’s approval, went to the authorities.
Following the report the Bishop was charged by civil authorities with failing to report the abuse and the diocese spent close to $1.4 million dollars defending him and itself. At the conclusion of the trial Bishop Finn was convicted of a single misdemeanor offense of failing to report a pedophile priest. As punishment he is serving two years of court-supervised probation. The debate now ongoing in his diocese is whether or not he should resign and on that his diocese is divided and how it will come out is not known.
Although Bishop Finn did not report the abuse to civil authorities, the Bishop punished Father Ratigan by sending him to live at the Sisters of St. Francis Convent where he could have the quiet needed to contemplate the error of his ways and, according to one lawsuit filed against him, the time to continue with his photographic hobby. When civil authorities learned of his conduct they did not think confinement to a nunnery was sufficient punishment for his transgressions. He was criminally charged and ultimately pled guilty to four counts of producing child pornography and one count of attempting to produce child pornography. He faces life in prison when sentenced. His sentence is not likely to be served at a convent. Why anyone in a position of authority would think a convent the proper place to send a priestly pedophile with a penchant for young girls to be rehabilitated, one more tutored in things ecclesiastical than I, can explain.