Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Syria, the United States and the Vienna Convention
Our country, right or wrong. When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right.
— Carl Schurz, Address at Anti-Imperialistic Conference 1899
It was a good few days for the “Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.” It spends much of its time in relative obscurity but in the first two weeks of July it found itself in the news on two different occasions. Heady stuff even for a Convention. Its second appearance came about because of events in Syria on July 11 and its first appearance because of events in Texas four days earlier.
Those who follow such things are well aware that Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian trained ophthalmologist who received subspecialty training in that field at the Western Eye Hospital in London is now running Syria. Notwithstanding his excellent academic and medical credentials he has proved himself more adept at killing his citizens than addressing their concerns about how the country was run by his father, Hafez al-Assad and is now being run by him. Older Syrians remember 1982. That was the year of a revolt in Hama by the Sunni Muslim community against the rule of Hafez al-Assad. Hafez al-Assad sent tanks in to crush those opposed to his rule and killed many thousand of Hama’s citizens. The slaughter enhanced Hafez’s control if not his popularity. He ruled until he died in 2000 and was succeeded by his son who, following in his father’s footsteps has been murdering Syrian citizens who protest his rule. In June Bashar’s forces killed 40 people and more were killed when the army tried to return to Hama in early July. During 2011 more than a thousand Syrians have been slaughtered by the Syrian government forces trying to put down those demanding government reform.
On July 8, U.S. Ambassador, Robert Ford, travelled to Hama, a town where demonstrations have been on going for many weeks. Mr. Ford said he went to Hama to support the people’s right to peacefully demonstrate. After his speech he sharply criticized the government crackdown on its citizens. The Syrian government and its supporters were upset by his comments and on July 11, hundreds of government supporters attacked the U.S. Embassy in Damascus, spray-painting walls with obscenities, breaking windows and destroying security cameras. The United States was outraged.
State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, said that Syria’s charge d’affaires who was being summoned to the State Department would be told that the Syrian government “has not lived up to its obligations under the Vienna Convention to protect diplomatic facilities, and it’s absolutely outrageous.” She was referring to Article 31 of the Convention, which states “Consular premises shall be inviolable to the extent provided in this article.” Paragraph 3 of Article 31 says the state in which the facility is located is “under a special duty to take all appropriate steps to protect the consular premises against any intrusion or damage and to prevent any disturbance of the peace of the consular post or impairment of its dignity.” Permitting the embassy to be vandalized was a violation of Syria’s obligations under the Convention and the United States was justified in criticizing Syria for its inattention to the Convention’s requirement. It was just that the timing was a touch awkward.
Ms. Nuland’s comments were made four days after the U.S. Supreme Court said it was no big deal for the United States to ignore a different provision of the Convention and following its decision, Texas executed a criminal whose rights under that Convention had been violated. The criminal was Humberto Leal Garcia Jr. who was convicted of a brutal rape and murder that took place some years earlier. The provision that the Court ruled on is found in Article 36 of the Convention.
Article 36 provides that any foreign national arrested shall be informed, without delay, of “his rights” to have his consular officials notified of his arrest. Paragraph 2 of Article 36 says the rights granted a person arrested must be exercised in conformity with the laws of the country in which the national is confined but the laws of that country must give full effect to the provisions of the treaty.
Humberto’s lawyers tried to get the U.S. Supreme Court to delay his execution because of the fact that he had not been advised of his right to contact his consular officers. Five justices were unimpressed with Humberto’s appeal and permitted his execution to proceed.
Justice Breyer, writing for the dissenters, observed that the Vienna Convention had been signed and ratified by the United States. The failure of Texas authorities to notify him of his Vienna Convention rights was a violation of the United States’ obligations under the Convention. In his dissent, Justice Breyer quotes approvingly from the Solicitor General’s brief in which the Solicitor General said that Humberto’s execution “would cause irreparable harm” to “foreign-policy interests of the highest order.” The majority, of course, was not concerned with foreign policy considerations.
Confronted with complaints that it has violated its obligations under the Vienna Convention I am confident that Syria will be too polite to criticize the Court’s decision in Humberto’s case although it may express its puzzlement as to why, to use Ms. Nuland’s words, it’s outrageous for Syria to ignore the Convention’s mandates, but not for the United States to do so.
Thursday, July 7, 2011
The Advertiser and the Adjustable Rate Mortgage
Worm or beetle-drought or tempest-on a farmer’s land may fall,
Each is loaded full o’ ruin, but a mortgage beats ‘em all.
— Will Carlton, The Tramp’s Story
Juxtaposition. Avoid it. It makes things seem ridiculous if not incomprehensible. Consider the banking industry. At almost the same time that Bank of America agreed to an $8.5 billion settlement with assorted investors who were disappointed in the investment results they realized when investing in bonds that were based on substandard mortgages, an ad in the New York Times for adjustable rate mortgages (ARM) provided by PenFed caught my eye. The ad seemed oblivious to the lessons taught the last few years.
The substandard mortgage and the ARM were two of the reasons for the country’s recent financial troubles. Banks conspired with borrowers to let them take out loans without verifying their income and assisted the would be homeowners in acquiring properties that were beneficiaries of bubbles rather than increases in value. Many borrowers did not know how ARMs worked. They were seduced by the promise of a low initial interest rate and unaware that that rate could quickly become punitively high, depending on factors over which the borrower had no control.
ARMs were all the rage in the last decade. Borrower and lender alike assumed that house prices (if not values) would continue to go up and when the time came for the interest rate to be adjusted upwards, the home owner would sell at a profit and not be confronted with the higher monthly payments required by the new, much higher interest rate. It was, therefore, surprising to see that notwithstanding their contribution to the mortgage crisis, one financial institution that offers ARMs goes to great length to make them attractive, if deceptively so. That institution is PenFed whose copywriters for ads for ARMs were either born after the recent mortgage crisis (unlikely) or were completely oblivious to what went on (more likely.) The foregoing assumption is based on an advertisement in the New York Times that appeared in late June and that can be viewed on PenFed’s webpage.
As long as you’re a fine print sort of person, the ad is not at all deceiving. And even if you’re not a fine print sort, I’m sure that a loan officer would carefully explain to you that contrary to what the bold print in the advertisement appears to say, it doesn’t mean it at all. It means the fine print stuff. The rest was just put in to catch the reader’s eye. In my case it worked.
The ad was a half page ad. Using a headline type designed to attract the reader’s attention, it proclaimed: “A PenFed Mortgage. Right for you.” It then stated in considerably smaller type the advantages of a 5/5 Adjustable Rate Mortgage which included the statement that “Your rate is locked-in for 5 years at a time, guaranteed.” In large bold letters in the center of the ad it provided an example that a casual reader would assume was an example of how such a mortgage would work. It said that for the first 60 months at a mortgage rate of 3.35% and an annual percentage rate of 3.494%, the monthly payment would be $1,959. In the next line it said for the next 300 months at a 3.625% rate and an annual percentage rate of 3.494% the monthly payment would be $2,039. Beneath this description, in small-italicized print appeared a recital that the interest rate “is variable and can increase by no more than 2 percentage points every 5 years . . . .”
There is probably a simple explanation for why, when the interest rate goes from 3.25% to 3.625%, the annual percentage rate remains constant, although the explanation will not be found in this relatively unsophisticated space. The more tantalizing question to which no answer is yet forthcoming is, why would PenFed place, in an advertisement for a 5/5 ARM, an example that shows 60 monthly payments at one fixed rate and 300 payments at another fixed rate when in fact there is not only no guarantee that the second rate will remain in effect for 300 months but a certainty that it will not. A phone call to the call center for PenFed Mortgage where one can apply for a mortgage yielded little enlightenment. The person who answered the phone said he had seen the ad and found it confusing. He said when consulting with his superior about its confusing nature he was told that the company was required to advertise the mortgage in that fashion. He did not say whose requirement it was. Another person in the call center thought the form of the advertisement was mandated by the government.
Any borrower will almost certainly have any confusion caused by the ad cleared up before the borrower actually signs any papers. The ad is probably just intended to catch the attention of the readers, some of whom may be potential borrowers. It has probably worked.
Thursday, June 30, 2011
San Francisco, Sub-Saharan Africa and Circumcision
The laws of God, the laws of man,
He may keep that will and can;
Not I: let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me.
—A.E. Housman, Last Poems
Two men have been in the news this week for identical reasons. The two men are Matthew Hess who lives in San Diego, California and King Goodwill Zwelithini kaBhekuzulu who lives in the eastern South African province of KwaZulu-Natal. They are both interested in circumcision-Mr. Hess wants the practice to stop and the King wants it to expand. The King is concerned about the health of his subjects. Mr. Hess is an officious intermeddler or, more likely, a con artist.
The World Health Organization reports that “there is compelling evidence that male circumcision reduces the risk of heterosexually acquired HIV infection in men by approximately 60%. According to WHO, two-thirds of the world’s HIV positive people live in Sub-Saharan Africa and in response to that there has been an increasing emphasis on the importance of circumcision. According to a report on National Public Radio, 13 countries in sub-Saharan Africa have started circumcision programs and South Africa hopes to have 5.6 million men circumcised by 2015. The King issued a directive in 2010 urging males of all ages to be circumcised. In 2010, South African president, Jacob Zuma announced that he had been circumcised and encouraged his sons to follow in his footsteps. South Africa has embarked on a program designed to circumcise millions of African males in order to slow the spread of AIDs. Meanwhile, up North. . . .
In May, seven thousand one hundred signatures were obtained in San Francisco in support of an initiative that will now appear on the San Francisco ballot in the November election. It was sponsored by Matthew Hess who apparently thought his initiative would have more resonance in San Francisco than in his home town. If adopted by San Franciscans, the initiative will become Article 50 of the San Francisco Police Code.
The ordinance makes it unlawful to “circumcise, excise, cut, or mutilate the whole or any part of the foreskin, testicles, or penis of another person who has not attained the age of 18 years.” The ordinance makes an exception if the circumcision is “necessary to the physical health of the person on whom it is performed because of a clear, compelling, and immediate medical need with no less destructive alternative treatment available, and is performed by a person licensed in the place of its performance as a medical practitioner.” Although many anti-abortion statutes contain exceptions to the prohibition against abortion, if, among other things, the mother’s health is at risk, it is hard to figure out under what circumstances there would be a “clear, compelling, and immediate medical need” to circumcise a baby. What is easy to discern is that this is someone wanting to join the ranks of those who like to impose their notions of right and wrong on all the rest of us. The ordinance states that in its application “no account shall be taken of the effect on the person on whom the operation is to be performed of any belief on the part of that or any other person that the operation is required as a matter of custom or ritual.” Violation of the proposed ordinance is a misdemeanor.
The King is encouraging his subjects to be circumcised. He is influenced by the scientific evidence that says circumcision can improve the health of his people. Matthew Hess, on the other hand, does not care about the health benefits of circumcision but says his bill is trying to create consistency between how boys and girls are treated. He says circumcision is a form of genital mutilation equivalent to what is done to young girls in some societies. Of course there is a slight difference between the two procedures. Whereas the female genital mutilation reportedly has a variety of serious adverse effects on young girls that can affect them for the rest of their lives, circumcision has none on boys.
Matt has not limited his efforts to trying to get laws passed outlawing circumcision. He has invented something that kind of undoes the circumcision. It is pictured on line and is called a “foreskin restoration device.” The photos of Matthew that can be seen on line show him holding and admiring the device although none that this writer has found show the device actually being applied nor is it clear under what circumstances its use is appropriate. Matthew is not content with his invention of the “foreskin restoration device.” The Foreskin Restoration Device is not his only accomplishment. He has also started an online comic book featuring as the hero someone known as “Foreskin Man” whose role is to prevent newborn males from being circumcised.
Muslims and Jews are concerned about Matt’s efforts. Circumcision is part of their religious ritual going back thousands of years. They think he is some kind of a bigot. Others think he is some kind of a nut. Both are probably right.