During the War of 1812, an angry mob smashed the printing presses of a Baltimore newspaper that dared to come out against the war. When the mob surrounded the paper’s editors, and the state militia refused to protect them, the journalists were taken to prison for their own protection. That night, the mob broke into the prison, killed one journalist and left the others for dead. When the mob leaders were brought before a jury, they were acquitted.
Alexis de Tocqueville tells this chilling story in “Democracy in America,” and warns that the greatest threat the United States faces is the tyranny of the majority, a phrase he is credited with coining.
Category: Politics
TSA to Offer Pre-Approved Security Passes
AP:
Airline passengers who buy a preapproved security pass could have their credit histories and property records examined as part of the government’s plan to turn over the Registered Traveler program to private companies, federal officials say.
Governor Doyle’s State of the State Coverage
WisPolitics has a useful roundup of Doyle’s speech and reaction around the state.
“The Origins of the Great War of 2007”
With every passing year after the turn of the century, the instability of the Gulf region grew. By the beginning of 2006, nearly all the combustible ingredients for a conflict – far bigger in its scale and scope than the wars of 1991 or 2003 – were in place.
The first underlying cause of the war was the increase in the region’s relative importance as a source of petroleum. On the one hand, the rest of the world’s oil reserves were being rapidly exhausted. On the other, the breakneck growth of the Asian economies had caused a huge surge in global demand for energy. It is hard to believe today, but for most of the 1990s the price of oil had averaged less than $20 a barrel.
Sort of a bolt of lightning as I’ve been reading Shirer’s the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I’m now entering 1939 in this amazing 1960 work. The look back with respect to opportunities missed is simply astonishing. I hope Ferguson is dead wrong, but one can see the seeds of war…
The Fiction Zone that DC Has Become
Lessig explains why we’re (the US) so far behind in terms of broadband performance and economics:
How did France get it so good? By following the rules the US passed in 1996, but that telecoms never really followed (and cable companies didn’t have to follow): “strict unbundling.” That’s the same in Japan — fierce competition induced by “heavy handed” regulation producing a faster, cheaper Internet. Now of course, no one is pushing “open access” anymore. Net neutrality is a thin and light substitute for the strategy that has worked in France and Japan.
It will be interesting to see where our Wisconsin politicians land on this matter.
More on the KPMG Tax Shelter Case
Yet more examples of the spaghetti that is our tax law:
- Lynnley Browning:
Former KPMG tax professionals who are facing criminal charges over questionable tax shelters challenged the government yesterday to prove that they had broken the law.
The defendants filed more than two dozen motions in United States District Court in Manhattan yesterday, asking among other things that charges be dropped because no court had ever ruled the shelters in question illegal.
- David Reilly and Paul Davies:
One defense filing, submitted to the U.S. District Court in New York, accused prosecutors of “distorting” the facts and “obfuscating the truth-finding process” in order to win the case. By threatening KPMG with criminal indictment, the motion said, the government forced the firm to accept a “draconian” deferred prosecution agreement in which it admitted the tax strategies were fraudulent and agreed to waive attorney-client privilege.
“The goal is obviously not justice, nor truth, but instead the unsavory desire to tack another skin to the wall,” the filing said.
IRS Sued on Failure to Release Tax Data
Records showing how thoroughly the Internal Revenue Service audits big corporations and the rich, and how much it discounts the additional taxes assessed after audits, are being withheld from the public despite a 1976 court order requiring their disclosure, according to a legal motion filed last week in federal court in Seattle.
For decades, the information was given at no charge to a professor at Syracuse University, Susan B. Long, who made it available on the Internet at trac.syr.edu, with tools for people to conduct their own analyses.
Among other findings, Professor Long’s information has shown that in 1999 the poor were more likely than the rich to be audited.
David Burnham, co-director with Professor Long of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which collects raw government data, said the withheld information made it impossible to evaluate the intensity of audits. Mr. Burnham noted that the withheld data included figures that indicated how much auditors say is owed in extra taxes, but that the tax agency lets taxpayers negotiate down.
“It is simply impossible to evaluate the I.R.S. without this data,” Mr. Burnham said, “and they know it.”
Congress Hands Caught in the Cookie Jar
Declan McCullagh and Anne Broache:
All House members who use cookies either acknowledge it or have privacy policies that are silent on the topic. Of the 23 senators who pledged not to employ cookies but do anyway, 18 are Republicans and five are Democrats.
“It shows their lack of understanding of technology,” said Sonia Arrison, director of technology studies at the Pacific Research Institute, a nonprofit group in San Francisco. “It’s willful ignorance. They’re complete hypocrites. How can they accuse companies of poor data management when they’re not doing it on their own Web sites?”
No rule prohibits the use of Web monitoring techniques by Congress. But such a restriction does apply to executive branch agencies. The Pentagon and others scrambled this week to eliminate so-called Web bugs and cookies after inquiries from CNET News.com.
What Worries Bill Gross
This recovery is different because it was spawned and subsequently nurtured on the back of asset appreciation alone. Greenspan and company have high hopes that investment and then employment will ultimately kick in and work their self-sustaining magic one more time, but jobs and investment these days go to Asia at the margin, and domestic animal spirits have been squelched by the looming inevitability of reduced returns on risk capital in a low interest rate world. I’ll leave the Asian story for another day or let you turn on CNN at 11:00pm EST to get your fill of Lou Dobbs – the Dobbsian spectre of foreign competition on the march is undeniably real. My point in this Outlook will be an extension of the thoughts expressed over the past few months that this recovery is on fragile legs because it is asset-appreciation-based and that future asset appreciation is vulnerable based on the weakening stimulative power of interest rates. Therein lies the potential for a white hot speculative blaze turning into a destructive recessionary fire. Such an analogy inevitably suggests that in future years, Rome, Georgia, may not be on fire, but burning.
Northwest’s Pilot Scope Clause Contract Negotiations
Sort of an abstract issue, but relevant for Madison, particularly with the growth of 50 to 100 seat aircraft in and out of Madison
: Interesting look
Northwest’s scope clause is, in fact, particularly onerous relative to scope clauses at other major airlines. United, Delta, American & US Airways can outsource (to regional airlines) aircraft up to at least 70 seats (US Airways can even outsource some aircraft of 86 seats). Continental’s limit is 59 seats, but can do a virtually unlimited number of those.
The issue at Northwest is particularly acute because Northwest flies smaller mainline aircraft than any other major airline. Northwest itself flies over 100 DC-9s (photo above). These geriatric aircraft (many of them over 30 years old or more) have just over 100 seats. Click here for further DC-9 data.