cook county budget statement Jan. 29 2007

COOK COUNTY BUDGET STATEMENT January 29, 2007

How much justice can you afford? If you are not a professional athlete beating a rape case with
$12 million, or a politician getting $10 or $20 million in criminal defense from a politically potent
law firm, or a student at an expensive university flimsily charged with rape in a nationally publicized case, probably not too much.

How much justice can Cook County afford? Or, rather, how much injustice?

Now that irresistable payrolling has met immovable tax resistance, it is high time indeed county budget cutters wrap themselves around the numbers the previous sheriff gave on Channel 11 recently, that the average stay in Cook County jail is 190 days, in New York, 45 days. If the Cook County stay could be cut to the New York figure, the jail population would be cut by three-fourths, at least those not actually serving sentences. That alone comes to beaucoup buckoes.

From a more bleeding heart standpoint, let’s figure Cook County jail is not a wholesome place to be, as Steve Bogira, Courtroom 302, makes abundantly clear, if anyone still needs that. Let’s reasonably figure the poor slobs coming out, by and large, are hardly less disposed to commit crime than when they went in. Let’s also figure, in a country with 6% of the world’s population but 25% of its prisoners, a lot of them should not be in jail to begin with. And all this punishment is no deterrent when the prospective criminal figures, get it if I do, get it if I don’t.

Protection of the innocent is not an idle, idealistic luxury. Even the legal profession does not realize this, however, judging by the special lawyers’ advertising section in the January 2007 Chicago magazine. In a brief article appropriate for a supermarket tabloid, it describes criminal defense work as defending the deplorable and barely gets beyond the personal satisfactions of prominent defense attorneys.

Any responsible description of criminal defense is lacking without quoting Blackstone, that by the ancient wisdom of the law it is better to let ten guilty go free than imprison one innocent, and that it is the surety of punishment, not the severity, that deters crime. Let’s update that to include non-punishment of the innocent. Let’s send them a message, keep your nose clean and everything’s cool.

Let’s figure too, that a proper public defender investigative staff would have caught Burge years earlier, likewise the papers proving Anthony Porter’s innocence.

A state senator said that DuPage county expenses are one-third those of Cook on a per capita basis. That raw, simple figure ought to have considerable shock value. Cook County has a generations-old morass to work its way out of, something beyond meat-ax quotas. But figure
each make-work job destroys several real jobs, when we figure it destroys the returns on capital, capital that could create several real jobs.

Figure, too, it takes 80 hours a week to support a family in recent decades, not 40, because of the increased cost of living, in turn, because of excessive government spending. Figure, also, the problems of youth, the drugs, sex, violence, etc., are due largely to absent parents, per Mary Eberstadt, Home Alone America. Let’s call it jurogenic crime, then, that is, crime caused by the system, directly and indirectly. And while Chicago Metropolis 2020 can issue quite an erudite analysis of excessive punishment, the excessive spending it advocates elsewhere, especially in transportation, is a big part of the problem.

Just as precision-guided warheads need less explosive, the closer they get to the target, public bodies ought to precision-guide their spending and punishment.

I can hear it already, that Cook County does not have the cash for even this much analysis, much less for beefing up the public defender’s office. "Revenue enhancement," however, need not be a euphemism for increased taxes, not when TIFs are just a slush fund for cutesy pie urban renewal. The County might sue the City of Chicago over TIFs as violating the appropriation power. Taxpayer lawsuits have a tough row to hoe in the courts, but a taxspender action might have a bit more clout.

William F. Wendt, Jr.

http:/beyondstateofnature.blogspot.com/
http:/beyondconservofascism.blogspot.com/ 

COOK COUNTY BUDGET STATEMENT January 29, 2007

How much justice can you afford? If you are not a professional athlete beating a rape case with $12 million, or a politician getting $10 or $20 million in criminal defense from a politically potent law firm, or a student at an expensive university flimsily charged with rape in a nationally publicized case, probably not too much.

How much justice can Cook County afford? Or, rather, how much injustice?

Now that irresistable payrolling has met immovable tax resistance, it is high time indeed county budget cutters wrap themselves around the numbers the previous sheriff gave on Channel 11 recently, that the average stay in Cook County jail is 190 days, in New York, 45 days. If the Cook County stay could be cut to the New York figure, the jail population would be cut by three-fourths, at least those not actually serving sentences. That alone comes to beaucoup buckoes.

From a more bleeding heart standpoint, let’s figure Cook County jail is not a wholesome place to be, as Steve Bogira, Courtroom 302, makes abundantly clear, if anyone still needs that. Let’s reasonably figure the poor slobs coming out, by and large, are hardly less disposed to commit crime than when they went in. Let’s also figure, in a country with 6% of the world’s population but 25% of its prisoners, a lot of them should not be in jail to begin with. And all this punishment is no deterrent when the prospective criminal figures, get it if I do, get it if I don’t.

Protection of the innocent is not an idle, idealistic luxury. Even the legal profession does not realize this, however, judging by the special lawyers’ advertising section in the January 2007 Chicago magazine. In a brief article appropriate for a supermarket tabloid, it describes criminal defense work as defending the deplorable and barely gets beyond the personal satisfactions of prominent defense attorneys.

Any responsible description of criminal defense is lacking without quoting Blackstone, that by the ancient wisdom of the law it is better to let ten guilty go free than imprison one innocent, and that it is the surety of punishment, not the severity, that deters crime. Let’s update that to include non-punishment of the innocent. Let’s send them a message, keep your nose clean and everything’s cool.

Let’s figure too, that a proper public defender investigative staff would have caught Burge years earlier, likewise the papers proving Anthony Porter’s innocence.

A state senator said that DuPage county expenses are one-third those of Cook on a per capita basis. That raw, simple figure ought to have considerable shock value. Cook County has a generations-old morass to work its way out of, something beyond meat-ax quotas. But figure each make-work job destroys several real jobs, when we figure it destroys the returns on capital, capital that could create several real jobs.

Figure, too, it takes 80 hours a week to support a family in recent decades, not 40, because of the increased cost of living, in turn, because of excessive government spending. Figure, also, the problems of youth, the drugs, sex, violence, etc., are due largely to absent parents, per Mary Eberstadt, Home Alone America. Let’s call it jurogenic crime, then, that is, crime caused by the system, directly and indirectly. And while Chicago Metropolis 2020 can issue quite an erudite analysis of excessive punishment, the excessive spending it advocates elsewhere, especially in transportation, is a big part of the problem.

Just as precision-guided warheads need less explosive, the closer they get to the target, public bodies ought to precision-guide their spending and punishment.

I can hear it already, that Cook County does not have the cash for even this much analysis, much less for beefing up the public defender’s office. "Revenue enhancement," however, need not be a euphemism for increased taxes, not when TIFs are just a slush fund for cutesy pie urban renewal. The County might sue the City of Chicago over TIFs as violating the appropriation power. Taxpayer lawsuits have a tough row to hoe in the courts, but a taxspender action might have a bit more clout.

William F. Wendt, Jr.

http:/beyondstateofnature.blogspot.com/ http:/beyondconservofascism.blogspot.com/

moral casualty of vietnam

This was written in that balmy, pre 9/11 era when the war clouds on the horizon were mostly over Columbia.

CHARLES MANSON, PRO-LIFE?

Can you imagine Charles Manson turning pro-life and campaigning against abortion? Would his assistance be welcome in the anti-abortion movement? Charles Manson, for those of you too disgustingly young to remember, directed the horrendous raids in Los Angeles, in which his "Manson Clan" invaded the Tate and LaBianca households, slaughtered the occupants, and desecrated some of the bodies.

Back when the Vietnam War was still going full blast, the murders and trial were somewhat more sensational than even the O.J. Simpson affair. Back when the Vietnam War was still going full blast, to be sure. Back when 200 body bags or more were coming back every week. Back when the standard operation of the war was the "search-and-destroy mission," an expedition into the surrounding countryside, not to take and hold land, but simply to kill as many people as possible and be celebrated in Robert McNamara's infamous weekly press briefings as "body counts" and "kill ratios."

Back when "free-fire zones" meant shoot anything that moved in certain areas. Back when "popping dinks" meant shooting Vietnamese for sport. Back when photos had an extensive underground circulation, showing napalmed children, bodies shredded by plastic shrapnel that could not be detected by X-rays, and soldiers posing behind decapitated Viet Cong bodies, like hunters posing with a deer. Back when Air Progress, December 1968, hardly some hippie, peace creep rag, said of B-52 carpet bombing tactics: "For the most part enemy ground fire in South Vietnam has seldom been effective above 3000 ft. Thus B-52's drop as low as 5,000 ft. to put their bombs closer to friendly perimeters- and let Stratofort crews check the results. But when the Boeing bombers go over the Demilitarized Zone, and occasionally into the North Vietnam panhandle, they move to higher altitudes to avoid more sophisticated antiaircraft weapons." Back when you could easily get yourself called a Communist or a coward for objecting to any of this, or even today, even by some self-styled "pro-life" campaigners.

Some thirty years later, to be sure, you can still overlook all this, blame everything on the "brutal Hanoi regime," and still enjoy good standing in the "pro-life" movement. as Rep. Henry Hyde did in a Wall Street Journal piece last July. In such circles, I would suppose, it would be considered irrelevant or even offensive to call the Manson Clan rampages "search and destroy" missions in miniature. In the real world of moral formation, however, it is completely relevant, indeed, the more offensive, the more relevant. Louis Brandeis' famous dissent, that when the government breaks the law, it invites every man to break the law, is hardly some narrow, technical dictum. No, it embraces the very core and essence of morality, without which no human society can survive.

"Pro-life" moral concerns badly, badly need to bring a thing or two out of the Twilight Zone. Let's look at the rise in social pathologies over the past quarter century or so, in particular at the corrosive effects of the Vietnam War on American society. Square, traditional, "pro-life," Norman Rockwell types have yet to realize it, but it was the Vietnam War that destroyed traditional authority and gave the drug culture, the sexual revolution and the rip-off ethic their biggest boost. It gave the Vietnam generation a morally tragic choice between the square, traditional culture that supported the war and the hedonistic, dissolute counter-culture which just dropped out to escape it.

James Lincoln Collier, The Rise of Selfishness in America (Oxford University Press, 1991), traces the gradual rise of dissolute, hedonistic lifestyles through the 19th and 20th centuries. Previously confined to the vice districts, they were celebrated in risque novels in the 1930's. In the 1950's they gained additional exposure in Playboy and the beat movement. It was only after the demoralization of Vietnam and Watergate, however, that they spread throughout American society. A gradual encroachment became a flood of drug use, illegimate births and broken families. Figure today's eight and ten year old "super-predators" pushing each other out of windows and whatnot are the offspring of teen age mothers born about then.

If you like Vietnam, you will love Columbia. It is not so much a matter of refighting Vietnam as of restoring moral credibility. It absolutely requires repudiation of quite a few policies, past and present, with about the same moral stature as a Manson Clan rampage. Otherwise the "pro-life" movement has about the same moral stature as Charles Manson.

transitional drug policy

TRANSITIONAL DRUG POLICY

What do we have to show for the current "War on Drugs"? Bulging prisons? Alienated youth? Crime caused by high drug prices? Innocent citizens raided by mistake? Inner city neighborhoods shot up by rival drug gangs? One tenth of incoming drugs being intercepted? Meddling in foreign countries akin to the early stages of the Vietnam War?

What is the alternative? Legalization? There is a compelling argument that illegal drugs cause much the same problems that illegal alcohol did during Prohibition, problems that were largely cured by repeal. For all the fine theory, however, there is the practical political problem that alcohol was a mainstream cultural phenomenon, while drugs are associated with deviant and dissolute subcultures. Across the board legalization is not a program likely to get anyone elected anytime soon. Neither would abolition of all regulation of alcohol and tobacco, as far as that goes.

While not quite kosher libertarian, however, such policies are far better tailored to the recognized dangers these mainstream intoxicants present and do not create the massive ill effects of the drug war. There are perhaps politically viable alternatives to complete legalization, modeled somewhat on current alcohol and tobacco policies, tailored to the specific dangers of particular drugs. If the life of the law is not logic but experience, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, then we need to accumulate a different sort of experience before any final policy can be made.

As a biochemical matter, there is nothing more dangerous about marijuana than tobacco and alcohol. Existing regulations can be easily adapted, such as not driving under a specified influence and no sales to minors. It may well cause the same health hazards as tobacco, which its present illegal status obscures. Imprisonment for use or even sale of marijuana to adults is a complete waste of law enforcement needed for crime with real victims and intitates a significant portion of the population to evasion of the law. If marijuana were regulated much as tobacco and alcohol, it would be removed from the criminal subculture and would not likely lead to use of other illegal drugs.

Opiates in and of themselves do not cause violent behavior. Opiates such as morphine and codeine have long had medical uses, They can cause cravings intense enough to push people into crime, however, if only because their illegality makes their prices exhorbitantly high and available only within a criminal subculture. Folk wisdom has it, however, that legal opiates would be no more expensive than a pack a day cigarette habit. Some sort of opiates should be available under medical supervision, if only to remove them and users from criminal circles.

There are various drugs which do in and of themselves cause violent behavior, such as crack, cocaine, LSD and various amphetamines. Although alcohol has long been known to cause violent behavior and has recently been implicated by the federal government in some 40% of violent crime, a common approach is not likely to be politically acceptable anytime soon. Thus they have to be separated from those that do not cause violent behavior in and of themselves. There is nothing unlibertarian, however, about holding purveyors of such substances responsible for violent behavior of uses, just as dram shop laws hold bartenders responsible for the drunken behavior of customers.

Legal availability of marijuana and opiates ought to divert drug use from the truly dangerous varieties. A selective drug legalization ought to mitigate most of the evils of both drug use and the war on drugs. Who knows, maybe someone might even get elected on such a platform

Bork's pixalated idea of "original intent"

Chicago, Illinois 60622 September 6, 2005

To the editor, Harper’s:

Cass Sunstein was nowhere near hard enough on the halfway originalists. (Harper’s, September 2005) What have all of them missed, just for starters? Robert Bork, The Tempting of America, says it is heresy to deny that judges are bound by the law, i.e., original intent (p4). He then says a lot of New Deal and Great Society cases were decided wrongly on that basis, but have become too much a part of the fabric of society to change now (p158). He accepts paper money. even to the point of questioning judicial sanity (pp155, 157, 158), and the draft (p122), without the slightest examination of original intent.

Why fulminate merely about judges creating rights not in the Constitution, but not powers? Helvering v. Davis (1936) held Social Security to be an emergency power to spend ourselves rich, not an enumerated power. How long before it creates its own emergency?

Former Federal Reserve secretary Bray Hammond wrote in his 1957 Pulitzer prize winning Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War, Chapter 4, quite a complete history of the monetary clause: "...These decisions removed whatever constitutional inhibitions ever existed upon the power of Congress to authorize anything it wishes as money. Thus, in the course of 150 years, changes in monetary and business habits, in governmental responsibility, in statutes, and in jurisprudence have strengthened the Constitution's ban on issues of money by individual states but have nullified completely the original intent that the federal government should have no power to make anything but the precious metals legal tender. "... One can either consider the departure from the original intent a calamity or hold that the original intent, though wise at the time, could not possibly endure...." (pp109-110)

When the framers said, "raise and support armies," they meant paid professional armies. There is compulsory military service, but under the militia clauses,. It is certainly not intended to reduce American citizens to mindless tools of the government, nor to send them halfway around the world, whether or not they are needed for emergencies at home, such as Katrina. This we can see from the Federalist Papers, the debates in the First Congress on the Bill of Rights, and Story’s commentaries. If we know what to look for, the 1980s Perpich v. DOD cases show the National Guard is unconstitutional as a commingling of army and militia.

William F. Wendt, Jr

fuller quotes from Federalist 51

This is a fuller quote from Federalist 51, which is too long for the 500 character home page introduction:

"...Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or liberty be lost in the pursuit. In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature, where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger; and as, in the latter state, even the stronger individuals are prompted, by the uncertainty of their situation, to submit to a government which may protect the weak as well as themselves, so, in the former state, will the more powerful factions or parties be gradually induced, by a like motive, to wish for a government which will protect all parties, the weaker as well as the more powerful...."

This is a previous quote from Federalist 51:

"...But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions."

red, white, and blue wahabi

(Yours truly has a Saudi friend who would object strenuously to this characterization of Wahabism. The stereotype is important, however, if only because "aginners" become mirror images of what they are against.)

RED WHITE AND BLUE WAHABIS?

Would Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein ever give two hoots in hell what motivates Americans? Why, then, should we care any more about theirs?

At the September 2003 meeting of the Illinois Forum, a statewide conservative and libertarian group, John McNeal, a retired prosecutor, said all the fuss over the PATRIOT Act was over nothing, that the act was largely drug enforcement and anti-crime syndicate measures that had been around for two decades or so. Plus, some good old fashioned charity fraud investigaton, something he had done in the attorney general’s office. Picking up on the IRA, phony Muslim charities were making widows and orphans, not helping them. The Libertarians, he said, were on the wrong side of the issue and were spreading unjustified fears of the government.

At the end of the meeting a Libertarian candidate for U.S. Senate, Jerry Kohn, introduced himself. A former Republican who had voted for Bush but had since objected to his war and terrorism policies, he pointedly differed with NcNeal’s earlier remarks. As Kohn said the 9-11 hijackers had to be extremely angry to do such a thing, McNeal, two seats away at the table, stood up and said he was not going to tolerate such nonsense, that it was treasonous, and that the Wahabis were a militant sect that had been trying to take over the world since the early history of Islam. It went back and forth, Kohn being well outshouted by the vehement McNeal, citing WWII precedents for dealing with foreign saboteurs.

After the meeting Kohn’s supporters, by and large, had the better of the post-mortems. One McNeal supporter simply could not understand how anyone could legitimately object to U.S. foreign policies or to bloated military spending or to troops in over 100 countries. She said it was just my opinion and actually asked why I don’t leave, as if she owned the country.

I asked if she had ever read the Federalist Papers, especially Nos. 6 and 8, which every good conservative should know are the public case for ratifying the Constitution. She said she had, but, to me, not very believably.

Why, indeed, should any good American care what motivates terrorists or tyrants? For one simple reason, if nothing else, that we do not descend to their level or become mirror images of them. That is one reason why McNeal’s attitudes, written into law and policy, scare me a lot more than anything from overseas. How much further does such anti-terrorism, in this instance disrupting a perfectly orderly expression of opinion, have to go before it descends into home-grown Wahabism?

McNeal & Co. might recall the military proverb to judge an enemy not by his intentions, but by his capabilities. The capabilities of a home-grown red white and blue Wahabism, dogmatically oblivious to differing opinion or even to making enemies quite unnecessarily, there or here. "Projecting American power anywhere in the world," as the Navy video at the Museum of Science and Industry puts it, at least that sort, are incomparably more frightening to me than anything that Saddam or Osama might ever pull off, even a suitcase nuclear explosion.

Not that an enemy’s intentions or motivations are irrelevant at all, however "treasonous" to consider. At the risk of undemonizing the enemy, there might be a way to defuse his all too human will to fight, but not, however, a demon’s.

And let’s be careful not to demonize McNeal & Co. the way they demonize others. When will they realize that they do not ease mistrust with any such contempt of others’ opinions and most certainly not the divisiveness that undermines their war effort? By my Vietnam nostalgia, the anti-war movement was only inflamed, not cowed, by the pro-war side calling it Communists, cowards, traitors and such. Read very, very carefully, if you are patriotic enough, Federalist No. 6, about men, possessing the confidence of their countries, plunging them into ruinous wars for personal reasons, and No, 8, on people too cowed by frequent wars to resist military usurpations.

William F. Wendt, Jr.