Vic Socotra

21 March 2009

Pains and Penalties

(The old Parish Stocks at Meldreth)

The first blooms are out, brilliant pastels on the bushes and bright cheery yellow on the daffodils out in front of Big Pink. The earth is repeating the cycle as it always does. So are we.

I wish we were up to it, but it appears that we can’t dampen the wild swings of irrational exuberance of the financial system any more than our forbearers could. We managed to put it off for a while, but greed is a powerful drug. It has brought us low, and the wild round of spending will inevitably bring the curse of inflation back to seize what the government doesn’t.

We learned several painful lessons from the Great Depression, though apparently not well enough. I suppose it is a little like the great Smokey Bear campaign to prevent forest fires that was successful enough to leave so much tinder on the ground that when the inevitable spark occurred, it burned so much fiercer.

At least we know what is coming, though the personal details are a little hazy. To cope, I think I will clean out the retirement accounts and look around for something that will hold value when the currency won’t. I don’t see what continuing to dump money into a 401K will do for me.

I mean, what is the point? Inflation is going to render the account worthless, probably starting next year, and besides, according to the timetable announced by the Administration and the mind-boggling deficits, this is the last year the taxman won’t conduct a full body-cavity search.

Unless the Congress decides to do something else, of course. They are acting more squirrelly than usual these days.

I was thinking about an ad campaign featuring a couple who would be the 2009 equivalent of Harry and Louise back in the early days of the Clinton administration. They were the couple who worried about government health care; I would like to find an average couple here in Blue Arlington- maybe one of those hated lawyers and a school teacher- who make the famous $250,000 a year, are underwater on their house, and are expected to cough up their cash in the public good.

Of course, the way the public mood is, the crowd would probably want to throw them in the stocks and inflict some penalty and pain for whining.

Taken in that context, a vegetable garden like the one that the First Lady is going to have her servants maintain seems like a pretty good idea. And all that survivalist stuff seems to be making a lot of sense these days.

It’s funny- even old Bolshie Dan Shorr on National Public Radio was talking about the confiscatory legislation directed at the AIG executive bonuses as a “bill of attainder.”

That is an old term of art from the British Parliament, also known as an “act of attainder.”

I like old Dan, and being a thoroughly non-sectarian analyst, I take the Marxist dialectic to heart. I like to test my natural resistance to change with an experienced progressive voice. I start with thesis, collide it against anti-thesis and eventually reach some sort of synthesis.

For several years thesis has ruled the stage; now it is anti-thesis in the majority.

We are living through a time when antique phrases have suddenly regained currency. For example, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) is taking charge of the government in El Salvador this week.

Remember when that was the fulcrum of the Cold War? So much of what I know is strangely topsy-turvy this week.

You would think that an election so far away would be of little consequence here, like a few dozens of millions of dollars spread over hundreds of billions. Oh well, life is ruled by the things we can comprehend, not the larger universe that exceeds our ability to grasp.

The FMLN victory has tendrils that encircle the building. The Buckingham Neighborhood is the home to many who fled the long-ago war, and their sons and daughters who have come since to work for the Yankee Dollar. One of the contributing factors in the election there has been the downturn of remittances from those who live here.

The hard times hit our legal and illegal residents first, and consequently the lack of day labor directly connects to the payments wired back to San Salvador. Lack of the payments worsens the economy, and the government has to look around to find the means to fund the public good.

In the campaign, the conservative Arena Party warned that the FMLN will start doing what their ideological big brother Hugo Chavez has done in Venezuela, which is to expropriate private property in the interest of the state, which is what the Salvadoran gang MS-13 is doing right here.

Hugo Chavez doesn’t need a gang. His process is quite legal under Venezuelan law, passed by the legislature, and conducted through a process closely aligned with the bill of attainder. That was the means by which the British Parliament declared a person or group of persons guilty of a crime, and then punished them without benefit of a trial.

I suppose what astonished me this week that we could so blithely slide past two centuries of judicial and legislative history.

Bills of Attainder were useful to a variety of parties, initially in the favor of the Crown, which was able to confiscate property, though there were other worthy purposes.

In December of 1660, for example, the Commons and Lords passed a resolution "That the Carcasses of Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton, John Bradshaw, and Thomas Pride, whether buried in Westminster Abbey, or elsewhere, be, with all Expedition, taken up, and drawn upon a Hurdle to Tiburne, and there hanged up in their Coffins for some time; and after that buried under the said Gallows.”

Continuing the restoration comedy, in 1689, the Catholic-dominated Parliament of Ireland convened to draw up a secret list of almost three thousand names. The Parliament ordered these men to report to Dublin for trial, named a date, and declared their property forfeit. The choice was painful. Non-appearance meant that parliament took possession of all property. Appearing held the risk of being drawn and quartered.

One those named on the list was Sir William Stewart, Earl of Mountjoy, a protestant who owned properties in the counties of Donegal and Tyrone. Through intrigue at the court of Catholic King James II, he happened to be confined in the Bastille in Paris. Parliament expected that he extricate himself from prison, and make it back to Ireland for his punishment on pain of forfeiture of his estates.

That would have been difficult, since Parliament kept the contents of the master list secret until after the date had passed.

Bills to confiscate legally-possessed private property- like the quite legal if inappropriate bonuses paid to the AIG profiteers- were sometimes called "bill of pains and penalties."

The last such bill was passed by Lords in 1820, but not considered by Commons; it sought to divorce Queen Caroline from King George IV and adjust her titles and property accordingly, on grounds of her alleged adultery.

Bills of Pains and Penalties were applied to the British colonies as well, including those in North America. The Revolution in American can be argued to have been a conservative one, since the injustice of attainder was considered a direct assault on property owners.

It was, of course, although the former colonies used their own bills of attainder to inflict pain and penalty on British loyalists by seizing their property.

The Framers of the Constitution took the matter seriously, and designed the separation of powers between the judicial and legislative branches to ensure that Congress did not get into the practice of seizing property without judicial process. The text of the Constitution, Article I, Section 9; Clause 3 contains these words:

“No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.”

In response to populist outrage, the US Congress this week set about doing exactly that. Our elected fools enacted a law to tax bonus recipients at companies that receive bailout funding, including AIG at a rate of 90%.

Some consider that to be perfectly fine. The bastards deserve it, and besides, that was the tax rate for everyone at one time, so why not?

Dan Shorr has a long perspective, and Bolshie or not, a respect for the integrity of the founding documents.

He considers the matter at least worth consideration. Others consider the run-amok financiers to be traitors, and worthy of special pain and penalty.

I don’t like the greedy pricks at AIG, and I begrudge them the bounty of my taxpayer money. But I must confess that I am a little concerned about shredding the constitution. There are some articles in there that I am really counting on using in the next couple years.

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