If the government had access to the communications between a client and his lawyer, the lawyer would be nothing but a government agent, like Soviet defense attorneys, whose official role was to serve as adjuncts to the prosecution.
Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton, "The Tyranny of Good Intentions"
Once upon a time, the U.S. Justice Department respected the legal rights that make law a shield of the innocent rather than a weapon of government. No more. What the great English jurist William Blackstone called "the Rights of Englishmen" have been eroded beyond recognition.I've written about tax issues before, including this article on our very odd SUV subsidies.The last remaining right — the attorney-client privilege — is under full-scale assault by Justice Department prosecutors in the tax shelter case involving the accounting firm KPMG. The Justice Department has demanded, and the accounting firm has agreed to, a waiver of the attorney-client privilege for communications between lawyers and KPMG employees involved in marketing tax shelters the Internal Revenue Service has challenged.
The attorney-client privilege was long championed by jurists because they realized the privilege promoted equality under the law. Convictions can result from lack of access to legal knowledge as well as from actual wrongdoing. To ensure defendants would avail themselves of legal counsel, their communications with attorneys were made confidential, outside the reach of prosecutors.
In recent years, the Justice Department has taken the position that winning its cases is more important than historic rights centuries in the making. Arguing that the innocent have nothing to fear from their attorneys' disclosures of their confidences, department has employed various means of subverting the attorney-client privilege.
Sentencing guidelines from the White House-appointed U.S. Sentencing Commission have greatly strengthened prosecutors' ability to attack the attorney-client privilege. Indictment of a company and the severity of punishment depends on its "cooperation" with the investigation.
A January 2003 memo by Deputy Attorney General Larry D. Thompson, now a fellow at the Brookings Institution, defines "cooperation" in a way that drives a wedge between a company and its employees. A company that pays its employees' legal fees is defined as uncooperative.
Faced with the threat of being declared uncooperative, KPMG announced it would pay its employees legal fees only if they waived the attorney-client privilege and "cooperated" with the investigation. Invariably, "cooperation" requires self-incrimination and negotiation of a guilty plea. By making it impossible for a defendant to defend himself, the government need never have a real case.
Americans must think seriously about the quality of "justice" coming from the Justice Department. Prosecutors have defined "cooperation" as aid in convicting oneself or a fellow employee, as waiving all constitutional rights and privileges, as betrayal of fellow employees and as helping prosecutors create the appearance of guilt even when no crime has been committed.
Among the pending victims in the KPMG case, Jeffrey Eischeid faces 20 years in prison for marketing KPMG tax shelters that experts said were legal.
The IRS has the right to challenge the tax shelters, and the accounting firm has stopped marketing them. But for the Justice Department to retroactively declare them illegal illustrates the precarious position of a defendant today. Whatever he has done can be declared illegal after the fact.
The Justice Department also has disposed of the legal principle there can be no crime without intent. Neither Jeffrey Eischeid nor other KPMG employees knowingly or intentionally sold illegal tax shelters. The products were approved by KPMG's professional responsibility committee, and the IRS' challenge does not mean a crime was committed.
However, Justice prosecutors have become experts at creating the impression crimes have been committed. By stripping away a defendant's rights, prosecutors can coerce a guilty plea, crime or no crime.
Conservatives who prattle about Americans living under a rule of law are speaking of a bygone era. The rule of law ended during the New Deal, when President Franklin Roosevelt turned congressional statutes into authorization bills for federal bureaucrats to legislate via regulations.
Today, there is even less accountability. Appointed officials make criminal law without even a congressional authorization bill. The Sentencing Commission's "proposals" become law unless Congress vetoes them. What we are witnessing is the emergence of a fascist legal order in which law and legal procedure are whatever unelected officials decide serves the interest of government.
How else can we explain how the four foundations of our legal system — no retroactive law, no crime without intent, no self-incrimination, and the attorney-client privilege — have been swept aside in the federal case against KPMG?
Paul Craig Roberts is a columnist for The Washington Times and is nationally syndicated.
Dean campaign architect Joe Trippi's new book discusses the power of the internet and how individuals and organizations can benefit.
Interesting article by writer Eric M. Johnson, a Marine Corps Reservist on the Washington Post's Iraq coverage (if it can be called that).
Don't take my word for it that the Post’s reporting is substandard and superficial. Take the word of Philip Bennett, the Post's assistant managing editor for foreign news. In a surprisingly candid June 6 piece, he admits that "the threat of violence has distanced us from Iraqis." Further, "we have relied on Iraqi stringers filing by telephone to our correspondents in Baghdad, and on embedding with the military. The stringers are not professional journalists, and their reports are heavy on the simplest direct observation." Translation: we are reprinting things from people we barely know, from a safe location dozens of miles away from the fighting.UPDATE: The article was also published in the NY Post on Saturday, 7.3.2004.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a Patent Busting Contest:
Every year numerous illegitimate patent applications make their way through the United States patent examination process without adequate review. The problem is particularly acute in the software and Internet fields where the history of prior inventions (often called “prior art”) is widely distributed and poorly documented. As a result, we have seen patents asserted on such simple technologies as:
- One-click online shopping (U.S. Patent No. 5,960,411.)
- Online shopping carts (U.S. Patent No. 5,715,314.)
- The hyperlink (U.S. Patent No. 4,873,662.)
- Video streaming (U.S. Patent No. 5,132,992.)
- Internationalizing domain names (U.S. Patent No. 6,182,148.)
- Pop-up windows (U.S. Patent No. 6,389,458.)
- Targeted banner ads (U.S. Patent No. 6,026,368.)
- Paying with a credit card online (U.S. Patent No. 6,289,319.)
- Framed browsing; (U.S. Patent Nos. 5,933,841 & 6,442,574.) and
- Affiliate linking (U.S. Patent No. 6,029,141.)
The Justice Department today denied Freedom of Information Act requests to make public data on foreign lobbyists, claiming that '[i]mplementing such a request risks a crash that cannot be fixed and could result in a major loss of data, which would be devastating'. The requestor responded that '[t]his was a new one on us. We weren't aware there were databases that could be destroyed just by copying them.
Steve Fainaru continues his series on the monopoly that is baseball, including Bud Selig's all powerful role in the game and public financing of stadiums. Today's article includes quotes from Senator Herb Kohl (D-Wis) regarding a potential baseball team in Washington, DC (nice to see the Senator spending time on important issues....)
I continue to be amazed that it took a newspaper 700 miles from Wisconsin, The Washington Post, to write this series on the fleecing of taxpayers. Perhaps former Governor Tommy Thompson helped out - he's quoted in the articles.
My father and I drove, rather started and stopped numerous times last week, as we attempted to navigate our way around Chicago. We slowed to a stop about 20 miles east of Illinois on I-90, routed around the stalled traffic on a combination of Indiania 912, US 41/12, the Chicago Skyway (also under construction), State Street, Lake Shore Drive, then finally back to 90.... I've never seen it worse than last Thursday. Larry Sandler discusses the gory details of driving around Chicago. Lake Express is an option....
Madison's Monopoly Utility, MGE, has according to this isthmus column [1.8MB PDF] by Chamond Liu, served it's local customers by:
Fore (friends of responsible energy) Madison has quite a bit of information on this issue.
I've written about MGE's high rates and routing cash through the Kansas Democratic Party (!) before.
P. J. O'Rourke on Iwo Jima or Sulfur Island.
From February 19 to March 26 of 1945, 6,821 Americans and about 20,000 Japanese were killed in the fight for the island.
Fascinating article by Steve Fainaru on Bud Selig's Miller Park hardball tactics (with some interesting comments from former governor Tommy Thompson):
The soaring brick ballpark on the outskirts of this city took the lives of three ironworkers. It cost a Republican state senator his job and set back taxpayers a sum equal to the Milwaukee County parks budget projected over the next decade. It nearly exhausted the political capital of the former governor, Tommy G. Thompson, who championed the stadium to keep Wisconsin "major league." But Thompson won't set foot in the place. Last year, when the ballpark's tenants, the Milwaukee Brewers, invited Thompson to Opening Day, he declined. He did it to protest Brewers owner and Commissioner of Baseball Allan H. (Bud) Selig, who, Thompson said in an interview, provided misleading financial information to get the stadium built, then broke promises to use the increased revenue to make the Brewers competitive.I've not set foot in Miller Park, and don't plan to. Then, there's this quote from the deputy editor of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel on their predicament (the newspaper's parent company's Chairman was a lobbyist for the stadium!):"There were just so many misleadings and mischaracterizations," said Thompson, now Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Bush administration.
Inside the newspapers, reporters and editorial writers felt constrained. "We were totally compromised at that point," said Sue Ryon, deputy editor of the Milwaukee Journal's editorial page, then the lead editorial writer on the stadium issue. "We had no credibility. Anything we said, it was, 'Well, who can believe them? Look at the position they're in?' We felt as a newspaper, as an editorial board, handcuffed, and that was pretty much from the beginning."Two useful links: Field of Schemes | Doug Pappas site
I don't support recording movies in theatres, however, it seems absurd with the challenges our country faces today, including health care, education, terrorism and job growth, that our elected senators (Kohl | Feingold) would support - unanimously, this bill (S.1932). Once again, our elected senators are bowing to the cash machine from Hollywood and the RIAA. Nice work. Contact Senators Kohl and Feingold and let them know that there are much greater priorities than this....
What a waste of time and money.
Ernie rebuts Hollywood and the music industry shiller's Hatch & Leahy's new "Induce Act", which criminalizes the act of inducing another to commit a copyright violation.
The EFF posts a fake complaint against Apple Computer, maker of the ipod.
James Cramer writes about Old Media Giant Viacom's difficulties:
Viacom SOS. No, to find out why Viacom’s stock sank to the 52-week-low list, all you need to do is look to the 52-week-high list, where the winners are: video games, satellite radio, video-on-demand, and Internet search engines. Those are the companies with the better models, the better technology that has, in an incredibly short period of time, stolen massive amounts of the fuel that powered Battleship Viacom: the viewers themselves.
Dan Gillmor writes about the latest version of the "best law money can buy":
I hadn't been taking some proposed new copyright legislation very seriously, mainly because it's logically absurd on its face. But the "Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act of 2004" (PDF) seems to be moving so quickly that we have to pay attention now.This bill, the stated purpose of which is to criminalize actions that might "induce" copyright infringement, doesn't just overrule the Sony Betamax case, which gave us the right to tape TV shows to watch later. It would turn people offering totally legitimate technology into criminals, if what they offered could also be used for infringing purposes.
Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch is cloaking the bill as "child protection." It is nothing of the sort. It is a Hollywood-sponsored attack on fundamental freedom, and on innovation. (Ernie Miller deconstructs Hatch's floor speech introducing the bill. See also Lessig's comments.)
A smart idea:
To encourage drivers to take more frequent breaks, the Texas Department of Transportation wants to set up free wireless Internet access at rest stops and travel information centers.
Mojave Airport, with its stands of refreshments (orange soda and doughnuts) is the site of Monday Morning's Spaceship One Launch. This will be the first privately funded initiative into orbit - paving the way for space tourism. Mike Hodgkinson updates us from Mojave. Mike Melvill is the pilot of this Burt Rutan designed craft. Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen has backed the project with $20M.
Cory Doctorow gave a talk this week at Microsoft. He is asking the company to go back to its roots on the issue of Digital "Rights" Management (aka Digital Restrictions Management), or DRM. He posted the talk on his website. Doctorow tried to persuade Microsoft that:
Duncan Campbell profiles Steve Jobs. Some classics:
Jobs on money: "I was worth over $1m when I was 23, and over $10m when I was 24, and over $100m when I was 25, and, erm, it wasn't that important, erm, because I never did it for the money" From Triumph of the Nerds, 1996 TV documentary
Jobs on Bill Gates: "I wish him the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger"
Zermatt based Ulrich Inderbinen, who made his last Matterhorn ascent at 90, died Monday at the age of 103.
Berkeley explorer may have stepped on ancient Thule.
Perk Hoggs on the cost of executive perks.
The problem is not the cost of the perks themselves; at a ten-billion-dollar corporation, they’re hardly even a rounding error. It’s what they are symptomatic of. Perks and rigid management hierarchies tend to go together; perks are designed in part to reinforce status divisions, and rigid hierarchies do not lend themselves to intelligent decision-making, since they isolate executives from the rest of the company. Also, C.E.O.s who indulge in perks are likely to be profligate in general with shareholder money.There are problems in both the private and public sector. Our senators have incredible health care AND average much better investment returns than us poor taxpayers. There are plenty of examples of corporate excess. Hoggs makes some useful points. Via John Robb.
Tribune owned LA Times recently announced layoffs, just after winning a couple of Pulitzer prizes according to this story by Jacques Steinberg.
"Look at USA Today; how many Pulitzers have they won?" Mr. Janedis added, singling out the flagship of the Gannett chain, which has yet to win one. "But they sell a lot of advertising and get good rate increases."The article also compares major publisher cashflow margins (from Banc of America Investment Securities):
Watertown is a very wet place, as these photos show:
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Robert Jones provides a very useful introduction to Bioinformatics, or the the intersection of molecular biology and computer science.
The idea is to create a new tourist industry: "For the last 30 years, people have thought that space flight is only for a select number of government employees," said Peter H. Diamandis, chairman and president of the X Prize Foundation, the competition's organizer. "We want to change that mind-set."
Wisconsin native Marc Andreessen (now living comfortably in Silicon Valley) participated in a Washington Post online chat yesterday. Andreessen discussed the tech business, new software tools, P2P/distributing information and open source software. He also touches on John Kerry's statements on globalization and midwest manufacturing: "it's not coming back". A useful read.
Superconductors are starting to be useful....
One of the 15 Ornamental groves in the gardens of Versailles will be reopened on June 12th.
It marks the latest in a series of American gifts to restore the great creation for Louis XIV of André Le Nôtre and Charles Le Brun. After the second world war John D. Rockefeller gave millions to restore the place, convinced that the chateau and its gardens were of wider than French significance. Americans then responded generously to storm damage in the 1990s, and now the American Friends of Versailles have given $4m and years of voluntary work to help French experts recreate the Bosquet des Trois Fontaines (the Three Fountains Grove).
The June 5, 2004 Economist reviews "A Little History of British Gardening":
NAPOLEON called England a nation of shopkeepers: given the demise of the British high street, it would be more appropriate today to call it a nation of gardeners. The bicentenary of the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) this year has spawned a green-fingered fever across a country where gardening is already a national pastime; where more than 15% of the population has a conservatory; where television gardeners are national heart-throbs; and where almost everyone has an opinion on rhododendrons
The latest Pew Research Center News Study shows that more than half the population has written off the traditional media (TV & Newspaper). Via VodkaPundit.
These type of changes will drive down traditional media spending... (and ad rates)
Yuko Shimizu on Harvey Mintzburg's new book: Managers not MBA's
Congratulations! You have a sparkling new degree, highly prized in this world. You have learned a great many things about business. You have invested two years of your life, not to mention lost wages and a small fortune in tuition, in this impressive undertaking. As a result, you are fully qualified to go out and become a menace to society.Granted, this isn't fully the fault of your school. Nothing personal, but full-time MBA programs by their nature attract many of the wrong people--too impatient and analytical, with little experience in management itself. These may be fine traits for students, but they can be tragically ill-suited for managers.
Conventional MBA programs then compound the error by giving the wrong impression of management: that managers are important people disconnected from the daily work of making products and producing services; that managing is largely about decision making through analysis; that managers pronounce deliberate strategies for everyone else to implement; and worst of all, that by sitting still in a classroom for a couple of years, you are now ready to manage anything.
Steven Pearlstein updates us on the 930 pages in the recently passed Senate tax bill and the 398-page draft released last week by the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Bill Thomas (R-Calif.).
With a few exceptions, both bills are grab bags of special-interest provisions designed to reward the well-connected at everyone else's expense. They reward companies that have played cynical tax games and open up new vistas for the tax shelter industry. And while claiming that the purpose of the exercise was to create jobs in the United States, they will only enhance existing incentives for U.S. companies to earn their profits overseas.Worse still, they are almost certain to add billions each year to a federal deficit that is already too high.
Jeffrey Sawyer writes [pdf] in S U N Magazine:
Starvation isn't much of a concern in the West, but beneath the surface, at a very base level, is the fear that one will go hungry. We're also afraid of losing our homes, our reputations, our loved ones. Ultimately, we fear death. These fears have us act in ways that, over time, burden us to the point where we live either a grave or a superficial life.from Doc Searls
Mark Cuban has been writing a series of essays on building a business. Today, he talks about sweat equity, and building a business the old fashioned way.
The reality is that for most businesses, they don’t need more cash, they need more brains.So true....
Dan Gillmor writes about Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg remarks on broadband consolidation at the current D conference.
But he reverted to form, pretty much insisting that Verizon would reserve the right to discriminate on what gets delivered, and at what speed, on the lines and networks it controls.Residential internet users should, like those in Japan and Korea have much faster broadband connections at attractive prices. Current US dsl and cable options are quite slow compared to what's readily available in other countries (speeds to 20mbps and beyond vs dsl at 768kbps).
Here's an economic development issue, if there ever was one. I mentioned this issue to then candidate Jim Doyle some time ago......
Wired on intellectual property holders and IP outlaws:
On the one side are the intellectual property holders, predominantly citizens of Western nations. They're squaring off against IP outlaws, who tend to live in developing countries. The propertied class loudly asserts its ownership and control. The insurgents cry for openness and exploit technological loopholes with abandon.PDF Atlas of the free and unfree.
It seems odd to me that the defenders of the PATRIOT act urge us to look at the details of the Act and stop viewing it as Federal law enforcement's ticket to do essentially whatever law enforcement wants, without procedural safeguards.When you get into the trenches and watch how they are actually using PATRIOT, however, it becomes pretty clear that law enfocement has interpreted it as their ticket to do whatever they want.
My personal pet peeve is the Treasury Department's abuse of PATRIOT, as part of investigations having absolutely nothing to do with terrorism.For instance, I represent a small Internet service provider. Over a year ago, they received from the Customs Service (part of Treasury) a subpoena for a customer's personal information. The Subpoena purported to be about some buzz-word called "cybersmuggling" (how do you smuggle stuff over the Internet? -- perhaps we're closer to Star Trek transporters than I ever imagined!), and had no apparent connection to terrorism.
And, of course, Customs insisted that we must not tell anyone else about their Subpoena (don't want anyone to scrutinize and question what the Government is doing, I suppose). I've provided a redacted copy of my response letter to Customs (revealing no details of the investigation or the subject) to Chilling Efffects, and even they appear to be afraid to publicize this abuse.
Bio 2004 is underway in San Francisco. Wisconsin, like many other states/government bodies, has a pavilion.
The exhibitor list is here. This list, with numerous government bodies illustrates the great temptation that states provide narrowly focused tax incentives, as discussed here recently.
In the end, these conferences can suffer from "increasing returns", because the Kansas Biosciences Association, among many others are exhibiting (in the Kansas Pavilion), so too must the Illinois Farm Bureau, and many, many others.
TaxProf points to a "brazen" Powerpoint (!) presentation by Big 4 Accounting firm Ernst & Young: Turning Your State Government Relations Department from a Money Pit into a Cash Cow.
Ernst & Young delivered the PowerPoint presentation at a recent meeting of the State Government Affairs Council, which bills itself as "the premier national association for multi-state government affairs professionals of over 120 major US corporations, trade associations and service providers." Ernst & Young made the pitch to a who's who of leading companies -- Alcoa, Anheuser-Busch, Bank of America, Bayer, BellSouth, Best Buy, Capital One, Coors, Goodyear, Home Depot, MBNA, Microsoft, Nextel, Nissan, Pfizer, Toyota, Verizon, and Wal-Mart.
Ernst & Young acknowledges that taxpayers don't like corporate welfare but suggests ways to "provide government with justification" for giving tax incentives to businesses. A key strategy is to identify "public benefits" while making a threat of dire consequences if the deal is not made. At the same time, the PowerPoint presentation suggests techniques to prevent states from rescinding the tax incentives if the promised public benefits do not materialize.
Kelly Zito writes that:
The Santa Clara County assessor has slashed the values of about 1, 200 office and industrial buildings by about $8 billion, further underscoring Silicon Valley's protracted high-tech slump.Madison's property values have risen for years. Someday, there will be an adjustment, which will be painful for its tax base.County officials boosted assessed values of about 9,500 homes and condos that had been cut last year, but more than 23,000 residential properties continued to receive reductions totaling about $1.7 billion, they said Thursday.
Highly Decorated Army Vet and writer David Hackworth, pens his weekly column on the subject of Consequence Day.
The Iowa Electronic Market began its 2004 Presidential Market yesterday. Right now, Bush is ahead of Kerry.
The Governor's Task Force on Educational Excellence is evidently poised to suggest that the state fund schools by:
I think that school funding should include:
Dean E. Murphy writes about Seekers, Drawn to the Promised Land in Las Vegas.
Years ago, while living in San Francisco, I visited the Owens Valley (Eastern Sierra). The Valley, decimated by the LA Department of Water & Power may now see a flowing river, according to this article by Rene Sanchez.