Misinterpreting the Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment

We can sometimes forget that the First Amendment of the US Constitution actually imposes two restrictions on the government when it comes to religious matters. The amendment says that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The ‘establishment’ part gets the most attention in church-state matters because of repeated attempts to force religion into public life but the ‘free exercise’ part is also important. [Read more…]

How big banks cost taxpayers $83 billion per year

The problem of the big banks is becoming acute, as was made clear by Neil Barofsky in his excellent book Bailout: How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street that I reviewed here. While having banks that are too big to jail makes a mockery of the legal system by inviting corruption, there is another reason that they are bad and that is because when some banks are perceived as too big to fail/jail, then they are being implicitly guaranteed by the US government, that it will step in and rescue them if they get in trouble. That means that people feel as safe lending money to them as they feel with buying US Treasury bonds and this carries with it real costs. [Read more…]

What happened to Jeffrey Sachs?

Economist Jeffrey Sachs is professor of Health Policy and Management and Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University. He used to be one of your standard establishment types. As recently as 2006, he wrote a book The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time that I read in which he promoted the neoliberal ideology of the policies that developing countries should adopt. He was a major player on the international scene, a widely sought-after and quoted advisor to governments, the World Bank, the IMF, and the like. [Read more…]

TV review: Veep

The HBO comedy series Veep is pretty funny. The first season of eight episodes is out on Netflix and I watched it over two weekends. The backstory is that Selina Meyer is a US senator who tried and failed to get her party’s nomination for the presidency, then accepted the role of running mate and became vice-president. She finds that in the world of Washington politics, she now has far less clout than when she was a senator, reduced to making human interest appearances at kindergartens and yoghurt stores and the like. She has all the trappings of power (massive security detail and six limousine motorcades wherever she goes) but not the reality and the show deals with her frustration and insecurity at being deliberately excluded from the really important decision-making processes. [Read more…]

How big banks fix benchmark rates

The rules against insider trading are meant to ensure that ‘the market’ is democratic and that everyone has access to the same information on which to base investment decisions, and to prevent individuals from taking advantage of knowledge that might give them more accurate knowledge of the true value of something than the public at large. As a result, we are constantly reassured how ‘the market’ has a self-correcting mechanism that results in the publicly stated value of financial products reflecting their true value. [Read more…]

Religious rioting in Bangladesh

The Indian subcontinent is going through turbulent times as religious extremists try to demand that religious dogma drive each country’s legal system and social mores. Pakistan has been subjected to vicioius blasphemy laws. India has seen the rise of Hindu nationalists and Hindu-Muslim clashes, Sri Lanka has seen militant Buddhists, led by monks, attack ethnic and religious minorities, most recently the Muslims. [Read more…]

The perils of bravado

US presidents love to look tough. But why don’t they ever realize that it is always a mistake to publicly draw lines in the sand? It makes you look strong at that moment but boxes you in later, because political reality is always more complicated and requires flexibility and nuance in dealing with it. In the case of Syria, president Obama made the mistake nine months ago in a press conference of declaring that if the Syrian government used chemical weapons, they would be crossing a ‘red line’, leaving unsaid what he would do in response. [Read more…]

Burying those whom society despises

[UPDATE on May 9, 2013: He has finally been buried in an undisclosed location, bringing this shameful chapter to a close.]

In an odd sequel to the Boston bombing, the family of Tamerlan Tsarnaev wants him to be buried according to Muslim custom but it turns out that cemeteries are refusing to allow the body to be buried in their plots. The funeral director Peter Stefan has tried four cemeteries in three different states and has been rejected by all of them. His family wants him to be buried in Massachusetts, where he lived the last decade. [Read more…]