04 November 2009

Italian Justice

Wonders never cease: an Italian Court has convicted 23 Americans, 22 of them CIA agents, and 2 Italians for the 2003 kidnap of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, a Muslim cleric.

It turns out that kidnapping someone in broad daylight in a foreign jurisdiction without authority and then flying him illegally to Egypt where he is tortured and imprisoned for years without charge is a crime. The White house was 'disappointed' by the verdict, presumably because the United States does not believe any other nations exist, or at least that does not believe that these other nations are sovereign states with their own laws.

The Americans have refused extradition, of course. But the judgment will be enforceable in many countries, and as Roman Polanski will tell you the memory of the law is as long as its arm.

Let this be an example for all nations that respect the rule of law: torture is a crime of universal jurisdiction, and we can all try persons for this crime if their home country refuses to do so. The US may still claim that the ends justify the means... but they will have to do so from US soil unless they intend to do it from inside a jail. That is a small, but significant, victory.

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Bad news for Opel, Bad news for Capitalism

Fresh off the resuscitation and flush with about $60 billion in someone else's money, GM is going into battle to prevent the purchase of it's European Opel division by a consortium including Magna, a Canada-based auto parts manufacturer.

This is very bad news for Opel, since of course it means that instead of new ownership and continued operations under the freely negotiated sale deal (crafted by purchaser, governments, and unions to minimize job losses), Opel will get more of the same old management that led to this problem in the first place, along with (presumably) much larger and non-negotiated cutbacks by the New Boss (as a wise man once sung, same as the Old Boss).

It's also bad news for capitalism. Under this system, ostensibly the system in place in North America, corporate failures like GM are supposed to be cut up and sold to new owners and managers who believe they can make a profit with those assets. Giving the owners taxpayer money to continue their losing strategies is anti-capitalist. When the government steps in to bail them out it is the worst kind of corporate welfare, targeted at people who by definition do not deserve to remain in charge. They are necessarily failures from the capitalist perspective.

But armed with money they didn't earn or deserve, GM (and Goldman, and Citi...) get to act as if they never messed everything up, as if their management is still good, as if their ownership is still justified, as if their coffers are overflowing with earnings not handouts, to be used to pursue their same old strategies, which are now cast as success instead of failure.

We had our chance to force them to change, and instead we paid them to get back on that horse and trample us down again. We have no one to blame but ourselves... other than the managers of GM.

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