Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) will resign today from his seat in Congress. In addition to the political pressure from his own party, Weiner had a couple of strong legal reasons to resign.
I have disagreed with those defending Weiner or opposing his resignation. I could care less about his bizarre fetish with exhibitionist acts. However, he engaged in a pattern of lies that included alleging criminal acts of hacking by others and attacking the media. He is further accused of harassing women with these pictures. I cannot understand the view that a member who showed such utter dishonesty and poor judgment should be forgiven because he is “good for the cause” or a loyal liberal. I agree with the double standard shown in the response of cases like Senator Vitter, but that does not relieve Democrats or liberals of their duty to hold their leaders accountable.
Weiner had two strong legal reasons for resigning. As mentioned in earlier posts, the greatest danger of criminal conduct is his alleged coaching women to lie if contacted by investigators. Yesterday, another woman stepped forward to say that she was pressured to lie by Weiner. Notably, the woman yesterday also said that her efforts to discuss political issues were met by responses from Weiner to get her to engage in sextexting. By resigning Weiner reduces (the admittedly low) chances for a criminal investigation.
Second, Weiner was likely to be investigated for this misconduct and there are risks of claims of false statements as well as the creation of new evidence that could be used against him. This includes possible civil litigation. It also includes possible investigation of Weiner for harassment of women who were contacting him to discuss his work as a congressman. It also includes incidents where Weiner could be charged with using official resources in engaging in this conduct.
By resigning, Weiner shuts down the main threat of investigation that he is facing. The result of that investigation would have likely made it difficult for him to secure a new position — or to come back later and run again as a “healed” individual. The new photos show that this was not a few racy shots but pictures taken from various locations, including the House gym and his office. It also includes claims by women that they tried to get Weiner to discuss his political work and views — not his body parts.
Source: Politico
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/06/benefactors-activities-raise-new-ethical-concerns-about-justice-thomas.php?ref=fpc
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/2011/06/the-sins-of-anthony-weiner.html
http://firedoglake.com/2011/06/20/he-lives-precariously-by-the-sword-everybody-else-gets-the-shaft/ Weiner was investigating Clarence Thomas.
@Roco: A free market is only as ethical as the individuals who trade within it.
BINGO. That is why your ideal is a fantasy, it is based upon the insanely naive premise that you can trust other people in business.
Take a free market of 100 million adults, like we have in the USA. Find the 5% that are the least ethical. Among those find the 20% that are the smartest. You end up with a million damn smart unethical people willing to commit crimes to get their way, and NO, they aren’t already in prison because it doesn’t take a frikkin genius to get crimes committed on your behalf and not get caught.
THOSE are the people you are dealing with; THOSE are the people that will rise to the top, because in a business competition, the guy willing to do anything to win, ethical or not, criminal or not, is the odds on favorite for this competition, and only the stupid and impulsive get caught. Those are the sociopaths in jail, the smart sociopaths trick the dumb sociopaths into taking the risks and the falls for them.
And of course ONCE AGAIN you believe there is no such thing as a one-time trade, another fantasy, and you believe everybody will know who the fair and unfair traders are, another fantasy. Your entire philosophy relies on utter fairy tales.
And you claim letting people die isn’t part of the equation? How the hell do you think, in a free market system, people are going to discover that a drug intended to alleviate arthritis symptoms tends to cause cardiac arrest? Or increases the risk of suicide by 300%? How much longer would that take without the FDA, representing the people, demanding that drugs pass stringent tests before being sold to the public?
It doesn’t make a difference if they aren’t 100% effective, they are 99% percent effective and that means 99% less unnecessary loss of life, and those are hundreds of thousands of lives you would sacrifice on the altar of your fantasy to somehow magically send you a signal to make a wise purchasing decisions.
Free markets do not work. Smart Sociopaths are the least ethical link in your chain, and they will lie, cheat and steal their way to the top and con you out of your life’s savings and never look back. Once the vampire has had his fill, he doesn’t need to visit your financial corpse, and you don’t have the power to inform others because you are broke. If you give the smart sociopathsfree reign, they will enslave you. Literally.
Nor buy your baby formula from Wyeth….they dump the bad batches in South America…
Lotttakatz:
after the melamine scare with baby formula and lead paint, I would not buy anything for human or animal consumption from China. Regulations didn’t save your cat.
Tony C:
“a regulated market stops the cheats and con men and rip off artists and exploiters and therefore focuses competition where it can do the most good”
no it doesn’t, Bernie Madoff is a prime example of the inability of regulations to catch crooks or prevent fraud. Some people did not invest with him because they looked into it and something didn’t smell right to them. They didn’t trust his balance sheet.
Caveat emptor still holds in a regulated market, so why bother? Regulations punish good actors as well as bad actors and in the case of Bernie Madoff did nothing to protect the public.
Maybe if the public would start doing their own background checks and investigation we wouldn’t need as much regulation.
“This has nothing to do with regulating markets or not regulating them, it has to do with what you can do with your own time, money and property. One of the things you CAN do, and I have done, is to bet it on an idea you have that might pay off.”
That is a free market.
“But ONE of the things you CANNOT do with your own time, money and property is put people in danger or rip them off or defraud them. ”
You are correct and that is a matter of ethics of the individuals engaged in the free market. A free market is only as ethical as the individuals who trade within it. Morality is vitally important for an individual in a free market to be able to make money. If you cannot trust the individuals you do business with, you will find someone else from which to buy your goods and services.
Tony C:
“So, one dollar, or a few hundred dead strangers? The free marketers opt for the dead strangers, because their greed so overwhelms any empathy they might have they just really do not give a shit about anybody else.”
and that is just plain horseshit. The reason most of us free marketers like free markets is because they produce wealth for the average person and allow them a better quality of life. And if someone needs a helping hand? We usually pitch in and help them out.
Roco, China must be a darn free country. I think the melamine in their cat food may have killed one of my cats.
And what Tony C said.
@Roco: It is not true.
It is true, you are either a liar or an ignoramus. It is you that need to do some reading, I am quite familar with the entire episode.
@Roco: What you state is a free market concept …
NO, it is not. It is a freedom concept, period, that people can take risks with their own time, money, and assets as long as those risks do not impact upon other people that did not consent to the risk. This has nothing to do with regulating markets or not regulating them, it has to do with what you can do with your own time, money and property. One of the things you CAN do, and I have done, is to bet it on an idea you have that might pay off. But ONE of the things you CANNOT do with your own time, money and property is put people in danger or rip them off or defraud them.
The obvious extreme example is you cannot take the gun you own and use it to rob people, on the grounds that it is your gun and you can use it as you please. A less obvious example is that you cannot secretly use ingredients in a food product that you know are suspected of being carcinogenic. An even less obvious example is that you cannot purposely mislead people verbally into signing a contract that they do not realize, due to legalese and your lies about what it means, negates everything you said.
That is the difference between a free market and a properly regulated market: The free market is a free for all and the cheats win; a regulated market stops the cheats and con men and rip off artists and exploiters and therefore focuses competition where it can do the most good, in inventing better products and more efficient operations and superior quality, in beating the competition by offering consumers a better deal instead of trying to trip up the competition, or lie about them to scare consumers away, or sabotage them or tie them up in frivolous but expensive court battles or to get them outlawed by the government.
Regulated markets do all the things you think free markets do, and free markets compete by seeing who can hurt people the most and still get away with it.
Tony C:
“@Roco: It was pretty damn free, what caused the meltdown was the repeal of Glass Steagal, thus LESS regulation on banks, and the invention of “credit default swaps” so named to escape regulation as insurance, which they were, and were illegal insurance transactions. Thus even LESS regulation.”
That is a standard liberal/progressive talking point. It is not true. While it may have caused a disruption, it was not the main or even peripheral cause. You need to go and read some other analysis.
@Roco: So you are in agreement with me.
NO, I am not. You believe in absolute freedom, I believe in competition and capitalism that is constrained to compete without fucking people over. There is a huge difference. “Free markets” are free to fuck people over, and the philosophy of free marketers is that, “Hey, the system will correct itself.”
So first, I do not believe the system will correct itself, because the evidence of my eyes over 30 years speaks against it.
Second, it is not “okay” to me that even ONE person gets fucked over, defrauded, killed, bankrupted, or just screwed because they cannot afford a lawyer, or were incapable of understanding the legalese contract they were signing, or for whatever reason. Somebody else’s stupidity is not a license to exploit them or trick them or poison them or otherwise endanger them, physically, financially or emotionally. I do not believe in “caveat emptor,” I believe in fairness and truth in dealing, and I believe those must be enforced by law with punishments or they will not happen.
I believe in capitalism, I have started multiple successful businesses using my own capital. I believe that competition on the products and without dirty tricks and lies and fraud and without fucking over customers, investors, employees, suppliers or the public good benefits consumers. Let the best damn burger win, let the best software win, let the best centrifuge win, let the best smelter win, let the best investor earn billions, and let the losers go broke.
But I still do not agree with you, because if regulation does not restrict a business to the hard ass work of producing a better product at a profit without fucking anybody over, they will take the easy route of increasing profits by increasing risk, but primarily by increasing the risk to their customers and employees, not by increasing the risk to themselves.
Then the free market argument is always “Then their customers will abandon them and they will go bankrupt!”
But they will NOT, because they don’t give a shit, their PERSONAL fortune is secure, their LLC or corporation may go bankrupt, but they can take the PERSONAL fortune they have extracted from that and start another in one day. Either that or they just don’t care because their customers do not know each other. The world is not some small town where everybody can know the grocer is selling bad fish. The free market mantras depend upon a level of communication between customers that is both imaginary and totally impossible, and it waits for something horrific to happen to somebody else before the “signal” is sent that a vendor should be avoided. The free marketers ignore the fact that a little crime can go a long way; a con man doesn’t have to hit the same mark more than once. An insurance company can collect 40 years of premiums before it defrauds a cancer patient out of the care they thought they were entitled to get, then the patient dies. That has happened literally thousands of times now; and how many people do you personally know that it has happened to? Probably none. Word of mouth is way over-rated, only one or two astonishingly horrific stories will break into the media, and the media gets bored with repetition so 99.9% of them don’t get aired.
Free marketers are self-centered to the point of sociopathy; the free marketer says it is okay with them if a few hundred people have to die to prove a medicine is poisonous, because demanding that pharmaceuticals provide some reasonable scientific evidence that their medicines are unlikely to actually kill people is a regulation that might add a dollar to the prescription cost. So, one dollar, or a few hundred dead strangers? The free marketers opt for the dead strangers, because their greed so overwhelms any empathy they might have they just really do not give a shit about anybody else.
@Roco: It was pretty damn free, what caused the meltdown was the repeal of Glass Steagal, thus LESS regulation on banks, and the invention of “credit default swaps” so named to escape regulation as insurance, which they were, and were illegal insurance transactions. Thus even LESS regulation.
Regulation restricts unethical transactions; they may be unethical because they engage in fraud (which happened) or because they are irresponsible with other people’s money (which happened). A bailout is not government regulation, it is the opposite, it is robbery of taxpayers to pay off cronies and favors.
Increasing the freedom of the financial market by repealing regulation and then letting them ignore long established insurance regulation is what caused the meltdown. That didn’t work.
The health-care crisis is the same. Refusing to prosecute insurance companies for fraud and passing laws to prevent consumers from suing them is not “regulation” of the insurance company, it is anti-regulation. It allowed them to commit fraud, engage in monopolistic behavior, and violate contracts that literally resulted in the death of customers. The government again acted against the interests of citizens by allowing the insurance companies more freedom to fuck us over, and giving us less freedom to do anything about it.
The free market doesn’t work, if large corporations can do anything they want, what they usually choose to do is fuck people over. Because they know that a large corporation can crush tens of thousands of people if they make sure the battle is always framed as ten young lawyers against one broke and dying patient begging for them to honor their purposely complexified contract.
Mike Spindell:
as a liberal/progressive, I would think you would embrace free markets. 19th century liberals did. In fact that was one of the defining points of a 19th century liberal.
Tony C:
“What does work is suffering the consequences of bad decisions in management, investment, and execution of one’s job.”
So you are in agreement with me. What you state is a free market concept and you are correct. Bad management decisions should not be socialized, they should be paid for by the management and stockholders of the company.
On the one hand you are for market intervention and on the other you are against it.
Mike Spindell:
There was a period in our history where markets were mostly free, which was the 19th century. I grant you that they were not totally free.
The amount of wealth created was amazing and it lifted the entire country from a sleepy agrarian nation into an industrial superpower. Dont you think a truly free market would do even more?
So you are technically correct but the market was minimally regulated in the 19th century, much less than it is today. Down turns were steeper but lasted months instead of years.
Tony C:
“The free market doesn’t work. What does work is suffering the consequences of bad decisions in management, investment, and execution of one’s job. That is what the government did with the bailout, they protected people in charge from their own bad decisions and law breaking. It worked against us, not for us.”
If the government bailed out the financial markets then it wasnt a free market was it.
Mike S.,
Wall Street….Its a Free Market…They set you up…they take your money…its Free or course….You are free to complain…You can file a complaint….but with who…the Government of course….That too is free…
More simpler…You have, it they want it, they take it, you are free to complain…Free Market…