Author: jpm

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A Certain Type of Empire

America is an odd empire. For one thing, it both denies and doesn’t know it is one. It does, nonetheless, have a globe-spanning military presence, spending more than the next thirteen countries combined and with a presence in at least 38 countries, consisting of at least 662 bases and other facilities (pdf).

More importantly, America is a new type of empire (although not that new), a financial empire. The currency of the world is the US Dollar.

Pieces like this one today by Liu Chang in China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency should be a wake-up call. When your creditors start talking about divesting, it may be too late to turn it around.

(It should be noted that, hysterical media yammering aside, China doesn’t not own our country; we do. Most US debt is owned by the American people, individually and through their government. But that doesn’t make good headlines.)

I’m not stuffing my mattress with Euros and burying gold the back yard, but I’m not optimistic.

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A certain type of client

Amongst my clients, a sense of morality and a code of ethical behavior manifest themselves. I would never have predicted it, but it occurs again and again, and each time maintains an impressive internal consistency, even when it is contradicted by the evidence.
For instance, take what I will call the casually violent man. He gets in fights in bars, settles disputes amongst his peers with his fists, and generally lives a very physical existence. But he doesn’t do drugs. “Look at my record, Mr. Miller, look at my record.” He’ll repeat himself, thus making his truth self-evident. “I don’t do drugs.” “I get into fights, but I’m no drug dealer!”
This scenario plays itself out over and over again. “I’m not a violent person, I just like to steal things.” “I am a drug dealer, not a thief.” Each time, I run up against this personal, internally consistent sense of morality with clients. No matter how serious the offense with which they have been charged, there’s some further crime they would never commit.
Prosecutors find this boundary laughable, and see all criminals as alike, as “Bad Dudes.” But defense attorneys see things differently. For me at least, this sense of right and wrong, even among the most hardened offenders, gives me hope. It isn’t much, but I’ll take it.

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Stack paper to the ceiling and ride on 24″ chrome

Centre County’s drug law enforcement have netted some serious profits this year. Out of nearly a million dollars taken in by the Attorney General’s office, $250,000 has come back to the Centre County District Attorney’s Office to spend as the elected District Attorney sees fit.

The lack of oversight concerns one of our county commissioners, Chris Exarchos, who would like to see increased public scrutiny of the use of such funds.

I don’t have a problem per se with the secrecy built into the law that prevents the public from knowing what these funds are spent on. That being said, if we assume the goal of law enforcement vis a vie drug policy is to reduce the impact of drugs on the community, this approach is not likely to result in appreciable gains. Explaining why she supports the law’s secrecy provisions as they are presently written, District Attorney Stacy Parks Miller shared this with the Centre Daily Times:

That would put people engaging in the drug trade on specific alert to look for the tools we have given a particular department to fight against that activity,” Parks Miller said. “If we said we bought a certain recording device, if they bought drugs and there was a device that looked like that, they would be on alert. We’re not going to give criminals an advantage.

Security through obscurity is generally regarded as insufficient protection against any reasonably motivated party. Our law enforcement will continue to catch the low-hanging fruit: the slow and/or stupid drug dealers, and the casual drug user who sells to a friend. The smarter dealers will continue to elude capture.

(Speaking of which, Centre county is way overdue for a big drug bust. Surely the market has had sufficient time to recover since the last round a few years ago.)

So really, the $250k has bought us nothing new relative to effective crime prevention. Our drug policy continues. The war drags on. We have always been at war with Eastasia.

A much better use of this money would be to put it into prevention and treatment. I firmly believe we need to do more to address the underlying causes of addiction. To that end, we should treat addicts as medical patients, not as criminals.

I think I have pressed enough hot buttons for one day.