quotations from chairman federalist

QUOTATIONS FROM CHAIRMAN FEDERALIST

Two and a quarter centuries after it was written it is easy to sharpshoot the Constitution, as did Hendrik Hertzberg, reviewing Robert A. Dahl, How Democratic Is the American Constitution?, New Yorker, July 29, 2002. Slavery is an easy target and equal state representation in the Senate has long outlived its usefulness, which was about the extent of the discussion. If I might ask a stupid question, however, could we sophisticated moderns, with two centuries of 20/20 hindsight, do any better today?

How well, for instance, are we doing today on such long-running issues as abortion and capital punishment? Or something even since Hertzberg's review, war?

Not that we want it competely democratic to begin with. The whole point of a written constitution and a Bill of Rights in particular is to curb the tyranny of the majority. Not that we presumptuous moderns have outgrown the problem.

Does anyone else remember thirty odd years ago, with the Vietnam War going full blast, when some people typed up the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights on plain white paper, no fancy script or parchment, went out on the public streets, and asked people to sign them? Guess what? They got called Communists!

Some years earlier the Chief Justice Earl Warren had doubted the Bill of Rights could have been passed at the time.

At least Hertzberg admits to post founder culpability, in the form of Supreme Court decisions. In any event, the Constitution as we know it today, is considerably less than perfect. If I might ask another stupid question, however, did the founding fathers let us down? Or did we let them down?

Ever hear of the Federalist Papers? Lots of people have not, including supposedly intelligent college graduates. Ever go through them in any depth, at least beyond the relatively well known passages on factions in No. 10?

Lots more have not, including quite a few legal scholars, so-called.

When the Constitution was first released by the 1787 Convention, and not being the revised Articles of Confederation it was called to produce, there was a big controversy whether it should be ratified or not. To persuade the public to ratify it, particularly in New York, three members of the Convention, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison, wrote 85 essays to explain its meaning, first published anonymously in newspapers. They have been cited in many court decisions since then, if not always when needed.

One slight warning- they take considerable effort to read and understand. They written on a considerably higher level than most present day pseudo-profundity. Once the method in their madness sinks in, nevertheless, we prisoners of temporal provincialism might handle a thing or two better ourselves.

Not that we want it too terribly undemocratic, either. Those white-wigged, slave-driving old fogeys actually had a better idea of democratic accountability than our high-flying legal obscurantists today. James Madison, in Federalist 62, offered impeccably elegant grounds to declare unconstitutional the innumerable, impossibly complicated laws currently on the books. As an argument for the Senate, it just goes to show that body is not performing its intended function. What legal or political commentary of the past half century or more comes anywhere close to this?

"The internal effects of a mutable policy are still more calamitous. It poisons

the blessings of liberty itself. It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be tomorrow..."

"... Every new regulation concerning commerce or revenue... presents a new harvest to those who watch the change, and can trace the consequences; a harvest, reared not by themselves, but by the toils and cares of the great body of their fellow citizens. This is a state of affairs in which it may be said with some truth that laws are made for the few, not for the many." (original emphasis)

But on to the crunch. What passes for "original intent" these days is laughable indeed when we compare it to the real thing. In Bennis v. Michigan, 516 U.S. 442 (1996), the mossbacks on the U.S. Supreme Court held forfeiture laws constitutional in routine law enforcement. A Michigan couple owned a $600 jalopy, which he used to pick up a prostitute on the way home from work. He got caught and the car was forfeited, her interest as well as his. Rehnquist’s majority opinion cited forfeiture of ships used in smuggling and stills used in illegal production, that such precedents were too well established to change now. Thomas concurred, that innocence had little to do with it. So did supposedly liberal Ginsburg, that "equitable" considerations tempered the injustice. Stevens dissented, joined by Breyer and Souter, on personal responsibility, that indeed the wife herself was the real victim. Kennedy’s dissent distinguished between ships used in smuggling and items of everyday life. This excerpt from Federalist 12, by Alexander Hamilton, however, urging the very formation of the Union, one country instead of several, went unmentioned. It is perhaps irrelevant today, amidst our tolerance of"arbitrary and vexatious powers" in a variety of matters, "anti-terrorism" only being the most recent:

"In France there is an army of patrols (as they are called) constantly employed to secure her fiscal regulations against the inroads of the dealers in contraband. Mr. Neckar computes the number of these patrols at upwards of twenty thousand. This proves the immense difficulty in preventing that species of traffic where there is an inland communication and shows in a strong light the disadvantages with which the collection of duties in this country would be encumbered, if by disunion the States should be placed in a situation with respect to each other resembling that of France with respect to her neighbors. The arbitrary and vexatious powers with which the patrols are necessarily armed would be intolerable in a free country."

The constitution is what the judges say it is, said Charles Evans Hughes, one time Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Or is it what the framers say it is? The Supreme Court has at least twice held the constitutionality of the draft "beyond question," United States v. O’Brien, 391 U.S. 367 (1968); Lichter v. United States, 334 U.S. 742 (1946). From Federalist 22, 24, 25, 28, 29, and 46, however, we can see there is compulsory military service under the Constitution, but not under the army clause. The 18th century terminology is a bit tricky two centuries later; the "levies of men" begun before a declaration of war in No. 25 are definitely not conscripts, if we consult the context of the same phrase in No. 22. No. 24, by Hamilton, best summarizes the contrast between compulsory and professional military service, one that could have put a much greater dent in Vietnam War policies, had we not become so accustomed to the "arbitrary and vexatious powers" of contemporary life:

"... These garrisons (on the Western frontier) must either be furnished by occasional detachments from the militia, or by permanent corps in the pay of the government. The first is impractible; and if practible, would be pernicious. The militia would not long, if at all, submit to be dragged from their occupations and families to perform that most disagreeable duty in times of profound peace. And if they could be prevailed upon or compelled to do so, the increased expense of a frequent rotation of service, and the loss of labor and disconcertion of the industrious pursuits of individuals, would form conclusive objections to the scheme. It would be as burdensome and injurious to the public as ruinous to private individuals. The latter resource of permanent corps in the pay of the government amounts to a standing army in time of peace; a small one indeed, but not the less real for being small."

See No. 46 on the final answer to the threat of a standing army in times of peace and the debates in the First Congress on the Bill of Rights, including a context to discern a different understanding of "keep and bear arms," we might find a solution to the long running gun control controversy, intractable to modernistic understanding, such as it is, one reasonably if not completely satisfactory to both sides.

Not that we have to fight the last war in the Federalist Papers; we can also fight the next one. Who are we modern provincials to snivel at the framers, anyway? How far have we fallen, indeed! What more pointed, more succinct demolition of U.S. foreign policy over the past half century, than that penned by John Jay in No. 5, if now the shoe is on the other foot, the policy that still has "foreign armies" in dozens of countries, over a decade after the end of the Cold War?

"...And here let us not forget how much more easy it is to receive foreign fleets into our ports, and foreign armies into our country, than it is to persuade or compel them to depart. How many conquests did the Romans and others make in the character of allies, and what innovations did they under the same character introduce into the governments of those whom they pretended to protect."

Not that the Constitution is a pacifist document, by any stretch of the imagination, but it offers impeccable reasons for questioning war. Indeed, the very purpose of the Union was to keep us out of wars. as John Jay wrote in No. 3:

"The number of wars which have happened or will happen in the world will always be found to be in proportion to the number and weight of the causes, whether real or pretended, which provoke or invite them. If this remark be just, it becomes useful to inquire whether so many just causes of war are likely to be given by united America as by disunited America; for if it should turn out that united America will probably give the fewest, then it will follow that in this respect the Union tends most to preserve the people in a state of peace with other nations."

If the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights are too "Communist" for some, then Federalist No. 6, by Alexander Hamilton, if outright Bolshevist by that sort of reckoning, is a pointed warning indeed as to who might really be making dupes of us:

"The causes of hostility among nations are innumerable. There are some which have a general and almost constant operation upon the collective bodies of society. Of this description are the love of power or the desire of pre-eminence and dominion- the jealousy of power, or the desire of equality and safety. There are others which have a more circumscribed though an equally operative influence within their spheres. Such are the rivalships and competitions between commercial nations. And there are others, not less numerous than either of the former, which take their origins entirely in private passions; in the attachments, enmities, interests, hopes, and fears of leading individuals in the communities of which they are members. Men of this class, whether the favorites of a king or of a people, have in too many instances abused the confidence they possessed; and assuming the pretext of some public motive, have not scrupled to sacrifice the national tranquility to personal advantage or personal gratification."

How far have we fallen? Written as a timeless commentary on human nature, Hamilton's observations in No. 8 are frighteningly timely, certainly in recent months, however dubious the threat to begin with. More so, why we have tolerated so many "arbitrary and vexatious powers" without question over the past few decades:

"... The perpetual menacings of danger oblige the government to be always prepared to repel it; its armies must be numerous enough for instant defense. The continual necessity for their services enhances the importance of the soldier, and proportionably degrades the condition of the citizen. The military state becomes elevated over the civil. The inhabitants of territories, often the theatre of war, are unavoidably subjected to frequent infringements on their rights, which serve to weaken their sense of those rights; and by degrees the people are brought to consider the soldiery not only as their protectors but as their superiors. The transition from this disposition to that of considering them masters is neither remote nor difficult; but it is very difficult to prevail upon a people under such impressions to make a bold or effectual resistance to usurpations supported by the military power."

Listen up, all you "living constitution" flit-abouts, making up the rules as you go along, ever phobic of the "dead hand of the past," and all you pseudo-conservative noodniks, who think you can just throw your weight around forever, at home and abroad, to the next paragraph of Federalist No. 6, with more examples afterwards. This is what should really terrify us. Now, especially, that we have not heard lately of any Presidential connection to Enron, but instead about trying "to kill daddy":

"The celebrated Pericles, in compliance with the resentments of a prostitute, at the expense of much of the blood and treasure of his countrymen, attacked, vanquished, and destroyed the city of the Samnians. The same man, stimulated by private pique against the Megarensians, another nation of Greece, or to avoid a prosecution with which he was threatened as an accomplice in a supposed theft of the statuary of Phidias, or to get rid of the accusations prepared to be brought against him for dissipating the funds of the state in the purchase of popularity, or trom a combination of all these causes, was the primitive author of that famous and fatal war, distinguished in the Grecian annals by the name of the Peloponnesian war; which, after various vicissitudes, intermissions, and renewals, terminated in the ruin of the Athenian Commonwealth."

Here's hoping this was not too much of a strain on anyone, except perhaps the war-mongers. There are more "quotations from chairman Federalist" where these came from, some, indeed, more lyrical, most less. Here's hoping, again, that we overly entertained creatures of recent decades have enough mental effort left to figure out where we are, before we set out for points unknown.

The Federalist Papers are available in paperback for $8 or in the library. They should be on-line somewhere too.

William F. Wendt, Jr.

 

beyondblogfamily

william wendt wrote:

To whom it may concern:

These are six blogs I have just started in November 2006.

The first is about Chicago transportation issues. The title is a take-off on Moving Beyond Congestion, the project of the Chicago transit agencies to push a major funding bill through the legislature in 2007, which has its website under that name.

They want investment in the future, they say, but the general point here is that it is investment in the past.

http://beyondcongestionbetweenears.blogspot.com/

The second is about primordial human emotions that evolved in hunter-gatherer band over about two million years, but which still dominate our thinking, such as it is, today. Einstein said the bomb changed everything but the way we think. Indeed.

http://beyondmoralaggression.blogspot.com/

The third is about legal issues, the general point being that our vaunted protections of law are little but a Maginot Line easily by-pased through Belguim. It seeks to restore some semblance of legal legitimacy.

http://beyondstateofnature.blogspot.com/

The fourth is a non-Chicago transportation commentary. Shoving blind is pushing cars with no one on the point to signal a stop. It is a great way to cause a train wreck. "The one way to run a railroad" celebrated in Rush Loving, The Men Who Loved Railroads," is shoving blind in a larger context. This is for non-Chicago transportation topics.

http://beyondshovingblind.blogspot.com/

The fifth wonders if "pro-life" and "limited government" are merely cudgels in the cultural wars or have real and important meanings. Is sex subject to moral constraint but not war? Is criminal law or mere unremitting hostility the way to deal with drugs, abortion, and homosexuality?

http://beyondconservofascism.blogspot.com/

The sixth probes Jewish paranoia, certainly understandable in light of history, but a sort of cultural Tay-Sachs disease that creates its own enemies. If you're not paranoid, you're crazy, said Sherman Skolnick, that resolute son of the old sand.

http://beyondjewishparanoia.blogspot.com/

Stay tuned. Rome was not built in a day.

cook county budget statement January 6, 2006

COOK COUNTY BUDGET STATEMENT January 6, 2006

I sat through some three and a half hours of public meeting on September 15 about a management audit for the juvenile detention center. I heard Commissioner Peraica ask the Public Defender if one of his lawyers misses a hearing, it is a thirty-day continuance and at $70 a day. The answer was yes and the Public Defender himself said he was just beginning to understand some things in his own office with the reports coming out. There was some discussion of increased staffing for the office and including the Public Defender in upcoming budget discussions.

In my little three minute moment of glory I said a staffer in the state auditor’s office told me some twenty-five years ago they do not check to see if commuter train crews put in their full 150 mile days. That’s cost accounting, he said, seeing how well the money is spent. We only do compliance auditing, to see if it is spent according to law. That’s exactly what has been missing heretofore in government, up to that management audit, I said, something unthinkable for private business to go without.

Also, that the foregoing discussion vindicated what I had been trying to tell this Board for the past ten years, on the most nitty-gritty level. Spend a bit more on the public defender and a lot less elsewhere. So I was expecting at least an increase in non-lawyer staffers in the proposed budget, but such was not to be. I counted 430 non-administrative criminal lawyers to settle some 380,000 cases a year, or 3.5 per lawyer per business day. 75 investigators are supposed to conduct 160,000 criminal investigations or 2100 each. This is exceedingly weak-kneed protection of the innocent. Maybe the scorching last week by a federal judge for overcrowding at the jail will help county budget-makers see the light.

Unfortunately protection of the innocent is viewed in this day and age as an idle, idealistic luxury. Punishment is seen as therapy, the more the better. That is why we have so many prospective criminals who figure, "Get it if I do, get it if I don’t." It is high time to send them a message, "Keep your nose clean and everything’s cool." For this discussion, Steve Bogira, Courtroom 302, p52, the recent definitive work on Cook County justice, such as it is, makes two points. First:

"(The) larger point, about the need to study the causes of crime. was soon forgotten. The county’s power brokers had little incentive to do anything that might reduce the number of defendants; by the 1920s ward bosses were already hopelessly hooked on courthouse and jail patronage. Judges, prosecutors, bailiffs, clerks, probation officers, and jail guards owed their jobs to the ward bosses- and showed them their thanks by knocking on doors on election dsy."

If we have to spend that much, let’s give everyone a trial and eliminate plea bargaining. Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton call it "Reinventing Torture" in a chapter of their book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice.

Second, that real estate and political machinations put the criminal courts at 26th and California instead of near the downtown. That problem has the same solution as parking problems at a rehabbed Cool County hospital, an early application of a little tried monorail technology. Since the suburban commissioners appoint Metra and RTA board members, it is high time they do some cost accounting on these agencies, which blow hundreds of billions each year on obsolete technologies and give the suburbs suburban service for city sales taxes. Figure excessive government spending is why it takes two incomes to support a family in recent decades, in turn why the detention center has so much clientele to begin with.

The military has been buying precision-guided warheads for several decades on the proposition of physics that the closer an explosion is to the target, the less explosive is needed to destroy it. With that in mind, precision-guided public spending and precision-guided criminal punishment are long overdue. If we could only figure out precision-guided health care.

William F. Wendt, Jr.

 

MORE HAMILTONIAN THAN HAMILTON?

 MORE HAMILTONIAN THAN HAMILTON?
In the 1790s there was a major debate between the followers of Thomas Jefferson, who wished to keep the powers of the new federal government to those strictly enumerated in the Constitution, and those of Alexander Hamilton, who wished to interpret the "necessary and proper" power of Congress broadly. The particular issue then was whether Congress could charter a bank as "necessary and proper." As it happened, Congress did charter a bank and the power was eventually upheld in McCullough v. Maryland (1819), one of John Marshall’s famous Supreme Court decisions, the one that said the power to tax involves the power to destroy.
Federal power expanded greatly during and after the Civil War, when Hamilton’s views were not much mentioned, and during and after the Great Depression, when they were. In U.S. v. Butler (1935) the Supreme Court took four pages of the official reports to hold that the federal government could fund projects of national importance under an expanded reading of the Taxation and Appropriation Clause, even if this was not strictly enumerated under the powers of Congress, but not merely local projects. The principal authority cited on this particular point was Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures, restated four decades later in Supreme Court justice Joseph Story’s Commentaries.
The next year the Supreme Court upheld federal unemployment insurance in Chas. Steward Machine Co. v. Davis and Social Security in Helvering v. Davis, even though neither is enumerated in the Constitution. Both decisions held the financial power of the federal government can deal with emergencies beyond the capacity of state governments. Helvering also said the distinction between local and national is largely for Congress to decide. In a chapter of Public Policy and the General Welfare (1941), Charles Beard trumpeted this newly found power also in appellate cases, Greenwood County, S.C. v. Duke Power Co., and Kansas City Gas & Electric v. Independence, Kan., regarding federal assistance to electric power plants, and an Attorney General opinion regarding housing.
If there seems to be no extended Supreme Court discussion of the constitutionality of federal involvement with housing, United States v. Emory (1943) did hold the purpose of the National Housing Act was to "spend ourselves rich," and City of Cleveland v. United States (1946) held it constitutional, if only with a footnote of citations to Butler, Steward and Helvering. Presumably constitutional under this line of thought, and fit for litigation in courts instituted for great national issues, is 42 United States Code 1701r, dealing with pets in federally subsidized senior citizen housing.
Under this line of thought expenditures obviously local in nature gained a national dimension through the federal power of the purse, for all practical purposes, to "spend ourselves rich." As an emergency measure to deal with the Great Depression, Social Security was held constitutional on this basis alone, an "emergency" measure in effect for close to seven decades now.
About this same time the Supreme Court also expanded greatly the federal power to regulate interstate commerce. A farmer growing grain on his own land to feed his own livestock was held to be in interstate commerce because he affected prices of commodities in interstate commerce. Wickard v. Filburn, (1941). Among other cases to similar effect, Borden v. Borella (1945) held an elevator operator to be in interstate commerce. The famous footnote 4 in the Carolene Products case (1938) said economic issues would not get strict constitutional scrutiny. In other words, the constitution has been suspended in this regard.
After decades of opposing overpriced, extravagant transit projects, in 2000 I sued to have the federal funding of local transit projects declared unconstitutional. The government’s own motion to dismiss described a federal program to fund local projects. I filed a motion for summary judgment, that it is plainly contrary to the prohibition in Butler. The courts never ruled on that question, my severe objections notwithstanding. The federal statute, Title 49, United States Code, Chapter 53, does not even claim a national purpose.
What would Alexander Hamilton himself think of such spending? In Federalist No. 34, one of the papers explaining the Constitution and arguing for its ratification, he said,
"What are the chief sources of expense in every government? What has occasioned that enormous accumulation of debts with which several of the European nations are oppressed? The answer plainly is, wars and rebellions; the support of those institutions which are necessary to guard the body politic against these two most mortal diseases of society. The expenses arising from those institutions which are relative to the mere domestic police of a state, to the support of its legislative, executive, and judiciary departments, with their different appendages, and to the encouragement of agricultures and manufactures (which will comprehend almost all the subjects of state expenditures) are insignificant in comparison with those which relate to the national defense."
In Federalist No. 7, discussing the causes of domestic strife, Hamilton also left a hint, obviously overly subtle, of what would happen if the floodgates of government spending were loosed, in particular on national funding of local projects:
"... There is, perhaps, nothing more likely to disturb the tranquility of nations than their being bound to mutual contributions for any common object that does not yield an equal and coincident benefit. For it is an observation, as true as it is trite, that there is nothing men differ so readily about as the payment of money."
In recent decades the caseloads of the federal courts have spiralled and with them unpublished opinions. Now we can see why. Legal scholars have severely criticised the federal courts for such opinions, all too often giving important legal issues short shrift. At least one federal judge has defended them on grounds of the spiralling caseload. Neither, it would seem, however, has connected the caseload with constitutional abdication.
In 1949 a blue ribbon committee of bankers and professors issued a small book, Our National Debt, updating Hamilton by a century and a half. Among other things, it said that the emphasis in banking changed during the war from private loans to investment in government securites, that the banks profited greatly during the war, and that a change in philosophy was shifting much spending to Washington.
"Spending ourselves rich" with government borrowing is the very core of the long dominant Keynesian ideology. As stated by perhaps its most prominent advocate, Hitler was the first Keynesian, he brought the Keynesian remedy with a rush, and he forced England and America into the Keynesian remedy. The Keynesian remedy also came to be associated with military spending. So goes at some length the inimitable prose of John Kenneth Galbraith in The Age of Uncertainty, but still complaining about old-fashioned objections to Keynesian ideas. Even that was several years after the Presidential proclamation, "We are all Keynesians now."
Now that interest on the federal debt has been the second or third largest item in the federal budget for decades, and the country is otherwise drowning in debt as well, it is high time to see how many public officials, in cluding federal judges, own bank stocks.
Are we all Hamiltonians now? Real or counterfeit? The answer to that requires a long overdue national re-examination.
William F. Wendt, Jr.

WHO'S SELLING STOLEN GOODS NOW?

WHO'S SELLING STOLEN GOODS NOW?

There were indeed stolen goods on the old Maxwell St. market, but that was strictly small-time, compared to what UIC and its little in-crowd have done since.

Until its closing in 1994 the old market had several full-time vendors on the west side of Halsted, who had leased or sub-leased plots of City land and kept merchandise there all week long. The tires and hubcaps were kept mostly outdoors, but some also had shanties, or even enclosed space for other merchandise. The southernmost vendor, at the corner of 14th Place, also sold a wide variety of car radios, auto parts, tools, bicycles, and other hardware.

I had known him for about five years when the City bulldozed these operations in August 1994, shortly before turning over the land to UIC. When I was first getting acquainted with him, I saw him buy a large bicycle from a little twerp easily a head shorter than I am. I sat on it and the seat was high enough for someone easily two or three inches taller than I am. I told him. He was rather embarrassed and put the bike in back. Later I also saw a bicycle for sale there, a clipped cable with a lock still wrapped around its handlebars. Every so often I saw him buy items from people just walking in, no questions asked. About as often I saw uniformed policemen browsing the merchandise, but, if any ever asked where it came from, that escaped my attention. At least once that I recall, I saw someone point out an item that had been stolen from him and get it back, just like that.

This came up in court one day, the point being that he had a higher standard of ethics than UIC, Maxwell St. itself being stolen goods. I had filed a lawsuit over the $20 million appropriation UIC used to purchase that land from the City and otherwise transform it into UIC's idea of a port of entry for the academically qualified. A largely Mexican group of vendors had gone to Springfield three times in May 1994 to stop the appropriation, with yours truly tagging along. The third time we had a full scale hearing before the House higher education committee, with UIC and the City also present. After a generally favorable reception, we were promised, on the record, a hearing in Chicago.

On June 15, 1994, however, Rep. Shirley Jones (6th) held a hearing in Springfield for a little UIC in-crowd, including former 1st Ward Alderman Ted Mazola, the market's arch-enemy. He testified the vendors were being told it was a "fait accompli." Our position, canceling the appropriation, went unmentioned. I got wind of it the evening before, but we could not confirm anything. Some of us went to Springfield twice in July, but we only got sweet nothings. That, however, is how the appropriation was passed.

A lawyer filed a suit, but fizzled out completely. About a year later I found out the Illinois Constitution, Art. IV, §7(a), requires reasonable notification of legislative proceedings. I filed my own lawsuit, under that provision and Art. I, §5, guaranteeing the right to assemble peaceably and petition for redress of grievances. The Illinois courts never addressed the constitutional issues. If the appropriation were declared unconstitutional, however, UIC would have to undo every expenditure made with it.

My parting shot to the Supreme Court of Illinois was a threat of a federal suit, which I filed not quite a year later. The lower courts grossly misapplied the "Rooker Feldman" doctrine that you cannot appeal a valid state court decision to a federal trial court, under the curious notion that lower federal courts cannot even inquire into that validity, even though the "Rooker Feldman" U.S. Supreme Court decisions offer plain grounds. The 7th Circuit United States Court of Appeals also completely ignored UIC's plans for sale of the assets, the stolen assets. The Supreme Court of the United States (No. 00-325) refused to hear the case, the still unresolved jurisdictional questions notwithstanding. My first action, should the legal issues ever come up for air, will be to freeze all the stolen assets into court custody.

UIC is now selling townhouses in the old Maxwell Market area, some running into mid-six figures. Ted Mazola is the agent for the other well connected developers.

Where is their office? That same vendor's old spot, Halsted and 14th Pl.

William F. Wendt, Jr.

printed in Southwest News-Herald November 20, 2003

 

Schwertglauben - The German Compound Word for It

reproducible two page advertising supplement
Schwertglauben - The German Compound Word for It
The Germans have a compound word for it.
Zeitgeist, literally, time-spirit, or spirit of times. Weltschmerz, literally, world-pain, or pain of the world. Schadenfreude, literally, misfortune-joy, or joy in someone’s misfortune.
Let’s add another, Schwertglauben,, literally, sword-belief, or belief in the sword, per Wolfram Witte, The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality. The Germans have had a bit too much belief in the sword in their turbulent past, haven’t they? Are they the only ones? Consider a political cartoon of the mid-1960s, showing the signs:
1965- Get out of Vietnam
1975- Get out of the Phillipines
1985- Get out of Hawaii
1995- Get out of California
Schwertglauben can do that to you. It seems so logical, so beyond dispute. It poses as the great inexorable reality, but, as a reality check, it leaves a lot, much too much, to be desired.
The Vietnam War was a classic case of Schwertglauben. All that napalm, plastic shrapnel (not detectable by X-rays), B-52 carpet bombing, twice the bomb tonnage as dropped in WWII, search-and-destroy missions, herbi-cides,”destroy it in order to save it,” etc., somehow could not stop those pajama clad rice farmers from taking over the world, or at least Vietnam.
And still there is much residual Viernam Schwertglauben, even after three decades, a bit too reminiscent of the stab-in-the-back resentments that set the stage for Nazism.
How is Schwertglauben doing today? Wunderbar! It oozes from every pore of, “Stay the course,” and, “Don’t cut and run!” Ever since “Misson accomplished!” it has survived the failure to find WMDs, the failure to connect Saddam and Osama (as likely as Gloria Steinem and Jerry Falwell), and the Project for a New American Century’s plans to invade Iraq needing a “Pearl Harbor incident” to mobilize the public.
It even survived Andy Rooney’s dramatic reading on “60 Minutes” of, by guess who, not to mention the original printing,
“I firmly believed that we should not march into Baghdad. Our stated mission, as codified in UN resolutions, was a simple one- end the aggression, knock Iraq’s forces out of Kuwait, and restore Kuwait’s leaders. To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us, and make a broken tyrant into a latter-day Arab hero. It would have taken us way beyond the imprimatur of international law bestowed by the resolutions of the Security Council, assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning them to fight in what would be an unwinnable urban guerilla war. It could only plunge that part of the world into greater instability and destroy the credibility we were working so hard to reestablish.” George H.W. Bush, A World Transformed, 1998, p464
If Schwertglauben, can survive such blatant clobbering over the head, the following will be much too subtle, but that just goes to show its resilience as a belief system, as a first assumption. “Know your enemy,” goes the old military proverb, but Schwertglauben.is satisfied with anything that can be put on a boot camp poster. Anything is to show “they only understand force” is quite all right, however, as if Schwertglauben understands anything more than that, as if that were not a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Fazwa Gerges, The Far Enemy: Why JIHAD Went Global, might not be the final, definitive account of jihad, apparently compiled without electronic sureveillance, but it just might prove the Dick Tuck saying that the best way to apy on a political campaign is to get on the mailing lest. Not only did he read jihadi writings, but he actually interviewed dozens of them. Not that it jibes with Schwertglauben , but it seems al Qaeda was largely discredited in the Muslim world prior to the Iraq invasion. That did for jihad about what the Russian invasion of Afghanistan did.
Chamberlain-style “appeasement” of Islamo-fascists is another recent staple of Schwertglau-ben, however, never mind the WWI reparations demands on Germany that sparked the horrendous inflation and paved the way for Hitler. That should be a lesson in fooling around with someone else’s country, even to Schwertglauben..
Schwertglauben’s close ideological cousins raise the specter of international government and blue-bereted “peacekeepers” putting down insurgency here. If that ever happens, however, there will be the common observation, here and elsewhere, “Taste of your own medicine!”
One definition of military victory is breaking the enemy’s will. Schwertglauben , with its insular, overbearing, pre-conceived notions has no idea if it is breaking the enemy’s will or inflaming it. If that will can only be expressed through tank columns or fleets of ships or planes, it has a fighting chance. If sapper attacks or suicide bombers can express it, Schwertglauben is only an Elmer Fudd chasing the wascally wabbit. Of course it can always complain about no-win wars.
This country was not founded on Schwertglau-ben. See the first few Federalist Papers as to why the Union was formed in the first place. If you have yet to be patriotic enough to read No. 6, let us partially correct that deficiency now:
"The causes of hostility among nations are innumerable. There are some which have a general and almost constant operation upon the collective bodies of society. Of this description are the love of power or the desire of pre-eminence and dominion- the jealousy of power, or the desire of equality and safety. There are others which have a more circumscribed though an equally operative influence within their spheres. Such are the rivalships and competitions between commercial nations. And there are others, not less numerous than either of the former, which take their origins entirely in private passions; in the attachments, enmities, interests, hopes, and fears of leading individuals in the communities of which they are members. Men of this class, whether the favorites of a king or of a people, have in too many instances abused the confidence they possessed; and assuming the pretext of some public motive, have not scrupled to sacrifice the national tranquility to personal advantage or personal gratification.
"The celebrated Pericles, in compliance with the resentments of a prostitute, at the expense of much of the blood and treasure of his countrymen, attacked, vanquished, and destroyed the city of the Samnians. The same man, stimulated by private pique against the Megarensians, another nation of Greece, or to avoid a prosecution with which he was threatened as an accomplice in a supposed theft of the statuary of Phidias, or to get rid of the accusations prepared to be brought against him for dissipating the funds of the state in the purchase of popularity, or trom a combination of all these causes, was the primitive author of that famous and fatal war, distinguished in the Grecian annals by the name of the Peloponnesian war; which, after various vicissitudes, intermis-sions, and renewals, terminated in the ruin of the Athenian Commonwealth."
Thucydides, “The Melian Dialogues,;” the victorious Athenians do what they can; the defeated Melians do what they must, would be
a giddy trip to Schwertglauben today. But we have just seen what happened to the Athenians, at least if Schwertglauben does not get in the way. How far have we fallen? A timeless commen-tary on human nature, Federalist No. 8 shows why we have tolerated so much Schwertglauben :
"... The perpetual menacings of danger oblige the government to be always prepared to repel it; its armies must be numerous enough for instant defense. The continual necessity for their services enhances the importance of the soldier, and proportionably degrades the condition of the citizen. The military state becomes elevated over the civil. The inhabitants of territories, often the theatre of war, are unavoidably subjected to frequent infringements on their rights, which serve to weaken their sense of those rights; and by degrees the people are brought to consider the soldiery not only as their protectors but as their superiors. The transition from this disposition to that of considering them masters is neither remote nor difficult; but it is very difficult to prevail upon a people under such impressions to make a bold or effectual resistance to usurpations supported by the military power."
As Douglas MacArthur updated that in 1957:
“Our swollen budgets constantly have been misrepresented to the public. Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear- kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor- with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.”
In the interests of ideological balance, liberal tax and spend is a Schwertglauben on taxpayers. Unions have their Schwertglauben toward bosses and scabs, And see Galbraith, The Age of Uncer-tainty, on Hitler being the first Keynesian.
Das Schwert will be an unfortunate necessity for the forseeable future, but let us not make a belief system out of it. Let us take one of its more cogent lessons of recent decades, that ot precision- guided munitions. The closer a warhead lands to the target, the less explosive is needed to destroy it. Precision guidance is exactly what das Schwert needs in the larger context, evenn if it means opposing (!) the President. And not merely abroad, but protection of the innocent at home as well.
What if there was a vocal German movement about 1935 or so, pushing the notion, “Hey, Hitler, this Jew-stuff and war-stuff is blinking, blanking nuts. Cut it out, immediately if not sooner!”
That would have saved a lot of trouble, even if it encouraged Germany’s “enemies,” nicht wahr?
Or do we learn from history that we do not learn from history?
“For it is a truth, which the experience of all ages has attested, that the people are commonly most in danger when the means of injuring their rights are in the hands of those of whom they entertain the least suspicion.” Federalist 25
WHOLE ELEPHANT QUARTERLY
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Copyright 2006 by William F. Wendt, Jr. permission granted to reproduce and distribute in whole this two page advertising supplement

third rail in court

A NEW EXPRESSION FOR AVOIDING THE THIRD RAIL- IN
> COURT
> Touch the third rail of a rapid transit system,
> which conducts six hundred volts or more to the subway or
> elevated trains, and you are instantly dead.
> In recent years "avoiding the third rail" has
> become the expression for politicians’ ducking issues that
> could easily result in political suicide. Political
> candidates, in office or not, can and do duck issues
> they do not care to address, as long as they answer
> to the electorate.
> In court, however, it is a different story. What if
> courts avoided issues the way politicians do? What
> if courts ignored precedents or even constitutional
> questions?
> In theory, at least, courts of law have nowhere the
> sort of discretion that politicians do.
What kind of law would we have if courts ducked issues?
> Going back to Blackstone, at least, they are bound
> by precedents, by the doctrine of "stare decisis," so
> that judges do not make new law every time a case is
> decided. Going back to Marbury v. Madison (1803)
> American courts are obligated to rule on
> constitutional issues when necessary to decide a
> case, or else there is no constitution. The whole idea of
> due process is to prevent arbitrary action. Judicial
> acts are immune from lawsuit so that judges can be
> free to address controversial issues. If judges
> could "avoid the third rail," would there be any rule of
> law? Is there any rule of law when they do, at least
> in my recent cases?
> In 1995 I sued the University of Illinois over its
> appropriation to wipe out Maxwell St., on grounds it
> was passed at a legislative hearing without the
> opposition being notified. Although I plainly cited
> sections of the Illinois constitution, requiring
> notification of legislative hearings and protecting
> the right to petition for redress of grievances, the
> state courts denied there was a constitutional
> issue. My last motion in the state supreme court cited
> Marbury and threatened a federal lawsuit if there
> were no constitutional ruling.
> In 1998 I filed a federal lawsuit under the Civil
> Rights Acts of 1866 and 1871, for deprivation of my
> right to sue and conspiracy to block the course of
> justice in state court. The first is Reconstruction
> legislation to eliminate the "badges and incidents"
> of slavery (slaves were not allowed to sue, own
> property, make contracts, etc.), the second the "Ku Klux Klan
> Act" to restore civil order in the South, among
> other things, to keep the state courts open.
> The suit was thrown out on "Rooker Feldman
> doctrine" that state court judgments cannot be appealed to a
> federal trial court. Quite lost in the "doctrine,"
> however, named after U.S. Supreme Court decisions,
> is language in both distinguishing valid from invalid
> decisions. Rooker v. Fidelity Trust (1923) described
> a decision in which there was an exercise of
> jurisdiction, a full and fair hearing, and a ruling
> responsive to the issues. District of Columbia Court
> of Appeals v. Feldman (1983) defined the judicial
> process as application of law to fact. That none of
> this happened in my state case was ignored
> completely. Likewise, my strenuous objection that ignoring this
> argument is beyond court authority, in legal language,
> an hypothetical jurisdictional bar.
> In 2000 I sued to stop federal funding of local
> public transportation projects, on grounds the
> federal government has no authority to fund local projects
> under a 1935 U.S. Supreme Court decision, U.S. v.
> Butler. Also, that existing systems were being
> rebuilt without considering new technologies. Although I
> cited the government's own motion describing a federal
> program to fund local projects, the trial court
> ruled the matter a "political question." On appeal, after
> I filed a brief again citing the government's own
> description, the government moved to summarily
> affirm the trial court on technical grounds. Even though
> the trial court order itself said that my record was
> complete for appeal and that it did not have time to
> address my issues, the 7th Circuit affirmed on
> grounds it did not desire further briefing. My strenuous
> objections about ignoring constitutional issues were
> denied without explanation.
> "Avoiding the third rail" in court deserves a new
> expression, which the 7th Circuit also ignored. Part
> of Chicago legal lore is the lawsuit against the Chicago
Transit Authority over a drunk who established
> electrical contact with the third rail and died by
> urinating on it. And that is exactly what the 7th
> Circuit did to the Constitution.
> William F. Wendt, Jr.