Home | About | RSS Feed | Contact and Publicity Guidelines | Comment Policy the Law, the Universe, and Everything 

advertise-here4


Slip Opinions


Groundhog Day. (fp)

Banned in Tucson. (kw)

The Best and Worst of 2011 in Race and Law (kw)

Tortured to death for trespassing. (fp)

Drones of contention. (fp)

DOJ still coddling banks. (fp)

Creative destruction? Thank banks. (fp)

Blog about a new book, on how to talk to little girls--stressing smarts not cutes.   LAC

Macey on the heroic Rakoff. (fp)

Captured NY Fed. (fp)


solicitors

Our Podcast

Subscribe to Law Talk

law-rev-contents2.jpg


  • Posts by Author

  • Categories

  • Archives


  • Recent Comments


    • Shag from Brookline on Employment Division v. Smith is Wrong

    • Joe on On the Servicing Settlement

    • Shag from Brookline on Employment Division v. Smith is Wrong

    • Shag from Brookline on On the Servicing Settlement

    • A.J. Sutter on Employment Division v. Smith is Wrong

    • A.J. Sutter on Did Rahm Learn Anything From Cass?

    • Joe on Employment Division v. Smith is Wrong

    • Shag from Brookline on Employment Division v. Smith is Wrong

    • Bill Reynolds on Did Rahm Learn Anything From Cass?

    • brainfish2 on Employment Division v. Smith is Wrong

    • A.J. Sutter on Symposium Next Week on "A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents"

    • Patrick S. O'Donnell on Symposium Next Week on "A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents"

    • Patrick S. O'Donnell on Symposium Next Week on "A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents"

    • Joe on Same-Sex Marriage Opinion

    • Joe on Same-Sex Marriage Opinion
  •  

    Site Meter

    About the Blog

    Concurring Opinions is a multiple authored, general interest legal blog.

    (Image: Wikicommons)

Unhappy New Decade (A Rant)

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

This century’s inauspicious beginnings, marred by terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 and 2001-02′s corporate ruination at Enron and a half-dozen likewise fraudulent industrial companies, are eerily echoed by this decade’s ill-fated close, marred by the terrorist airplane assault on Christmas Day 2009 and ruination at AIG, Bear Stearns, Citicorp and a score of likewise irresponsible financial companies in 2008-09.

Official responses to the earlier ills were remarkably unsuccessful, offering greater occasion for political grandstanding and gains to the powerful than justifiable comfort to citizens. After 9/11, the Bush administration and Congress renovated and expanded government bureaucracy and waged two costly, endless, losing wars, with the losers being travelers, soldiers and taxpayers and the winners those in command of government, the military and companies benefiting from procurement and administration.

Despite weekend blathering from an Obama administration official, suggesting the 2009 Christmas bomber’s botched plans showed the Bush-installed system works, the system failed. And despite that failure, already official responses are making air travel even more difficult, costly and painful, with no basis for believing that official steps will be on target.

The Obama administration needs to correct this by implementing recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, like matching known terrorists to airline flight reservation systems, not putting passengers through inspection charades, like removing shoes and opening lap tops, designed more to keep us flying than prevent terrorists from flying.

After Enron, government enacted Sarbanes-Oxley, purporting to crack down on accounting abuses, installing a potpourri of measures advertised to end large financial frauds. Results were enormous costs imposed on many companies and big profits for auditing firms. Though benefits included superior audits for many companies, the financial crisis shows how wildly off-target that political response to obvious problems was.

Investors gained something from better general audits, but lost enormous wealth from galactic failure by both government officials and financial executives. The Federal Reserve, SEC, bank regulators, Congress and financial institution leaders should face up to their failures in allowing or promoting the proliferation of exotic securities whose risk attributes no one understood.

Once again, however, nothing of that sort is likely, and the response by government and business so far has been wildly off-target, hurting citizens while helping political and financial elites. The focus has been on how banks made billions of dollars in irresponsible loans to people who could not document their ability to repay them.

As reflected in President Obama’s unsuccessful jawboning of lenders to get lending going again, the response so far has been curtailed lending and increased hurdles borrowers must surmount before obtaining financing. It has become extraordinarily difficult for the most credit-worthy small businesses and hopeful home-owners to get loans, with loan officers and bank underwriters requesting, often repeatedly and sometimes maliciously, the most absurd documentation.

Characteristic of the century’s first decade, this off-target over-reaction simply ignores those at the heart of problems, primarily senior politicians, regulators and financial executives. Of course the financial crisis arose from low-level bank employees authorizing irresponsible loans to irresponsible individuals.

But this was allowed and promoted by high-paid bankers peddling global securities products under the indifferent oversight of officials in the Federal Reserve, SEC and Congress. It will not be cured by having low-level employees harass creditworthy potential borrowers. Meanwhile, legislation on the matter is stalled, with high-paid K Street lobbyists showering politicians with gifts on behalf of highly-paid banking executives.   And high finance keeps innovating intricate products, rewarded with sizable bonuses.

The terrorism of 9/11 and Christmas 2009 is complex and may be intractable. And while low-level airport employees, private and public sector, may bear some fault, ultimate responsibility and blame goes to political, diplomatic and military leaders, not those employees and certainly not travelers—the only ones who actually disrupted the terrorist.

The President and his administration should look inward to find fault and solutions, and certainly not claim the system is working. There’s reason to be skeptical and gloomy about whether they’ll do so, however, and one can forecast another unhappy decade coming, with everything at risk from travel plans and safety to financial goals and security. Yet given how bad the past decade was, the hopeful still will want to shout Happy New Year at this week’s end.


 December 29, 2009 at 11:18 am   Posted in: Current Events   Print This Post Print This Post

Responses (8)

  1. Landline - December 29, 2009 at 12:06 pm

    Whew. Aside from that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?

  2. A.J. Sutter - December 29, 2009 at 6:24 pm

    Cheer up — the decade ends on 12/31/2010 (just as the century began on 01/01/2001). It’s got time to improve.

  3. Jake - December 29, 2009 at 6:49 pm

    As far as fighting terrorism goes, the Bush Administration’s signal omission was its failure to drop a 100-megaton warhead on Mecca on 9/12/2001. The animals who wish us nothing less will never understand anything less.

    And the Obama Administration’s reaction to the attempted Christmas Day airliner bombing resembles nothing so much as a Roman bureaucrat, circa AD 100, complaining about how the Gauls smell, speak, and appear.

    The Bush Administration had its faults, but, for God’s sake, one never had the current sense that matches are in the hands of ignorant children in the dynamite shack.

  4. Bruce Boyden - December 29, 2009 at 7:10 pm

    Jake, how exactly would murdering millions of innocent people solve anything?

  5. The Law in 2009 (and what’s to come!) | usDemoCrazy - December 30, 2009 at 12:58 am

    [...] Finally, Concurring Opinions just gives us a good ol’ fashion RANT: This century’s inauspicious beginnings, marred by terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 and 2001-02’s corporate ruination at Enron … are eerily echoed by this decade’s ill-fated close… [...]

  6. Christa - December 30, 2009 at 9:17 am

    Things will look up eventually; once the market regains some certainty, maybe many other things will get rose-colored glasses. Being a military wife, I get more and more upset about the escalating war and security threats like the Christmas attempted attack, but I rarely feel hopeless unless I talk with people who are fearful about the stability of the economy.

  7. Paul Horwitz - December 30, 2009 at 10:44 am

    Jake, my recollection may fail me here, but I’m pretty sure some folks did have the nagging sense from time to time during the Bush Administration that matches were in the hands of ignorant children in the dynamite shack. That is, as they say on the blogosphere, IIRC.

  8. Jake - January 1, 2010 at 7:12 pm

    Paul — then please consider the Clinton Administration, asleep at the wheel (due to the good cigar and blue dress lullaby), while the forces of international terrorism grew unopposed, only to be dumped on Bush.

    Tag. Your turn.

Leave a Reply

Spam protection by WP Captcha-Free


  • « Previous post
  • Next post »

Authors

Daniel J. Solove
Kaimipono Wenger
Dave Hoffman
Frank Pasquale
Deven Desai
Danielle Citron
Lawrence Cunningham
Sarah Waldeck
Jaya Ramji-Nogales
Solangel Maldonado
Gerard Magliocca

Guests

Derek Bambauer
Gabriella Coleman
andré douglas pond cummings
David Gray
Brishen Rogers
Joseph Turow
Elizabeth A. Wilson













Previous Guests

Michael Abramowicz
Michelle Adams
Robert Ahdieh
Marvin Ammori
Michelle Anderson
Laura Appleman
Taunya Lovell Banks
Ann Bartow
Steven Bellovin
Adam Benforado
Gaia Bernstein
Francesca Bignami
Josh Blackman
Joseph Blocher
Jeremy Blumenthal
Kathleen Boozang
Bruce Boyden
Donald Braman
Al Brophy
Neil H. Buchanan
Bill Burke-White
Scott Burris
Paul Butler
Ryan Calo
Naomi Cahn
Anupam Chander
Miriam Cherry
Jack Chin
Glenn Cohen
Jennifer Collins
Caroline Mala Corbin
Thomas Crocker
Allison Danner
Brannon Denning
Deven Desai
Mike Dimino
Mark Edwards
Maxine Eichner
Jessica Erickson
David Fagundes
Lisa Fairfax
Joshua Fairfield
Christine Haight Farley
Kim Ferzan
Dan Filler
Mary Anne Franks
Michael Froomkin
Amanda Frost
Brian Frye
Timothy Glynn
Rachel Godsil
Eric Goldman
Kyle Graham
David Gray
Craig Green
Tristin Green
Jonathan Hafetz
Meredith Harbach
Michelle Harner
Jeffrey Harrison
Hosea Harvey
Erica Hashimoto
Jennifer Hendricks
Carissa Hessick
Laura Heymann
Robert Hillman
Gilbert A. Holmes
Nicole Huberfeld
Christine Hurt
Darian Ibrahim
Sherrilyn Ifill
John Ip
Shavar Jeffries
Kevin Johnson
Kristin Johnson
Jeff Jonas
Courtney Joslin
Dan Kahan
Jeffrey Kahn
Brian Kalt
Sam Kamin
Michael Kang
Chimène Keitner
Alicia Kelly
Orin Kerr
Nancy Kim
Heidi Kitrosser
Adam Kolber
Russell Korobkin
Alex Kreit
Anita S. Krishnakumar
Susan Kuo
Greg Lastowka
Sarah Lawsky
Youngjae Lee
Margaret Lewis
Erik Lillquist
Jeff Lipshaw
Jonathan Lipson
Jacqueline Lipton
Matthew Lister
Joseph Liu
Michael Madison
Kevin Noble Maillard
Solangel Maldonado
Jason Mazzone
Linda McClain
William McGeveran
Salil Mehra
Carrie Menkel-Meadow
Max Minzner
Viva Moffat
Scott Moss
Eric Muller
Jaya Ramji-Nogales
Helen Norton
Elizabeth Nowicki
Paul Ohm
Angela Onwuachi-Willing
Michael O'Shea
David Opderback
Kristen Osenga
Rafael Pardo
Marcy Peek
Eduardo Peñalver
Robert Percival
Michael J. Pitts
Marc Poirier
David Post
Amanda Pustilnik
Shruti Rana
Geoffrey Rapp
Neil Richards
Lori Ringhand
Alice Ristroph
Marc Roark
Sasha Romanosky
Tuan Samahon
Susan Scafidi
David Schraub
Paul Secunda
Jonathan Siegel
Jessica Silbey
Peter Smith
Judd Sneirson
Adam Steinman
Charles Sullivan
Rick Swedloff
Olivier Sylvain
Steph Tai
Andrew Taslitz
Robert Tsai
Jenia Turner
Steve Vladeck
Ari Waldman
Spencer Weber Waller
Howard Wasserman
Melissa Waters
Frank Wu
Alfred Yen
Corey Yung
David Zaring
Timothy Zick
Michael Zimmer
Jonathan Zittrain

Ownership

Concurring Opinions is a
general-interest legal blog
operated by Concurring
Opinions LLC, a Pennsylvania
Limited Liability Corporation.

Blogroll

Above the Law
Access to Justice
ACS Blog
Althouse
Balkinization
Becker-Posner Blog
BlackProf
BoingBoing
Chicago Law Faculty Blog
Conglomerate
CrimLaw
Crime & Federalism
CrimProf Blog
Crooked Timber
Derechoalderecho
Discourse.net
Dorf on Law
Election Law
Emergent Chaos
The Faculty Lounge
Feminist Law Profs
43(B)log
Freakonomics Blog
Freedom to Tinker
Google Blogoscoped
How Appealing
Ideoblog
Info/Law
Instapundit.com
Juris Novus
Jurisdynamics
Just Books
Law and Humanities Blog
Law and Letters
Law Librarian Blog
Legal Profession Blog
Legal Theory Blog
Legal Times Blog
Leiter Reports
Brian Leiter's Law School Reports
Lessig Blog
Madisonian Theory
Media Law Blog
Mirror of Justice
The Moderate Voice
National Security Advisors
Opinio Juris
Point of Law
PrawfsBlawg
ProfessorBainbridge.com
Property Prof Blog
Red Tape Chronicles
The Right Coast
Schneier on Security
SCOTUSBlog
Security Dilemmas
Sentencing Law and Policy
Simple Justice
Sivacracy.net
The Situationist
Susan Crawford
TalkLeft
Talking Points Memo
TaxProf Blog
TeachPrivacy Blog
Tech & Marketing Law
Truth on the Market
Volokh Conspiracy
WorkPlace Prof Blog
WSJ Law Blog
Wonkette
The Yin Blog


© Concurring Opinions

Powered by WordPress