Legal Commentary

Geithner's Giving Me The Balky Blues

By Ethan Brown

A few years back, while researching my second book Snitch I found myself returning to one simple question: why has even modest criminal justice policy reform been so difficult to achieve?

The question was sparked specifically by the notorious 100:1 disparity between sentences for crack and powder cocaine.

This injustice had been decried for more than a decade by drug policy reform advocates to even federal judges. Yet the sentencing disparity between the two forms of essentially the same drug proved incredibly difficult to change. Indeed, since 1995 The United States Sentencing Commission (USSC) repeatedly criticized the guidelines for being too harsh and for applying mostly to low-level offenders--yet nothing changed. [More...]

Now, I realize that changing policy of any kind is a slow process, partciularly when it comes to criminal justice policy which has been rooted in a blind, "tough on crime" mindset since the 1980s. And it was heartening to see Supreme Court decisions such as Kimbrough v. The United States in 2007 in which the court ruled that judges could sentence crack cocaine offenders below the sentencing guidelines.

Nonetheless, mandatory minimums have still yet to be eliminated. And the lack of meaningful progress in criminal justice policy reform--particularly when you have not just the Drug Policy Alliance but Republican Senators like Jeff Sessions arguing that the criminal justice system is broken--seemed to me to be indicative of a democracy that had become sadly incapable of real reform.

It turned out I was not alone in thinking this way. Via James Howard Kunstler I read Dmitry Orlov's presentation "Closing the Collapse Gap," a sort of side by side comparison of the U.S. and late stage USSR. Orlov wrote that, like the USSR, the U.S. has a "balky, unresponsive, corrupt political system, incapable of reform."

I've been thinking about Orlov a lot as I follow the developments with Geithner and Treasury, in which all the bad ideas seem to be winning out.

Against all evidence from the likes of Krugman, Roubini, Yves Smith, etc., Geithner insists that the financial crisis stems from an irrational "fire sale" of undervalued assets. Yet here's Roubini on the financial crisis once again disputing that view: this is NOT a liquidity crisis, instead "the institutions are insolvent."

With each passing day in this financial crisis--particularly today's bizarre revelations about the stress tests which Joe Weisenthal at Clusterstock rightly called called "something of a joke"-- I'm becoming increasingly convinced that Orlov's diagnosis of the U.S. is correct. Our democracy not only stumbles in the face of crisis--it fights off any credible fixes.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on April 09, 2009 (boomark / email).