Alex Acosta let the cat out of the bag: the Justice Department knew all about the Jeffrey Epstein Florida plea deal — Robert Willman

Jeffrey Epstein was being protected. The process and communications that accomplished it, and who did it, are not yet known.

The media has reported none of this, although the court documents are available and Robert Willman provides references to them.

Another case of a double standard of justice. Now the question is how far will it go, or will it be buried with the rest of the bodies.

Sic Semper Tyrannis
Alex Acosta let the cat out of the bag: the Justice Department knew all about the Jeffrey Epstein Florida plea deal

Robert Willman

Raúl Carrillo — What Modern Monetary Theory Can Teach Us about Criminal Justice

Currency issuers v. currency users.  Good article in many ways relating MMT to the law.

Tropics of Meta

What Modern Monetary Theory Can Teach Us about Criminal Justice

Raúl Carrillo, attorney and board member of the Modern Money Network

Sputnik — Judge Demands US Intelligence Agencies Reveal Details on Occupy Protest Spying

9/11 > Patriot Act > national security state > Department of Homeland Security > surveillance state > police state.

"Taking names."

“The message to people is don’t participate [in public dissent] because you may be considered a threat to the government or the corporate state,” Hetznecker said.

Sputnik International
Judge Demands US Intelligence Agencies Reveal Details on Occupy Protest Spying

Pam Martens — Clintons Are Under Multiple FBI Investigations as Agents Are Stymied

Martens suggests that the Obama DOJ acted politically to obstruct FBI investigations of the Clintons.

Wall Street On Parade
Clintons Are Under Multiple FBI Investigations as Agents Are Stymied

Pam Martens

Daily Mail — No comment: Clinton has 'nothing to say' about Wikileaks email revealing $12M quid pro quo with Morocco's king that an aide said was a 'mess' of her own making

• 'I have nothing to say about Wikileaks, other than I think we should all be concerned about what the Russians are trying to do to our election'
• Democratic nominee was responding to a question posed by DailyMail.com during a question and answer session on her plane
• Trump went on offense over the 'pay for play' agreement at a rally Friday
• Emial from Huma Abedin revealed how Clinton got King of Morocco to underwrite $12m Clinton Foundation summit
• Abedin revealed: 'The condition upon which the Moroccans agreed to host the meeting was her participation.'
• She backed out of Marrakesh event amid a human rights storm after Abedin wrote: 'She created this mess and she knows it'

Emphasis in lede.

Daily Mail (UK)
No comment: Clinton has 'nothing to say' about Wikileaks email revealing $12M quid pro quo with Morocco's king that an aide said was a 'mess' of her own making

Francesca Chambers, White House Correspondent and David Martosko, U.S. Political Editor for Dailymail.Com

Jonathan Turley — Wikileaks: Top Clinton Aides Detail “Expensive Gifts” and Unethical Deals By Clintons Through Their Foundation

Conflict of interest (unethical but not illegal) or quid pro quo (illegal)?

Wikileaks: Top Clinton Aides Detail “Expensive Gifts” and Unethical Deals By Clintons Through Their Foundation
Jonathan Turley | Professor of Law at The George Washington University Law School

Alex Emmons — Major New Court Ruling Says “Even The President” Can’t Declare Torture Lawful

In a robust ruling in favor of Abu Ghraib detainees, an appellate court ruled Friday that torture is such a clear violation of the law that it is “beyond the power of even the president to declare such conduct lawful.”

The ruling from a unanimous panel of judges on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals reinstates a lawsuit against a military contractor for its role in the torture of four men at the notorious prison in Iraq.

Last June, a district court ruled that a “cloud of ambiguity” surrounds the definition of torture, and that despite anti-torture laws, the decision to torture was a “political question” that could not be judged by courts.

That ruling echoed the widely discredited legal theories of the Bush administration, which argued that the war on terror gave the president the inherent authority to indefinitely detain and torture terror suspects, and conduct mass surveillance on Americans’ international communications.

But the Fourth Circuit soundly rejected that theory, saying that the United States has clear laws against torturing detainees that apply to the executive branch.…

The Intercept
Major New Court Ruling Says “Even The President” Can’t Declare Torture Lawful
Alex Emmons

Patrick G. Eddington — The “Pardon Snowden” Case Just Got Stronger

Cato gets one right, but it's not about economics.

Cato Institute — Cato At Liberty
The “Pardon Snowden” Case Just Got Stronger
Patrick G. Eddington

Brad DeLong — Musings on “Just Deserts” and the Opening of Plato’s Republic – More

Greg Mankiw Defending the 1% proposes what he calls the “just deserts” theory of social justice:

What you have gained and hold by playing by the economic rules is yours: social justice consists in not cheating or injuring people, and not being cheated or injured in turn.

This is an old theory: we see it first in the western intellectual tradition nearly 2400 years ago, in the opening of the dialogue that is Plato’s Republic. It is advanced by Kephalos…

Socrates dismisses it out of hand.

WCEG — The Equitablog
Musings on “Just Deserts” and the Opening of Plato’s Republic
Brad DeLong

See also

Counterpunch
The Magical Invisibility Cloak Utilitarianism Wears in the Age of Neoliberal Capitalism
Fred Guerin

Scientific American
How Morality Changes in a Foreign Language

Julie Sedivy

Understanding Society
Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy
Dave Elder-Vass | Lecturer in Sociology at Loughborough University

Robert Hackett — Bitcoin Is Not Money, Miami Judge Rules

Money is what the law says it is. This judge ruled that Bitcoin is property.

Michell Esponiza, the defendant, had sold $1,500 worth of the virtual currency to undercover police officers who said they intended to buy stolen credit card numbers with it, as the Miami Herald reports. The cops then brought a case against him, alleging that Espinoza had illegally engaged in money laundering.

The court’s decision? Where there’s no money, there’s no money laundering.

“This Court is not an expert in economics, however, it is very clear, even to someone with limited knowledge in the area, that Bitcoin has a long way to go before it is the equivalent of money,” the Miami-Dade Circuit judge Teresa Mary Pooler said in her ruling, which the Miami Herald published.

“This court is unwilling to punish a man for selling his property to another, when his actions fall under a statute that is so vaguely written that even legal professionals have difficulty finding a singular meaning,” she added.…

Fortune
Bitcoin Is Not Money, Miami Judge Rules
Robert Hackett

Alex Tabarrok — What Was Gary Becker’s Biggest Mistake?

Gary Becker on rational choice theory applied to crime and punishment.

Marginal Revolution
What Was Gary Becker’s Biggest Mistake?
Alex Tabarrok | Bartley J. Madden Chair in Economics at the Mercatus Center and am a professor of economics at George Mason University. I am also a research fellow with the Mercatus Center

See also

Publisher's blurb:

It is widely believed today that the free market is the best mechanism ever invented to efficiently allocate resources in society. Just as fundamental as faith in the free market is the belief that government has a legitimate and competent role in policing and the punishment arena. This curious incendiary combination of free market efficiency and the Big Brother state has become seemingly obvious, but it hinges on the illusion of a supposedly natural order in the economic realm. The Illusion of Free Markets argues that our faith in “free markets” has severely distorted American politics and punishment practices.

Bernard Harcourt traces the birth of the idea of natural order to eighteenth-century economic thought and reveals its gradual evolution through the Chicago School of economics and ultimately into today’s myth of the free market. The modern category of “liberty” emerged in reaction to an earlier, integrated vision of punishment and public economy, known in the eighteenth century as “police.” This development shaped the dominant belief today that competitive markets are inherently efficient and should be sharply demarcated from a government-run penal sphere.

This modern vision rests on a simple but devastating illusion. Superimposing the political categories of “freedom” or “discipline” on forms of market organization has the unfortunate effect of obscuring rather than enlightening. It obscures by making both the free market and the prison system seem natural and necessary. In the process, it facilitated the birth of the penitentiary system in the nineteenth century and its ultimate culmination into mass incarceration today.

The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order
Bernard E. Harcourt

Stephen Gandel — Mortgage Exec At the Heart of Financial Crisis Escapes Charges

Mozilo walks with only a hefty fine, not all of which he paid himself.

Fortune
Mortgage Exec At the Heart of Financial Crisis Escapes Charges
Stephen Gandel, senior editor

Dirk Ehnts — The Atlantic on Adam Smith and inequality miss major quote

The Atlantic has an article named The Problem With Inequality, According to Adam Smith. One paragraph reads:

Yet there remains a broad consensus, even among scholars of the period, that Smith was concerned by poverty but not by economic inequality itself. According to this view, Smith hoped to ensure that all members of society could satisfy their basic needs, but he was untroubled by relative differences in income and wealth. As long as everyone has food on their tables, clothes on their backs, and a roof over their heads, the thinking goes, it does not matter if some have far more than others. Indeed, it is often claimed that Smith saw economic inequality as a manifestly good thing. 

I have pointed out in 2012 that the Prometheus edition of “The Wealth of Nations” is abridged and that a major quote from book 5, chapter 1 is missing:

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

This is only one sentence from some longer paragraphs that Smith has on the the sovereign….

People who quote others should actually read them.

econoblog 101
The Atlantic on Adam Smith and inequality miss major quote
Dirk Ehnts | Lecturer at Bard College Berlin

William K. Black — The Lie That “China Wins” if the TPP Kangaroo Tribunals are Stopped

The “serious people” of the lame stream media are encouraging the lame ducks to vote for the CEOs’ dream deal. One of their principal claims is “If T.P.P. falls apart, China wins. It’s as simple as that.” TPP is deliberately opaque, complex, and crafted in secrecy by the CEOs’ lobbyists to be the opposite of “simple.” It has nothing to do with China winning or losing. TPP is all about Article 9 of the TPP, which allows CEOs to rig the system so that the CEOs win and the people and nations lose.…

The ‘serious person’s” article never mentions Article 9, but it does include this carefully crafted attempt to mislead his readers: “[TPP] binds Vietnam to countries where the rule of law is arbiter rather than authoritarian diktat.” As Americans are now all too aware, the American “rule of law” is a threadbare pretense when it comes to powerful financial CEOs. Article 9 is the “rule of law” only in the sense that it specifies that the “rule of law” does not apply to the kangaroo tribunals that can impose billions of dollars in penalties on a nation for the high crime of trying to discourage smoking. Article 9 is designed to bypass one of the most important requisites of national sovereignty – a nation’s laws and judicial system.

Article 9 is authoritarian diktat – by the CEOs of multinational corporations. CEOs share a community of interest to block effective regulation and enforcement against corporate crimes and abuses. CEOs and their lobbyists were given unique access to craft the draft deal while the public was excluded. Everything we know from human history tells us that they would use that power and secret access to rig the system to benefit their interests and ensure that they could use Article 9 to impair the ability of nations to use the “rule of law” to prevent corporate abuses and crimes.…

We can stop the TPP. People are increasingly coming to understand that it has nothing to do with “free trade” and everything to do with CEOs’ dream of rigging the system so that they can get even wealthier through the “sure thing” of fraud and abuse with impunity from the laws.…

New Economic Perspectives
The Lie That “China Wins” if the TPP Kangaroo Tribunals are Stopped
William K. Black | Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC

Dylan Minor — CEOs with Lots of Stock Options Are More Likely to Break Laws

Perverse incentives.

Harvard Business Review
CEOs with Lots of Stock Options Are More Likely to Break Laws

Dylan Minor | visiting assistant professor at Harvard Business School and assistant professor at the Kellogg School of Management

Joe Mellor — British people ‘will never forgive’ Blair, says poll

Another legacy down the toilet. History will not be kind. America, we're waiting.

There have already been rumours that the Chilcot inquiry will come down hard on Tony Blair, and a lot of the British people blame him for entering a war that was unnecessary and possibly illiegal.

Recently Blair himself admitted that he “profoundly” underestimated the complexity of Middle Eastern politics.

Now a survey by pollsters YouGov in the Independent ahead of the report by Chilcot, which will be released in July, found only eight per cent think he did absolutely nothing wrong.

Even worse for Blair more than half of the people polled said they will “never forgive” him for taking the UK into a bloody conflict in Iraq, the backlash which still persists today, and has seen the formation of IS, a terror group who many would argue is a lot worse than Sadam Hussein.…

A majority (53 per cent) say that they could never forgive him. Just 8 per cent think Mr Blair did nothing wrong, whilst 15 per believe it’s time we forgave him for his misjudgments.…

As time passes fewer and fewer people are comfortable with the Iraq war and its reasons for it. Tony Blair may have a lot more questions to answer in the coming months and years. It seems unlikely that there are going to be many new fans of Mr Blair anytime soon.

The London Economic
British people ‘will never forgive’ Blair, says poll

Joe Mellor

Juan José Cruces and Eduardo Levy Yeyati — What the world can learn from Argentina's holdout saga

A bit legally wonkish for most probably, but posted here for the record.

Vox.eu
What the world can learn from Argentina's holdout saga
Juan José Cruces and Eduardo Levy Yeyati

Josh Israel — Nevada Lawmaker: It’s Okay To Aim Guns At Cops If They Aim At You First

Nevada Assemblywoman Michele Fiore (R), who is currently seeking her party’s nomination for an open U.S. House seat, said last week that she believes the right to self defense includes the right to aim your gun anyone who aims a gun at you, even if they are a law enforcement officer.

In an interview with a local TV station last Sunday, Fiore attacked the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) as “a bureaucrat agency of terrorism.” Pressed by KLAS-8 host Steve Sebelius about whether she believes the Second Amendment grants citizens the right to point a weapon at a “duly authorized law enforcement officer who is just out there doing his job,” she said that self-defense includes the right to aim back at anyone who points a gun at you first — and to put your own life ahead of theirs.

“I would never ever point my firearm at anyone, including an officer of the law, unless they pointed their firearm at me,” Fiore explained. But, the assemblywoman continued, “once you point your firearm at me, I’m sorry, then it becomes self-defense. Whether you’re a stranger, a bad guy, or an officer, and you point your gun at me and you’re gonna shoot me and I have to decide whether it’s my life or your life, I choose my life.”

Think Progress
Nevada Lawmaker: It’s Okay To Aim Guns At Cops If They Aim At You First

Josh Israel

Ollie McAninch — Corporations will rule Governments if TTIP goes ahead

Even if TTIP goes ahead, ISDS needs serious rethinking. It will be interesting to see if the democratically elected Governments have the power or willingness to adhere to the will of the people who elected them, rather than the corporations that fund them.

The London Economic
Corporations will rule Governments if TTIP goes ahead

Ollie McAninch, economist working in journalism

Reno Berkeley — Banking Expert Who Exposed Savings & Loan Corruption Joins Sanders Campaign

An expert in banking corruption and finance has joined the Bernie Sanders campaign. William K. Black, an associate professor at the University of Missouri-KC, is Bernie Sanders’ new economic advisor. Black was one of the central figures in exposing and prosecuting corruption in the savings and loan crisis from the late 1980s and mid-1990s. His addition to the Sanders campaign brings important knowledge in laws pertaining to finance and banking.…

Inquisitr.com

Banking Expert Who Exposed Savings & Loan Corruption Joins Sanders Campaign

Reno Berkeley