[PEN-L:28674] Re: ...Drudgery

["Ian Murray" <seamus2001@xxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Justin Schwartz" <jkschw@xxxxxxxxxxx>

>
> Why would be a such a great idea to have the demos tell college professors
> how to run their shop? In most of this country, that would result in the
> shut-down of biological departments, except for ag depts, the conversion of
> most philosophy depts into bastions of conservative Christian
> fundamentalism, etc. All the remaining socialists would be fired at once.
> For that matter, what does the demos know about surgery? Would you want to
> be operated on by medical professionals who were accountable, in doing their
> job, to anything but their expertise? Likewise, if I may say so, with us
> legal professionals. Would you want my considered legal judgment, given as
> best as I can give it, or my judgment as informed and limited by what a
> bunch of people who know no law nor how the legal system works nor anything
> much except that they don't like lawyers because we are all greeedy rich
> crooks?

=====================

Notice how you amorphize "the demos" into a monlith by eradicating every institutional boundary to
set up an imaginary opposition. All in all betraying a contempt for the masses that would do James
Madison proud. The question, given your choices of institutional locations above, is whether the
Universities are to be run democratically by those who work there or they are to remain a hybrid of
feudal and corporate forms of organization. Regarding hospitals, I would note that nowadays many in
the nursing professions require and receive just as much education and training as MD's and this has
set off an immense politics of expertise replete with authoritarian behaviors on the part of Doctors
each of whom is every bit as fallible as the other professional staff.

As for the law...............what many find troubling is not that there are too many greedy lawyers
but that the legal profession has encroached far too much into the demos in a manner akin to
professional neoclassically trained economists. The law is turning social conflict into a cash cow
and it's not just a matter of passively gaining advantage of windfalls coming from other contexts of
the political economy, the legal professions must make markets for their expertise in order to play
the grow or die game of capitalist competition. To the extent that zero-sum and negative-sum games
driven by adversarial communication and fora begins to crowd out positive-sum non adversarial forms
of social communication and production we're creating an ongoing disaster.




> In my typical, class-blinkered, petty bourgeois manner, I am a real fan of
> expertise. Democracy has its place, but not in micro-managing the use of
> real expertise by real experts. There are skills that require long study and
> constant application to master, and where the opinion of the populace has no
> damn role, except indirectly in setting general ethical standards and rules
> and regulations embodied in law. Don't tell me how to manage my shop.
>
> jks (proud advocate of a  nation of shopkeepers)
>

=================

As usual it's not about looking at the opposition of democracy to expertise but enlarging the scale
and scope of their complementarities.

Ian

...speaking of expertise.....

Complexities Slow Enron Probe
Prosecutors Still Labor on First in Wave of Scandals

By Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 27, 2002; Page E01


Enron Corp.'s collapse last fall was the scandal that foreshadowed a dozen others.

Law enforcement authorities have swooped into action, making high-profile arrests this month of
executives at Adelphia Communications Corp. and ImClone Systems Inc. for their alleged involvement
in white-collar fraud. They've opened probes into alleged fraud at WorldCom Inc. and other
companies.

But former Enron executives continue to quietly go about their lives, seven months after the Houston
energy-trading company collapsed into bankruptcy.

Lawyers familiar with the cases say prosecutors consider the Enron case far more complex than the
other incidents of alleged corporate misdeeds. Enron presents one of the most complicated business
structures investigators have ever probed, encompassing scores of off-balance-sheet partnerships
that had the effect of hiding corporate debt and enriching insiders. Documents and witnesses in the
case dot the globe.

What's more, according to sources familiar with the investigation, all of Enron's business deals
were vetted by either Enron's auditors at Arthur Andersen LLP or its attorneys at the law firms
Vinson & Elkins and Kirkland & Ellis. That gives company executives a potent defense: that they
relied on the advice of experts.

Thus prosecutors must construct a more broad-based case against Enron leaders, in an attempt to show
that fraud permeated every layer of the Houston energy giant.

The effort may be similar to the long-running investigations of Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corp., the
now-defunct investment firm Drexel Burnham Lambert Group Inc., and the savings and loan crisis, said
Philip Heymann, a Harvard University professor and former Justice Department official in the Clinton
administration.

Justice Department spokesman Bryan Sierra said the Enron task force is moving forward smoothly,
without any artificial deadlines.

"You can't really compare one case to another," Sierra said. "There's no boilerplate or standard way
of conducting an investigation. . . . You bring charges when you are prepared to prove them in
court."

Since the Enron probe began in late January, prosecutors have won an obstruction-of-justice
conviction against Andersen and a guilty plea from the Andersen partner in charge of the Enron
audit, David B. Duncan. They have brought criminal complaints against three British bankers who
allegedly defrauded their company in concert with Enron executives. The bankers could be indicted in
the next few weeks, sources said.

By contrast, the alleged accounting fraud and self-dealing by Adelphia's founding family, the
Rigases, and the insider-trading charges against ImClone's Samuel Waksal involve fewer people and
more clear-cut transactions.

All the investigations come at a time when Justice and U.S. attorney's offices around the nation are
stepping up their efforts to root out corporate wrongdoing, increasingly using criminal complaints
and other tactics to arrest executives rather than waiting for a grand jury to indict them.

Typically, prosecutors bring such complaints against violent defendants or others they want to get
off the streets quickly. To set the process in motion, an FBI agent or a postal inspector files a
statement under oath attesting that there is a reasonable probability a crime has been committed and
that the accused person took part in the crime.

In at least three recent cases, including the early-morning arrests of former ImClone CEO Waksal and
Adelphia patriarch John J. Rigas and his sons, prosecutors chose to use criminal complaints.

Lawyers involved in those incidents said the use of the complaints -- and the practice of arresting
the executives rather than allowing them to surrender -- reflects grandstanding by the Justice
Department not seen since the insider-trading cases of the 1980s.

Prosecutors usually consider whether a defendant will seek to hide evidence or harm witnesses when
deciding to make an arrest. Neither factor, said defense lawyer Peter Fleming, applies to John
Rigas, 77, who has a history of heart problems.

"Put on top of that our consistent efforts over the last 10 days to surrender these guys
voluntarily," Fleming said. "There was no legitimate basis for the arrest, no reason whatsoever."

Barry Boss, a Washington-based defense lawyer and former public defender, said arresting a
nonviolent defendant after he agrees to surrender is "extremely unusual."

"The only purpose it served was to create a media frenzy," Boss said.

A spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan, where the Rigas arrests occurred this week,
did not return calls for comment.

But Michael Chertoff, assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department's criminal
division, told a Senate panel earlier this month that aggressive measures are needed to restore
investors' confidence in the stock market and to deter other corporate offenders.

"The bottom line is that white-collar criminals are just as much criminals as those who steal with a
gun or knife," Chertoff said. "They do real harm to real people. They ruin lives."

Mary Jo White, a former U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, agreed. "From a
prosecutor's point of view, it's important to send a very strong message that the government's
cracking down." she said. "Nothing in a prosecutor's mind sends a message quite as strongly as a
picture of a guy in handcuffs."