IARIYAR
Smithfield Foods, which name you might recognize from a few years back, when it made headlines for polluting Smithfield Lakes with waste from its pig butcheries in the deregulated business environment, is in the news again. This time, it has filed a racketeering lawsuit against unions, arguing that the collective bargaining labor unions employ makes them de facto organized criminal organizations, likening political activity to extortion and public protest to a frustrated extortionist’s sabotage. Says one of the Smithfield lawyers, “It’s actually the same thing as what John Gotti used to do. What the union is saying in effect to Smithfield is, ‘You’ve got to partner up with us to run your company.’” The company does not recognize its own methods as extortion carried out against its community—you gotta provide the business climate we want to find employment. While I do not endorse violent crime, there would be a certain poetic justice in Smithfield learning first-hand what real mafia tactics are like. Until that day, Smithfield figures economic intimidation is okay, but only if you’re a major shareholder in a large corporation.
The Times’ article.
The U.S. government intends to try children as war criminals. Department of Justice attorney Andy Oldham, arguing for the prosecution, insists that if Congress intended to exclude juveniles from Guantanamo war courts, it would have made an explicit exception in its use of the word “person;” which word he insists legally refers to “anyone born alive.” Meanwhile, the court (three judges appointed by both president Bushes) ruled in Rasul v. Myer that anyone located outside the United States at the time of alleged crimes does not fall within the definition of “person.” Executive orders to the DoJ figure inhuman behavior is okay, but only if you’re applying it to scary brown people. Or Democrats.
The Reuters article.
Senator Arlen Specter, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, wants to open an investigation into destruction of evidence that the New England Patriots illegally filmed New York Jets’ defensive signals, specifically the tapes allegedly recording the signals. Senator Specter does not, however, feel an investigation into the CIA’s destruction of evidence of (flatly illegal, as well as immoral) CIA use of torture on prisoners. It’s not like human rights are really important, at least not as important as football, or at least not to Senator Specter, who figures that covering up evidence and making illegal recordings is okay, but only if you’re brutalizing human beings and not major corporations.
The National Post article.
Are we tired of the double standards yet? Are we ready for equal treatment under the law, instead of whatever radical redefinition suits the authoritarians and robber barons from minute to minute? The behavior has become so prominent in our society that it’s earned its own acronym: IARIYAR—it’s all right if you’re a Republican—and even honest Republicans are wondering how their party could have vanished down the same rabbit hole with civil liberties, a working wage, international respect, fair elections, fiscal restraint, and the ever-promised but never-witnessed prosperity to come from tax cuts almost exclusively benefiting the wealthy.