The Security Pretext: An Examination of the Growth of Federal Police Agencies

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, bureaucrats and special interest groups have been busy repackaging everything from peanut subsidies to steel protectionism under the rubric of "national security." Federal law enforcement agencies have also been expanding their power in the name of combating terrorism, whether or not such expansion has anything to do with enhancing security. One safeguard that exists to prevent such abuse is congressional oversight, but too many members of Congress are too often reluctant to challenge law enforcement officials. For freedom to prevail in the age of terrorism, three things are essential. First, government officials must take a sober look at the potential risk and recognize that there is no reason to panic and act rashly. Second, Congress must stop federal police agencies from acting arbitrarily. Before imposing costly and restrictive security measures that inconvenience thousands of people, police agencies ought to be required to produce cost-benefit analyses. Third, government officials must demonstrate courage rather than give in to their fears. Radical Islamic terrorists are not the first enemy that America has faced. British troops burned the White House in 1814, the Japanese navy launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and the Soviet Union deployed hundreds of nuclear missiles that targeted American cities. If policymakers are serious about defending our freedom and our way of life, they must wage this war without discarding our traditional constitutional framework of limited government

Banking on Cooperation: The Role of the G-20 in Improving the International Financial Architecture

Piling is expensive but often necessary when building large structures, for example bridges. Some pile types, such as steel core piles, are very costly and it is therefore of great interest to keep the number piles in a pile group to a minimum. This thesis deals with optimization of pile groups with respect to placement, batter and angle of rotation in order to minimize the number of piles. A program has been developed, where two optimization algorithms named Genetic Algorithm and Direct Search, and four objective functions have been used. These have been tested and compared to find the most suitable for pile group optimization. Three real cases, two bridge supports and one culvert, have been studied, using the program.  It has been difficult to draw any clear conclusions since the results have been ambiguous. This is probably because only three cases have been tested and the results are very problemdependent.The outcome depends, for example, on the starting guess and settings for the optimization. However, the results show that the Genetic Algorithm is somewhat more robust in its ability to remove piles than Direct Search and is therefore to prefer in pile group optimization

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and the Politics of Governmental Investigations

In May 2009, Congress passed the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act which created the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, an independent, bipartisan panel tasked to examine the causes of the current financial and economic crisis in the United States. Franklin Roosevelt never created an independent commission to investigate Wall Street, but the Pecora hearings, the eponymous investigation of Wall Street wrongdoing run by a former New York prosecutor, captivated the country. For sixteen months in the worst depths of the Great Depression, Ferdinand Pecora paraded a series of elite financiers before the Senate Banking and Currency Committee. In one hearing after another, he chronicled how the leaders of Wall Street had manipulated stocks, dodged taxes, fleeced their shareholders, and collected enormous bonuses for peddling shoddy securities to unsuspecting American investors. Sensational headlines galvanized public opinion for reform and created the climate in which Congress was able to re-shape much of the modem structure of federal financial regulation. In the first hundred days of Roosevelt\u27s administration, Congress passed the Banking Act of 1933. Earlier, Congress had passed the Securities Act of 1933. A year later came the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Now, more than a year after the FCIC released its final report, it is clear that the Commission did not live up to the legacy of its Depression-era predecessor. It was not until six months after the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was enacted that the FCIC released its report on the causes of the financial crisis. This article compares the politics that underlay the FCIC investigation with those not only of the Pecora investigation but with those of what is generally perceived as a more successful independent commission—the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (the 9/11 Commission). When Congress created the FCIC it rejected proposals to conduct a congressional investigation more in line with the Pecora investigation and instead chose to model the FCIC explicitly on the 9/11 Commission. This paper highlights two reasons why the FCIC was not the Pecora investigation redux and why it failed to achieve the same consensus as the 9/11 Commission. The first explanation involves how the goals for these different investigations were defined. As explained in more detail in Section II, the Pecora investigation appears to have represented an innovative and novel application of congressional investigatory power. While the Pecora probe was ostensibly designed to investigate conditions in the securities markets in preparation for potential legislation, it differed from prior congressional efforts because its motivation was external to the legislature. The second reason why the FCIC hearings never looked like the Pecora hearings was because the former\u27s design and structure bore absolutely no resemblance to the latter. Rather than being an investigation by a standing congressional committee subject to the near dictatorial control of the committee\u27s chair, the FCIC was an independent, bipartisan commission that needed consensus to operate effectively. As explained in Section III, the FCIC was subject to the same limitations and political pressures that beset the 9/11 Commission\u27s investigation. Both commissions faced numerous obstacles to conducting vigorous investigations: the partisan selection of commissioners combined with broad commission mandates, woefully small budgets, short time frames for conducting their investigations, and weak subpoena powers. The 9/11 Commission\u27s chairman, former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, went so far as to argue that his commission was designed to fail

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and the Politics of Governmental Investigations

In May 2009, Congress passed the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act which created the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, an independent, bipartisan panel tasked to examine the causes of the current financial and economic crisis in the United States. Franklin Roosevelt never created an independent commission to investigate Wall Street, but the Pecora hearings, the eponymous investigation of Wall Street wrongdoing run by a former New York prosecutor, captivated the country. For sixteen months in the worst depths of the Great Depression, Ferdinand Pecora paraded a series of elite financiers before the Senate Banking and Currency Committee. In one hearing after another, he chronicled how the leaders of Wall Street had manipulated stocks, dodged taxes, fleeced their shareholders, and collected enormous bonuses for peddling shoddy securities to unsuspecting American investors. Sensational headlines galvanized public opinion for reform and created the climate in which Congress was able to re-shape much of the modem structure of federal financial regulation. In the first hundred days of Roosevelt\u27s administration, Congress passed the Banking Act of 1933. Earlier, Congress had passed the Securities Act of 1933. A year later came the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Now, more than a year after the FCIC released its final report, it is clear that the Commission did not live up to the legacy of its Depression-era predecessor. It was not until six months after the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was enacted that the FCIC released its report on the causes of the financial crisis. This article compares the politics that underlay the FCIC investigation with those not only of the Pecora investigation but with those of what is generally perceived as a more successful independent commission—the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (the 9/11 Commission). When Congress created the FCIC it rejected proposals to conduct a congressional investigation more in line with the Pecora investigation and instead chose to model the FCIC explicitly on the 9/11 Commission. This paper highlights two reasons why the FCIC was not the Pecora investigation redux and why it failed to achieve the same consensus as the 9/11 Commission. The first explanation involves how the goals for these different investigations were defined. As explained in more detail in Section II, the Pecora investigation appears to have represented an innovative and novel application of congressional investigatory power. While the Pecora probe was ostensibly designed to investigate conditions in the securities markets in preparation for potential legislation, it differed from prior congressional efforts because its motivation was external to the legislature. The second reason why the FCIC hearings never looked like the Pecora hearings was because the former\u27s design and structure bore absolutely no resemblance to the latter. Rather than being an investigation by a standing congressional committee subject to the near dictatorial control of the committee\u27s chair, the FCIC was an independent, bipartisan commission that needed consensus to operate effectively. As explained in Section III, the FCIC was subject to the same limitations and political pressures that beset the 9/11 Commission\u27s investigation. Both commissions faced numerous obstacles to conducting vigorous investigations: the partisan selection of commissioners combined with broad commission mandates, woefully small budgets, short time frames for conducting their investigations, and weak subpoena powers. The 9/11 Commission\u27s chairman, former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, went so far as to argue that his commission was designed to fail

The Changing Face of Money

In this essay I argue that widespread failure to comprehend the intrinsic nature of modern money loomed large in the recent crisis, and that broader comprehension of its meaning is a precondition for effective post-crisis reforms. First, I provide a brief history of money, emphasizing its gradual divergence from inherent value. I then consider the value of today’s dollar in economic, legal and psychological terms, arguing that each perspective conveys a single over-arching lesson—that better comprehending our money requires better comprehending ourselves. The introspection that this exercise demands reveals with unique clarity some of the critical lessons of the crisis and its aftermat