SECTION TWO, PART TWO

children of the lesser god; the ROOL of law: There is a seeming six degrees of separation between an issue ( almost ANY issue ) in the US at the moment, and somebody invoking the phrase "rule of law " as some form of talisman to justify some view, or form of, of action. Using some contemporary issues this week...two explicit, one implicit. Firstly, we should look at the current charge of subversion against Edward Snowden, a former technical exponent at the National Security Agency (NSA), who is seeking political asylum in almost any country. US spokespeople have been quoted as warning prospective grantors that Snowden is a citizen of a country which follows the rule of law, and by implication, he would naturally be treated fairly { and by subtext, you will be aggravating the US if you grant the leaker/whistleblower his request, given that he is accused of leaking material about the US's surveillance efforts against it European allies .... That is, the US's national interest is more important than other national interests }. To escalate the invocation, we have the President of the US suggesting that Egypt should return to the rule of law as quickly as possible. Of course the issue here is that Egypt is struggling to deal with multiple social challenges, one of which....the government voted in last year, has now fallen foul of not delivering to public perceptions, and after social protest, the military has asked the leader to step down while a new arrangement is put in place. Part of the process is that the government was being too slow at combatting entrenched special interest corruption. Of course, at the heart of this is...What is the rule of law? This is the social construct which organises society so that, under the faith system that says fairness/equality/justice/trust/honesty are exercised by government/institutions/courts, then I will exercise my control, and live in this society. I will not seek retribution against my neighbour for physical or financial harm, but rely on the legal system to deliver appropriate remedy or punishment for any wrongs, either arbitrary or negligent. Now for the implicit one: a number of banks in the US are complaining that the currently proposed capital requirements are unfair, because it will place them at a competitive disadvantage to the international system, because it gives them less to loan to potential customers. Not to be cute, let's name a few of those banks who are classified as globally significant: JP Morgan, Citigroup, State Street, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley,etc. The global significance classification must be some strange USA definition....I do not understand it. The only significance seems to be the largesse that they received a few years ago......didn't Goldmans get a belated banking licence, so that they didn't have to follow Lehmans: didn't JP Morgan get classified as the agent provocateur for the merger/acquisition will to power of the FDIC/Department of the Treasury, by taking over Bear Stearns, and Washington Mutual: didn't State Street arbitrarily decide that cash funds can impose redemption freezes despite the dumb investments being by them, not their clients ( maybe the clients were the dumb ones after all!): didn't Morgan Stanley launch some highly leveraged wholesale funds: didn't Citigroup get nationalised in everything but name. Aren't a lot of these globally significant banks also being challenged by the European Union because they were trying to stop competition a few years in the trading of Collateralised Debt Securities by the exchanges.....these were the price-by-appointment securities which destroyed bank and other investor balance sheets a few years ago. But the real ROOL of law is this. Washington Mutual was one of those almost missed features of those particular hectic weeks of September 2008, where contingency over-ruled equity. Didn't JP Morgan get, effectively, a national retail banking network, at a time when retail deposits were better than gold.....(who did take their deposits out of WaMu in that final fatal few weeks?): did Goldman's have any short positions in WaMu prior to both its demise, and the freeze on short positions in financial stocks came into force. Didn't both the equity holders and the senior debt owners in WaMu take horrendous losses? Was the Bank of Ireland one of those debt holders.? Hadn't the Irish Government guaranteed their banking sector debts. So does that mean that the potato growers , and Corrs lovers, indirectly sponsored the acquisition of a cheap national retail branch network by JP Morgan. How silly of me..that must be what is meant by globally significance..able to gouge globally, while being laxly monitored by an unaccountable Federal Reserve system, whose sole role is to undermine its own currency, and create massive moral hazard for policies it does not know how to reverse. A number of seriously bad decisions were made in 2008/2009, for which no apology has been made, but which seem to have been treated as If they never happened. How could Dimon get away with the justification about their trading losses last year? The USA seems to think that subversion is a government owned concept - ask Indonesia, when despite whether they thought it a good idea, the US disagreed with that country's toying with communism last century. When the rule of law has no relevance, then it is replaced by the law of the jungle. Children of Lesser Gods shouldn't only exist in countries other than the USA. Social cohesion seems poorly served at present.