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Politics : Actual left/right wing discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (9116)	12/19/2010 11:11:13 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10087

The question originated with me, and I don't think it is current anymore. It was about oil interests passing laws that erode civil freedoms. I have decided in the interim that a major issue is de facto v. de jure government. The oil companies have a remarkable, if unsurprising, way of being, um, oily. They tend to do this under the various tables, having a large effect de facto. This is done without much overt legislative or judicial activity, unless the issue is simply too big to keep informal. (Examples include a big oil spill or the reluctance to give up the economic advantage of organolead in our gasoline, despite obvious reports of lead compounds' serious and chronic toxicity.) I have great difficulty discussing de facto politics, because they are protean by design. I am on slightly better ground with matters of jurisprudence, but the correlation between law and justice is famously poor. It is a great irony that appellate judges in the USA are called justices, when indeed justice is not their purview or bailiwick. That is the elaboration and application of law. The difficult interface between codified law and socially effective justice consumes the energies and intellects of thousands of American professionals in law, many of them possessed of brilliance, dedication and integrity. It is generally the venal ones who sloganize.