第一夜

Posted 2020-08-15

Two years ago, Rupert Murdoch‘s daughter, Elisabeth, spoke of the "unsettling dearth of integrity across so many of four institutions". Integrity had collapsed, she argued, because of a collective acceptance that the only "sorting mechanism" in society should be profit and the market. But "it‘s us, human beings, we the people who create the society we want, not profit".

Driving her point home, she continued: "It‘s increasingly apparent that the absence of purpose, of a moral language within government, media or business could become one of the most dangerous goals for capitalism and freedom." This same absence of moral purpose was wounding companies, such as News International, she thought, making it more likely that it would lose its way as it had with widespread illegal telephone hacking.

As the hacking trial concludes -- finding guilty one ex-editor of the News of the World, Andy Coulson, for conspiring to hack phones, and finding his predecessor, Rebakah Brooks, innocent of the same charge -- the wider issue of dearth of integrity still stands. Journalists are known to have hacked the phones of up to 5,500 people. This is hacking on an industrial scale, as was acknowledged by Glenn Mulcaire, the man hired by the News of the World in 2001 to be the point person for phonehacking. Others await trial. This long story still unfolds.

In many respects, the dearth of moral purpose frames not only the fact of scuh widespread phone hacking but the terms on which the trial took place. One of the astonishing revelations was how little Rebekah Brooks knew of what went on in her newsroom, how little she thought to ask and the fact that she never inquired how the stories arrived. The core of her successful defense was that she knew nothing.

In today‘s world, it has become normal that well-paid executives should not be accountable for what happens in the organizations that they run. Perhaps we should not be so surprised. For a generation, the collective doctrine has been that the sorting mechanism of society should be profit. The words that have mattered are efficiency, flexibility, shareholder value, business-friendly, wealth generation, sales, impact and, in newspapers, circulation. Words degraded to the margin have been justice, fairness, tolerance, proportionality and accountability.

The purpose of editing the News of the World was no to promote reader understanding, to be fair in what was written or to betray any common humanity. It was to ruin lives in the quest for circulation and impact. Ms Brooks may or may not have had suspicions about how her journalists got their stories, but she asked no questions, gave no instructions -- nor received traceable, recorded answers.

 

 

On a five to three vote, the Surpreme Court knocked out much of Arizona‘s immigration law Monday -- a modest policy victory for the Obama Administration. But on the more important matter of the Constitution, the decision was an 8-0 defeat for the Administration‘s effort to upset the balance of power between the federal government and the states.

In Arizona vs United Staes, the majority overturned three of the four contested provisons of Arizona‘s controvesial plan to have state and local police enforce federal immigration law. The Constitutional principles that Washington alone has the power to "establish a uniform Rule of Natruralization" and that federal laws precede state laws are noncontroversial. Arizona had attempted to fashion state policies that ran parallel to the existing federal ones.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the Court‘s liberals, ruled that the state flew too close to the federal sun. On the overturned provisions the majority held the congress had deliberately "occupied the field" and Arizona had thus intruded on the federal‘s privileged powers.

However, the Justices said that Arizona police would be allowed to verify the legal status of people who come in contact with law enforcement. That‘s because Congress has always envisioned joint federal-state immigration enforcement and explicitly encourages state officers to share information and cooperate with federal colleagues.

Two of the three objecting Justice -- Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas -- agreed with this Constitutional logic but disagreed about which Arizona rules conflicted with the federal stature. The only major objection came from Justice Antonin Scalia, who offered an even more robust defense of state privileges going back to the alien and Sedition Acts.

The 8-0 objection to President Obama turns on what Justice Samuel Alito describes in his objection as "a shocking assertion of federal executive power". The White House argued that Arizona‘s laws conflicted with its enforcement priorities, even if state Laws complied with federal statues to the letter. In effect, the White House claimed that it could invalidate any otherwise legitimate state law that it disagree with.

Some powers do belong exclusively to the federal government, and control of citizenship and the borders is among them. Buf if Congress wanted to prevent states from using their own resources to check immigration status, it could. It never did So. The administration was in essence asserting that because it didn‘t want to carry out Congress‘s immigration wishes, no state should be allowed to do so either. Every Justice rightly rejected this remarkable claim.