Diary Entries on Will Brady's website

INTERESTED IN TALKING ABOUT THIS SUBJECT? There's a new discussion group that has been established on the Yahoo Groups website. It's still new, so the discussion has not yet gotten going, but participants are welcome. Stop by, sign up, and add your POV.

| Treason is by one definition: [1] the betrayal of trust, [2] the offense of attempting by overt acts to overthrow the government of the state to which the offender owes allegiance or [3] to kill or personally injure the sovereign or his family.¹
     But in a constitutional democracy, where the "sovereign" is "of, by and for, the people," then we might reasonably look more closely at what ought to be done if that "sovereign or his family" has been "personally injured" by one, or a group of someones, has also seriously betrayed their trust.
     To use an easy to think of example, let's look at the case of the executives of ENRON in this scenario.
     In that situation, the managers entrusted with the personal assets of others, contracted to enrich the assets of the public and different communities in particular [Connecticut, for example, who paid out $220 million USD to build a trash-to-energy fuel cell plant operation, or California, where ENRON price-gouged the state's citizens while stashing the profits into dummy corporations then distributed to the managers such as Ken Lay and others], individually enriched themselves and in the process "personally injured" the economic health and well being of many communities.
     While they may have gotten momentarily wealthy through legal and accounting subterfuge, the actions and efforts of a handful of individuals, have, indeed, endangered the Economic Lives of the polity. As such, while they have not technically committed a series of felonious acts (arguable, as well) they may be accountable under some new form of legal construct. Quite frankly, the laws needed to address this level of criminal action, might not yet be on the books. So maybe it is time to work to put them there.
     Now, clearly, I'm not talking here of some simple form of business embezzlement. The accountant at the little printing company, for example, who socks away $100,000 a year from cleverly baked books and eventually gets caught, may certainly have injured the ecomonic well being of that company, but he's hardly injured the whole community. Besides, there are criminal codes to address that level of malfeseance.
     Racketeering Laws ~ initially designed to go after organized crime figures ~ might be used against a group of individuals who have stolen a corporation's assets, used scams and cons and extortion techniques to personally enrich themselves, but they do so on a limited scale (though it may be a scale can sometimes get rather large). Besides, that kind of scenario still remains within the confines of a business model and ~ not infrequently ~ these kinds of operations are still based on scamming individuals and other corporations. They are not endeavors that impact on the whole of the larger social/ecomonic fabric.
     Now, when politicans get involved in scams and embezzlements, it has not infrequently been done with use of bribes and other kinds of corruption. But laws already exist to deal with these kinds of crimes as well.

What makes the concept of economic treason even worth looking at now?      Well, the scale of the operation becomes important. The number of parties involved in the operation, who was involved and how much they profited. They are factors as well. But perhaps most significantly, when the powerful engage in practices to influence and change legislation that makes it easier to (no need to be coy here) rape the public coffers, decimate communal wealth, pollute the environment, compromise health and well-being then, clearly, some new form of legal protections for the rest of us need to be enacted to address this very real, very sizable and very portentous problem.
     In truth, economic treason has been with humankind for a very long period of time; quite possibly as long as there have been complex societies and unscrupulous entrepeneurs. We just haven't articulated the need for legal protections for these crimes ...or, they have been dealt with (vis, the French Revolution and the reign of Louis XVI)
      Yet the downside of how this was dealt with in the French Revolution carried with it other unwanted consequences; those who started punishing the guilty (of social/economic malfeasance and worse) became, themselves, oppressors, albeit, maybe not on the level of those who fiscally decimated the French at the time.
      The other consideration here is borne of the recognition that as the political/social order of land-based nations around the world increasingly becomes democratized, and as global corporatization (non-land based nations, really) creates greater strangle-hold on the economic fabric of those land based nations, then developing legislation to protect the economic sanctity and stability of land-nations has to be crafted, tested, and enforced.
      But I digress. The idea is what comes first.
      So what the hope is, in developing this forum now, is merely to introduce the concept. True, the illustration on the front of this discussion group is an original (and copyright protected) illustration.      And, true, I penned the text that runs alongside the sides of that illustration.      But I have no ego attachment to the IDEA. I just imagine it may take on a life of its own.
      As such, I have opened up this group with the express purpose of encouraging others to reflect upon the concept, to mull over its implications, and to temper their observations and considerations with a sense of fairness and social justice.
      The guillotine (or its counterparts) may not be the most efficacious method of having someone pay for having committed this kind and level of crime. Other iniatives might be more effective in protecting the rsources of the common man against the feudal barons and duchies of the 21st century.
     Your thoughts and input are welcome.

¹ Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary