Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Mitch Townsend (Part I is here.)
As Charles at LGF would put it: Amnesty International reaches bottom, digs.
Their website now features “USA: Betraying human rights
Information for journalists related to the US reaction to the Amnesty International Report 2005.” The first item in this press information package is a video interview on the subject of Guantanamo with none other than Noam Chomsky. What, was Osama bin Laden not available?
Amnesty International’s 2004 report attracted an unusual amount of attention this week because of the stress that its Secretary General, Irene Kahn, laid on the United States’ failings. Her comparison of the Guantanamo detention facility to the Soviet-era gulag system was denounced by the US president, vice president, and defense secretary. There is little reason to discuss this comparison any further, except to note that it makes a change when the left compares Bush to Stalin instead of to Hitler.
However, the Secretary General’s remarks were just the preamble to a lengthy report on the state of human rights throughout the world. Surely an organization concerned with the relief of suffering and injustice would be most concerned with the worst cases, and in fact, the dismal situation in is Darfur the first case discussed and is dealt with at some length. It is a fair inference that the Secretary General wishes to call the world’s attention to the abuses AI regards as most egregious and urgent. While ceding pride of place to Sudan, the United States also receives lengthy attention. Without descending into utilitarianism, it must also be a fair inference that abuses not mentioned in the Secretary General’s statement are regarded as less offensive, capricious, or cruel than the ones mentioned, and less deserving of the world’s attention.
Here are ten other countries whose endeavors in the fields of human rights and jurisprudence were not thought worth mentioning in the Secretary General’s summary. Because of the special scrutiny of the United States by Amnesty, where there is some mention of the US in the context of the report on another country, AI’s remarks are noted.
Countries not mentioned in Irene Kahn’s message:
Arthur Andersen received a bit of posthumous vindication yesterday when the US Supreme Court overturned their conviction on a charge of obstruction of justice. The jury, in later interviews, cited the destruction of documents as evidence of wrongdoing. Andersen was far from innocent, but I believed at the time that they had been convicted of the wrong crime. At the end of an audit, every bit of paper must be either (a) put in a workpaper binder, signed, reviewed, and put into storage; or (b) destroyed. Preliminary drafts and CYA files are not permitted in any accounting firm. The firm must stand behind its work product and have the “sufficient competent evidential matter” to document its audit opinion, and be able to support its reasoning. Alternative arguments and preliminary drafts are subject to discovery in legal proceedings, and keeping them undercuts the final decision. Every accounting firm (and law firm) uses a shredder.
The key question, which was not settled at the trial, was whether Andersen continued to destroy documents after it believed they would be used in an investigation. At some point, Enron was known to be a “busted audit” and an investigation was inevitable. The shredding should have stopped then.
So says the Telegraph, speaking about the Conservative Party. Any three American conservatives can give you four firmly held opinions on any topic; why do they think unanimity is possible, let alone desirable?
It occurred to me that we tend to see the same economic thinkers
associated with each other. Sometimes it is because of membership in a
particular school of thought (Chicago, Austrian, Neo-Classical), sometimes
due to the political implications of their economics, other times as a
result of direct citation and elaboration of each other’s work. Often the
connection is unclear but the association is strong. In these cases, it
might be that the writers were describing different aspects or phases of
related economic processes. As a practical man of business, I was
interested in seeing what long-dead economist actually owned me, and I was
pretty sure it wasn’t Keynes. It turned out that I am in thrall to more
congenial proprietors, and some of what they say is of immediate interest in
understanding what is going on around me and what I’m doing about it. These
thinkers can be arranged in a sequential format to help describe economic
decision-making.
Col. John R. Boyd (USAF) developed a model of the decision cycle in war.
It is called the Boyd Cycle or the OODA Loop, for Observation,
Orientation, Decision, and Action.
