Fawkes and other non-breaking news

View 700 Monday, November 07, 2011

I have a three hour medical appointment – it’s a class, not an emergency – this afternoon, so today will be truncated.

Several readers have noted that we didn’t celebrate Guy Fawkes day. The definitive book on that was done by one of my favorite historians and essayists, C Northcote Parkinson, but the book is long out of print and there never has been an eBook copy that I know of. There seem to be a number of interesting books that are caught in the void here – no one seems to be interested in making eBooks of them. Parkinson died in 1993 so his books will be in copyright for a long time. He was twice a widower and his third wife did not long survive him, and if there are any children I never know of them, so I have no idea who controls his literary estate. Someone ought to get his books into eBook format. They are ail interesting enough and I would wager that collectively they would sell a few thousand copies a year, but someone would have to get them properly formatted.

This is a good topic for an essay: how can we reform this system so that there is an incentive to get such books available to those who want to read them? We don’t need a government program, we merely need a way to guarantee payment to copyright owners while allowing an incentive to those who want to do this. I am not sure how to make that work. Google tried and ended up in lawsuits. Lawsuits are of course a larger problem than just this.

In the not doing breaking news department, we still have no idea what Cain is accused of. One story is that one of the anonymous accusers was made to feel uncomfortable in a hotel room, but further rumour saith not.

Gloria Allred says she will break a story at the Friar’s Club this afternoon, complete with accuser and details. The world awaits breathlessly.

I am reminded by attorney friends that an association like the National Restaurant Association might well find it expedient to offer a year’s salary as severance to an employee claiming sexual harassment against the Association (since the Association, not the harasser, is liable and thus must defend) to make it all go away, since the alternative would cost more than that in attorney fees plus the time of the principals, the harassment of ‘discovery’ hearings, and the whole panoply of events that take place once a suit is filed. There is little upside to fighting the case even if the win is a slam dunk. It will cost more to win it than to settle it out of hand, leave alone the public relations effects. There is almost no upside to fighting it.

We have a system very friendly to the plaintiff bar in the US, and there are plenty of shakedowns in the name of equality. The Americans with Disabilities Act generates thousands of meritless cases that are settled simply to get rid of them: it costs more to win than to pay. In California one lawyer filed cases against Vietnamese nail parlors, accumulating hundred. Since the plaintiff was his own lawyer it cost him little to file hundreds of cases and then offer to settle. Then one day he was shot down in the street by a Vietnamese gang member said to be somehow related to a parlor owner. That seems to have ended the great spate of lawsuits against Vietnamese nail parlors in California.

So far all the allegations against Cain appear to be of the “made to feel uncomfortable” variety rather than the explicit proposition variety, but I make no doubt that they can find someone to accuse him of almost anything: the stakes are very high here. As Clarence Thomas found. If Cain is a boor it will come out, with explicit incidents cited. So far we have only rumor, and in many cases rumor of rumor.

Anyway, I need to get ready for my walk, and my appointment is early afternoon and lasts all day.

For those interesting in the legal technicalities of sexual harassment, see “Sexual Harassment’s Legal Morass” by Curt Levey in today’s Wall Street Journal. I hadn’t had a chance to read it before my walk this morning. It gives the details of just why a restaurant association might wish to settle cases before they can be filed if the cost is low enough. It’s clear enough to me that we have a morass, and much of it has been built buy a series of federal laws and regulations over matters more properly – and more expediently – left to the States.

There is now an actual accuser and specification of charges against Cain. She has hired the rather expensive Gloria Allred but does not want to sue. Her specification is that she went to Cain in hopes that he would help her get a job with the Restaurant Association, and he groped her in a car. There is no allegation that he went further, or that he got her a job. There are no witnesses or evidence. Bill Clinton settled a similar matter with an $850,000 payment to Paula Jones. All the relevant web sites are overloaded as one might expect.

One political note: when Clinton as governor engaged or was alleged to have engaged in various sexual hijinks while he was Governor of Arkansas, it did not end his career. He was elected and then re-elected. This was, after all, a white man indulging in playful dalliance. Clarence Thomas when faced with sexual harassment charges stated that it’s a more serious matter when a black man is accused of such behavior. For a good part of the United States that may still be true. Given Allred’s capabilities and connections this accusation will get a lot of press attention. A white governor of Arkansas who has contempt for the military is given more political indulgence than a black self-made businessman. That’s a political reality. How much that matters among Republican primary voters isn’t clear but it is certainly significant.

We appear to be in for another couple of weeks of this, rather than a discussion of the critical issues in this critical election. Meanwhile Greece continues to show us what is going to happen to the United States. See “A Look Inside the Super Committee” by Stephen Moore on just how much good we are likely to get out of present measures. The Democrats want more money and few cuts, and for that matter more spending. Greece, here we come.