Quote of the Day: a Free Press

Joseph Pulitzer: "Our republic and its press will rise and fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery."

Now go read NYT v. Sullivan (1964). More on that case here, about halfway down the page.

Definition of Middle Class

VP Biden recently defined middle-class as a family of four with an annual income of about $85,000.

Eric Savitz Reports on San Jose's Commercial Office Vacancies

From Eric Savitz's facebook feed on January 18, 2010:

Anyone need 44 million share feet of office space?

As the San Jose Mercury News reports, nearly 20% of Silicon Valley’s commercial office buildings stood empty at the end of 2009 - the worse vacancy rate in at least 15 years. And the situation is expected to get worse in 2010.

Grubb & Ellis predicts that the office vacancy rate this year will hit 22.4%, up from 19.1% at the end of 2009. The vacancy rate for R&D buildings is expected to his 18.5% this year, up from 17% at the end of last year.

The average monthly rent for Valley office space is expected to drop to $1.87 per square foot in the second half of this - down 28% from the $2.58 level at the end of 2009.

Good news if you need office space; not so good if you happen to be a landlord.

It looks like the recession is slamming Silicon Valley, but this city always bounces back. Also, I don't think this recession has hit San Jose as hard as the last one. When the internet bubble burst, my commute to downtown San Jose seemed like I was going through a highway ghost town. These days, I still contend with plenty of traffic. If things get really bad, I will notice traffic declining, and traffic has remained steady for the past five months.

List of Most Dangerous Jobs

John Seiler has an interesting book review here, where he lists the most dangerous jobs, as complied by the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

1. Fishing-related workers
2. Logging workers
3. Pilots and flight-related workers
4. Iron and steel workers
5. Taxi cab drivers
6. Construction workers
7. Farmers and ranchers
8. Roofers
9. Electrical power workers
10. Truck drivers and sales-related drivers
11. Garbage collectors
12. Law enforcement

Carr v. Rosen: a New Development?

Local San Jose media is abuzz with the revelation that D.A. Dolores Carr is seeking to "boycott" a judge. A judge recently issued a decision accusing a Santa Clara County D.A. (not Carr) of ethical violations. Now, Carr apparently believes that this judge might be biased against her department in the future. (If a judge sanctioned you severely for ethical violations, would you want to appear in front of that judge again?) Carr then indicated she would use every California attorney's procedural right to strike the judge from future cases.

Dolores Carr is using a legitimate method (i.e., CCP 170.6 declarations) to get a judge she believes will be more favorable to her department. Every California lawyer, not just the D.A., has the absolute right to bounce one judge from his or her case in state court.

I don't know much about Carr or the judge, but it seems to me that if someone wants to criticize Carr, s/he should be examining the content of the judge's decision--not Carr's savvy use of legal procedure. For example, what exactly does the decision say? Did the judge say that Carr was directly involved in the ethical violations? What should Carr do to prevent similar situations from happening in the future?

Also, have previous SCC D.A.s been subjected to such decisions? If so, is there a disparity between the number of such decisions against Carr's office as compared to her predecessors?

In short, instead of focusing on the judge, we ought to be more concerned about future ethics violations. When such violations occur, criminals may go free. As a local voter, I would like Carr to indicate that she is taking the judge's decision seriously, is investigating what happened, and is taking specific measures to fix the problem.

Bonus: a local attorney explains his view of the situation:

Local lawyer: there is a constitutionally based, political process involved in the selection of superior court judges. When the DA sets up a blanket peremptory against one single judge, the DA is undermining the will of the people. The Governor and the voters have decided the judge is fit to preside over criminal cases, but the DA gets to decide otherwise by effect of the blanket peremptory. That's undemocratic and an abuse of power. It's beyond extreme as a matter of practice, as indicated in the article. It's also bare-knuckled intimidation against judges willing to stand-up to misconduct by the DAs office. The DAs are a nice bunch, but not infallible.

You don't need a comparative study to figure out how very wrong Carr is here, because it's a misuse of power a priori, without any possible justification given the remedies available under the system. The DA is there to prosecute crime, not exact payback on judges. And, if what the judge did was so beyond the pale, there's a remedy for that: it's called the ballot box.

Me: I am curious to see what the state bar does. If the D.A. committed gross misconduct, the bar should investigate and at least suspend him. I also wonder if the judge had a way of dealing with the misconduct that didn't involve letting an alleged child molester go free. For example, could the judge have referred the D.A. to the state bar instead of dismissing the case outright? Unfortunately, I don't know enough about criminal law to have an informed opinion. If, however, the judge was Constitutionally-able to send the case to a jury by excluding tainted evidence and/or including limiting instructions, I understand Carr's reaction.

William Faulkner's Words of Wisdom

Last time I tried, I couldn't handle William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. Even so, Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech is a must-read for all Americans, especially during our so-called "Perpetual War on Terror":

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart...

For more, see HERE.

Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. (RCL) and Haiti: Insensitive or Sensible?

Many people have been criticizing Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. (RCL) on blogs and Facebook based on this Guardian story. The story references a Royal Caribbean ship that docked on a Haitian beach during the post-earthquake crisis in Haiti. The outrage comes from the allegation that people who are enjoying themselves next door to such a large humanitarian crises are callous and inhuman. The outrage may be misplaced.

People criticizing Royal Caribbean and the passengers who docked in Haiti might should read the Guardian's article more carefully: "100% of the proceeds from the call at Labadee [will] be donated to the relief effort." From an objective standpoint, more donations to help the Haitans are a good thing, right? A friend of mine summed it up this way:

The cruise ship is in business to provide vacations for its clientele. It is what they do. They're not in the business of giving up their source of income to provide help...It is best for people to focus on what they're good at doing and for businesses to do what they're good at doing. Asking businesses to lose money to provide aid isn't reasonable.

Another friend of mine disagreed:

If that [humanitarian work, charity] is not what they do, then why bother dissembling? I say they port in Haiti and keep the profits!

The rebuttal:

Now that's just wrong. Its either your way or the highway? They give $1 and you want $100, so you tell them to keep their dollar? Is that productive? I say if you want to help, regardless of what it is, it is appreciated, and [most] people are grateful.

At this point, another person jumped in:

If I saw a guy selling shirts on 9/12 that said "Glad to not live in New York," and he said proceeds go to 9/11 victims, I'd still punch 'em in the face. There are just better ways to lend support without being insensitive too.

His comment seems to have energized others into participating:

People in Haiti depend on those tourism dollars. I think it would make things worse to not stop at that port. One day of not bringing tourists into the craft market at that port could mean no food for a family for a week for all we know.

Another person asked about what the more fortunate Haitians were doing to help each other:

This is an excellent reminder that the earthquake did not devastate all of Haiti (let alone Hispaniola) and that for some part of Haiti it's possible to conduct business as usual and return to one's home at the end of the day. What are these Haitians doing for their fellow citizens?

Personally, I felt that the people criticizing Royal Caribbean were being hypocritical. After all, we tend to forget that suffering happens 24-7, even when it's not televised:

Most Americans don't make any sacrifices to help the poor 340 days out of the year. Only when the telly shows a bunch of poor people getting really hurt do most Americans, God bless them, pay millions of dollars to help.

365 days out of the year, the majority of the world is suffering, and most Americans go about their daily business. When a child dies from starvation in Somalia, Americans go to Disneyland. When an American drone kills Afghan civilians, we go to the supermarket and choose from 50 different cereals. As malaria kills thousands of people every day, who are the main persons who help blunt this tragedy? Rich Americans like Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett, who have done more to help the poor than any of us will.

My point? People suffer every single day, and the way to help them isn't to cause Americans to become more poor or to have less fun. If we truly want to help the poor, as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and the founders of Kiva have done, the goal should be to help Americans get rich so we have the money to help others. Only the strong can help the weak, in my humble opinion.

I've never been on a cruise, but hats off to Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. for donating "100% of the proceeds from the call" at Labadee, Haiti to the relief effort. If I do have time to go on a cruise, I will remember RCL's generosity and give them special consideration when choosing among potential cruise ships.