Pulling yourself: a thought

If you're going to pull yourself up by the bootstraps, how do you get those bootstraps?

Did the coach at Penn State do it?

I’m responding to your question of the day about whether the former coach at Penn State charged with sodomizing children did it. I speak as someone who for the last 18 years of my career in criminal justice devoted my primary attention and effort to hearing and sharing stories and cases of sexually assaulted children. Overwhelmingly, they were not believed by child service investigators, expert witnesses, and judges when they sought protection. I and my students also celebrated the healing among the many survivors , and thanked them for the evidence and stories they presented to us.

I appreciate the concern for children’s safety represented by the current wave of media/public/political revulsion of child sexual assault and the harm it does indeed do. but I think asking whether listeners believe the coach is counterproductive.

In England, the media are generally forbidden from naming people charged with or arrested for crimes until and unless they are convicted in court. I wish media in the US would follow their example. If I don’t I know whether the coach is guilty, I can’t believe anyone else knows better, including WOSU listeners.

I will venture this hypothesis: that if the accusations charged are true, then the coach is only one actor in locally, possibly nationally and internationally organized child trafficking. In my experience in these cases those who take the fall for serial child rape and torture just enable us to cut off wider investigation of organized traders in children who chalk up the legal loss as a cost of carrying on business undisturbed.

personhood

CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS OF PERSONS: CORPORATE RIGHTS

Hal Pepinsky

November 9, 2011

Yesterday an initiative in Mississippi to make every human embryo entitled to all rights of “personhood” failed, but I’m intrigued by the logic behind the drive to protect persons’ lives.

The US Supreme Court has reaffirmed that for-profit corporations chartered by state secretaries of state have all the rights of “persons.” So I wonder by the logic of rights of persons: Isn’t it the case that once chartered, a corporation (formerly inc now llc) cannot be killed by competitive corporate persons or by state-organized liquidation, who are arguably criminally guilty of voluntary manslaughter? The right to life of persons is huge. Love and peace--hal

re laws to limit public workers' rights

A message sent to npr "Talk of the Nation" this Nov. 2 on Ohio ballot issue 2 to repeal restrictions on public workers' rights:

From: Pepinsky, Harold E.
Sent: Wednesday, November 02, 2011 2:18 PM
To: talk@npr.org
Subject: Isn't Ohio sb5 just one of 16 idential bills...

...written by the American Legistlative Council (ALEC) most prominently founded by the Corrections Corporation of America--the world's biggest prison-industrial private prison operator--to wine and dine and supply principally Republican state legislators w/o regard to anything come from their own constituents? We find ourselves in a race to an ALEC-sponsored race to the bottom, where the rationale for Ohio SB5 is for is that public employees ought to be brought down to the level of impoverishment of those who work for whatever pitiful jobs and lack of benefits offer, An ugly ALEC initiative promoting corporate for-profit global greed. regards--hal


Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com, 519 Evergreen Circle, Worthington, OH 43085-3667, 1-614-885-6341


ps--Ohio Gov. Kasich was a Lehman Bros vp and promoter, thence promoted to politics; how's that for knowing how to create jobs?