The Roundtable
Welcome to the Roundtable, a forum for incisive commentary and analysis
on cases and developments in law and the legal system.
on cases and developments in law and the legal system.
 By Alexander Saeedy
Alexander Saeedy is a senior at Yale University studying history. With six years of historical distance between the beginning of the Great Recession and the present, it is clear that the United States and Europe have had fundamentally different, though not opposite, experiences with the global crisis. One possible reason for this difference was the Federal Reserve’s invocation of emergency powers in 2008. The invocation was an obviously legal action—emergency powers are included within the Federal Reserve’s charter—but it is fair to ask: how constitutional and democratic was it? We may find some answers by turning back to 2008. When Bear Stearns, the former investment bank that became defunct in that same year, was found to have mortgage securities that were toxic, the Federal Reserve created a limited liability corporation called Maiden Lane LLC and floated $30 billion to the corporation, a loan designed to absorb Bear Sterns’ toxic assets. The remainder of Bear Stearns was sold to JPMorgan Chase. [1] The process was repeated in September of 2008 as Maiden Lane II LLC and Maiden Lane III LLC took on $43.8 billion of AIG’s toxic assets. [2]
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 By Alexander Saeedy
Alexander Saeedy is a rising senior at Yale University studying History. Teachers' unions have had a rough few years in the public eye. In the face of sinking international rankings in education, America wants to know: how did our schools get to be so bad? There are the usual suspects. American taxes don't allocate enough money to public education. The remains of post-Brown v. Board of Education segregation give disproportionate attention to students from privileged, generally white, backgrounds. But for critics on the right, it has everything to do with organized labor. Teachers' unions, the argument goes, have stopped schools from keeping standards as high as they should be. Teachers' unions are well-known guardians of their employees. In America, there are two big players: the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Since 1989, the NEA and AFT have donated $67,776,328 to federal candidates and political parties [1]. The combined contributions of all American teachers’ unions in the 2008 election cycle was $68,955,160 [2]. |
