Crime

The Horror of Rape -- Especially When Rapists Can Act with Impunity

Max R. — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:55:12 -0500

A beloved friend of mine was brutally raped several years ago by an organized crime figure in her city. A serial predator, he used his business front, a restaurant, to lure young women with prospects of working there. Eventually he would get them alone, then viciously assault them, and rape them, like he did to my friend. What's more, in addition to the horrific crime itself, he went even further in committing the foulest gestures of misogyny. But it didn't stop there -- afterwards he would slander his victims as prostitutes to his staff -- to cover his tracks. Still, the most terrifying part is -- he knew he could get away with it.

He knew that his victims would find out when they reported the crime to the authorities that he was a member of a local mafia, so that they would not press charges for fear of retaliation. He also likely had someone within the county DA's office in his backpocket, such as the attorney who strongly dissuaded my friend from seeking justice, while applying an air of cold indifference. (He wasn't interested in the rape itself. In fact, he asked few questions about it. Instead, he wanted to know what other criminal activities she had seen. Perhaps it was to know what else he needed to be proactive about?) On the one hand, the attorney was very likely someone tight with this vile thug who would run interference for him (something like Matt Damon's mole inside the police dept. for crime boss Jack Nicholson in "The Departed.") On the other hand, that doesn't rule out that the entire DA's office was compromised.

The point is that as many times as this happened, for some reason, the DA's office and the police kept looking the other way. They never clamped down on him in any way, not even for his various underworld activities. In fact, the attorney from the DA's office told her that there were major federal charges in the works against him (which he didn't specify) -- which was one of the reasons he gave for not prosecuting her crime. Of course, nothing ever materialized in the form of any charges.

Although this abominable crime happened years before I knew my friend, it has outraged me on so many levels, with all the intensity as if it had happened yesterday. It is singularly the most horrifying story ever told to me personally (all I have shared here is but the tip of the iceberg of this truly heinous crime). One of the most disturbing aspects of the crime is that the criminal justice system tolerated a brutally violent serial rapist. In fact, to this day he is still a restaurant owner (now in a town just outside the city where he had the other restaurant), with all the outward veneer of being a "respectable" businessman.

One question that has especially haunted me is how could this depraved monster keep getting away with it? (Even though he could evade the law, how come he isn't six feet under on some small piece of real estate?) My theory is that he is a very intelligent criminal psychopath, who carefully sized up his potential victims. Since they were regular customers, he probably would meet their boyfriends and husbands. Perhaps he even checked into their backgrounds -- especially to see if they had any connections of their own. If he determined that there was really no threat of personal retribution (i.e. taking the law into their own hands) -- then he had his next victim. And of course, he also covered his tracks by probably having at least one attorney in the DA's office to run interference for him (if not the DA himself). He would also fire, or do whatever else, to eliminate any of his employees that might be in touch with the victim afterwards (suddenly the bartender who was talking to my friend one day had a disconnected phone and an empty apartment -- she never heard from him again). So, he would maintain his reputation to those unaware of his role in organized crime, that only knew him from the mask he wore as a restaurant owner and family man (while craven and despicable, it's still astonishing that he pulled this off again and again). In effect he'd wipe the slate clean and start over for the next victim.

This story has truly haunted me. Because this happened to a friend, it has especially made me realize what a horrific crime rape is. As burned out as I am on politics and causes in general, I am now so inspired to join the fight against sexual violence. In her case, the crime itself is about as nightmarish as can be. Truly, rape is the ultimate violation of one's space, of one's personal boundaries -- in a world where incursions of any kind -- are generally considered infractions. But with rape -- it is the worst violation one can commit upon another (save for murder).

I myself have never been the victim of a violent crime. I was once mugged by a group of young hoods holding bats and knives on me, but I talked my way out of it. I just lost some cash, but kept my wallet and credit cards. In fact, this is the first time a violent crime has happened to someone close to me -- amazingly enough. But especially because of the depraved, sinister nature of the crime, and the fact that it was committed by an evil figure in the underworld -- it couldn't be any more disturbing. This has really shown me on a personal level the outrage of how acts of evil can be committed, even repeatedly, by those who have the power to live above the law.

I was driven for years to expose whatever I learned about the likes of the Bushes, who could somehow keep committing crimes, and still get elected to office -- with their respectability somewhat intact. But I found this story of a relatively small-time criminal figure, and his ability to get away with maybe the worst crime against society (apart from murder) so much more disturbing. Maybe it's simply because it hit so close to home, so to speak. The fact that the powerful can live above the law and act with impunity, thanks to corruption within the System, is a frightening matter to behold. In the case of what happened to my friend, it's horrifying enough when existing laws are not enforced, due to personal connections and corrupt officials. But what about when the laws themselves are designed to grant impunity for the powerful? Of course, the Bush Administration did just that to allow CIA employees and others to perform torture.

But more related to what I have discussed is how companies like Halliburton's KBR have clauses in their employment contracts barring their employees from suing the corporation -- if they are raped by co-workers. This of course has been countered by Al Franken with his amendment that "would ban the practice of committing employees to arbitration in the case of assault." (In other words, Franken's Amendment would make it so that the victims could get their day in court.) So on the one hand, there is often impunity for the powerful due to under the table corruption and the power of organized crime, as happened in the inability of my friend to seek justice. But when impunity for a crime such as rape is actually made official policy --- that is taking it to another level of social immorality . My next blog entry will be on the KBR clause, and the Franken Amendment as a remedy against such a travesty.

America's Drug Crisis: Brought to You by the CIA

dlindorff — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:49:14 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Next time you see a junkie sprawled at the curb in the downtown of
your nearest city, or read about someone who died of a heroin overdose,
just imagine a big yellow sign posted next to him or her saying: “Your
Federal Tax Dollars at Work.”

Kudos to the New York Times, and to reporters Dexter Filkins, Mark Mazzetti and James Risen, for their lead article
today reporting that Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of Afghanistan’s
stunningly corrupt President Hamid Karzai, a leading drug lord in the
world’s major opium-producing nation, has for eight years been on the
CIA payroll.

Okay, the article was lacking much historical perspective (more on
that later), and the dead hand of top editors was evident in the overly
cautious tone (I loved the third paragraph, which stated that “The
financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence
agency and Mr. Karzai raises significant questions about America’s war
strategy, which is currently under review at the White House.” Well,
duh! It should be raising questions about why we are even in
Afghanistan, about who should be going to jail at the CIA, and about
how can the government explain this to the over 1000 soldiers and
Marines who have died supposedly helping to build a new Afghanistan).
But that said, the newspaper that helped cheerlead us into the
pointless and criminal Iraq invasion in 2003, and that prevented
journalist Risen from running his exposé of the Bush/Cheney
administration’s massive warrantless National Security Agency
electronic spying operation until after the 2004 presidential election,
this time gave a critically important story full timely play, and even,
appropriately, included a teaser in the same front-page story about
October being the most deadly month yet for the US in Afghanistan.

What the article didn’t mention at all is that there is a clear
historical pattern here. During the Vietnam War, the CIA, and its Air
America airline front-company, were neck deep in the Southeast Asian
heroin trade. At the time, it was Southeast Asia, not Afghanistan, that
was the leading producer and exporter of opium, mostly to the US, where
there was a resulting heroin epidemic.

A decade later, in the 1980s, during the Reagan administration, as
the late investigative journalist Gary Webb so brilliantly documented
first in a series titled “Dark Alliance” in the San Jose Mercury
newspaper, and later in a book by that same name, the CIA was deeply
involved in the development of and smuggling of cocaine into the US,
which was soon engulfed in a crack cocaine epidemic—one that continues
to destroy African American and other poor communities across the
country. (The Times' role here was sordid—it and other leading papers, including the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times—did
despicable hit pieces on Webb shamelessly trashing his work and his
career, and ultimately driving him to suicide, though his facts have
held up.) In this case, Webb showed that the Agency was actually using
the drugs as a way to fund arms, which it could use its own planes to
ferry down to the Contra forces it was backing to subvert the
Sandinista government in Nicaragua at a time Congress had barred the US
from supporting the Contras.

And now we have Afghanistan, once a sleepy backwater of the world
with little connection to drugs (the Taliban, before their overthrow by
US forces in 20001, had, according to the UN, virtually eliminated
opium production there), but now responsible for as much as 80 percent
of the world’s opium production—this at a time that the US effectively
finances and runs the place, with an occupying army that, together with
Afghan government forces that it controls, outnumbers the Taliban 12-1
according to a recent AP story.

The real story here is that where the US goes, the drug trade soon
follows, and the leading role in developing and nurturing that trade
appears to be played by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Your tax dollars at work.

The issue at this point should not be how many troops the US should
add to its total in Afghanistan. It shouldn’t even be over whether the
US should up the ante or scale back to a more limited goal of hunting
terrorists. It should be about how quickly the US can extricate its
forces from Afghanistan, how soon the Congress can start hearings into
corruption and drug pushing by the CIA, and how soon the Attorney
General's office will begin a grand jury probe into the CIA's drug
dealing.

Americans, who for years have supported a stupid, blundering and
ineffective “War on Drugs” in this country, and who mindlessly back
“zero-tolerance” policies towards drugs in schools and on the job,
should demand a “zero-tolerance” policy toward drugs and dealing with
drug pushers in government and foreign policy, including the CIA.

For years we have been fed the story that the Taliban are being
financed by their taxes on opium farmers. That may be partly true, but
recently we’ve been learning that it’s not the real story. Taliban
forces in Afghanistan, it turns out, have been heavily subsidized by
protection money paid to them by civilian aid organizations, including
even American government-funded aid programs, and even, reportedly, by
the military forces of some of America’s NATO allies (there is
currently a scandal in Italy concerning such payments by Italian
forces). But beyond that, the opium industry, far from being controlled
by the Taliban, has been, to a great extent, controlled by the very
warlords with which the US has allied itself, and, as the Times now reports, by Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s own brother.

Karzai, we are also told by Filkins, Mazzetti and Risen, was a key
player in producing hundreds of thousands of fraudulent ballots for his
brother’s election theft earlier this year. Left unsaid is whether the
CIA might have played a role in that scam too. In a country where
finding printing presses is sure to be difficult, and where
transporting bales of counterfeit ballots is risky, you have to wonder
whether an agency like the CIA, which has ready access to printers and
to helicopters, might have had a hand in keeping its assets in control
in Kabul.

Sure that’s idle speculation on my part, but when you learn that
America’s spook agency has been keeping not just Karzai, but lots of
other unsavory Afghani warlords, on its payroll, such speculation is
only logical.

The real attitude of the CIA here was best illustrated by an
anonymous quote in the Filkins, Mazzetti and Risen piece, where a
“former CIA officer with experience in Afghanistan,” explaining the
agency’s backing of Karzai, said, “Virtually every significant Afghan
figure has had brushes with the drug trade. If you are looking for
Mother Teresa, she doesn’t live in Afghanistan.”

“The end justifies the means” is America’s foreign policy and military motto, clearly.

The Times article exposing the CIA link to Afghanistan’s
drug-kingpin presidential brother should be the last straw for
Americans. President Obama’s “necessary” war in Afghanistan is nothing
but a sick joke.

The opium, and resulting heroin, that is flooding into Europe and
America thanks to the CIA’s active support of the industry and its
owners in Afghanistan are doing far more grave damage to our societies
than any turbaned terrorists armed with suicide bomb vests could hope
to inflict.

The Afghanistan War has to be ended now.

Let the prosecution of America’s government drug pushers begin.
_______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based investigative reporter.
His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press,
2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Agent Orange in Vietnam: Ignoring the Crimes Before Our Eyes

dlindorff — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:51:19 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

On Oct. 13, the New York Times ran a news story headlined
“Door Opens to Health Claims Tied to Agent Orange,” which was sure to
be good news to many American veterans of the Indochina War. It
reported that 38 years after the Pentagon ceased spreading the deadly
dioxin-laced herbicide/defoliant over much of South Vietnam, it was
acknowledging what veterans have long claimed: in addition to 13
ailments already traced to exposure to the chemical, it was also
responsible for three more dread diseases—Parkinson’s, ischemic heart
disease and hairy-cell leukemia.

Under a new policy adopted by the Dept. of Veterans Affairs, the VA
will now start providing free care to any of the 2.1 million
Vietnam-era veterans who can show that they might have been hurt by
exposure to Agent Orange.

This is another belated step forward in the decades-long struggle
by Vietnam War veterans to get the Defense Department and the VA to
acknowledge the American government’s responsibility for poisoning them
and causing permanent damage to them and often to their children and
grandchildren. Dioxin, one of the most poisonous substances known to
man, is known to cause many serious systemic diseases, autoimmune
illnesses, cancers and birth defects. (It is also a warning about the
general Pentagon and government approach to other hazards caused by its
battlefield use of toxins—most significantly the increasingly common
use of depleted uranium projectiles in bombs, shells and bullets—an
approach which features lack of concern about health effects on troops
and civilians, denial of information to troops, and denial of care to
eventual victims.)

Missing from the Times article, written by military
affairs reporter James Dao, which did include mention of the
obstructionist role the government has played through this whole sorry
saga, was a single mention of the far larger number of victims of Agent
Orange in Vietnam—the people on whose heads and lands the toxic
chemical was actually dropped, or of the adamant refusal by the US
government to accept any responsibility for what it did to them.

Thai Thi Nga, 16, 2nd-generation victim of US Agent Orange use in Vietnam

According to the article, the VA estimates that there may be as
many as 200,000 US veterans who are suffering from Agent Orange-related
illnesses. But according to a court case brought on behalf of
Vietnamese victims, which was dismissed by a US Federal District Judge
who ruled that there was “no basis for the claims,” there are at least
three million Vietnamese, and possibly as many as 4.8 million, who are
suffering the same Agent Orange-related illnesses as American veterans
and their children. It is estimated that as many as 800,000 Vietnamese
in the country’s south currently suffer from chronic health problems
due to Agent Orange exposure, either to themselves, or to a parent or
grandparent. Most of these victims, some of whom are retarded, and
others of whom cannot walk or have no use of their arms, need constant
care.

Veterans for Peace,
an organization whose membership includes a large number of Vietnam War
veterans, has issued a call for the US to provide funds for health
care, education, vocational education, chronic care, home care and
equipment to clean up hotspots of dioxin in Vietnam—a call which
Congress and the White House have consistently ignored. Tests have
found dioxin levels around the sites of the three main former US bases
in what was South Vietnam to be 300-400 times recognized safe levels.
The US dumped huge amounts of Agent Orange for miles around those bases
to kill off jungle cover that Vietnamese fighters could use to approach
the bases, but it was never cleaned up when the US pulled out.

One organization that includes a number of American veterans of the
way, including former military doctors or soldiers who later became
physicians, is the Vietnam Friendship Village Project USA Inc., which raises funds to help establish communities in Vietnam to care for the victims of Agent Orange.

It may seem a pathetic stab at principle given America’s use of two
nuclear weapons against civilian targets in Japan a few years later,
but back in World War II, in the midst of the most brutal
island-to-island fighting during the Pacific War, a US Judge Advocate
General in the Pentagon ruled that a military request for permission to
use herbicides against the Japanese on Pacific islands would be illegal
under the Hague Convention (forerunner of what are now called the
Geneva Conventions). He ruled that trying to destroy the crops of
civilians on those islands to deny food to the Japanese troops would be
a war crime. The US went ahead and used the herbicides anyway, arguing
that even though it was illegal, the US was free to go ahead, since the
Japanese had already broken the laws of war by using strychnine to kill
military guard dogs in Siberia. Under the rules of war, if one side
breaks a rule, the other side is no longer bound by it.

But the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese never used toxic materials
against US forces or against South Vietnamese forces. And the Pentagon
in the Vietnam War never even considered whether spraying a highly
toxic herbicide over 1.4 million hectares—12% of the total land area of
Vietnam and almost 25% of the southern half of the country—might be a
war crime.

Moreover, the Pentagon knew, before it began its massive
defoliation campaign, about studies showing that Agent Orange was
heavily laced with deadly dioxin, but covered up those studies, some by
the chemical’s makers, Dow Chemical and Monsanto, and never even warned
the troops who handled the material daily, or who were sent out to
fight in areas that had been heavily sprayed.

The ongoing medical disaster in Vietnam caused by America’s
criminal use of Agent Orange to defoliate a nation would be a good
place for President Obama to start earning his just-awarded Nobel Peace
Prize. He could kick off his peace campaign by finally honoring
President Richard Nixon’s immediately broken promise to provide several
billion dollars in reconstruction aid to Vietnam at the conclusion of
peace talks at the end of the war. Not a dollar of such aid was ever
given.

Meanwhile, perhaps the New York Times could salvage a bit
of its journalistic reputation by having Dao or some other reporter
write a piece about the impact of America’s Agent Orange use on the
people of Vietnam.
_______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is
“The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

A Safe Substitute for Alcohol

davidswanson — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 17:44:08 -0400

By David Swanson

The U.S. Department of Justice says that alcohol plays a pivotal role in two-thirds of all cases of violence against an intimate (a spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend), and blames alcohol for contributing to 100,000 sexual assaults against young people every year. That's right, alcohol hurts more people than al Qaeda.

Of course, alcohol does not always lead every consumer of it to violence. Most people who drink alcohol don't hurt anyone. But a large percentage of those who do get violent have been drinking alcohol. Should we ban it? We tried that once with miserable results, and we've banned other substances with equally bad outcomes.

We could stop promoting alcohol so heavily, but the impact of doing so would probably not be large. What to do? Well, what if there were a substitute for alcohol that didn't make anyone violent? What if this substitute were far less dangerous than alcohol to the health of the person using it, as well as to those around him or her? What if this alternative substance even had health benefits and medicinal properties and potentials? What if this substance satisfied the desire for intoxication without actually containing anything toxic, and you woke up the next morning without a hangover? What if this magical substitute for alcohol could boost the economy, free prisoners, reduce prison budgets, free up police to address serious crimes, and subtly improve our culture if only we could discover what it was?

The common name for this life-saving drug is marijuana, and in "Marijuana Is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink?" the authors Steve Fox, Paul Armentano, and Mason Tvert argue for legalizing marijuana as a regulated substitute to reduce the societal damage done by alcohol. In the book's foreword, Norm Stamper, former Chief of the Seattle Police Department, writes:

"I've been asking police officers throughout the U.S. (and Canada) two questions. First: 'When's the last time you had to fight someone under the influence of marijuana?' (And by this I mean marijuana only, not pot plus a six-pack or fifth of tequila.) My colleagues pause; they reflect. Their eyes widen as they realize that in their five or fifteen or thirty years on the job they have never had to fight a marijuana user. I then ask, 'When's the last time you had to fight a drunk?' They look at their watches. It's telling that the booze question is answered in terms of hours, not days or weeks."

The case for making pot more available to those who might choose it over alcohol seems straightforward. Unless, of course, you've heard any of the pervasive myths that have been spread about it in this country for nearly a century. In 1927, lacking any Iraqi aluminum tubes to peddle yet, the New York Times published this fantasy:

"Mexican Family Go Insane
"Five Said to Have Been Stricken By Eating Marihuana
"A widow and her four children have been driven insane by eating the Marihuana plant, according to doctors, who say there is no hope of saving the children's lives and that the mother will be insane for the rest of her life…."

This is not terribly different from the stories promoted by our government today, and much of the book is devoted to debunking myths. While television networks are not required to give back even a smidgen of our airwaves for political campaigns or information, they have been required to air anti-pot propaganda, or to incorporate it into the plots of shows (such as "ER" and "Beverly Hills 90210"). In 2005, the Government Accountability Office determined that the government's anti-pot campaign had violated the law against covert propaganda by producing video news releases that news programs aired as if they had been created completely independently of the government.

When Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps was shown in a photograph using marijuana, both USA Swimming and the US Olympic Committee came down hard on him, just as the NFL does to its players. These are all organizations that live off massive funding from the makers of alcohol. So, incidentally, do members of Congress. It's a good thing THEY are never influenced by money.

David Swanson is the author of the new book "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union" by Seven Stories Press. You can order it and find out when tour will be in your town: http://davidswanson.org/book

Agent Orange Causes Media Blindness

dlindorff — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 14:35:34 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Agent Orange, the herbicide used as a weapon by US military forces
in Vietnam for nearly a decade to defoliate vast stretches of inhabited
forest and jungle in an effort to deprive the Viet Cong and North
Vietnamese forces of both cover and a supportive populace, has long
been known to have caused a large number of serious and debilitating
diseases, many of them passed on to children of those exposed. But now
it also appears to cause a peculiar blindness among American
journalists.

This is demonstrably the case at the New York Times, where a report in Saturday’s edition on new Agent Orange links
being found to Parkinson’s Disease and ischemic heart disease noted
that it could lead to many more Vietnam War Era veterans being eligible
for disability benefits and treatment, but completely failed to mention
the significance of the discovery for the millions of Vietnamese who
were also exposed to the chemical—and for their descendants.

The new link was announced in a report by a 14-member committee of
the Institute of Medicine, which had been asked to determine what
conditions might be traced to exposure to the chemical that had been
“used to clear stretches of the jungle” in Vietnam. As the article
noted, since 1994, the Institute of Medicine has to date found 17
medical conditions that can be traced to exposure to Agent Orange, “13
of which qualify veterans for service-connected disability benefits.”

There’s a lot wrong with this article, as written by Times
reporter Janie Lorber (though admittedly we can’t know what is her
responsibility and what is the handiwork of the newspaper’s editors)...

For the rest of this story, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net

____________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is
available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Where's the Goddamn Outrage: When It Comes to Labor Laws, We Have a Corporate Crime Wave

dlindorff — Wed, 20 May 2009 11:50:06 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

A new study of 1004 union organizing drives conducted by the
director of labor education research at Cornell University’s School of
Industrial and Labor Relations has found that two-third of the
companies involved were violating US labor law by holding one-on-one
interrogations of workers, by threatening workers about their union
support, by firing union organizers or using half a dozen other illegal
tactics to defeat unionization campaigns.

Prof. Kate Bronfenbrenner, author of No Holds Barred: The Intensification of Employer Opposition ot Organizing,
says that these illegal tactics by employers have been used to drive
union representation at American companies down to only 12.4 percent
from a level of 22 percent just 30 years ago.

If a similar level of illegal behavior by companies was reported
dealing with, say, false billing of customers, deceptive reports to
shareholders or violation of environmental laws, there would be a
clamor for action in Congress, and among the public, but so far, there
is no outcry over this wholesale violation of the nation’s labor laws.

One reason may be because nobody except the unions themselves and
the companies breaking the law would know about this particular
corporate crime wave.

The only article I’ve seen on this study was published by the New
York Times, but it was run in an inside page of the Times business
section, which is largely ignored by most readers.

Why would an article about workers be consigned to the business
pages? Is it only of interest to businesses and investors? Surely not.
The author of the piece, Steven Greenhouse, one of the nation’s last
journalists to actually have a labor beat, is a fine reporter, and
writes his articles not in business jargon but in a style that would be
easily understood by anyone who could read. His article, headlined
“Study Says Antiunion Tactics Are Becoming More Common,” surely belongs
in the front section of the newspaper, and in fact, given its shocking
evidence of rampant criminality on the part of employers on a national
scale, should be on the front page of the paper if editors were
applying honest news judgement (How many people are impacted? How new
is the information? How dramatic is the new information?).

But a second reason may be that unions themselves are doing a poor job of getting the story out.

Right now the US labor movement is desperately trying to win
passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill which, if passed as
currently written—a long shot at this point—would address some of the
issues raised in Prof. Bronfenbrenner’s study by eliminating the need
for secret ballot unionization votes. Those elections, companies and
their labor-busting lawyers have long ago learned, can be delayed for
years while they illegally whittle away at union support. But because
the unions are trying to keep the support of a wavering President
Barack Obama and of Democrats in Congress for passage of EFCA, in the
face of massive lobbying by big business interests, they are avoiding
the kind of street politics that would make this corporate crime wave a
big story.

What should be happening is mass marches in the nation’s cities,
and especially in Washington, demanding action on EFCA. President Obama
and most Democrats in both Houses of Congress, all campaigned saying
they backed EFCA, but now many are backing away from that promise.

A million angry workers massed and shouting on the Washington Mall
would stiffen their spines, as would big demonstrations in the major
cities of the country.

Mass action would also force the media to look at the way companies
are simply thumbing their noses at the nation’s labor laws, which
outlaw intimidation of workers, outlaw firing of union activists, and
guarantee free elections on the issue of whether to have a union at a
workplace.

Of course, a third problem is that American workers have long been
quiescent on the issue of labor unions. Polls show that a majority of
Americans would like to have a union where they work, but very few of
us seem willing to fight for that right. Maybe with polls showing that
over 50 percent of Americans now worry that they may be laid off, and
with companies clearly using the economic crisis as an excuse for
bashing employees, that quiescence is ending. The only way to find out
is for the labor movement to call for street action.

This is no time to be polite with politicians, and no time to limit
political action to writing email letters, signing petitions and making
phone calls.

This is a time to call out the corporate managers who are treating
the labor laws like so much toilet paper—a time for boycotts, for
marches, and for sit-ins.

End the American corporate crime wave of labor law violations!

Demand stiff penalties for breaking labor laws!

Support unionized companies and boycott anti-union companies!

Pass the ECFA, as written, with no compromises!

________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and long time labor
activist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s
Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Now We Can See Why Open Government Is the Only Way to Go

dlindorff — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 12:53:41 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

For years, advocates of open government, mostly on the left, but
also on the right, have railed against the growing secrecy of the US
government. But the focus, particularly of left critics, has been on
the Intelligence budget, a $40+ billion “black box” that is completely
protected from public and even congressional scrutiny, and on large
swaths of the Pentagon budget, which are kept hidden allegedly for
“national security” reasons.

For the most part, the American public has adopted an ovine
attitude towards such secrecy, assuming that the “government knows
best.”

Now, however, with the economic crisis, and the collapse of AIG,
Citibank, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, Lehman
Brothers, General Motors, Chrysler and other leading US firms, and with
bailouts that are putting taxpayers on the hook to the tune of
trillions of dollars, the people are waking up, or at least are
starting to get restless in their slumber.

Perhaps there will be a new awareness soon of the importance of transparency in all parts of government.

For now, the Obama administration, the Federal Reserve and Congress
are all trying desperately to ease the citizenry back into a state of
torpor by adopting a position of mock outrage at the $135 million in
bonuses paid out by AIG to the very employees who created the
disastrous and crooked Credit Default Swap market that precipitated the
global economic collapse.

What they don’t want to happen is for people to start thinking
about the $183 billion that Congress and the Fed approved for AIG,
which we now have learned was simply a devious scheme for passing more
money in secret through to troubled banks and investment banks – among
them Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and
others – that had bought these CDOs.

Recall that back in September, when the crisis first hit in earnest
and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson first called for a bailout
program, he asked—in a three-page proposal to Congress which he
insisted they must pass or risk total economic collapse and the
imposition of martial law!—for absolute authority as Treasury Secretary
to hand out the $700 billion and for protection against any legal
action for whatever he might choose to do with it.

Congress didn’t accede to his imperious request, though it did give
him half the money he wanted: $350 billion, saying it would provide the
second $350 billion later (the new Congress did hand the second half of
the money over just before President Obama took office). A sizeable
chunk of that huge sum of taxpayer money went to AIG, the giant
insurance company that had devised a scheme to sell “insurance” for the
mortgage-backed securities that banks were gorging on. The term
insurance has to be placed in quotes, because since these contracts
were not backed by any assets, they were really not insurance at all.

As rumors spread that much of the so-called Troubled Assets Relief
Program (TARP) money that was provided to AIG was actually passed
through to banks and investment banks that were already receiving TARP
funds directly (including nearly $50 billion to foreign institutions),
Congress and some news organizations, notably Bloomberg, sought to
learn what firms were actually receiving the cash. AIG, the Treasury
Department and the Bush and later the Obama administration initially
fought such disclosure, as did all the bank recipients, claiming that
releasing the names of the recipients would make investors doubt their
stability.

Finally, thanks to the efforts of New York State Attorney General
Andrew Cuomo, whose office has been pursuing the issue in the courts,
we have the answer: the money was going primarily to the nation’s
biggest banks.

But most troubling is that a disproportionate amount of the AIG
bailout money--$13 billion -- went to Goldman Sachs, a company that
until July 2006 was headed by Treasury Secretary Paulson himself. No
wonder Paulson, AIG, Goldman Sachs and others wanted to keep this all
under wraps. No wonder too that Paulson initially tried to get Congress
to immunize him from the legal consequences of his bailout actions.

The truth is that Goldman Sachs and Paulson should be prosecuted
for corruption. The deal that Paulson engineered in secret for
shoveling taxpayer money into his former firm is surely one of the
largest acts of official larceny of public funds in the history of the
country.

Goldman Sachs even publicly announced in early February that it was
returning $10 billion in TARP funds it had received last fall, saying
it didn’t need the money. Well sure the company didn’t need the
money—because it was getting even more in secret via the AIG conduit.

With this backdrop, the rest of the bailout might well be seen as a
hugely expensive cover: give enough money to the rest of the big banks
and investment banks, and nobody in the industry will squeal about the
sweet deal Goldman Sachs was getting.

Of course, the corruption goes much deeper. While public money was
being funneled into the banks and other financial institutions, those
same institutions were using some of this taxpayer largesse to lobby
Congress to do even more. Just between October 1 and the end of 2008,
18 recipients of TARP funds reported spending nearly $15 million on
lobbying efforts in Washington. Among the biggest
bailout-recipient/lobbyists: American Express ($1.1 million), AIG ($1.1
million), B of A ($$880,000), Citigroup ($1.5 million), Goldman Sachs
($720,000), JPMorgan Chase ($1.1 million), Wells Fargo ($580,000).
These amounts represent quite an investment considering that these
firms all received, in return for their TARP lobbying efforts, billions
of dollars in bailout money.

Remember, Paulson’s original plan was to have even the TARP direct
bailout grants kept secret from the public. That idea didn’t fly. But
many of these companies that used their public funds to lobby for more
public funds also received secret bonus bailouts via AIG.

So here’s what happens when you have secret government. The public gets royally shafted.

Now that the story is coming out, the crooks in Congress, the White
House and at Treasury and the Fed are desperately trying to lull us all
back to sleep by feigning anger at the relatively paltry sums AIG is
handing out in bonuses to some of the crooks and scheisters on its
staff.

We should not put our heads down on the pillow being offered, though.

The lesson here is that we need open government, and that we need
to demand that our media not go for the cheap and easy story being
handed out by government press release.

Also, there’s this last thought: If you thought that the banking
mess was a horrible rip-off, just try to imagine what level of
corruption there must be in the Pentagon and the Intelligence programs
that have been operating in absolute secrecy and with no scrutiny for
decades!

Baa-a-a-a-a-a-a.
_________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book
is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now
available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

AR State Party Chairman Bill Gwatney Dead, Police Kill Suspected Gunman

Chip — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:04:05 -0400

Arkansas State Democratic Chairman, Bill Gwatney, died this afternoon at the hospital where he was taken after a gunman entered the Democratic Party Headquarters in Little Rock this morning and opened fire, then fled. According to police Lt. Terry Hastings, the gunman fired several shots, "He came in and went into this office and started shooting." The gunman, a white male in his 40s, lead police on a high speed chase which ended in a hail of bullets between the police and the suspect, who was injured. The suspected gunman died.

Gwatney was a state legislator for 10 years, and owned 3 GM car dealerships. He was a superdelegate to the Democratic Convention. ABCNews.com reported that workers at the Republican State Party office were sent home as a precautionary measure.

Bill Clinton, Arkansas' former governor and former first lady, Hillary, called Gwatney a strong state party chairman and "a cherished friend and confidante. We are deeply saddened by the news that Bill Gwatney has passed away," the former governor and first lady of Arkansas said in a joint statement. "His leadership and commitment to Arkansas and this country have always inspired us and those who had the opportunity to know him."

Bush/Cheney and special contracts with Big Oil in Iraq - ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!!!

seandiego — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 02:32:23 -0400

THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE APPEARED IN THE SAN DIEGO UNION TRIBUNE TODAY (7/2/08). THE AMERICAN PEOPLE MUST UNITE TO SHOW THE WORLD WE DID NOT SUPPORT OR APPROVE OF THE INJUSTICES OF THIS ADMINISTRATION AND THE CRIMES IT COMMITTED AGAINST IRAQ, THE CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES AND THE WORLD. TO REGAIN OUR STATURE IN THE WORLD, WE MUST CHARGE BUSH AND CHENEY WITH WAR CRIMES BEFORE THE REST OF THE WORLD DOES IT FOR US. CONTACT YOUR CONGRESSPERSONS TODAY!

Opening Iraq's oil fields to Big Oil

By Bob Herbert
THE NEW YORK TIMES

July 2, 2008

It's getting harder and harder to remain deluded. With each day comes new facts to drag our heads out of the sand.

Two weeks ago, The New York Times reported that four Western oil giants were on the verge of signing no-bid contracts that would return them to Iraq, the third-most bountiful petroleum playground on the planet. It was the kind of news that big oil lives for.

Giddy executives singing “Oh Happy Day” could be heard in the corporate offices of Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP, which had been shut out of Iraq for three and a half decades.

We also learned this week that a group of American advisers, led by a team from the State Department, played a key role in drawing up the contracts between the companies and the Iraqi government. Chevron and several smaller oil companies also got contracts.

President Bush and Vice President Cheney, both former oil company executives, have long tried to tell us this war was about terrorism, about weapons of mass destruction, about bringing freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people, about anything but oil.

Said Bush: “We cannot wait for the final proof: the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

He didn't wait. It didn't matter that Saddam Hussein posed no imminent threat to the United States. Or that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The troops were sent into battle in early 2003 and there is still, after more than five years and more than 4,000 American deaths, no end to the war in sight.

One of the starkest examples of U.S. priorities came during the eruption of looting that followed the fall of Baghdad. With violence and chaos all about, U.S. troops were ordered to protect one particularly treasured target – the Iraqi Oil Ministry. As David Rieff wrote in The New York Times Magazine in November 2003:

“This decision to protect only the Oil Ministry – not the National Museum, not the National Library, not the Health Ministry – probably did more than anything else to convince Iraqis uneasy with the occupation that the United States was in Iraq only for the oil.”

How convenient that the peculiar perspective of the oil-obsessed Bush administration can now be put to use advising the Iraqi government on its unusual no-bid contracts with big oil.

The contracts themselves are not huge. They are like the keys on a coveted ring that will begin opening the doors to Iraq's vast oil reserves. As the Times reported Monday, “At a time of spiraling oil prices, the no-bid contracts, in a country with some of the world's largest untapped fields and potential for vast profits, are a rare prize to the industry.”

A prize, yes. But at what cost?

In addition to the terrible toll of Americans and Iraqis killed and wounded, the war in Iraq has diverted attention and resources from critical problems here in the United States, where the housing market has been crippled, the stock market has tanked, gasoline has soared past $4 per gallon, unemployment is increasing and an extraordinary number of debt-ridden working families are staring into a financial abyss.

Even as oil companies are enjoying staggering profits, many Americans – in July! – are already worried sick about the potentially ruinous cost of heating their homes next winter.

And then there's the so-called war on terror.

The latest news is that al-Qaeda, the terror network that actually did attack the United States, has successfully regrouped in the tribal areas of Pakistan and has reconstituted its ability to institute terror attacks from the region.

For an administration joined at the hip to the oil industry, the lure of Iraq's enormous reserves was stronger even than the impulse to conquer an enemy that murdered more than 2,700 civilians on Sept. 11, a toll greater than the number of Americans killed by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor.

Referring to al-Qaeda members who regrouped in Pakistan, the Times reported on Monday:

“Current and former military and intelligence officials said that the war in Iraq consistently diverted resources and high-level attention from the tribal areas. When American military and intelligence officials requested additional Predator drones to survey the tribal areas, they were told no drones were available because they had been sent to Iraq.”

Who knows how long it will be before the United States disengages in any significant way from Iraq. What you can take to the bank is that this country will not make any major advances in energy policy, in health coverage, in rebuilding its infrastructure, in improving its public schools or in curtailing runaway public and private debt until our open-ended commitment to this catastrophic multitrillion-dollar war comes to an end.

How long will it take before that finally sinks in?

American and Israeli War Crimes: Same Atrocities, Different Responses

dlindorff — Thu, 01 May 2008 12:59:05 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

In the last few days, both the Israeli military and the US military have fired missiles into homes, in an effort to target what they said were terrorists, in the process killing many innocent civilians.

But what a contrast we see in both the reporting on these events, and in the response within the two countries!

In the Israeli case, the IDF fired a missile into a family home in Gaza, killing a mother and her four young children, who were eating breakfast at the time. The children were aged 6 years through 15 months. While the IDF and the Israeli government blamed the tragedy on Hamas, saying it operates in proximity of civilians and is thus responsible for their deaths, an Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem, has caqlled for a criminal investigation into the killings, saying that Israel and the IDF have violated internation law by firing the missile in a densely populated area where civilian casualties would be likely. A spokesman for the group, Sarit Michaeli, says that Israeli claims that it is not responsible for such deaths are incorrect, and adds that under international law, “Even if you attack a legitimate military target, the anticipated damage has to be in proportion to the anticipated gain.”

How does such a moral calculus apply to American military policy? The most recent example of US military tactics in this regard came yesterday, when American forces, in clear violation of international law regarding national sovereignty, fired a missile into a house in Somalia (a nation that the US is not at war with), reportedly killing an alleged leader of the Al Qaeda organization in Somalia, Aden Hashi Ayro, but also another 30 people—all unidentified. Reports suggest that many of those killed and others who were wounded, were innocent civilians who happened to be sleeping in the house in question.

To date, no American human rights group has protested this action as a criminal violation or a violation of international law. No member of Congress has decried the attack.

The AP story reporting the incident didn’t even mention the possibility that the action could be a violation of law.

Nor is this an isolated incident. In Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Pakistan, in Somalia and elsewhere, the US regularly launches missiles, often from remote controlled drone aircraft, and drops large bombs on houses and even larger compounds, sometimes destroying whole villages at a time, in order to hit individual alleged terrorists. Often, it turns out on investigation that the target individuals weren’t even present at the scene of these bloody massacres of civilians.

So commonplace are these wanton acts of violence by US forces that the US-installed leader of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, has publicly called for a halt to them, because of the number of innocent Afghan citizens being killed. Iraqis too, are enraged at the number of innocent victims of US bombings in places like Sadr City, where the killing of innocent children by US bombs has become a deadly routine.

No one—not one person—in the US military, the Pentagon or the Bush administration has been prosecuted for war crimes or criminal violations for these atrocities.

It becomes clearer and clearer with the passing of time that Bush’s and Cheney’s so-called War on Terror is actually a War of Terror, being waged against the people of such places as Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia.

At least in Israel, some citizens are willing to call such behavior criminal, and to demand a halt to it.
_______________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net