Municipalities are permitting “tax increment financing” that allow the big chains “to keep the sales taxes that you are forced to pay at the tax register,” Johnston said on the television interview program Books of Our Time, sponsored by the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover and broadcast by Comcast.

“Instead of that money going to the schools and the fire department and the police department and the library, it is funneled through a mechanism of local government, usually a special authority, to finance the purchase of municipal bonds so that means that the wealthy underwriters and the lawyers and auditors all get a piece of this money to buy the land and build the store,” Johnson told TV host Lawrence Velvel, dean of the law school.

The store is then leased to the big chain developer “at terms that amount to giving it to them for free or nearly free over a period of time,” Johnston said, “and it’s destroying local business.” An amazing aspect of this “corporate socialism” policy, Johnston says, “is that local business owners have not risen up and stopped this.”

“A system in which government, whether Federal or local, picks the winners in the economy, is not capitalism, it’s not competition, it’s not free market, it is corporate socialism, it is statism, it’s the state making these choices,” Johnston said.

In his new book, Free Lunch (Portfolio) Johnston amplifies this point by noting “Sam Walton practiced corporate socialism. As much as he could, he put the public’s money to work for his benefit. Free land, long-term leases at below-market rates, pocketing sales taxes, even getting workers trained at government expense were among the ways Wal-Mart took every dollar of welfare it could get.”

“Walton had a particular fondness for government-sponsored industrial revenue bonds,” Johnston continued, “which cost him less in interest charges than the corporate bonds the market economy uses to raise money.”

Johnston said in the television interview that if the public really understood what was happening they would not permit government subsidies to corporations to go forward.

Johnston pointed out: “Subsidies to retail cannot make us wealthier. Retail is at the end of the economic line. If you want to subsidize things, first subsidize education, then subsidize basic research, then subsidize applied research and development and subsidize infrastructure — rails and canals and highways — and maybe in some cases manufacturing and mining to get something going. But the least bang for the buck, and often the negative bang for the buck, would be subsidizing retail. What’s happening is wealthy families, the richest families in America, are getting welfare and they apparently have no shame about this.”

Johnston points out government handouts for Wal-Mart “reduce the costs of competing in the market” and by soliciting the subsidies “Wal-Mart shifted some of the risks of its expansion onto the majority of Americans who are not regular Wal-Mart shoppers.”

He said the fortune Wal-Mart is reaping is no different from what other corporate players are getting. “We are transferring enormous amounts of money to corporations and wealthy individuals,” Johnston pointed out. For example, he said, “We gave Warren Buffett’s companies a hundred million dollar gift last year.” (Buffett’s firm has a two-thirds-billion-dollar, interest-free loan from our government for more than 28 years, Johnston notes. Similarly, Donald Trump benefits from a tax enacted to help the elderly and the poor but part of which is now diverted to his casinos, Johnston says.)

“The incomes of the top one percent are exploding, are pulling away from everybody else,” Johnston said, “while the middle-class is stifling and the bottom is dropping out (of the economy).”

Author Johnson, for many years the tax reporter for The New York Times, has won a Pulitzer Prize and many other awards and uncovered so many tax dodges that he has been called the “de facto chief tax enforcement officer of the United States.”

* The Massachusetts School of Law(MSL), sponsors of Books Of Our Time, is a non-profit institution dedicated to providing a quality, affordable legal education to minorities, immigrants, and students from economically disadvantaged families who would otherwise not be able to attend law school and enter the legal profession.

This incredible and illegal practice contributes “to the prisoners’ suspicions that the (real) lawyers are not to be trusted and could be aiding the government,” TCW says in its July issue.

This subterfuge is only one of the many treacherous tactics the government is employing to sabotage the efforts of lawyers to represent their clients.

As Newsday, the Long Island, N.Y. daily, reported: “The military has set up a system that delays legal correspondence for weeks and requires lawyers from around the country to write motions at a single secure facility in Virginia. Detainees have alleged that interrogators have tried to turn them against their lawyers.”

Lawyers have to wait for months for security clearances to visit their clients, and the military insists on seeing any legal papers they plan to show prisoners, and reserves the right to censor them or ban them entirely.

After meeting with their clients at Guantanamo, Newsday reported, lawyers must turn their interview notes over to guards, who send them on to the Pentagon facility in Virginia that is the only place lawyers can go to write their motions. There, the military tries to edit out detainees’ claims of mistreatment from the public record.

Some military lawyers have been gagged from speaking to the media after they made allegation that guards are routinely beating Guantanamo prisoners. Australian Broadcasting (AB) reported defense lawyer Lt. Col. Colby Vokey and legal aide Sgt. Heather Cerveny, who represent a Gitmo prisoner, were ordered not to talk to reporters after they filed a formal complaint to the Pentagon about the beatings.

“I think all the other military defense lawyers have got to be feeling a little bit afraid,” Muneer Ahmed, an American University law professor, told AB. “There’s a chilling effect that this type of gag order has.” He added, “It further undermines what we know to be a broken system of justice.”

Worse than gagging, is imprisoning lawyers who speak out. The Pentagon literally hammered Lt. Commander Matthew Diaz who, in January, 2005, disclosed information about the Guantanamo prisoners, including their names. For this act of civility, Diaz was sentenced to six months in a military prison, TCW reported.

(At Guantanamo and U.S.-run prisons in the Middle East, the Pentagon and CIA reportedly keep “ghost” prisoners — captives whose names do not appear on any documents and whose presence is not reported to the Red Cross as required by international law.)

According to Newsday, guards and interrogators peruse prisoners’ private legal papers and warn them that prisoners who have lawyers will wait longer to get out. Tom Wilner, a lawyer for 12 Kuwaiti detainees, said an interrogator asked one of his clients, “Did you know your lawyers are Jews?”

The Justice Department and Pentagon have claimed inmate lawyers are creating “unrest” among the prisoners, provoking hunger strikes. That’s in case you mistakenly thought it is the harsh conditions at Gitmo that have driven so many prisoners to hunger strikes and suicide.
The U.S. government is “not only trying to deny counsel to the prisoners, but is actively trying to remove Guantanamo from any scrutiny, legal or otherwise” as well as “marginalizing the lawyers representing the prisoners,” TCW said.

Who needs attorneys anyway? In describing the conviction of Jose Padilla, an American citizen arrested on terrorism charges in 2002, USA Today noted August 17th he was held for three years “without charges, without seeing an attorney and without recourse to the courts.” Why should any citizen have the right to a lawyer if the Bush regime wills it otherwise?
The jury that convicted Padilla found him guilty of conduct that amounts to terrorism. Be warned, though, the system that convicted him amounts to totalitarianism.

After being denied access for five years to terror suspects, the Red Cross last year interviewed 15 detainees after their transfer to Guantanamo. One of them was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Al Qaeda leader thought to be the primary architect of the Sept. 11 attacks. “Congressional and other Washington sources familiar with the report said that it harshly criticized the CIA’s practices,” author Jane Mayer writes in an article titled “The Black Sites” in the August 13 issue.

“One of the sources said that the Red Cross described the agency’s detention and interrogation methods as tantamount to torture, and declared that American officials responsible for the abusive treatment could have committed serious crimes,” Mayer writes. This includes “grave breaches” of the Geneva Conventions, and violation of the U.S. Torture Act of 1994.

Prisoner Mohammed, for example, was told by his American captors, “We’re not going to kill you. But we’re going to take you to the very brink of your death and back.” Mohammed was held initially either at a secret underground CIA detention site near Kabul International Airport known as the “Dark Prison” or in a former brick factory north of the city known as the “Salt Pit,” then later moved to an undisclosed site allegedly in Poland. Mohammed was captured in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, and turned over to the CIA on March 4, 2003.

Mohammed is said to have told the Red Cross he was kept naked in a cell for days, questioned by female handlers, attached to a dog leash and shoved so that he was forcibly banged into the walls, and suspended from the ceiling by his arms with his toes barely touching the ground.

Furthermore, Mohammed said, he was chained naked to a metal ring in his cell for prolonged periods in a painful crouch, kept in alternately suffocating heat and painful cold and doused with ice water, practices that violate Geneva Conventions. According to a source familiar with the Red Cross report, Mohammed in Poland was shackled naked except for a pair of goggles and earmuffs, and waterboarded five times.

Two former CIA officers friendly with one of Mohammed’s interrogators said he was waterboarded just once and, Mayer writes, “needed only to be shown the drowning equipment again before he ‘broke.’” One of his interrogators suffers “horrible nightmares” from his participation in the procedure, The New Yorker article says.

Mayer reports, “Some detainees held by the C.I.A. claimed that their cells were bombarded with deafening sound twenty-four hours a day for weeks, and even months.” One of these, Binyam Mohamed, now in Guantanamo, told his lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, that speakers blared ear-splitting rap anthems into his cell while he was handcuffed or “ghoulish laughter” that was “like the soundtrack from a horror film.” Mohamed told his lawyer, “Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and doors, screaming their heads off.” Another CIA practice, according to a former prisoner, was to lock a man in a foul-smelling suitcase for long periods of time. That prisoner, Khaled el-Masri, the German car salesman seized in 2003 on dubious evidence and released the next year, said in the Salt Pit at Kabul his interrogators shouted at him, “You’re in a country where there’s no rule of law. You might be buried here.” Another prisoner told the Red Cross, he was kept for a prolonged period in a cage called the “dog box” which was so small that he could not stand.

Ramzi Kassem, a professor at Yale Law School, said his Yemeni client Sanad al-Kazimi, now in Guantanamo, told him that while in the Dark Prison he was suspended by his arms for long periods, causing his legs to swell painfully, and was beaten with electric cables. The hanging position is designed, among other things, to prevent detainees from being able to sleep.

According to Alfred McCoy, a University of Wisconsin history professor, “long-time standing” was a common interrogation technique of the Soviet K.G.B. In his recently published A Question of Torture he writes the Soviets found making a victim stand for 18 to 24 hours can produce “excruciating pain, as ankles double in size, skin becomes tense and intensely painful, blisters erupt oozing watery serum, heart rates soar, kidneys shut down, and delusions deepen.”

The brutal treatment of the alleged terrorists at the hands of the CIA has cast doubt on whether any of them could be convicted in a court of law. Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst, told reporter Mayer, “What are you going to do with K.S.M. (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) in the long run? It’s a very good question. I don’t think anyone has an answer. If you took him to any real American court, I think any judge would say there is no admissible evidence. It would be thrown out.”