This week, O’Connor launches a California book tour, beginning in the San Francisco Bay Area. On Monday, O’Connor sat down for a video interview with Prison Radio, where he discusses aspects of this story not addressed in this text interview. Marking the book release, Prison Radio has recorded a special message from Kevin Cooper himself. To learn more about Cooper’s case and what you can do to help, visit his website.

Prison Radio:  How did you get involved in Kevin Cooper’s case?

J. Patrick O’Connor:  During the fall of 2008, I was in the Bay Area on a book tour for The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal.  During the tour, supporters of Kevin’s approached me at various venues and asked me to consider writing a book on Kevin’s case.

PR:  How did you go about writing this book?

JPO:  I took on this project with no preconceived notions of Kevin’s guilt or innocence. Each case is different, radically so.

My first step was to read and notate the trial transcripts, documents of over 8,000 pages.  I then read all the police reports, witness interviews, and various newspaper accounts. I reviewed the most shocking crime scene and autopsy photos I’ve ever seen — and those I will never forget.  The autopsy reports on the four victims spoke of an incredibly frenzied killing field inside the Ryens’ master bedroom.

Finally, I read all of the appeals and the judicial rulings.  By this time I was ready to begin interviewing various people involved in Kevin’s trial and his subsequent appeals.

PR:  What’s the main obstacle to researching a case that is 25 years old?

JPO:  The biggest problem is that a number of key people involved in the investigation and trial have died, have retired, or have simply forgotten important factual details.

Another obstacle is that because Kevin technically still has appeals open to him, the San Bernardino County D.A.’s Office refused to discuss the case with me.  Nonetheless, I was able to interview Kevin’s trial attorney, his investigator, and the lead prosecutor at his trial as well as many other people familiar with Kevin’s trial and appeals.  For important background on the Ryens, I was able to interview Peggy Ryen’s half-sister and Doug Ryen’s sister.

PR:  Did you ever interview Kevin Cooper?

JPO:  I visited with Kevin for nearly three hours at San Quentin in the summer of 2009.  During this intense interrogation — I was in the process of deciding whether to take on this book possibility — I could sense Kevin felt a number of my questions were intrusive, if not insensitive.  There were things about his past and about his stay at the hideout house, and his fleeing to Mexico that I simply had to know to be able to go forward.

By the end of the interview I was taken with his equanimity and his resolve to prove he was wrongfully convicted of the gruesome Chino Hills murders. Over the next two years, I was able to pose many other questions to Kevin in written form, through his defense team at the Orrick law firm.

PR:  What convinced you that Kevin was innocent of these crimes?

JPO:  A lot of different things. To just cite one here: The prosecution and the police withheld and destroyed evidence that would have exonerated Kevin — evidence that was so exculpatory to him that had it been revealed Kevin would not have even been on trial for these murders.

PR:  Can you provide some background on Kevin Cooper’s case?

JPO:  Kevin Cooper was convicted of the brutal murders of a Chino Hills, California family and a young houseguest in 1985, and has been on death row at San Quentin since then. Scapegoat: The Chino Hills Murders and The Framing of Kevin Cooper, shows how the sheriff’s office and the district attorney’s office of San Bernardino County framed Cooper for these horrific murders and how the justice system has failed him at almost every turn in his long, drawn-out appeal process.

If it were not for a court-ordered moratorium on executions in California over the lethal injection controversy, Cooper – with no appeals remaining – would have been executed by now. It is expected the moratorium will not be lifted until at least 2013.

Two days before the murders of Doug and Peggy Ryen, their 10-year-old daughter, Jessica, and 11-year-old Christopher Hughes, Cooper escaped from a nearby prison and holed up in a vacant house 125 yards below the murdered family’s hilltop house.  Two days after the San Bernardino sheriff’s department established that Cooper had hid out there, it locked in on him as the lone assailant despite numerous eye witness reports that implicated three, young white men as the perpetrators.

From that day forward, four days after the murders were discovered, the sheriff’s department discarded information that pointed at other perpetrators, destroyed evidence that exculpated Cooper, and planted evidence that implicated him.

PR:  What eyewitness testimony is there pointing to other perpetrators?

JPO:  The only survivor of the attack, 8 1/2-year-old Josh Ryen, told ER personnel and a sheriff’s deputy that his assailants were three white men. Cooper is black.

Around midnight on the night of the murders, a couple, attempting to exit a driveway in their truck, saw three, young white men driving rapidly down the only road that leads away from the Ryens’ house in a station wagon that it turned out was stolen from the murdered family.

Shortly after that sighting, two women in a nearby bar saw two young white men, one wearing coveralls, with blood splatter on their faces and clothing.

Four days after the murders, another woman turned into the sheriff’s office bloody coveralls her boyfriend, a convicted murderer, had left on the floor of her closet.  The woman stated she had other information that implicated her boyfriend in the murders but wanted to be interviewed by homicide detectives.  She would have told them that her boyfriend’s hatchet was missing and that he no longer had the tan T-shirt he wore the Saturday of the murders.

PR: What aspects of the crime scene challenge the case against Cooper?

JPO:  The murders were committed with at least three, and probably four, weapons: a hatchet, an ice pick and one or two knifes. The theory that one perpetrator could or would use three or four weapons, is fundamentally counterintuitive.  At trial the prosecutor argued that Cooper was ambidextrous, which he is not.

Nor could one person control two able-bodied adults and three children running around the house, one of whom, Jessica, made it outside the house during the attack. The adult victims were each fit, 41-year-old chiropractors and both were mobile during the onslaught and fought hard for their lives, sustaining numerous defensive wounds to their hands and arms.

The crime scene evidence, according to the medical examiner, showed that the mother was cradling the daughter before the mother died, which meant one of the attackers had brought Jessica back into the house.  More than anything else, this meant there had to be more than one assailant because each parent kept a loaded gun in the master bedroom where the assault occurred.

There was an uncommon viciousness to the attack as though the killers meant not only to murder but to send a message of payback or retribution.  The medical examiner counted 144 wounds on the four murder victims, including 28 fractures and two amputations.  While Cooper’s trial was in progress, an inmate in a California prison told prison authorities and a San Bernardino County Sheriff’s detective that his cellmate had confessed to the Chino Hills murders, stating it was an Aryan Brotherhood hit but the three killers had gone to the wrong house.

PR:  What about the destroyed evidence you cited earlier?

JPO:  During Cooper’s preliminary hearing, the sheriff’s office destroyed the bloody coveralls.  The sheriff’s office claimed it never conducted any tests of the coveralls and admitted it never sent homicide detectives around to interview the woman who had turned them in.

The sheriff’s office also destroyed a bloody blue T-shirt discarded not far from the bar. Coupled with a tan T-shirt found the next day near the bar, the two bloody T-shirts were strong proof that at least two assailants had murdered the Ryens and Chris Hughes.  Testing of the tan T-shirt showed the blood on it matched the blood profile of Doug Ryen and no one else.

PR:  You also said that evidence was planted?

JPO:  Years later, in 2002, as Cooper was attempting to prove his innocence with DNA testing now afforded death row inmates by the California Legislature, his blood was now found on the tan T-shirt. To Cooper and his appeal attorneys, this showed rank tampering and planting of evidence, a belief that was greatly reinforced when it was revealed in 2004 that the vial containing Cooper’s blood, taken from him when he was arrested and kept all those years in the crime lab, was discovered now to contain the DNA of at least one other person.

A hatchet sheath and a bloody green button from a prison jacket were found at the hideout house a day after two detectives had searched the house and found nothing of evidentiary value.  Under oath one of the detectives denied looking in the bedroom but crime scene technicians lifted his fingerprints from the door of the closet where Cooper slept.  It would be established at Cooper’s trial that when Cooper escaped he was wearing a brown jacket, not a green one.

PR:  In 2004, Cooper came within hours of being executed before an extremely rare en banc ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed his execution and granted him a successive habeas corpus hearing in federal district court in San Diego. Can you explain more about this 2004 ruling?

JPO:  In particular, the Ninth Circuit ordered the district court to conduct DNA testing on the numerous blonde or light brown hairs found clutched in Jessica’s hand and other similar hairs deposited on other victims.

The Ninth also ordered EDTA testing to determine if Cooper’s blood had been planted on the tan T-shirt.  EDTA is an anti-clotting substance used in crime labs to preserve blood in vials, to prevent it from coagulating and breaking down. If tests conducted showed high levels of EDTA on the blood attributed to Cooper on the T-shirt, it would establish tampering.  If tampering were established, it would call into question all the forensic evidence the prosecution used to link Cooper to the crime scene.

It seemed that Cooper, after nineteen years of asserting his innocence from death row, would be vindicated.  At a minimum, the district court would have had to order a new trial or exonerate him outright.

Federal District Court Judge Marilyn Huff was not going to let that happen.  She had turned down both of Cooper’s previous habeas appeals, finding evidence of his guilt “overwhelming.”

PR:  How did Judge Marilyn Huff treat Cooper’s third habeas appeal?

JPO:  Over a period of a year, Judge Huff periodically held evidentiary hearings.  As she did, she methodically thwarted Cooper’s attorneys at every turn, refusing to allow Cooper’s experts to participate in the EDTA testing.  When the private lab the court hired to test Cooper’s blood on the T-shirt found elevated levels of EDTA, Judge Huff allowed the lab to retract its findings three weeks later on the grounds the lab itself was contaminated with EDTA during the testing.

Judge Huff dispensed with any further EDTA testing by ruling that the EDTA testing of the tan T-shirt conducted was not conclusive and that EDTA testing in general was an unproven science and of no value.  She was wrong on both counts:  both Cooper’s expert and the private lab found high levels on EDTA on the samples tested from the tan T-shirt and EDTA testing is a proven science.

The extreme bias against Cooper that Judge Huff displayed with impunity throughout the evidentiary hearings was at its most obvious when it came to the DNA testing of the hair clutched in various victims’ hands ordered by the en banc Ninth Circuit.  When a portion of those hairs had been tested in 2002, they were found to have no antigen roots, denoting that the hairs had fallen out rather than been yanked out during the assault.  Those hairs, the tests showed, were either from the victims themselves or were dog hairs.

There could be no purpose in retesting those hairs. However, over half of the hairs in the victims’ hands or adhered to their bodies had not been tested in 2002 and may well have contained antigen roots.    If the mitochondrial testing of those hairs resulted in a DNA that excluded all the victims and Cooper, there would be proof positive that someone other than Cooper was a perpetrator.  Judge Huff, incredibly, ordered testing only of the already tested hairs.

PR:  Did anything new come out at this point?

JPO:  During the evidentiary hearings, Cooper’s lawyers inadvertently learned for the first time about the bloody blue T-shirt found not far from the bar.  How could Judge Huff get around the implications of a bloody blue and a bloody tan T-shirt found one day apart near the bar?

In addition, the prosecution’s not disclosing the blue T-shirt to the defense was a major Brady violation that was so exculpatory to Cooper on its own that it mandated a new trial.

Judge Huff’s way around this inconvenient hurdle was to find that the blue T-shirt was in reality the tan T-shirt, even though the blue shirt was found the day before the tan shirt in a different location from the bar and the woman who found the bloody blue shirt testified at the hearing that the shirt she found was blue.

Judge Huff’s handling of Cooper’s habeas proceedings led Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge William Fletcher to write, “There’s no way to say this politely. The district court failed to provide Cooper a fair hearing and flouted our direction to perform the two tests.”

PR:  Judge Fletcher also made a strong statement about Cooper’s case, as a guest speaker at Gonzaga University School of Law on April 12, 2010.

JPO:  Yes, Judge Fletcher delivered a lecture on the subject of the death penalty, holding that the problems with the administration of it are widespread and endemic rather than merely regional or local.

To illustrate he cited the Kevin Cooper case, stating “The case I am about to describe is horrible in many ways.  The murders were horrible.  Kevin Cooper, the man now sitting on death row, may well be – and in my view probably is – innocent.  And he is on death row because the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department framed him.”

Judge Fletcher, a Rhodes Scholar who roomed with Bill Clinton at Oxford University, said what happened in the Cooper case “is a familiar story.  It is by no means the usual story.  But it happens often enough to be familiar.  The police are under heavy pressure to solve a high profile crime.  They know, or think they know, who did the crime.  And they plant evidence to help their case along.”

PR:  A closing thought?

JPO:  Kevin Cooper has now spent half of his life on death row for a crime he had nothing to do with.  He is, in a word, a scapegoat.

Our nation, so richly endowed with natural resources and with a capable and industrious population, should be able to devise ways and means of insuring to all our able-bodied men and women, a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.

– Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1937

Millions of people in the US work and are still poor. Here are eight points that show why the US needs to dedicate itself to making work pay.

One. How many people work and are still poor?

In 2011, the US Department of Labor reported at least 10 million people worked and were still below the unrealistic official US poverty line, an increase of 1.5 million more than the last time they checked. The US poverty line is $18,530 for a mom and two kids. Since 2007 the numbers of working poor have been increasing. About 7 percent of all workers and 4 percent of all full-time workers earn wages that leave them below the poverty line.

Two. What kinds of jobs do the working poor have?

One third of the working poor, over 3 million people, work in the service industry. Workers in other occupations are also poor: 16 percent of those in farming; 11 percent in construction; and 11 percent in sales.

Three. Which workers are most likely to be working and still poor?

Women workers are more likely to be poor than men. African American and Hispanic workers are about twice as likely to be poor as whites. College graduates have a 2 percent poverty rate while workers without a high school diploma have a poverty rate 10 times higher at 20 percent.

Four. What about benefits for low wage workers?

Ten percent of US workers earn $8.50 an hour or less according to the US Department of Labor. About 12 percent have health care and about 12 percent have retirement benefits. Nearly one in four get paid sick leave and less than half get paid vacation leave.

Five. What rights do the working poor have?

Most workers have a right to earn at least the federal minimum wage of $7.50 an hour. Tipped employees are supposed to get at least $2.13 each hour from their employer and if the worker does not earn enough in tips to make the $7.50 minimum wage, the employer must make up the difference. People who work more than 40 hours in a workweek are entitled to one and one-half of their regular pay for each hour of overtime.

Six. What about wage theft from the working poor?

Many low wage workers have part of their earnings stolen by their employers. Examples include not paying people the full minimum wage, not paying required overtime, stealing from tipped employees, or fraudulently classifying workers as independent contractors. A survey of over 4000 low wage workers in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York conducted by university and non-profit researchers found: 26 percent of the workers were paid less than the minimum wage in the previous week, a majority were underpaid by more than $1 an hour; a significant number worked overtime the previous week and were not paid the legally required overtime; many were required to come early or stay late and work “off the clock” and were not paid for it; almost a third of the tipped workers were not paid the minimum wage and more than 1 in 10 tipped workers had some of their money stolen by their employer or supervisor.

Seven. What is a living wage in the US?

Dr. Amy Glasmeier of Penn State University has created a Living Wage Calculator that estimates the hourly wage needed to pay the cost of living for low wage families in the US. It breaks down the cost of living by state and locality across the nation. In New Orleans, a mom with one child needs to earn $17.52 to make ends meet. In New York, the mom with one child should earn $19.66 to make it. If we now realistically calculate the number of people who work and do not earn a living wage, the numbers of working poor in the US skyrocket to several tens of millions.

Eight. What about jobs for the unemployed and underemployed?

The US Labor Department estimated recently that 13 million people were unemployed. Another 8 million people were working part-time but wanted full-time work. Even more millions who are not working are not counted in those numbers because they have been unemployed so long.

A study by Northeastern University found that in the poorest families, unemployment is nearly 31 percent. Underemployment is also much more of a problem in poor homes, with over 20 percent of those workers reporting they are working part-time but seeking full-time work.

Our nation can do so much more. We say our country values work. It is time to do something about it.

If the US truly values work, we need to support the millions of our sisters and brothers who are low wage workers. Steps needed include: raising the minimum wage to a living wage; protecting workers from getting ripped off; making it easier for workers to organize together if they choose to; and creating jobs, public jobs if necessary, so that everyone who wants to work can do so. Many are already working on these justice issues.

For those interested in learning more about this, see the websites of Interfaith Worker Justice, the National Employment Law Project, and the National Jobs for All Coalition.

Working with One of Pinochet’s Victims

Owing to the four years I worked with one of his torture victims in my Seattle practice, the arrest of Augusto Pinochet in London in 1998 was a profoundly moving and personal event. The Spanish extradition order issued by Judge Baltasar Garzon heralded in a new era in international justice. Primary to 1998, deposed dictators like Batista, the Shah of Iran, and Fernando Marcos could look forward to a luxurious and secure retirement, thanks to the American military and intelligence sponsors who brought them to power. The US refuses to recognize International Criminal Court (ICC) jurisdiction over war crimes committed by Americans or foreign dictators they support. Although they have no problem facilitating the transport of political enemies to the Hague, for example Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic (who many believe was innocent), no American will ever stand trial at the ICC for crimes against humanity.

Prior to the 1973 CIA coup that overturned Chile’s democratically elected government (and brought Pinochet to power), Father X taught literature at a Catholic university in Santiago. Except for being antifascist, Father X was totally apolitical. I suspect Pinochet’s military regime arrested and imprisoned him more to set an example than to eliminate one of their adversaries, In one important respect, all intellectuals are enemies in a totalitarian regime. The desire to be well-informed and engage in critical thinking can be very dangerous in a regime that demands total conformity.

Destroying a Man Psychologically

The only scars Father X ever showed me were on his forearms. On both arms the scar tissue was full thickness, indicating the muscle had been cut to the bone. The scars ran from the decubitus (inner elbow) to his wrist. The impact of the psychological pain his captors inflicted was far more damaging. Father X was arrested along with all his fellow priests from his university. Then he was forced to listen as, one by one, they were tortured and killed. His jailers threatened him on a daily basis, “Tomorrow we’re coming to kill you, Father.” To the best of his knowledge, all the other priests were murdered. Mysteriously, one year after his arrest, he was released. Escaping into Argentina, after four years he was granted refugee status in the US.

Sentenced to Life in the US

Though technically he had his “freedom” in the US and was safe from overt political persecution, Father X was deprived of both his livelihood and the Chilean culture that had been the fabric of his life. Father X had always viewed American culture as shallow and materialistic. In his mind, the US was a country where people were stripped of cultural identity and moral values to get them to spend money and accumulate possessions. He had no illusions about the role the US government had played in creating and supporting Pinochet’s brutal military dictatorship. However Argentina was also ruled by a US-appointed dictator, and Father X had no other options. His new life in the US was just another sentence – one that offered no chance of reprieve, short of natural death or suicide.

The American Catholic church had no comparable academic positions to offer him, and he had no experience of parish work. The best the Church could offer was help in applying for Supplemental Security Income (a Social Security program for disabled people with no work history). The latter provides an extremely meager and insecure income and lifestyle. This was especially true after the Republicans took control of Congress in 1994. Thanks to Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America, Father X routinely received letters that his benefits were about to be canceled because of his immigration status.

Judge Garzon and the Bush 6

Although Judge Garzon is most famous for ordering Pinochet arrested, he also indicted Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders, as well as issuing an order for British authorities to detain Henry Kissinger for questioning. In 2009, he attempted to indict six former Bush officials for crimes against humanity. The Bush 6 were the legal team who authorized Bush’s use of torture at Guantanamo and elsewhere. They included Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo (Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel, Douglas Feith (Undersecretary of Defense for Policy), William Hayne (Donald Rumsfeld’s Chief Counsel), Jay Bybee (Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel), and David Addington (Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff). Wikileaks cables released last year reveal the heavy handed role the Obama administration in played in having Garzon removed from the Bush 6 case and its eventual dismissal.

The December 2010 Wikileaks Cables

The cables also reveal that the US pressured the Spanish government to force Garzon to drop his investigation into the death of a Spanish reporter who was killed by US shelling in Baghdad, into allegations by Spanish Guantanamo detainees of being tortured and into the use of Spanish bases for CIA “rendition” flights (in which the CIA kidnapped foreign nationals and transported them to prisons in countries that openly practiced torture).¹
Prior to Garzon’s May 2010 suspension on so-called “corruption” charges, he was an examining magistrate for the Audencia National, Spain’s central criminal court. He was appointed in 1998 and was responsible for investigating Spain’s most important “organized” crime cases, especially those involving terrorism, criminal syndicates, state corruption and money laundering.

Inquisitorial Justice

The “inquisitorial” legal system used in France and Spain is very different from the adversarial system used in the US, Britain and other former British colonies. In an inquisitorial system, the court actively investigates the facts of a case. In an adversarial system, the court merely functions as an impartial referee, leaving it to the prosecution and defense to collect and present evidence. Inquisitorial justice is based on “civil” or “natural” law. This holds that legislation based on inherent rights and binding rules of behavior is the source of law. An adversarial system is based on “common law.” The latter regards prior judicial precedent (i.e. previous court rulings) as the main source of judicial law.

In Spain the role of an examining magistrate like Garzon is merely to gather facts, not to prosecute or make legal findings. Once a case is referred for prosecution, another judge oversees the trial and makes judicial findings.

Going After the Extreme Right – and Left

Some of Garzon’s more famous investigations include those of Spanish drug traffickers working with Colombia’s Medellin cartel, violent extremists belonging to the Basque separatist movement ETA, and an interior minister who oversaw Spain’s “dirty war” against ETA (involving right wing vigilantes and mercenaries who engaged in extrajudicial killings and other atrocities). In 1999 he helped convict the Mayor of Marbella for corruption.

Spanish law, which recognizes universal jurisdiction, allows an examining magistrate to charge and investigate a war criminal from another country, provided their own country chooses not to charge them. This is based on the principle that crimes against humanity warrant prosecution, even when they occur outside the national boundaries of the country exercising judicial authority. Because genocide, torture, and similar abuses of state power, are crimes against all, many jurists argue that it’s wrong to limit their prosecution to national boundaries. Especially as countries like the US, which refuse to recognize the International Criminal Court, are unlikely to charge their own leaders with crimes against humanity.

Garzon’s indictment of Pinochet was the first high profile example of universal jurisdiction. His international cases include genocide charges he filed against Argentine military officers for their activities during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship, resulting in the successful prosecution of two of them.

The Charges Against Garzon

Judge Baltasar Garzon himself faces three charges. On reviewing the charges, the Spanish Supreme Court has ruled he must face trial on all of them. The first alleges that he dismissed a tax evasion case against the director of Banco Santander, in return for a 302,000 euro donation to fund human rights classes Garzon taught at the Juan Carlos I Center at the University of New York in 2005-2006. Although no funds went to Garzon personally, the prosecution has a letter he signed requesting the donation from the bank’s chairman Emilio Botin. The evidence suggests the judge may be guilty of a conflict of interest. Although he took the case against Santander more than a year after Biotin made the donation, strictly speaking he should have stepped aside to allow another judge to oversee the investigation. In the US, judicial conflict of interest charges occasionally result in censure, but are more likely to be ignored.²

The second charge relates to violating attorney-client privilege by ordering “illegal” phone taps between defendants (top politicians of the opposition party) and their lawyers. Garzon insists the taps were necessary because the attorneys were serving as financial messengers in a criminal scheme.

Investigating Crimes against Humanity: Illegal under Spanish Law

The third and most serious charge is that Garzon exceeded his authority in investigating crimes against humanity by the brutal Franco regime, in violation of Spain’s 1977 Amnesty Law. If found guilty, Garzon could be disqualified from the bench for 20 years. His supporters find it ironic that he has stood up to multiple death threats from Colombian and Spanish drug dealers, Basque and Islamic terrorists, and organized crime figures – only to be blind-sided by archaic legislation considered illegal under international law.

The charge stems from an order Garzon issued, at the request of families, to exhume the remains of victims assassinated and/or disappeared by the Franco regime. Garzon and the more than two hundred international organizations that condemn the prosecution against him, contend that international law supersedes a national amnesty law in dealing with crimes against humanity. In 2008 the UN Committee on Human Rights advised Spain to repeal the 1977 Amnesty Law. Likewise the European Tribunal of Human Rights has warned that a guilty verdict on this charge will result in Spain’s suspension.

Although Garzon was suspended from his official duties in May 2010, the Spanish authorities allowed him to work as a consultant to the International Criminal Court in La Hague for six months been May and November 2010. In October 2010, an Argentine judge successfully petitioned Spain to be allowed to investigate Franco regime crimes that Garzon was barred from pursuing.

Recognizing and Supporting Moral Courage

I shouldn’t have to make the case why all Americans, across the political spectrum, should support courageous judges like Garzon. They take enormous personal risks to take a stand against US officials who further their political interests by committing crimes against humanity. Without brave individuals like Baltasar Garzon, genuine political change would be impossible. Join the Support Baltasar Garzon Facebook page.

1. See.
2. See a, b, and c.

A fifth martyr, Louis Lingg, either took his own life while awaiting execution with his comrades, or he was murdered by the police. Lingg occupied a cell that was isolated from those of his comrades. According to newspaper reports at the time, Lingg deliberately detonated a small explosive device in his mouth, which blew off most of his face. It required several hours for him to die. No one has been able to explain how Lingg, an unrepentant defendant in the most famous prosecution in US history, and under tight security, was able to smuggle bombs into his tiny prison cell. Louis Lingg was almost certainly murdered by the police.

Alternatively, some historians have speculated that a sympathizer might have somehow managed to smuggle a small amount of explosives into the prison so that Lingg could deprive the state of the satisfaction of executing him. According to this theory, Lingg, not the state of Illinois, orchestrated his own death.

The Haymarket martyrs, as they were later called, were accused of inciting violence against the Chicago police force that, acting at the behest of prominent businessmen, frequently beat and murdered unarmed strikers with impunity. No police officer was ever tried, much less convicted, for their crimes against workers attempting to democratize the workplace. This theme should sound a familiar refrain to modern protestors.

No credible evidence was presented that tied any of the anarchists to the bomb that exploded among a mob of heavily armed policemen that had attacked a peaceful public rally in the Haymarket Square on the night of May 4, 1886. Sworn police testimony was contradicted by hundreds of eyewitnesses.

The Chicago anarchists were convicted of a crime they did not commit. Their trial, like later politically-motivated trials in the US, was a sham. The jurors, handpicked to convict by a specially appointed bailiff, were paid by local businessmen after getting the conviction and death sentence the business community desired. The prosecutors knew that Albert Parsons had already left the rally and was relaxing with his comrades at a nearby tavern when the incident occurred. It made no difference.

The Haymarket martyrs were fighting for the eight hour work day, the right to peaceful assembly and for freedom of speech. It was here that the idea of “one big union” originated. The men were tried and convicted for their anarchist beliefs rather than for the commission of any crime they committed.

America pays homage to statesmen like Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams — its so called founding fathers. But working people have never known or have forgotten those who gave their lives in the struggle for social and economic justice in the workplace. Few contemporary American workers honor their fallen comrades. We owe these courageous men and women our eternal gratitude.

Class-conscious working people of today are fighting the same pitched battle as the Haymarket martyrs more than 124 years ago. As we witness the final death throes of capitalism, America is regressing. We are drifting back to Chicago of the 1880s. Those who have employment are producing more for their employers, working longer hours for less pay and receiving fewer benefits.

Corporate profits are soaring. Fewer employers are paying pensions. The disparity between rich and poor is increasing. The centralized state is imposing austerity upon working people. As class conflict intensifies, we are seeing tiny enclaves of opulence embedded within a global matrix of poverty and want.

Despite alternating cycles of boom and bust, little has changed between the rich and poor since 1887. Justice is still being denied by a system that is antithetical to social and economic democracy. We are living in a dystopia that provides justice to those who have the money to pay for it and denies those who do not.

But let us remember that regression inevitably spawns an equal and opposite reaction. The class-consciousness and resistance that August Spies spoke of during his sentencing in a Chicago Courthouse long ago are reawakening. We see his prophesies manifested in the Occupy Wall Street movement that is spreading across the nation and hurtling around the Earth with the speed of electrons. We see them particularly manifested in Oakland, California. US workers are finally organizing and resisting tyranny again. The strike is still our greatest weapon.

The Haymarket martyrs were men of principle and men of ideas who envisioned a more egalitarian world and sought to create it. This is the threat they posed to capitalism and Chicago’s business community. Their struggle is also our struggle. We must embrace it.

The spirit of Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engle, Adolph Fischer, and Louis Lingg, and countless others, preside over the OWS movements around the nation. These men lived large. They deserve to be remembered and honored. The state, despite its best efforts, could not murder an idea whose time had come. That idea has come again. In fact, it never really died.

There will be other martyrs. The global struggle for justice continues. Revolutionaries always circulate among us. Sometimes their heat sets everything ablaze.

Long live the spirit of resistance! Long live the spirit of the Haymarket Martyrs! Long live anarchy!

Author’s note: A detailed account of the lives of the Chicago anarchists is presented in a compelling book written by labor historian James Green titled Death in the Haymarket, published by Anchor Books.

Disorganized and still finding our footing, we nonetheless have already proven our value. The political discourse is being framed differently, big banks and huge financial entities are beginning to understand that their power may not be limitless. Corporations are learning that their grip on global culture may not be as firm as imagined. Most importantly, we are finding our voices and our power, and connecting in new ways with each passing moment.

Here in Cincinnati, we face challenges similar to other occupations. Our encampment was shut down after two weeks, with 145 citations and over 50 arrests, which led to a Federal lawsuit based on First Amendment rights. Since then we’ve been looking for a new, sustainable encampment, while still carrying out our various processes and actions.

We have had our successes. We targeted four local council members who supported the 1%, all were defeated. We joined with other Occupations in Bank Transfer Day, moving money and staging street theatre. We built an oil derrick to highlight local Senator and Super Committee Member Rob Portman’s unwillingness to rid us of oil and energy subsidies. Yet to me nothing is a greater success than adopting these five principles.

Peace, Love, Equality, Justice and Solidarity. Fine words, every one. And the idea behind each word is tremendously powerful and empowering. These words speak well for us. They create the basis for a system of ethics. Let’s take a moment to consider the implications of holding these principles.

1] An End to War. There can be no war with the principle of peace. It’s antithetical. As Albert Einstein said, “You cannot simultaneously prepare for war and for peace.” Any policies or actions that promote war cannot be condoned by Occupy Cincinnati. Also implied, an end to personal violence. We have far too many situations in the old culture where wounded and fear-driven folks lash out, power trip or otherwise act out in a fashion that is deleterious to human health. We wholeheartedly resist such behaviors.

2] Reversing Globalization. We cannot find these adopted principles in the system of globalization. Designed and built for the profit of the 1%, there is no equality or justice in extractive practices like mining and logging, child and underpaid labor and poorly made products. To honor our principles, we must necessarily extract ourselves from the globalized system to whatever extent we can, starting with spending our money locally and starving behemoths like Walmart.

3] Restoring Communities and Ecosystems. We have no equality when corporations ravage communities and living systems just to make a buck. We have no legal recourse when government sides with corporate interests. With these principles, the Occupation can work to create a generative, rather than extractive culture. Organic food production, sustainable, local energy solutions, community-building and getting involved with local government are all implied in the principles of equality and justice.

4] Reconstituting Government. Federal governments across the globe have proven time and time again where their loyalties lie, and it is not with we, the people. This Occupation must focus on reconstructing governments based on Internet-enabled technologies and human need. The archaic, dysfunctional, corrupt system of government that serves the 1% must be replaced.

This is powerful stuff. Revolutionary stuff. And yes, revolution is what we are about here in the Occupied Territories. Of course, with these principles our efforts mirror the efforts of Gandhi, King and other change agents who refused violence at every turn, and yet created something fundamentally better than the condition that existed previously.

With this worldwide Occupation, we begin to see the scope of what we are about. Creative acts of solidarity, fresh eruptions from the Arab Spring, talk of a constitutional assembly – doesn’t sound much like a fad. It sounds like revolution. But as we are committed to peace, it does not mirror bloody revolutions from the past [can’t speak for agents of the 1%]. It reflects something completely new under the sun, an uprising such as the world has never seen.

I encourage other Occupied Territories to adopt these or similar principles. Such principles form the frame we operate within, the lens through which we apply ourselves. And while we cannot control violence from the state, we can hold to our process and principles, and do all we can to make this R-Evolution as peaceful and agile as possible.

With 720 inmates on death row, the California Supreme Court has just distinguished itself as one of the most opportunistic and result-oriented group of jurists in the history of United States jurisprudence. They have now affirmed 45 death penalty cases in a row, without so much as a penalty reversal. Ruling 100% of the time for the prosecution in these cases reflects a level of callousness and dishonesty rarely witnessed in the history of law.

During the same time period that the California Supreme Court has rubber-stamped the propriety of state-sanctioned killing for all those who come before it, such beacons of light as Texas, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, have reversed numerous death penalty cases.

So, given the sorry lack of justice and due process in these cases, why are not more California death row inmates being killed? The answer is that the federal district courts still have vestiges of real judges, appointed by previous  administrations, who have been willing to evaluate these cases honestly; however, that situation is quickly changing. We are now entering the period of judicial history where the Reagan/Bush I & II, judicial appointees  are going to be in the great majority.

Committed right-wingers such as Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito and their ilk now inhabit the halls of justice throughout the nation, and “law and order” will soon be the sole guiding principle of the day. Within a year, the 720 inmates on California’s death row will start to receive the punishments that brain-dead Republicans have in store for them: death for all on the row. The very same brilliant minds that determined that failing to tax the rich would somehow help the poor, have now put their cards on the table regarding criminal justice: kill them all and let God sort it out.

It is clear that a defendant undergoing the charade of judicial process in our concentration camp at Guantanamo is more likely to get a fair trial than a death penalty defendant in front of the  California  Supreme Court. Subjects of our torture techniques throughout the world are more likely to get a fair shake  from their owners and masters than the innocent victims of our judicial system will get from the hooded cobras who sit on California’s highest court.

Some justice!

Andiko, Executive Director of the Indonesian community rights NGO, HuMa said: “Forced evictions at gun point and the destruction of the homes of men, women and children without warning or a court order constitute serious abuses of human rights and are contrary to police norms. The company must now make reparations but individual perpetrators should also be investigated and punished in accordance with the law.”

The operations occurred in the 20,000 hectare oil palm concession of PT Asiatic Persada, a 51%-owned subsidiary of the Wilmar Group. Singapore-based Wilmar is represented on the Executive Board of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and as well as holding over 600,000 ha. of plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia, has expansion plans in other continents, is the world’s largest palm oil trader and has processing facilities in Sumatra and Europe.

Abetnego Tarigan, Executive Director of the Indonesian NGO, SawitWatch, which is also a board member of the RSPO, stated, “Frankly we are very disappointed. We expect leading members of the RSPO to scrupulously adhere to the agreed standard, which includes respecting peoples’ customary rights and resolving disputes. RSPO member companies should pro-actively reach out to communities and not resort to the heavy-handed tactics of past eras.”

As detailed in the report, underlying the present problems is a long-standing land conflict with the local communities whose lands were taken over by the oil palm plantation without recognising their rights, without compensation and without their consent. Wilmar, which took over the plantation in 2006, has declined to recognise the communities’ land claims or offer them smallholdings within its concession instead offering them shares in a 50/50 1000 ha joint venture further west. Some community members, who did join this scheme, have since repudiated it claiming it has brought them few benefits and further conflicts.

Marcus Colchester, who led the field team that investigated the situation and who is Director of the international human rights group, Forest Peoples Programme, noted that the NGOs have now filed a third complaint about Wilmar with the International Finance Corporation’s Compliance Advisory Ombudsman (CAO). The previous complaints had led to the suspension of all World Bank funding to the palm oil sector worldwide. Currently, the CAO still has an ongoing process to mediate the disputes between Wilmar subsidiaries and the communities. However, in Jambi, these efforts broke down in June this year.

Colchester said: “The good news is that Wilmar has apparently now agreed to the CAO returning to mediate in resolving this land conflict. Let’s hope this time both the CAO and the company invest enough to resolve these disputes in line with the IFC Performance Standards, the RSPO standard and international human rights norms. But we can’t help asking, why is it taking so long? The delays in achieving redress and justice for local communities are unacceptable.”

Something else was Penn State. Neatly packaged for the media was the trifecta of what passes as journalism—sex, scandal, and celebrity. And so the media circus rolled into State College, salivating at their good fortune.

The “sex” part of the story was that Jerry Sandusky, former defensive coordinator of the Nittany Lions, was accused of 21 felony counts of sexual abuse of boys. A 23-page Grand Jury report, released Nov. 4 following a drawn-out three-year investigation, detailed some of the specifics. However, this story, no matter what the media say it is, is not about sex. It is about child molestation, child abuse, and endangering the welfare of a child. Big difference.

The “scandal” is that it appeared that high-ranking Penn State officials, although they restricted Sandusky’s access to campus, didn’t contact police or child protection services, possibly believing they were protecting the university’s image.

The “celebrity” part is Joe Paterno, who listened to a graduate assistant who says he saw an act of sodomy by Sandusky, and then, disgusted by what Sandusky may have done, reported it the athletics director and senior vice-president for administration. Paterno met his legal responsibility, and isn’t under any criminal investigation. Questions to Paterno in court would probably result in the defense objecting to hearsay testimony since Paterno never witnessed the act.

Almost every Pennsylvania TV station and dozens of networks sent camera crews into State College. As the number of TV crews increased, the quality of reporting sank, as almost every on-air reporter seemed to feel a need to ask even dumber questions and make dumber statements than every other reporter. These are the TV stations that send camera crews to out-of-town football games, Spring training in Florida, and bowl games, yet have downsized their news staff, plead economic poverty, and failed to adequately cover critical news stories. In Pennsylvania, it has meant little original reporting about conflict-of-interest and ethics scandals in the state legislature. Sports, apparently, is “sexy”; the public’s money and legislature integrity aren’t.

These are the same members of the media who for many of Paterno’s 46 years as head coach had filed stories that he should step down after any two losses in a row, or during a losing season, or even a season that didn’t have enough wins. The media had also layered comments that Paterno was everything but senile, that he was too old to be coaching. But, Paterno, known in the media as “JoePa,” kept winning, and kept demanding academic and athletic excellence in addition to moral integrity from his players. The university’s library, not any of its athletic buildings, is named for him. America’s best-known coach was building not a place for future NFL stars, but a place where college students could supplement their education to become productive members of society. His graduation rate is among the highest in Division I athletics.

However, based upon the amount of newsprint and air time given to this story, you would swear that Paterno was guilty, arrested, and probably already convicted. The media almost forgot about Sandusky as they began piling on to Paterno. Six column headlines and five minute network stories dominated the news agenda. Like sharks, they smelled blood and circled their prey, a towering figure about to be toppled. With little evidence, these sanctimonious scavengers called for one of the most ethical and inspirational coaches and professors to resign, claiming he didn’t do enough, that he should have personally called the police rather than follow established protocol.

Many of the media horde, who had never written any story about Penn State’s excellent academic and research programs, soon began pumping out ludicrous statements that Penn State’s reputation would be tarnished for years. Despite their self-righteous denials, the screeching of “Joe Must Go” in one-inch bold black headlines undoubtedly influenced the university’s board of trustees, which was constantly proving that incompetence isn’t just a media trait. Their attitude seemed to be not whether what Paterno did was a terminable offense, but that to terminate him would somehow save the university’s tarnished reputation—and maybe preserve the value of their own luxury seats at Beaver Stadium.
On Wednesday, Nov. 9, three days before the Penn State/Nebraska game, which was to be the last home game of the season, the Trustees, with a push from Gov. Tom Corbett, fired Paterno, thus justifying all the ink and air time spent by the media that seemed distracted from the real story—Sandusky, not Paterno, was arrested.
That night, thousands of students staged a demonstration of support for Paterno. The media called it a riot and almost universally condemned the students for exercising a First Amendment right of peaceful assembly and freedom of speech. What little damage done—the highest estimate was about $20,000—was by a relatively small number of participants.
On game day, the media camped in front of Paterno’s house. ESPN coverage of the game, which drew about twice as many viewers as expected, was constantly punctuated by the “scandal,” and what Paterno did and didn’t do. Tragedy had suddenly become a sport.
Contributing to the media’s shameful performance were mountains of crocodile tears, dripping with moral indignation. Had the media spent even a tenth of the time before the Penn State scandal to publish and air stories about child welfare problems, and what could be done to protect the most vulnerable of society, their myriad comments would have been credible.

In contrast to the masses, several reporters did credible reporting, including the hometown Centre Daily Times. But the best reporting might be that of Sara Ganim, who had begun her investigation first at the Centre Daily Times before moving to the Harrisburg Patriot-News. Three years after graduating from Penn State, she broke the story in March that the Grand Jury was investigating Sandusky and others. Her story at the time didn’t get much traction. But, for several months she meticulously gathered facts and wrote news, not opinion and speculation, which dominated the work of many of her colleagues, many of whom showed they were incapable of even reaching the journalistic standards of reporting at the National Enquirer.

Perhaps Joe Paterno should have done more; perhaps he should have called the police or at least followed-up with his earlier concern. But, we don’t know yet the facts.

One concern remains. Today, these Monday Morning Quarterbacks of the media and a pack of largely anonymous self-righteous fans all say that unlike Paterno they would have done “the right thing.” How many, if faced by the same set of circumstances, would have done “the right thing” a month ago?

What a farce!

In order to deliver this recent bout of “justice,” the US has once again jettisoned formal legality and due process. Al-Awlaki—an American citizen—was found guilty of terrorism and sentenced to death because his government says he was guilty and deserving of death. Case closed.

The administration, nevertheless, assures us that great thought and deliberation was put into the April 2010 decision to mark al-Awlaki for death. As the Washington Post reported, “the CIA did reviews every six months to ensure that those targeted for possible killing [including al-Awlaki] remained threats as defined by law and presidential findings.” The administration, we learn, performs its role as judge, jury, and executioner with great diligence. Oh, what a relief! In this case, who’s the next American on the hit list?

Such legal circumvention, though, seems to be the modus operandi of the Obama administration’s program of targeted assassination. After all, in order to carry out the extrajudicial assassination of bin Laden, the US had to skirt international law in its incursion into Pakistan. But the bin Laden and al-Awlaki attacks are hardly aberrations. Extrajudicial killings are official US state policy. American justice must truly be the envy of the world; for the shackles of international law never binds such “justice.”

It is ironic then, that the administration’s hit on al-Awlaki so closely follows President Obama’s address to the United Nations General Assembly. Respect international law and human rights, Obama preached to the world at the UN, as he forcibly derided the brutal suppression by the Syrian government of its own people. Yet as Obama spoke, not only were CIA planners busily readying the strike on al-Awlaki, the American state of Georgia was busy readying the execution of Troy Davis. Hence, lurking behind this edifice of American morality lays a foreign policy unwavering in its murderous pursuit of “its own people” and a domestic judicial system that ferries the innocent to their death. This is American justice unvarnished.

The dubious execution of Davis, moreover, leaves a nagging question: if the state can execute an innocent man at home, why would it be any different in its executions carried out abroad? But we are not to ponder such things. We are not supposed to peer through the fog of war. If it is a criminal trial one wishes to see, why there is the trial of Michael Jackson’s doctor Conrad Murray, of course.

Perhaps seeking a measure of civility and legality here is misplaced. We are at war—as we are readily told—and it is either kill or be killed. Hence, we kill. But if this is truly the case, we have surely bungled this war. In fact, it is as our very “successes” in this endless war continue to mount that its further escalation becomes inevitable. Each successive targeted assassination, after all, only leads to further such strikes by the US military and CIA. As I write, for instance, US drones continue to prowl the skies of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and other nameless places, waiting to unleash further fury. And as American Hellfire missiles and elite commando teams continue to descend from the night’s skies sowing death, the inevitable violent backlash only hastens. Violence breeds violence.

The assassination of al-Awlaki, like that of bin Laden, in the end does nothing to “make the world safer,” nor does it signal a “great blow” to al Qaeda. The death of a terrorist, it should be fairly obvious, does nothing to deter suicidal ideologues. Nor, for that matter, does killing any terrorist do anything to weaken their ideology, for ideology cannot be defeated by military force. Neo-Nazis, after all, exist today. And, of course, we do not resort to war in order to eradicate the lingering scourge of Nazism. If we did, we would only transform the marginalized into persecuted martyrs, thus helping to swell their ranks. But least we forget that comparisons between the ideology of al Qaeda and its related groups to that of Nazism are only to be drawn in justification of war, not to illustrate war’s folly.

Nonetheless, all those patriots celebrating America’s latest “victory” in the war on terror would still be wise to give pause. Contrary to the jubilant claims of American triumphalism, the nation remains incapable of at least two things: breaking free from the cycle of violence and death, and abandoning our delusional claims of moral superiority.

It is thus terror that has truly emerged triumphant in the death of Anwar al-Awlaki, not America. We, meanwhile, continue our rapid plunge into the moral abyss of reprisal bloodshed.

Few people are likely to spend their spare time thinking about tax revenue authorities, but domestic tax collection could be equally as important for global justice advocates as issues of aid, trade or debt cancellation. In recent years, many civil society organisations have begun to highlight the imperative need for improved tax administration systems in the South. To begin with, tax is a vital source of revenue for governments to pay for essential services, infrastructure and social protection for their citizens. Tax systems play a fundamental role in redistributing wealth within an economy, and are central to reducing poverty and inequality, not least as it is the poor who depend more on publicly-funded services like health and education. Effective tax systems are about more than financing development, however; tax is also central to building the social contract between citizens and the state. There is now a wealth of research making the case that taxation generates stronger state-citizen relationships than money from other sources, such as aid or natural resources.

From almost any perspective, improved revenue collection is essential if developing countries are to end indebtedness in their own countries and finance poverty eradication from their own resources. In the longer term, a strong personal income tax collection system is clearly the best course of action for ending aid dependence in low-income countries. Yet the gap between where most developing countries’ tax levels stand today and where they quickly need to get to remains enormous. Countries such as Bangladesh and India, for example, gather less than 10 percent of national income from tax revenue, compared to well over 40 percent of GDP in some high-income countries such as France and Sweden.  ¹  According to calculations by ActionAid for 2007, an extra US$198 billion could have been realised if all developing countries were able to turn at least 15 percent of their GDP into tax revenues (a commonly cited reasonable minimum for a developing country’s revenue-to-GDP ratio, although many countries could raise much more).  ²

Instead, the overall trend of tax levels for governments in the South is going the other way. As a result of the recent financial crisis and ensuing recession, declining national income has led to a fall in tax revenue for most developing countries. At the same time, many rich countries are cutting back on their aid commitments, while falling investment and growing unemployment are placing a greater demand on government resources. The cost is inevitably being felt most by the poorest people, not least when social security systems are receiving the lowest level of support precisely when they are needed most. In this context, finding ways to increase tax revenue is critical if poor countries are to fill the funding gap needed to provide essential services and tackle poverty.

Plugging the holes

There are formidable challenges to overcome if developing countries are to ‘plug the holes’ where tax revenue is leaked out of the economy whilst also increasing the efficiency, capacity and jurisdiction of national tax authorities. On the domestic front, concrete steps can be taken to reduce the problems of corruption, mismanagement and weak administration. Concerning the illegal appropriation of public funds, for example, or the question of whether improved finances will actually be channeled into social services and public investments, the way forward lies in rendering the political process more democratic, accountable and transparent. Some countries have now started to experiment with alternative budget processes, such as participatory budgeting, to help ensure that government expenditures reflect the public interest. ³  Many poor countries also face the challenge of a huge informal sector – generally untaxed, unregulated and growing in size – that can comprise well over 50 percent of the total labour force.  ⁴  Such a significant barrier to raising taxes requires governments to redesign incentive mechanisms that create legitimacy for the informal sector, and make sure that informal workers benefit from public services in exchange for tax. ⁵

By far the greatest challenges to increasing tax revenue come from outside developing countries themselves. Beginning in the 1980s, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank pressured governments to reform their tax systems in line with the so-called Washington Consensus policies. These fairly homogenous set of tax reforms aimed to make the economies of poor countries more compatible with the demands of global trade integration and financial liberalisation, at the expense of redistribution and the potential for tax to challenge inequality.  ⁶   In concert with their notorious Structural Adjustment Programmes, the IMF demanded that developing countries minimise the taxation of foreign investors, eliminate import barriers and reduce tariffs, even though trade taxes (those taxes levied at the border, mainly import tariffs and export duties) are one of the most important sources of income for countries in the South, particularly in Africa. According to the IMF’s theory, the losses in customs revenue would be compensated by the introduction or increase of other domestic taxes on purchases, such as value-added tax (VAT).  ⁷  Not only did this formula fail to bear fruit for the poorest countries who never managed to compensate for the losses in tariff revenue, but indirect or consumption taxes like VAT tend to be regressive, especially in countries with large informal economies – meaning that they have a disproportionate impact upon the poor, and negative welfare effects.  ⁸

The IMF-led development model of the past few decades also enforced what is commonly known as the ‘tax consensus’ which has further deprived poor countries of vital tax revenues from multinational corporations (MNCs). In the global competition to attract foreign direct investment, governments are pressured to offer low tax rates and incentives to MNCs such as reduced corporate tax, tax holidays and subsidies. This is the ‘race to the bottom’ in which MNCs are able to play governments off each other in order to secure the biggest tax breaks, in return for the questionable benefits of increased productive investment in the host country. Special economic zones are frequently set up in developing countries – known in Latin America as the infamous ‘maquiladoros’ – which have different tax laws to the rest of the country, as well as poor worker rights, low environmental standards, and often disrespect for indigenous peoples who are displaced by land-grabbing companies. The true costs of these arrangements are ultimately borne by society in terms of lost tax revenue, which is likely to shift the tax burden onto domestic taxpayers or translate into less provision of public services. Research also questions whether tax competition attracts high-quality investment to developing countries, or creates the kind of jobs that would help permanently lift people out of poverty. ⁹

Tax dodgers

The other major obstacle on the international stage that deprives poor countries of tax revenue has now become an in vogue issue for campaigners – tax dodging by corporations and rich individuals. In recent years, a growing number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have begun campaigning on tax justice issues, pointing out the abject failure of the world’s tax systems that reward investors, MNCs and wealthy or corrupt elites at the expense of domestic economies and poor people. Many multinational groups of companies take advantage of secrecy jurisdictions, popularly known as tax havens, to shift profits and assets overseas and reduce their overall tax liability. Some companies take further advantage of the globalised system by manipulating the prices that are charged for goods and services within a company but across national borders, known as transfer mispricing.

Christian Aid has estimated that developing countries collectively lose US$160 billion in tax revenues as a result of international tax evasion practices by MNCs alone.  ¹⁰  According to the Tax Justice Network, tax evasion by high-net-worth-individuals costs governments worldwide a further $255 billion annually in lost revenues.  ¹¹  International experts and NGOs have formulated comprehensive recommendations to reform a system of global finance built on secrecy, which inevitably requires new intergovernmental and multilateral rules and regulations, and cannot rely on the voluntary efforts of individual countries or corporations. One prominent solution favoured by the Tax Justice Network could be a ‘World Tax Authority’ that takes responsibility for tackling tax corruption, tax havens and profit laundering, although further progress on creating such a forum under the auspices of the United Nations remains pending.

For most if not all of the least developed countries, building effective tax systems to finance essential services and national development will be impossible without additional support from official development assistance (ODA). There are vast differences amongst tax levels between developing countries, as well as between countries of the Global North and South. This means that some poor countries have a far greater challenge than others to finance their development from domestic resources. At present, however, aid donors still tend to see taxation as a “dangerous idea” in development, and are far less likely to prioritise financing tax systems than other forms of aid. One of the reasons for this, according to UK tax expert Mick Moore, is that a focus on taxation in developing countries, or the lack of it, could in turn focus public attention on the lax rules that also characterise tax systems in donor nations.  ¹²  Currently, less than one thousandth of development aid is spent on helping countries improve their tax systems. ¹³

Aiding the South

There are some signs that this trend is shifting as some international donors have begun to provide funds and technical assistance for tax-related projects. The UK Department for International Development (Dfid) has set an example by funding 181 tax-related projects between 2001 and 2006, and recently supporting a new research consortium on tax system issues in low-income and fragile countries called The International Centre for Taxation and Development (ICTD).  ¹⁴  Many case studies illustrate the positive gains that investments in tax systems can generate. For example Ghana, with help from the German government, increased its corporation tax revenues by 44 percent in real terms, and direct taxation by 22 percent between 2003 and 2005.  ¹⁵  Similarly, Rwanda was able to quadruple its level of tax collection between 1998 and 2006, while Uganda also nearly doubled its tax-to-GDP ratio between 1993 and 2003 with the help of aid donors.  ¹⁶  But there is still considerable scope for rich-country governments and international donors to increase funding for poorer countries to strengthen their tax systems, increase surveillance and tackle illicit flows of capital.

Domestic taxation, previously referred to as the Cinderella in debates about financing for development, is emerging from the shadows as one of the most important issues for civil society to get behind and influence.  ¹⁷  If we want to advocate for a fairer sharing of world resources, tax policy is fundamental to narrowing the gap between rich and poor, and ensuring the availability of funds for vital social programmes. There is a clear understanding of what developing countries should aim towards: broad-based tax systems that redistribute wealth by seeking to levy more taxation on those with a greater ability to pay, including rich individuals and landowners; the taxing of capital and resource consumption, rather than applying more regressive taxes such as VAT; and the effective taxation of multinational corporations. These are the essential prerequisites for more just and equal societies in rich and poor countries alike, and should be actively supported through development cooperation to strengthen the capacity of national revenue authorities.

Of course, the massive redistribution of resources from rich to poor that is needed to end poverty will never happen without a reformed architecture of global governance, a shift in power relations from North to South, and major political-institutional changes in the global economy. The most powerful industrialised countries and the institutions they dominate – namely the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organisation – are in large measure responsible for the loss of tax revenue in the South resulting from forced tariff reductions, unjust trade policies and odious debt repayments. An unprecedented level of international cooperation is also needed to effectively tax multinational corporations, close down tax havens and fight corruption, bribery and the embezzlement of stolen money to foreign bank accounts. But domestic tax policy is inseparably bound up with all these issues, for without a fair and efficient system of tax collection and income redistribution there can be no lasting improvement in the poverty situation of developing countries. The entrenched opposition to progressive reforms from those who benefit from the status quo, such as wealthy or corrupt elites and profit-driven investors, only reinforces the responsibility of civil society to push for a drastic increase in public revenues through international tax justice.

1. ActionAid, Accounting for Poverty: How international tax rules keep people poor, September 2009, table on p. 13.
2. Ibid.
3. United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, Combating Poverty and Inequality: Structural Change, Social Policy and Politics, September 2010. See chapter 8.
4. Friedrich Schneider, Andreas Buehn and Claudio E. Montenegro, Shadow Economies All over the World: New Estimates for 162 Countries from 1999 to 2007, The World Bank, July 2010.
5. Oxfam, 21st Century Aid: Recognising Success And Tackling Failure, May 2010, p. 39.
6. lledo, V., Schneider, A. and Moore, M., Governance, Taxes and Tax Reform in Latin America, IDS working paper, 1st January 2004.
7. Jens Martens, The Precarious State of Public Finance Tax evasion, capital flight and the misuse of public money in developing countries – and what can be done about it, Global Policy Forum, 2007, p. 21.
8. M. Shahe Emran and Joseph Stiglitz, On selective Indirect Tax Reform in Developing Countries, Stanford University / Columbia University, 2002.
9. Christian Aid, Tax justice advocacy toolkit: a toolkit for civil society, January 2011, p. 12. See the studies listed on reference 34.
10. Christian Aid. Death and taxes: the true toll of tax dodging, London, 2008.
11. Tax Justice Network. The price of offshore, TJN, 2005.
12. ‘Dangerous Ideas in Development – Why are Aid Donors Frightened of Taxation?’, event held by the Institute of Development Studies at Westminster, London, on 24th April 2007, with Mick Moore And John Christensen.
13. ‘Tax for Development’, OECD Observer, December 2009, quoted in Nicholas Shaxson, Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World, The Bodley Head, London, 2011, p. 282.
14. Institute of Development Studies, ‘Taxation is a path to better governance’, 17th December 2010 [online] www.ids.ac.uk
15. ActionAid, Accounting for Poverty, op cit, p. 45.
16. Ibid, p. 13.
17. Nicholas Shaxson, Treasure Islands, op cit.

Banned in Vermont
By Rosemarie Jackowski
Publisher: Shire Press
Manchester, VT (2010)
Paperback, 251 pages
ISBN: 978-1-60571-100-3

Kim Petersen: The title Banned in Vermont refers to antiwar protest being banned in the state?

Rosemarie Jackowski: That and more. I really am talking about the whole issue of freedom of access to information. The problem is that when something is banned — people don’t know that it exists. When a candidate for elected office is banned from debates and forums the voters are unaware of it. This happens during every election in Vermont. Candidates are arrested if they try to participate — unless they are members of the Democratic or Republican Party. Ironically, when copies of BANNED IN VERMONT were donated to the public library, the library banned the book. In my view, that makes it more worthy of being read.

KP: Patriotism. You make a distinction between blind patriotism and informed patriotism. Yet even if people were informed about the great crimes committed by their government, wouldn’t that negate any patriotic sentiment? How can a person love a country that exists because of a genocidal past? I submit that people have to get past loving a geopolitical entity and love people wherever in the world they may live.

RJ: I agree with your thought behind this question. Maybe one can’t love a country with a genocidal past… but in that case, the highest form of patriotism might be in working toward reparations for those who have been victims. An immoral or unjust act cannot be forgiven until amends are made. This is important for the victims but also for the victimizers. I like your point about getting past loving a geopolitical entity and loving ALL people. I often make that point in the book when I say that no one should be given any privilege because of the location of his mother at the time of his birth.

KP: “Any candidate who participates in a forum, which excludes others on the ballot, shows contempt for voters and the democratic process.” What you write is sound insofar as respect for the democratic process; however, for there to be a democratic process, there should be a democracy. Do you consider the United States a democracy?

RJ: No, the United States was never a Democracy. That word gets thrown around a lot. I do believe that there could be a ‘democratic’ process. It would be very hard to achieve, and there would be the issue of the influence of group-think and the pecking order in any attempt at getting to a democratic process.

KP: You consider the topic of justice often and deeply in your book. Have you ever considered that capitalist society has utter contempt for justice, that justice is just a slogan to be wielded for the ends of those who hold power?

RJ: I love this question. I don’t know if there can ever be any justice in a capitalistic society. But, the concept of justice is very important to me… maybe more important than anything else because it encompasses everything. Justice for everyone is even more important than love for all of our fellow beings. Love is an emotion that may or may not result in humanitarian acts. Working for justice for all is a very concrete concept. Working toward justice for all is the ultimate moral dedication of anyone’s life… an important matter of conscience. That is why the back cover of the book states: “Where there is no Justice, nothing else matters. War is the ultimate injustice, because it imposes Capital Punishment on those who have not been Tried or Convicted. Therefore, every Officer of the Court should be openly and actively opposed to war.” There will never be a completely just society, but we surely can do better than what we have now.

KP: What do you mean by your “profound respect for the rule of law”?

RJ: I have respect for some Libertarian and also some Anarchist philosophy. Because people are aware of that, it seemed important to state that I do have “profound respect for the rule of law”. Boundaries on human conduct are necessary because without them we would have rule by ‘the pecking order’. The rich and powerful would have no limits. That is sort of what we now have because the ‘system’ is used as a tool of those in the upper economic class. I have a lot of respect for the rule of law and almost no respect for the legal system as it is. If we had a just legal system, everything would be different. War criminals would be prosecuted. The economic system would be fair – because if it wasn’t, there would be legal recourse.

KP: The reason I asked that question is because law is usually written by those who hold power, not by the unempowered. Therefore, laws can be written to protect the interests of the powerful against the unempowered.

RJ: I see your point. To me the Rule of Law implies Justice — not always the law as it is written. An unjust law would be trumped by the concept of fairness and what is just. Nullification is required when the law is unjust, unethical, or in violation of human rights.

KP: You often mention 1492, yet you wrote, “our government will not regain its legal and moral authority until it gives up its life of international Crime…” Do you believe that the government of the United States ever had legal and moral authority? Given that the country is situated on land gained by the murder and dispossession of its Original Peoples, it seems the only moral and legal action would be to pay reparations and return whatever has been stolen to its rightful owners.

RJ: The legal part is a hazy area. Laws change. Laws are written by whoever happens to be in power at the time. Slavery was legal. Original Peoples have a moral right to reparations. This creates a conundrum. How far back should we go historically? Actually, this is an issue that I think about often because of the suffering of the Palestinians, the Chagossians, and many others. Maybe there is a somewhat fair way to look at this… a formula… mathematically decreasing the reparations over long periods of time. That would mean that land confiscated 50 years ago would deserve greater compensation than land confiscated many, many centuries ago. The bottom line is that it is impossible to undo an immoral or unjust act.

KP: A few things struck me from your answer. First, with all due respect, I submit the bottom line is that morals and human decency demand people of conscience to, as far as possible, atone for the immoral acts of forebears that the descendants are benefitting from now. Living on, and from, that dispossessed from others would seem to fit that bill. Furthermore, there is no statute of limitations for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide under international law. So if how to atone is based in “profound respect for the rule of law” (and I have little respect for laws created by plutocrats, national or international) then surely justice should be carried out according to the law. Second, your formulation posits the longer a people have suffered dispossessions, the lower the reparations would be. Is that not a formula that encourages the dispossessors to draw out the dispossession as long as possible and profit to the maximum before international justice, if it does at all, enforces its tardy laws? Third, and this overlaps somewhat, but your question “How far back should we go historically?” is dangerous because it might encourage the creation of long-term facts on the ground, something Israel is often accused of (and it seems to be a successful strategy for Zionists because few people talk about the legally [which does not imply morally] recognized 1948 borders anymore but refer to the 1967 borders gained through aggression (which is, I submit, a sop to the “supreme international crime”).

RJ: I agree with what you say. My thought was that, for example, justice would require us to place some value on the fact that the land that the USA now occupies was owned by others in 1492. Simply returning all of the land now to the previous owners would punish those who had no responsibility for the original crime. After many generations have passed, that fact has to be considered relevant. On the other hand, the descendants of slaves are closer in generation and still suffering some of the harm of slavery, while others are enjoying some of the benefit. Therefore reparations for slavery would be higher up on the scale. You mention the Zionists and the 1948/1967 borders. What would you say to those who say Israel has the right to land there because they had been there thousands of years ago? Maybe a claim that goes back thousands of years is diluted by time???? How would you answer those who suggest that the nation of Israel should have been located in Europe? Holocaust survivors deserve compensation, but why from the Palestinians? Why not from the Europeans? This topic always reenforces my belief that all religions should be respected. This is currently not a popular view. Many of my friends are absolutely opposed to all religions. They are Evangelical Atheists. I understand their view, but do not agree with it. My view is that actions should be judged, not religious systems. Borders changed through aggression should not be recognized by the international community.

KP: With all due respect, your sentence that vegans “have reached a higher moral plane than the rest of us” sounds hyperbolic to me. For example, what should humans living in Arctic regions subsist on to reach the higher plane?

RJ: You got me with this one. I do believe that vegans have reached a higher moral plane, but I also believe that respect for human life takes precedence for those who have no access to other food. I have had discussions about the morality or immorality of using antibacterial soap, or taking antibiotic medicine. Great topic for philosophical debate, but I come down on the side of human life when forced to choose whether or not to protect the life of a microbe.

KP: You wrote, “The main challenge to 9/11 conspiracy theorists comes from Osama Bin Laden. He explained why the attack occurred.” I do not understand the logic presented since you later call into question the government’s story. Also, how does someone’s view on the reason underlying an attack connect to how the attack was carried out? Why do you label those who question the government’s version of what happened on 9-11 as “conspiracy theorists”?

RJ: I do not believe that the government directly planned and caused 9/11. I refer to 9/11 as ‘the goose that laid the golden grenade’ because the US used it as an excuse for unending war. The government has a long history of lying and is not above sacrificing US citizens. It just seems to me that Blowback is the more likely cause. I am often confronted on this issue by those who disagree with me. Actually, on this issue I am sort of agnostic. The more important question is: “Would it make any difference if someone came forward with absolute proof that 9/11 was a government act?” Probably not — it is on the public record that the USA has killed 500,000 Iraqi children, that 45,000 US citizens die every year from lack of access to health care, that WikiLeaks has exposed government secret plots… on and on. I am convinced that most citizen/voters have very little interest in what the government does and hardly notice. If someone came forward with absolute proof of a government connection to 9/11, it would make the headlines for a day or two and then public interest would be refocused on the latest football scores or which celebrity is sleeping with someone else’s spouse.

KP: I wished you had asked John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, in your interview why it took so long for him to figure out he was a gangster for capitalists. It seems he knew a long time before he gave up the perks he received from his part in the gangsterism.

RJ: That would have been a good question. In a way, maybe many of us share that with Perkins. Living under Capitalism gives the illusion of ‘perks’ to all of us. The pressure from society to ‘fit in’ is a very powerful force. Speaking out against the system is very hazardous and anyone who does it pays a high price. It takes a long time to overcome the toxic misinformation that comes to us from the culture. This makes me think about how many are ‘for peace’ but unwilling to actively oppose war. To oppose war it is necessary to oppose the entire war machine – that includes those who finance the weapons, manufacture the weapon systems, and also those who use the weapons to kill. As a former flag-waver, I do not exonerate myself. Now I finally ‘get it’ and understand the influence of the culture and the school system. There was a time when I believed what the textbooks and teachers taught me. As I say in the book — in the town where I grew up, the only heroes were the ones in military uniforms. Those who are selected as heroes in any culture can have a powerful influence on a young person. Sad to say, now there are uniformed troops going into elementary school classrooms. This is done to honor the troops as role models and instill patriotism in the young student.

KP: Finally, what do you feel is the moral responsibility of judges who rule on laws that they know are immoral and unjust?

RJ: Actually [former New Jersey Superior Court] Judge Andrew Napolitano talks about this often. He talks about Natural Law. In my view this is not even a close call. Morals and justice come first. Maybe that is why I would not be a good lawyer.

Add to that the shocking images of abuse of Iraqi detainees in the American-run detention centre in Abu Ghraib, Baghdad, and that of a battered to death Baha Mousa, the Iraqi hotel receptionist in a British-run detention centre in the south of Iraq, and you get the idea that these thugs and torturers felt international law did not apply to them. Apart from the immorality, inhumanity and criminality of these actions, they are totally counterproductive. A report published by the Watson institute, Brown University in the U.S., puts the effect of such inhumanity and lawlessness thus:

In Iraq, over 100,000 prisoners have passed through the American-run detention system, with many of those detained in the first years of the war processed through the Abu Ghraib prison. In 2004, accounts of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse… and death of Abu Ghraib prisoners came to public attention. Iraqi security chiefs allege that the existence of, and conditions in U.S. [run] prisons actually strengthened Al Qaeda, and they blamed the detention system for increased violence in 2010.

The Guardian (August 5, 2011) under the heading “revealed: Britain’s secret policy on overseas torture” reports that:

A top-secret document revealing how MI6 and MI5 officers were allowed to extract information from prisoners being illegally tortured overseas has been seen by the Guardian. The interrogation policy – details of which are believed to be too sensitive to be publicly released at the government inquiry into the UK’s role in torture and rendition – instructed senior intelligence officers to weigh the importance of the information being sought against the amount of pain they expected a prisoner to suffer. It was operated by the British government for almost a decade.

The government has rightly set up an inquiry to look into British complicity in torture and rendition, which would begin after a police investigation into torture is completed. One of the most admired traits in western societies is their adherence to the supremacy and universality of the rule of law. That principle has been battered by the “war on terror”. Any inquiry that is serious in restoring the reputation of the UK must be robust and serious; what better way to do that than to address the concerns of human rights groups that have worked tirelessly to bring some of these abuses to light. The previous government fought doggedly to keep these shameful actions from the British public. Witness the case of Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohammed, when the previous foreign secretary was ordered by six high court judges to release CIA information about the torture of the detainee. David Miliband took the case to appeal, where three of the country’s highest-ranking judges dismissed his appeal with the Lord Chief Justice’s remarks reported by the Independent (February 10, 2010):

He [the Lord Chief Justice] pointed out that the redacted paragraphs would not reveal information which would be of interest to a terrorist or criminal or provide “any potential material of value to a terrorist or a criminal”. The judge added: “Indeed, it seems right to emphasize that the publication of the redacted paragraphs would not and could not, of itself, do the slightest damage to the public interest.” Lord Judge said there was no secret about the treatment to which Mr. Mohamed was subjected while in the control of the U.S. authorities.

Is it surprising that human rights groups that include Amnesty, Liberty and Human Rights Watch want openness and transparency before they take part in such an inquiry? Their concerns were expressed in a letter, reported in the Guardian (August 5, 2011):

We are particularly disappointed that the issue of what material may be disclosed to the public will not be determined independently of government and, further, that there will be no meaningful participation of the former and current detainees and other interested third parties… As you know, we were keen to assist the inquiry in the vital work of establishing the truth about allegations that UK authorities were involved in the mistreatment of detainees held abroad. Our strong view, however, is that the process currently proposed does not have the credibility or transparency to achieve this.

Mr. Cameron, the alleged illegal violations of human rights of detainees did not happen under your watch. You have an opportunity to draw a line under what happened, and restore Britain’s reputation, which is extremely important in fighting terrorism, by having a credible inquiry that satisfies the objections raised by the lawyers representing these reputable and internationally respected organizations.

The universality of human rights, respect for the rule of law, and avoiding double standards in dealing with nations and individuals should become the guiding principles of America and Britain. Now, that in parallel, with good intelligence and effective policing, is the moral, smart, and effective way to fight terrorism.

We’re told that the trouble began last Saturday night 6th August. According to a BBC report, about 300 people gathered outside a police station that night and “demanded justice”. Their protest quickly spiralled out of control.

The justice the crowd were demanding followed the killing by police of a young black man, Mark Duggan. Details of the killing are sketchy, to say the least; but according to the first report issued by the “Independent” Police Complaints Commission there is no evidence to suggest that Mr Duggan shot at the police. However, a starter’s pistol that had been converted to fire live rounds was supposedly discovered near his body.

Although it seems that Mr Duggan had been involved with local gangs, his family and friends strongly refute the suggestion that he is likely to have become involved in a shoot-out with armed police; and according to the Guardian, although he had previously been held on remand, he had never before been convicted of any crime. The inquest into the shooting is scheduled for December; but if numerous previous inquests into the actions of the police are anything to go by (Stephen Lawrence, Jean Charles De Menezes, Bloody Sunday, Guildford Four, Birmingham Six, for example), anyone expecting justice would be well advised not to hold their breath.

The media coverage of the current urban unrest is unsurprisingly one-sided. Our TV screens have shown hours of coverage of those whose property has been damaged, stolen or destroyed. Many of these people are understandably angry and scared. Many others have been shrill in their demands for tougher policing, and there have been calls to use the army. All of our trusted leaders are unsurprisingly unanimous in their condemnation of the rioters, and their support of the police. We’ve heard stiff-lipped politicians and steely-eyed chief constables angrily asserting there cannot be any possible justification for the violence, and firmly promising the full retribution of the law. In the media’s ceaseless desire to provide “balanced” reporting, we’ve even seen numerous young people, many of whom are black, stridently condemning the trouble – although one or two have alluded to police oppression. We’ve seen dozens of angst-ridden commentators with puzzled frowns asking “why do they do it?” (which reminded me of George W Bush famously asking “why do they hate us?” in his apparent bewilderment at the Moslem world’s dissatisfaction with the outrages perpetrated against it by Bush’s government).

I don’t presume to speak for a single rioter. No doubt there are some who are opportunist small-time criminals. However, if one tries to take a reasonably objective view of today’s political landscape in Britain, it’s pretty difficult not to believe that most of the responsibility for the rioting lies in exactly the same place as with all civil unrest of this kind since the beginning of “civilisation”: our trusted leaders.

1. Over the last thirty-odd years our trusted leaders have killed-off British manufacturing – the primary source of the nation’s wealth. They have also colluded with international banksters, trans-national corporations and foreign governments to sell-off Britain’s publicly owned infrastructure: energy and water supplies, communications and transport. Then they sold off essential public services such as health and education. They indebted the nation’s future generation to the tune of hundreds of billions (possibly trillions) of pounds with their nefarious Private Finance Initiatives. Throughout all this a very tiny handful of people have become unbelievably wealthy, whilst the vast majority of Britons have seen their wages decline, or watch their jobs disappear altogether. When they can find employment (which is not an easy thing to do) the vast majority of young Britons must now work longer hours for less money and in worse conditions than their parents did. They cannot hope to retire at the same age as their grandparents did, and they cannot hope to receive as good a pension as their grandparents had.

There might be cause for a young person to feel a little discontent with that situation.

2. Britain looks more and more like a police state than it has done since the Civil War. The police who, until not very long ago took pride in walking the streets carrying nothing more dangerous than a short truncheon and a pair of handcuffs – even when the nation was at war, now strut around in suits of armour with a small arsenal of various lethal weapons at their fingertips. They can, and do, imprison people without charge for up to two weeks. It’s impossible for people to use an airport without being subjected to rigorous, intrusive, and perfectly ridiculous, “security” checks (a direct consequence of our trusted leaders’ repulsive foreign policies); and we routinely send our young people off to distant countries dressed up as soldiers of one kind or another where they are ordered to commit acts which, if any form of real international justice existed, would undoubtedly be condemned as war crimes.

There might be cause for a young person to feel a little discontent with that situation.

3. Then, of course there is the killing of Mr Duggan itself – the supposed trigger of the current unrest. Directly pertinent to the police state which Britain has become, the killing of this young man is indicative of the total impunity with which the police believe they can act. Violent police raids are a routine daily occurrence in underprivileged neighbourhoods throughout the UK. The raids are nearly always destructive, and terrifying, and often prove utterly fruitless. And numerous completely innocent people have been killed or wounded by the police, with the subsequent “inquiries” routinely exonerating the perpetrators.

There might be cause for a young person to feel a little discontent with that situation.

Whilst it’s most probable that none of these factors are consciously passing through the mind of some young person as he loots a store or sets fire to it, it’s equally probable that at least one of these reasons explain the daily living conditions of that young person. So far we haven’t seen a lot of rioting in the streets of South Kensington or Chelsea say, or any of the leafy suburbs or gated communities where the sons and daughters of politicians, banksters, corporate executives, lawyers and company accountants while away their comfortable lives. No doubt they’re too busy studying to become the next generation of trusted leaders.

However, there might be cause for some young people to feel a little discontent with that situation.

The US brags about its political systems as being based on the separation of powers between the Executive (President and Vice-President), the Legislature and the Judiciary and a resulting built-in checks and balances system. This is supposedly a superior form of democracy based on checks and balances to avoid abuse of power by one or the other of the three branches forming the US government. In the US Constitution Article II Section 2 states that the US president has “the power to grant reprieves and pardons…” Every indication is that President Obama, far from using his constitutional powers to free the Cuban Five, made it clear to the Supreme Court judges that they should rule against revision.¹

This has obviously been a political case right from day one. It is even further revealed by the Supreme Court’s decision and the shameless refusal of the judges to publicly explain to the world the basis of their ruling. Of course the judges are not obliged to divulge it according to the American legal system. However, in a case such as this one which the whole world and many governments are watching, a public explanation was necessary. We are perhaps witnessing one of the greatest ironies in the current international political scene. The Cuban Five are cruelly and politically persecuted for their peaceful anti-terrorist motivations and activities. The reason? They are acting on behalf of and supporting the Cuban government. One of the main charges that Washington levies against Cuba is lack of democracy, that it is does not, amongst other characteristics exhibit a political system similar to the American one which would include checks and balances. The Cuban system is in fact one unified revolutionary peoples’ political power, from the top down and from the bottom up including the judiciary, each enjoying its own respective fields of competence. The relationship and inter-action of all the different Cuban state levels between themselves including the judiciary and all of these institutions in turn with the citizens, is a feature of the Cuban type of democracy. There is no need to get into a debate as to whether the Cuban system is more democratic than the American model. However, if one takes into account this latest Supreme Court episode of US democracy in action on the one hand and my direct experience and study of the Cuban political system on the other hand, Cuba has no “democracy” lessons to take at all from the USA.

1. See Ruben Campa, et al., Petitioners v. United States of America and Wayne S. Smith, “Free the Cuban Five!” Nation, 13 July 2010.

Regarding this issue, since March fourth to date the international media, especially based in Miami, Washington and Madrid, are concentrating on Havana, the Gross trials and legal challenges.

For those who may be puzzled by the Supreme Court decision, it would be useful to examine briefly what has happened in the United States — not Cuba — between March fourth to date in order to perhaps shed some light onto the Supreme Court’s confirmation of the lower court’s resolution. In this five-month period, the Obama Administration has on many occasions repeated its policy of interfering in the internal affairs of Cuba under the guise of “democracy promotion”. For example, the Congress has recently ratified once again the decision to spend 20$ million in the next year explicitly dedicated to subversion in Cuba, including the type of activities that Gross had carried out and for which he has been arrested, tried, found guilty and sentenced. On many occasions the Obama Administration in collaboration with their mercenaries on and off the island did not reduce, but rather reinforced, their provocative activities against the sovereignty of Cuba, one of the legal principles violated by Gross as a US agent contractor.

While Obama visited Chile on March 21, 2011, not long after the original trial and sentencing of Gross, the US President spoke about the need to defend “democracy and human rights within our borders [USA and Chile], let us recommit to defending them across our hemisphere…. And yes, that includes the people of Cuba.”

How do readers think that the Cuban government and judiciary had taken this? By adding insult to injury, Obama stated in an interview to a Chilean newspaper as a prelude to his visit to Santiago de Chile that “The Chilean experience, and more particularly its successful transition to democracy and its sustained, growing economy, is a model for the region and the world.”

When the news was released on August fifth regarding the Cuban Supreme Court decision, it was the same day that those of us who follow the news through Telesúr and other alternative media were able to bear witness to how the Chilean police violently attacked the students and professors demanding education, economic and political rights. There were according to official sources 874 arrests and hundreds wounded. Is this the example that Obama meant of Chile being a model of democracy and economic development for Cuba? The scenes of Chilean state brutality resembled more the emblematic steps (Escalanita) of the University of Havana before the January 1, 1959 Triumph of the Revolution, when the US-backed Batista dictatorship unleashed their forces so many times against the youth, professors and workers. Many students were killed in these assaults in Havana, but so far at the time of writing in any case, there has been no deaths in Chile during the course of the current confrontations.

Despite the demands to Obama from around the world declared by Nobel Prize winners, individual parliamentarians, parliaments and personalities for the release of the Cuban Five, what has Obama done between March fourth and today? He has done nothing, and we are heading into a most crucial period for the soon-to-be concluded Habeus Corpus process for Gerardo Hernández Nodelo, with nothing yet positive in sight at this time. The Cuban Five are imprisoned since 1998 because they attempted to curb US-backed terrorist interference in the internal affairs of Cuba.

Given all these provocations and repeated confirmations from the White House and the US Congress that they have every intention to continue their program of attempting to subvert Cuba’s constitutional order, how else can the Cuban government and judicial authorities react? They have no choice but to make it clear that they will continue to defend their sovereignty as it is the right of every country to do so, big or small.

Allan Gross and his family should blame their own government for their predicament. The White House got him into it in the first place. By carrying out the same policies against Cuba since March fourth to date, it has given no reason for the Cuban judiciary to decide otherwise.

In dissident politics in the United States, we have long argued that this quest for economic and military dominance can’t be squared with basic moral and political principles. We’re on top, but it’s unjust and unsustainable.

Whether or not the United States has ever had a legitimate claim to that top spot — or whether there should be spots on top for any nation(s) — the days of uncontested dominance are over: Our economy is in permanent decline and our military power continues to fade. We are still the wealthiest society in history, but we are no longer the dynamic heart of the global economy. Our military is still able to destroy at will, but the wars of the past decade have demonstrated the limits of that barbarism.

How should the U.S. public react to this shift? One approach would be to acknowledge that predatory corporate capitalism based on greed and First World imperialism based on violence have produced obscene levels of inequality, both within societies and between societies, that are inconsistent with those basic moral and political principles. Our task is to reshape systems and institutions before it’s too late.

That kind of critical self-reflection also leads to the conclusion that our society not only fails on the criterion of social justice but also is ecologically unsustainable. We are a profligate, consumption-mad society, in a world in which unsustainable living arrangements are the norm in the developed world and spreading quickly in the developing world. We can’t predict the time frame for collapse if we continue on this trajectory, but we can be reasonably certain that without major changes in our relationship to the larger living world the ecosphere will at some point (likely within decades) be unable to support large-scale human life as we know it.

These crises, if honestly acknowledged and squarely faced, would test our capacity to analyze and adapt — there’s no guarantee that enough time remains to prevent catastrophe. Without such honesty, there is no hope of a decent future.

So, the bad news is that we’re in trouble.

The worse news is that the mainstream political culture cannot face this reality.

Dissident political organizing must take into account the fact that contemporary America is deeply delusional. Our collective life is shaped by a propaganda-driven political system that ignores and evades. Political leaders — from the reactionary right of the Republican Party to the liberal left of the Democratic Party — are not interested in creating new systems to face these challenges but instead are mired in trivial debates about how to duct-tape together the existing social, economic, and political systems to allow us to live in our delusions a bit longer.

In addition to critiquing the delusions of the dominant culture, we dissidents have to make sure we don’t absorb those same delusions. We have to be honest not only about the promise of social movements but their limits. My fear is that many — maybe even most — people who identify with progressive/left/radical politics are in denial about the depth of the crises and, therefore, prone to misjudge the potential of traditional social movements. Those of us who define ourselves by our commitment to social justice and ecological sustainability — those who want to make the world a better place — have to be careful to avoid delusions of our own. Here’s how this often plays out:

A dissident speaker offers a critique of some aspect of the dominant culture’s political, economic, or social systems. The task of taking on those systems seems overwhelming, and someone in the audience asks, “Is there any hope that we can change things?” The speaker acknowledges the difficulty of the task, but points out that social movements in the past have faced great challenges, lost many battles along the way, and persevered to make the world a better place. In the United States, the speaker often cites the civil rights movement as an example: Courageous people organizing over centuries to challenge the deeply entrenched white supremacy that defined the country, ending first slavery and then formal American apartheid. The speaker reminds the audience that the work of popular movements remains incomplete and that we owe it to generations past and future — and to ourselves — to press on.

I’m familiar with that exchange because I’ve both been in those audiences and also been the speaker offering that analysis. It’s an honest response — historically accurate and morally defensible — but these days I’m less comfortable with that stock answer. Yes, we must remember the promise of social movements, inspired by past successes. But we also need to be clear about their limits in the present and future.

Let’s push the example of the civil rights movement a bit:

When Martin Luther King, Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in the 1963 March on Washington, he spoke of “a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.” He argued that “the architects of our republic” had signed “a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir,” which guaranteed “the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” For black Americans, that note “has come back marked insufficient funds,” King said. “We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check — a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.”

In 1963, King was speaking in a world that promised endless bounty, and his claim was that black people had a right to their fair share of that bounty; the metaphor of checks and banks was not only metaphorical. He spoke of political liberty, but the assumption was that with the “riches of freedom” would come, if not actual riches, certainly a more equitable share of the country’s wealth. White America didn’t particularly like letting black — or indigenous, Latino, Asian — people into the winner’s circle, but once it became impossible to maintain apartheid-by-law, white folks gave a bit of ground. White society grudgingly gave that ground in the middle of a post-World War II boom that promised endless expansion. The fight for racial justice took place on a relatively stable platform of U.S. global political power and economic growth.

The same context applies to other social movements of that period fighting for workers’ rights, women’s rights, lesbian/gay rights, ecological awareness. Moving into the 1990s, it also applies to the global justice movement that focused on the economic imperialism of the First World, and even to the anti-war movement of the early 2000s.

There were, of course, ups and downs in these decades. The U.S. debacle in Southeast Asia led to doubts about U.S. power and methods, but those were washed away by the demise of the Soviet Union and the American “victory” in the Cold War at the end of the 1980s. There were economic recessions, but they didn’t disturb a widely shared belief that the economy, over the long haul, would grow indefinitely. There was a brief period of concern in the 1970s about environmental limits, but when predictions of short-term disaster proved imprecise, most people quit worrying.

Most of the dissident political analysis and organizing of the past half century also has gone forward with an assumption of economic growth and ecological stability. The goal of much of this organizing was to make that stable, growing world a fairer place with a more just distribution of power and resources. I believe that even many of those fighting against U.S. domination of the world expected — and wanted — to live in a world in which the United States remained if not central and obscenely wealthy, at least important and comfortable.

To borrow a phrase from songwriter John Gorka, that is the old future, and the old future’s gone — dead and gone, never to return. While the dominant culture may indulge its delusions of endless bounty, that’s not how the cards are falling. What does that mean for political dissidents? With so many variables and contingencies, any attempt at specific prediction can’t be taken seriously. But we have to do our best to anticipate what is coming so that we can organize as effectively as possible.

The key shift: We will be organizing in a period of contraction, not expansion. There will be less of a lot of things we have come to take for granted (energy and natural resources) and more of other things we’ve been hiding under the rug for a long time (toxic residue and environmental disruption).

That less/more reality in the physical world will no doubt have an effect on our political/economic/social worlds. It may well be that the liberal tolerance that has been hard-won by subordinated groups will evaporate rather quickly with intensified competition to acquire energy resources and avoid toxic disruptions. A willingness to share power and wealth during times of abundance doesn’t automatically endure in times of scarcity. Scapegoating, a time-honored tactic, is especially useful during hard times.

My concerns about this are exacerbated by two trends in contemporary society: a diminished capacity for empathy and a dwindling connection to the natural world.

On empathy: Capitalism defines human beings as primarily greedy, self-interested animals designed to maximize their own position, especially in the acquisition of material goods and status. That instinct obviously is part of our nature, but — just as obviously — that is not all there is to human nature; given the long evolutionary history of humans in band-level societies defined by solidarity and cooperation, we should assume the greedy instincts probably are not primary. Yet in capitalism that sociopathic instinct is rewarded and reinforced. With each generation that lives in such a system, our capacity for empathy is undermined. This is not an argument against individuality or for complete subordination to the collective, but merely recognition of one of the ugliest aspects of capitalism — the belief that we can ignore the fate of others and still make a decent world.

On nature: In a high-energy/high-technology society that is increasingly mass-mediated, with each generation we grow more alienated from the larger living world. Just as capitalism undermines our connections to each other, industrial society undermines our connections to other species and the ecosystems on which we depend. The industrial world is a dead world, and our immersion in that world makes it harder for us to see what is dying. This is not an argument against all technology or human’s use of our creative capacity to change our environment, but merely recognition of one of the scariest aspects of modernity — the belief that we can ignore the living world and still live in the world.

There is nothing terribly new in these warnings. Let’s go back to the civil rights movement and another of King’s memorable speeches, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” delivered on April 4, 1967, at Riverside Church in New York City. In his critique of the U.S. attack on Vietnam and the larger forces behind that attack, King said: “I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

Ask yourself, where do we stand on the struggle to move from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society? What about our obsession with machines and computers? The culture’s worship of profit motives and property rights? How much progress have the past four decades of progress brought?

None of this is a call to abandon organizing or sink into the paralysis of despair. It’s simply a suggestion that we deal with reality. Is the sky falling? Of course not, because the sky doesn’t fall — that’s the wrong metaphor. Better to ask, is the sky darkening?

What is my program for organizing in a world beneath a darkened sky? I have no program, only some observations and tentative conclusions, maybe nothing more than gut instincts.

First, we should focus on creating more actual physical spaces and real human networks based on progressive/left/radical values, putting as much energy as needed to anchor and solidify them, even if it takes time away from issue-oriented campaigns. As we work on specific policy issues, let’s organize with an eye toward building not coalitions but communities. In hard times, coalitions evaporate, but communities have a shot at surviving.

Second, whatever projects we pursue, there should be a component that connects people to the non-human world and includes physical work in that world. We need not disconnect completely from our abstract analytical work and computers, but every project should give us a chance to do physical work with others, outdoors as much as possible.

Those first two instincts have led me to redirect a considerable amount of my time, energy, and money to a progressive community center we are building in Austin, TX, 5604 Manor. There is important and exciting organizing and advocacy work going on there, but just as important is the community-building activity as we renovate the building, clean up the back yard, plant gardens, and get to know each other across lines of age, race, and language.

These instincts are captured in the first stanza of William Stafford’s poem, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”:

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

My third instinct may seem obvious: We need to tell all the truths that we know and feel. My sense is that this is our most difficult task, to speak honestly of the darkening sky. In the dominant culture, such talk is most often ignored — people either refuse to listen, laugh it off, or deride it as defeatist. Even in dissident circles, attempts to discuss these subjects bluntly often lead people to disengage or demand that I only speak in a positive manner.

But every day there are more people — though still a small minority — who want to face what is coming, even though such a reckoning deepens our grief. Our task is to speak aloud what others may feel but may be afraid to voice. Perhaps the most radical act today is to speak the truth about a darkening sky and remain committed to organizing, knowing there is no guarantee we can endure, let alone prevail.

This spirit is captured in the last stanza of Stafford’s poem:

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes, no, or maybe –
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

The potential power of social movements at this moment in history flows from this commitment to speaking the truth — not truth to power, which is too invested in its delusions to listen — but truth to each other.

2…   Immediately discontinue the manufacture, export, and use of drones.  Cut the military budget by 99%. Cut the State Department budget by 90%.  Eliminate the Black Budget which was authorized by the 1947 National Security Act of President Truman.  Even if all uniformed members of the military were brought home, the killing would not end. It is clear that  the State Department, CIA, and private contractors are more dangerous than the military. The uniformed military is only the tip of the iceberg. The real danger is with US forces that operate in secret.

3…   Encourage the dissemination of information from whistleblowers such as Bradley Manning and Julian Assange.  Any possibility of a democratic nation died with the adoption of the Black Budget which prevented citizens from having access to information; therefore, no informed vote has been cast in the USA since 1947. If you can’t follow the money, you don’t know what your government is doing. More whisleblowers are needed so that voters will have the information necessary to cast informed ballots.

4…   Place a 100% tax on all income above $88,000 – all income, earned and unearned.

5…   Aim to close all nuclear power plants.  Encourage green power - solar power – water power – wind power.   A ridgeline with windmills is preferable to a ridgeline that has been contaminated.

6…   Support small, local, organic family farms.  End all subsidies to large industrial farms.

7…   End all secret boards.  This can be accomplished by withholding public funds from organizations that use secret boards for decision-making purposes.

Hospital ‘Ethics’ Boards meet in secret and make life and death decisions.  Any decision to ‘pull the plug’ should be made in the open. Patient confidentiality would not be violated if the identity of the patient was not disclosed.

Library boards sometimes meet behind closed doors and censor political books that could be considered ‘unpatriotic’.  (Yes, it is now happening in the USA.)

When fascism came, it was not at the point of a gun, it was not brought by government troops, it was not even imposed by the Corporate CEO or the Hedge Fund manager.  Fascism quietly came in the guise of a misinformed teacher, a celebrity celebrating assassination, and a bespectacled librarian banning books.

8…   The problems with the legal system could fill volumes but there are some simple improvements that could be made.

Limit the use of expert witnesses.  With enough money testimony can be designed to fit any goal desired – no matter how unjust. Juries should always be told when testimony is purchased.  Now is the perfect time to examine the way juries work.   Secret deliberations foster unjust verdicts.  The deliberations should be open -  the identities of the jurors could be withheld till after the verdict is rendered.   Group deliberations are a problem.   Anytime more than one person is in a room, one person will be dominant.   A pecking order contaminates the process and can prevent a fair verdict.  Is unanimity really a sacred concept – or should there be room for dissenting views within a jury?    Even the Supreme Court allows for dissenting opinion.

End the death penalty. The State should never have the power to kill its citizens or anyone else. In addition, the death penalty can be a deterrent to justice.  The first juror to speak publicly after the Casey Anthony trial stated that it was the death penalty that affected her verdict vote.

9…   Adopt a national policy which assures food, shelter, and medical/dental care for all – with no regard to race, creed, citizenship, economic status, place of birth, or any other dehumanizing judgment.

10…  Send a formal apology with an offer of reparations to all individual victims of unjust US imprisonment and torture.  Also to all countries that have been victims of USA foreign policy. Start with the former inhabitants of Diego Garcia. The Chagossians were forcibly removed so that the island could be transformed into a military base for the US. It can be debated that the forced expulsion of the native population is evidence of genocide by the USA.

Is there a common thread to these statements? Each writer/thinker/orator is training a highly honed mind upon some of the profoundest concepts of our frail human intellect and imagination: liberty; truth and lying; morality and sin. Each brief statement is a flourishing note—the memorable, essential solo arpeggio in the midst of the orchestral performance. But… beyond the particular insight or theme, each author shares a certain quality of mind—the ability to probe deeper, to turn the mundane or jejune or vapid idea on its head: to look within the essence of the question and oneself… to rotate the squares of the Rubik’s Cube till one gets just the right fit.

Now consider this statement by Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court’s recent decision to nullify the state of California’s ban on selling “gory” videos to minors:

“Grimm’s Fairy Tales, for example, are grim indeed. As her just desserts for trying to poison Snow White, the wicked queen is made to dance in red hot slippers ‘till she fell dead on the floor.”

What’s missing?

Well, as Wordswoth once responded to a noisome fellow who claimed he could write as well as he—if only he had a mind to: “It is clear that the only thing missing is the mind.”

It is not just that Justice Scalia is making a false analogy, comparing apples and eggs—two very different media—the interactive, sensory-flooding world of “Mortal Kombat,” for example, with the word-by-word, progressive-sequential approach of the literate world… but, also, he seems to have missed a key point. Snow White—and not even an “avatar” of Snow White—is not the agent of the wicked queen’s demise. The queen’s wretched end is a consequence of her violation of higher moral codes—and the ultimate “enforcer” is not some kid with a joystick, but… fate.

Perhaps it is wrong to expect a higher level of thought from our Supreme Court justices? After all, they are not charged with upholding wisdom; merely with the far-easier task of upholding our Constitution—with all its faults.

And just what is this “Constitution,” this “living” document? Reading it, we wander around labyrinths of legalese with various elite interests—slave state vs. commercial; agrarian vs nascent manufacturing—until we come to the fairly clear Bill of Rights.

Except, we’re still trying to figure out “Freedom of Speech”… and, God knows, the Second Amendment is as wide open as Jared Loughner’s surreal gaze. The Constitution is not exactly William Blake’s territory: “Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believed.” More like Butler’s: “We are not required to know the truth, but to speak it, and so with justice.” And in this murky world of truth, half-truths, falsehoods and confusion, the “eternal vigilance” of which Phillips reminds us is the “price of liberty.” And, that vigilance, that review and interpretation is not, ultimately, the province of Supreme Court justices, but is, inviolably, ours—i.e., We the People’s.

Three times in the past 18 months our Supreme Corporate Court has expressed contempt for We the People and elevated the rights and privileges of a select few above the increasingly disenfranchised many. The “prejudice” of these Supremes was clearly manifested in January, 2010 when, according to the New York Times, the Court “ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections. … The 5-4 decision was a vindication, the majority said, of the First Amendment’s most basic free speech principle—that the government has no business regulating political speech.” On the other hand, “the dissenters said that allowing corporate money to flood the political marketplace would corrupt democracy.”

Now here’s where things get murky. Nowhere in the Constitution are corporations mentioned. Not until 1819 does the Supreme Court recognize corporations as having some of the “contractual rights” of “persons.” But, while the “rights” of corporations have expanded exponentially in the past couple of centuries, the rights of the People have been abridged. Money, after all, is a marvelous lubricator of “political speech.” While the Court has been telling the wealthy “Full speed ahead,” some 45 million Americans have been getting by on food stamps, and several million more are too worried about their jobs and/or foreclosures to help bankroll local or national candidates. The First Amendment is about Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Expression. It has nothing to do with permitting corporate financial power to overwhelm the free speech of the people—to drown out their voices. Here we are in Mark Twain territory: “You want to be very careful about lying; otherwise, you are nearly sure to get caught.”

The two other instances of Supreme Court-Constitutional perfidies came lickety-split in June, 2011. First the Court decided that 1.5 million female employees of Walmart could not exercise their First Amendment right of Free Speech by uniting in a class-action suit against their alleged gender-biased employer—that global corporation that has helped to finance thousands of factories and sweatshops around the world and driven down wages in the homeland. Again, one thinks of Samuel Butler: “Cannibalism is moral in a cannibal country.” Cannibalizing the working class is fine and dandy, the fat cats caterwaul, but the tasty morsels would be gauche to complain!

Perhaps these salivating cats have not read the First Amendment carefully or they would have understood that the right to petition for governmental redress of grievances also comes within its purview. And, one wonders: if corporations have expanded their rights as persons and have increasingly assumed quasi-governmental powers—often writing legislation through their lobbyists—haven’t We the People the right to petition corporations and our government for a redress of grievances?

The third wave of these judicial outrages came just in time for the 4th of July celebrations of our freedoms! In another 5-4 decision, with Don Scalia writing the majority opinion, the Court effectively told California’s parents they could go screw themselves. (But not in public!)

On John Stewart’s show the other night, I caught a sample of the kind of videos California’s parents did not want sold to their children: an attractive blond in a skin-tight wet-suit was literally being torn apart by two hulking males on either side of her, pulling on her limbs like a chicken’s wishing bone. Guts, blood and gore spill out of the cracked carcass.

Perhaps we should not be surprised that the Court honored the First Amendment Right of Expression of the multi-billion dollar video-“game” industry over the First Amendment Right of millions of Californians to express their opprobrium. (And these citizens, one should note, were not insisting on censorship—they wanted regulation: under the same principles that we regulate the sale of alcohol, tobacco or firearms to minors, or restrict their access to potentially dangerous motor vehicles.) Wise justices might have recalled Ben Franklin: “Sin is not hurtful because it is forbidden, it is forbidden because it is hurtful.”

Probably it is too much to hope, in the majority of these “Justices,” for the quality of mind that can penetrate the great mysteries of life, truth, and morality—not to mention justice and law!. We hope for wisdom and the understanding of great hearts, and we are met with the Wall of the Law. About one hundred and fifty years ago, Chief Seattle of the Duwamish tribe, perceived our fatal dichotomies all too well:

He gave you laws. … Your religion was written upon tables of stone by the iron finger of your God. … Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors—the dreams of our old men… and it is written in the hearts of our people. … Tribe follows tribe, and nation follows nation, like the waves of the sea. It is the order of nature, and regret is useless. Your time of decay may be distant, but it will surely come, for even the White Man whose God walked and talked with him as friend with friend cannot be exempt from the common destiny.

Characters:

Antonio Scalia (aka “Big Tony” — BT)

Clarence Thomas (aka “Little Bell” — LB)

Scene: Big Tony has pulled Little Bell aside in the parlor of a Georgetown apartment.

BT: I thought we needed to have this chat about this upcoming Walmart case.

LB: Yazzah. …

BT: You see, essentially what we’ve got here is a bunch of hysterical women trying to bring down one of America’s iconic institutions.

LB: Yazzah. … That’s how I sees it.

BT: Well, you see, there’s this whole principle at stake here. (Putting his hand avuncularly on LB’s shoulder–) Little Bell, if this goes through. … I call it “collective redress,” you see. Well… it’s as dangerous as the notion of “collective bargaining,” you see. These women are trying to work the courts, I’m telling you. They’ll bring down the System, I’m telling you. They’ll bring down the whole fucken System!

LB: Yazzah. That’s right. That’s how I sees it.

BT: Marone! Can you imagine? Why, if we allowed them to do this… we’d have anarchy, I’m telling you. Soon we’d have the Hispanics… and they’d be organizing and they’d be suing the whole fucken government to get Texas back! Give it back to Mexico! Hell, man, we’d have the Injuns organizing and they’d want Massachusetts back—and all the rest of it! Why, we’d have your Black brothers organizing—some hothead young radical who hasn’t been co-opted yet, some little sperm cell that didn’t get washed out with the douche bag, and he’d be out there radicalizing the unemployed. … You know what he’d say, doncha?

LB: Nossah. …

BT: Why, he’d tell’em they had a right, that’s what he’d say… that they had a “Constitutional right” (!) to file a grievance against the whole goddamn government, that’s what he’d say. A collective action… a class-action case against the whole goddamn government, Clarence! The whole goddamn government!

LB: Yazzah. That’s what he’d say. I do believe it!

BT: And they’d listen, Clarence. They’d listen! An’ you know why?

LB: Nossah. …

BT: Because we’d of set the precedent, that’s why! With this goddamn Walmart case. … So, you see, Li’l Bell, that’s why we can’t do it. We just can’t do it!

LB: Yazzah. I sees it now.

BT: (A little calmer now–) Okay, so the Jew and the skirts will throw a fit…, who cares?

LB: Which Jew, Sah?

BT: Breyer, of course! Talk about a guy who’s living in the past, huh? He thinks it’s still the old days with Jews marching arm-in-arm with the colored folks at the NAACP!

LB: (Smiling–) Yazzah! Them were the days!

BT: Okay for them days, I guess, but Breyer’s gotta get with the program! I mean… ideas like a class-action suit against grievances…? What kind of grievances? How they gonna prove it? So…, a skirt doesn’t advance up the ladder of success like a guy does. Does that mean it’s a policy? I mean, what if the Palestinians got hold of such a notion, huh? I mean, where would we be? Where would it end?

LB: Yazzah. … I sees that.

BT: Do you know where we’d be?

LB: (Hesitantly–) Nossah.

BT: Up shit’s creek, that’s where we’d be! I mean the whole damn Empire, that’s where we’d be! The whole good-Jesus N.W.O.! (Suddenly cautious–) None of this is going past us, right LB? I mean. …

LB: Nossah! (Solemnly; raising his right hand–) On my word of honor!

BT: I mean… it would be like the Nixon tapes, fer god’sake. I mean, if it were to get out.

LB: Yazzah.

BT: I mean, it would be like that goddamn Ellsberg, ya know.

LB: Yazzah. That’s right. Like that goddamn Ellsberg.

BT: (Looking around; still suspicious–) What the hell is that on the wall?

LB: Huh?

BT: Over there? What is that? (As he approaches, the robot fly buzzes away, lands nearby.) Goddamn fly! You see that? Goddamn fly! What kind of maid service they got in this place? Huh? The whole country’s falling apart and a bunch of hysterical women want to sue Walmart!

LB: (Shaking his head–) It’s bad! No measure! The folks has no measure no more!

BT: Well…, we’ll have the Jew and the skirts putting up a fuss, but we’ll just get Gwen Ifill or someone in the media to say something about the “liberals” on the court and then the American people will go back to sleep. They’ll stop paying attention soon as they hear that word. They’ve been conditioned now.

LB: Yazzah, that’s the word! (Hits his thigh–) “Conditioned!” (Laughs.)

BT: (Avuncularly again–) And, of course, that hybrid in the White House—he won’t say anything. He’s smart. He knows his place. He’ll keep his mouth shut. He can talk about marching on the picket lines when he’s a candidate, when he’s campaigning, but… he knows how the game is played. He’ll send Michelle off to Africa or something like that. Set her up with a meeting with Mandella an’ all the boobs will say, “See, they’re such good people! They really care!”

LB: (Laughing–) They really care! That’s a good one!

BT: Well, I’m glad we had this little talk, LB. I feel better now, knowing I can count on you!

LB: (Serious again–) Yazzah!

BT: Oh, yeah, there’s something else on the docket. Something about environmental groups being able to sue power companies that release too many emissions. (Starts laughing–) Can you imagine!

LB: (Laughing–) Nossah!

BT: Well, they know where they can stuff that case, right, LB?

LB: Yazzah! Stuff it!

BT: So…, how’s the little missus, LB? She treating you good?

LB: Yazzah! She’s a good one. Long as she keeps her mouth shut when she shouldn’t be pokin’ her nose where it don’t belong! But, I keeps her quiet now.

BT: That’s good, LB. That’s good. Wish the skirts would mind their lessons! They just don’t know what we’re up against. Crazy people want to bring down the whole System, the whole kit-n-kaboodle that we built up over the thousands of years! The whole financial system! The IMF…, and the World Bank…, and the central banks…, and the Rothschilds…, and the corporations…, and the nation-states with their sham democracies that hold it all together… the religious institutions… the kings and queens… the whole goddamn mother-fucking System! Like it was nothin’!

LB: The whole kit-n-kaboodle!

BT: Well, we’re not gonna let’em! We’re not gonna let’em do it, by God! No, sir! We don’t have this beautiful military-surveillance System for nothing, by God! We ain’t gonna let’em do it!

LB: Nossah! Tha’s right! Not gonna let’em! Not gonna let’em bring down the whole kit-n-kaboodle!. … Nossah. … Nossah. … Nossah. …

In 2007, the American Civil Liberties filed a landmark lawsuit, Mohamed et. al. vs. Jeppesen DataPlan, Inc., on behalf of five victims of the Bush administration’s so-called “extraordinary rendition” kidnap and torture program.

The five men, Binyam Mohamed, Ahmed Agiza, Abou Elkassim Britel, Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah and Bisher al-Rawi, claimed with copious evidence to back their assertions, that their “rendition” and torture was facilitated by the Boeing subsidiary.

Not a single plaintiff was ever charged with a so-called “terrorism” offense let alone convicted of a crime in open court. That didn’t stop America’s shadow warriors from kidnapping, drugging and then whisking them away–aboard aircraft provided by Jeppesen–to CIA “black sites” or the dungeons of close U.S. allies in Europe and the Middle East.

In 2006, the firm’s filthy role in CIA torture programs was exposed by investigative journalist Jane Mayer in The New Yorker.

Indeed, one Bob Overby, Jeppesen’s managing director, said during a breakfast for new hires in San Jose, Calif., “We do all of the extraordinary rendition flights–you know, the torture flights. Let’s face it, some of these flights end up that way.”

Technical writer Sean Belcher blew the whistle on the firm and told Mayer that Overby, extolling the virtues of the corporatist bottom line, said: “It certainly pays well. They”–the CIA–”spare no expense. They have absolutely no worry about cost. What they have to get done, they get done.”

Another recipient of the CIA tender mercies was Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen, who was kidnapped while on vacation in 2004 by the Agency after attempting to cross the border between Serbia and Macedonia.

According to The New Yorker, Masri charged in court papers that “Macedonian authorities turned him over to a C.I.A. rendition team. Then, he said, masked figures stripped him naked, shackled him, and led him onto a Boeing 737 business jet.”

“Flight plans, Mayer reported, “prepared by Jeppesen show that from Skopje, Macedonia, the 737 flew to Baghdad, where it had military clearance to land, and then on to Kabul. On board, Masri has said, he was chained to the floor and injected with sedatives. After landing, he was put in the trunk of a car and driven to a building where he was placed in a dank cell. He spent the next four months there, under interrogation.”

The CIA claimed it was all a case of “mistaken identity” when he was finally released, and dumped penniless, along the side of a road in the former Yugoslavia.

Mayer disclosed that after delivering their human cargo up to torture, “the American flight crew fared better than their passenger. Documents show that after the 737 delivered Masri to the Afghan prison it flew to the resort island of Majorca, where, for two nights, crew members stayed at a luxury hotel, at taxpayers’ expense.”

As a corporate entity directly profiting from the CIA’s torture programs by planning and facilitating Agency ghost flights, Jeppesen bears equal responsibility for serious breeches of U.S. and international law. As a co-conspirator with the CIA, Jeppesen was complicitous in the Agency’s illegal kidnapping and disappearance of “terrorism” suspects into CIA black sites across Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

While American “justice” is now a euphemism for impunity for the ruling rich and a maximum security prison cell for the poor, others are far less squeamish when it comes to pointing the finger, and naming names.

As the Council of Europe reported back in 2007, “The Legal Affairs and Human Rights Committee now considers it factually established that secret detention centres operated by the CIA have existed for some years in Poland and Romania, though not ruling out the possibility that secret CIA detentions may also have occurred in other Council of Europe member states.”

The Council “earnestly deplores the fact that the concepts of state secrecy or national security are invoked by many governments (United States, Poland, Romania, ‘the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’, Italy and Germany, as well as the Russian Federation in the Northern Caucasus) to obstruct judicial and/or parliamentary proceedings aimed at ascertaining the responsibilities of the executive in relation to grave allegations of human rights violations.”

“The Committee also stresses,” human rights rapporteur Dick Marty wrote, “the need to rehabilitate and compensate victims of such violations. Information as well as evidence concerning the civil, criminal or political liability of the state’s representatives for serious violations of human rights must not be considered as worthy of protection as state secrets.”

Not that any of this mattered to the U.S. government. Shortly after the ACLU’s suit was filed, Bush’s Justice Department intervened, claiming that the case could not go forward and asserted the “state secrets privilege,” arguing that evidence presented by the plaintiffs in court detailing their horrific treatment would undermine U.S. “national security.”

Never mind that these programs were hardly secret and had been disclosed by multiple investigations by journalists and human rights organizations. Shortly after taking office in 2009, this position was defended by Barack Obama’s discredited “change” regime, claiming that the entire case was a “state secret.”

During arguments before the Ninth Circuit in early 2009, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Justice Department attorney Douglas Letter told the court in a thinly-veiled warning that “judges shouldn’t play with fire.”

However, ACLU attorney Ben Wizner said during oral arguments “that the supposedly ultra-secret rendition program is widely known.” Wizner noted “that Sweden recently awarded $450,000 in damages to one of the plaintiffs, Ahmed Agiza, for helping the CIA transport him to Egypt, where he is still being held and allegedly has been tortured.”

“The notion that you have to close your eyes and ears to what the whole world knows is absurd,” Wizner told the court.

Winding its way through the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, a three-judge panel overturned the District Court’s dismissal of the suit, ruling that the government cannot dismiss the case and that the “state secrets privilege” can only be invoked after specific evidence is presented. The three-judge panel went further however, and stated forcefully in their opinion:

At base, the government argues … that state secrets form the subject matter of a lawsuit, and therefore require dismissal, any time a complaint contains allegations, the truth or falsity of which has been classified as secret by a government official. The district court agreed, dismissing the case exclusively because it “involves allegations about [secret] conduct by the CIA.” This sweeping characterization of the “very subject matter” bar has no logical limit–it would apply equally to suits by US citizens, not just foreign nationals; and to secret conduct committed on US soil, not just abroad. According to the government’s theory, the Judiciary should effectively cordon off all secret government actions from judicial scrutiny, immunizing the CIA and its partners from the demands and limits of the law.

But there’s the rub: the secret state had no intention of ever presenting evidence that the plaintiffs’ treatment was “legal,” and in fact, sought to cover their tracks and those of their defense industry partners in the hope of completely erasing this case, and others, including those involving the government’s illegal warrantless wiretapping programs which most certainly “cordon off all secret government actions from judicial scrutiny,” effectively expunging evidence of government crime from the public record.

Undaunted, the Obama administration appealed the decision before a full panel of 11 judges, and in September 2010, that panel reversed the Ninth Circuit’s earlier ruling by a 6-5 vote.

Last December, the ACLU petitioned the Supreme Court to review the lower court’s decision dismissing the lawsuit, but the Court declined.

“With today’s decision, Ben Wizner, the litigation director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, said in a press release, that “the Supreme Court has refused once again to give justice to torture victims and to restore our nation’s reputation as a guardian of human rights and the rule of law.”

Decrying the court’s refusal to review the case against Jeppesen, Wizner said that “to date, every victim of the Bush administration’s torture regime has been denied his day in court. But while the torture architects and their enablers have escaped the judgment of the courts, they will not escape the judgment of history.”

Last month’s dismissal of the ACLU’s petition is all the more ironic considering that the Court, in an 8-1 ruling, permits police to conduct searches of private homes without benefit of obtaining a warrant if they believe an “exigent [emergency] circumstance” prevails.

In other words, we’re to meekly submit to the further erosion of Fourth Amendment protections and can no longer seek relief from the courts simply because police, whom we know never lie or frame criminal defendants, have reason to “suspect” that illegal behavior is taking place behind closed doors!

But as the World Socialist Web Site points out, “a host of recent decisions, all of which in one way or another purport to show ‘deference’ to the executive, whether for reasons of ‘national security,’ ‘state secrets,’ or the ‘exigencies’ of police work, the Supreme Court is abandoning any effort to restrain the exercise of executive power.”

Socialist critic Tom Carter writes, “These decisions, taken together, effectively relegate a US judge to the same role as a judge in a police state, who functions merely as an after-the-fact rubber stamp for executive decisions,” and “should be taken as a warning of things to come.”

While the three Ninth Circuit judges who slapped down the Obama administration’s spurious claim of “state secrets” in the Mohamed vs. Jeppesen case believe that “the Founders of this Nation knew well … arbitrary imprisonment and torture under any circumstance is a gross and notorious act of despotism,” it should be abundantly clear by now that America’s ruling class has no interest in defending basic democratic rights as the drift towards a police state under Bush and Obama has become a repressive tsunami.