There are a number of reasons for this conclusion:

1) Obama has never stood upon principle when the issue of personnel and appointments are concerned. He abandoned Van Jones; same for Shirley Sherrod; same for Elizabeth Warren; same for Justice Liu, currently of the California Supreme Court. All the Tea Party has to do is criticize a potential candidate as being too far to the Left, or too “socialistic,” and Obama runs for the hills. It is quite likely that he will end up appointing a milk-toast liberal who will make little difference when push comes to shove.

2) The U.S. Supreme Court, with Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Roberts and Kennedy, will not be a progressive force for needed social change for a decade or more. With a middle of the road associate of the sort that Obama might appoint, it will at best, be a force for little or no change in the foreseeable future.

3) The U.S. Supreme Court plays a rather insignificant role in changing the important policy decisions that confront the American people. It is true that a right-wing court can rule for George Bush over Al Gore, or for corporate “personhood” over corporate responsibility, or for the legitimacy of a police state or a military empire, instead of for working people. But, ultimately, it is the Congress, owned, bought and paid for by the corporate oligarchy, which makes the laws, overrides “bad” Supreme Court decisions and defines the context within which laws and lawsuits are defined. An “unpopular” court decision can be overturned in a week by a hostile Congress. A disenfranchised public cannot force a group of millionaire politicians to do what is right for the people, without more power and influence than currently exists among the 99% of this country.

4) Historically, the Supreme Court has played a conservative and pro-corporate role regarding the social issues of the day. While the William O. Douglas, Hugo Black, and Earl Warren courts made significant inroads into the areas of protection for those accused of crime and in support of civil rights activists, it was the mass movements of those decades that laid the foundation for those decisions. The Court was not defining or creating a new consciousness; rather, it was merely reinforcing the social trends taking place in the society. The reactionary politics of the American ruling class pose an insurmountable obstacle to the current Supreme Court’s ability to support progressive social change and public control over our economy and resources. While the Occupy Movement, for example, has had a significant impact in educating the American public as to the abuses imposed upon us by the corporate oligarchy, in reality, there is no unified, organized opposition to military/corporate domination of life in this country.

5) The Hobson’s choice of electing Obama because of the minimal impact he will have on future Supreme Court decisions is a ridiculous one. This President has appointed Wall Street hooligans to run our economy. He has waged the most vicious, unwarranted wars in our nation’s history against defenseless Muslims. He has pandered to and empowered an oil industry that is destroying the environment and resources of the entire world, while doing nothing to regulate or control them. He has consistently helped the rich at the expense of the poor. The suggestion that a potential appointment to the US Supreme Court would justify four more years of abuse from this President is nonsense. Any potential court appointment would be a meaningless token in the context of the harm this President is causing. It is similar to a Wal-Mart offer to give customers a $10 rebate on items that are massively overpriced to begin with.

6) There are other marginal advantages to having an Obama in the White House, rather than a Repub: a) the veto power will be exercised more humanely with a Democratic President than a Republican one; b) appointments to various congressional committees and offices will be more diverse than anything the Repubs are capable of; and, c) visitors to the White House will be more likely to represent the world’s peoples than are the white-sheeted candidates the Repubs are likely to court. But the major direction of the country; namely, away from democracy toward imperialism; the concentration of wealth; the destruction of quality education and meaningful human services; and, Klu Klux Klan patriotism rather than just immigration laws — those all are squarely in the hands of the Repubs, whether they be fronted by Obama or a GOP mouthpiece. Until those directions change, the vote for either party is long-term suicide with continued oppression and war.

The next time someone says that the Repubs and the Democrats are the same, BUT the Democrats will make better Supreme Court appointments, think twice. You are getting suckered by a false premise.

The issue does not end here, however, because inevitably the next question arises: When is it inappropriate to choose “the lesser of two evils?”

If a rational human being were asked in 1928 Germany, “Which one of these people do you support: Eichmann, Hitler or Himmler?”, very few people would be likely to choose which of these monsters should be spared and which supported. Most intelligent people would say, they are all horrible excuses for human beings, and good citizens should not support any of them.

What if one is more likely to be nice to Gypsies, or sympathetic to the idea of women’s emancipation or equality with men, or interested in saving the forests? Does an intelligent person say “I’ll support a, or b, or c, because of one or several of these factors?” Or is one left with the realization that the evil done by these “leaders” outweighs any positive act that they might do, regardless of how much better their “constructive” ideas might be?

The people of the world are watching their environment destroyed, their economy hijacked, their future despoiled by wars and poverty. The fact that Obama might appoint a lukewarm liberal to the Supreme Court instead of a Bush-style reactionary means nothing.

The Department of Justice has thus far failed to prosecute any of the contractors involved, so the only path currently available for any accountability is through these human rights lawsuits.  However, after years of litigation, the allegations of torture by contractors in these cases have still never been seriously examined, much less ruled on, by the courts.  None of the plaintiffs in any of these cases have yet to have his or her day in court to tell their account of what they suffered. The reason is because the private military contractors have raised numerous legal defenses, many of which the plaintiffs’ lawyers have argued are plainly inapplicable to private corporations. which have kept the cases from moving into the discovery phase, where the nature of the contractors obligations, actions and oversight, as well as what happened to the plaintiffs would be the examined in detail. So far, CACI and Titan/L-3 have focused the courts on any question but whether the plaintiffs were tortured. As CCR and co-counsel summarize the question in their brief in Al-Quraishi v. Nakhla and L-3:

Are corporate defendants entitled to categorical “law of war” immunity for their alleged torture and war crimes when such a proposed immunity runs counter to settled understandings of the law of war and centuries of Supreme Court precedent, and would give for-profit contractors more protection from suit than genuine members of the U.S. Armed Forces?

This week, CCR and co-counsel filed briefs that argue the cases must go forward. Additionally, yesterday a number of other human rights organizations along with a group of retired high-ranking military officers are filing supporting amicus briefs to add their voices to the chorus of concern over contractor impunity. The military officers’ brief argues that, “given that employees of civilian contractors indisputably are not subject to the military chain of command, and therefore cannot be disciplined or held accountable by the military, it makes little sense to extend to them such absolute tort law immunity for their misconduct.”

This legal battle is taking place as the United States is outsourcing war at a rate beyond anything ever seen in our history. During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the number of contractors has at times far exceeded the number of soldiers. Now, as the U.S. ends the war in Iraq, the State Department is reporting that it has been in the process of tripling the number of armed security contractors it will employ in Iraq to provide security for the thousands of State Department employees that will remain to work in what is now by far the largest U.S. embassy in the world.

It’s important for people to understand what is going on in the courts regarding this current litigation not only because the torture survivors need justice, but also because these cases have wide implications beyond this particular situation.  The corporations involved argue that they should be exempt from any investigation into the allegations against them because, among other reasons, our federal government’s interests in executing wars would be at stake if corporate contractors can be sued.  This is incredibly flawed logic; the lawsuits are for acts that are far outside the “laws of war” and these are crimes that are not in the government’s interest.

They are also invoking a new, sweeping defense that first appeared two years ago in a separate case CCR and co-counsel brought against these same corporations, Saleh v Titan. The new rule is termed “battlefield preemption” and aims to eliminate any civil lawsuits against contractors that take place on any “battlefield.” Among the numerous alarms this should set off is the fact that in the U.S.’ War on Terror it is argued that many places far from any actual war zone are now battlefields. Indeed, a detention center in Iraq filled with civilians who were never charged with any crimes, which is what we’re talking about in these current cases before the court, should not be considered a battlefield.   And acts of torture, which is what is at issue in these cases, cannot be characterized as “combat,” which is what this defense allows.

Think about what it would mean for private military contractors to be immune from any type of civil liability, even for war crimes, as long as it takes place on a so-called battlefield during this time of unprecedented use of contracting and when the term “battlefield” is being stretched to meaninglessness in the ever-expanding U.S. War on Terror. Anyone and everywhere could be a target. That is what is at stake here. Everyone who cares about human rights should be paying attention.

In giving their reasoning for dismissing these cases, the Fourth Circuit panel that originally heard the case (over a strong dissenting opinion) expressed its fear that cases like these would “undermine the flexibility that military necessity requires in determining the methods for gathering intelligence.” But this is exactly the point. No one should ever have the “flexibility” to commit war crimes, rape and other forms of torture. There absolutely must be consequences for these violations. If there are not, courts will essentially be saying anything goes – even the most sadistic and brutal torture – if you are a private military contractor.

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!

Predictably, while many Americans suffer the consequences of no medical care, it is the poor and disabled who suffer the most; yet, this past week the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments that will make it legal for the state of California to cut fees to Medi-Cal providers, affecting 7.6 million poor people using the program.

One would expect that the public could turn to the court system for some kind of remedy. The old adage “I’ll have my day in court,” or “See you in court,” seems appropriate: Take the state of California and Governor Brown to court to stop them from wreaking havoc on people’s lives. Governor Brown and the Legislature approved a 10 percent, $620 million Medi-Cal cut to help balance the 2011-12 state budget. The outright injustice of denial of medical care for the poor has become mainstream and acceptable.

A day in court to argue that it is unconscionable to deny medical care to the poor? It would seem so American, so just, and so obviously right; but Americans should realize that getting a day in court requires a little quirk of the law, unbeknownst to many, that an American citizen must have “standing”¹ to argue a case before the bench. Standing is one of the most transparent ploys that the Supreme Court uses to deny justice to the poor and empower the rich. Indeed, the court has a panoply of vehicles and obstacles to employ in preventing access to the courts. They are all designed to disenfranchise the poor.

We don’t usually think in terms of the legal obstacles that keep American citizens from having their day in court; yet the obstacles reach far beyond even the courts. Think of it as just another ploy in the armamentarium of the rich. The mean-spirited and spiteful republicans, for example, are trying to change the voting rights affecting mostly the elderly; i.e., to preclude them from voting for Democratic Party or progressive candidates. One only has to consider the republicans’ successful attempts to block a 96-year Afro-American Chattanooga woman from voting because she does not have an identity card. Limiting access to the courts is not so far from limiting people the access to their right to vote.

The Medi-Cal case, Douglas vs. Independent Living Center, 09-958, raises the limited issue as to whether the Supreme Court will allow doctors, nurses, hospitals, and patients to challenge the cut-off of  health care to indigent Californians. Although this a matter of life and death, the irony here is that the Supreme Court is not going to address the issue of whether Americans have the right to adequate medical care; but rather, only the procedural question of whether they can even argue in a courtroom that health care is a right and not a privilege.

1. “The legally protectible [sic] stake or interest that an individual has in a dispute that entitles him to bring the controversy before the court to obtain judicial relief…. Standing, sometimes referred to as standing to sue, is the name of the federal law doctrine that focuses on whether a prospective plaintiff can show that some personal legal interest has been invaded by the defendant…. It is not enough that a person is merely interested as a member of the general public in the resolution of the dispute. The person must have a personal stake in the outcome of the controversy…. The standing doctrine is derived from the U.S. Constitution’s Article III provision that federal courts have the power to hear “cases” arising under federal law and ”controversies” involving certain types of parties. In the most fundamental application of  the philosophy of judicial restraint, the U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted this language to forbid the rendering of advisory opinions …. Once a federal court determines that a real case or controversy exists, it must then ascertain whether the parties to the litigation have standing. The Supreme Court has developed an elaborate body of principles defining the nature and scope of standing. Basically, a plaintiff must have suffered some direct or substantial injury or be likely to suffer such an injury if a particular wrong is not redressed. A defendant must be the party responsible for perpetrating the alleged legal wrong.”

Philosophers whose ancestors built the gargantuan computer Deep Thought to calculate an answer to that Ultimate Question were mortified upon learning that their computer spent 7.5 million years to come up with 42. Deep Thought’s response was along the lines of: How do you expect to understand the answer, when you don’t understand the question?

Perhaps a correlation is there regarding Corporatocracy’s denigration of the Wall Street Occupiers for not having a clear message, for not having a tidy answer to Corporatocracy’s question of “What’s the Problem?”

Specific grievances probably outnumber protestors — even counting their rapidly — multiplying allies around the country. When virtually everything has been fouled by Wall Street kinds of casino juju, and corporate criminality in general, how might a single clear message be formulated?

Ultimately, Corporatocracy seems to be asking for an answer to a question they don’t understand — I mean, under the circumstances, if they actually have to be told what the problem is, doesn’t that imply a complete vacuum of understanding?

Of course, their posturing is all lies; they know precisely what evil they propagate and will do everything in their expanding powers to continue to inflict the same upon the “other 99 percent”. Virtually everything they do has roots in some breed of lie.

And since they’ve gotten such a smother of denigration out of the “no clear message” chicanery, maybe it’s time to skin their little pet by pronouncing a clear message in triptych—right off the top?

At least it’s my opinion that the following three demands offer clear initial focus:

1)  End corporate personhood

2)  End the Fed

3)  End military adventurism

Corporate Personhood

Regarding deceit being Corporatocracy’s constant companion, beginnings of corporate personhood represent a fine example. It’s widely believed that a Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) ruling in May of 1886 was responsible for bestowing upon corporations all the rights, under the Constitution, of “…all persons born or naturalized in the United States…”

Actually, in that 1886 “Santa Clara County versus Southern Pacific Railroad” case, the SCOTUS carefully avoided the issue of corporate personhood—the “landmark ruling” was birthed by J.C. Bancroft Davis, a former railroad company president turned court reporter. J.C. slipped the ruling into the headnotes of the case—voila! Instant landmark ruling.

Please see the article, Artificial People for a fuller picture.

For us 99 percent, a premier reward of ending corporate personhood would be the invalidation of the SCOTUS ruling in 2010 that removed any restrictions on the amount of money corporations may spend on elections (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission). Put another way, denying corporations absolute ownership of elections would be a violation of their free speech as “…persons born or naturalized in the United States”, as guaranteed under the first amendment.

The SCOTUS ruled essentially that the will of voters shall not infringe upon the right of corporations to choose and control American leadership….

Testing the limits of smarminess, Mitt Romney told a maverick in the herd at the Iowa State Fair (birthplace of deep-fried butter on a stick): “Corporations are people, my friend.”

Surely, some of Mitt’s best friends are corporations. But his assertion has as little to do with corporations actually being people as it does with Mitt seeming presidential. His goo-goo condescension is effectively cloaked, apparently; otherwise, people might be more sensitive to his uncanny ability to make babies cry. But, of course, it doesn’t matter now that the SCOTUS gave corporations the keys to elections.

The Federal Reserve

Deceit from the get-go. The Federal Reserve is not federal, and it has no reserves; the name was conjured primarily to fool people into believing the Fed is part of the government, and might somehow appear on the horizon to save us on a rainy day.

Sorry, the Fed creates rainy days so they can steal property for pennies on the dollar, as they did with farms during the Great Depression. Current head of the Fed, Ben Bernanke — he even admitted the Fed caused the Great Depression. Ben apologized, and promised they would never do it again.

The Fed is a private corporation insatiably sucking blood from America with debt money. One thing governments like about debt money is how it makes war easy by eliminating the mess of having to directly raise money for war. Overall, it seems hard to imagine any single private entity inflicting anything even close to the damage the Fed has inflicted, and inflicts, on us 99 percent, our country, and countries with valuable resources, especially oil.

James Madison, fourth president of the United States, called the private international banking cartel of which the Fed is a part, the “Money Changers”. And Madison said, “History records that the Money Changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and its issuance.”

Thomas Jefferson said:

I sincerely believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a money aristocracy that has set the government at defiance. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs.

Abraham Lincoln:

The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than a monarch, more insolent than autocracy, and more selfish than a bureaucracy. It denounces, as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes. I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me and the bankers in the rear. Of the two, the one at the rear is my greatest foe.

Some of America’s most profound history orbits the power of the international banking cartel (some might say Rothschild Bankula) seizing control of the nation’s issuance of money. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution states that Congress shall have the power to coin money and regulate the value thereof. Seems plenty clear.

We have had three private central banks. The first was born in 1791 as the Bank of the United States, 70% owned by foreigners. Primary opposition focused on the fact that it was unconstitutional, creation of such a bank with a monopoly on issuing money. This first central bank had a 20-year charter; only the vote of Vice President George Clinton in 1811 saved us from renewal of that charter.

Britain (home of the City of London, throne of Bankula) attacked us soon thereafter. Whether or not the War of 1812 was a direct result of non-renewal of the first central bank’s charter, that’s a matter of history, which Napoleon called, “A set of lies agreed upon.” History keeps proving him right.

Anyway, President Monroe signed into law the charter for the Second Bank of the Untied States on April 10, 1816. This bloodletting also came with a twenty-year charter—at the end of which, President Jackson was able to disengage Bankula from America’s throat. Later, when asked what his greatest accomplishment had been during his two terms as President, Andrew Jackson replied “I killed the Bank.”

He stopped charter renewal of the second Rothschild-controlled central bank. Jackson even has “I Killed The Bank” written on his tombstone. Many believe this populist message relating to banking helped to launch the Democratic party.

To the monstrous misfortune of us 99 percent, with utmost deceit and malice aforethought, the Federal Reserve Act was slimed through while most of congress was on Christmas break, 1913. Woodrow Wilson, JP Morgan’s bag man (much of Wilson’s administration were Morgan men), immediately signed it into law. And now, 98 years later, we’ve been all but bled white.

Getting Bankula off our throat this time seems nearly impossible. As proven over the years, a most dangerous thing a president might do is defy private central banking.

In the words of Niall Ferguson, of the House of Rothschild: “There are now only 5 nations on the world left without a Rothschild controlled central bank: Iran; North Korea; Sudan; Cuba; and Libya.”

Joining that tiny elite club might be one of the greatest achievements possible for our 99 percent.

Military Adventurism

It’s conceivable that nobody really knows how much we spend on “defense”. Between the Fed, and the Pentagon—it’s surprising our jar has any cookies left at all.

Black operations, information blackouts for national security, all the “unknown unknowns” the Pentagon is such a black hole that $2.3 trillion are “unaccounted for” and nobody seems to have a clue where it all went. Despite getting double billing in the lengthy list of amazing 9/11 coincidences, the money is still missing.

There was certain scuttlebutt about the issue for months — but then, Secretary of Offense Donald Rumsfeld chose to make a formal public announcement on 9/10/01. And if that’s not an amazing coincidence by itself, making it news the day before 9/11 would bury the story; whatever hit the newly-renovated area of the Pentagon was aimed precisely at the only department so far to settle back into the renovated area. That department was the Army’s Resource Services Washington, consisting of mostly civilian accountants tasked with finding out where the missing $2.3 trillion went. 34 of the department’s 65 employees—over half of the only people that could have been hot on the missing trillions’ trail—were killed, all their work vaporized. Beyond amazing, maybe even an unknown known unknown, the richest kind.

The Pentagon is so out of control they are even inventing new kinds of “defense”, such as the utterly ominous, humanitarian aggression; killing foreign civilians to protect them, mostly from the air.

We currently spend more on “defense” than all the world’s other countries combined. So:

Close our nearly 1,000 military bases on foreign soil. Stop the wars of plunder, whatever they may currently be veiled as. Stop the neocon obsession with taking over the world (“benign global hegemony”). Bring our troops home with a new mission: Defense. Imagine…a whole new mission for the Department of Offense: Defense.

The 1 percent may pretend that offense and defense are the same thing, that a good offense is the best defense. But the world—that other 95 percent of global population—knows the difference quite clearly.

No Leadership?

Is the main reason Corporatocracy denigrates the “occupiers” for having no defined leadership because there’s no clear target for assassination? Who’s to disappear when nobody invites disappearance? Leaders can be lightning rods; lack of leaders makes it impossible to know exactly where to strike. Disappearing the whole lot of those “without a clear message” might be tempting, but even with martial law would be messy, bad for the image.

Power concedes nothing without a fight, never has, never will. We are in the fight of our lives, for our lives. If we turn back now…game over, despite our fantastic advantage in numbers.

Mitt Romney has the audacity to co-opt the term, “occupy” — as in, he’s ready to occupy the White House. “This is dangerous class warfare,” he says, even though his 1 percent has been balls-to-the-wall waging class warfare against our 99 percent at least since the Reagan days. Well, a man like Mitt being the president of the world’s “superpower”, even if it has been so gutted, is so in debt to the Money Changers, and the presidency is fundamentally puppetry, it would still be mace in the face of our 99 percent.

Perhaps Mitt will choose as his running mate, deep-fried butter on a sticK — not to be confused with Palin, and a stick.

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.

The insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and health industry bring shame on every person connected with them. Foreigners shake their heads in disbelief at the farce and charade our health industry has become. More and more Americans are literally outsiders in what has become an exclusive resource for the rich: health care.

Our educational institutions have priced themselves out of the public realm. They now serve as research arms of the corporations that fund them. Students can’t possibly graduate with a meaningful education without incurring hundreds of thousands of dollars in debts and loans. The arms industry, Pentagon and multi-national corporations control virtually all of the research of our “educational” institutions.

The public service sectors of our economy have not only failed to keep up with the needs of the people, they barely even recognize the crumbling infrastructure that surrounds them. Public highways look like minefields; streets are rarely cleaned; public buildings fall into disrepair, with no money to keep them up; electricity is becoming too expensive for middle class households to support; and, more garbage fills the streets of our cities than the landfills created to hold it.  Even water will soon become a scarce resource, to be bought and sold by those who “own” it.

Police and their cohorts, the prison guards have become invading armies joined at the hip in our cities and counties. The widespread murder and torture perpetrated by these “armed servants” of the ruling class is of epidemic proportions, and the laws protect these murderers in the name of law and order. Police who murder are seldom prosecuted, their names are hidden from the press, and those who challenge their authority face life-threatening opposition.

The courts have been bought and paid for by the corporations that finance judicial elections, and the politicians who appoint their lapdogs to the bench, do so upon orders from above. Prosecutors run our judicial system, and justice is nowhere to be found.

The media has become an arm of the entertainment industry, and good looks are more important to a reporter’s success than having a brain, or developing anything like investigative skills. The news is what corporate America and the Pentagon say it is – nothing more and nothing less.

Corporations, in the name of profit, are destroying the environment and our natural resources at an unparalleled pace. Even if the human race is able to outlast the catastrophes created by the ruling class, it is questionable whether the earth itself can survive.

The military-industrial complex defines our foreign policies pure and simple. Manufacturers of weapons systems and the Pentagon, which use those weapons, assure the world that our country will continue to invade and kill anyone who can’t fight back.

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.

“The more things change, the more they are the same.” Neither of the party twins, both pawns of Corporate America have done anything since the 1970s but perpetuate “hands-off” (i.e., deregulations and lax enforcement) and “hand-outs” (i.e. corporate welfare, including “warfare welfare”) government when it comes to dealing with big business.

Dangerous to America: Deregulation and an Unbridled Free-Market

The proof is already in the flattened pudding that free-market theory and its practice are utterly unworkable, destructive, and a hypocritical ploy by the corpocracy, the “devil’s marriage” between corporations and government. Economic Katrina (i.e., the Second Great Depression) in which Main Street was swamped by Wall Street is what happens when corporations and banks are free to plunder.

Corporations and their allies naturally loathe government regulations. President Jimmy Carter started the trend toward deregulation; President Ronald Reagan accelerated it with gusto; President Clinton declared that “the era of big government is over” and promptly began deregulating everything in sight including the financial services industry; and President Bush’s anti-regulatory actions even outdid Reagan’s record. The party twins know who butters their bread.

One industry after another has been deregulated while the public is told in each instance how competition and efficiency would be boosted, resulting in lower prices and better  products and services. It’s the hollow free-enterprise promise that never fails to leave the public holding the bag and worse, as when the deregulated energy industry creates blackouts to jack up energy prices; when deregulated toy makers make toys that can kill; when deregulated tires explode on the highway; when the deregulated agricultural industry lets mad cow disease happen; when deregulated drugs and medical devices kill patients, etc., etc.

Anti-trust regulation is especially weak and toothless. No corporation or bank should be allowed to get so big that when they are on the brink of failing they are bailed out by the government (i.e., the taxpayers) simply because they are deemed “too big too fail.” Free-market ideologues claim that antitrust regulation limits competition. But huge corporations and monopolies are what limit if not kill competition. Moreover, corporate size encourages corporate lawlessness. That is, the bigger the corporation the more likely it will have the opportunity, the incentive, the swagger, the clout, and the impunity from going criminal when it’s the surest way to fatter profits.

Dangerous to America: The Corporate “Get Out of Jail” Card

Speaking of impunity that is almost always what happens when corporations run afoul of the law. Never mind that much of corporate wrongdoing is legal because our government has made it legal, there is enough illegal wrongdoing by corporations left over to cause, says the private watchdog and anti-corporate crusader, Ralph Nader, “more damage to people’s health, safety, and economic resources by far than crime in the streets.”

Government protection of corporate criminality is too big a subject to go into detail here. I would have to describe and critique each of the many corporate “escape hatches” (e.g., legal loopholes, etc., etc) and the many forms of prosecutorial pampering (e.g., deferred prosecutions, etc., etc). Contrast this hands-off approach to corporate crooks by our government to the case of petty thieves in at least one state who are imprisoned for life with little chance of parole if they are convicted of petty thievery three times. The U.S. Supreme Court, incidentally and not surprisingly, upheld the state’s “three strikes and you’re out law.”

No, I will not belabor further how our government protects corporate wrongdoing and the harm it does. I will simply say that the American people ought to be able to rely on their government to protect and promote their health, safety, and general welfare from being endangered by corporate exploitation. But their government is not their government any more. It is a government of, for, and by U.S. corporations.

How can Americans reclaim their government and make it promote and support their own general welfare? Short of a revolution, and that would be a bloody mistake even though Thomas Jefferson thought every generation needs a revolution, Americans will have to unite and mount political pressure guided by a coalition of anti-corpocracy NGOs to pursue legally and peacefully wholesale political, judicial, and economic reforms. Who in America has the stature to lead the way? FDR, with the help of public outrage, crushed the corpocracy of the Flapper Era. Who could be a new FDR? You tell me. I would pick either Ralph Nader or the Rev. Jessie Jackson, but the one is wrongfully blamed for Gore’s defeat and the other would probably be acceptable only to the color blind.

What is America’s future? You tell me. America needs an ambulance and keeps getting a hearse instead. I think America is getting closer to the cemetery and farther away from the emergency ward.

Now for the bad news. There’s still about two more weeks to be garroted by TV ads.

Back-to-back-to-back, we are choking on lies, distortions, and half-truths. This year may go into history as having the most vicious attack ads since the “dark ages” shortly after the nation was founded. Biggest difference? More than two centuries later, most of the ads scream at you from television rather than partisan newspapers.

Between $3.5 and $4.5 billion will be spent on campaign ads this season. That’s one to two billion more than was spent during the mid-term elections four years ago.

One of the reasons for the increase in spending is that the conservative wing of the Republican party has launched an all-out assault to once again take over Congress. Another reason is that they got a supreme assist in January. The Supreme Court, by a 5–4 vote along party lines, decided in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission [130 S.Ct. 876] that the First Amendment applies to corporations, which now would enjoy the same protections given to citizens and associations of citizens. The decision essentially obliterated the gains made by the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (known as the McCain–Feingold Act) that reformed campaign spending— and a Supreme Court decision (McConnell v. FEC; 540 U.S. 93) a year later that ruled most of the Act constitutional.

In a strongly-worded dissent in the Citizens United case, Justice John Paul Stevens declared the Supreme Court’s decision “threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation…. [It is] a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt.”

Justice Stevens further argued that, “While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.”

President Obama called the decision, “a major victory for Big Oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.”

Eight of the 10 groups that have bought the most TV advertising this election lean to the Republicans, according to an analysis of by the Wesleyan Media Project.

And that brings us to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, second in spending only to the Republican Governors Association. The Chamber of Commerce, along with the National Rifle Association, was one of the most vigorous supporters of the Citizens United legal case to extend First Amendment protections to corporations.

At one time, the Chamber was a  non-partisan association that advanced the interests of all business. During the past decade, it has become an advocacy group for conservative candidates and ideology. For this election, it has promised to spend about $75 million in campaign ads. Because the Chamber, a non-profit agency, doesn’t need to report who it receives contribution from, or even report its spending to the Federal Elections Commission, the nation is left wondering if it’s true, as the President charges, that significant donations are from foreign companies and governments. Those contributions are illegal under U.S. law. The Chamber claims it does receive foreign money but doesn’t use it for political advertising — but refuses to disclose specifics.

Even if the Chamber doesn’t use foreign money for political ads, the revenue it receives from foreign money frees up its budget to increase spending for a right-wing agenda. Four years ago, almost every organization disclosed where their funds came from. This year, according to FEC data, only about one-third of the organizations have done so.

Republicans have put a “face” on their attack ads, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who appears in more anti-Democrat campaign ads than any Democrat running for office, is seen as everything evil. Perhaps it’s because she is a powerful woman who represents San Francisco, a district that is racially, culturally, and ethnically diverse. Pelosi, and most Democrats in hotly contested races, are portrayed as Pelosi puppets who voted for the stimulus bill and health care reform, both seen erroneously by the ultra-conservative wing as socialist or Marxist programs.

Most objective analysts say that the stimulus bill, even with its flaws, kept the nation out of sinking into a Depression, and that health reform, derisively known as Obamacare, has significantly improved the nation’s health care while keeping costs down. However, President Obama doesn’t appear in too many attack ads. For the Party on the White to emphasize the “evils” of President Obama could result in a backlash.

In response, the Democrats have charged Republicans as being the “Party of NO,” with no social conscience and no political agenda, a party that blocks any reform or progress solely for political reasons. What the Democrats didn’t do is more important than what they did do. The Democrats have been unable to effectively use campaign advertising to portray the Republicans as the party in power when the nation entered into an unjustified $1 trillion war in Iraq, created the greatest deficit in American history, refused to stop Wall Street and bank greed, allowed the mortgage crisis to develop and undermine American security, brought about double-digit unemployment, and shoved the nation into one of its greatest recessions.

But here’s another reality.  TV ads, like newspaper editorials, seldom change anyone’s preconceived opinions. Liberals continue to support liberals. Conservatives continue to support conservatives. The “independent” middle, sometimes known as a “soft vote” because both parties try to grab it, is largely a myth. The “soft middle” may not be influenced by any campaign ad—and they may not even vote.

So what is the purpose of TV ads and the significant increase in funding? Simply, it’s to hold and reinforce the base. Conservatives have done much better to rally their base than have liberals this year. If the conservative retake either or both houses of Congress, it will not be because the Obama administration failed, but because the conservatives spent significantly more on television ads, rallied its base, controlled the agenda, and effectively blocked an ineffective Democratic response that failed to counter lies, distortions, and half-truths.

Once confirmed, Elana Kagan will solidify their control when the Court reconvenes in October — her record exposing extremist positions, including outlandish anti-terrorism practices, unconstitutional federal litigation, and “love (for) the Federalist Society,” affirming her endorsement of an organization supporting rolling back civil liberties; defiling human rights; ending New Deal social policies; opposing reproductive choice, government regulations, labor rights, and environmental protections; subverting justice in defense of privilege; and as Solicitor General, arguing against First Amendment rights without which all others are at risk -an ideology the Court endorses, one protecting privilege against the rule of law.

Rolling Back First Amendment Protections

In his same day article, New York Times writer, Adam Liptak, headlined, “Court Affirms Ban on Aiding Groups Tied to Terror” (despite no tie whatever), saying:

In a case pitting free speech against the national security, the Supreme Court….upheld (in a 6 – 3 decision) a federal law that makes it a crime to provide ‘material support’ to foreign terrorist organizations, even if (it entails) training for peacefully resolving conflicts.

Affirming a bogus terrorist threat, Chief Justice Roberts wrote:

At bottom, plaintiffs (supporting free speech) simply disagree with the considered judgment of Congress and the executive that providing material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization – even seemingly benign support – bolsters the terrorist activities of that organization.

US Code Title 18, Part I, Chapter 113B, 2339A, defines “Providing material support to terrorists” as:
(1)  …any property, tangible or intangible, or service, including currency or monetary instruments or financial securities, financial services, lodging, training, expert advice or assistance, safehouses, false documentation or identification, communications equipment, facilities, weapons, lethal substances, explosives, personnel (and) transportation, except medicine or religious materials;

(2)  the term ‘training’ means instruction or teaching designed to impart a specific skill, as opposed to general knowledge; and

(3) the term ‘expert advice or assistance’ means advice or assistance derived from scientific, technical or other specialized knowledge.

As Solicitor General, Elena Kagan agued the case in February, Justice Roberts at the time contradicting himself saying “The government is wrong that the only thing actually at issue in this litigation is conduct,” not protected speech, then adding that combatting terrorism takes precedence over First Amendment rights, Justices Breyer, Ginsberg and Sotomayor disagreeing in their decision.

So did Center for Constitutional Rights plaintiff, David C. Cole, saying:

We are deeply disappointed. The Supreme Court has ruled that human rights advocates, providing training and assistance in the nonviolent resolution of disputes, can be prosecuted as terrorists. (This decision says) that the First Amendment permits Congress to make human rights advocacy and peacemaking a crime. That is wrong.

It also criminalizes opponents of US laws in violation of constitutional protections, the Patriot Act and others post-9/11 most prominent, ones making America a police state, supported by High Court complicity. In addition, charity is now a crime, when given to bogusly designated terrorist organizations or any individuals or groups against American imperialism, making them enemies of the state, the Dallas-based Holy Land Foundation Charity (HLF) an example, the largest US Muslim charity until the Bush administration shut it down.

On December 4, 2001, the Treasury Department declared HLF a terrorist group, froze its assets, falsely claimed they were used to funnel millions of dollars to Hamas, when, in fact, they provided vital aid to needy, impoverished families in Occupied Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, Bosnia, Albania, Checknya, Turkey, and US cities, HLF explaining:

“We gave:

– books, not bombs;
– bread, not bullets;
– smiles, not scars;
– toys, not tanks;
– peace, not terror;
– liberty, not poverty;
– hope, not despair;
– love, not hate; (and)
– life, not death.”

It got its five principles long prison terms, the daughter of former CEO Shukri Abu-Baker, Zaira, interviewed on the Progressive Radio News Hour on June 13, this writer now exchanging emails with her father at Terre Haute federal prison’s Communications Management Unit, segregating Muslims from the general prison population, treating them more harshly, no matter that most there are innocent, Shukri one of the most prominent and honorable.

Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) Press Release on the High Court Decision

On June 21, CCR headlined “Supreme Court Ruling Criminalizes Speech in Material Support Law Case,” saying:

In Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the first case against the Patriot Act, supporting free speech rights over bogus national security concerns, the Court ruling criminalizes “many groups and individuals providing peaceful advocacy… including President Carter for training all parties in fair election practices in Lebanon.” He submitted an amicus brief opposing Holder’s position.

Initiated in 1998, plaintiffs challenged the constitutionality of laws making it a crime to provide “material support” to designated terrorist groups, CCR’s Senior Attorney Shayana Kadidal explaining that:

The Court’s decision confirms the extraordinary scope of the material support statute’s criminalization of speech. But it also notes that the scope of the prohibitions may not be clear in every application, and that remains the case for the many difficult questions raised at argument but dodged by today’s opinion, including whether publishing an op-ed or submitting an amicus brief in court arguing that a group does not belong on the list is a criminal act.

CCR called the ruling “one of a very few times that the Supreme Court has upheld a criminal prohibition of speech under strict scrutiny, and the first time it has permitted the government to make it a crime to advocate lawful, nonviolent activity.”

Given extremist right wing governance under both parties, (Eric Holder the new John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, or Michael Mukasey; Obama the new Bush) no longer do constitutional protections apply. As a result, anyone may be prosecuted for supporting human rights, civil liberties, democratic freedom, writing articles like this one, or airing populist views on programs like the Progressive Radio News Hour.

High Court Lifts Ban on GMO Alfalfa in Monsanto v. Geertson Seed Farms

On June 21, the New York Times published Greenwire writer Jennifer Koons’ article, headlined, “Supreme Court Lifts Ban on Planting GM Alfalfa,” saying:

In its first ruling on genetically engineered crops, the Supreme Court today overturned a lower court’s decision prohibiting Monsanto Co. from selling pesticide-resistant alfalfa seeds until the government completes an environmental impact study.

In 2006, environmental groups, farmers and consumers sued the USDA, forcing it to rescind its 2005 approval, arguing that cross-pollination could contaminate farmland, and that overusing Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide would harm soil and groundwater, creating “Roundup-resistant ‘super weeds.’ ”

After the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ban, Monsanto appealed to the Supreme Court, winning 7-1, Justice Stephen Breyer abstaining because his brother, US District Court Judge Charles Breyer, ruled against the USDA in 2007.

Another case is now affected, “involving Monsanto’s breed of pesticide-resistant sugar beets, US District Court Judge Jeffrey White allow(ing) plantings of the modified crops to continue this year but warned that he might block use of Monsanto’s seeds in future seasons while an environmental review takes place.”

Environmental groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife, Humane Society of the United States, and National Resources Defense Council filed an amicus brief against the ruling, arguing that it will limit their ability to rely on National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) protections “to ensure a meaningful consideration by federal agencies of the impacts of their actions on the environment, and particularly wildlife and plants.”

California, Oregon and Massachusetts Attorneys General also filed briefs for their “states’ interests in protecting their natural resources and their citizens’ rights to be informed about the environmental impacts of federal actions.”

Monsanto supporters included the US Chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute, CropLife America (favoring pesticide proliferation), and the National Association of Home Builders, filing their own brief, advocating no restraints on the right to pollute and plunder, even at the expense of human health, the usual position they endorse.

Alfalfa is America’s fourth largest crop, grown on about 23 million acres, according to Monsanto.

Harmful GMO Seeds and Foods

In 2003, Jeffrey’s Smith’s Seeds of Deception exposed the dangers of GM foods and ingredients, independent tests showing them harmful to human health. For example, rats fed GM potatoes had smaller livers, hearts, testicles and brains, damaged immune systems, and structural changes in their white blood cells, making them vulnerable to infection, disease and early deaths — compared to other rats fed non-GM potatoes.

In addition, after 10 days of testing (the human equivalent of 10 years), thymus and spleen damage, enlarged tissues, liver atrophy, and significant proliferation of stomach and intestines cells (a sign of future cancer risk) showed up.

Yet despite the known risks, GM foods and ingredients saturate our diet, over 80% of processed ones containing them as well as corn, rice, soybeans and soy products, sauces, ice cream, salad dressings, vegetable oils, peanut butter, meat, other animal products, eggs, even infant formula, making everyone consuming them lab rats in an uncontrolled, unregulated mass human experiment, involving risks too late to reverse once enough of them are consumed — no authority representing the public welfare to stop it, corporate interests are all that matter.

In their ruthless pursuit of profit, Monsanto and other agribusiness giants freely contaminate US farmlands (and vast areas globally), making most foods consumed harmful to human health, and organic ones increasingly compromised, because winds carry GM seeds to most other crop acreage, the High Court sanctioning much more once GM alfalfa plantings proliferate.

In December 2009, in her capacity as Solicitor General, Kagan intervened in the first case on which SCOTUS will rule involving genetically modified crops, Monsanto v Geertson Seed. She defended Monsanto’s fight to contaminate the environment with its GM alfalfa, not the American people’s right to safe feed and a protected environment. 

The lower court ruled that “contamination of organic and conventional alfalfa crops with the genetically engineered gene has occurred and defendants acknowledge as much. Such contamination is irreparable environmental harm.”

That other fields, not those of Geertson Seed, et al., had been contaminated does not bother Kagan. “The district court failed to find either that respondents had suffered or were likely to suffer irreparable harm…”

This flies in the face of reality. The biotech industry has admitted it cannot prevent contamination of natural fields. When Bayer CropScience contaminated nearly a third of the US rice supply with its GM version, its defense lawyers told jurors that “Bayer’s containment protocols were equal to or exceeded industry standards when the test rice escaped into the general supplies.”

If the best containment protocols don’t work, then contamination cannot be prevented. That is clearly an indication that natural crop farmers are “likely to suffer irreparable harm.”

Geertson Seed explains some basic facts about alfalfa and GM contamination:

Alfalfa is not just a prolific field crop, but feral alfalfa and weedy alfalfa is commonly found beyond the fields by roadways, irrigation canals, backyards and beyond….

Contamination of conventional alfalfa from genetically engineered alfalfa is a major concern. The primary mode of contamination is from the movement of pollen by bees from plant to plant. Alfalfa is pollinated by many different bees and other insects that fly long distances. Sudden wind gusts like those associated with summer thunder storms can carry pollinators over greater distances. When a pollinator visits an alfalfa plant that has the Roundup Ready (RR) gene inserted, it will pick up the pollen that contains the RR gene and carry it to a distant conventional alfalfa plant. If that pollen fertilizes the blossom of the conventional plant, the resulting seed will contain the RR gene.

This contamination becomes especially important because contaminated alfalfa will continue to sprout for years: “The seed produced by alfalfa can have 50% or more dormant seed [which] can lay dormant in the soil for many years.”

Glyphosate is one of the most toxic herbicides in use today. Monsanto’s trade name for it is Roundup. Geertson Seed explains that:

Roundup Ready alfalfa will have a selective advantage over non GE alfalfa and will become the dominant weed variety. In turn, the weedy Roundup Ready alfalfa will be difficult to kill and will become a source of pollen and seed that will contaminate other feral plants and conventional alfalfa seed fields in the area. In a few years, it will be extremely difficult to avoid contamination from GE alfalfa.

Worse, researchers at the University of Caen found that Monsanto’s particular formulations of glyphosate in Roundup “actually amplified glyphosate’s toxic effects,” which include human cell death.

Kagan seems to believe that the biotech industry’s inability to prevent contamination is not an issue for farmers, the environment or we the people. Her repugnance toward our human right to reject the deployment of genetically engineered crops comports with corporate views.

She earns the M on her forehead, joining Justice Clarence Thomas, a former Monsanto lawyer who corruptly refused to recuse himself from Monsanto v Geertson Seed.

A review of her published scholarship after almost two decades in and out of academia turns up four law review articles, two brief pieces and several book reviews and in memoriam. There is nothing even remotely resembling a major legal text or research publication.

Her lack-luster academic publication record is only surpassed by her total lack of any practical experience as a judge: zero years in adjudication, unless one accepts the line of her exuberant advocates, who point to Kagan’s superb ability in adjudicating among the squabbling faculty at Harvard Law School when she served as Dean. No doubt Kagan had been very busy as the greatest fundraising Law School Dean in Harvard’s history ($400 million), which may account for the fact that she never found time to write a single academic article during her nine year tenure (2001-2009).

The criteria for her appointment to the Supreme Court have little to do with academic performance as it is understood today in all major universities. Nor does her total inexperience as a judicial advocate compensate for academic mediocrity.

The evidence points to a purely political appointment based, in part, on social networks and certainly not on her lack of affinity for the agenda of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Kagan’s approval of indefinite detention of suspects squares with the extremist restrictions on constitutional freedoms first articulated during the Bush Administration and subsequently upheld by President Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder. It is no coincidence that Kagan appointed a notorious Bush torture advocate, the genial Jack Goldsmith, to the Harvard Law faculty.

Elena Kagan’s appointment certainly was not based on “diversity“. She will be the third Jew on the Supreme Court and, together with the six Roman Catholics, will decide the most critical cases with far-reaching and profound impact on citizens’ rights and protections. For the first time in US history the nation’s largest demographic group, the Protestants (of any hue or gender), will have no representative on the Court, thereby excluding the descendents, like retiring Justice Stevens, of the brilliant, strongly secular judicial heritage that formulated the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights and its amendments.

Kagan’s nomination to the US Supreme Court is not exceptional if we consider many of Bush and now Obama’s choices of advisers and officials in top policymaking posts. Many of these officials combined their diplomas from Ivy League universities with their absolutely disastrous performances in public office, which no amount of mass media puff pieces could obscure. These Ivy League mediocrities include the foreign policy advocates for the destructive and unending wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan and the leading economic advisers and officials responsible for the current financial debacles. The names are familiar enough: Wolfowitz, Feith, Abrams, Levey, Greenspan, Axelrod, Emmanuel, Indyk, Ross, Summers, Rubin, et al.: Prestigious credentials with mediocre, or worse, performances. What is the basis of their rise? What explains their ascent to the most influential positions in the US power structure?

One hypothesis is nepotism … of a certain kind. Elena Kagan got tenure at the august halls of the University of Chicago in 1995 on the basis of one substantive article and one brief piece, neither outstanding. With this underwhelming record of legal scholarship, she became visiting professorship at the Harvard Law School, published only two more articles (one in Harvard Law Review) and received tenure. Prima facie evidence strongly suggests that Kagan’s ties to the staunchly Zionist faculty at both Chicago and Harvard Law Schools (and not her intellectual prowess) account for her meteoric promotions to tenure, deanship and now the US Supreme Court, over the heads of hundreds of other highly qualified candidates with far superior academic publication records and broader practical judicial experience.

The public utterances and political writings of innumerable Harvard, Princeton, Chicago, Yale, John Hopkins professors, whether it be on the speculative economy, Israel’s Middle East wars, preventative detention, broad presidential powers and constitutional freedoms are marked by a singular mediocrity, mendacity and an excess of hot air reeking of the barnyard.

If you do not qualify on the basis of excellent scholarship or broad-based practical experience, your ethnic tribesman will wax ecstatic over you as a “wonder colleague”, a “superb teacher”, a “brilliant consensus builder” and a “world champion fund raiser”. In other words, if you have the right ethnic connections and political ambitions, they can adjust the criteria for tenure at the University of Chicago, the deanship at Harvard Law School and a lifetime appointment to the US Supreme Court.

Elena Kagan joins a long list of key Obama appointees who have long-standing ties to the pro-Israel power configuration. Like Barack Obama, Elena Kagan started her legal apprenticeship with the Chicago Judge, Abner Mitva, an ardent Zionist, who hailed the newly elected President Obama as “America’s first Jewish President”, probably his soundest judgment.

The issue of the composition of the US Supreme Court is increasingly crucial for all Americans, who are horrified by Israel’s devastation of Gaza, its threats to launch a nuclear attack on Iran and its Fifth Column’s efforts to drag us into a third war in ten years. With the Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations pressing the compliant US Congress to declare “anti-Zionism” as a form of “anti-Semitism” and “opposition to Israel’s policies” as amounting to “support for terrorism”, thus criminalizing Americans critical of Israel, another active pro-Zionist advocate on the Court will provide a legal cover for the advance of Zionist-dictated authoritarianism over the American people.

Yes, Kagan would be another woman on the Supreme Court. Yes, she would probably adjudicate conflicts among the judges and strengthen Obama’s police powers. And, yes, she would likely favor your indefinite detention if you support the right of Palestinians to struggle (“terrorism”) against the Israeli occupation … especially if you defend America against Israel’s Fifth Column.

But remember when you apply for Ivy League law school appointment or a top judicial post and your CV lacks the requisite publications or work experience, just ask Judge Abner Mikva or Larry Summers or Rahm Emmanuel for a recommendation. With such support you will shoot ahead of the competition… because you have the right ethnic connections.

If this had been a drunk driver running his car into a crowd of people and killing 29 people, he would have been arrested on the spot and charged with murder. The West Virginia governor needs to answer the question why he hasn’t ordered the arrest of the drunk driver in this case. The drunk driver is still free to commit further mayhem. At the very minimum the senior operating officers of this mine and of Massey Energy including the board of directors and the major stock holders should be arrested and charged with aggravated murder for profit.

While the deaths of these miners is tragic enough for their families, the families will likely experience further woes in the very near future. Those families have lost the breadwinner and the majority of them will likely loose their homes within 3 to 5 years and end up on public welfare. Why shouldn’t the ones that profited the most from the sweat and labor of these lost miners, be forced to maintain these families? In short the assets of the senior managers including the board of directors and the largest stockholders should be seized and sold dividing the proceeds equally among the 29 families.

Thus far there has been no credible response coming from either the state or federal government. Instead a blue ribbon whitewashing committee will be appointed to vindicate the owners of the mine after a slap on the wrist.

While the deaths are tragic this incident is only a symptom of an even greater tragic unfurling in the United States. That is the government no longer represents the people instead we have a government of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations and the people can be damned. Unless this headlong rush towards fascism is checked; incidents like this will only increase in frequency and it will become common place for corporations to demand their employees put their lives at risk for the betterment of the corporation.

Fascism is a merger of business and government. It never comes complete all at once nor does it require a revolution since its in essence a top down revolution by the rich elite to maintain their grip on the society. Instead, it infiltrates into every aspect of a society until it suddenly blossoms into the full blown virulent variety like Nazi Germany. The U.S. has been on a steady march towards fascism since the 1900s. The pace quickened with election of Ronald Reagan and the pace became a headlong rush under George W. Bush. This march towards fascism was made possible by right wing legislatures and by right wing judicial activism of the Supreme Court. A good example being the recent decision by the Supreme Court just weeks ago ruling corporations could spend any amount of money on elections.

Perhaps, the question we need to ask the West Virginia governor is how much money he has accepted from Massey Energy or its principals and owners in his election bids. This points to the extreme urgency of appointing a liberal to the recent Supreme Court vacancy to counter the extreme right wing bias now gripping the court.

For years, I have been sounding a warning about creeping fascism and the gradual erosion of our rights. In the mid 1990s, I first proposed an amendment to limit the rights of corporations. At the time, I was a lone voice in the wilderness. That amendment is included in my book Nazi Hydra In Fascist America including of the court cases coming from right-wing judicial activism supporting corporate rule.

Such an amendment is desperately needed to reverse the worst decision ever made by the Supreme Court in which a right wing judicial activist simply proclaimed corporations had the right to personhood. At least one of the members of that court owned stock in the railroad company in the case before the court. At that time. Almost all of the clauses included in the proposed amendment are reenactments of past law that has been overturned by judicial activism from the far right such as the recent decision to allow corporations to spend freely in an election.

Allowing corporations to buy the best politicians possible is not the answer to reforming what is wrong with America today. With the recent ruling to allow corporations to spend freely in an election will only insure that candidates that have been vetted by big business will appear on the ballot and our second question for the governor of West Virginia will only be more valid..

The greatest threat this country faces is not from its external enemies but rather from the internal enemy headed by the rich elites demanding one world government. The only rights we and freedoms we enjoy are rights that we stand ready to fight for. The greatest weapon one can wield at these fascist crackpots that are running the nation business is knowledge. I urge those that stand ready to fight for their freedom to obtain a copy of the Nazi Hydra and learn how the enemy has infiltrated our society and what we can do to expunge the enemy from our society. Live free or live in fear.

Having concluded that it would be in the best interests of the Court to have my successor appointed and confirmed well in advance of the commencement of the Court’s next Term, I shall retire from regular active service as an Associate Justice.

NBC anchor Brian Williams called him a “liberal lion,” a “lawyer’s lawyer.” UPI’s Michael Kirkland said he led the Court’s “four-member liberal bloc.” AP’s Mark Sherman and Calvin Woodward said he “carved a liberal legacy on the high court.” Clinton’s acting Solicitor General, Walter Dellinger, called him “the Chief Justice of the Liberal Supreme Court.” Writing in The New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin said he was a “liberal leader (who’s) views suggest a sensibility more than a philosophy.” 

Others remember him both ways:  voting to reinstate the death penalty in 1976 and against “affirmative” preferences in the 1978 Bakke case; and  for his scathing 2000 Bush v. Gore dissent, support for reproductive rights, and the separation of church and state, among his other liberal and conservative decisions. 

In a 2007 interview, Stevens told journalist, Jeffrey Rosen, he hasn’t changed much since his 1975 appointment, saying:

“I don’t think of myself as a liberal at all. I think as part of my general politics, I’m pretty darn conservative.” His judicial hero is Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, Republican centrist and fellow “judicial conservative.”

Potential Successor Candidates

Some observers believe Solicitor General Elena Kagan is the leading contender. Educated at Harvard Law School, she then clerked for Justice Thurgood Marshall, followed by several years in private practice after which she taught law at the University of Chicago. In 1995, she became Clinton’s associate counsel, then deputy assistant for domestic policy and deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council. Clinton nominated her to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, but no confirmation hearing followed. In 1999, she taught at Harvard Law School, then, in 2003, university President Larry Summers appointed her dean, a position she held until confirmed Solicitor General in 2009.

As the president’s chief lawyer before the High Court, she’s well known as the “Tenth Justice.” In 2009, she was a finalist to replace Justice David Souter, leading some to believe she’s top choice now to succeed Stevens.

On April 12, University of Illinois Law Professor Francis Boyle said the following:

“As dean of the Harvard Law School, Kagan hired Bush’s outgoing director of the Office of Legal Counsel, Jack Goldsmith, as a law professor. Goldsmith is regarded by myself and many others in the field as a war criminal. He wrote some of the memos that attempted to make violations of the Geneva Conventions appear legal. Kagan actually bragged about ‘how proud’ she was to have hired Goldsmith after one of his criminal Department of Justice memoranda was written up in the Washington Post.” 

Boyle added more:

• her endorsement of Bush’s “bogus category ‘enemy combatant,’ whose implementation has been a war crime in its own right;”
• as Solicitor General, she supports illegal/unconstitutional positions in federal litigation, including before the Supreme Court;
• she’s quoted saying, “I love the Federalist Society,” an extremist right wing group against democracy; for rolling back civil liberties and human rights protections; supporting imperial wars, torture, and corporatism; ending New Deal social policies; opposing reproductive rights, government regulations, organized labor, and environmental protections; and subverting justice in defense of privilege.

Five current Supreme Court justices are Federalist Society members: Chief Justice John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, and Clarence Thomas.

During her Solicitor General confirmation hearing, she supported the Bush administration’s world as a “battlefield” notion, war a proper legal framework for dealing with terrorism, and indefinitely detaining anyone called an “enemy combatant,” no matter its violation of constitutional and international law protections, or as Boyle explained in his June 8, 2007 article titled, ”Unlawful Enemy Combatants and the International Criminal Court:”

This “World War II era legal category of dubious provenance… is long-defunct,” yet Bush and Obama still use it — the term changed to “unprivileged enemy belligerents” under Section 1031 (the 2009 Military Commissions Act) of the FY 2010 Defense Authorization Act.

For Boyle, it’s a “quasi-category to create an anti-matter universe of legal nihilism where human beings (including US citizens) can be disappeared, detained incommunicado, denied access to attorneys and regular courts, tried by kangaroo courts, executed, tortured, assassinated and subjected to numerous other manifestations of State Terrorism,” all of which the current High Court, Congress, Obama administration, and both major parties endorse.

No wonder Texas A & M’s Bush School of Government and Public Service Professor William F. West called Kagan “a fan of presidential power,” the “unitary executive” kind under Bush and now Obama.

Himself a Harvard Law grad and Ph.D in political science, Boyle wrote twice about “Harvard’s Gitmo Kangaroo Law School: The School for Torturers,” most recently on April 1. At least five of its professors advocate torture and war crimes, including:

• Detlev Vagts “who supported abusing” Saddam Hussein despite his prisoner of war protections under Third Geneva and the UN Convention against Torture;
• Alan Dershowitz, a notorious bigot and advocate for murder and torture;
• Richard Parker Boyle calls a “neo-con law non-entity;”
• Phil Heymann, former Deputy Attorney General under Janet Reno, “the Butcher of Waco;” Heymann ordered the cover-up; and
• Jack Goldsmith, complicit in the Bush administration’s crimes of war and against humanity for “designing, justifying and approving the hideous (post-9/11) human rights atrocities” — along with co-conspirator John Yoo and others; these men are no different than “Nazi Law Professor Carl Schmitt, who justified every hideous atrocity that Hitler and the Nazis inflicted” throughout Europe, including horrifically against Slavs, Jews, and everyone opposing their ideology.

In his June 17, 2008 version of the above article, Boyle accused Harvard law professors and deans of “no longer (being) fit to educate Lawyers, Members of the Bar, and Officers of the Court… Harvard is to Law School as Torture is to Law. The Harvard Law School Faculty and Deans torture the Law. Do not send your children or students to Harvard Law School where they will grow up to become racist war criminals! Harvard Law School is a Neo-Con cesspool.” 

And now perhaps one of their own, former professor and dean Elena Kagan, may replace John Paul Stevens, shifting the Court further to the right by subverting justice and democratic freedoms in favor of privilege.

Court Over Constitution

On February 27, this writer’s article, titled “America’s Supremes: Court Over Constitution” said the following:

In all three branches of government, “America was always ruled by men, not laws, who lie, connive, misinterpret, and pretty much do what they want for their own self-interest and powerful constituents. (Like today), In 1787, “the people” who mattered most were elitists. The American revolution substituted new management for old. Everything changed but stayed the same under:” 

• an illusory democracy;
•  a powerful president; a virtual dictator in times of war;
• a corrupted Congress representing privilege, not people; and
• a separate judiciary able (through “judicial review”) to overrule Congress and the Executive, but most often goes along; power supports power, the kind today heading America toward tyranny, already well advanced with obliging High Court help.

Other Potential Choices

Merrick B. Garland, Judge on the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and Harvard Law grad. He then clerked for Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, briefly served as a Special Assistant US Attorney General before entering private practice, during which time he also worked as an Assistant US Attorney for the District of Columbia. In 1993, he became Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the DOJ’s criminal division, and in 1994 principal Associate Deputy US Attorney General.

Called a moderate, he wasn’t a finalist in 2009 to replace Souter. Conservatives may support him. Liberals may object, but both sides have other preferred choices. In their April 10 Slate.com article headlined, “Who Should Replace Justice Stevens,” Emily Bazelon and Dahlia Lithwick named Garland, Kagan and Judge Diane Wood as the frontrunners, then listed other possibilities, some familiar, others less known.

In his April 10 article titled, “Justice John Paul Stevens announces his retirement from the Supreme Court,” Washington Post writer Robert Barnes quoted Alliance for Justice’s Nan Aron saying:

“Republicans will oppose any nominee sent up by the president. This is already a court that’s tilted in favor of large corporations and special interests. Justice Stevens’ replacement ought to be a person who understands how decisions affect the rights of everyday Americans.” 

On April 9, the Alliance for Justice web site praised Stevens’ “Historic Legacy of Championing Constitutional Values… his distinctive voice will be greatly missed,” and not likely replaced by his successor.

Diane P. Wood, Judge on the 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago and University of Texas School of Law grad. She then clerked for Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, worked as a lawyer-advisor in the State Department’s Office of Legal Advisor before entering private practice. She also taught law at Georgetown University and the University of Chicago where she was also associate dean. During the Reagan administration, she served as special assistant to the Associate Attorney General, and as the Antitrust Division’s Deputy Assistant Attorney General for international, appellate and policy matters under Clinton before becoming a federal judge.

In his May 2009 New Republic article headlined, “Good Wood,” Jeffrey Rosen called her “The second coming of Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” quoting University of Chicago’s “libertarian scholar” Richard Epstein saying:

She has an ideal judicial temperament,” admired by “her colleagues, her clerks, and the lawyers who practice before her… open to argument on all questions, and the lawyers who appear before her know they will get a respectful hearing. She is theoretically rigorous but nondogmatic. I think that her nomination should be greeted with acclamation by Democrats and Republicans alike.

Perhaps the former, not the latter if the National Review‘s Ed Whelan (“bench memos,” May 22, 2009) comment is indicative, calling Wood “a hard-Left judicial activist and aggressor on culture-war issues.” More  saying she’s “ready to invent a constitutional right to same-sex marriage… believes (including) ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance violates” the Constitution’s Establishment Clause, (stating “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”), is “more extreme” than other judges on abortion, and aggressively pursues “her ideological agenda.”

Other Names Mentioned

– Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, wasn’t a finalist in 2009, unlikely to be now;

– Harold Koh, former Yale Law School dean and current State Department legal advisor, a man Glenn Greenwald calls “genuinely liberal,” for sure why Republicans will strongly oppose him;

– Greenwald also calls Diane Wood and Stanford Law Professor Pam Karlan superior choices, compared to Kagan who’ll shift the Court further to the right;

– Cass Sunstein, University of Chicago Law School visiting professor, (on leave) Harvard Law professor, current White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Administrator, and another candidate Greenwald opposes in his March 26 article titled, “The Horrible Prospect of Supreme Court Justice Cass Sunstein,” saying:

“From the beginning of the War on Terror, Cass Sunstein turned himself into the most reliable Democratic cheerleader for Bush/Cheney radicalism and their assault on the Constitution and the rule of law.” He also supports military commissions, illegal surveillance, and “mock(ed) the notion that Bush had committed crimes while in office.” Given those credentials, he’s as dangerous as Kagan and other suggested right wing possibilities.

– DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano for one, a 2009 finalist, hard line in her present position, militantly anti-immigrant, and was earlier accused of corrupt cronyism as Arizona governor;

– Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a hard line, neoliberal hawk, who once told ABC’s Good Morning America (during the 2008 campaign) that if Iran attacked Israel (implausible on its face), America would respond by “obliterating” the country; in other words, incinerate its entire population in a nuclear holocaust;

– Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, a personal friend of Obama and fellow Harvard Law grad;

– Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow, confirmed by an anonymous White House source as one of at least 10 contenders; Slate writer Emily Bazelon calls her “a great dark horse… a star legal academic… and a leading expert on family law; she’s also close to Obama, having mentored him as a law student, and her father, former FCC Commissioner Newton Minow gave him his first legal job as a summer law firm associate; and

– numerous other names mentioned in various High Court sweepstakes opinion pieces, most unfamiliar to the public.

America needs no more Scalias, Alitos or Kennedys. It needs another Thurgood Marshall, William Brennan or William O. Douglas, more then to follow. Instead, Obama will likely shift today’s extremist Court even further to the right, for sure if Elena Kagan is appointed or others with similar credentials.

 – conspiring to defraud the United States;

 – conspiring to provide and conceal material support to terrorist activity;

 – providing and concealing material support to terrorist activity; and

 – two counts of making false statements.

The charges related to her alleged violation of Bureau of Prisons Special Administrative Measures (SAMS) that prohibit discussing topics the Justice Department rules outside “legal representation” — to inhibit a proper defense and obstruct justice for anyone DOJ wants to convict. 

Her client was Sheik Abdel Rahman, a one-time CIA asset, convicted in 1995 and now serving a life sentence for “seditious conspiracy” for his alleged connection to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing despite convincing evidence of his innocence.

As an advocate for justice, Lynne was targeted, indicted, and after a seven month 2004 – 2005 show trial featuring the worst of McCarthy-like tactics, convicted on February 10, 2005 after 13 days of deliberation on all five counts. She was automatically disbarred, then sentenced on October 17, 2006 to 28 months imprisonment.

She remained free on bond until the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit revoked it on November 17, 2009, ordering her surrender on November 19 at 5PM to be imprisoned at:

MCC-NY, 150 Park Row, New York, NY 10007 — Prison number 53504-054

Though subject to change, she’ll be resentenced on July 15, at which time her 28 month confinement may be sustained, reduced, or what friends and family fear, increased after the three-judge Appeals Court panel accused her of lying, called for a longer sentence, and remanded her case to District Court Judge John G. Koeltl for reconsideration. 

It puts strong pressure on him to comply, despite, on sentencing, calling Lynne’s character “extraordinary” and, believing a long imprisonment would be “an unreasonable result,” citing “the somewhat atypical nature of Stewart’s case (and) lack of evidence that any victim was harmed as a result of the charged offense.”

Also that terrorism enhancement sentencing was “dramatically unreasonable in (her) case (because it grossly) overstate(d) the seriousness of (her) past conduct and the likelihood that (she would) repeat the offense. (Stewart) has no criminal history and yet (terrorism enhancement would) place (her) in the highest criminal history category equal to that of repeat felony offenders for the most serious offenses including murder and drug trafficking.”

Ordinarily, if lawyers violate SAMs or other prison rules, it’s handled administratively like restricting visitation rights or denying them. For doing her job, Lynne was criminally indicted to:

– discredit, silence and disbar her; and 

– intimidate other lawyers not to defend unpopular clients too vigorously or face similar treatment.

 Potential long imprisonment sends a strong message, what’s for Obama administration prosecutors to consider after Judge Koeltl resentences.

Second Circuit Denies Full (En Banc) Rehearing  

On February 23, the Appeals Court majority ruling denied Lynne’s request, stating:

– “the terrorism enhancement is the dominant sentencing consideration in this case. The district court erred in discounting it to zero. That is an error both procedural and substantive in nature, highlighting one reason that the two-step sequencing of review for procedural and substantive error makes so little sense in this case.”

– “….the abuse of her law license is a basis for enhancing Stewart’s sentence…. Stewart is reported as having expressed the view that she would do what she did again, but ‘might handle it a little differently’ to evade detection. So for her, supporting and promoting terrorism remains acceptable; anything else… is technique.”

– “Media reports (which require skeptical vetting) reflect that Stewart has promoted her criminal conduct as a matter of principle,” including at a law school conference attended mostly by students, “seek(ing) to corrupt the young by enlisting (them) in the project of degrading legal practice.”

– “….the issue of substantive reasonableness may be obviated or mitigated following the district court’s correction of the procedural error identified by the panel majority… this Court may have an opportunity after remand to reach issues that are not decided by the panel majority.”

On July 15 or if rescheduled, the harsh Appeals Court message will weigh heavily on Judge Koeltl when he resentences. 

As a result, Lynne’s web site highlights the concern, saying:

“We need your support now more than ever!”

A petition to free her can be found on her site. Add your name to the hundreds who’ve signed, and support Lynne’s struggle against prosecutorial injustice.

Lynne’s Message

After being jailed, Lynne’s web site published her letter to “Sisters and Brothers, Friends and Supporters,” saying:

“Well the moment we all hoped would never come is upon us. Good bye to a good cup of coffee in the morning, a soft chair, the hugs of grandchildren and the smaller pleasures in life.”

At that time, she was well treated “due to my lawyer team and your overwhelming support. While I have received ‘celebrity’ treatment here in MCC — high visibility — conditions for the other women are deplorable. Medical care, food, education, recreation are all at minimal levels. If it weren’t for the unqualified bonds of sisterhood and the commissary it would be even more dismal.”

At the end, she thanked supporters for showing up for her jailing, calling it a moment she’ll always cherish. “The broad organizational representation was breathtaking and the love and politics expressed (the anger too) will keep me nourished through this.”

Her final comment was vintage Lynne:

“Organize – Agitate, Agitate, Agitate! And write to me and others locked down by the Evil Empire.”

Love Struggle, Lynne Stewart

On December 3, the Lynne Stewart Defense Committee’s (LSDC) Pat Levasseur updated her status after a December 2 conference before Judge Koeltl discussing resentencing procedures. Under consideration was whether to do it “de novo” (starting over, disregarding his initial reasoning) or by clarifying and updating his October 2006 decision.

At issue is the Appeals Court opinion as well as Lynne’s age (70) and health. Her blood pressure is “extremely high,” and she needs bladder surgery. It’s “not life threatening but increasingly uncomfortable,” so it’s essential to complete as soon as possible successfully.

LSDC plans public events on Lynne’s behalf “in cooperation with others to fight for (her) sentence to remain 28 months.” 

Additional time will be cruel and unusual by any standard, yet Republican and Democrat prosecutors demand maximum penalties against anyone they target – innocent or guilty, to punish using underhanded tactics to intimidate juries to convict, and tell defense lawyers to steer clear of unpopular clients or not defend them vigorously.

“It’s not the government’s money, it’s the people’s money.” — George W. Bush, stump speeches, 2000.

“I don’t want to pay for somebody else’s…” “problems” (welfare), “kids” (public schools), “medical” (health care).

Character Is Fate (Heraclitus/Novalis)

The social programming language of capitalist authoritarianism seeks to activate personal greed, intellectual insecurity and visceral racism as motivators of guided popular political reaction. The Pavlovian logic to this scheme of social manipulation is that all human beings are possessive, gullible and fearful.

Don’t think this last generalization too extreme. Rare are the people who are as unconcerned about their survival and possessions as were Diogenes of Sinope, the Greek “cynic” philosopher of the 4th century BC, and Ryōkan Taigu (1758-1831), the hermit Zen monk poet and calligrapher. Similarly, rare are the people, without organic brain disorders, who do not have some fear of being made fools of when matching wits with more polished, more educated, more experienced, more charismatic or simply a luckier class of people. Lastly, we are all racists. As highly evolved monkeys, we instinctively identify with our monkey troop of people with similar appearance, existential outlook, language, culture, place of origin, the economic neighborhood we imagine we deserve a place in, and the socio-political fantasy we have been imprinted with and trained to take as the thread of history that expresses us.

As we become more self-aware, more experienced and better educated, we can see through many of the racist concepts and attitudes of the past. But it is self-deception to imagine that we have ever individually “gone beyond racism” in our visceral responses to the instants of daily life that erupt before us, or that we will never have a sudden emotion, thought or fear that is completely above the muck of primordial racist reaction. It is intellectual pride, and false, to assume we can consciously will ourselves to transcend the psychological reactions of our paleo-mammalian brains. Instead, it is psychologically much healthier to realize that our common human nature assures that any behavior humanly possible, remains humanly possible for each of us as well.

C. G. Jung made this point about Nazism, that those people least likely to act like Nazis and Nazi collaborators were those who knew they had no special immunity to Nazi psychology (not assuming they were too “intellectual”, “moral”, or “religious” to be swayed), but instead actively countered its influences to their behavior. A similar attitude operating out of the cerebral cortex is needed to manage the unthinking motivations arising out of our deeper-set limbic system, our reptilian brain. Racism is a burst of raw emotional energy whose emergence is to be detected and redirected intelligently, while within the individual.

People whose self-awareness, of the type described, are weak and under-developed and can be manipulated more easily. “There’s a sucker born every minute” (pre-1898, attribution uncertain). People who are keenly aware of this psychology, and devoid of moral principles, like the fictional Elmer Gantry and the all-too-real Joseph Goebbels, can manage the herding of a mass of people to give up their power — in every sense of the word — to a driving elite. The few rule the many by persuasion. The levers of direction are the popular flaws of character.

We The People

In theory, the many governments (federal, state and local) in the United States of America are democracies: assemblies of elected representatives of populations of citizens, and officials appointed by the elected representatives to execute specific tasks in the public interest. In this model, government is the apparatus designed to implement the popular consensus about the management of the shared material existence of the citizenry.

Identifying and prioritizing the specifics of the popular will are supposedly accomplished by the concentrating and winnowing effects of competitive electioneering and parliamentary debate. The regulation of markets and trade, the upkeep of public infrastructure, the provision of emergency services against natural disasters, and the prudent maintenance of defense forces are all examples of publicly shared concerns governments are created to manage. The education of children till they reach adulthood, intellectual maturity and a self-sustaining professional competence, as well as the health care of the citizenry are enduring publicly shared concerns that are ideally suited for management by functionally dedicated government apparatuses.

When Ronald Reagan said “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” he was saying that we, the people, were the problem since our government is the democratic abstraction of our shared existence. So if we are “the problem,” then whose problem is this? Why would “our” President disown the apparatus of our common will, whose implementation he had been entrusted to lead? Certainly, one could understand “our” President saying that there were problems in the government apparatus limiting its responsiveness to our needs, and effectiveness in achieving our goals: “my purpose as your President is solving the problems our government has in meeting all its obligations to the public.” Note however, this last quote is fictional.

On the 20th of January, 1981, the new President of the United States was telling us that “we the people” were in somebody’s way, a somebody who actually was represented by the power and authority he now held, and which he intended to use to destroy the deposed government that was “us.” A coup. In the light of subsequent history, a reasonable characterization. Twenty-nine years and one day after Ronald Reagan came to power, the U.S. Supreme Court made it plain, by issuing its Dred Scott decision of the 21st century, elevating corporate rights above those of individual flesh-and-blood human beings. Now, every legally recognized person — real or corporate — is equally entitled to spend as much as they have to influence political debate. Clearly, because political access is so precious, it must be metered out on the basis of wealth.

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.” (Anatole France: Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault 1844-1924)

“It is true that liberty is precious, so precious that it must be rationed.” (Attributed to Lenin: Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov 1870-1924)

Yes, we, the people, are certainly in somebody’s way, unless our consumption, labor or demise lards a corporate bottom line. Think of yourself as a unit in a statistical ensemble of metabolic form virtual property, an advanced concept of slavery that transcends the 13th Amendment and the unitary static materialist concept of the lump-of-flesh slave; a human herd whose collective activity in a spectrum of markets exudes profitability like the methane clouds that flatulate up from bovine concentrations. The free market system strikes a match to the gas, charges you for the heat and leaves you with the ashes, if not a scorched rump. We are herded by the owners of the markets we are counted in.

One example is health care; our medical needs are not the prime concern, but instead preserving the profits of the parasitic medical financing business carried on by the insurance industry, which is interposed between medical providers and patients. So our medical market owners, the insurance industry, must herd us to its best advantage, not ours. When we, the people, try to fashion a public health care system that does meet our needs, by cutting out the middleman (the essence of good business practice), we immediately find that “government is the problem.” In fact, democracy is the problem. If democracy is not strictly rationed, the whole herd might stampede and any number of markets tossed over and sunk, like the bales of tea dropped into Boston Harbor on December 16, 1773.

It’s All About The Money

When George W. Bush said “It’s not the government’s money, it’s the people’s money” during his campaign speeches in 2000, he was broadcasting coded programming language designed to activate resentment over personal inadequacies and have the resulting shame-based anger projected onto a victim population. The purpose of such social programming is to train the indoctrinated population to maintain its unthinking visceral obedience to the directing ideology, and so provide political support to an oligarchy that simply exploits its trained masses shamelessly.

When you hear people say “I don’t want to pay for somebody else’s…” “problems” (welfare), “kids” (public schools), “medical” (health care), you hear the internalized programming. With blissful obliviousness these political automatons will allow their economy to wither, and dispatch their tax dollars to fund the gold-plated war-waste of the Pentagon system and the many outrageous corporate subsidies (“bonuses”) that remain protected by the “tax cuts” that are so liberal to corporate wealth, so measly for the suckers, but do bump those “welfare cheats” off the dole most satisfactorily to both the duped and the malevolent.

The great con-job here is in training a large population into accepting that property has more rights than people. Since under democracy there is always the threat that popular consensus could place some restrictions on “property” (the “right” of money to do as it pleases), then property — as it is understood today: wealth protected by the legalistic über-persona of corporate structure — must destroy democracy. Democracy is communism.

A History Of Social Control

How did the corporate ideology social programmers manage to peel back a million years of human evolution to produce the “Tea Party” sideshows where people act at their limbic level, like monkey troops howling over the invasion of their banana groves? Let’s skip through history to piece together an answer.

The European white man used a divide-and-rule strategy to control the native populations of the many countries he colonized in the Western Hemisphere, Asia, Africa, the Pacific and the Middle East. Tribal rivalries stoked by the white overlords could keep the natives distracted from coordinating a united opposition to colonialism. Selected native groups and individuals could be educated and trained to become the local managers and enforcers of the white man’s rule. They internalized the white man’s culture up to a point, sufficient they hoped to “elevate” them out of native society and into some respectable place in the white man’s social hierarchy, and along with that add to their wealth and prestige. These were the compradors, native-born agents of colonial interests in Asia, and the native troops deployed by white colonial management to control the native masses. Successors in the role of native collaborators with white social control are the racial and ethnic tokens deployed by U.S. corporate and political management today; some are quite polished, prominent, and well-paid.

The management of today’s masses in the United States evolved out of the mechanisms for managing the natives that began with Christopher Columbus and the European Conquest of the Americas. Native and slave management in early colonial times evolved into race management after the Civil War, and then to the economic and social class management of the present day. The entire mentality of social control is that of colonialism.

The most significant Civil Rights legislation since the end of the Civil War was enacted during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson (Democratic Party):

• The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (extended voting rights and outlawed racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and by facilities that served the general public),
• The National Voting Rights Act of 1965 (outlawed discriminatory voting practices that had caused the widespread disenfranchisement of African Americans),
• The Civil Rights Act of 1968 (the “Fair Housing Act” prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental, and financing of housing).

The combined tensions of desperation by white racists at losing overt social control, and the pent up rage of blacks over the slow pace of authentic relief of oppression and the opening of economic opportunities, erupted into many urban riots during the 1960s. Very prominent ones were: the Watts Riots of 1965 in Los Angeles; the 1967 riots in Newark and Detroit; and the 125 cities that erupted into riot during April and May of 1968 in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4th.

In 1968, Richard M. Nixon (Republican Party) used a “Southern Strategy”, a “law and order” play on Southern white racist resentment, to win the presidential election. Johnson likely assumed that Civil Rights legislation would bring a flood of black votes to the Democrats nationally, and perhaps compensate somewhat for the certain loss of Southern white racist votes; but, blacks are only about 12% of the population, and Nixon counted on there being more than 12% white racist resentment within the 75% white population — both in the South and nationally. He won by a landslide.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan tapped into the submerged bigotry that exists coast-to-coast, to call forth the resentful inner white Southerner (the inner Confederate) within much of the national electorate, and win the presidency. Reagan’s managers had learned from Nixon, and devised an expanded form of the Southern Strategy.

During George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign (as well as his two terms in office) economic class and “race” code words were euphemisms for each other. The decoded programming message was: poor and unworthy people, like wasteful and lazy blacks, and dirty and ignorant Mexican (Latino) immigrants are taking “your” (deserving inner whites’) money by creating social welfare burdens that “your” government is now forced to pay, because of bad “give-away” legislation foisted on it by wrong-headed liberals (white snobs and non-white agitators). Your undeserved (because of your inner whiteness) increasing poverty is directly attributable to the drain on taxes by these unworthy, non-white-centered, strange-language populations. In voting for George W. Bush (and obeying his managing oligarchy), you put money “back” into the pockets of people like you, who deserve it.

All the language publicly broadcast by “conservatives” is pure lying to induce visceral obedience to the corporatist oligarchy’s political control, and allow it to continue bleeding the public like a swarm of elephant-sized ticks. Following are generalized decodings of the core instructions and their imprinted reflection.

The Hypnotic Message (“watch the watch…”):

You lack… stuff (money, brains, looks, youth, education, a nice location, a desirable mate, successful children), so you resent paying for others who get it free; others who are inferior, threatening, strange, unclean, unwholesome, wasteful, disrespectful of your importance (as a real American), and of your precedence in “our” traditional system of social rank. You resent these others polluting and degrading the system you expect to provide for you, to profit you, to honor you, to hold still and not progress beyond your capacity to understand, and to preserve the order of social rewards so no unworthy others pass you by and push you back.

You must fight back, don’t let them have free things which your work has paid for, don’t let them have advantages that makes it easier for them to advance ahead of you, and makes it harder for you to maintain your superiority without learning anything new, without becoming smarter or richer on your own. Don’t let these others have advantages that crowd the places you expect to occupy as you move on in life; crowd them with more unwholesome unworthy competitors, whose increasing number threaten to diminish your standing, and end your way of life.

The Internalized Message:

I lack stuff, and it is these unclean others who have degraded the system that previously would have moved me up faster and more comfortably. So I want to exclude these others, keep them from crossing “our” borders, and taking our advantages without paying as much as I did; even worse, creating problems my tax dollars have to pay for and which wouldn’t even happen if those people weren’t here, so I would have more of my own wealth. I have to stand up for the people like me who run for office and are willing to get the government to take care of the real Americans, who deserve the benefits that they paid for, and their parents and grandparents paid for; that will push out the unclean ones and ensure there are no extra moochers sapping our wealth, and bringing me down. Because I lack stuff, I don’t want to pay for other people to have stuff, and because I don’t want the government to take more of my money, I’m voting for the people who want to cut down the government, and cut down taxes. I’m voting to stop the give-aways, because the politicians who will do that care about me, a real American who makes a real contribution to the country, and deserves not to have it pissed away on wasteful others.

And so are fools serenaded into the abattoir.

The facts of the Abu-Jamal/Faulkner case are highly contested, but all sides agree on certain key points: Abu-Jamal was moonlighting as a taxi-driver on December 9, 1981, when, shortly before 4:00 a.m., he saw his brother, William “Billy” Cook, in an altercation with Officer Faulkner after Faulkner had pulled over Cook’s car at the corner of 13th and Locust Streets, downtown Philadelphia. Abu-Jamal approached the scene. Minutes later when police arrived, Faulkner had been shot dead, and Abu-Jamal had been shot in the chest. The bullet removed from Faulkner, reportedly a .38, was officially too damaged to match it to the legally registered .38 caliber gun that Abu-Jamal says he carried as a taxi driver, after he was robbed several times on the job. Further, Amnesty International has criticized the official “failure of the police to test Abu-Jamal’s gun, hands, and clothing” for gunshot residue, as “deeply troubling.” Abu-Jamal has always maintained his innocence, and today still fights the conviction from his death-row cell in Waynesburg, PA, where he also records weekly radio commentaries, and has now written six books.

Recently, Abu-Jamal had petitioned the US Supreme Court to review the US Third Circuit Court ruling of March, 27 2008, which rejected his bid, based on three issues, for a new guilt-phase trial. One issue was that of racially discriminatory jury selection, based on the 1986 case Batson v. Kentucky, on which the three-judge panel split 2-1, with Judge Thomas Ambro dissenting. Ambro argued that prosecutor Joseph McGill’s use of 10 out of his 15 peremptory strikes to remove otherwise acceptable African-American jurors, was itself enough evidence of racial discrimination to grant Abu-Jamal a preliminary hearing that could have led to a new trial. In denying Abu-Jamal this preliminary hearing, Ambro argued that the Court was creating new rules that were being exclusively applied to Abu-Jamal’s case. The denial “goes against the grain of our prior actions . . . I see no reason why we should not afford Abu-Jamal the courtesy of our precedents,” wrote Ambro.

In his new essay titled “The Mumia Exception,” author J. Patrick O’Connor argues that the Third Circuit Court’s rejection of the Batson claim and of the other two issues presented is only the latest example of the courts’ longstanding practice of altering existing precedent to deny Abu-Jamal legal relief. O’Connor cites many other problems, including the 2001 affidavit by a former court stenographer, who says that on the eve of Abu-Jamal’s trial, she overheard Judge Albert Sabo say to someone at the courthouse that he was going to “help” the prosecution “fry the nigger,” referring to Abu-Jamal. Common Pleas Judge Pamela Dembe rejected this affidavit on grounds that even if Sabo had made the comment, it was irrelevant as long as his “rulings were legally correct.”

The phrase “Mumia Exception” was first coined by Linn Washington, Jr., a Philadelphia Tribune columnist and professor of journalism at Temple University, who has covered this story since the day of Abu-Jamal’s 1981 arrest. Washington criticizes the Third Circuit’s ruling against Abu-Jamal’s claim that Judge Sabo had treated him unfairly at the 1995-97 Post-Conviction Relief Act (PCRA) hearings, which was another issue the Circuit Court had considered. Citing “the mound of legal violations in this case,” Washington says “the continuing refusal of U.S. courts to equally apply the law in the Abu-Jamal case constitutes a stain on America’s image internationally.”

Launched Campaign Cites Withheld Evidence

The Philadelphia Inquirer has reported that supporters of Mumia Abu-Jamal are responding to the March 2009 US Supreme Court ruling by launching a campaign calling for a federal civil rights investigation into Abu-Jamal’s case. The campaign’s supporters include the Riverside Church’s Prison Ministry, actress Ruby Dee, professor Cornel West, and US Congressman Charles Rangel, who is Chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means. In 2004, the NAACP passed a resolution supporting a new trial for Abu-Jamal, and campaign supporters will be gathering to publicize the civil rights campaign at the upcoming NAACP National Convention in New York City, July 11-16, and to pressure the NAACP to honor their earlier resolutions by actively supporting the current campaign seeking an investigation. Supporters will then be in Washington, DC on July 22 to lobby their elected officials, and in mid-September, they’ll return to Washington, DC for a major press conference.

Thousands of signatures have been collected for a public letter to US Attorney General Eric Holder, which reads: “Inasmuch as there is no other court to which Abu-Jamal can appeal for justice, we turn to you for remedy of a 27-year history of gross violations of US constitutional law and international standards of justice.” The letter cites Holder’s recent investigation into the case of former Senator Ted Stevens, which led to all charges against him being dropped: “You were specifically outraged by the fact that the prosecution withheld information critical to the defense’s argument for acquittal, a violation clearly committed by the prosecution in Abu-Jamal’s case. Mumia Abu-Jamal, though not a US Senator of great wealth and power, is a Black man revered around the world for his courage, clarity, and commitment, and deserves no less than Senator Stevens.”

Several campaigns seeking a civil right investigation into the Abu-Jamal case have been launched since 1995, at which time the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) was one of many groups that publicly supported an investigation. In a 1995 letter written independently of the CBC, Representatives Chaka Fattah, Ron Dellums, Cynthia McKinney, Maxine Waters, and John Conyers (now Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee) stated, “There is ample evidence that Mr. Abu-Jamal’s constitutional rights were violated, that he did not receive a fair trial, and that he is, in fact, innocent.” Assistant Attorney General Andrew Fois responded to the CBC’s request, and in a September 1995 rejection letter written to Congressman Ron Dellums, Fois conceded that even though there is a five-year statute of limitations for a civil rights investigation, the statute does not apply if “there is significant evidence of an ongoing conspiracy.”

One of the 2009 campaign’s organizers is Dr. Suzanne Ross, a spokesperson for the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition of New York City. Citing Andrew Fois’ letter, Ross argues that the “continued denial of justice to Mumia in the federal courts, as documented by dissenting Judge Thomas Ambro,” is evidence of an “ongoing conspiracy,” and thus merits an investigation. “Throughout the history of this case, we were always told ‘Wait until we get to the federal courts. They will surely overturn the racism and gross misconduct of Judge Sabo,’ but we never got even a preliminary hearing on the issue considered most winnable: racial bias in jury selection, the so called Batson issue.” Ross also criticizes the Third Circuit’s denial of Abu-Jamal’s claim that Judge Sabo was unfair at the 1995-97 PCRA hearings, and considers this denial to be further evidence of an “ongoing conspiracy.” Ross argues that the courts’ continued affirmation of Sabo’s rulings during the PCRA hearings, and Sabo’s ultimate ruling that nothing presented at the PCRA hearings was significant enough to merit a new trial, serves to legitimize numerous injustices throughout Abu-Jamal’s case.

Specifically referring to the issue of withheld evidence, that was central to the case of former Senator Ted Stevens, organizer Suzanne Ross identifies five key instances in Abu-Jamal’s case, where “evidence was withheld that could have led to Mumia’s acquittal.” The DA’s office withheld two items from Abu-Jamal’s defense: the actual location of the driver’s license application found in Officer Faulkner’s pocket; and Pedro Polakoff’s crime scene photos. Then, at the request of prosecutor McGill, Judge Sabo ruled to block three items from the jury: prosecution eyewitness Robert Chobert’s probation status and criminal history; testimony from defense eyewitness Veronica Jones about police attempts to solicit false testimony; and testimony from Police Officer Gary Waskshul.

DA Suppresses Evidence About Kenneth Freeman

In their recent books, Michael Schiffmann (Race Against Death: The Struggle for the Life and Freedom of Mumia Abu-Jamal, 2006) and J. Patrick O’Connor (The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal, 2008) argue that the actual shooter of Officer Faulkner was a man named Kenneth Freeman. Schiffmann and O’Connor argue that Freeman was an occupant of Billy Cook’s car, who shot Faulkner in response to Faulkner having shot Abu-Jamal first, and then fled the scene before police arrived.

Central to Schiffmann and O’Connor’s argument was the presence of a driver’s license application for one Arnold Howard, which was found in the front pocket of Officer Faulkner’s shirt. Abu-Jamal’s defense would not learn about this until 13 years later, because the Police and DA’s office had failed to notify them about the application’s crucial location. Journalist Linn Washington argues that this failure was “a critical and deliberate omission,” and “a major violation of fair trial rights and procedures. If the appeals process had any semblance of fairness, this misconduct alone should have won a new trial for Abu-Jamal.” More importantly, Washington says, “this evidence provides strong proof of a third person at the scene along with Faulkner and Billy Cook. The prosecution case against Abu-Jamal rests on the assertion that Faulkner encountered a lone Cook minutes before Abu-Jamal’s arrival on the scene, but Faulkner got that application from somebody other than Cook, who had his own license.”

At the 1995 PCRA hearing, Arnold Howard testified that he had loaned his temporary, non-photo license to Kenneth Freeman, who was Billy Cook’s business partner and close friend. Further, Howard stated that police came to his house early in the morning on Dec. 9, 1981, and brought him to the police station for questioning because he was suspected of being “the person who had run away” from the scene, but he was released after producing a 4:00 a.m. receipt from a drugstore across town (which provided an alibi) and telling them that he had loaned the application to Freeman (who Howard reports was also at the police station that morning).

Also pointing to Freeman’s presence in the car with Cook, O’Connor and Schiffmann cite prosecution witness Cynthia White’s testimony at Cook’s separate trial for charges of assaulting Faulkner, where White describes both a “driver” and a “passenger” in Cook’s VW. Also notable, investigative journalist Dave Lindorff’s book (Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, 2003) features an interview with Cook’s lawyer Daniel Alva, in which Alva says that Cook had confided to him within days of the shooting that Freeman had been with him that morning.

Linn Washington argues that, “this third person at the crime scene is consistent with eyewitness accounts of the shooter fleeing the scene. Remember that accounts from both prosecution and defense witnesses confirm the existence of a fleeing shooter. Abu-Jamal was arrested at the scene, critically wounded. He did not run away and return in a matter of seconds.” Eyewitnesses Robert Chobert, Dessie Hightower, Veronica Jones, Deborah Kordansky, William Singletary, and Marcus Cannon all reported, at various times, that they saw one or more men run away from the scene. O’Connor writes that, “some of the eyewitnesses said this man had an Afro and wore a green army jacket. Freeman did have an Afro and he perpetually wore a green army jacket. Freeman was tall and burly, weighing about 225 pounds at the time.” Then there’s eyewitness Robert Harkins, whom prosecutor McGill did not call as a witness. O’Connor postulates that the prosecutor’s decision was because Harkins’ account of a struggle between Faulkner and the shooter that caused Faulkner to fall on his hands and knees before Faulkner was shot “demolished the version of the shooting that the state’s other witnesses rendered at trial.” O’Connor writes further that “Harkins described the shooter as a little taller and heavier than the 6-foot, 200-pound Faulkner,” which excludes the 6’1”, 170-lb Abu-Jamal.

Linn Washington’s 2001 affidavit states that he knew Freeman to be a “close friend of Cook’s,” and that “Cook and Freeman were constantly together.” Washington first met Freeman when Freeman reported his experience of police brutality to the Philadelphia Tribune, where Washington worked. Washington says today that, “Kenny did not harbor any illusions about police being unquestioned heroes due to his experiences with being beaten a few times by police and police incessantly harassing him for his street vending.”

Regarding the police harassment and intimidation of Freeman, which continued after the arrest of Abu-Jamal, Washington adds: “It is significant to note that the night after the Faulkner shooting, the newsstand that Freeman built and operated at 16th and Chestnut Streets in Center City burned to the ground. In news media accounts of this arson, police sources openly boasted to reporters that the arsonist was probably a police officer. Witnesses claimed to see officers fleeing the scene right before the fire was noticed. Needless to say, that arson resulted in no arrests.” Dave Lindorff argues that the police clearly “had their eye on Freeman,” because “only two months after Faulkner’s shooting, Freeman was arrested in his home, where he was found hiding in his attic armed with a .22 caliber pistol, explosives and a supply of ammunition. At that time, he was not charged with anything.” O’Connor and Schiffmann argue that police intimidation ultimately escalated to the point where police themselves murdered Freeman.

The morning of May 14, 1985, Freeman’s body was found: naked, bound, and with a drug needle in his arm. His cause of death was officially declared a “heart attack.” The date of Freeman’s death is significant because the night before his body was found, the police had orchestrated a military-style siege on the MOVE organization’s West Philadelphia home. Police had fired over 10,000 rounds of ammunition in 90 minutes and used a State Police helicopter to drop a C-4 bomb (illegally supplied by the FBI) on MOVE’s roof, which started a fire that destroyed the entire city block. The MOVE Commission later documented that police had shot at MOVE family members when they tried to escape the fire: in all, six adults and five children were killed.

As a local journalist, Abu-Jamal had criticized the city government’s conflicts with MOVE, and after his 1981 arrest, MOVE began to publicly support him. Through this mutual advocacy, which continues today, Abu-Jamal and MOVE’s contentious relationship with the Philadelphia authorities have always been closely linked. Seen in this context, Schiffmann argues that “if Freeman was indeed killed by cops, the killing probably was part of a general vendetta of the Philadelphia cops against their ‘enemies’ and the cops killed him because they knew or suspected he had something to do with the killing of Faulkner.” O’Connor concurs, arguing that “the timing and modus operandi of the abduction and killing alone suggest an extreme act of police vengeance.”

DA Suppresses Pedro Polakoff’s Crime Scene Photos

On December 6, 2008, several hundred protesters gathered outside the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office, where Pam Africa, coordinator of the International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal, spoke about the newly discovered crime scene photos taken by press photographer Pedro Polakoff. Africa cited Polakoff’s statements today that he approached the DA’s office with the photos in 1981, 1982, and 1995, but that the DA had completely ignored him. Polakoff states that because he had believed Abu-Jamal was guilty, he had no interest in approaching the defense, and never did. Consequently, neither the 1982 jury nor the defense ever saw Polakoff’s photos. “The DA deliberately kept evidence out,” declared Africa: “someone should be arrested for withholding evidence in a murder trial.”

Advocacy groups called Educators for Mumia and Journalists for Mumia explain in their fact sheet, “21 FAQs,” that Polakoff’s photos were first discovered by German author Michael Schiffmann in May 2006, and published that Fall in his book, Race Against Death. One of Polakoff’s photos was first published in the US by The SF Bay View Newspaper on Oct. 24, 2007. Reuters followed with a Dec. 4, 2007 article, after which the photos made their television debut on NBC’s Dec. 6, 2007 Today Show. They have since been spotlighted by National Public Radio, Indymedia.org, CounterPunch, The Philadelphia Weekly and the new British documentary In Prison My Whole Life, which features an interview with Polakoff.

Since May, 2007, www.Abu-Jamal-News.com has displayed four of Polakoff’s photos, making the following points:

Photo 1: Mishandling the Guns — Officer James Forbes holds both Abu-Jamal’s and Faulkner’s guns in his bare hand and touches the metal parts. This contradicts his later court testimony that he had preserved the ballistics evidence by not touching the metal parts.

Photos 2 & 3: The Moving Hat — Faulkner’s hat is moved from the top of Billy Cook’s VW, and placed on the sidewalk for the official police photo.

Photo 4: The Missing Taxi — Prosecution witness Robert Chobert testified that he was parked directly behind Faulkner’s car, but the space is empty in the photo.

The Missing Divots — In all of Polakoff’s photos of the sidewalk where Faulkner was found, there are no large bullet divots, or destroyed chunks of cement, which should be visible in the pavement if the prosecution scenario was accurate, according to which Abu-Jamal shot down at Faulkner — and allegedly missed several times — while Faulkner was on his back. Also citing the official police photo, Michael Schiffmann writes: “It is thus no question any more whether the scenario presented by the prosecution at Abu-Jamal’s trial is true, because it is physically impossible.”

Pedro P. Polakoff was a Philadelphia freelance photographer who reports having arrived at the crime scene about 12 minutes after the shooting was first reported on police radio, and at least 10 minutes before the Mobile Crime Detection Unit that handles crime scene forensics and photographs. In Schiffmann’s interview with him, Polakoff recounted that “all the officers present expressed the firm conviction that Abu-Jamal had been the passenger in Billy Cook’s VW and had fired and killed Faulkner by a single shot fired from the passenger seat of the car.” Polakoff bases this on police statements made to him directly, and from his having overheard their conversations. Polakoff states that this early police opinion was apparently the result of their interviews of three other witnesses who were still present at the crime scene: a parking lot attendant, a drug-addicted woman, and another woman. None of those eyewitnesses, however, have appeared in any report presented to the courts by the police or the prosecution.

It is undisputed that Abu-Jamal approached from across the street, and was not the passenger in Billy Cook’s car. Schiffmann argues that Polakoff’s personal account strengthens the argument that the actual shooter was Billy Cook’s passenger Kenneth Freeman who, Schiffmann postulates, fled the scene before police arrived.

Robert Chobert’s Legal Status Withheld From Jury

At prosecutor Joseph McGill’s request, Judge Albert Sabo blocked Abu-Jamal’s defense from telling the 1982 jury that key prosecution eyewitness, taxi driver Robert Chobert, was on probation for throwing a molotov cocktail into a school yard, for pay. Sabo justified this by ruling that Chobert’s offense was not crimen falsi, i.e., a crime of deception. Consequently, the jury never heard about this, nor that on the night of Abu-Jamal’s arrest, Chobert had been illegally driving on a suspended license (revoked for a DWI). This probation violation could have given him up to 30 years in prison, so he was extremely vulnerable to pressure from the police. Notably, at the later 1995 PCRA hearing, Chobert testified that his probation had never been revoked, even though he continued to drive his taxi illegally through 1995.

At the 1982 trial, Chobert testified that he was in his taxi, which he had parked directly behind Faulkner’s police car, and was writing in his log book when he heard the first gunshot and looked up. Chobert alleged that while he did not see a gun in Abu-Jamal’s hand, nor a muzzle flash, he did see Abu-Jamal standing over Faulkner, saw Abu-Jamal’s hand “jerk back” several times, and heard shots after each “jerk.” After the shooting, Chobert stated that he got out and approached the scene.

Damaging Chobert’s credibility, however, is evidence suggesting that Chobert may have lied about his location at the time of Faulkner’s death. As noted earlier, the newly discovered Polakoff crime scene photos show that the space where Chobert testified to being parked directly behind Officer Faulkner’s car was actually empty. Yet, even more evidence suggests he lied about his location. While prosecution eyewitness Cynthia White is the only witness to testify seeing Chobert’s taxi parked behind Faulkner’s police car, no official eyewitness reported seeing White at the scene. Furthermore, Chobert’s taxi is missing both from White’s first sketch of the crime scene given to police (Defense Exhibit D-12), and from a later one (Prosecution Exhibit C-35). In a 2001 affidavit, private investigator George Michael Newman says that in a 1995 interview, Chobert told Newman that Chobert was actually parked around the corner, on 13th Street, north of Locust Street, and did not even see the shooting.

Amnesty International documents that both Chobert and White “altered their descriptions of what they saw, in ways that supported the prosecution’s version of events.” Chobert first told police that the shooter simply “ran away,” but after he had identified Abu-Jamal at the scene, he said the shooter had run away 30 to 35 “steps” before he was caught. At trial, Chobert changed this distance to 10 “feet,” which was closer to the official police account that Abu-Jamal was found just a few feet away from Officer Faulkner.

Nevertheless, Chobert did stick to a few statements in his trial testimony that contradicted the prosecution’s scenario. For example, Chobert declared that he did not see the apparently unrelated Ford car that, according to official reports, was parked in front of Billy Cook’s VW. Chobert also claimed that the altercation happened behind Cook’s VW (it officially happened in front of Cook’s VW), that Chobert did not see Abu-Jamal get shot or see Officer Faulkner fire his gun, and that the shooter was “heavyset” — estimating 200-225 lbs (Abu-Jamal weighed 170 lbs).

In his 2003 book Killing Time, Dave Lindorff wrote about two other problems with Chobert’s account. While being so legally vulnerable, why would Chobert have parked directly behind a police car? Why would he have left his car and approached the scene, if in fact, the shooter were still there? Lindorff suggests that “at the time of the incident, Chobert might not have thought that the man slumped on the curb was the shooter,” because “in his initial Dec. 9 statement to police investigators, Chobert had said that he saw ‘another man’ who ‘ran away’. . . He claimed in his statement that police stopped that man, but that he didn’t see him later.” Therefore, “if Chobert did think he saw the shooter run away, it might well explain why he would have felt safe walking up to the scene of the shooting as he said he did, before the arrival of police.”

The Attempts to Silence Veronica Jones

Veronica Jones was working as a prostitute at the crime scene on December 9, 1981. She first told police on December 15, 1981 that she had seen two men “jogging” away from the scene before police arrived. As a defense witness at the 1982 trial, Jones denied having made that statement; however, later in her testimony she started to describe a pre-trial visit from police, where “They were getting on me telling me I was in the area and I seen Mumia, you know, do it. They were trying to get me to say something that the other girl [Cynthia White] said. I couldn’t do that.” Jones then explicitly testified that police had offered to let her and White “work the area if we tell them” what they wanted to hear regarding Abu-Jamal’s guilt.

At this point, Prosecutor McGill interrupted Jones and moved to block her account, calling her testimony “absolutely irrelevant.” Judge Sabo agreed to block the line of questioning, strike the testimony, and then ordered the jury to disregard Jones’ statement.

The DA and Sabo’s efforts to silence Jones continued through to the later PCRA hearings that started in 1995. Having been unable to locate Jones earlier, the defense found Jones in 1996, and (over the DA’s protests) obtained permission from the State Supreme Court to extend the PCRA hearings for Jones’ testimony. Sabo vehemently resisted — arguing that there was not sufficient proof of her unavailability in 1995. However, in 1995 Sabo had refused to order disclosure of Jones’ home address to the defense team.

Over Sabo’s objections, the defense returned to the State Supreme Court, which ordered Sabo to conduct a full evidentiary hearing. Sabo’s attempts to silence Jones continued as she took the stand. He immediately threatened her with 5-10 years imprisonment if she testified to having perjured herself in 1982. In defiance, Jones persisted with her testimony that she had in fact lied in 1982, when she had denied her original account to police that she had seen two men “leave the scene.”

Jones testified that she had changed her version of events after being visited by two detectives in prison, where she was being held on charges of robbery and assault. Urging her to both finger Abu-Jamal as the shooter and to retract her statement about seeing two men “run away,” the detectives stressed that she faced up to 10 years in prison and the loss of her children if convicted. Jones testified in 1996 that in 1982, afraid of losing her children, she had decided to meet the police halfway: she did not actually finger Abu-Jamal, but she did lie about not seeing two men running from the scene. Accordingly, following the 1982 trial, Jones only received probation and was never imprisoned for the charges against her.

During the 1996 cross-examination, the DA announced that there was an outstanding arrest warrant for Jones on charges of writing a bad check, and that she would be arrested after concluding her testimony. With tears pouring down her face, Jones declared: “This is not going to change my testimony!” Despite objections from the defense, Sabo allowed New Jersey police to handcuff and arrest Jones in the courtroom. While the DA attempted to use this arrest to discredit Jones, her determination in the face of intimidation may, arguably, have made her testimony more credible. Outraged by Jones’ treatment, even the Philadelphia Daily News, certainly no fan of Abu-Jamal, reported: “Such heavy-handed tactics can only confirm suspicions that the court is incapable of giving Abu-Jamal a fair hearing. Sabo has long since abandoned any pretense of fairness.”

Jones’ account was given further credibility a year later. At the 1997 PCRA hearing, former prostitute Pamela Jenkins testified that police had tried pressuring her to falsely testify that she saw Abu-Jamal shoot Faulkner. In addition, Jenkins testified that in late 1981, Cynthia White (whom Jenkins knew as a fellow police informant) told Jenkins that she was also being pressured to testify against Abu-Jamal, and that she was afraid for her life.

As part of a 1995 federal probe of Philadelphia police corruption, Officers Thomas F. Ryan and John D. Baird were convicted of paying Jenkins to falsely testify that she had bought drugs from a Temple University student. Jenkins’ 1995 testimony in this probe, helped to convict Ryan, Baird, and other officers, and also to dismiss several dozen drug convictions. At the 1997 PCRA hearing, Jenkins testified that this same Thomas F. Ryan was one of the officers who attempted to have her lie about Abu-Jamal.

More recently, a 2002 affidavit by former prostitute Yvette Williams described police coercion of Cynthia White. The affidavit reads: “I was in jail with Cynthia White in December of 1981 after Police Officer Daniel Faulkner was shot and killed. Cynthia White told me the police were making her lie and say she saw Mr. Jamal shoot Officer Faulkner when she really did not see who did it . . .Whenever she talked about testifying against Mumia Abu-Jamal, and how the police were making her lie, she was nervous and very excited and I could tell how scared she was from the way she was talking and crying.” Explaining why she is just now coming out with her affidavit, Williams says “I feel like I’ve almost had a nervous breakdown over keeping quiet about this all these years. I didn’t say anything because I was afraid. I was afraid of the police. They’re dangerous.” Williams’ affidavit was rejected by Philadelphia Judge Pamela Dembe in 2005, the PA Supreme Court in February 2008, and in October 2008, by the US Supreme Court.

Further supporting the contention that police had made a deal with White, author J. Patrick O’Connor writes, “Prior to her becoming a prosecution witness in Abu-Jamal’s case, White had been arrested 38 times for prostitution . . . After she gave her third statement to the police, on December 17, 1981, she would not be arrested for prostitution in Philadelphia ever again even though she admitted at Billy Cook’s trial that she continued to be ‘actively working.’” Amnesty International reports that later, in 1987, White was facing charges of armed robbery, aggravated assault, and possession of illegal weapons. A judge granted White the right to sign her own bail and she was released after a special request was made by Philadelphia Police Officer Douglas Culbreth (where Culbreth cited her involvement in Abu-Jamal’s trial). After White’s release, she skipped bail and has never, officially, been seen again.

At the 1997 PCRA hearing, the DA announced that Cynthia White was dead, and presented a death certificate for a “Cynthia Williams” who died in New Jersey in 1992. However, Amnesty International reports, “an examination of the fingerprint records of White and Williams showed no match and the evidence that White is dead is far from conclusive.” Journalist C. Clark Kissinger writes, a Philadelphia police detective “testified that the FBI had ‘authenticated’ that Williams had the same fingerprints as White.” However, Kissinger continues, “the DA’s office refused to produce the actual fingerprints,” and “the body of Williams was cremated so that no one could ever check the facts! Finally, the Ruth Ray listed on the death certificate as the mother of the deceased Cynthia Williams has given a sworn statement to the defense that she is not the mother of either Cynthia White or Cynthia Williams.” Dave Lindorff reports further that the listing of deaths by social security number for 1992 and later years does not include White’s number.

Gary Wakshul’s Testimony Blocked

On the final day of testimony, Abu-Jamal’s lawyer discovered Police Officer Gary Wakshul’s official statement in the police report from the morning of Dec. 9, 1981. After riding with Abu-Jamal to the hospital and guarding him until treatment for his gunshot wound, Wakshul reported: “the negro male made no comment.” This statement contradicted the trial testimony of prosecution witnesses Gary Bell (a police officer) and Priscilla Durham (a hospital security guard), who testified that they had heard Abu-Jamal confess to the shooting, while Abu-Jamal was awaiting treatment at the hospital.

When the defense immediately sought to call Wakshul as a witness, the DA reported that he was on vacation. Judge Sabo denied the defense request to locate him for testimony, on grounds that it was too late in the trial to even take a short recess so that the defense could attempt to locate Wakshul. Consequently, the jury never heard from Wakshul, nor about his contradictory written report. When an outraged Abu-Jamal protested, Judge Sabo replied: “You and your attorney goofed.”

Wakshul’s report from December 9, 1981 is just one of the many reasons cited by Amnesty International for their conclusion that Bell’s and Durham’s trial testimonies were not credible. There are many other problems that merit a closer look if we are to determine how important Wakshul’s 1982 trial testimony could have been.

The alleged “hospital confession,” in which Abu-Jamal reportedly shouted, “I shot the motherf***er and I hope he dies,” was first officially reported to police over two months after the shooting, by hospital guards Priscilla Durham and James LeGrand (February 9, 1982), police officer Gary Wakshul (February 11), officer Gary Bell (February 25), and officer Thomas M. Bray (March1). Of these five, only Bell and Durham were called as prosecution witnesses.

When Durham testified at the trial, she added something new to her story that she had not reported to the police on February 9. She now claimed that she had reported the confession to her supervisor the next day, on December 10, making a hand-written report. Neither her supervisor, nor the alleged handwritten statement was ever presented in court. Instead, the DA sent an officer to the hospital, returning with a suspicious typed version of the alleged December 10 report. Sabo accepted the unsigned and unauthenticated paper despite both Durham’s disavowal (because it was typed and not hand-written), and the defense’s protest that its authorship and authenticity were unproven.

Gary Bell (Faulkner’s partner and self-described “best friend”) testified that his two-month memory lapse had resulted from his having been so upset over Faulkner’s death that he had forgotten to report it to police.

Later, at the 1995 PCRA hearings, Wakshul testified that both his contradictory report made on December 9, 1981 (“the negro male made no comment”) and the two-month delay were simply bad mistakes. He repeated his earlier statement given to police on February 11, 1982 that he “didn’t realize it [Abu-Jamal’s alleged confession] had any importance until that day.” Contradicting the DA’s assertion of Wakshul’s unavailability in 1982, Wakshul also testified in 1995 that he had in fact been home for his 1982 vacation, and available for trial testimony, in accordance with explicit instructions to stay in town for the trial so that he could testify if called.

Just days before his PCRA testimony, undercover police officers savagely beat Wakshul in front of a sitting Judge, in the Common Pleas Courtroom where Wakshul worked as a court crier. The two attackers, Kenneth Fleming and Jean Langen, were later suspended without pay, as punishment. With the motive still unexplained, Dave Lindorff and J. Patrick O’Connor speculate that the beating may have been used to intimidate Wakshul into maintaining his “confession” story at the PCRA hearings.

Regarding Abu-Jamal’s alleged confession, Amnesty International concluded: “The likelihood of two police officers and a security guard forgetting or neglecting to report the confession of a suspect in the killing of another police officer for more than two months strains credulity.”

Conclusion: the DA Still Wants to Execute

“The urgent need for a civil rights investigation is heightened because the DA is still trying to execute Mumia,” emphasizes Dr. Suzanne Ross, an organizer of the campaign seeking an investigation. This past March, the US Supreme Court declined to hear Abu-Jamal’s appeal for a new guilt-phase trial, but the Court has yet to rule on whether to hear the appeal made simultaneously by the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office, which seeks to execute Abu-Jamal without granting him a new penalty-phase trial.

In March, 2008, the Third Circuit Court affirmed Federal District Court Judge William Yohn’s 2001 decision “overturning” the death sentence. Citing the 1988 Mills v. Maryland precedent, Yohn had ruled that sentencing forms used by jurors and Judge Albert Sabo’s instructions to the jury were potentially confusing, and that therefore jurors could have mistakenly believed that they had to unanimously agree on any mitigating circumstances in order to consider them as weighing against a death sentence. According to the 2001 ruling, affirmed in 2008, if the DA wants to re-instate the death sentence, the DA must call for a new penalty-phase jury trial. In such a penalty hearing, new evidence of Abu-Jamal’s innocence could be presented, but the jury could only choose between execution and a life sentence without parole.

The DA is appealing to the US Supreme Court against this 2008 affirmation of Yohn’s ruling. If the court rules in the DA’s favor, Abu-Jamal can be executed without benefit of a new sentencing hearing. If the US Supreme Court rules against the DA’s appeal, the DA must either accept the life sentence for Abu-Jamal, or call for the new sentencing hearing. Meanwhile, Mumia Abu-Jamal has never left his death row cell.

How You Can Help

Actions are being organized throughout the summer to support the campaign for a federal civil rights investigation, including at the upcoming NAACP convention in New York City, July 11-16. Organizers are focusing particularly on July 13, the day that Attorney General Holder will address the convention. Supporters will then be in Washington, D.C., on July 22 to lobby their elected officials and, in mid-September, they’ll return to Washington, D.C., for a major press conference.

For more information on how you can support the campaign for a federal civil rights investigation, and to sign the online letter and petition to Attorney General Holder, please visit: http://freemumia.com/civilrights.html.

* This article was first published by the SF Bay View Newspaper on June 16, 2009.

The Imagined Latino Community

The media that focuses on the Latino communities in the United States has contributed to a pervasive misperception that exists about who Mexicans, Puerto Rican, Cubans, Salvadorians and other groups of Latin American descent are in the larger context of United States society. While the Anglo media has always perpetuated stereotypes about “latinos,” the “latino” media, in order to expand its markets beyond the ethnic niches of the various Latin-American origin groups, has also contributed to the idea that all Latin-American origin groups are alike. While there are many similarities among these groups there are also significant differences that are revealed in the discourse about the selection of a second generation Puerto Rican to be the first “latina” in the Supreme Court.

It is ironic that this process of racialization (erasure of the cultural and historical differences between ethnic groups) that has created a “Latino” pseudo-racial group is occurring at a time when a color-blind ideology is dominant in political, legal and pedagogical discourse in the United States. Although race is still the essential pivot around which American society is constructed and its hierarchies developed, the courts, politicians and the educational system are negating the role of race and racism in the inequalities that persist in our society. This ideology is so prevalent that it has become common sense and unexamined and is dominating our most important institutions. In the educational system, for example, Janet Schoefield, in study done in a school in 2001, revealed that white students did not know Martin Luther King was an African American. The courts have narrowed the use of race in redressing racial inequalities and politicians do not dare utter the word racism in the public sphere. Most recently, section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, while not overturned, was interpreted in a narrower, individualistic way opening the door to another possible examination by the Supreme Court in the future. Judge Sotomayor, will likely have, if approved, a crucial role in that future decision.

The recent election of President Barack Obama has led many to talk about a “post-racial” United States. Yet, the same inequalities exist, the same hate crimes exist and children of the various Latin American heritages continue attending substandard and underfinanced schools. Recently, evidence suggests we may be at the dawn of a new “post-racial” “Latino” politics emerging across the nation. Los Angeles Mayor Villaraigosa has increasingly distanced himself from appearing too ethnic, the California 32nd congressional district, until recently represented by progressive Hilda Solis — a majority “Latino” district — will no longer be represented by a politician of Latin American origin and in San Antonio Julian Castro became mayor following a similar strategy to broaden his appeal. In some sense, could it be that Peter Skerry, who wrote Mexican Americans: The Ambivalent Minority might be right? Are “Latinos” just another temporarily racialized group on its way to becoming mainstreamed (which in the U.S. means white)?

However, the cacophony of strongly negative comments about Judge Sotomayor made by the Republican Party’s right wing, especially Tom Tancredo, Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich reveals the power of race and racism in contemporary America. Judge Sotomayor’s mistake, in their view, is that she affirmed her social experience as a “Latina” woman and how it provides her a rich perspective to add to the various other world views that abound in mainstream legal discourse. In a culture where the “color-blind” ideology is dominant any enunciation of ethnicity or race is taboo. However, the reality is that Judge Sotomayor is not too far from mainstream legal thought.

Their stance also might place the party in a more difficult place as it tries to recruit among the emerging actors in the political arena. The Republican Party is increasingly becoming whiter and ideologically extreme. In terms of Latin-American voters, it only received 31 percent of the “latino” vote in 2008, down from 40 percent in 2004. Since, today, 22 percent of all American less than 18 years of age are “latinos” the future of the party seems tenuous at best.

Legal Background

President Obama, in announcing Judge Sotomayor’s nomination for a seat in the Supreme Court, mentioned a case that involved the baseball major leagues in 1995. Dave Zirin’s article in The Nation (“Sotomayor is a Sporting Judge,” May 29, 2009) argued that Judge Sotomayor “saved” the capitalist owners of the baseball franchises from themselves. She basically saved them from their own short sightedness and greed. In fact, her decision to squash the bosses’ lockout helped baseball grow from a business that produced $1.3 billion to one that produces $7.5 billion.

A recent analysis of her judicial decisions by the McClatchy news agency revealed that Judge Sotomayor has been in the Court of Appeals since January 2002. Since that time, in criminal cases she has decided 65 of 90 instances in favor of the government. In 450 cases she presided over, she was only revised in six cases; none of them were criminal cases.

What is not clear is her position on abortion. None of the cases she has been involved in have had anything to do with an interpretation of Roe v. Wade (1973) and in other cases tangentially related her decisions were diverse. Right wing conservatives like Rush Limbaugh are hoping that her Catholic background will determine her position on abortion. Five of the judges are Catholic and only Anthony Kennedy strayed away from an anti-abortion stance in 1992 when he supported the right of a woman to an abortion. It is ironic that those who critique Judge Sotomayor for being honest about her background and experience as a Puerto Rican woman now place their hope on that background for a particular interpretation of the law.

However, it is revealing that this dialogue, which pivots around this “latina” woman, is contradictorily being used to both reproduce the fiction of a “Latino community” and on the other hand to extol the culture of meritocracy that permeates American culture. “Latino” is a category that is still empty of content although it might truly become a social reality in the future as diverse Latin-American origin communities intermarry and begin to develop a hybrid “latino” culture and identity. But in the meantime, the real ethnic groupings are the Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican and other communities with their unique historical experiences and cultures. A recent survey (June 4) by Quinnipiac University indicated that 49 percent of whites and 66 percent of Jewish Americans support Judge Sotomayor for the court. Close to 85 percent of African Americans contrasted with 58 percent of “latino” showed support for Judge Sotomayor’s selection. Some have argued that a large number of conservative Cubans may have biased the survey.

In another survey by McClatchy news (May 28-June 8), which had a larger sample than the Quinnipiac University survey, “latino” support for Judge Sotomayor is 72 percent. If the media continues to emphasize her “immigrant” working class background it may continue to elicit the support of Latin-American communities. But ironically, the way this message has been communicated presents her story as a “rags to riches” epic without any social context that helps make sense of her achievement. It is important to acknowledge her efforts and at the same time nuance the individualistic message that is being used to explain her success. Her mother, Celina Sotomayor, an important figure in her life, led her to appreciate Puerto Rican culture, which nurtured a sense of place and significance in a society that was not always hospitable to differences. Also, it is important to acknowledge that she grew up in a New York where the struggles of the Puerto Rican and the Black community opened doors to Latin Americans to new opportunities. Organizations like the Young Lords, ASPIRA and others forced the powers that be to provide access to education, health care and housing. This fertile context of social struggles is the stage that catapulted the intelligence and determination of this Puerto Rican woman into the public sphere.

Her achievements, rightly so, belong to her and to those on whose shoulder many of us have been carried into the present.

Absent from the conversation around the Sotomayor nomination are all but the most cursory review of her legal career before being appointed a federal judge by George Bush — a mere twelve years of legal experience, five as a prosecutor for the D.A.’s office in Manhattan, and another seven as partner at the international law firm of Pavia & Harcourt. Summaries of her decisions are hard to find. Although much is made of the fact that she will be only the fifth judge not a white man to sit on the high court, few detailed comparisons are made between her legal career and those of Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas. Finally there are no attempts to discuss the unique, and not always positive role that the US Supreme Court plays or ought to play in the life of the country.

All these concerns are outside the bubble, not only for corporate media, but for the blogs and commentators who allow corporate media to draw the limits of their universe.

Sotomayor’s first job out of law school was as a prosecutor in the Manhattan D.A.’s office. Her time as a prosecutor roughly coincides with the end of the first decade of New York’s infamous Rockefeller drug laws, a time when our nation’s historically discriminatory law enforcement apparatus began locking up larger percentages of black and Latinos than anywhere else on the planet. From there she moved on to a spot as associate, then partner at the international law firm of Pavia & Harcourt, and international law firm offering “…a full range of legal services to companies, individuals, and Italian and French governmental organizations and agencies… who do business in the United States as well as American clients who do business in the U.S. and abroad.”

Among Pavia & Harcourt’s areas of special focus are the enforcement of intellectual property laws, and obtaining writs of confiscation and seizure of goods believed to be in violation of such laws. In this selection from Ed Shanahan’s IP Law & Business he assembles quotes from the Wall Street Journal, the National Journal and the New York Times that paint a picture of Sotomayor’s passionate involvement on behalf of her corporate clients:

[A]s the Wall Street Journal Washington Wire blog further explains in this colorful post, the “peak” of her career at the firm “came in representing Fendi in trademark actions against makers and sellers of counterfeit handbags and other items, according to George Pavia, the firm’s managing partner.”

Sotomayor, the WSJ reports, didn’t just fight for her clients in court.

“Firm founder George Pavia told the paper that when the firm would get a tip about suspect cargo, investigators “would trace where the shipment had gone — for example, to a warehouse or a store. Then, working with police, the firm would seek a warrant to view and attach the items. Often, the lawyers learned through experience, such visits would prompt angry responses from the merchants involved. But Sotomayor, who became a high-profile defender of the brand, seemed to enjoy going along. ‘On several occasions,’ Pavia said, ‘she went in wearing a Kevlar vest and seized the goods.’”

“(In this profile of Sotomayor, The New York Times adds to the judge’s legend: “One incident that figures largely in firm lore was a seizure in Chinatown, where the counterfeiters ran away, and Ms. Sotomayor got on a motorcycle and gave chase.”)

“The Journal also reports that Sotomayor played an integral role in what might be termed an IP publicity stunt aimed at calling attention to the then-growing problem of high-fashion knockoffs:

“With Sotomayor in charge, the firm decided in 1986 to stage a bonfire — to be known as the ‘Fendi Burn’ — in the parking lot of the Tavern on the Green restaurant. There was a catch, however: the New York Fire Department refused to permit it.

“So the firm decided on the next best thing, crushing the items in garbage trucks, in an event that came to be known as the ‘Fendi Crush.’

“‘In the presence of the press . . . we threw masses and masses of handbags, shoes, and other items into these garbage trucks,’ Pavia said. ‘It was the pinnacle of our achievement, and Sonia was the principal doer.’

No place on earth has more lawyers than the U.S., and in the late 80s, early 90s, New York City had more lawyers than anywhere in the country. This is how a young former prosecutor gets noticed and considered for the federal bench. Maybe Democratic senators and the White House of George H.W. Bush took note of her on their own. Maybe lobbyists and campaign contributors affiliated with her clients recommended her as someone who would look out for their interests. Take your pick. Either way, Bush put her on the federal bench in 1992.

For the twelve years she was a prosecutor and in private practice, right up until her appointment to the U.S. District Court, Sotomayor spent evenings, weekends and personal time, as an active board member of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Committee. During those years PRLDEF publicly opposed police brutality, the death penalty, felony disenfranchisement, and discrimination in housing and employment. It filed lawsuits to protect the voting rights of minorities in New York and the human rights of migrant workers. PRLDEF even sued an official of the Reagan administration for defamation over his public statement that most Puerto Ricans were on food stamps. No reports we have seen say that she personally filed those suits or that she ever appeared in court on behalf of litigants in discrimination and other lawsuits. As a board member she was reportedly involved in the planning and overall supervision of these activities.

After his graduation from Yale Law School in 1974, Clarence Thomas attached himself directly to the Republican Party as a black man squarely against equal rights under the law. He became assistant attorney general in Missouri in 1974, chief counsel for Senator Sam Brownback in 1978, and in 1982, chairman of the Office of Economic Opportunity under Ronald Reagan, where he publicly defied the Congress by sitting on thousands of age and race discrimination complaints till the statute of limitations ran out on them. After only fourteen years as an attorney, Thomas had earned his appointment to the federal bench in 1989, and shortly after that to the Supreme Court.

The only other nonwhite person to serve on the US Supreme Court in two centuries has been Thurgood Marshall. Marshall’ graduated Howard University law school in 1933, where he was mentored by Charles Hamilton Houston. Houston was the architect of a decades-long crusade to use the courts to overthrow America’s Jim Crow segregation laws. After less than a year of private practice, Marshall joined Houston at the NAACP, where he spent the next quarter century crisscrossing the country, sometimes at the risk of his own life, defending African Americans in court who were falsely accused of murder and rape. Marshall took their cases, along with those of black people who directly challenged Jim Crow laws all the way to the Supreme Court where he won a phenomenal 29 out of 32 cases, including the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled that separate school systems for blacks and whites were unconstitutional.

After 28 years of legal practice, far longer than either Thomas or Sotomayor, Marshall was named to the US Court of Appeals in 1961, US Solicitor General in 1965, and in 1967 was nominated to the Supreme Court by Lyndon Baines Johnson. Before donning the black robe Marshall had already fundamentally changed the American legal landscape. He had directly represented the poor and disenfranchised in the courts of dozens of states, raised money and public support for their legal defense. By the 1950s, Marshall was known around the country as “Mr. Civil Rights.” He is said to have taken a dim view of civil disobedience and many of the tactics of the Freedom Movement in the 1950s and 60s, but generally refrained from publicly voicing those sentiments, and defended some of them in court.

The comparative pre-judicial careers of these three seem to indicate that the speedy road to the federal bench is to be a useful right wing political operative like Thomas or a zealous advocate of multinational business, like Sotomayor. Defending the poor and changing history seems to be a longer and much less certain way to get a federal judgeship.

Sonia Sotomayor is no Clarence Thomas, to be sure. The PRLDEF did great work during the years she served on its board, but she can hardly claim sole credit for it. In any case, PRLDEF wasn’t her full time job, and certainly not what got her on the federal bench. She is no Thurgood Marshall either, not by a long shot. There are still lawyers who devote most of their practice to defending the poor and disenfranchised, and an even larger number who file suits against giant corporations on behalf of ordinary people. No matter their legal brilliance, those attorneys rarely get judicial appointments. Why? No Supreme Court Justice since Marshall has represented a defendant in a criminal case, let alone a death penalty case. Why? No Supreme Court Justices sued wealthy and powerful corporations on behalf of ordinary working and poor people either.

Why?

Why should representing poor people as defendants in a court of law, or suing wealthy corporations on behalf of the ordinary people whose rights these powerful and immortal institutions trample upon every day rule a judgeship out of any lawyer’s future? Was that the founding fathers’ intent? More importantly, should it be ours?

A frank discussion of what a democratic society should expect from its court system is also long overdue. For the last generation, the courts have squatted squarely on the necks of working class Americans, relentlessly affirming the unearned privileges of a wealthy corporate elite over the rest of us, often in ways no governor, president or legislature would dare attempt. To name just a few instances, the courts have ruled that equal funding of public schools between wealthy and poor neighborhoods cannot be accomplished, even when state constitutions require it. Judges have affirmed that the First Amendment gives corporations the right to lie to and deceive the public for commercial gain, and that patent laws allow US corporations to claim exclusive rights to crops grown by farmers for dozens of centuries in various parts of the world. The Supreme Court recently ruled that money, in the form of campaign contributions, is free speech, setting major roadblocks in the path of campaign finance reform.

We need to take note of the historic significance of the first Latina to be nominated to the Supreme Court. Like the embrace of a black president by most of the nation’s ruling elite, it does signify a departure from a kind of old fashioned nineteenth and twentieth century racism, at least insofar as the admittance of carefully vetted and well-qualified minorities to that elite goes. But the advancement of a few is not necessarily the advancement of democracy, or of the many.

The easy out for progressives around the Sotomayor nomination is to waste all their time and oxygen debating Republicans, ridiculing and refuting their racism. While this is important, it mustn’t be allowed to take all the air from the room. If we really want more than a change in the color of the faces at the top of American society, we’ll have to spend a lot more energy evaluating their corporate connections of our judges on every level, and determining who they really serve.