From Jonathan Turley, Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University, writing in USA Today:.
Obama has not only openly asserted powers that were the grounds for Nixon’s impeachment, but he has made many love him for it. More than any figure in history, Obama has been a disaster for the U.S. civil liberties movement. By coming out of the Democratic Party and assuming an iconic position, Obama has ripped the movement in half. Many Democrats and progressive activists find themselves unable to oppose Obama for the authoritarian powers he has assumed. It is not simply a case of personality trumping principle; it is a cult of personality.
Long after Watergate, not only has the presidency changed. We have changed. We have become accustomed to elements of a security state such as massive surveillance and executive authority without judicial oversight. We have finally answered a question left by Benjamin Franklin in 1787, when a Mrs. Powel confronted him after the Constitutional Convention and asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got — a republic or a monarchy?” His chilling response: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
We appear to have grown weary of the republic and traded it for promises of security from a shining political personality. Somewhere, Nixon must be wondering how it could have been this easy.
Helmut Kohl: I acted like a dictator to bring in the euro
Helmut Kohl, Germany’s former chancellor, has admitted that he acted like a “dictator” to bring in the single currency to the country, otherwise he “would have lost” had he held a referendum
Stefan Lindskog, chair of the Sweden’s Supreme Court, told an Australian audience Wednesday that Julian Assange is, quite simply, a benefactor of humanity, as Al Jazeera reports:
“He’ll be thought of as a person who made public some pieces of classified information to the benefit of mankind,” he said.
“It should never be a crime to make known [a] crime of a state.”
For the first time in the 44 years the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press has been tracking American attitudes toward marijuana, the majority of Americans now declare they’d like to see it legalized.
From Dutch public television, another stunning VPRO Backlight documentary [previously featured shows], this one exploring the dirty little corporate tricks used to avoid paying taxes:
The program notes:
“Where do multinationals pay taxes and how much?” Gaining insight from international tax experts, Backlight director Marije Meerman (‘Quants’ & ‘Money & Speed’), takes a look at tax havens, the people who live there and the routes along which tax is avoided globally.
Those routes go by resounding names like ‘Cayman Special’, ‘Double Irish’, and ‘Dutch Sandwich’. A financial world operates in the shadows surrounded by a high level of secrecy. A place where sizeable capital streams travel the world at the speed of light and avoid paying tax. The Tax Free Tour is an economic thriller mapping the systemic risk for governments and citizens alike. Is this the price we have to pay for globalised capitalism?
At the same time, the free online game “Taxodus” by Femke Herregraven is launched. In the game, the player can select the profile of a multinational and look for the global route to pay as little tax as possible.
research: William de Bruijn
camera: Jean Counet
montage: Bart van den Broek
geluid: Tim van Peppen, Benny Jansen, Joris van Ballegoijen
productie: Marie Schutgens
animaties: Bitcaves & Motoko
What becomes clear is that borders are only meaningful for the flesh-and-blood person, while they are utterly permeable for the disembodied corporate person so beloved of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Pay close attention to this Oscar Leon report from The Real News Network on Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Argentinian Cardinal transformed into Pope Francis I — signifying his homage to St. Francis of Assisi, that most austere-living of saints.
Indeed, watch the headlines displayed in the video, and their invocation of papal austerity as sign of the new pope’s conspicuous frugality.
Watching the video, we had a perverse thought.
Frankie’s no liberation theologian, out to redistribute wealth. No, he’s here to preach the religious benefits accruing from the embrace of austerity. The poor accrue virtue by acceptance of their status, nay, by embracing their status.
Looking back at the recent history of the Catholic church, we see an easy acceptance of fascism in preference to communism, the provision of escape lines for Nazi war criminals in the wake of Nazi defeat, and the ongoing cooperation and funding of radical right underground groups during the Soviet era.
Who better to sell the austerian message to the peoples of, say, Spain, Portugal, and Italy, that a Latin American pope who names himself after a hippie saint?
And he’s proven himself quite accommodating to oligarchical imposers of austerian measures, and now runs a city state with its own bank-with-a-troubled history, laundering both mafia and spook money.
Anyway, just a thought.
Pope Francis accused by family and friends of tortured priests
I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy. And I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large.
You know, if you’re caught with an ounce of cocaine, the chances are good you’re going to go to jail. If it happens repeatedly, you may go to jail for the rest of your life. But evidently, if you launder nearly a billion dollars for drug cartels and violate our international sanctions, your company pays a fine and you go home and sleep in your own bed at night, every single individual associated with this. I think that’s fundamentally wrong.
While police and government officials are relieved the apparent fiery death of fired Los Angeles Police Officer Christopher Dorner, California historian and UC Riverside Professor of Creative Writing Mike Davis offers some qualifications, writing at the London Review of Books Blog:
Perhaps his brain synapses have been misfiring for a long time, but the core of Dorner’s Manifesto is a coherent account of how a police Explorer Scout realised his life’s dream as a LAPD rookie and then had his reputation and career destroyed for being an honest cop. He debunks the myth – propagated by the LA Times, Mayor Villaraigosa, and most of the liberal establishment – that thanks to Saint Bratton a kinder, gentler and more diverse LAPD now protects and serves Los Angeles.
Indeed Dorner’s eye-witness account of routine sadism, racism and conspiracy in the department is totally in line with its historical institutional culture and was inadvertently fact-checked by the LAPD’s wild shooting of two innocent women and Chief Beck’s kneejerk exculpation of the officers involved. (Those who think that there are no more Rodney Kings should look carefully at the case of the LAPD patrol woman who killed a mentally ill woman last summer by stomping on her genitals.)
One of the most infamous paragraphs in the history of modern investigative journalism was written by a member of the UC Berkeley journalism faculty, repudiating his own reporting about on of America’s most prominent gangsters.
Here’s what Lowell Bergman and his colleague wrote to ease themselves out of a multi-million-dollar lawsuit filed by, among others, Morris Barney Dalitz, the syndicate thug who ran the mob’s skimming operation in Las Vegas back in the days esnl was working his first daily newspaper job in Sin City:
“We feel it right to acknowledge the positive information received about you [Dalitz] in recent years and, accordingly, to express any regret for negative implication or unwarranted harm that you believe may have befallen you as a result of the Penthouse article.”
The article, “La Costa: The Hundred-Million-Dollar Resort with Criminal Clientele,” appeared in the March 1975 issue of Penthouse, and focused on the mob’s involvement in a posh golfing resort in North San Diego County, a few miles from Oceanside, where we joined the staff of the late Blade-Tribune in 1967, shortly after leaving the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Our job had us covering Carlsbad, the adjacent town and closet to La Costa [the town’s city manager would soon take a posh job at the mob watering hole]. When a story took us to the resort, we found ourselves amazed when we looked at the membership board: Familiar names included Moe Dalitz [previously, and here], Frank Sinatra, Carl Cohen [the Sands casino manager who famously knocked out some of Sinatra’s teeth after the drunken crooner drove a golf cart through one of the hotel’s plate glass windows], and Don W. Reynolds, the publisher of the Review-Journal. For a fresh Vegas emigre, it felt like coming home.
We remember telling our managing editor the next day, “That La Costa looks like quite a place.”
We learned about the Penthouse story when a spotted an ad for it on the side of a bus in Los Angeles, where we had just started work for the Southern California Visitors Council — a gig we worked for a year before returning the ink-stained wretch trade at the late and much-lamented Santa Monica Evening Outlook.
We found the story of the resort’s financing by the mob-controlled Teamsters Central States Pension Fund fascinating, making sense of that membership board we’d seen seven years before.
But resort owners Merv Adelson, Irwin Molasky, Dalitz, and Allard Roen filed that $522 million lawsuit, and when push came to shove, the journalists folded, followed by Penthouse, with apologies accepted in exchange for each side bearing its own legal costs.
From the magazine’s 1985 skinback [a journalism term for what Kansas folks used to call “eating crow”], a declaration that Penthouse
did not mean to imply nor did it intend for its readers to believe that Messrs. Adelson and Molasky are or were members of organized crime or criminals. In addition, Penthouse acknowledges that all of the individual plaintiffs, including Messrs. Dalitz and Roen, have been extremely active in commendable civic and philanthropic activities which have earned them recognition from many estimable people. Furthermore Penthouse acknowledges that among plaintiffs’ successful business activities is the La Costa resort itself, one of the outstanding resort complexes of the world.
But now, 28 years after the settlement, comes conclusive proof that the journalists were right.
Here’s a telling quote from “Remembrance of Wings Past,” a remarkable profile of Merv Adelson by Bryan Burrough in the March edition of Vanity Fair:
The Rancho La Costa resort opened its doors to the public in 1965. From the outset Adelson could tell his dreams of escaping the Mafia had been dashed. “The first guests, they were all Teamsters!” he exclaims. And then Detroit and Chicago Mob bosses, all the way up to Meyer Lansky himself. “There were hundreds of them!” Adelson adds. “I couldn’t get rid of them! The Teamsters treated it like their country club. It got a real reputation. I didn’t like it at all. But I couldn’t stop it. We owed them money! What could I do?” His children were soon being teased with the same taunts they had heard in Las Vegas. He was trapped. A very rich trap, but a trap nevertheless.
Lansky was the mob’s money wizard, portrayed as “Hyman Roth” by Lee Strassberg in The Godfather, Part II, a man who got his start partnering with Bugsy Siegel [“Moe Green”] and Charlie “Lucky” Luciano:
Adelson is rather disingenuous in his interviews, claiming he had no idea who he’d gotten in bed with — hard to believe of anyone circulating in his circles in the Sin City of the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, he claims, only with the publication of The Green Felt Jungle, a 1963 bestseller by Ed Reid and Ovid Demaris did he realize just who he’d partnered with in his Sin City business dealings.
The profile paints a picture of a down on his luck octogenarian, living in a Santa Monica apartment no larger than the walk-in closets of his salad days dwellings.
So Bergman’s skinback was a farce, and the Penthouse article he disavowed was right. It didn’t hurt Bergman’s career, since he went on to produce for 60 Minutes, then found himself a nice nest at UC Berkeley’s journalism school.
Philadelphia Daily News scribe Will Bunch, writing at his blog, Attytood:
Obama’s expanded, top-secret drone war has allowed the U.S. to kill high-level members of al-Qaeda without the risks that ground troops have faced in Iraq or Afghanistan, where U.S. troops have been fighting more than 11 years.
But in doing so, a president who promised “the most open and transparent administration in history” has gone to Nixonian lengths to hide its actions from the American people and from Congress. He’s ordered missile attacks on countries such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia with which the nation is not at war – drone strikes that in addition to its targets have killed as many as 1,000 innocent civilians, including women and children.
And according to a White House white paper obtained by NBC News, Obama has claimed a power never even envisioned during the waterboarding-drenched years of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney – the ability to order the assassination of an American citizen believed to be engaged with al-Qaeda at a high level, even if that citizen is not currently plotting against the U.S.
Trigger-happy Los Angeles cops shot a 71-year-old woman and her daughter as they were delivering newspapers Thursday morning, all because they thought their pickup was beuing drive by a 270-pound six-foot-tall murderous ex LAPD officer suspected of a murderous cop-killing rampage.
We counted at least 29 bullet holes in a Los Angeles Times photo of their truck — which match neither the model or the color of the vehicle driven by suspected triple-murderer Michael Dorner, who is the subject of a massive manhunt.
“The problem with the situation is it looked like the police had the goal of administering street justice and in so doing, didn’t take the time to notice that these two older, small Latina women don’t look like a large black man,” family attorney Glen T. Jonas told Ari Bloomekatz of the Los Angeles Times.
But what really strikes us as curious is the spin on the headlines about the shooting, with their accuracy seeming to increase with the distance of the headline writes from the City of Angels.
Priests’ ecclesiastical missteps treated more sternly than abuse
Files detail cases in which L.A. Archdiocese officials displayed outrage over a priest’s violation of canon law while doing little for victims of his sexual abuse
Journalist Matt Taibbi assesses the Obama Administration’s approach to holding banks accountable for their behavior, and early indications are not promising. Taibbi tells Bill that fearing another economic calamity is no excuse for turning a blind eye to shockingly unethical decisions and management.
“The rule of law isn’t really the rule of law if it doesn’t apply equally to everybody. If you’re going to put somebody in jail for having a joint in his pocket, you can’t let higher ranking HSBC officials off for laundering $800 million for the worst drug dealers in the entire world,” Taibbi tells Bill. “Eventually it eats away at the very fabric of society.”
Watch Bill’s full conversation with Taibbi on this weekend’s Moyers & Company.
In light of our musings on medical cannabis, we provide an equal time response opportunity in the form of a Sundance-debuting, audience award-winning public service announcement:
The program notes:
Debuting at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and available only on YouTube
Catnip is all the rage with today’s modern feline, but do we really understand it? This film frankly discusses the facts about this controversial substance.
