Author: Dave LIndorff

Hey Americans! Let’s all start taking responsibility for what we do wrong. Let’s all start being accountable for our actions or our lack of action.

John Stumpf, the CEO of Wells Fargo Bank, one of the nation’s biggest “too-big-to-fail” banks, is showing us the way in to this bright new stand-up world.

When the government discovered that his bank had since as long ago as 2011 been boosting its bottom line by creating millions of credit card accounts in the name of but behind the backs of existing Wells Fargo clients, and then running up charges on those accounts, charging the unawares named holders of the cards late fees and interest for those charges, it slapped the bank with a $185-million fine. But as with prior criminal behavior by the nation’s biggest banks (think Citibank, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase), it didn’t indict any bank executives this time either.

But hey, this John Stumpf is a stand-up guy. He has told the media and the Senate Banking Committee that he takes “full responsibility” for the gigantic defrauding of the country’s third largest bank’s customers, and says that he is “accountable” for the high-pressure sales tactics demnded of low-level bank salespeople to make them produce sales of bank products — the policy that led over 5300 of those employees to set up the fraudulent accounts.

But here’s the beautiful thing: Standing up and saying “I take full responsibilty” and “I’m accountable” is really easy! You don’t have to actually do anything and nothing happens to you! In fact, Stumpf admitted under questioning by Senate Banking Committee member Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts, that he earned $19.3 million last year alone, $ 4 million of that a bonus for doing such a fine job of running the operation — this in a year in which the bank and its board of directors was well aware that it was being investigated for the gigantic fraud. “Taking responsibilty” and being “accountable” doesn’t apparently involve actually taking responsiblity or being accountable, as in stepping down from one’s lucrative post as CEO, much less leaving one’s firm. It doesn’t apparently even mean taking a pay cut. Pretty neat really.

That’s not true though for the thousands of employees who engaged in the actual act of creating the fraudulent charge accounts. They have all been fired by the bank, no doubt at Stumpf’s direction. They took a substantial paycut for their criminal behavior, which one might say is a kind of “taking responsibility” for what they did, though perhaps they didn’t do it voluntarily.

Model stand-up guy John Stumpf, CEO of Wells Fargo Bank
 

Politicians of both major parties love to boast that the US is the world’s oldest democracy and of course a “model for the world.” Putting aside the matter of whether or not that is even true (US “democracy” cannot really be said to have begun until women got the vote in 1920, and maybe until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 made voting by blacks truly a reality in parts of the country, and meanwhile Iceland’s Althing or parliament dates to 930 AD), the use of electronic voting machines in many jurisdictions has made any such claims a complete joke.

These needlessly confusing, often malfunctioning, and easily hackable devices, which have demonstrably done things like switch whole voting records from one candidate to another, or simply erased all votes cast in a day, and which are so costly that they are used as an excuse to provide only minimal opportunity to vote in many “undesirable” election districts, leading to lines that can require waiting hours outdoors just to get to cast a ballot, belie the claims made for the US to be a beacon of liberty and democratic governance.

So what’s the deal with these machines? Why do we even have them?

Voting in the UK (left) and the US
 

The goal of any voting system should be accuracy, not speed of counting, and yet we see state after state and county after county getting sold on electronic equipment that is costly, error-ridden, failure prone, and unnecessary. For centuries, people in democracies have voted by raised hands or with paper ballots, with minimal problems given good official and volunteer oversight.

What is driving the switch to machines in the US is the media. The same corporate media that have turned campaigns into battles over soundbites, “gotcha” questions, and a focus on non-issues like whether a candidate’s hair is silly looking or whether he/she believes in God.

For the corporate media, Election Day and Election Night are all about money – specifically a race to “call” election results. Who will be first to announce a winner as the votes are tallied? In an industry that has been paring down news budgets year after year to the point that little serious reporting gets done, vast sums are spent having people stationed at polling places everywhere calling in the tallies as they get read out of the machines.

But why should we care — particularly when it comes to national races — when newly elected, or re-elected, members of Congress, and the president, are not actually installed in office until January, more than two months after the voting is over and done with?

There is plenty of time to get it not first, but right, and that would be true even if we were to use paper ballots and count them by hand, as used to be the standard procedure.

Depending on how you look at it, lawyers for Mumia Abu-Jamal, the Philadelphia journalist and political prisoner serving a life sentence in a Pennsylvania prison after a controverial 1982 conviction for killing a white Philadelphia police officer, won a huge victory, lost big or maybe won and will win again soon.

His victory, a finding issued on Sept. 1 in Scranton, PA by Federal District Judge Robert Mariani that the state’s Department of Corrections “protocol” for treatment — actually for non-treatment — of inmates with deadly Hepatitis C cases, violates the US Constitution’s Eighth Amendment against cruel and unusual punishment, if upheld on appeal at the Appellate Court level, could open the door for thousands of the state’s inmates with Hep-C to receive the latest highly effective but extremely costly medicines that could eradicate the virus from their bodies. It could also serve as a powerful precedent to win such treatment for the tens of thousands of infected inmates in the sprawling web of other local, state and federal prisons across the entire US who are currently being denied care for what has been called a prison epidemic of Hepatitis C.

Abu-Jamal’s loss, on a minor and correctable technicality, means that his own raging Hep-C infection, first discovered over a year ago, will continue to go untreated with those medications, meaning his liver will continue to suffer further irreversible damage from the disease — damage that could, if allowed to continue untreated, amount to an extrajudicial execution despite his having already had his original death sentence overturned as unconstitutional.

Bret Grote, legal director of the Abolitionist Law Center, an anti-death penalty organization, filed the lawsuit on Abu-Jamal’s behalf in August 2015 seeking a preliminary injunction to force the DOC to provide life-saving new anti-viral drugs to him to treat and cure the Hep-C wracking his body. He says that the reason the judge gave for denying that request was that the suit had not properly named the individuals in the Department of Corrections responsible for determining whether a prisoner would or would not receive treatment.

Mumia in 2013 and in 2015, showing the ravages of the Hep-C infection he contracted in the interim
 

In late 2014, the New York Times ran a major investigative piece by reporter James Risen about several billion dollars gone missing, part of a shipment of pallets of $12–$14 billion in C-notes that had been flown from the Federal Reserve into Iraq over a period of a year and a half in an effort to kickstart the Iraqi economy following the 2003 US invasion. Risen reported that about $1.5 billion of the cash, somehow stolen, had been discovered in a bunker in Lebanon by a special inspector general appointed to investigate corruption in the US occupation of Iraq. The article got front-page play.

Earlier that same year, the Washington Postran a story reporting the US State Department inspector general’s finding that during Hillary Clinton’s years as secretary, the State Department had lost records for or misreported some $6 billion in government contracts. (State claimed the money was not lost, just not accounted for.)

These stories are basic Journalism 101, the kind of bread-and-butter reporting on government that one expects from a major news organization. So how to explain that neither of these prestigious and influential newspapers—or practically any of the corporate media in the US, for that matter—bothered to mention it when the Pentagon’s inspector general this year issued a report blasting the US Army for misreporting $6.5 trillion (that’s not a typo; it’s trillion with a T) as its spending total for the 2015 fiscal year.

Now, clearly that number cannot be correct, since the entire Pentagon budget for 2015 was a little over $600 billion, or less than 10 percent of what the Army was saying it had spent.

Even if this were just an outrageous accounting error, it would certainly seem to merit a news article. But the IG’s office did not see it as a laughing matter…
 

This article by DAVE LINDORFF appears on the website of the media criticism organization Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, and can be read in full by going to: FAIR.org

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I was reading the latest smug piece by New York Times columnist Timothy Egan, when I came across the most amusing example of being what you’re criticizing.

Egan, in a piece titled “The Dumbed Down Democracy,” bemoaned the spreading ignorance of the American electorate.

Not only are 10 percent of Americans illiterate, Egan groaned. They’re also “politically illiterate.” Expressing mock astonishment, he wrote, “I give you Texas. A recent survey of Donald Trump supporters there found that 40 percent of them believe that Acorn will steal the upcoming election.”

He goes on: “Acorn? News flash: That community-organizing group has been out of existence for six years. Acorn is gone, disbanded. dead. It can no more steal an election than Donald Trump can pole vault over his Mexican wall.”

In Egan’s view, it’s those Trump voters who are ignoramuses.

Egan goes on: “We know that at least 30 million American adults cannot read. But the current presidential election may yet prove that an even bigger part of the citizenry is politically illiterate — and functional. Which is to say, they will vote despite being unable to accept basic facts needed to process this American life.”

Example?

Well, Egan says, “If Trump supporters knew that illegal immigration peaked in 2007, or that violent crime has been on a steady downward spiral nationwide for more than 20 years, they would scoff when Trump says Mexican rapists are surging across the border and crime is out of control.”

Maybe he’s right (though I’ve heard supposedly well-educated college grads tell me they believe the same stuff), but then Egan goes on to write: “If more than 16 percent of Americans could locate Ukraine on a map, it would have been a Really Big Deal when Trump said that Russia was not going to invade it — two years after they had, in fact, invaded it.”

I don’t know what knowing that Ukraine shares a long border with Russia has to do with knowing Russia supposedly invaded the place in 2014 (not having a remotely shared border certainly didn’t stop the US from invading Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya or Syria), but in any case, Russia never invaded Ukraine. Only in the New York Times or similarly compromised corporate media would you read such bullshit propaganda.

The NY Times, in April 2014, ran this photo allegedly showing Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine, based on unverified claims by the Kiev post-coup government. The image was later shown to have been an old photo taken in Russia, not Ukraine, and the paper’s ombudswoman announced it was a 2013 photo that had been taken in Russia.
 

Hampton — Recently, while selecting the appropriate worn and muddy clothes for yard work, I chose a mostly-broken belt that a sensible person would have tossed long ago. To me, however, there was still a shred of usefulness in it so I kept it to occupy the lowest rung of my very short wardrobe ladder. The belt had problems; the holes for the various sizes became seriously enlarged after the first few uses making it barely functional and quite unattractive. As I cinched it, I felt something give, only to discover that one of the two screws that held the buckle to the belt tore through the cheap belt material rendering it now, even to me, totally useless. As I grumbled and inspected the problem, I noticed the brand name proudly displayed on the buckle: Donald J. Trump.

Trump belt bites the dust a week after purchase (photo by Elizabeth Lindorff)
 

While I periodically have written commentaries dissecting and pillorying news articles in the New York Times to expose their bias, hypocrisy half-truths and lies, I generally ignore their editorials since these are overtly opinions of the management, and one expects them to display the elitist and neo-liberal perspective of the paper’s publisher and senior editors.

That said, the August 17 editorial about Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who has spent four harrowing years trapped in the apartment-sized Ecuadoran embassy thanks to a trumped-up and thoroughly discredited political rape “investigation” by a politically driven Swedish prosecutor and a complicit right-wing British government, moves far beyond even the routine rampant bias and distortion of a Times editorial into misrepresentation and character assassination. As such it cries out for criticism.

Headlined “A Break in the Assange Saga,” the editorial starts off with the flat-out lie that “Ecuador and Sweden finally agreed last week that Swedish prosecutors could question Julian Assange at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London where he has been holed up since 2012.”

The casual reader fed only corporate media stories about this case might logically assume from that lead that such an interview has been held up by a disagreement of some kind between Ecuador and Sweden. In fact, Ecuador and Assange and his attorneys have stated their willingness to allow Swedish prosecutors to come to London and interview Assange in the safety of their embassy for several years now. The prosecutor in Sweden, Marianne Nye, who has been pursuing Assange all that time like Ahab after his whale, has not only never taken up that offer, but by her refusal to go to London in all this time, demanding instead Assange’s enforced presence in Stockholm, has allowed any possible rape charges, if any were even appropriate, to pass the statute of limitations. The paper doesn’t mention this. Nor does the editorial mention that the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Working Group on Arbitrary Detention last February found that Assange is effectively being held in arbitrary detention by the UK and Swedish governments, and called for his release, and for the lifting of British government threats to arrest him and extradite him if he leaves the safety of the embassy.

Julian Assange remains holed up in the Ecuador embassy in London fearing extradition to the US on an espionage charge
 

UPDATE: A week after this article was originally written and posted on this site, Bridget Serchak, chief of public affairs at the Pentagon’s Office of General Inspector, sent us the following supposed explanation of the enormous unaccountable and unauditable 2015 expenditure budget of the US Army, as reported on below. Her explanation of why that budget is somehow stated as being nearly double the entire FY 2015 budget of $3.8 trillion is as follows:
 

“For clarification, these numbers reflect changes made in Fiscal Year 2015…
These adjustments do not adjust the budget amount for the Army. The dollar
amounts are possible because adjustments are made to the Army General Fund
financial statement data throughout the compilation process for various reasons
such as correcting errors, reclassifying amounts, and reconciling balances
between systems. The general ledger data that posts to a financial
statement line can be adjusted for more than the actual reported value of
the line. For example, there was a net unsupported adjustment of $99.8
billion made to the $0.2 billion balance reported for Accounts Receivable”
 

We will let this obtuse “explanation” stand. Clearly, even if Congress — or someone in Congress — wanted to police the country’s military and see what it is actually doing with the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars it receives and spends each year, they would find it totally impossible to do so, with this kind of “accounting” going on. I took a semester of managerial accounting at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business during a journalism fellowship program once, and I cannot begin to understand what they’re saying here. No doubt that’s the object.
 

What if the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services were to report that $6.5 billion in spending by that federal agency was unaccounted for and untraceable? You can imagine the headlines, right? What if it was $65 billion? The headlines would be as big as for the first moon landing or for troops landing on Omaha Beach in World War II.

But how about a report by the Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General saying that the US Army had $6.5 trillion in unaccountable expenditures for which there is simply no paper trail? That is 6,500 billion dollars! Have you heard about that? Probably not. That damning report was issued back on July 26 — two whole weeks ago — but as of today it has not even been reported anywhere in the corporate media.

I took a long hike today through a local nature preserve. It was a humid 96° F with the heat index, thanks to the humidity making it feel like 110° — too hot to work on the stone re-pointing job I’m doing on our old stone house. I needed some nature, though, after spending the last few weeks reading and writing about our insane political situation, with Republican Donald Trump, a con artist posing as a fascist and denouncing minorities and immigrants and Hillary Clinton, a Democratic war-monger, corrupt and probably richer than Trump, posing as a people’s advocate.

Mexico-bound Monarch butterfly…but will the butterfly reserve still be there for it?
 

Wandering down a path into the woods and following a local stream, though, I found myself getting more troubled than before. These woods, where I’ve walked for years, used to be filled with myriad species of birds — water birds, hawks, songbirds and others, and insects — dragonflies, butterflies, bees and flies of all kinds, as well as frogs, turtles and snakes. I’d usually return from such walks to report having seen a Baltimore oriole, a blue heron, a garter or a water snake, a large snapping turtle or one or another kind of hawk. I wouldn’t even report on the butterflies, as they were myriad.

Today though, the forest was quiet. Occasionally I’d hear the sound of some unidentifiable bird, probably a starling or sparrow, but bird sounds were rare. Sightings too. I heard no cries from bluejays or crows, saw no hawks or waterbirds — not even mallard ducks, and heard no songbirds. I saw one small painted turtle sunning itself on a fallen tree in a dammed up part of the stream — a spot that used to be covered with turtles on a day like this. And I heard no frogs, which might explain the lack of any herons or other wading birds. The two creatures I did see were a deer (these apex mammals seem to have made the suburbs home, with no available predator except the automobile to diminish their numbers, and with grass and suburban flower gardens providing abundant food) and a beautiful solitary orange Monarch butterfly, which was flying with more purpose, in almost a straight line down the pathway, than I’ve ever seen a butterfly fly (perhaps it is on it’s lonely way to Mexico hoping to find a mate?). Other than that, there were almost no bugs too. That’s really scary, since bugs, besides pollinating plants, provide that basic protein source for most larger animals up the food chain. I had read that bugs of all kinds are in a dramatic decline all around the globe, and it certainly looks like it if they aren’t even pervasive in a nature preserve where there is no insecticide being used, where grass isn’t cut, and undergrowth is left alone.

I had noticed this decline earlier when we were up in the Catskills where we have a summer house. The streetlight in front of our property, which used to be enveloped in literally thousands of moths, flies and flying beetles during late spring and early summer months, to the delight of the brown bats that dove into the cloud again and again filling their bellies each night, these days is devoid of insects, which is astonishing and, when one thinks of it, terrifying.