Author: Dave LIndorff

The Boston Marathon bombing has already demonstrated the best and the worst of America for all the world to see.

First, let’s talk about the best. When the bombs detonated, despite the shock and the horror of the blown-off legs and arms, and the blood on street and sidewalk, and without knowing what else might be coming, ordinary citizens jumped into action to try and help the gravely wounded and the dying. Average people with no experience in this kind of mayhem stepped up without hesitation to care for strangers, applying tourniquets, carrying people who couldn’t walk to hospital tents, or just holding a hand and calling for help.

People pored over their cellphone photo records and camera files, looking for photos that could help identify the killers. Without their volunteer actions, the police and federal agencies would have had no clue who they were looking for. With them, it was quick work pinpointing and identifying the two men who appear to have placed the two bombs.

Later, while police failed to catch one of the brothers suspected of having been a bomber, despite placing all of metropolitan Boston under a kind of martial law, it was a citizen who, after the so-called “lock-down” of the city had been lifted, spotted the suspect and alerted police.

Now for the worst.

Let’s start with the martial law. Okay, it wasn’t a declaration, but with police and the Mayor ordering everyone in Boston and its suburbs to stay inside and lock their doors, “answering only to police,” it was virtually the same thing.

Boston under state of siege: a preview of martial law?

The way I see it, we had two acts of terrorism in the US this week. The first took place at the end of the historic Boston Marathon, when two bombs went off near the finish line, killing three and seriously injuring dozens of runners and spectators. The second happened a couple days later in the town of West, Texas, where a fertilizer plant blew up, incinerating or otherwise killing at least 15, and injuring at least 150 people, and probably more as the search for the dead and the injured continues.

It’s pretty clear that the Boston Marathon bombing was an act of terrorism, with police making arrests and having killed one of the two suspects who had earlier been captured on film and video at the scene of the bombings.

The villains in the West Fertilizer Co. explosion can be much more easily identified: the managers and owners of the plant.

West Fertilizer was built starting back in 1962 in the middle of the small town of West, TX, a community founded in the 19th century and named after the first local postmaster, T.M. West. It makes no sense, of course, to locate such a facility that uses highly toxic anhydrous ammonia as a primary feed stock (a compound that burns the lungs and kills on contact, and that, because it must be stored under pressure, is highly prone to leaks and explosive releases), and one that makes as its main product ammonium nitrate fertilizer, around lots of people. Ammonium nitrate, recall, is the highly explosive compound favored by truck bombers like the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. It was the fertilizer, vast quantities of which were stored at the West Fertilizer plant site, which caused the colossal explosion that leveled much of the town of West.

Building such a dangerous facility in the midst of a residential and business area, and allowing homes, nursing homes, hospitals, schools and playgrounds to be built alongside it, is the result of a corrupt process that is commonplace in towns and cities across America, where business leaders routinely have their way with local planning and zoning commissions, safety inspectors and city councils. Businesses small and large also have their way with state and federal safety and health inspectors too.

Images of terror in America, East and West (left: The Boston Marathon bombing, right: the West Fertilizer blast)

I ran the Boston Marathon back in 1968, and, my feet covered with blisters inside my Keds sneakers, dragged across the finish line to meet my waiting uncle at a time of about 3 hours and 40 minutes. It was close enough to the time that the current bombing happened in this year’s race — about four hours from the starting gun — that had I been running it this year, I might still been near enough to the finish line to have heard the blasts.

That really brings home to me the horror of what just happened.

At the same time, I’m reminded that back when I ran my Boston Marathon, which was only weeks after the Viet Cong’s bloody Tet Offensive, we didn’t give a thought to the idea of the Viet Cong bringing their war home to America. Now you have to at least wonder whether this bombing might in some way have been linked to America’s various wars abroad.

We don’t at this point have a clue who was behind this atrocity, but whether it was some foreign terrorist organization, a contingent of Taliban fighters seeking to bring the Afghan War to the US, or a domestic right-wing group protesting abortion, the income tax or the country’s “Kenyan” president, it should be a wake-up call to the nation that our violent national culture and our imperial pretensions will eventually reap us a whirlwind.

A country that goes around blowing up children in Afghanistan by the score, as happened last week in Kundar Province, Afghanistan, that claims for itself the right to kill anyone, anywhere, if the president or his designees in the Pentagon and the CIA decide that person is a threat or an annoyance (and that is willing to kill lots of innocent bystanders, including women and kids, to do it), a country that encourages its police to act like an occupying military force in their jurisdictions, breaking into homes in SWAT gear at dawn, pointing assault rifles in people’s faces, arresting people on trumped-up charges, such a country and its people at some point must realize that such behavior invites a violent response.

Two acts of terror: US bombing kills 10 children in Afghanistan, and twin bombs strike Boston Marathon

What’s wrong with the Obama administration’s proposal to change the way Social Security checks are adjusted for inflation from using the Consumer Price Index (CPI) to instead using something called a “chained” CPI?

Let’s start with the fundamental problem: Social Security is not a cause of the federal budget deficit, and will not be for years, even if nothing is done to raise more revenue for the program.

Sure the US will eventually have to come up with more money to pay the benefits earned by retirees in the Baby Boom generation, but that problem of an eventual shortfall in Social Security tax revenues can be easily solved by simply eliminating the cap — currently $113,000 in annual income — that is subject to the FICA tax. If the cap were completely eliminated, so that all income was subject to the tax, as is the case with the Medicare tax, the shortfall would be nearly eliminated. Any remaining shortfall could be erased too, by extending some kind of FICA tax to unearned income from investments. My favorite is one that is common in Europe: a small — say 0.25% — tax on short-term stock and bond trades.

But there is a bigger problem with this Obama proposal to cut both Social Security benefits and Medicare funding: Adopting a long-time Republican proposal, it only looks at those programs in isolation, and concludes that they need to be cut. Our Nobel Peace Prize-winning president does not look at the biggest and most wasteful spending in the entire federal budget, which is the military. That bloated white elephant, which this year is sucking up close to $800 billion, not counting the interest on money borrowed to pay for past wars and armaments, could be cut in half or even by three-quarters, and it would still leave the US military budget larger than any other nation’s in the world. The US would be no less safe in that case. In fact, it would be a hell of a lot safer because we would no longer have US troops stationed expensively and provocatively in 1000 foreign locations.

Nobody in Congress is talking about slashing military spending and spending the savings on medical care, Social Security, education and other pressing needs. The public needs to demand this.

Obama on his campaign pledge not to cut Social Security: 'Hey, that was just a campaign promise…

Note from TCBH: Manhattan island hosts the headquarters of four of the nation’s five biggest “too-big-to-fail” banks: Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, JP MorganChase, and Citi Group. US Attorney General Eric Holder has stated publicly in Congress that he has no intention of seeking criminal indictments of these banks or their top executives — or even their middle-ranking executives for that matter — despite the myriad frauds, scams and schemes they’ve all engaged in, like robo-signing mortgage documents and touting derivatives that they were privately calling “sh*t,” all of which led to the crashing of the US and global economies.

Holder may be feeling pressure from the White House not to prosecute the big banks, but what about District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr.? As Manhattan DA, he has at his disposal New York state’s powerful banking laws, as well as the state’s anti-fraud and conspiracy statutes. But incredibly, he has not filed a single criminal case against the giant mega-banks under his jurisdiction. Instead, as I write in a cover story in the current edition of the New York city business publication Crain’s New York Business, he has brought the full power of his office down on one of the tiniest banks in the Big Apple: Chinatown’s Abacus Bank.

The thing is, Abacus is a bank that has made no sub-prime loans, doesn’t trade in derivatives, and has a default rate on its loans that is close to zero. At 0.5%, in fact, its default rate is less than one-tenth of the national average default rate of 6.0% for the nation’s banks! Unlike the powerful, predatory “too-big-to-indict” banks located just a few blocks further downtown, Abacus is also a bank that actually reported to federal regulators on its own the problem that led to Vance’s indictment. It was even commended by the Office of Thrift Supervision for being so forthcoming. In contrast, reporting fraud by their own executives is not something that the biggest banks have been particularly known for. No matter, Vance, a politically ambitious politician, went after not the big banks, but Abacus. Go figure. To read this incredible tale of misplaced prosecutorial priorities and epic political gutlessness, go to: Crain’s New York Business (Warning: reading the article is free, but you will have to register to access it.)
 

Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, Jr.: no prosecutions of biggest banks based in his Manhattan district

The history of third parties in America is pretty dismal. The system is rigged against them, for one thing. But equally problematic is the lack of focus that leads to infighting and splits whenever a third party is created.

A great answer to this would be to create a third party that has a laser-like focus on a single huge issue, where there is little or no room for debate over what the party stands for.

As it happens, there is such an issue, and it has the potential to decimate the two major parties by pulling support from both their bases.

I’m talking about Social Security and its more recent offspring, Medicare, both under threat by the Democratic/Republican duopoly in Washington, with the Democratic president now proposing a budget that would cut Social Security benefits and Medicare funding.

Social Security is without a doubt the most popular program ever created in Washington. Virtually every American pays into it and expects to rely on it in old age, or if he or she becomes disabled. There are currently 54 million people who are receiving Social Security benefits ( 39 million are 65 or older, and 8 million are disabled). And there are some 74 million Baby Boomers — people born between the years of 1946 and 1964, representing one-in-four of all Americans — who will be receiving it over the next several decades. Add to that number the many younger people who are ardent advocates of the program, not just because they expect to also depend upon it, but because they know it is providing already for their parents and grandparents, and you have a bloc of voters and potential voters the likes of which this nation has never seen.

The key to getting them all together is establishing a political party whose raison d’être is preserving, improving and expanding Social Security benefits.

“The vast majority of 401(k) funds are at risk of lawsuits over excessive fees.”
— James Holland, fiduciary consultant
 

Short-sellers and the plaintiff’s bar have a lot in common. Short-sellers attack companies they consider over-valued. Plaintiff’s attorneys file class-action suits on contingency against firms they think are committing fraud. Both can win big or lose big. Both are widely hated by corporate America.

Enter Jerry Schlichter, a plaintiff’s attorney whose St. Louis worker injury law firm Schlichter Bogard & Denton last year won a big judgment in federal district court against technology firm ABB and its 401(k) provider, Fidelity Management Trust, a leading provider of 401(k) investment plans.

In a March 2012 ruling that has roiled the retirement world, the court awarded plan participants at ABB $36.9 million, plus court costs and legal fees of $50 million. It was a big victory for Schlichter, who since 2006 has filed a raft of lawsuits over allegedly excessive fees charged to employees for their 401(k) plans.
Although Schlichter and other attorneys have also lost their share of excessive fee class action suits, the ABB verdict, now on appeal in the 8th Circuit, as well as hefty settlements with Caterpillar and General Dynamics, is nonetheless a shot across the bow of the 401(k) industry.

It warns plan sponsors large and small that they need to analyze the plans they offer their employees better and to accept their ERISA-mandated fiduciary responsibility to provide retirement plans with reasonable recordkeeping, administrative and investment fees. And it alerts employees that their plans may be ripping them off, or at least serving them poorly.

Willie James Sauls is unlikely to see the outside of a prison. Last fall a court in the state of Texas sentenced this 37-year-old man to 45 years in jail. His crime: he snatched the purse from an old woman.

In Norway, meanwhile, a court sentenced Anders Behring Breivik, a right-wing racist who slaughtered 77 people, mostly teenagers, and injured several hundred, to 21 years in prison — less than half that time — with an option for that detention to be extended by five-year increments if he is determined to be still dangerous. Otherwise, the 32-year-old, if considered rehabilitated, could be released at the age of 53.

In the 1970s and ‘80s, Germany was rocked by killings committed by a radical left group called the Red Army Faction. Its members killed over 30 people, including the nation’s attorney general and leading industrialists. Eventually its leaders were caught and convicted, but by 2007, almost a decade after the Red Army Faction had announced its own dissolution, those still in prison were pardoned by the country’s president.

It is beyond inconceivable to imagine a US president, governor or even a judge, releasing a prisoner from a US jail who had committed the kind of offenses committed by either Breivik or members of Germany’s Red Army Faction. It is, for that matter, hard to imagine any political leader in the US pardoning even purse-snatcher Willie James Sauls.

This is, after all, a country that just recently hounded a 26-year-old internet activist, Aaron Swartz, into committing suicide, after a federal prosecutor threatened him with 35 years in jail — this for the heinous crime of stealing income from a company that was collecting revenue for making available academic papers for which the authors get not a penny (in a protest action he had publicly hacked an MIT server and downloaded hundreds of academic papers which the private contractor was charging for!). This is a country that routinely convicts the wrong people and locks them up for decades and doesn’t even apologize if they manage to eventually prove their innocence and win release. It’s a country that is holding people as “terrorists” at Guantanamo, without trial, for over a decade, knowing they never did anything wrong, simply because it doesn’t have the courage to admit its errors.

Right-wing Americans love to call the US a “nanny state,” claiming that the federal government is always trying to pass laws regulating people’s lives. What the US really is, though, is a “puni-state” — a nation that thrives on vengeance and retribution, and that rejects the whole notion of rehabilitation or character change (even while euphemistically calling its prisons “corrections” facilities).

Willie James Sauls: 45 years for purse snatching in Texas

The American media are full of glowing reports and praise for President Obama for “brokering” a detente between Israel and Turkey, two former allies who have been at loggerheads since May 31, 2010 when heavily armed Israeli Defense Force fighters boarded the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish-flagged vessel seeking to break Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza with non-military supplies, and killed nine unarmed peace flotilla activists.

In the deal arranged by the American president, Israel’s hot-head prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who had ordered the raid, apologized “to the Turkish people” for “any mistakes that might have led to the loss of life or injury.”

It was a lame excuse for murder, but it appears that Turkey’s government was ready to bury the hatchet and, as a client state of the US, was also under some pressure from this country too.

It is interesting and indicative of the continuing power of the pro-Israel lobby in the US, that President Obama did not, as part of this brokered deal, bother to demand that Netanyahu include an apology, weak or otherwise, to the American people for the killing of an American national. For one of the nine people slaughtered by the IDF in that raid, a 19-year-old young man named Furkan Dogan, was an American citizen — a son of Turkish parents, but born in the U.S.

Dogan’s death has never been protested or even investigated or questioned by the US government — an astonishing abrogation of this government’s oft-repeated promise to protect American lives. Indeed, in his first debate in the series of three presidential campaign debates with Republican Mitt Romney last fall, President Obama said, in his first answer to a question from the moderator, that his number on responsibility was to protect Americans.

Furkan Dogan in Turkey before he was killed on a peace voyage to Gaza by Israeli Defense Force boarders. Obama’s response: No apology needed.

Updated Monday, March 11
 

Thanks to the courageous action of Private Bradley Manning, the young soldier who has been held for over two years by the US military on trumped-up charges including espionage and aiding the enemy, we now have solid evidence that the country’s two leading news organizations, the Washington Post and the New York Times, are not interesting in serious reporting critical of the government.

Manning, in admitting at his military court martial hearing recently that he was in fact the source of hundreds of thousands of damning and embarrassing documents and cables exposing the perfidy and even war crimes of the US in Iraq and Afghanistan which were turned over to Wikileaks, also stated that he had first attempted to provide those documents — which included the secret video of an attack helicopter massacring civilians, including two Reuters journalists, and those who tried to rescue the victims — to the Post and the Times.

Both supposed “news” organizations failed to pursue his offer, and did not run those stories of US criminality until the documents had been released by Wikileaks.

The same two news organizations, not surprisingly, have largely ignored Bradley’s prolonged incarceration in a military brig– incarceration that held him in solitary confinement, often naked, and which a UN human rights investigator called “torture” as well as his pretrial hearing and trial, once that process finally got underway.

Even the New York Times’ own ombudsman felt compelled to criticize the paper for its shameless dereliction of journalistic duty in ignoring the persecution of a man whose work the paper sprayed all over its news pages, once his documentary evidence became available through Wikileaks, instead of directly from Manning himself.(And once it became clear that other publications, notably the British Guardian newspaper and the German magazine Der Spiegel, were going to publish his leaks.)

Private Bradley Manning is a human rights hero being mercilessly persecuted by the Obama administration for telling the truth. It’s a story barely covered by the New York Times and Washington Post, who long ago ignored his efforts to tell them about US military criminality.