Author: Dave LIndorff

 
There is a basic concept when it comes to justice that the punishment should fit the crime. It’s a concept that in Law-and-Order America has long vanished. Some states, like California, have done this with brutish “Three-Strikes-You’re-Out” policies that have ended up sentencing young men to life in prison for something like stealing a video, because it was the perpetrator’s third crime. Others, like Florida, have done it by sentencing a pre-teen kid to life in prison for a killing because he was tried as an adult.

The mentality that does these things also operates at a lower level, before sentencing, and involves police who over-react, and over-charge people for minor violations. I was talking to a black man recently who spent four years in prison in Pennsylvania for throwing a brick through a window. “I was drunk,” he says, “and so I tossed the brick, which was stupid, but the police called that a burglary attempt, and so I got four years.”

My own experience with this mentality came with two traffic tickets involving my son. They might seem minor in comparison, but they still speak to this mentality.

The first happened earlier this year in my suburban community of Upper Dublin, PA. Jed and I were in the car early in the morning, headed for an appointment in Philadelphia. Jed, only 17, was driving for the first time in early morning and had never had the experience of driving past a school during the “flashing school zone” period, when cars had to go 15 miles per hour. A careful driver, he was obeying the law meticulously as we passed the town’s high school and elementary school. Then, just past the elementary school, at the intersection where we had to turn to go a few hundred feet to the entrance to a divided highway, Jed made the turn and began accelerating towards the ramp entrance.

I immediately spotted a black unmarked police car parked deceptively on the side of the road, but before I could even tell Jed to slow down, it took off behind us, lights flashing.

Busted!
Jed Lindorff

My wife Joyce and I were renting a car for the week this morning at a Hertz office just outside Philadelphia. There was a line of people either waiting to pick up a vehicle, or to return one.

The harried clerk behind the counter — the only guy in the office — was fielding calls while trying to serve the first guy in line, who was trying to rent a car for a vacation trip with his wife to North Carolina’s Outer Banks. No sooner would the poor clerk sit down at the computer to start typing in the information from the man’s driver’s license than the phone would ring — a phone that was located on a desk in a cubicle behind him, requiring him to get up and run around to the back cubicle.

The man at the counter, and others in the line, sighed audibly.

The clerk rolled his eyes in apology as he explained to the caller that he was backed up in the office, and would have to call her back. There was a pause, and he said into the phone calmly, “Within the hour. I promise.”

Then he came back to the counter, apologizing. The phone rang again. He ran back to the phone and fielded this second call, again saying he’d have to call the person back.

The man at the counter, likely a college professor judging by his baseball cap, which had embossed on the side “Penn Relays Official,” observed to no one in particular, “Here it is: the New American Economy.”

I said, “You got that right!”

Later, after four people had been taken care of and it was our turn, as we were inspecting the vehicle for dents and scratches before signing off on the rental, I asked the guy why the office was so short-staffed. “They cut us back to one person on Saturdays,” he said. “But there’s way too much work for one person.” (He had just had to leave four people in line in the office to run out across the parking lot, wearing his crisp office uniform, with its long pants, in 90-degree heat, to retrieve a sun-roasted black car for us and bring it to the front of the office.)

I asked him if he had some wall that he could beat his fist against when he got home. “I go straight to the gym after work,” he said with a wry laugh.

This incident happened on the same day that the local paper, the Philadlephia Inquirer, reported on its front page that Merck, the pharmaceutical giant, is planning to lay off 13,000 of its employees over the next four years.
US Companies aren't hiring, they're making existing workers work harder

The chief economist at ratings agency Moodys is warning that the U.S. could be headed for a renewed recession.

Calling the current situation “very perilous,” John Lonski adds that the politicians in Washington, where both parties are vying to present budgets featuring massive cuts in spending, could help bring on that recession–just as the new Conservative Party-led government in Great Britain brought on a return to recession this year through its aggressive cutting of public spending. Worse yet, they could create a new shut-down in credit or “liquidity” in the financial industry that “could be more serious even than what caused the collapse of Lehman Brothers” in 2008.

Lonski, in an interview with ThisCantBeHappening!, said, “What scares me is that, because of the weakened condition of the federal government, there is less confidence in the philosophy of `too big to fail’– the idea that the government will come in and back up any financial company that runs into trouble.” He said the government is probably no longer in a position to make trillions of dollars available to prop up failing big banks as it did in 2008 and 2009, and that fearing this, financial institutions may pull back, drying up lending.

Lonski and his colleague Ben Garber, another economist at Moody’s Capital Markets Research Group, today released a new report titled “Double Dip Risk Rises as DC Standoff Continues,” in which they warn that the U.S. “may be closer to a double dip recession than commonly thought.”

The two men note that the US economy “continues to soften,” and say that evidence is “proving elusive” of any recovery in the second half of of this year. And that’s “assuming a reasonable resolution of the debt standoff” between Republicans and Democrats in Washington, and increasingly even among Republicans themselves.

“Even with a market-friendly resolution of the debt standoff,” they write, “a double-dip recession is far from unlikely.”
The Economy (left) is heading south, while joblessness (right) continues to to rise

Glenn Greenwald has just written that President Obama, by playing a leading role in pushing for cuts in Social Security benefits as part of the whole kabuki-theater drama over the debt ceiling, and the alleged crisis of America’s national debt, has cut out the “soul” of the Democratic Party.

Let’s start by saying that if the Democratic Party ever had a soul, it was sold long ago to the Evil Ones who run corporate America, and especially the horned legions on Wall Street. But the point Greenwald makes is a good one: Obama and his backers in the Democratic Party in Congress — the power brokers like Sen. Harry Reid and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and the sell-outs like Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL), Kent Conrad (D-ND) and Mark Warner (D-VA), who are the Democratic half of the so-called Gang of Six currently putting forward a proposal to raise working class taxes while cutting taxes for the rich, and to slash $3 trillion from programs that are critically important for the poor and the sick — have abandoned any commitment they and the party might once have had to working class America and to the poor and have gone over completely to a strategy of trying to compete with Republicans in currying the favor of the rich and the powerful.

There is at this point only one thing to do, and it’s not to encourage some liberal figure to run a quixotic primary campaign against Obama for the 2012 Democratic Presidential campaign. Nor is it to write a letter to the President vowing not to vote for any reduction in Social Security Benefits, as 61 House members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus did late this week.

It is to move forward with a strategy to develop a fully-competitive progressive Third Party to run races in every Congressional district and for every Senate seat up for grabs in 2012, and to run a serious candidate for President.

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Exhibit 1: The sad state of alternative media:

This article was submitted to both Truth Out and Common Dreams for publication on their sites, which have been filled with articles criticizing President Obama’s sellout of traditional Democratic Party principles supporting Social Security and Medicare. Neither site has been willing to run this story. Common Dreams has gone further, actually pulling a letter I wrote in the comment section of a Sunday CD piece by Jeff Cohen which was calling for Bernie Sanders to run in the Democratic Primary against Obama. My letter made the point that running in a primary against Obama would only lead Obama to again lie about his being a progressive, only to ignore any promises he might make should he be re-elected. In the letter, I linked to this article, and mentioned that CD had chosen not to run it. Apparently, at Common Dreams, letters criticizing CD editorial decisions are not allowed, yet this is exactly one of the criticisms we on the left have been leveling at the NY Times and other corporate media for years. So how different then is Common Dreams from the MSM? How different is Truthout for that matter, if it cannot run pieces that are outside of its own political viewpoint? Another reason why readers of this particular online newspaper should be sending us financial support.
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The smoking ruin that is the the Obama White House, and the rotting corpse that is the Democratic Party, have, incredibly, together been boxed into a corner by, of all things, the certifiably insane Republican Party.

This amazing situation has resulted not through any brilliant strategy on the part of the Republicans, but by the self-inflicted wounds of the Democrats.

Faced with a collapsing economy that is at serious risk of performing a reprise of the Great Depression, Congressional Democrats and President Obama were in a perfect position to grab the flag and run home with it by declaring war on unemployment and on the party that has unequivocally declared itself openly to be the standard bearer of the wealthy and powerful.

All the president and Congressional Democrats had to do was announce that Social Security, Medicare, education and programs to protect the poor were all off limits in any discussion of the federal budget, and to declare an immediate 25% cut in military spending, as called for earlier by Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), the ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee.

How hard would that have been to do? The polls show it’s what the public wants. Any elected official who did this, particularly someone elected and re-elected as a Democrat, would have been hailed by voters for such a bold action.

According to a Pew Research Center poll conducted in late May and released June 11, 60% of Americans correctly attribute the nation’s enormous deficit primarily to military spending, which eats up 52% of every tax dollar (Social Security and Medicare are entirely funded by separate payroll taxes, and not only have not contributed a single dollar to the federal deficit, but have been routinely borrowed from by the government to finance the deficit in the government’s operating budget caused by military spending). Only 24% blame the deficit on domestic spending other than military (and probably every one of those is a Republican or right-wing independent who likely believes that the earth was created 6000 years ago, and is flat, and who will never vote Democratic no matter what).
Military vs. Education spending around the globen (US in company of Iran, China, Russia, UAE and India)

It is part of America’s state religion, the Free Market fundamentalist religion that is accepted as gospel by all leading politicians, by the “brain trust” that sets goverrnment economic policy, and by the supposedly hard-nosed analysts who convince American investors where to put their money, that “markets know best.”

How then to explain the panicked reaction of investors and markets to the Labor Department’s monthly Bureau of Labor Statistics report on the latest monthly jobs and unemployment figures?

Those numbers reported out for the month of June, released at 9:00 am after the usual kind of tight secrecy you’d expect of a National Security Administration international risk assessment, came in at an anemic 18,000 net new jobs, and a new official jobless rate up slightly from 9.1% for May to 9.2% for June. An hour later the stock market plunged by about 1% in a matter of minutes (that 1% drop represented a paper loss to investors of $140 billion!). The reason given by analysts and financial journalists for the plunge was that the “expectation” of investors, based upon forecasts of the jobs number made by economists and analysts the day before the BLS announcement, was for somewhere between 90,000 and 120,000 new jobs, and for a dip in the jobless rate to 9.0%.

So because the actual number of new jobs reported by the BLS was somewhere like 72,000 to 102,000 lower than the forecast estimates, and because the jobless rate edged up instead of down, investors dumped a pile of shares, causing the value of most shares on the exchanges to lose value.

That investor reaction, and the poor jobs numbers themselves, were interpreted by those same economists and analysts in the following days as an indication that the US economy was in trouble–that the supposed recovery from the deepest recession since the 1930s had “stalled.”

The “wisdom” of the market was saying that the American economy was stumbling again.

But hold on a minute. What has really changed with those numbers?
Voodoo Economics: BLS figures are used by investors, analysts and politicians like religious icons.

In ways little and huge, it is clear that we live in a nation, a culture and a society that is terminally ill.

The latest outrage — the execution of a Mexican convicted in Texas of the brutal slaying of a 16-year-old girl in blatant violation of a universally adopted international treaty that requires that as a foreigner he be able to notify his home country’s consulate of his case — is evidence of this sickness, which appears to have both physical and mental aspects.

As a journalist I have traveled widely in the world, often in police states like China or Laos, and I have always been confident that if I ran afoul of those police, at least I could count on the fact that the authorities would be legally bound to notify my embassy, so that I could get international attention and, hopefully, legal assistance.

This point was made, belatedly and not particularly assertively, by the White House in the case of death-row inmate Humberto Leal Garcia Jr. in Texas, but the politically ambitious governor of Texas, Rick Perry, who is contemplating a run for the Republican presidential nomination, figured killing Garcia was a good career move, and he just ignored the president. The Supreme Court, meanwhile, declined to intervene, claiming, absurdly, that it hasn’t got the power to order a state government to halt an execution.

That’s just pathetic–the kind of illogic you expect from the likes of Antonin Scalia. The Constitution clearly states that only the federal government can negotiate and sign international treaties, and that once a treaty is signed and voted on by the Senate it is the law of the land, ergo the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations is the law of the land. The state of Texas is in violation of that treaty, having arrested, tried, convicted and today executed Garcia without notifying his consulate of these actions. Clearly the state broke the law of the land, and the federal authorities had the right to call a halt to this atrocity. Yet none of the three branches of the government acted–a shameful ducking of responsibility to uphold the law. This means that any American who travels abroad, anywhere (and especially in Mexico), is at grave risk of being caught up in a dangerous legal situation, with the foreign government under no obligation to notify US authorities. (I’d sure think twice about traveling to Mexico now if I were a Texan!)

Then look at the Casey Anthony case. The woman, just acquitted by a Florida jury in a capital murder case where she was charged with murdering her daughter, never should have faced first-degree murder charges in the first place. Criminal neglect maybe, but not murder. The prosecutors had no evidence–not only of how the child had died, but that would have linked Anthony to the body. But this is America. Prosecutors want big trophies that are to be won in big media trials, and this one was a classic of the genre. The media piled on, ghoulish crime stalkers camped outside the courthouse trying to get a seat at the witch trial. Everyone outside the jury box was convinced she was guilty, guilty, guilty. And she walked. Why? Because in the one redeeming chapter in this sick saga, the jurors did their duty, and decided, in relatively short order, that the prosecution’s case was shot full of holes, and they could not say with a straight face that Anthony’s guilt had been proven “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

I would say that verdict makes me proud to be an American, but for the fact that a) the jurors are mostly being condemned by the public for doing the right thing and b) in most murder trials jurors are railroaded by lying, overly-aggressive and simply unprincipled and ambitious prosecutors who see their job as winning, not seeking justice. The conclusion of this case was shocking precisely because it was so unusual.
What kind of people would accept the idea of 44 million desperately poor fellow citizens?

Today is the anniversary of the day that the nation’s founders, gathered in Philadelphia a few miles from my house (which as it happens had already been standing for about 28 years old at the time), at great personal risk, signed the Declaration of Independence, with its ringing declaration that all men–Americans and everyone else, too–are born equal and are endowed with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Five years ago at this time, I was just starting my road trip promoting my book, The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006), which documents the wholesale assault, by then President George W. Bush, and his chief consigliere, Vice President Dick Cheney, on those bold concepts and on the subsequent Constitution and Bill of Rights which those same founders set up as the guiding principles of this nation.

I never imagined as I wrote that book, and as I traveled the country making its case that these two wretched men were criminals and constitution-wreckers, that I would later be witness to a perhaps even more dangerous threat to what remains of our national heritage. But here we are, more than half-way through the first (and hopefully last) term of President Barack Obama, and we are witnessing not only a continuation of the crimes of those last two villains, not only a wholesale blocking of efforts to bring those two criminals and their accomplices to justice, but a continuation, by the man who succeeded them, of the destruction of our once relatively free society.

During the Bush/Cheney years, I was speaking once about the case for impeachment at a gathering in southern New Jersey. At the end of my presentation, an elderly woman with a walker stood up and asked what we could do to make impeachment happen. I told her people needed, en masse, to flood their Congressional representatives with phone calls and letters demanding that they file articles of impeachment and authorize the House Judiciary Committee to initiate impeachment hearings.

She then said, “I’m afraid to do that. Won’t my name end up on some list then and make me subject to harassment and investigation?”

At the time, I told her such talk was nonsense–especially if many like-minded citizens took the same kind of action. I told her that as bad as things were, we were not a totalitarian society, and that the best protection against such a thing was for us all to exercise our First Amendment rights.

While I still think it is important for us all to stand up for and to use those enumerated rights — the rights of freedom of speech, of freedom of assembly, and of course the right to petition the government over grievances — I could no longer honestly tell that woman that she had nothing to fear.
The 'Audacity of Hope', blocked in Athens, okayed as an IDF target by the US government

The United States Military is spending $20.2 billion a year for air-conditioning the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Read that again please: $20.2 billion every year just to provide air-conditioning for our troops in these two desert countries.

How much is $20.2 billion?

Well, I live in Pennsylvania, where the eighth-largest school district in the country, here in Philadelphia, is about to lose 1300 of its 11,000 teachers–that’s 12% of the teaching staff in an already overcrowded school system–because the state’s Republican governor and legislature want to cut some $500 million in education funding from the state’s $27-billion budget. That military air-conditioning bill could not only restore those teachers by closing the $400 million budget deficit facing the Philadelphia School District. It could almost fund the entire budget of the state! In fact, it could probably fund the school budget deficit in almost all the school districts in the nation.

$20.2 billion is more than the entire budget of the state of North Carolina!

It is the same as the $20-billion shortfall expected next year in the federal Pell Grant program that provides scholarship aid to low-income students attending college.

It is about one-forth of the entire budget of the federal Department of Health and Human Services.

It is two-and-a-half times the size of the entire 50-state federal Head Start program of early childhood education.

Now I know our soldiers have it tough over there in the 120-130-degree heat in Iraq, and it’s pretty hot in Afghanistan too, at least in the valleys. But then again, very few Iraqis and even fewer Afghans have air-conditioning. Many have probably never even seen an air-conditioner. And most, if they had one, wouldn’t have any electricity to run it with. (That’s why air conditioning is so costly for the US military. Not only do they have to ship in the A/C units. They have to truck in the gas to run the generators to produce the electricity to run the A/C, at great personal risk to the drivers of the fuel trucks.)

That $20.2 billion, by the way, is also about a tenth of the total cost of the two ongoing wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It's cool to be a soldier in Afghanistan or Iraq

Let me state from the outset: I have no problem with soldiers who inflate or embellish their war stories, any more than I am bothered by anybody who likes to spice up the tale of a youthful exploit.

It’s different though, when exaggerations our outright fictions are exploited for personal gain, like what Connecticut’s Attorney General Richard Blumenthal successfully campaigned for the US Senate on the outrageous claim that he was a Vietnam War combat veteran, when he really wasn’t.

My grandfather, William Lindorff, earned a Silver Star in World War I, where he was an ambulance driver on the front lines in France. My father, a Marine in World War II, says that his dad never once talked about that medal. Now, I’d say that’s a real hero.

David Christian, on the other hand, who ran twice unsuccessfully for a seat in Congress in Pennsylvania, has talked a lot about his own heroism as a soldier in Vietnam. In fact he’s written (with author William Hoffer), a book about his exploits, titled Victor Six. A cover blurb from the Philadelphia Inquirer touts him (perhaps a bit excessively, given Marine Gen. Smedley Butler’s unparalleled two Congressional Medals of Honor), as “this country’s most decorated war hero.”

I’m not going to challenge Christian’s tales of his heroic actions in Nam, where his website claims he won two Silver Stars, but some of his other stories, particularly one  he recently told to blustery conservative radio talk-show host and local newspaper columnist Michael Smerconish, do merit a little examination, and raise questions about what Stephen Colbert would call his general “truthiness.”
David Christian, Michael Smerconish and Kevin Ferris