This Can't Be Happening!

US Constitution, Article II, Section 2 on pardon power of the president: ‘The President shall…have Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.’
 

Whatever the truth regarding Deep State and Democratic Party charges of alleged Russian “meddling” in last year’s election (and I’m definitely in the camp that says there has been no hard evidence presented to show Russia hacked DNC emails), Donald Trump and his administration are now ensnared in a serious investigation by an independent prosecutor, former FBI Director Robert Mueller, into obstruction of justice and other crimes that could technically lead to indictments of Trump aides and to Trump’s impeachment.

But don’t forget: Trump has one unassailable power as president — the power to pardon — and I predict he will wield it.

The US Constitution gives a president the almost absolute power to pardon, including to pardon someone before he or she has been convicted of a crime or even indicted. As President Gerald Ford proved, such pardon power can even be used to pardon someone — in his case the disgraced and resigned ex-President Richard Nixon — before he had even been charged with a crime.

The only limitation on that presidential pardon power is that it cannot be used if the president is impeached, or to interfere with the impeachment process.

What this means is that as long as there has not been an impeachment of the president, or at least the launching of impeachment hearings in the House of Representatives, there is no constraint on President Trump’s use of his pardon power. He can, according to many legal experts, even pardon himself, though in that case he could still be impeached and removed from office, just not prosecuted for any crimes (impeachment is not a criminal proceeding, but is simply a process for removing a person from office).

I believe it is likely therefore, that Trump, for whom appearances, tradition, propriety, and the good of the country are all meaningless notions, will use his pardon power to block investigations into, and block indictments of former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and his top advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner, and anyone else who gets caught up in the investigation into crimes committed by him and his administration, his transition team and his campaign.

While such actions — even more shocking than Nixon’s abrupt firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox during the Watergate scandal — would likely stun the public and would, by most Americans, be viewed an admission of Trump’s guilt, it would effectively eliminate any chance for Mueller to prosecute or even to investigate anyone in the Trump administration. People who are pardoned cannot be pressured by fear of indictment and a promise of immunity into turning state’s evidence.

Canada’s affordable, efficient and widely popular single-payer system saves millions for U.S. corporations. That’s the main reason many of them shifted production into Canada. But if they know Canada’s system is so good, why aren’t executives of the parent companies here in the US lobbying for it?

To read this story by Dave Lindorff, please go to Salon.com

Delaware County, NY — If President Donald Trump is successful in getting key parts of his proposed budget passed by the Republican-led Congress — especially his cuts in Medicaid and in the Food Stamp program — he is certain to face a rebellion among people in places that went heavily for him in last November’s election. Places like Delaware County in heavily Republican Upstate New York.

My family owns a summer home in Delaware County where we have lived on and off, mostly during the summer (or on weekends before it gets too cold) for the last 31 years, making us, if not native upstate New Yorkers, then at least accepted neighbors and friends of people who are.

A main street in Delaware County, NY (Google street view)
 

Tucked up against the northeastern corner of Pennsylvania just at the point where the East and West Branches of the Delaware flow together to form the Delaware River, Delaware County in the Catskill Mountains is an area that was hit hard by the deliberate deindustrialization policies of the last half century or so promoted by alternating Democratic and Republican governments in Washington, DC. Once home to myriad large and small saw mills that supplied, for example, ash lumber stock for the Louisville Slugger company in Kentucky, to medical equipment manufacturers and the like, and to the usual array of auto dealerships, grocery stores, restaurants, bars, vacation resorts, day camps, etc., the county saw its well-paying and often unionized jobs move abroad or, after passage of NAFTA, down to Mexico. And those companies moved away or shut down, so did many of the smaller businesses that depended on paying customers. Today, the poverty rate in the county is officially at about 25%, drug use and alcoholism, as in much of rural America, are both rampant, joblessness is higher than the state average, with a third of households classified as distressed, meaning that they are spending more than 30% of the median family income of $32,500 just to meet mortgage payments or rent (that’s almost $20,000 a year less than the national median family income level and only $2000 above the official federal poverty level for a family of four!).

People here are white — about 97% of them, in fact, according to the latest US Census. Half of them have at best a high school education. Don’t get me wrong. These are clever, enduring and savvy folks who know how to get by on incomes that are often quite low. They know how to grow gardens, how to fish and to hunt for deer and other game, how to fix their own automobiles and pickup trucks — things that most urban and suburban Americans have entirely lost the ability to do.

 
Good people don’t smoke marijuana.
         - Jeff Sessions

Gage ain’t nothin’ but medicine.
         - Louis Armstrong

Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
         - Matthew 5:7 (The words of Jesus Christ)
 

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has sent a memo to all federal attorneys (those he hasn’t fired) setting in motion a radical reversal of the trend toward bi-partisan reform that has been building for at least a decade in the criminal justice system and the drug war. The memo states: “Any inconsistent previous policy of the Department of Justice related to these matters is rescinded, effective today.” This flies in the face of a movement that has led 30 states to reform their criminal justice systems in the area of mass incarceration. Sessions would, from the top down, re-establish “the sort of mass incarceration strategy that helped flood prisons during the war on drugs in the 1980s and 1990s,” according to The New York Times. “We’re going to double down on an approach everybody else has walked away from,” says Kevin Ring, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums. Sessions has personally emphasized a particular disdain for marijuana, as in the remark cited above. The federal government, of which Sessions is the top lawman, has adamantly refused to ease its marijuana laws as state after state modifies or legalizes their laws.

A call to prayer, a pipe and Sessions in the Times. (Photo left, Lou Ann Merkle, right, John Grant)

As I read this stuff, all I can think is Attorney General Jeff Sessions is a guy who needs to smoke a doobie. It must be incredibly stressful being attorney general in an administration in tragic free-fall, especially after he was forced to recuse himself on the intense Russia collusion investigation due to lying about his own meetings with Russians. Meanwhile, profound change is in the air as the nation’s business is rapidly being consumed into a wildly expanding internet-connected world that threatens to unravel life as we know it. Narrow-minded concerns like re-toughening sentencing for drug offenses seems dangerously out-of-synch with the times. There is so much research on the tenets of harm reduction as an alternative approach to incarceration and the ideas of a “war” on drugs that to suddenly wind the clock backwards now is tantamount to a crime in itself. One has to wonder: What’s up with this fellow from Alabama?

In the most recent issue of Neurology, Dr. Altaf Saadi and colleagues reveal the disheartening news that African Americans and Hispanic Americans receive lower quality neurologic care than their white counterparts.

Analyzing data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey from 2006-2013, they found that Black patients were 30% less likely to see an outpatient neurologist even after adjusting for social factors such as insurance coverage. Hispanic patients were 40% less likely.

They looked at neurologic diseases such as stroke, headache, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, and epilepsy. According to the CDC, strokes kill over 130,000 Americans each year, about 5% of deaths. Strokes are also the leading cause of long-term disability. Furthermore, the risk of stroke is nearly twice as high for Black Americans as opposed to whites. Yet, despite higher rates of stroke, Black Americans are seeing neurologists, the experts on strokes, less.

The authors postulate that there are likely simultaneous factors. The first factor they cite is low health literacy. Not only are patients unaware of all the possible follow up care that can prevent another stroke or minimize the impact of a recent one, folks might not even recognize the symptoms of stroke, multiple sclerosis, or Parkinson’s disease to begin with.

Folks of color are more likely to have their care across more than one healthcare system making it difficult for the primary care doctor, the emergency room doctor, the neurologist, and the hospital doctor to coordinate their care. If you live in the Southeastern United States, the number of neurologic specialists is far lower than anywhere else in the country.

And finally, the impact of implicit bias and stereotyping cannot be underestimated. Though most doctors are well intentioned and would like to be “color-blind” study after study has shown that we have also absorbed the subtle messages that society sends us that folks of color are inferior or less deserving of care. As this study points out, even at high volume specialty sites, Black and Hispanic patients get delayed care compared to whites.

But perhaps the most distressing part of this article is that time and resources were put towards it at all. We already know that Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, get lower quality care and that they die younger because of it. David Hatcher, former Surgeon General reports that from 1991-2000, 880,000 excess deaths could have been averted had the health of Black Americans matched that of whites.

Sputnik Radio's 'Loud&Clear' with host Brian Becker (click on the image to hear the segment with Lindorff and Zeese)

Democratic politicians, aided and abetted by their journalist supporters in publications like the Washington Post, New York Times and at electronic news organizations like CNN, MSNBC and NPR, are playing a dangerous game focusing their anti-Trump “resistance” energies on trying to revivify the moribund Cold War with Russia and China.

You hear almost nothing out of Democratic Party establishment figures about the continuing economic crisis facing most average and poor Americans, who continue to struggle trying to get by on lower paying jobs than what they had before the Great Recession (supposedly ended!), or working at part-time jobs, living from paycheck to paycheck while the rich get richer, and having the traditional tickets out of their family’s predicament — a quality public school education and then college for their kids, a home they can finance and ultimately own, and a secure support system for their parents, and eventually themselves when they reach retirement age — undermined and threatened with death by a thousand cuts — all taken from them.

Instead, the American public hears from Democrats and a liberal media how President Trump is in some kind of conspiracy with the evil Russians, who we’re told insidiously helped destroy America’s election system, handing the presidency to Trump instead of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

There are so many things wrong with this picture.

First off, Russia these days, almost three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is not America’s enemy — something that at least half of Americans understand instinctively, including most of those who voted for Trump in November. 86,000 US tourists and business people visited Russia in 2015, part of some 33 million who visited the country from around the globe to make it the ninth-most-visited country in the world.

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Forbes magazine, when tensions between the US and Russia were high amid Democratic Party charges that Russia was trying to throw the election to Trump last August, published an article reporting that billions of investment dollars were flowing from the US into Russia from a Fortune 500 list of America’s biggest firms, including PepsiCo, Procter&Gamble, McDonald’s, Mondelez International, General Motors, Johnson & Johnson as well as resource companies like Cargill, Alcoa, and General Electric.

Russia, let us not forget, has been keeping the primarily US-owned and funded ISS space station staffed with its Soyuz rocket ferries, while the US flounders, trying to find the funding to develop a reliable transport system of its own following the forced retirement of the ill-conceived space shuttle.

UPDATE: Massive weekly candlelight demonstrations that began last fall on Oct. 29 and that brought an incredible 2.3 million into the streets of central Seoul on Dec. 3 have been transforming South Korea’s politics and society, pressuring the National Assembly to impeach and oust the corrupt President Park Geun-hye and now bringing about the election of a peace candidate from the Democratic Party of Korea (DPK), Moon Jae-in.

Moon’s election is a historic moment pregnant with new opportunities.

A human rights lawyer and former student activist, Moon is calling for an end to threats by the US against North Korea and for the adoption of a policy of friendship and peaceful negotiation with the north.

His biggest challenge though will be ending the subservient colonial-status that lies at the heart of the US-South Korea relationship, dating back to the US military occupation of South Korea that began in 1945 with the end of World War II.

Many Americans may know that the Korean War never really ended, and that rather, with the armies of China and the US and their respective North and South Korean “allies” having battled to a stalemate at roughly where the border was at the start of the war, an armistice was signed. What Americans don’t know is that since the Korean War began, ostensibly under the authority of a United Nations Security Council resolution, the US, under the facade of calling itself the “UN Command,” has continued to exercise full and unfettered control over the armed forces of the Republic of Korea.

This unprecedented situation even led a prominent US commander, the late Gen. Richard G. Stilwell, to call the relationship “the most remarkable concession of sovereignty in the entire world.” Gen. Stilwell went on to note that relying upon a twisted interpretation of the UN resolution that authorized war against North Korea, the US has asserted that it has full authority, acting supposedly in South Korea’s interest, even to use nuclear weapons against the North.

An attempt was made by an earlier peace-advocating candidate from the DPK elected to the presidency to eliminate the U.N. Command but it was rejected on June 24 1994 because the US simply would not allow it. The Security Council, under US influence, merely “recommended” the creation of a unified command, specifying that “it be under the authority of the United States” — a meaningless change in phraseology. Technically, in 1994 the South Korean government was granted control over its military during peace time, but the US would retain control over the country’s military during any time of conflict with the North. That situation is projected to remain in force into some unspecified time in the 2020s.

Thus, the US alone, 67 years after the start of the Korean War, still claims the authority to “decide on the continued existence or the dissolution of the United Nations Command.”

This cancer, which leaves South Korea — the seventh largest national economy in terms of GDP right behind the UK and one of Asia’s most modern countries — as little more than a vassal state or colony of the US, needs to be excised. We will see how the new Moon administration grapples with it and how far the US will go to try and preserve this pathological relationship.
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Test launch of US THAAD missile defense system now installed in South Korea against the popular wishes — and amid doubts that it would work anyway against a real missile attack. (Army.mil photo)
 

North Korea today is not the North Korea of 1994 when President Bill Clinton seriously considered a preemptive strike against the Yongbyon nuclear reactor. Back then North Korea did not possess any nuclear weapons.

Now North Korea possesses the knowledge of nuclear weapons technology and any US cyberattacks can only slow the process of weapons development but not stop it. Most likely the North’s ability to reconstitute nuclear weapons technology is there for good — and it is proceeding with ICBM experiments too.

 
The past two days were a roller-coaster for me in the national struggle for meaning in the realm of war and peace. First, I was talking with a friend about his conscientious objector status specifically to the Vietnam War. This was early in the war, and he made it under the wire. Soon, draft boards realized they better stop giving CO status to those morally opposing a specific war, lest they encourage a groundswell of opposition among potential combatants that could undermine an unpopular war like the one the US government chose to unleash on the Vietnamese. The war really began in 1945 when President Truman betrayed our WWII ally, the Vietnamese, and supported re-colonization by the French.

Senator John McCain and documentary filmmaker Ken Burns

Later that night, I was part of an hour-long group phone call of fellow Vietnam veterans and friends in an organization called Full Disclosure. The group works to counter the government’s well-funded 13-year propaganda project to clean up the image of the Vietnam War; it emphasizes individual heroism and passes out badges and plaques to veterans. Members of Full Disclosure are very concerned right now about the upcoming Ken Burns 10-week PBS documentary series on the Vietnam War. Trying to get any kind of influence with Burns or members of his team on how the war is to be represented to Americans in 2017 is an uphill struggle.

Following the Full Disclosure phone call, I watched Mel Gibson’s excruciating film Hacksaw Ridge, about a CO medic who refused to even touch a rifle and saved 75 men from certain death in a horrific battle on the island of Okinawa in May 1945. I find Mel Gibson to be a repugnant lout; but my CO friend told me the film was a must-see. The husband of a gay Vietnam veteran friend who was a Navy corpsman with a Marine infantry unit in Vietnam also told me the film was good and how it reminded him of his husband’s experiences in Vietnam. (My medic friend felt no need to personally sit through Gibson’s gore fest.) Like the protagonist of Hacksaw Ridge, my friend refused to carry a weapon and saved men with sucking chest wounds and mangled and bleeding legs. He had been assured by a Navy recruiter he would be sent to journalism school, but Navy leaders did not need young men to assemble facts and information on the war; they needed what is historically known as cannon fodder, specifically cannon fodder able to keep other men alive. As cannon fodder, my friend’s sexual preference was irrelevant.

A Philadelphia judge has issued a stunningly powerful order requiring the city’s District Attorney’s Office to locate and release all documents related to the involvement of a former top prosecutor in the most contentious murder case in Philadelphia’s history. Because that former DA, Ronald Castille later became- a state supreme court justice and ultimately chief justice, the order could shine a light onto the dark legacy of ethics shredding misconduct by members of the state’s highest court.

It also opens the door a crack to the possibility that Mumia Abu-Jamal, currently serving a life sentence without possibility of parole, could have his 1982 murder conviction for the killing of a white Philadelphia police officer overturned.

The order, issued recently by Common Pleas Judge Leon Tucker, comes in an appeal filed by attorneys for celebrated jailhouse journalist Abu-Jamal. It represents yet another setback for the Philadelphia’s District Attorneys Office, an office already reeling from federal corruption charges filed recently against the city’s current DA Seth Williams.

Philadelphia prosecutors have spent decades fighting to sustain Abu-Jamal’s murder conviction for the 1981 shooting death Philadelphia police officer, Daniel Faulkner. Since Abu-Jamal’s conviction by a mostly white jury in 1982, entities as diverse as Amnesty International, government officials in the U.S and abroad plus prominent individuals around the world have condemned his trial, conviction and appeals process as a miscarriage of justice fraught with misconduct by prosecutors and judges, including members of Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court.

The current Abu-Jamal appeal centers on the legal unfairness of actions taken by former Philadelphia DA Castille, who as top prosecutor, oversaw the legal effort to keep Abu-Jamal on Pennsylvania’s death row, and then later served as a state Supreme Court justice ruling on appeals of those very actions by his former office.

Years after his election to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania in 1993, Castille joined six other court justices in rejecting an appeal by Abu-Jamal for a new trial based on documented evidence of egregious misconduct by police, prosecutors and the judge who presided over Abu-Jamal’s original 1982 trial and over his initial Post Conviction Relief Act hearing in 1995.

Retired PA Supreme Court Chief Justice Ronald Castille, Philadelphia Common Please Judge Leon Tucker and Mumia Abu-Jamal
 

Abu-Jamal’s legal team recently argued that Castille’s vote in the court’s 1998 rejection of their client’s appeal violated ethics provisions covering all judges in Pennsylvania –- a basic legal rights issue brushed aside by Pennsylvania’s high court in its unanimous 1998 ruling.

This latest Abu-Jamal appeal centers on a 2016 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in Williams v. Pennsylvania granting convicted murderer Terrance Williams a new trial because of Justice Castille’s refusal to recuse himself from a decision on Williams’ appeal of his conviction. The U.S. Supreme Court in that case blasted Castille because he had, as DA, approved the decision to seek the death penalty against Williams. His later vote as the state’s top judge denying an appeal of that conviction included his dismissal of chilling documentation that Philadelphia prosecutors working for him had unlawfully withheld critical exculpatory evidence during Williams’ trial — a circumstance similar to documented evidence of prosecutorial misconduct in the Abu-Jamal case.