How I became radicalized

For most of my life, I thought my country was fundamentally sound and moving in the right direction.

I knew there were serious problems and injustices in American life, but I thought that these were aberrations, contrary to our democratic ideals, which under our democratic system would be reformed over time.

I rejected the Communist belief that the crimes of capitalism are systemic, while the failures of Communism are failures to correctly understand or follow Marxist doctrine.

But my own beliefs were the mirror image of this.  I believed that the crimes of Communist countries were the inevitable result of a bad system, while the crimes of Western countries were aberrations that could be corrected.

The first step in my radicalization was the passage of the USA Patriot Act in October 2001.  I was shocked at how fundamental liberties, such as habeas corpus and trial by jury, could be simply wiped off the blackboard, and the majority of Americans would see nothing wrong with this.

I always thought of torture as the ultimate crime against humanity, because it destroys the mind and soul while leaving the body alive.   Torture became institutionalized, and even popular—possibly because of the illusion that it would be limited to people with brown skins and non-European names.

But I still thought of this as an aberration, part of a scheme by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and others to restore executive power that had been lost after the Watergate hearings.  I voted for Barack Obama with great enthusiasm in 2008, not because I believed he would be a strong reformer, but because I thought he would restore the country to normal.

I soon learned that there was a new normal, one that was different from what I thought it was.

A loophole on police asset seizures

In a previous post, I praised Attorney General Eric Holder for ending federal participation in police asset seizures.  But Susie Madrak on the Crooks and Liars blog pointed out a loophole in his announcement that I didn’t notice.

Holder’s decision allows some limited exceptions, including illegal firearms, ammunition, explosives and property associated with child pornography, a small fraction of the total. This would eliminate virtually all cash and vehicle seizures made by local and state police from the program.

What this means, as a practical matter, is that local and police state departments will focus their energies on the firearms and child porn busts, because they’ll be determined to fill those gaping holes in their budgets.

via Crooks and Liars.

Eric Holder bans most federal asset seizures

Asset seizures by police in many U.S. localities had become big business, and, in some localities, literal highway robbery.  So the following, which is from the Washington Post, is important good news.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Friday barred local and state police from using federal law to seize cash, cars and other property without warrants or criminal charges.

Eric Holder

Holder’s action represents the most sweeping check on police power to confiscate personal property since the seizures began three decades ago as part of the war on drugs.

Since 2008, thousands of local and state police agencies have made more than 55,000 seizures of cash and property worth $3 billion under a civil asset forfeiture program at the Justice Department called Equitable Sharing.

The program has enabled local and state police to make seizures and then have them “adopted” by federal agencies, which share in the proceeds.  It allowed police departments and drug task forces to keep up to 80 percent of the proceeds of adopted seizures, with the rest going to federal agencies.

“With this new policy, effective immediately, the Justice Department is taking an important step to prohibit federal agency adoptions of state and local seizures, except for public safety reasons,” Holder said in a statement.

Holder’s decision allows limited exceptions, including illegal firearms, ammunition, explosives and property associated with child pornography, a small fraction of the total.  This would eliminate virtually all cash and vehicle seizures made by local and state police from the program.

The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution states that “no person shall … be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”

Seizure of property of persons not convicted or even charged with a crime is a clear violation of the plain language of the Constitution.  Attorney-General Holder’s commendable action was long overdue.

LINK

Holder limits seized-asset sharing process that split billions with local, state police by Robert O’Harrow Jr., Sari Horowitz and Steven Rich for the Washington Post.

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Afterthought [1/30/2015]

Susie Madrak on the Crooks and Liars blog pointed out something I failed to think of.

What this means, as a practical matter, is that local and police state departments will focus their energies on the firearms and child porn busts, because they’ll be determined to fill those gaping holes in their budgets.

via Crooks and Liars.

Unless, of course, Holder meant that police will only be allowed to seize firearms, ammunition, explosives, child pornography and electronic media used to store child pornography.  But my guess is that Susie Madrak’s interpretation is the correct one.

What’s the matter with us liberal Democrats?

Why did President Obama never crack down on the Wall Street banks that caused the financial crisis?

Why did Eric Holder’s Justice Department never prosecute financial fraud?  Why were the failed banks bailed out rather than put into receivership and reorganized, as was done after the savings and loan crisis?  Why didn’t the President hire regulators who were willing to do their jobs?

And why don’t we liberal Democrats care?

All these things, as Thomas Frank has pointed out with his usual eloquence, were (1) fully within the President’s power, (2) good policy and (3) hugely popular.  Instead the President invests his political capital in anti-worker initiatives such as the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.

The liberal Washington press corps says it is politically impossible for President Obama to do the things that his constituents elected him to do.  Frank debunked their arguments one by one, and pointed out that, if the pundits are right, then American politics is an exercise in futility and nothing will ever change for the better.

What the President offers working people are placebos.  He has proposed giving free tuition community college students who meet certain criteria.

I think this would be nice, but community college is already reasonably affordable.  The problem of student debt originates elsewhere.  And sending more people to college does not in itself generate more well-paying jobs.  In itself, it just means higher-educated servers at Starbucks.

I criticize President Obama a lot, but I think the deeper problem is that so many liberal Democrats are willing to go along with the Washington consensus he represents.  Thankfully, this is starting to change.

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It’s not just Fox News: how liberal apologists torpedoed change, helped make the Democrats safe for Wall Street by Thomas Frank for Salon.   Well worth reading in its entirety.

The nine billion dollar whistleblower

A year ago, the U.S. Department of Justice announced a $9 billion settlement with JP Morgan Chase to settle a case of securities fraud.

The $9 billion was the price paid for not going to trail, and not hearing the testimony of whistleblower Alayne Fleischmann, which was a bargain, because the market value of the bank’s stock rose by more than that amount when the settlement was announced.

Fleischmann was a deal maker for JP Morgan Chase who warned her superiors back in 2008 that the bank would be guilty of securities fraud if it sold risky mortgage-backed securities based on false  information.

She was brushed off and lost her job.  She contacted the Securities and Exchange Commission, Department of Justice and other authorities and also was brushed off.   But she is determined to bring out the facts anyway, despite the legal risk of violating a confidentiality agreement and the certainty of being blacklisted from working on Wall Street.

“The assumption they made is that I won’t blow up my life to do it,” she said.  “But they’re wrong about that.”  Matt Taibbi told her story in the current Rolling Stone.

LINKS

The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JP Morgan Chase’s Worst Nightmare by Matt Taibbi for Rolling Stone.

Matt Taibbi and Bank Whistleblower on How JP Morgan Chase Helped Wreck the Economy, Avoid Prosecution, the full Democracy Now broadcast with transcript.

Bill Black on why financial crime isn’t prosecuted

Bill Moyers did a great interview with Bill Black, an expert on white-collar crime and former financial regulator, on the Obama administration’s failure to prosecute financial fraud.  He sums up the situation accurately, clearly and briefly.  Here are highlights from the transcript.

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WILLIAM K. BLACK:  Yeah, in baseball terms they’re batting 0.000.  But they’re not just batting 0.000, they took called strikes. They never got the bat off their shoulder and even swung.  They didn’t even try.

BILL MOYERS:  Do you remember when President Obama told “60 Minutes,” I think it was late December of 2011 that, “Some of the most damaging behavior on Wall Street…wasn’t illegal?”

BLACK: I do.

MOYERS: What did you think?

BLACK: I thought that he was wrong. That in fact if he listened to what the United States of America has demonstrated in court and through investigations, the activity was clearly illegal, it was a violation of a whole series of laws that make it felonies.

And these are just the frauds that caused the crisis. In addition to the frauds that caused the crisis, which are massive and we could talk about, we have the largest cartel in world history. This was the bid rigging of Libor, which is an international standard that sets the prices [interest rates] on over $300 trillion in [loans and financial] contracts.

A trillion is a thousand billion, right?  And then we have the foreclosure frauds where we have false affidavits [that the records were verified].  Over 100,000 felonies in that context.  And then we have the bid rigging on bond prices where all the major banks, according to the Justice Department, were involved.

And then we had the Federal Housing Finance Administration, a federal agency suing virtually every largest, of the largest 20 banks in the United States of America, saying they defrauded Fannie and Freddie through false sales.  And it goes on and on.

The savings and loan debacle, we made over 30,000 criminal referrals [during the administration of the elder George Bush].  Here, zero criminal referrals as far as we can get any public information.  So the first thing Holder should’ve done is re-establish the criminal referral process.  Because, you know, banks don’t make criminal referrals against their own CEOs.

MOYERS: Do you tell yourself, well, there is a justifiable and understandable reason why they don’t prosecute?

BLACK: No, there is no justifiable reason.  Apparently modern financial regulators are vastly more sophisticated than we were as financial regulators 25 years ago.  Because we had never figured out that the key to financial stability was leaving felons in charge of the largest financial institutions in the world.

The legacy of Eric Holder

The Real News Network interviewed Bill Black, an expert on white-collar crime and a former financial regulator, on the legacy of Attorney General Eric Holder.  Here is part of what he said:

Eric Holder has surprised me.  I always predicted that he would at least find one token case to prosecute some bank senior executive for crimes that led to the creation of the financial crisis and the global Great Recession. … …

Well, he’s actually going to leave without even a token conviction, or even a token effort at convicting. 

So, in baseball terms, he struck out every time, batting 0.000, but he actually never took a swing.  So he was called out on strikes looking, as we would say in baseball.

And I couldn’t believe that he would leave without at least having one attempted prosecution against these folks.

So he hasn’t done the most–he never did the most elementary things required to succeed. He never reestablished the criminal referral process, which is from the banking regulatory agencies, who are the only ones who are going to do widescale criminal referrals against bank CEOs, because, of course, banks won’t make criminal referrals against their own CEOs.

Holder could have reestablished that criminal referral process in a single email on the first day in office to his counterparts in the banking regulatory agencies, and he’s going to leave never having attempted to do so.

On top of that, if you’re not going to have criminal referrals from the agencies, the only other conceivable way that you’re going to learn about elite criminal misconduct of this kind is through whistle-blowers.  And as you mentioned, this administration, and Eric Holder in particular, are known for the viciousness of their war against whistle-blowers.

What the public doesn’t know—and it doesn’t know because of Eric Holder—is that in the three biggest cases involving banks–again, none of them, not a single prosecution of the elite bankers that drove this crisis—all three of those cases, against Citicorp, against JPMorgan, and against Bank of America, were made possible by whistle-blowers.

via After Eric Holder Resigns, A Look at His Record on Bank Prosecutions.

Instead of prosecutions, Holder negotiated settlements in which the big banks agreed to pay big fines.  That would have shifted the penalty from the actual wrongdoers to the stockholders.  Black pointed out that the stockholders didn’t suffer, either, because when the settlements were announced, the stock prices of the banks rose by more than the amount of the settlements.

Eric Holder stepping down as attorney general

Attorney General Eric Holder plans to step down as soon as a successor is confirmed.  I think the following is a just summary of his legacy.

Holder’s tenure as Attorney General has been a tragic one. Not only has he been engulfed in partisan scandals over an incompetent gun running sting known as “Fast and Furious,” he has been under fire for attacking the First Amendment rights of the media and is widely seen as having given his friends and former clients on Wall Street a complete pass on the criminal conduct that led to the 2008 financial crisis.

Holder’s involvement with the war on whistle-blowers, tracking and intimidating reporters, killing Americans without judicial review, and the abysmal failure to enforce the law against criminals in the financial services industry has left America a more divided and unjust society.

Not a particularly good legacy to leave behind.

America not only saw a white collar crime wave go unpunished, but saw Holder himself announce a doctrine that has been called Too Big To Jail.  

Holder claimed in congressional testimony that some Wall Street banks could not be prosecuted because of their size, saying “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.”

Holder made no corresponding effort to break up the banks so they could become the appropriate size for him to feel comfortable prosecuting them when they broke the law. 

Instead, the comment signaled to everyone that if you were big and powerful enough the Holder Justice Department was not coming after you in criminal court – which still holds true as there has not been any major prosecutions against the banks or bankers.

As Eric Holder exits the stage America remains worse off from his having been in office.

via FDL News Desk.

Coming clean on drone killings?

Attorney-General Eric Holder has revealed the names of four American citizens killed by flying killer drones.  They are the pro-terrorist Muslim cleric Anwar al-Alwaki; Samir Khan, who happened to be nearby when al-Alwaki was killed; Abdulrahman al-Alwaki, Anwar’s 16-year-old son who was killed a few days later; and Juda Kenan Mohammed, about which nothing else is known.

Anwar al-Alwaki was killed on purpose, because of he reportedly worked with terrorist plotters.  Samir Khan, Abdulrahman al-Alwaki and Juda Kenan Mohammed were killed by accident—”collateral damage.”  I can’t really generalize from a few examples, but if only one out of four victims of Obama’s flying killer drones were actual targets, this does not speak well of the supposed precision of drone strikes.

I think more Americans would be concerned about this if the unintended victims had names such as John Smith, Patrick O’Riley or Karl Andersen.   We need to remember that what can be done to people with dark skins and Arabic names can be done to people with light skins and European names (not that the latter is worse than the former).

Holder’s memo says the Obama administration’s policy is only to assassinate American citizens if they are on foreign soil and if (1) they pose an “imminent threat of violent attack” against the United States, (2) capture is not feasible and (3) the attack is conducted in accordance with the law of war.   The law of war requires that (a) killing is required by military necessity, (b) civilians are not intentionally targeted, (c) collateral damage does not exceed the military value of the operation and (d) the type of weapons used do not inflict unnecessary harm.

He gives a bill of particulars against Anwar al-Alwaki which makes a strong case that al-Alwaki was an “enemy combatant” and deserved to be targeted under these criteria—although there are observers who dispute his facts, and al-Alwaki himself, laboring under the disadvantage of being dead, is not able to give his side of the story.

Read Holder’s letter as a lawyer would.  Note that his criteria refer only to the killing of American citizens abroad.  There is nothing in the letter to limit drone killings of foreigners abroad.  In particular, there is nothing to limit the “signature strikes” killings people in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia based on suspicious patterns of behavior—what you might call “walking while Muslim.”

I was struck by the supercilious tone of the letter.   Holder appears to feel that the Obama administration really wasn’t obligated to reveal the names of the four dead Americans, and that it has gone above and beyond its duty of transparency to satisfy critics in the Senate.

Actually, this stance is politically shrewd.  Obama and Holder don’t absolutely refuse to disclose what the administration is doing, but they make it as difficult as possible to obtain the most minor bits of information.  With each disclosure, the temptation for Congress must be to declare victory for transparency and give up.

When I raise questions like this, friends point to earlier periods of American history, such as the Civil War, World War One and World War Two, when civil liberties were temporarily suspended with no permanent loss of liberty.  But all these conflicts came to an end in a short time, and the country was able to return to normal.   What is different about the “war on terror” is that, on the one hand, the existence of the country is not at risk, but, on the other hand, the war is planned to last for decades and perhaps indefinitely.

LINKS

Holder Letter on Counterterrorism Strikes Against U.S. Citizens, a copy of Eric Holder’s letter to Patrick J. Leahy, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

U.S. Acknowledges Killing 4 Americans in Drone Strikes by Charlie Savage and Peter Baker in the New York Times.

The Audacity of Eric Holder’s Letter by Conor Friedersdorf.

Washington gets explicit: its ‘war on terror’ is permanent by Glenn Greenwald.

Eric Holder answers Rand Paul (sort of)

Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky conducted a nearly 13-hour filibuster, asking whether President Obama claims the authority to kill Americans on American soil.  Attorney-General Eric Holder sent him the above letter.

The letter is Obama-like in its deftness, and in the way it makes Paul’s question seem ridiculous.  Barack Obama, as a politician, has a knack of allowing his opponents enough rope to hang themselves rhetorically, and then jerking the noose tight.  Of course it was not a ridiculous question.   What was ridiculous is that it took a nearly 13-hour filibuster to get this much of an answer.

What Holder does not say is what powers President Obama does claim, and the legal and Constitutional basis for that claim.  Does he have the right to kill Americans not engaged in combat on foreign soil?  Does he have the right to kill foreigners not engaged in combat?  Does “combat” mean actual fighting, or is there a more subtle definition of “combat”?

Kevin Drum of Mother Jones had this to say.

Points for drollery, I suppose. You have to appreciate the opening line: “It has come to my attention…..”

But this is still a weird reply.  Or maybe just deliberately opaque, like the previous replies.  If the president can’t use a drone to kill an American not engaged in combat, then he can’t use any other weapons to do this either.  Right?  There’s nothing special in the law about drones, after all.  So why not say so?

In addition, of course, the definition of “engaged in combat” is obviously key here.  Without much more detail on that, this probably doesn’t really tell us anything new.

But maybe I’m over-analyzing this, or being too harsh.  Rand Paul says he’s “quite happy” with this letter, so perhaps “combat” is precisely defined elsewhere.  My cynicism level is fairly high based on the administration’s game playing over the meaning of “imminent” in their white paper about drone strikes overseas, but maybe it’s now a little too high.

via Kevin Drum | Mother Jones.

Click on Why It Matters Than Rand Paul Got His Answer for comment by Conor Friedersdorf [Added 3/8/13]

21st century due process

The Constitution of the United States says that noone can be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law. President Barack Obama has asserted the right to sign death warrants for anyone he deems a terrorist.

Attorney-General Eric Holder was asked how President Obama’s claim squares with Constitutional due process.  Holder replied that the Constitution guarantees due process, not legal process.  Cartoonist Ruben Bolling speculated on what the new due process might look like.

Double click to enlarge.

“No Bill of Attainder, no ex post facto Law…”

The US attorney general, Eric Holder,  has announced that the Justice Department and Pentagon are conducting “an active, ongoing criminal investigation” into the latest Assange-facilitated leak under Washington’s Espionage Act.

Asked how the US could prosecute Assange, a non-US citizen, Holder said, “Let me be clear. This is not saber-rattling,” and vowed “to swiftly close the gaps in current US legislation…”

In other words the espionage statute is being rewritten to target Assange, and in short order, if not already, President Obama – who as a candidate pledged “transparency” in government – will sign an order okaying the seizing of Assange and his transport into the US jurisdiction. Render first, fight the habeas corpus lawsuits later.

via CounterPunch.

Before there was a Bill of Rights guaranteeing freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of worship and the right to keep and bear arms, the United States Constitution protected even more basic freedoms.  The Constitution banned ex post facto laws and bills of attainder, guaranteed the right of habeas corpus and defined the crime of treason in narrow and specific terms.

These were the basic principles of a nation founded on the principle of the rule of law – a principle that in the English-speaking world went back to the Great Charter of 1215 and the English Bill of Rights of 1688.  The principle of the rule of law is that no matter how much you anger your rulers, they can’t do anything to you unless you break an actual law with a specific punishment.

The rule of law means that a government can’t punish you for breaking a law that was passed after the fact (ex post facto law).  It can’t pass a law aimed at you personally (bill of attainder).  If you are arrested, you have a right to be brought before a judge and told what specific law you are accused of breaking (habeas corpus).  And you can’t be charged with treason just because you’ve done something that the government didn’t like.

All this has been turned on its head in the case of Julian Assange and Wikileaks.  Eric Holder says that he’s made up his mind to charge Julian Assange with something – although as of now he hasn’t been able to specify a law he has broken.  And if there is no law on the books, he will propose something “to close the gaps in U.S. legislation.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Assange should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and, “if that becomes a problem, we need to change the law.” [Added 12/11/10]

Holder and others have invoked the Espionage Act of 1917, which was passed at a time when the nation had gone even crazier than it has now.  The Islamophobia of today is nothing compared to the Germanophobia of that era.  The law has never been used against journalists, and for good reason.  If the government can define anything whosoever as a secret, and can punish anyone who reveals its secrets, there are no limits on its power.  How can we the people hold our government accountable if it can keep us from knowing what it does?