3 Iraq military contractor co-defendants  get only 30-year prison terms

former Blackwater guards, from left, Dustin Heard, Evan Liberty, Nicholas Slatten and Paul Slough

by Andrea Germanos

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth on Monday sentenced former Blackwater security guard Nicholas Slatten to life in prison for his role in a 2007 attack on Iraqi civilians, which left 14 dead and wounded 17 others.

The Associated Press reports that the three other Blackwater employees—Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Heard—were sentenced to 30 years and one day each on charges that included manslaughter, attempted manslaughter and using firearms while committing a felony.

Earlier:

Four former Blackwater guards face sentencing Monday for their role in the deaths of 14 Iraqi civilians during a 2007 massacre called “Baghdad’s bloody Sunday.”

The men, Dustin Heard, Evan Liberty, Paul Slough, and Nicholas Slatten, were convicted in October 2014 after years of legal battles. “Slatten faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison without parole for first-degree murder before U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth,” the Washington Post reports; the other three men face the possibility of dozens of years behind bars.

While defense lawyers have argued that the men were acting in self-defense, federal prosecutors wrote that the men’s “crimes here were so horrendous—the massacre and maiming of innocents so heinous—that they outweigh any factors that the defendants may argue form a basis for leniency.”

In an interview with Democracy Now! last year, Jeremy Scahill, author of the bestselling Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, described the deadly traffic square shooting that left 17 people killed:

[Blackwater guards] were responding—they were a unit called Raven 23. They were the elite Praetorian Guard of the U.S. occupation. They were guarding Paul Bremer, who was the original sort of proconsul in Iraq, the “viceroy,” as he liked to call himself. They were responding to an incident that had occurred on the opposite end of Baghdad from where their base was located. They roll out. They end up hitting a crowded intersection at Nisour Square. What often would happen in Iraq is that mercenary contractors would start throwing frozen water bottles at cars, trying to force them off the street, and then eventually escalate up to shooting at vehicles. These guys basically tried to take over this traffic circle, the Blackwater guys, so that they could speed around and continue on to their destination.

A small white car with a young Iraqi medical student and his mother didn’t stop fast enough for the Blackwater convoy, and they decided to escalate it all the way up to assassinating those individuals. And I say “assassinating,” because they shot to kill these people, and then they blew their car up. And then, that started this massive shooting spree that went on for—it was sustained for minutes. And at the end of it, 17 Iraqis were killed, including a nine-year-old boy named Ali Kinani, whose story we’ve told on the show before, and some 20 others were wounded in the attacks. And it was—you know, it became known as Baghdad’s “Bloody Sunday.”

And Blackwater… in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, said that they had been fired upon. They had their allies in the media. A senior producer at CNN was quick to get on TV and say, “Oh, no, no, this wasn’t a massacre. You know, this was a firefight, and Blackwater was shot at.” Clearly, this jury saw what the Iraqi eyewitnesses have always contended, and that is that this was an unprovoked massacre of Iraqi civilians, none of whom were posing a threat, except not stopping fast enough for the mercenaries helping to occupy their country.

The incident became a flashpoint of outrage over the atrocities that U.S. forces—particularly mercenaries—inflict on occupied civilian populations in Iraq.

The Post reports Monday: “Defendants said that the case is the first in which the U.S. government prosecuted its own security contractors for the firearms violation, which involve weapons given them by the government to do their jobs in a war zone.”

Scahill wrote following the guilty convictions that they marked yet another instance in which high-ranking individuals failed to be the targets for accountability. 

“Just as with the systematic torture at Abu Ghraib, it is only the low level foot-soldiers of Blackwater that are being held accountable. [Blackwater founder Erik] Prince and other top Blackwater executives continue to reap profits from the mercenary and private intelligence industries.

“None of the U.S. officials from the Bush and Obama administrations who unleashed Blackwater and other mercenary forces across the globe are being forced to answer for their role in creating the conditions for the Nisour Square shootings and other deadly incidents involving private contractors,” Scahill wrote.

[Shelton, WA has a similar addiction to eating its children and will suck up to anyone who will provide the dining table, as noted in coverage here of local officials doing exactly that during a public meeting where State prison officials contemplated opening yet another hell hole in the community.]

“It is no easy matter to go to Heaven by way of New Orleans.” -Reverend J. Chandler Gregg-

The Gathering Storm

by Kathy Kelly

Kathy Kelly

(Kathy Kelly, co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence info@vcnv.org), is in federal prison for participation in an anti-drone protest. She can receive mail at: KATHY KELLY 04971-045; FMC LEXINGTON; FEDERAL MEDICAL CENTER; SATELLITE CAMP; P.O. BOX 14525; LEXINGTON, KY 40512.)

Lexington, KY — Lightning flashed across Kentucky skies a few nights ago. “I love storms,” said my roommate, Gypsi, her eyes bright with excitement. Thunder boomed over the Kentucky hills and Atwood Hall, here in Lexington, KY’s federal prison. I fell asleep thinking of the gentle, haunting song our gospel choir sings: “It’s over now, It’s over now. I think that I can make it. The storm is over now.”

I awoke the next morning feeling confused and bewildered. Why had the guards counted us so many times? “That was lightning,” Gypsi said, giggling. The guards shine flashlight in our rooms three times a night, to count us, and I generally wake up each time; that night the storm was also a culprit.

As the day continued we saw large pools of water had collected at each entrance to Atwood Hall. Prisoners from drought-ridden areas wish they could collect the rainwater and send it home. Fanciful notions, but of the kind, at least, that can help us remember priorities. I suppose it’s wise, though, to focus on what can be fixed. The elevator here, for instance.

The Department of Justice Budget for Fiscal Year 2015 provides 27.4 billion in discretionary funding. In state prisons alone, it’s estimated that taxpayers spend an average of $31,286.00 per inmate per year. (The Price of Prisons: What Incarceration Costs Taxpayers, p. 9). But, for most of the 2.5 months that I’ve lived here in Atwood Hall, the elevator from the basement to the 3rd floor, which should serve close to 300 women, has been out of order. According to “inmate dot com,” our in-house rumor mill, a decision was made, last month, not to fix it. In the past several weeks, two women arrived in wheelchairs and another new prisoner is blind.

I like moving from the basement to the third floor on the staircase. It’s easy exercise. But traveling up and down the stairs can be life-threatening for many prisoners here.

Ms. P. seems to be in her seventies. Wiry white hair, fixed in a braid that reaches down her neck, surrounds her golden brown face. I like to imagine a framed oil painting of her gracing the first floor entrance.

A few nights ago, I watched her toil to haul herself, hanging on to the handrail, from the basement to the first floor. She needed to rest on the landing, winded, her heart pounding, barely able to speak. But Ms. P. made the best of it. “Ms. P.,” said another prisoner comfortingly, “maybe they’ll get this elevator fixed this week.” “I’d contribute my entire month’s salary if it would help repair the elevator!” Ms. P. said with a chuckle. She very likely earns $6.72 cents per month, at 12 cents an hour. Three of us readily agreed to match her donation, which would amount to about $28.00.

We need Ms. P.’s lightheartedness. But I’ve seen flashes of fury, followed by sad resignation, like lightning giving way to rain, in the faces of guards and prison administrators witnessing these scenes occurring on their watch, but as powerless to stop them as to call off those storms the other night.

A ray of brilliant sun fell for me last weekend with a visit from an old friend, parent to a lovely child I was especially delighted to see. Once again, I am luckier than so many whose loved ones lack the means for regular and intensive travel. Through our conversation in the prison visiting room, I learned the story of Thompson FCI, a freshly-constructed but never-occupied federal prison near Clinton, Iowa. My friend’s folks, who live near the town, have speculated for years, as have all the town’s residents, about when or whether the empty prison would ever open. Right now, my friend said, there’s only one full time employee in the prison, the warden, and his job is to mow the lawn.

Apparently, local people have been pining for the Bureau of Prisons to act. “The BOP’s positive impact on rural communities is significant,” says a 2015 paper issued by the Department of Justice. “By bringing in new federal jobs, stimulation of local businesses and housing, contracting with hospitals and other local vendors, and coordinating with local law enforcement, the BOP improves the economy of the town and the entire region where these rural facilities are located.”

Yet government’s promises to aid small towns with “prison money” often ring false. In an article entitled “The American Prison, Open for Business?” (Peace Review, vol. 20, issue 3), Stephen Gallagher notes that although prisons may bring with them high-paying jobs, “most employees of the prison industry do not live in the host communities.” “In a joint WSU/MSU study, it was found that 68 percent of the corrective jobs were held by people who did not even live in the county that housed the prison where they worked. In another study in California, it was found that less than 20 percent of the jobs went to residents of the host community.” And most people living in poor rural communities aren’t eligible for the better-paying jobs in the prison system.

Communities desperate to host a new prison should also consider the wages that will be paid to the prisoners. What company would choose to hire local non-inmate workers when the BOP can forcibly hire inmates to work for 12 cents an hour, right in their homes, with no need to consider employee benefits, pay raises, vacation pay or insurance. Prison labor creates a labor pool that is always available and can be maintained in a manner similar to the cost of maintaining slaves. If neighboring people lose their jobs, if they have to steal to try to get by, they can always wind up living in the prison.

I’m hard-pressed to see how this can possibly benefit an area’s economy, that is if its “economy” is understood to include all the area’s people, and not just the wealthiest who can influence prison placement.

When prisons are constructed in rural, southern areas, the political elites can count the entire prison population as part of their census, bringing federal funds into their jurisdictions, but without much pressure to share funds with their new ‘constituents,’ since the prisoners by and large can’t vote. Blighted urban areas lose funds desperately needed for education, housing, health care and infrastructure, while rural people compete to be hired as jailers.

One morning last week, a neighbor across the hall told us she feared she would choke on her own sobs as she cried herself to sleep. I wondered how many times the flashlights would re-awaken her during the night. She had been counting on a sentence reduction and her lawyer had told her, just the previous day, that her case is complicated and she most likely wouldn’t qualify. “I can’t do 3 1/2 more years here,” she said, completely distraught. “I just can’t!” “Yes, you can,” insisted one of the friends gathering to console her. I watched appreciatively, two people caught in the storm and guiding each other through it.

We hear about the droughts, and the temperature records, and we recognize that more storms are coming. The recent, and for many never-ended, financial crisis was a storm, and I notice that politicians and pundits are in full swing demanding a new regional war overseas with the arguments we’d hoped the nation had learned to reject twelve years ago. We can expect these threats, with ecological scarcity underlying them all, to build into each other: the perfect storm. We remember that storms can build quickly. “I can’t do 3 more years” might well be a statement truer, and truer for many, many more people, than my suffering fellow inmate ever imagined. We could be working together preparing shelter.

Many people of Clinton, Iowa will clamor for the prison to open, but not for more direct government help, communal help to foster employment and development in the the area. For many, a “free market” will mean the choice to lose our homes or find a home behind bars, or else to make a living keeping other people there; but without the choice, in an increasingly undemocratic nation, to pool our resources as a community and help each other to stay free; compassionately, or even sanely, to shelter each other from this storm. The jobs will come when strangers file in, in chains – that’s freedom. I look around me at “freedom,” and at how Ms. P. is getting a step up in the world.

We could awake into the world, build affinities between the suffering people locked in Atwood Hall and its managers, between the struggling rural community of Clinton and the urban desperate they wait to see bused in. Just about everyone longs to raise their children in a world where drought, storms, and brutal want won’t loom as insoluble, inevitable catastrophes. Working together we could reclaim misspent resources and correct misguided policies. Our fear and isolation from each other, aiming to get a step up above our neighbors, our reluctance to live in a shared world, may be worse than the other storms we face.

The other storms will come, and we will have to see how we weather them, but what if our terrible fear of each other could pass us by? What if, for those of us doing the easiest time, “I can’t do 3 more years” became “I won’t make you do 3 more years” – became our part in a chorused “we won’t do 3 more years!” ringing through our society. How miraculous it would be to hold our children and grand-children and sing, “I think that we can make it. The storm is over now.”

Colors Of The Wind (Theme from Pocahontas)

Theme from Toy Story (You’ve Got a Friend in Me)

Take the A Train

Satin Doll

Under The Sea (from The Little Mermaid)

“Harlem Nocturne” is a jazz standard written by Earle Hagen and Dick Rogers in 1939. The song was adopted by bandleader Randy Brooks the next year as his theme song. Originally written as a tribute to saxophonist Johnny Hodges, Earle Hagen said that he was inspired by Duke Ellington’s band, and he wrote the piece for Ray Noble Orchestra member Jack Dumont.

The haunting version by The Viscounts has the distinction of being a tune released twice by the same band and rising high on the Billboard charts each time: first in 1959, when it peaked at #53, and again in 1966, peaking at #39 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. It has been reported that there are about 500 covers of this classic. It’s also notorious as a slow strip/grind bluesy piece.

Harlem Nocturne/The Viscounts (long version – 1960)

The Viscounts / Harlem Nocturne

Harlem Nocturne – Willis Jackson (slow sax)

Harlem Nocturne — Illinois Jacquet

Play Along (Harlem Nocturne)

Harlem Nocturne – Saxophone Backing Tracks by saxophonebackingtracks

Judge sets $5,000 bail for state community corrections officer Michael C. Boone accused of possessing child pornography

Ever wonder just how secure all those files you’ve been storing in the ‘cloud’ are?–now you know! Privacy has long been dead. The thought police can and WILL arrest you for what you are thinking…or thought to be thinking. Simple possession of incriminating indices of bad thoughts…even fictitious ones…is enough. (e.g. kiddie porn, in law, need not actually be a photograph of anyone/anything, but can merely be composed of the scribbling or rendering of one’s fetid imagination.) The poetry of this particular example of big brother’s justice is the thought police have, in this instance, devoured one of their own…aided and abetted by none other than the creator of the Operating System most of us use on our computers: Microsoft!

by Amelia Dickson

Olympia, WA (4-8-15) — A Thurston County judge set bail at $5,000 for Michael C. Boone, an Olympia man accused of possessing child pornography.

The 37-year-old man, who works as a community corrections officer for the State Department of Corrections, appeared before Judge James Dixon on Wednesday afternoon. The judge found probable cause for three counts of second-degree possession of depictions of a minor engaged in a sexually explicit act.

According to the Corrections Department, Boone was hired in 2003 and works with adult offenders. He was placed on administrative leave, pending an investigation.

Boone also works as a reserve officer for the Tenino Police Department. Mayor Bret Brodersen said Boone has been placed on administrative leave there as well and that he won’t have access to Police Department facilities.

The State Patrol arrested Boone on Tuesday following an investigation that began in December. Microsoft notified law enforcement when employees discovered that Boone uploaded child pornography to his cloud account, according to court documents.

Detectives later confirmed that three of the images were child pornography that is well-known to law enforcement. The images were uploaded from an IP address belonging to Boone’s wife.

Sgt. James Mjor said in a press release that at present there is no indication that any child pornography was stored on Boone’s work computer but out of an abundance of caution, detectives seized the computer for a forensic examination.

Mjor said the investigation began when security officers at Microsoft noticed the electronic signature of well-known and frequently-traded images of child pornography on Boone’s Microsoft SkyDrive account. They contacted the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, which in turn referred the matter to law enforcement.

They served a search warrant at Boone’s home and found his laptop. The computer contained the same three explicit images that had been uploaded to Boone’s cloud account, according to court documents.

Deputy prosecuting attorney Jim Powers said that Boone has no criminal history, but because of the seriousness of the alleged crime, bail was still warranted. He also requested that Boone have no in-person contact with minors and that he have no access to the Internet.

Office of Assigned Counsel Attorney Sara Hixson, who represented Boone at the hearing, argued that those conditions were too harsh. She said that there was no indication that Boone had ever harmed his children, nor was there an indication that he would fail to appear in court.

“He has significant ties to the community,” Hixson said. “He has been here for more than 10 years.”

Dixon accepted Powers’ recommendations, clarifying that Boone could contact his children via phone calls and letters.

He also found Boone ineligible for a court-appointed attorney. Hixson said Boone plans to hire a private attorney before his next court appearance, an April 21 arraignment.

Tenino residents (Where Boone was a reserve LEO) say they were shocked and dismayed.

The investigation began with a tip from Microsoft.

Security officers at the Redmond company noticed the electronic signature of well-known and frequently-traded images of child pornography on Boone’s Microsoft SkyDrive account, according to the Washington State Patrol.

SkyDrive is like cloud storage for a person’s photos, documents and other files, which one can access from multiple devices.

They turned the information over to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, who forwarded it to the state patrol task force, Mjor said.

The task force said this afternoon it had no indication any child porn was stored on Boone’s work computer, but seized it for a forensic examination, and also seized his Tenino Police Department-issued smart phone.

The tip came in last week and initially was just an IP address, Mjor said.

Detectives went to speak with Boone, to see if he had any information he could help them out with, he said. While they were talking with him, other detectives were serving the search warrant at his home for his computer, he said.

MILAN – The Associated Press reports a man on trial for fraudulent bankruptcy opened fire in Milan’s courthouse Thursday, killing his lawyer, a co-defendant and a judge before being captured nearly 16 miles away as he fled on a motorbike, officials said.

As the shots rang out in the fortress-like tribunal, court employees barricaded themselves inside their offices and took cover under their desks while police hunted for the gunman who moved unimpeded from one floor to the next.

“There was a lot of panic at the beginning when people came running toward us saying there was a person with a pistol who had been shooting,” said lawyer Mirko Ricetti, who said he locked himself in a first-floor court room after hearing a shot.

After texting loved ones that they were OK, employees and lawyers were eventually allowed to trickle out of the tribunal, women first, followed by the men who had their court ID cards checked.

Interior Minister Angelino Alfano said the suspect was caught by carabinieri police in Vimercate, near Monza, indicating he had traveled some 15 miles from the scene before being captured. An ambulance with escort was seen leaving the Vimercate police station, but it wasn’t immediately clear if the gunman was inside.

Prosecutor Edmondo Bruti Liberati said the gunman first fired on his lawyer and co-defendant, killing both and seriously injuring a second co-defendant.

Afterwards, he “walked through the building, going down a floor, and killed the judge,” Bruti Liberati told The Associated Press.

He said it wasn’t clear whether there was any relationship between the gunman and the judge.

He identified the slain judge as Fernando Ciampi, who worked in the civil section of bankruptcy court. The ANSA news agency identified the gunman as Claudio Giardiello.

Bruti Liberati said the gunman was on trial with two others for fraudulent bankruptcy.

Giardiello’s former attorney, Valerio Maraniello, told RAI state TV the case concerned a failed real estate business and that Giardiello was “very unusual” and “over the top” in his legal dealings.

The shooting immediately raised questions about how the man gained entrance to the Fascist-era courthouse with a weapon, given that visitors must pass through metal detectors.

The courthouse has metal detectors at the four main entrances, but lawyers and courthouse employees with official IDs are regularly waved through without the additional security screen and accredited employees can drive into the internal garage.

Attornies Mirko and Davide Pupo noted that the metal detector from the lawyers’ entrance had been removed several months ago.

Employees who emerged after the shooting suggested that the gunman could easily have gained entrance without passing through the metal detector by entering with his lawyer, though other attorneys said their clients routinely are told to go in via the public entrance.

The deputy interior minister, Filippo Bubbico, said an investigation would determine who was to blame for any security lapse, given also that the gunman wasn’t stopped as he moved from one floor to the next to continue the spree, and then was able to flee unimpeded.

“There’s no doubt that this episode signals a non-functioning of the protection mechanisms, which must be employed daily and which have worked for years at the Milan tribunal,” he told Sky TG24.

Security concerns are particularly high in Milan given the May 1 opening of the Expo world’s fair. In fact, the interior minister, Alfano, was in Milan on Thursday to preside over a public security coordination meeting for Expo when the shooting erupted.

Nearly Getting Away With Murder

by Scott Lemieux

He probably would have gotten away with it.

That’s the sobering reality of the video of South Carolina police officer Michael Slager shooting Walter L. Scott as he ran away, not posing the slightest threat to the officer. The utter indifference to human life evident in the video, shot by Feidin Santana, is horrifying. As Scott’s father put it, “The way he was shooting that gun, it looked like he was trying to kill a deer.” After Scott was felled by at least one of eight shots, Slager occupied himself with handcuffing Scott and possibly trying to plant evidence rather than making any immediateattempt to save his life. The phrase “cold-blooded killing” could have been invented for this shooting.

After the video surfaced, the relevant local authorities, to their credit, acted promptly and justly. Slager was fired by the police department and charged with Scott’s murder by the district attorney. The killing was denounced by South Carolina’s Republican governor and its two Republican senators. In this case, clear video evidence pierced the thin blue line.

And yet, if it wasn’t for the pure chance of Slager’s actions being videotaped, he probably would have gotten off scot-free. Without videotaped evidence, stories of officers fearing for their lives before using deadly force can be difficult to dispute, and local police departments have little incentive to conduct extensive, critical investigations of the self-justifications of officers who kill. Even worse, they do have incentives to cover up even the most serious police misconduct.

“Americans are bombarded with evidence that police officers who use excessive or fatal force will go to great lengths to protect themselves and make sure they face no legal repercussions,” says Heather Ann Thompson, a professor of history at Temple University who specializes in issues of criminal justice. “From the state police bloody retaking of Attica in 1971, to the recent police officer killing of a citizen in South Carolina, cover-up is the first line of defense.”

This tendency to cover up represents a very serious systematic problem. A great deal of the criminal justice system depends on the honesty of law enforcement officials. Many criminal prosecutions depend on police testimony, and we often must rely on the investigations of local police when potential cases of misconduct arise. Pervasive dishonesty both lets individual bad actors escape punishment and undermines essential law enforcement activities. [Police not only routinely perjure themselves in their written reports/sworn testimony, but by being permitted to lie to ‘suspects’ are tacitly encouraged to do so!]

As Jeet Heer details at The New Republic, the social science literature shows that our trust in the police is often not warranted. “Testilying” (police giving knowingly false testimony in court) and “reportilying” (police producing reports that are knowingly false) are dismayingly common. The prosecutors theoretically charged with checking police behavior are all too likely to be in cahoots with them, rather than acting as a watchdog. Within the system, most people have nothing to gain and much to lose by aggressively pursuing police misbehavior.

The immediate response of the North Charleston police department to Scott’s killing is a case in point. Without the knowledge that the killing had been videotaped, the department gave an account of the killing that was brazenly false. This tall tale was straightforwardly reported by local media, and probably would have set the narrative and led to Slager’s exoneration had the videotape not surfaced.

This is particularly disturbing because the use of deadly force is hardly unusual. Although it’s only the second week of April, 11 people have been killed by police officers in South Carolina so far this year. Many or all of these applications of deadly force may have been justified, of course. [‘of course’?] But it is very difficult to trust the process that finds the overwhelming majority of these cases to be so. And it is very, very hard to believe that Scott’s case is an aberration.

One upshot of this case is to demonstrate the vital importance of the First Amendment right of citizens to film the behavior of police officers who are on duty. As The Washington Post‘s Radley Balko explains, despite the hostility of police officers [and @narchists!] to being filmed, recording their behavior while on duty is protected by the First Amendment in all 50 states. Citizens should be educated about this right and make use of it. At worst, one result of the killing of Walter Scott is that more officers will not expect that they can kill unarmed and unthreatening citizens with impunity.

Much has been made of the often rancorous debate surrounding capitalism, whether it truly exists in the U.S. and if it is the best we can do in terms of fairness, efficiency, and sustainability. One aspect is, however, irrefutably apolitical: A sustainable economy requires a sustainable environment and vice-versa–a tautology, really. If capitalism requires ever increasing levels of production and expansion (as economists claim) in a world of finite resources, the two are incompatible…not some distant day in the far off future, but now, today where untold numbers of people suffer and die from its toxic impact along with its severing their access to vital fundamental necessities (e.g. clean safe air & drinking water) for themselves, their children, their community.

At its core, our economic model acts as a virtual executioner of entire populations, both human and not, by providing incentives (profit) to promote their destruction as surely as the Nazis used the mechanism of government toward the same end. Ours, simply sells permits to corporations that allow them to, in essence, operate the gas chambers. Our national policy favoring such wanton slaughter and death by proxy begs we ask a disturbing question: What was the point of beating the Nazis only to become just like them?

Capitalism in America: Giving Crazy a Bad Name While Subverting Democracy

by John Atcheson

Ever since Milton Friedman’s series of essays on Capitalism and Freedom, conservatives have tried to link democracy and capitalism as essential handmaidens.  But as the evidence shows, it’s a reality-busting bundle that only a psychotic could love…Or believe.

The fact is, capitalism as practiced in America – far from being democracy’s handmaiden — is anathema to freedom, and ultimately, impoverishing to the vast majority of its citizens.

And it’s driving us crazy.

Let’s Take a Look at Crazy:

Sometime around 2050, large portions of many of America’s coastal cities will become uninhabitable due to periodic floods of epic proportions, unless we spend trillions of dollars on sea walls and pumping systems.  Think Katrina and Sandy occurring every year in the majority of our coastal cities.

The coastal flooding will be accompanied by droughts, huge forest fires, famine, massive migrations of climate refugees, and extinction of up to half the world’s species.  Oh, what the hell, throw in widespread pestilence, too.

But of course, the most ardent believers in capitalism say we can’t afford to take steps to prevent this – even though clean energy systems would create more jobs and economic growth than continuing to use fossil fuels.

So, what’s a psychotic to do?

Well, the true believers are in denial, with some even trying to pass laws prohibiting people from acknowledging the reality of climate change, which is the cause of all these catastrophes. Or, in the case of Florida – the State which will suffer the most – the governor is prohibiting state employees from using the words “climate change” or “global warming.”

Yeah, that’s sane.

Any objective look at this kind of behavior would have to label it as certifiable, mandatory lock-up, straight-jacket worthy insanity.

But it gets worse.

You’d think preserving the capacity to feed people would be pretty much an imperative.  But you’d be wrong.

As George Monbiot pointed out, the UN estimates we will need about 6 million hectares of new farmland each year to keep up with population growth – instead, we’re losing 12 million hectares to depletion.

Why? Because the consumptive monocultural approaches we use are “profitable,” according to capitalism.  So, basically, capitalism is setting us up for starvation and calling it profitable.

Meanwhile, we’re turning the oceans – the main source of protein for more than a billion people – into sterile acidic and nearly lifeless crypts.  Already, fisherman across the globe are pulling up nets fouled with jellyfish, which will dominate the seas in the not too distant future.

Another clear sign of psychosis.

Then of course, there’s the fact that Obama is proposing aggressive measures to cut carbon at the same time as he’s permitting exploration for more oil in the Arctic, even though we know we have to leave most of what we’ve already found in the ground or risk global catastrophes of biblical proportions.

Yeah, that makes sense.

We the people share a big part of the blame. While the Plutocrats take over the country, we keep electing people who hate government and want to turn it over to the private sector – aka the plutocrats — to run government.  Yet government is the only force capable of stopping the march of the fat cats and oligarchs.

At the state level, we’re seeing the fruits electing fruitcakes to run the state and the economy. In Kansas, they’re so hot to cut taxes that school systems can’t even finish the year.  And once promising Ohio has been consigned to the trash bin of economic history by this counterfactual clap trap, while Wisconsin – another bastion of conservative psychosis, lags far behind the nation in job growth and wages.

Crazy? It doesn’t get any crazier.  OK, now let’s move on.

How Capitalism Subverts Democracy

For starters, let’s acknowledge that in the United States, the interests of Big Money routinely trumps the will of the people. Here’s the proof:

• 91% want to strengthen rules on clean air and protection of drinking water; yet Congress – led by the Republican majority — is proposing to weaken them;
• 90% want to protect public lands and parks; yet the Republicans are proposing to put them on sale or otherwise privatize them;
• 74% of Americans favor ending subsidies to big oil; yet Congress has retained most of them;
• 90% of the citizens support legislation requiring background checks for gun purchase, but Congress can’t pass one.
• The majority of citizens favored allowing tax cuts for those earning over $250,000 to expire, but the best Congress could do is compromise on $400,000;
• 70% of Americans consider climate change to be a high priority issue, yet Congress has taken no action;
• Some 80% of Americans favor shoring up Social Security even if it means higher taxes and a similar number support retaining Medicare as is, but we’ve twice offered cuts to both programs as part of a “grand bargain”;
• Or take this gem … more than 80% of Americans want to clamp down on Wall Street but the best we could get was weak-sister legislation that is being completely eviscerated as it is translated into regulations.

The list could go on and on.  Over the years Americans have favored an end to fracking, single payer health care, greater public investment in infrastructure, an increase in minimum wage, and an end to the perennial wars and removal of all troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet Congress and the President routinely ignore these wishes at the behest of monied interests.

So much for the will of the people.

Democrats received 20 million more votes for Senate than Republicans in 2014, yet Republicans hold the majority of seats.  Similarly, it only takes about 48% of the popular vote for Republicans to hold a majority in the House.

Why? Because a sophisticated cadre of the ultra-rich have been on a 30 plus year campaign to buy government.  Think tanks, corporate “free” speech, Democratic complicity, and a bought and paid for media has resulted in a gerrymandered map, a stacked Supreme Court and elections in which money trumps the wishes of the people, and routinely puts the will of a tiny rich minority over those of the majority.

By any measure, the US is an Oligarchy, not a democracy. This too, is a result of our doctrinaire belief in unconstrained capitalism, which inevitably results in grotesque income inequalities, and – ironically – economic collapse.  Pushed by an unholy alliance of true believers and rich special interests, we’ve tried unconstrained capitalism three times now, and each time it has obliterated the middle class, and wrecked the economy.

Welcome to the New Dark Ages – where belief trumps facts; where wishful thinking beats reality

The facts show that pure unadulterated capitalism not only limits freedom and destroys the planet, it is self-extinguishing.

But facts have little sway with the true believers. Like inmates in the asylum, the plutocrats keep pushing the very thing that will destroy them.  Unfortunately, they’re taking us with them.

This is probably the most tender and expressive sax version of this wonderful song we’ve found. The video is impressive too, but they’ve switched off embedding. Click on the following link to see/hear a beautiful sax:piano duet:

If Ever I Would Leave You

Sonny Rollins (sax): Change Partner by Irving Berlin

Shelton, WA (4-4-15) — Premier Blue Cross has sent out letters notifying clients their personal identification data has been hacked as early as May 5, 2014 through Jan 29, 2015. The stolen info includes their address, name, date of birth, social security number, e-mail address, member ID #, and all the other earmarks needed to defraud patrons who entrusted this sensitive information to the health insurance company–i.e. a bailment! Blue Cross claims no evidence of inappropriate USE of the stolen information has been discovered…as though theft of such data wasn’t inappropriate in and of itself.

Blue Cross reassures customers it has hired a cyber security firm (Mandiant) to investigate. It claims it has turned over the details of the attack to the FBI as well. No information was released as to just when (if ever) the FBI might track down the miscreants and arrest them in Somalia, Syria, Ukraine, Nigeria, China, Iraq, Libya, Yemen or wherever else they might be. Clients are expected to remain confident Blue Cross will keep them updated–eventually.

Experts Say Purvi Patel Case Sets ‘Cruel’ Precedent

Roe v. Wade notwithstanding, doctors are not prosecuted/imprisoned for abortion procedures in the U.S. today and the Supreme Court famously ruled any laws attempting to criminalize the act were an invasion of women’s privacy under the ‘penumbra’ of the Constitution. Yet, Ms. Patel has been prosecuted and sentenced for acting according to her own lights without even the benefit of a doctor or medical clinic. Moreover, women are no longer prosecuted for ‘child abuse’ who drink, smoke, or consume drugs while pregnant pursuant to the High Court’s ruling that this was also an unconstitutional attempt to invade a pregnant woman’s privacy. At what point an embryo/fetus should acquire legal ‘person-hood’ status remains a topic of hot debate. Should taking the ‘morning after pill’ be a crime? Should fertility clinics that do not preserve the viability of unused in vitro fertilized eggs/embryos face jail? Many countries (including Canada) do not hold even women who kill their live infants under 1 year old to the same standards as those who might commit the act after their child is 1 year old, reasoning postpartum depression leaves the mother with a diminished capacity and the infant does not yet have the full compliment of legal (if not moral) rights.

Purvi Patel became the first woman in U.S. history to be sentenced for feticide over what the state said was an attempt to end her own pregnancy.

by Nadia Prupis

Though she has steadfastly claimed the loss of her pregnancy was a miscarriage, the 20-year prison sentence given to Purvi Patel by an Indiana court this week for the crime of ‘feticide’ is being slammed by legal experts and reproductive rights advocates who say the ruling is not only misguided and “cruel” given the facts of the case, but sets an “alarming” precedent for the rights of women both in Indiana and around the country.

Patel on Monday became the first woman in U.S. history to be sentenced to prison for losing her own fetus. She was found guilty of one charge of feticide and one charge of neglect of a dependent, after prosecutors claimed she delivered her fetus alive, rather than stillborn, as Patel told doctors.

“While no woman should face criminal charges for having an abortion or experiencing a pregnancy loss, the cruel length of this sentence confirms that feticide and other measures promoted by anti-abortion organizations are intended to punish, not protect women,” said Lynn M. Paltrow, executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, in a statement on Monday.

Indiana passed its feticide law in 2009, a year after a pregnant woman lost her twin fetuses when she was shot in the stomach during a bank robbery. Supporters said the law would help prosecute in those cases where a third party harmed a pregnant woman’s fetus, but opponents warned that it could be misused to criminalize abortions.

“The prosecution and verdict in this case demonstrate that, despite their claims to the contrary, the real result of the anti-abortion movement—if not the intended goal—is to punish women for terminating pregnancies,” Paltrow wrote in an article for The Public Eye magazine. “Turning this law into one that can be used to punish a woman who herself has an abortion is an extraordinary expansion of the scope and intention of the state’s law.”

Patel entered a hospital for blood loss in July 2013 and told doctors she had delivered a stillborn. But prosecutors accused her of taking drugs to induce an abortion based on a series of text messages on Patel’s phone in which she discussed buying the drugs online, although no drugs were found in her system or the fetus’s system. The state, having used a scientifically discredited “float test” to determine if there was air in the fetus’s lungs, then argued that Patel abandoned the fetus in a trash bin after it was born alive.

Katherine Jack, an Indiana attorney who defended another woman charged with homicide for losing a pregnancy, told the Guardian on Wednesday, “If [Patel’s case is] appealed and upheld, [the conviction] basically sets a precedent that anything a pregnant woman does that could be interpreted as an attempt to terminate her pregnancy could result in criminal liability.”

“This is quite traumatic and frightening,” Paltrow told the New York Times on Wednesday. “Many people would love to see an end to abortion, but a majority of even those people don’t want to see women locked up in prison.”

In an interview with Democracy Now!, Paltrow noted there are 38 states with feticide laws on the books. “Indiana’s law is somewhat different from other states, but it is not really about the language of the statute, it’s about the commitment of the prosecutors and the state to use it as a mechanism for depriving pregnant women of their human rights,” she said.

Kathleen Morrell, reproductive rights fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health, told the Guardian, “One of the most concerning [effects] is the chilling effect on women then becoming reluctant to seek care when they need it. Anything that restricts their desire to go and see a doctor because they think something bad could happen to them is just going to be bad for public health in general.”