OMNI
US LAWLESSNESS
NEWSLETTER #1
April
24, 2017
COMPILED
BY DICK BENNETT FOR A CULTURE OF PEACE, JUSTICE, AND ECOLOGY
http://omnicenter.org/donate/
WHAT’S AT STAKE: The United States as an origin
and locale of massive lawlessness is seldom observed by the citizenry because
it is not taught in our public schools or given much attention in mainstream
media. Why? The sciolism, myth of US exceptionalism,
nationalism, bipartisan flag patriotism, reluctance in our educational system to
look at the worst in our history, blind us.
Here I will cite a few of the
many important books that cry out to the citizens: study US history; don’t be resigned to
lawlessness; demand the truth about the US economic system and empire.
Contents of US Lawlessness Newsletter #1: Books
9 Books
Harms (vs. Democracy and Liberty) of the Two-Tiered System
of Justice, Massive Unprosecuted Economic Crimes, US National Security State, Empire,
Surveillance, Secrecy, Homeland
Security, War on Terrorists
Domestic
These four books discuss the assault on democracy by elite
immunity from crimes.
Glenn Greenwald. With Liberty and
Justice for Some: How Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful
Summary and
Excerpt
Ramirez and Ramirez, Restoring Law and Order on Wall Street (subtitle)
on the Economic Crisis of 2007-09, Massive, Unprosecuted Wall Street
Crimes
on the Economic Crisis of 2007-09, Massive, Unprosecuted Wall Street
Crimes
Noam Chomsky, Requiem
for the American Dream: The Ten
Principles of Concentration of Wealth and Power. 7 Stories P, 2017.
David Swanson, Review (11 Principles)
Dick, Principle #6: Deregulation, Repealing Glass-Steagall, Lobbying,
Revolving Door
David Swanson, Review (11 Principles)
Dick, Principle #6: Deregulation, Repealing Glass-Steagall, Lobbying,
Revolving Door
Charles Ferguson, Inside
Job. Film about the global
financial meltdown of the economic crisis of 2008, at a cost of over $20
trillion.
Selected related OMNI newsletters: Capitalism, Climate Change, Corporations,
Inequality, Mainstream Media, Nuclear Weapons, Wall Street
International (listed
in chronological order of each book’s subject)
Empire’s
Workshop: Latin America. . . . By Greg Grandin. 200 years of aggression. (Related: Harvest
of Empire: A History of Latinos in America
by Juan Gonzalez.
2012).
Bacevich, America’s
War for the Greater Middle East (1980 to present)
Glass, Rev.
“Andrew Bacevich and America’s Long Misguided War to Control the Greater Middle
East”
Dick, Summary
of Chapter One on Jimmy Carter
Gordon, American
Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial
for Post- 9/11 War Crimes (2001 to present): US War Against/Of
“Terrorism”
for Post- 9/11 War Crimes (2001 to present): US War Against/Of
“Terrorism”
Davies,
Nicholas. Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and
Destruction of Iraq.
Destruction of Iraq.
Rev. by David
Swanson
No Place to Hide by Glenn
Greenwald (Snowden’s revelations of massive spying by NSA)
Review by
Michiko Kakutani in the NYT
Selected related OMNI newsletters: Anti-War, Bullying, Exceptionalism,
Imperialism, Militarism, Torture, Violence, War and Environment, War Crimes,
Vietnam War
DOMESTIC US LAWLESSNESS
Glenn Greenwald. With Liberty and
Justice for Some: How Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. Macmillan/Picador, 2012.
From "the most important voice to have entered the political
discourse in years" (Bill Moyers) and the journalist who broke the story
on NSA spying programs comes a scathing critique of the two-tiered system of
justice that has emerged in America
From the nation's beginnings, the law was to be the great
equalizer in American life, the guarantor of a common set of rules for all. But
over the past four decades, the principle of equality before the law has been
effectively abolished. Instead, a two-tiered system of justice ensures that the
country's political and financial class is virtually immune from prosecution,
licensed to act without restraint, while the politically powerless are
imprisoned with greater ease and in greater numbers than in any other country
in the world.
Starting with Watergate, continuing on through the Iran-Contra
scandal, and culminating with Obama's shielding of Bush-era officials from prosecution,
Glenn Greenwald lays bare the mechanisms that have come to shield the elite
from accountability. He shows how the media, both political parties, and the
courts have abetted a process that has produced torture, war crimes, domestic
spying by the NSA, and financial fraud.
Cogent, sharp, and urgent, this is a no-holds-barred indictment of a profoundly un-American system that sanctions immunity at the top and mercilessness for everyone else.
Cogent, sharp, and urgent, this is a no-holds-barred indictment of a profoundly un-American system that sanctions immunity at the top and mercilessness for everyone else.
As multiple
episodes demonstrate, a belief that elite
immunity is both necessary and justified became the prevailing ethos in the
nation’s most influential circles. In countless instances over recent
years, prominent political and media figures have insisted that serious
crimes by the most powerful should be overlooked— either in the
name of the common good, or in the name of a warped conception
of fairness according to which those with the greatest power are the
most entitled to deference and understanding.
This is what makes the
contemporary form of American
lawlessness new and unprecedented. It is now perfectly
common, and perfectly acceptable, to openly advocate elite immunity. And this advocacy has had its intended effect:
the If the threat of real punishment for criminality is removed, for many rational people there will be little incentive to abide by the law and much incentive to break it. Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist 15, explained why.
It is essential to the idea of a law, that it be attended with a sanction; or, in other words, a penalty or punishment for disobedience. If there be no penalty annexed to disobedience, the resolutions or commands which pretend to be laws will, in fact, amount to nothing more than advice or recommendation.
For the nation’s most powerful elites, the law has indeed been whittled down to “nothing more than advice or recommendation.” Although there have been episodes of unpunished elite malfeasance throughout American history, the explicit, systematic embrace of the notion that such malfeasance should be shielded from legal consequences begins with the Watergate scandal— one of the clearest cases of widespread, deliberate criminality at the highest level of the U.S. government.
By the scandal’s conclusion, few contested that not only Nixon’s top aides but Nixon himself had committed serious felonies— either in authorizing the break-in and related illegalities, or in obstructing the ensuing investigation. Nonetheless, Nixon was ultimately shielded from all legal consequences thanks to the pardon granted by his handpicked vice president, Gerald Ford— who, it was widely believed, secured his appointment by agreeing to protect Nixon from prosecution.
Ford first explained his decision to pardon Nixon in a speech to the nation on September 8, 1974. The new president began by paying lip service to the rule of law: “I deeply believe in equal justice for all Americans, what ever their station or former station. The law, whether human or divine, is no respecter of persons; but”— and here he tacked on a newly concocted amendment designed to gut that phrase’s meaning—“the law is a respecter of reality.” Ford then proceeded to recite what have by now become the standard clichés our political class uses to justify immunity. Watergate, he intoned,
is an American tragedy in which we all have played a part. It could go on and on and on, or someone must write the end to it. I have concluded that only I can do that, and if I can, I must. . . .
The facts, as I see them, are that a former President of the United States, instead of enjoying equal treatment with any other citizen accused of violating the law, would be cruelly and excessively penalized either in preserving the presumption of his innocence or in obtaining a speedy determination of his guilt in order to repay a legal debt to society.
During this long period of delay and potential litigation, ugly passions would again be aroused. And our people would again be polarized in their opinions. And the credibility of our free institutions of government would again be challenged at home and abroad. . . .
My conscience tells me clearly and certainly that I cannot prolong the bad dreams that continue to reopen a chapter that is closed. My conscience tells me that only I, as President, have the constitutional power to firmly shut and seal this book. My conscience tells me it is my duty, not merely to proclaim domestic tranquility but to use every means that I have to insure it.
Remarkably, Ford explicitly pointed to Nixon’s lofty status as a reason to exempt him from the accountability applied to ordinary Americans— a complete reversal and rejection of the central covenant of the American founding. Ford’s signature line—“Our long national nightmare is over”— put a heroic spin on the betrayal of the rule of law: we end the “nightmare” of high-level criminality by sweeping it under the rug, protecting the wrongdoers, and pretending their crimes never happened.
Upon Ford’s death in December 2006, prominent figures rushed forth to consecrate his pardon of Nixon as an act of great nobility, magnanimity, and self- sacrifice, and thus to glorify its underlying premises. Leading the charge, not surprisingly, was Dick Cheney, Ford’s former chief of staff and the then-vice president. By 2006, Cheney himself had been accused of involvement in a wide variety of illegal acts, from establishing a worldwide torture regime and spying on Americans without warrants to outing a covert CIA agent and obstructing the resulting investigation.
Cheney’s own interests were thus clearly served by exploiting Ford’s death to bolster the propagandistic notion that elite immunity is dispensed not for the benefit of the powerful but rather in patriotic ser vice of the common good. At Ford’s funeral, Cheney eulogized his former boss by heralding the pardon as an act of national salvation. . . .
In fairness to Dick Cheney, we heard the same message from others, almost note for note. The Washington Post’s David Broder— the so-called dean of the Washington press corps— spoke for many journalists, past and present, when asked what would have happened had Nixon not been immunized.
My guess is that there would have been strong public pressure for prosecution of Richard Nixon, since several of his White House associates were already facing criminal charges. A lengthy trial would have been a difficult ordeal for the country, something President Ford wanted to spare Americans.
The actual beneficiary of the pardon, of course, was not “Americans” but Richard Nixon. Thanks to Ford’s act, Nixon himself was shielded from the kind of punishment that, as a “law-and-order” Republican, he had devoted his career to imposing on ordinary Americans when they broke the law, no matter how petty the offense. Yet this grant of immunity to the nation’s most powerful figure was endlessly cast as a generous gift to the American public, which—we were repeatedly told— had been spared the agony, acrimony, and shame of seeing their leader held accountable for his crimes as any other citizen would be.
The Nixon pardon, and the way it was sold to the country, became the template for justifying elite immunity. Nowadays, with only rare exceptions, each time top members of the nation’s political class are caught committing a crime, the same reasons are hauled out to get them off the hook. Prosecuting public officials mires us in a “divisive” past when we should be looking forward. It is wrong to “criminalize policy disputes”— meaning crimes committed with the use of political power. Political elites who commit crimes in carrying out their duties are “well-intentioned” and so do not deserve to be treated as if they were common criminals; moreover, politicians who are forced out of office and have their reputations damaged already “suffer enough.” To prosecute them would only engender a cycle of retribution. Political harmony thus trumps the need to enforce the rule of law.
Of course, all criminal prosecutions are, by definition, exercises in looking to the past rather than the future. All prosecutions impose substantial burdens on the accused, cost enormous amounts of time and money to resolve, and are plagued by numerous imperfections. The nation always faces pressing challenges and urgent problems from which headline-grabbing prosecutions will distract attention. All individuals accused of serious crimes suffer in multiple ways long before—and completely independent of— any actual punishment. And while it is true that criminal proceedings involving politicians who commit crimes in office inevitably engender partisan divisions and undermine political harmony, citing these circumstances as just cause for legal immunity is, by definition, creating a license to break the law. . . .
That dynamic expresses the underlying motive of the political and media classes’ general defense of elite immunity: by protecting the lawbreaking license for other powerful individuals, they strengthen a custom of which they might avail themselves if they too break the law and get caught. It is class-based, self- interested advocacy. That is why belief in this prerogative and the devotion to protecting it transcend political ideology, partisan affiliation, the supposed wall between political and media figures, and every other pretense of division within elite classes. It is in the interest of every member of the privileged political and financial class, regardless of role or position, to maintain the vitality of this immunity. And what we have seen over the last decade is the inevitable by-product of elite immunity: pervasive, limitless elite corruption and criminality. . . .For more on the book, see here. Continue Reading
The
Case for the Corporate Death Penalty: Restoring Law and
Order on Wall Street by Mary Kreiner Ramirez and Steven A.
Ramirez. NYU P, 2017.
AUTHORS
Mary Kreiner Ramirez is Professor of Law at Washburn
University School of Law, where she teaches a course on White Collar
Crime. She is a former prosecutor for the Department of Justice Antitrust
Division, where she prosecuted white collar criminals. She has published
numerous articles addressing the challenges in combating white collar crime.
Steven A.
Ramirez is Professor of Law
and Associate Dean at Loyola University of Chicago, where he also directs the
Business and Corporate Governance Law Center.
A critical examination
of the wrongdoing underlying the 2008 financial crisis.
An unprecedented
breakdown in the rule of law occurred in the United States after the 2008
financial collapse. Bank of America, JPMorgan, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and
other large banks settled securities fraud claims with the Securities and
Exchange Commission for failing to disclose the risks of subprime mortgages
they sold to the investing public. But a corporation cannot commit fraud except
through human beings working at and managing the firm. Rather than breaking up
these powerful megabanks, essentially imposing a corporate death penalty, the
government simply accepted fines that essentially punished innocent
shareholders instead of senior leaders at the megabanks. It allowed the real
wrongdoers to walk away from criminal responsibility.
In The Case for the Corporate Death Penalty, Mary Kreiner Ramirez and Steven A. Ramirez examine the best available evidence about the wrongdoing underlying the financial crisis. They reveal that the government failed to use its most powerful law enforcement tools despite overwhelming proof of wide-ranging and large-scale fraud on Wall Street before, during, and after the crisis.
The pattern of criminal indulgences exposes the onset of a new degree of crony capitalism in which the most economically and political powerful can commit financial crimes of vast scale with criminal and regulatory immunity. A new economic royalty has seized the commanding heights of our economy through their control of trillions in corporate and individual wealth and their ability to dispense patronage. The Case for the Corporate Death Penalty shows that this new lawlessness poses a profound threat that urgently demands political action and proposes attainable measures to restore the rule of law in the financial sector.
REVIEWS
·
"It’s abundantly
clear that law enforcement on Wall Street is woefully broken. In the wake of
the financial crisis, not one senior bank executive has been held accountable
for the pervasive wrongdoing that brought our economy to its knees, undermining
confidence in the fairness of our legal system as well as deterrence against
future misconduct. The authors confront this troubling reality head on and in
stark detail, leading readers into a fulsome debate about what is to be done to
restore the rule of law to our financial markets."
—Phil Angelides, Chairman, Financial Crisis
Inquiry Commission (2009-2011)
·
"This is an
informative and at its heart very angry book, and is fascinating...reading for
everyone who’s still smarting from the crash." —Publishers Weekly
·
"The Ramirezes
have unleashed a powerful condemnation of government’s weak-kneed response to
corporate crime in their impressive new study The Case for the
Corporate Death Penalty...[This]book helps us not only understand the scale
of criminality among America’s financial elites, but also the dynamics which
propel elites like Trump into office. If action is not taken to rein in the
lawlessness which the Ramirezes so thoroughly reveal, the economic and social
implications for America are terrifying."
—Popmatters.com
·
"In detailing the cases of Countrywide Financial, AIG Financial
Products Group, JP Morgan Chase, and Goldman, Sachs, among others, Ramirez and
Ramirez find ample evidence to proceed with criminal indictments." —Choice
·
"The Case for the Corporate Death Penalty provides an
inspired and thoughtful roadmap for knowing the new lawlessness, reviving the
old rule of law, and reclaiming our democratic nation in the process." —Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books
·
“The authors were among the regulators and prosecutors with the spine
to stop and jail financial frauds of the 1980s. Wall Street's criminal
elites so feared the crackdown that they unleashed their political allies to
turn the regulatory leaders into invertebrates. The authors show how to
regrow our spines, restore the rule of law on Wall Street, and reclaim our
Nation.” —William K. Black, Associate
Professor of Economics and Law, University of Missouri-Kansas City
·
“Exciting, well written, and potentially explosive… an extremely timely
topic and one that may well prove to be controversial and garner national and
international attention. The topic is critically important, as I have not
before seen this subject dealt with as forthrightly or marshalled as
effectively as here. To truly understand that, unlike the Enron-era scandals
or the Savings & Loans scandals, the government has failed to bring
criminal charges against any of the individuals responsible for the financial
market crisis of 2007-09 defies logic and comprehension.” —André Douglas Pond
Cummings, Professor of Law, Indiana Tech Law School
·
"The incontrovertible value of this book lies in the fact that
while it informs average Americans about the details of potentially criminal
conduct, it also provides policy discussions that include specific proposals
for reformers. Mary Kreiner Ramirez and Steven A. Ramirez are excellent
storytellers who expertly use salient narratives to support their theses." —Cheryl Wade, Harold McNiece Professor of
Law, St. John's University School of Law
CHOMSKY, NOAM.
Requiem for the American Dream. 2017.
FILM
Requiem for the American Dream
Noam
Chomsky (Actor), Peter
D. Hutchison (Director,
Producer, Writer), Kelly
Nyks (Director,
Producer, Writer). Format: DVD
REVIEW BY DAVID SWANSON
Chomsky Wants You to Wake Up from the American Dream
Written by
davidswanson
If you've just seen Michael Moore's movie and are wondering how in the world the United States got
diverted into the slow lane to hell, go watch Noam Chomsky's movie. If you've just seen Noam Chomsky's movie and
are wondering whether the human species is really worth saving, go see Michael
Moore's movie. If you haven't seen either of these movies, please tell me that
you haven't been watching presidential debates. As either of these movies would
be glad to point out to you, that's NOT HOW YOU CHANGE ANYTHING.
"Filmed over four years, these are his
last long-form documentary interviews," Chomsky's film, Requiem
for the American Dream, says of him at the start, rather offensively. Why?
He seems perfectly able to give interviews and apparently gave those in this
film for four years. And of course he acquired the insights he
conveys over many more years than that. They are not new insights to activists,
but they would be like revelations from another world to a typical U.S.
resident.
Chomsky explains how concentrated wealth
creates concentrated power, which legislates further concentration of wealth,
which then concentrates more power in a vicious cycle. He lists and elaborates
on ten principles of the concentration of wealth and power -- principles that
the wealthy of the United States have acted intensely on for 40 years or more.
1. Reduce Democracy. Chomsky finds this acted on by the very
"founding fathers" of the United States, in the creation of the U.S.
Senate, and in James Madison's statement during debate over the U.S.
Constitution that the new government would need to protect the wealthy from too
much democracy. Chomsky finds the same theme in Aristotle but with Aristotle
proposing to reduce inequality, while Madison proposed to reduce democracy. The
burst of activism and democracy in the United States in the 1960s scared the
protectors of wealth and privilege, and Chomsky admits that he did not
anticipate the strength of the backlash through which we have been suffering
since.
2. Shape Ideology. The Powell Memo from the corporate
right, and the Trilateral Commission's first ever report, called "The
Crisis of Democracy," are cited by Chomsky as roadmaps for the backlash.
That report referred to an "excess of democracy," the over engagement
of young people with civic life, and the view that young people were just not
receiving proper "indoctrination." Well, there's a problem that's
been fixed, huh?
3. Redesign the Economy. Since the 1970s the United States has
been moved toward an ever larger role for financial institutions. By 2007 they
"earned" 40% of corporate profits. Deregulation has produced wealth
concentration and economic crashes, followed by anti-capitalist bailouts making
for more wealth concentration. Offshore production has reduced workers' pay.
Alan Greenspan testified to Congress about the benefits of promoting "job
insecurity" -- something those Europeans in Michael Moore's film don't
know about and might find it hard to appreciate.
4. Shift the Burden. The American Dream in the 1950s and 60s
was partly real. Both the rich and the poor got richer. Since then, we've seen
the steady advance of what Chomsky calls the plutonomy and the precariat, that
is the wealthy few who run the show and get all the new wealth, and the
precarious proletariat. Back then, taxes were quite high on corporations,
dividends, and wealth. Not anymore.
5. Attack Solidarity. To go after Social Security and public
education, Chomsky says, you have to drive the normal emotion of caring about
others out of people's heads. The U.S. of the 1950s was able to make college
essentially free with the G.I. Bill and other public funding. Now a much
wealthier United States is full of "serious" experts who claim that
such a thing is impossible (and who must strictly avoid watching Michael
Moore).
6. Run the Regulators. The 1970s saw enormous growth in
lobbying. It is now routine for the interests being regulated to control the
regulators, which makes things much easier on the regulated.
7. Engineer Elections. Thus we've seen the creation of
corporate personhood, the equation of money with speech, and the lifting of all
limits under Citizens United.
8. Keep the Rabble in Line. Here Chomsky focuses on attacks on
organized labor, including the Taft Hartley Act, but one could imagine further
expansions on the theme.
9. Manufacture Consent. Obsessive consumers are not born,
they're molded by advertising. The goal of directing people to superficial
consumption as a means of keeping people in their place was explicit and has
been reached. In a market economy, Chomsky says, informative advertisements
would result in rational decisions. But actual advertisements provide no
information and promote irrational choices. Here Chomsky is talking about, not
just ads for automobiles and soap, but also election campaigns for candidates.
10. Marginalize the Population. This seems as much a result as a tactic,
but it certainly has been achieved. What the public wants does not typically impact what the U.S.
government does.
Unless the trends described above are
reversed, Chomsky says, things are going to get very ugly.
Then the film shows us a clip of Chomsky
saying the same thing decades earlier when he was still shown on U.S.
television. He's been marginalized along with the rest of us.
I imagine every friendly critic of this film
has a #11 to add, and that they are all different. In fact, I can think of lots
of things to add, but I insist on mentioning one of them. It's the same one
missing from Bernie Sanders' home movie starring Iowa and New Hampshire. Its
the thing missing from all U.S. discourse but showing up in Michael Moore's
movie as a great difference between the United States and Europe.
11. Dump Massive Funding into Militarism. Why should this be included? Well, militarism is the
biggest public program in the United States. It's over half of federal
discretionary spending. If you're going to claim that lobbyists are
concentrating wealth through their influence on the government, why not notice
the single budget item that eats up over half the budget? It does indeed
concentrate wealth and also power. It's a vast pot of unaccountable funding for
cronies. And it generates public interest in fighting foreign enemies rather
than enemies hanging out on Wall Street. It does militarize the police for
free, however, just in case Wall Street generates any disgruntled customers.
Chomsky does, of course, oppose militarism. As
far as I know he's consistently opposed it for many years. We see B-roll of him
in the movie with anti-war books in his office. And discussion of point #1
above mentions the peace movement of the 1960s. How the single biggest thing
that the wealthy and powerful do in their effort to expand their power over the
whole globe didn't make the top-10 list I don't know.
The film concludes with a call to build mass
movements for change. The United States still has a very free society, Chomsky
advises. A lot can be done, he tells us, if people will only choose to do it.
Get free books and gear when you become a supporter.
SWANSON’S ORGANIZATIONS: WORLD BEYOND WAR
, ROOTSACTION.ORG, WAR IS A CRIME
TALK NATION RADIO
Dick on Principle
#6: Run the Regulators. Recounts the repeal of the Glass,-Steagall
Act By Democrats and Republicans in 1999, the dramatic increase of revolving
door and lobbying, of deregulation and financial crashes, of banks “too big to
fail” and bankers “too big to jail,” trillion dollar bailouts by the public,
and the ascendancy of “neoliberalism.”
Margin Call. Kevin Spacey. DVD
Too Big to Fail. Paul Giamatti. DVD
The Big Short. Christian Bale. DVD
FILM, Charles Ferguson, INSIDE JOB, the first film to expose the shocking truth
behind the economic crisis of 2008.
From Academy Award®-nominated filmmaker, Charles Ferguson (NO
END IN SIGHT), comes INSIDE JOB, the first film to expose the
shocking truth behind the economic crisis of 2008. The global financial
meltdown, at a cost of over $20 trillion, resulted in millions of people losing
their homes and jobs. Through extensive research and interviews with major
financial insiders, politicians and journalists, INSIDE JOB traces
the rise of a rogue industry and unveils the corrosive relationships which have
corrupted politics, regulation and academia.
As he did with the occupation of Iraq in No End in Sight,
Charles Ferguson shines a light on the global financial crisis in Inside
Job. Accompanied by narration from Matt Damon, Ferguson begins and ends in
Iceland, a flourishing country that gave American-style banking a try--and paid
the price. Then he looks at the spectacular rise and cataclysmic fall of
deregulation in the United States. Unlike Alex Gibney's fiscal films, Enron:
The Smartest Guys in the Room and Casino Jack, Ferguson
builds his narrative around dozens of players, interviewing authors, bank
managers, government ministers, and even a psychotherapist, who speaks to a
culture that encourages Gordon Gekko-like behavior, but the number of those who
declined to comment, like Alan Greenspan, is even larger. Though the director
isn't as combative as Michael Moore, he asks tough questions and elicits
squirms from several participants, notably former Treasury secretary David
McCormick and Columbia dean Glenn Hubbard, George W. Bush's economic adviser.
Their reactions are understandable, since the borders between Wall Street,
Washington, and the Ivy League dissolved years ago; it's hard to know who to
trust when conflicts of interest run rampant. If Ferguson takes Reagan and Bush
to task for tax cuts that benefit the wealthy, he criticizes Clinton for
encouraging derivatives and Obama for failing to deliver on the promise of
reform. And in the category of unlikely heroes: former governor Eliot Spitzer,
who fought against fraud as New York's attorney general (he's the subject of
Gibney's documentary Client 9). --Kathleen C. Fennessy
Related: Matt Taibbi. Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the
Wealth Gap. (Spiegel and Grau,
2014). Hacker and Pierson. Winner-Take-All Politics. (Simon and Schuster, 2010). Melissa Rossi. What Every American Should Know about Who’s Really Running America. (Plume,
2007). Peter Barnes, Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons. (B-K,
2006). Jeffrey Clements. Corporations Are Not People. (Berrett Koehler, 2012). John
MacArthur. The Outrageous Barrtiers to Democracy in America. (Melville, 2008/12). Herman,
Susan. Taking Liberties: The War on
Terror and the Erosion of American Democracy. (Oxford UP, 2011). Garry Wills, Bomb
Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State. (Penguin, 2010.) Swanson,
David. Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect
Union. (Seven Stories P, 2009.) Jane
Mayer. The Dark Side: The Inside Story of
How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals. (Doubleday,
2008). A. O. Schwarz Jr. and Aziz Huq, Unchecked
and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror. New Press, 2007. Cole, David and James Dempsey. Terrorism and the Constitution: Sacrificing
Civil Liberties in the Name of National Security. (New Press, 2002. FBI and 1996 and 2001 Anti-Terrorism Acts.)
INTERNATIONAL US LAWLESSNESS
Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United
States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism By Greg Grandin. Henry Holt,
05/01/2007. ( Publisher’s description follows.)
"Grandin has always been a
brilliant historian; now he uses his detective skills in a book that is
absolutely crucial to understanding our present."—Naomi Klein, author
of No Logo
The British and Roman empires are often invoked as
precedents to the Bush administration's aggressive foreign policy. But America's
imperial identity was actually shaped much closer to home. In a brilliant
excavation of long-obscured history, Empire's Workshop shows
how Latin America has functioned as a proving ground for American strategies
and tactics overseas. Historian Greg Grandin follows the United States'
imperial operations from Jefferson's aspirations for an "empire of
liberty" in Cuba and Spanish Florida to Reagan's support for brutally
oppressive but U.S.-friendly regimes in Central America. He traces the origins
of Bush's current policies back to Latin America, where many of the
administration's leading lights first embraced the deployment of military power
to advance free market economics and enlisted the evangelical movement in
support of their ventures.
With much of Latin America now in open rebellion against
U.S. domination, Grandin asks: If Washington failed to bring prosperity and
democracy to Latin America—its own backyard "workshop"—what are the
chances it will do so for the world?NNECT
Praise for Empire's Workshop
“The Americans who engineered countless military coups,
death squads and massacres in Latin America never paid for their crimes --
instead they got promoted and they're now running the 'War on Terror.' Grandin
had always been a brilliant historian, now he uses those detective skills in a
book that is absolutely crucial to understanding our present.” —Naomi Klein,
author of No Logo
“Greg Grandin knows the history of modern Guatemala better
than anybody else in the world outside of that country-and therefore
understands the nature of U.S. attitudes and action toward Latin America at
their most disturbing. This grants him keen insight into the manic ferocity
behind U.S. imperialism across the globe today, which he describes in fine,
rich, vivid, bitter detail. Grandin also shrewdly observes that the outrages
possible in little U.S. neo-colonies are not so easy to accomplish on a grand
scale. His admirable book deserves many, many serious readers.” —John Womack,
Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics, Harvard
University and author of Zapata
Andrew Bacevich. America’s
War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History. Random House, 2016.
Review
by Charles Glass. The Intercept, April 23 2016,
THE
CONVICTION that
invasion, bombing, and special forces benefit large swaths of the globe, while
remaining consonant with a Platonic ideal of the national interest, runs deep
in the American psyche. Like the poet Stevie Smith’s cat, the United States “likes
to gallop about doing good.” The cat attacks and misses, sometimes injuring
itself, but does not give up. It asks, as the U.S. should,
What’s the good
Of galloping about doing good
When angels stand in the path
And do not do as they should
Of galloping about doing good
When angels stand in the path
And do not do as they should
Nothing undermines the
American belief in military force. No matter how often its galloping about
results in resentment and mayhem, the U.S. gets up again to do good elsewhere.
Failure to improve life in Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and
Libya stiffens the resolve to get it right next time. This notion prevails
among politicized elements of the officer corps; much of the media, whether
nominally liberal or conservative; the foreign policy elite recycled
quadrennially between corporation-endowed think tanks and government; and most
politicians on the national stage. For them and the public they influence, the
question is less whether to deploy force than when, where, and how.
Since 1979, when the Iranians overthrew the Shah and the Soviets invaded
Afghanistan, the U.S. has concentrated its firepower in what former U.S. Army
colonel Andrew Bacevich calls the “Greater Middle East.” The region comprises
most of what America’s imperial predecessors, the British, called the Near and Middle
East, a vast zone from Pakistan west to Morocco. In his new book, America’s War
for the Greater Middle East, Bacevich writes, “From the end of World War II
until 1980, virtually no American soldiers were killed in action while serving
in that region. Within a decade, a great shift occurred. Since 1990, virtually no American soldiers
have been killed anywhere except the Greater Middle East.”
That observation alone might prompt a less propagandized electorate to rebel
against leaders who perpetuate policies
that, while killing and maiming American soldiers, devastate the societies they
touch.
Bacevich describes a loyal
cadre of intellectuals and pundits favoring war after war, laying the moral
ground for invasions and excusing them when they go wrong. He notes that in
1975, when American imperium was collapsing in Indochina, the guardians of
American exceptionalism renewed their case for preserving the U.S. as the
exception to international law. An
article by Robert Tucker in Commentary that year set the ball
rolling with the proposition that “to insist that before using force one must
exhaust all other remedies is little more than the functional equivalent of
accepting chaos.” Another evangelist for military action, Miles Ignotus, wrote
in Harper’s two months later
that the U.S. with Israel’s help must prepare to seize Saudi Arabia’s
oilfields. Miles Ignotus, Latin for
“unknown soldier,” turned out to be the known civilian and Pentagon consultant
Edward Luttwak. Luttwak urged a
“revolution” in warfare doctrine toward “fast, light forces to penetrate the
enemy’s vital centers” with Saudi Arabia a test case. The practical test would
come, with results familiar to most of the world, 27 years later in Iraq. MORE https://theintercept.com/2016/04/23/andrew-bacevich-and-americas-long-misguided-war-to-control-the-greater-middle-east/
Review of Chapter One by Dick Bennett.
President Jimmy Carter provides the beginning
of this comprehensive narrative of US lawlessness in the Middle East. “However unwittingly, Carter…inaugurated
America’s War for the Greater Middle East, compounding rather than reversing
the errors he had inherited. With no end
in sight and little prospect of achieving success, that war continues to the
present day” (xxii).
Chapter One, “War of Choice,” tells the story. Until the 1970s, not the Pentagon, the White
House, or Congress planned to militarize US ME policy. The Cold War and Vietnam
War had preoccupied those leaders. The
US had looked to ME proxy nations to ensure the flow of oil westward.
All
that changed when Jimmy Carter became president. Carter campaigned for freedom, peace, and
human rights. But OPEC’s increasing
power was shifting alignments. A group
of hawks led by Robert W. Tucker and Edward Luttwak had been urging US “armed
intervention in the Arab World” to take “our” oil (6-8). And the Iranian revolution in 1979 overthrew
the Shah, whom the US had imposed on that country after the CIA had arranged
the overthrow of its elected leader.
New
advocates of making the Persian Gulf a high U.S. military priority (Paul
Wolfowitz, Albert Wohlstetter) were becoming influential (16-17). Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew
Brzezinski, supported intervention.
Carter resisted, questioning whether the nation’s fate was bound to
OPEC, including his 7-15-79 malaise speech arguing for peace and spiritual
renewal, but he was not persuasive.
Wolfowitz’ argument that the US should use soldiers rather than
diplomats to secure its interests prevailed; the nation chose access to oil;
Iranian students captured the US embassy in Tehran and students burned
embassies in Pakistan and Libya; and Carter “took his country to war.”
“So
in January 1980, [the nation] embarked upon a war for oil, which was in its way
a war to preserve the American way of life” (32). The Truman Doctrine became the Carter
Doctrine, encompassing all threats large and small and “generically referred to
as ’terrorists.’”
Related books by Bacevich:
The
New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War. Oxford, 2005. The
Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. Metropolitan, 2008. Washington Rules: America’s
Path to Permanent War. Metropolitan,
2010.
Related
Books: Paul Buchheit, ed. American
Wars: Illusions and Realities. Clarity,
2008. David Swanson. War Is
a Lie. 2010. Richard Rubenstein. Reasons
to Kill: Why Americans Choose War. Bloomsbury , 2010.
American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should
Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes by Rebecca Gordon. Skyhorse Pub./Hot Books, 2016.
No subject is more hotly debated than the extreme measures that
our government has taken after 9/11 in the name of national security. Torture,
extraordinary rendition, drone assassinations, secret detention centers (or
“black sites”), massive surveillance of citizens. But while the press
occasionally exposes the dark side of the war on terror and congressional
investigators sometimes raise alarms about the abuses committed by U.S.
intelligence agencies and armed forces, no
high U.S. official has been prosecuted for these violations – which many
legal observers around the world consider war
crimes.
The United States helped establish the international principles guiding the prosecution of war crimes – starting with the Nuremberg tribunal following World War II, when Nazi officials were held accountable for their crimes against humanity. But the American government and legal system have consistently refused to apply these same principles to our own officials. Now Rebecca Gordon takes on the explosive task of “indicting” the officials who – in a just society – should be put on trial for war crimes. Some might dismiss this as a symbolic exercise. But what is at stake here is the very soul of the nation.
The United States helped establish the international principles guiding the prosecution of war crimes – starting with the Nuremberg tribunal following World War II, when Nazi officials were held accountable for their crimes against humanity. But the American government and legal system have consistently refused to apply these same principles to our own officials. Now Rebecca Gordon takes on the explosive task of “indicting” the officials who – in a just society – should be put on trial for war crimes. Some might dismiss this as a symbolic exercise. But what is at stake here is the very soul of the nation.
Davies, Nicholas.
Blood on Our Hands: The
American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.
Nimble, 2010. Systematic US violations of
Nuremberg Principles and Geneva Conventions.
Review By David Swanson in his blog Let’s Try
Democracy
The most massive and brutal crime committed on
this planet during the past decade has been the invasion and occupation of
Iraq. And we're seeking to wash the blood off our hands without so much as an
"Out, damn spot!" Nowadays "looking forward, not backward"
is supposed to take care of everything, even as the crimes continue. What that
takes care of is the leading perpetrators who begin to sense that the coast is
clear and creep out of their holes to declare, as did Karl Rove this week, that
their biggest mistake was not more aggressively attacking those who pointed out
their crimes.
If there's anyone who knows where that path
leads, it's probably Benjamin Ferencz, who served as Chief Prosecutor for the
Einsatzgruppen Trial at Nuremberg in 1947 and who has just published the
forward to a new book by Nicolas Davies called "Blood on Our Hands: The
American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq." It's a useful moment in which
to be handed this masterful account of what we've done, not just because the
liars have been ceded the floor, but also because the crime is ongoing and we
will require the proper frame of mind as each deadline for withdrawal from Iraq
is violated, and because the Washington Press Corpse has begun to notice the
utter irresponsibility of the people we pay to tell us what is happening in the
world (not to mention to spy on us, overthrow governments, kidnap, imprison,
torture, and assassinate), and because we will not end the endless war in
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and other places unless there is accountability.
This is also the moment in which the
International Criminal Court has done something Ferencz had long worked for,
and determined that it will prosecute the crime of aggressive war. Even if the
ICC cannot go back now and prosecute the most serious such crime of recent
years, it can prosecute numerous US war crimes committed during the past
decade, and we can address the invasion and occupation of Iraq through courts
and legislatures in such a manner as to make its repetition elsewhere more
likely to result in criminal charges.
Ferencz has the highest praise for Davies'
book, as do I. Davies lays it all out: the planning and commission of the
criminal war on Iraq from its earliest stages through to the current phase. If
the Iraq occupation lasts another 50 years, it's doubtful a better account of
it will be produced than this one. Davies puts the invasion and occupation of
Iraq into a framework not only of history but also of law. "Blood on Our
Hands" is packed with critical information that never made it into the
so-called first draft of history, the U.S. media. This is a thoroughly
documented account of the motivations, launching, and the conduct through
several stages of the Iraq War, a war that any one of these periods shows to
have been, above all else, a massive crime.
One of the few journalists whose reporting on
Iraq I trust entirely is Dahr Jamail, who says "'Blood on Our Hands' is a
must read. For anyone wanting a full review of U.S. involvement in Iraq from
the early 20th century to the present, this book is mandatory. From
U.S.-backing of a 22-year-old Saddam Hussein, to the more recent role the U.S.
government played in orchestrating death squads in Iraq, Davies nails it."
Think Dahr and I are exaggerating? Here's
27-year CIA veteran Ray McGovern: "Nicolas Davies' well-documented yet
fast-moving and highly readable book packages the pieces into the best account
so far of the Iraq War -- how it happened and why."
Ray doesn't tend to overstate things, but just
in case you have doubts, listen to Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia, the author of
"Road from Ar Ramadi": "Davies has dissected the invasion and
occupation of Iraq with such precision that even the most knowledgeable reader
will be amazed. This book should be read and kept in every Congressional
office, in every public library, in every school and in every household. It's
an absolute must-read."
I could go on with the enthusiastic statements
from people who know, but I think I've made the point. "Blood on Our
Hands" is the best documented, most powerful, most legally actionable
account in existence of the worst crime currently being committed in our names,
which makes its title fitting indeed. Davies wrote to me about his appreciation
for Ferencz's assistance with the book, writing that Ferencz "completely
ignored my lack of formal credentials and took my work on its merits from the
moment he read my first article about Iraq. When I think about Ben, I only hope
that he can feel some peace and satisfaction for all that he has accomplished
in a lifetime of total commitment to peace and justice. He still seems more
concerned with fighting this fight to his very last breath, and my reason for
dedicating the book to him was partly to try and let him know that there are
new generations taking up the torch he carried so heroically."
Brothers and sisters, take up that torch.
No Place to Hide,
by Glenn Greenwald
The
title of the journalist Glenn Greenwald’s impassioned new book, “No Place to
Hide,” comes from a chilling observation made in 1975 by Senator Frank Church,
then chairman of a select committee on intelligence. The United States
That
was nearly 40 years ago, and as the documents leaked last year by the former
National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed, the N.S.A.’s ability to spy on our daily lives
has grown exponentially to Orwellian proportions. The documents provided by
Mr. Snowden revealed that the agency has an ability to monitor or collect
information from hundreds of millions of
people around the
globe, that it has broken into the communications links of major data centers
across the world, that it has circumvented or cracked much of the
encryption that
protects sensitive data on the Internet, and that, according to its own
records, it has broken privacy laws or exceeded its authority thousands of
times a year. The first journalist Mr. Snowden approached by email was Glenn
Greenwald, a columnist for The Guardian
and former constitutional lawyer who had frequently written about civil
liberties, the dangers of enhanced executive power, and surveillance abuses in
post-Sept. 11 America. (Mr. Greenwald has since left The Guardian to work with Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, on
building a new media venture, which includes the news site The Intercept, of which Mr. Greenwald, Laura Poitras
and Jeremy Scahill are founding editors.)
In
“No Place to Hide,” Mr. Greenwald recounts the story of how he and Ms. Poitras,
a documentary filmmaker, traveled to Hong Kong to meet with Mr. Snowden and the
race to publish articles based on the documents he provided, all the while
fearful of authorities’ closing in. The outlines of this story will be familiar
to readers who followed it in real time last year, and to readers of the recent
book “The Snowden Files”
(by the Guardian reporter Luke
Harding), just as much of the material here about the N.S.A. will be familiar
to readers of articles that have appeared in The Guardian (many with Mr. Greenwald’s byline), The Washington Post and The New York Times.
“No
Place to Hide” is enlivened by reproductions of dozens of fascinating documents
from the Snowden archive that help illustrate the N.S.A.’s methodology and that
showcase its strange corporate like boosterism (complete with sometimes corny
graphics). And Mr. Greenwald fleshes out his portrait of Mr. Snowden with fresh
observations from their exchanges. He amplifies our understanding of the
N.S.A.’s sweeping ambitions, methods and global reach, and provides detailed
insights into what he calls the agency’s “corporate partnerships,” which
“extend beyond intelligence and defense contractors to include the world’s
largest and most important Internet corporations and telecoms.”
For
instance, the agency’s Stormbrew program, Mr. Greenwald writes, “gives the
N.S.A. access to Internet and telephone traffic that enters the United States at various ‘choke points’ on U.S. U.S.
communications infrastructure — a residual by-product of the central role that
the United States U.S.
Mr.
Greenwald portrays Mr. Snowden — regarded by some as a heroic whistle-blower,
by others as a traitor — as a courageous idealist who felt he needed to act on
his beliefs. That outlook, Mr. Greenwald suggests, was partly shaped by books
Mr. Snowden read growing up — Greek mythology and “The Hero With a Thousand
Faces” by Joseph Campbell, which convinced Mr. Snowden that, in his own words,
“it is we who infuse life with meaning through our actions and the stories we
create with them.”
The
most gripping sections of “No Place to Hide” recount Mr. Greenwald and Ms.
Poitras’s 10-day trip to Hong Kong , where they
and The Guardian’s veteran correspondent Ewen MacAskill met with Mr. Snowden in
his hotel room. Mr. Greenwald describes the tradecraft they employed (removing
batteries from their cellphones, or placing the phones in the minibar
refrigerator) to avoid detection; his initial five-hour, litigatorlike grilling
of Mr. Snowden; and the “giddy gallows humor” that later crept into their
conversations (“I call the bottom bunk at Gitmo,” Mr. Snowden reportedly
joked).
Mr.
Greenwald writes that Mr. Snowden said one turning point in his decision to
become a leaker came in 2010, when he was working as an N.S.A. contractor in Japan.
“The stuff I saw really began to disturb me,” Mr. Snowden recalled. “I could
watch drones in real time as they surveilled the people they might kill.” He
added: “I watched N.S.A. tracking people’s Internet activities as they typed. I
became aware of just how invasive U.S.
Substantial
sections of this book deal not with Mr. Greenwald’s relationship with Mr.
Snowden and the N.S.A., but with his combative view of “the establishment
media,” which he has denounced for “glaring subservience to
political power” and
to which he condescends as inferior to his more activist kind of journalism.
.
. . . (Kakutani criticizes Greenwald’s
self-dramatization and a false generalization about US media --D)
When
Mr. Greenwald turns his fervor to the issue of surveillance and its
implications for ordinary citizens’ civil liberties, he is far more credible.
Sometimes eloquent. He places the N.S.A.’s current activities in historical
perspective with the F.B.I.’s Cointelpro program to target political groups
and individuals, begun in 1956 and ended in 1971. And he delivers a fierce
argument in defense of the right of privacy, quoting the Supreme Court Justice
Louis Brandeis’s famous dissent in the 1928 case Olmstead v. United States
The
Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man. by Luke Harding. Vintage, 2014. [This review accompanies the
Amazon advert. –Dick]
IT BEGAN WITH A TANTALIZING, ANONYMOUS EMAIL: “I AM A SENIOR
MEMBER OF THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY.”
What followed was the most spectacular intelligence breach ever, brought about by one extraordinary man. Edward Snowden was a 29-year-old computer genius working for the National Security Agency when he shocked the world by exposing the near-universal mass surveillance programs of theUnited States
In a tour de force of investigative journalism that reads like a spy novel, award-winning Guardian reporter Luke Harding tells Snowden’s astonishing story—from the day he left his glamorous girlfriend in Honolulu carrying a hard drive full of secrets, to the weeks of his secret-spilling in Hong Kong, to his battle for asylum and his exile in Moscow. For the first time, Harding brings together the many sources and strands of the story—touching on everything from concerns about domestic spying to the complicity of the tech sector—while also placing us in the room with Edward Snowden himself. The result is a gripping insider narrative—and a necessary and timely account of what is at stake for all of us in the new digital age. [It is not accurate to call it an “insider narrative,” since he was not there. Only Greenwald’s account is truly insider. But Harding, The Guardian’s foreign correspondent, had access at The Guardian to Greenwald’s reports and those of The Guardian’s Washington correspondent, Ewen MacAskill, who accompanied Greenwald and Poitras to Hong Kong. --Dick]
What followed was the most spectacular intelligence breach ever, brought about by one extraordinary man. Edward Snowden was a 29-year-old computer genius working for the National Security Agency when he shocked the world by exposing the near-universal mass surveillance programs of the
In a tour de force of investigative journalism that reads like a spy novel, award-winning Guardian reporter Luke Harding tells Snowden’s astonishing story—from the day he left his glamorous girlfriend in Honolulu carrying a hard drive full of secrets, to the weeks of his secret-spilling in Hong Kong, to his battle for asylum and his exile in Moscow. For the first time, Harding brings together the many sources and strands of the story—touching on everything from concerns about domestic spying to the complicity of the tech sector—while also placing us in the room with Edward Snowden himself. The result is a gripping insider narrative—and a necessary and timely account of what is at stake for all of us in the new digital age. [It is not accurate to call it an “insider narrative,” since he was not there. Only Greenwald’s account is truly insider. But Harding, The Guardian’s foreign correspondent, had access at The Guardian to Greenwald’s reports and those of The Guardian’s Washington correspondent, Ewen MacAskill, who accompanied Greenwald and Poitras to Hong Kong. --Dick]
Related: Priest, Dana and William Arkin.
Top Secret America: The Rise of
the New American Security State. (Little,
Brown, 2011. Immense trillion-dollars
increase of top, top secret agencies post-9/11.)
More Lawlessness
of US Empire
Tirman, John. The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians inAmerica Oxford America Seymour America
Tirman, John. The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in
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