CNN INTERVIEW WITH DICK CHENEY: WHY DIDN
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Author Archives: Margie Burns
‘Executive Assassination Ring’? When did it start?
Sexual Abuse of Minors by a Washington Judge
Sexual Abuse of
Minors by a WA Judge
—
horrible story I have ever been told about a judge came from around
there was a judge in the area
Politicized Justice Department Firings Are Not the Only Investigation Needed
Politicized Justice Department Firings Are Not the Only Investigation Needed
Rove, Miers
That Karl Rove and Harriet Miers are finally going to testify in some fashion before the House Judiciary Committee is encouraging news. It is to be hoped that ultimately their testimony 1) will be open to the public, and 2) will actually clarify something about politicized hirings and firings in the Bush Justice Department.
But we must remember that other issues besides politicizing Justice, however grave that was, have left residual dangers for this country.
U.S. economy March 2009
Now, with an avalanche of economic news and the continuing drain on our resources of occupation in Iraq and strife in Afghanistan, among other issues, the entire topic of illegal wiretapping has faded from view.
For eight years, the Bush administration and its allies in the GOP and the corporate media portrayed illegal wiretapping as an irreconcilable clash of fundamental civil liberties against the need for security. Much of the press and the Democratic Party fell into this rhetorical trap.
Signs of the times
To this day, too few of our leaders have challenged the Bush White House claim that any illegal actions were committed in order to protect and defend Americans.
This issue is not merely political, not merely ethical. It has intrinsic connections to domestic security for the United States.
A few reminders here, still relevant from a much earlier post:
- While claiming to protect Americans, the Bush White House accepted an ambassador from Saudi Arabia—home to 14 of the 19 highjackers who carried out the attacks of 9/11–with connections to al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and the Pakistani secret intelligence service (ISI).
- The same White House failed to expose or refused to expose support received by the 9/11 hijackers from Pakistan’s highest levels of government. Instead, Bush-Cheney embraced Gen. Musharraf as a full partner in the ‘war on terror.’
- The same administration disrupted an effective investigation in Pakistan by exposing a contact there.
- Needless to say, the same White House not only failed to capture Osama bin Laden but began to state, fairly soon after 9/11, that capture of bin Laden was somehow unimportant or irrelevant to our national security. No administration official ever pointed out publicly that UBL might be a valuable source of information regarding terrorism. This implication that UBL was unimportant persisted throughout the Bush administration, along with vague suggestions that he was hidden in some hut in the Pak-Afghan mountains—despite signs of high production value in some of the ‘civilized office-type videos released by bin Laden.
- Bush-Cheney also failed to glean all possible information from bin Laden’s employees and relatives.
- Quite the contrary, immediately after 9/11 it helped to put highly placed Saudis in this country on planes, and flew them out of the U.S.
- Throughout its terms, the same administration prevented genuine interrogation of prisoners, by accredited professionals, in venues controlled by the U.S. government, including lawyers for the accused in the process. The effect has been to prevent discerning which individuals were culpable of what acts, and perhaps to conceal lack of evidence.
- The same administration fogged counter-terrorism and anti-terrorism efforts by detaining hundreds of innocent Middle Easterners, and by exploiting national security to issue dubious alerts and ex-post-facto anecdotes about evildoers chastised, politically timed. Karl Rove among others openly stated that the ‘war on terror’ was politically useful in elections.
- The administration also bullied and suppressed the intelligence community to obtain intelligence products politically and financially advantageous for itself. In doing so, it fragmented and crippled government agencies engaged in genuine intelligence, research and analysis.
- The same administration also allowed or caused investigation into the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole to be stymied.
- Administration fiscal policy supported business practices including off-shoring, outsourcing, and privatizing that undermine security at U.S. ports and borders.
- For obvious reasons, the administration failed to reveal and clarify what business ventures Bush, Cheney, and their cronies and relatives engaged in, including business associations with foreign businesses and governments.
- While calling on the general public to join in the ‘war on terror’ and to maintain vigilance, the administration opposed every move to open up transmission of valid information to the public.
All these issues raise questions still unanswered to this day, and all of them are relevant to security.
As said, political consequences are by no means the most important consequences. Still, the danger to our political system, the enfeebling of a vital participatory democracy that replaces its public officials rather than keeping them for life and makes their positions hereditary, is significant. Flying in the face of reason, evidence and common sense, the Bush White House got away for eight years with arguing that government secrecy must be the sign of something good. We’re doing this for you.
The argument would be reasonable if law enforcement and intelligence personnel were eager to admit incarcerating the wrong person or other mistakes. But observation and experience remind us that secrecy is much more often the sign of a cover-up than of anything effective, favorable or beneficial.
Questions remain regarding the Cole bombing; the assassination of Massoud at the same time as 9/11; the deaths of so many Loya Girga soon after 9/11; the head of the ISI in the U.S. during 9/11; the 9/11 hijackers’ involuntary trips around the U.S., including to Las Vegas; and Riggs Bank’s financing persons of interest. Questions still remain regarding the anthrax mailings. Questions still remain regarding vote suppression and other anti-election efforts under the previous administration. Questions remain about even the lead-up to the Iraq war and the conduct of the war, the issue that has been most nearly investigated thoroughly. Questions remain about the construction of the world’s biggest U.S. embassy in Iraq and about the construction of so many U.S. installations encircling Saudi Arabia.
It is an open shame that current GOP officeholders, probably all of them, are eagerly urging President Obama to ‘look forward’ rather than ‘backward’—the metaphor used to justify failing to apply reasonable standards of professional responsibility. But the Democrats have no obligation to go along with a rejection of accountability and a ratification of false history. Quite the contrary.
[This article, deleted by the system among hundreds of articles and blog posts in summer 2011, is re-posted using archives and Word files.]
Holder Does the Country a Favor
Holder Does the Country a Favor —
General Eric Holder released seven legal opinions authored by the
Bush administration
There Was Never Going to Be ‘Bipartisanship’
There Was Never Going to Be ‘Bipartisanship’
President Obama delivers the State of the Union address
President Obama is receiving credit, rightly, for being considerably more polite and decent to his strident opponents—neocon media personalities, the GOP in Congress, former Republican candidates for office—than George W. Bush and his cohorts ever were to Democrats. He didn’t even wear garlic, going to dine with George Will, Bill Kristol and a host of other neocons in a house presumably free of mirrors. But it’s a good thing the news cycle moves so quickly nowadays. Otherwise, that quick set-up by the GOP in DC, to make ‘lack of bipartisanship’ the putative hallmark of presidential failure, might not have been so quickly seen through–and shot down.
The simple truth, to coin a phrase, is that there was never going to be bipartisanship from Republicans in Congress and/or angling for office. That’s not what they’re there for. They’re there to protect the interests they have always protected, at least at the highest party echelons.
Hence the rapidity and the blind rigidity with which the GOP already attempts to represent every fiscal move by the new administration in the old tax-and-spend light, ‘positioning’ Republicans in Congress as in favor of ‘cuts’ and Democrats as the reverse. Disregarding budget-busting amendments to the stimulus offered by the GOP, some media outlets have gone along with this line.
Predictably, one of the biggest differences between the House version of the stimulus package and the Senate version, the latter more affected by GOP demands, was that the Senate version included more, and more regressive, ‘tax cuts’. Thus the ‘cut spending’ line—actually, a rise in deficits—melds neatly with the ‘cut taxes’ line.
It’s a neat formulation but an Orwellian distortion.
When the GOP, which recently brought about the biggest wave of government spending in U.S. history and capped it off with a Wall Street bailout for some of the biggest beneficiaries of that spending, talks about ‘cutting taxes,’ in practice the ‘cuts’ boil down to two policies:
1) Shifting the tax burden from the wealthy and corporations to the middle class; and
2) Shifting the burden of raising taxes from the federal government to states and localities.
Both of these shifts are in practice regressive, bearing down hardest on those least able to bear any further financial strain. Over-all, what happens to ordinary taxpayers—especially hardworking, non-indigent individuals who have to watch every dime—when the Grover Norquist types go to work drowning the government in the bathtub?
We are seeing the answer right now, most prominently in Schwarzenegger’s California. In general, taxes imposed by state and local governments tend to burden ordinary individuals more than they do the affluent or corporations (which often operate above the aegis of state law). As today’s Washington Post sums it up, the new cuts being passed in California fit the typical pattern:
“The budget measure would trim spending by $15 billion, including $8.6 billion from funding for public schools. It would raise $14 billion in taxes by increasing the sales tax by 1 percent and the gasoline tax by 12 cents a gallon, by doubling vehicle registration fees and by levying a 2.5 percent surcharge on income taxes. The rest would come from new borrowing.”
It’s like reward-the-billionaire pinball. Of all forms of broad taxation, the most regressive is the sales tax. Such sales taxes as gasoline tax and fuel tax hit individuals and businesses dependent in transportation and housing particularly hard. Vehicle registration fees and other so-called ‘user’s fees’ are generally just a form of sales tax under another name, and btw not doing much to enhance the health of our automobile industry or our transportation sector generally. After all, the only way to avoid paying more in these sectors is to do without a car or to keep your old one. (And if you do without, you are still paying more, lately, for mass transit. See below.)
Ditto for all the ‘recordation fees’ and other fees so beloved of states and localities, imposed on you—“They’re gonna nick you every way they can,” an older guy around here commented—when you go to record your will or the deed to your house, or get a driver’s license or become a notary public, or buy a boat or hunt or fish, etc. For all the talk about a ‘death tax’—actually a very lenient estate tax—tax policy proposed by every Republican administration in memory is much like a tax on everyday living.
Property taxes are only somewhat less regressive—and they are pinned to a ‘market’ that may be nonexistent and is skewed to start with. Full discussion of the way the term ‘markets’ is used is far beyond the scope of this article, but just try to imagine what would happen to housing prices in your neighborhood if—here’s the paradox—your neighborhood became the most ideally stable in the country, with everybody paying off the mortgage and nobody moving. The effect: Since the most recent house sales, on a totally-paid-up block, would be years in the past, house prices as set by the ‘market,’ without correcting for lack of indebtedness, would be destructively low.
Be it noted that ‘small business,’ which we sometimes hear about a lot from GOP lawmakers, who have recently emphasized the talking point about reducing the tax burden on small business, is also hit hard by the most regressive taxes. As with individuals of modest means, genuine small businesses struggle the most with higher fuel prices, more recording and other user’s fees. They also have the hardest time maintaining adequate paperwork for ever-increasing sales taxes, which can also eat into their sales.
Then there’s the steadily rising cost of getting to the store or other place of business. Unsurprisingly, customers are numerous for delivery businesses–UPS, FedEx—and for online shopping centers—eBay, Amazon. That rise, good news in a commercial sense for some buyers and sellers, is directly related to transportation costs (as well as to the desire to save time and effort).
As I have noticed before, the subway and train station near my home illustrate the effects of federal ‘tax cuts’ connected to reduced federal transportation subsidies. Parking at the nearest Metro station, while limited, used to cost $1.75 per day, and you could get out for free if you left before 3:00 p.m. Now, the price has more than doubled and stays the same regardless of what time you leave.
A small item, by itself. But multiply $1.75 by 5, and you get a weekly increase of $8.75; multiply that by 4, and you get a monthly increase of $35.00; multiply that by 12, and you get a yearly increase of $420.00, give or take a little for either vacations or overtime. Meanwhile, both train fares and subway fares have also gone up, partly because of the pressure of fuel costs and maintenance costs.
Obviously, increases in the cost of transportation hit those people hardest who can least afford to pay. They hit the middle class, the going-to-work-class, much harder than the wealthy. But the nation’s counties, cities, towns and states have to levy such increases to pay for services. We have a growing population that requires transportation, and a shrinking proportion of the over-all percentage of taxes paid by the wealthy and by corporations.
NOTE
Below is a partial list, which used to be passed around by email, of taxes-by-any-other-name. None of these taxes have gone down in any state or locale:
Accounts Receivable Tax Building Permit Tax
CDL license Tax Cigarette Tax
Court Fines (indirect taxes) Dog License
Fishing License Food License
Fuel permit tax Gasoline Tax (42 cents per gallon [dated])
Hunting License Tax Liquor Tax
Local Income Tax Luxury Taxes
Marriage License Medicare Tax
Property Tax Real Estate Tax
Septic Permit Service Charge Taxes
Road Usage Taxes (Truckers) Sales Taxes
Recreational Vehicle Tax Road Toll Booths
School Tax State Income Tax
State Unemployment Tax (SUTA) Telephone federal excise tax
Telephone federal universal service fee tax
Telephone federal, state and local surcharge taxes
Telephone minimum usage surcharge tax
Telephone recurring and non-recurring charges tax
Telephone state and local tax Telephone usage charge tax
Toll Bridges Toll Tunnels
Traffic Fines (indirect taxation) Trailer registration tax
Utility Taxes Vehicle License Registration Tax
Vehicle Sales Tax Watercraft registration Tax
Well Permit Tax
This partial list does not include every ‘recordation fee,’ mentioned above, for everyday official documents like deeds and wills, or the raft of ‘license fees’ levied on entrance to most occupations or professions, or the extra sales taxes levied on airport parking and airplane tickets. Again, all these measures become more essential to small governments when they can count on neither federal support nor general economic prosperity.
Soaking the middle class, of course, goes much farther even than fees and indirect taxes, as everyone knows who has faced rising college tuition and rising health care costs. If people are now hoping fervently that President Obama will be a new FDR, it is in large part because President Bush implemented the unstated platform of reversing everything positive accomplished by FDR’s New Deal.
Have the IRS Compute Taxes for Top-Ranked Federal Officials
Have the IRS Compute Taxes for Top-Ranked Feds –Modest proposal, only this one in all seriousness is not satire: In the wake of disclosed tax liabilities for Geithner and Daschle, how about having all top-level federal employees, from here on out, get their taxes computed by the IRS in the first place?
From here on out, anyone elected to the U.S. Congress and the White House, appointed to Cabinet and cabinet-equivalent posts, and appointed to any positions requiring Senate confirmation, would have to have his/her federal taxes computed, every year, by the IRS itself. This policy, if implemented, would with a stroke of the pen provide at least an earnest of reform-mindedness in our top public servants in the federal government.
Indeed, the multiple advantages of this idea should be apparent almost at a glance. –And by the way, this law would continue to apply to the aforesaid public servants after they leave government, for the rest of their lives. This policy might diminish the revolving-door benefits of holding public office. With one clean sweep, it would certainly reduce any chance of honest error by government officials, the kind of error that breeds further cynicism and distrust of government in the general public. Presumably it would also reduce the chance of deliberate and strategic carelessness, the kind of carelessness in finance that we see so often, that by some regrettable coincidence always seems to profit the mistake-maker himself, while shortchanging the Treasury.
It would guarantee to the general public that no man is above the law, that the highest-ranked public officials are themselves subject to the IRS. It should thus also help the Treasury in court cases where the feds are trying to go after taxes from island-hopping tax shelterers and offshore evaders. And it would certainly reduce the trouble and expense of our current vetting procedures for high-ranking officials.
Tomorrow would be a good day to start, but probably some details would need to be fine-tuned, in drafting the legislation–assuming this cannot be done by executive order–to avoid unintended consequences.
I’ve put my accounting where my mouth (ink) is, btw. In the years when my own tax returns got too complicated for me to handle alone, I did request the IRS to compute.
This spot proposal is only an interim measure, of course. It is not a substitute for clarifying and streamlining the tax code, or for tax justice in the form of genuinely progressive taxes. But it would help in the short term, and perhaps for years to come.
Daschle Should Step Aside in Favor of Howard Dean
Daschle Should Step Aside in Favor of Howard Dean —
former Sen. Tom Daschle just keeps getting worse and worse, or rather the
reporting on issues pertinent to his Cabinet nomination keeps turning up
further pertinent information.
Yesterday (Jan. 31)
the Washington
Post reported that Daschle
recently owed $128,000 in federal back taxes
The Middle Class Needs Legal Aid, Too
Middle class needs legal aid too
In a sad, terrifying piece titled “Foreclosure’s Final Act,” today’s Washington Post reports a rare glimpse of our courtrooms from the perspective of the ordinary citizen:
“The court clerk calls his name, and Harry Rexrode, not entirely sure what to do, steps to the defendant’s table. He is dressed in jeans, a flannel shirt with dried paint spattered on the sleeves and work boots. He has no attorney.
“In a stern tone,Prince George’s County Circuit Judge Herman Dawson asks Rexrode whether he knows what is happening to him.
Rexrode, 50, nods his head.
“I want to see if I can get a continuance,” he says.
Dawson grins, as if amused by Rexrode’s use of the legal term. “A continuance? For what?”
“To stay,” Rexrode says.
“Rexrode is seeking a miracle really, in a place where there are precious few. He is in the county’s foreclosure court, asking Dawson to let him remain in the Hyattsville home he has owned since 1997 a little longer before the bank takes it and he is put out in the cold.”
This particular report is set in a courtroom in Prince George’s County, Md., where I live. It could have been set in any county in the larger Washington, D.C., region.
More on that below. The point to start with is that the report shows what happens not just to the poor, but to ordinary middle-class people, in this large and wealthy nation of ours, once they land in court.
One of the horrors of our legal system is one that has been too little reported: Judges in our courts are often inclined not to listen to parties who appear without an attorney. This might make sense in many legal cases, especially criminal matters, though it is awfully hard on the parties involved.
But telling Party A, or Party B, that he/she ‘should have gotten a lawyer’ is counter-intuitive to the point of abuse in some kinds of cases—particularly those cases where the party, whether plaintiff or defendant, is in court in the first place for financial reasons—in other words, for being cash-strapped.
From the Post:
“Courtrooms such as this across theWashingtonregion are the forums where banks ask judges to grant a default decree so they can take ownership of a home, and people such as Rexrode try to reverse or delay that decision.
They are almost always too late, and tragically ill-equipped to do so. Seated in Dawson’s nondescript courtroom, most share a look of puzzlement, fearful about their futures and uncertain of how the legal system works. They sound confused when the judge begins to pepper them with questions about dates of missed payments and when the bank began warning them about default. Few offer any evidence to support their claims.
“Have you talked to a lawyer?”Dawsonasks Rexrode.
“I didn’t know I needed one,” Rexrode responds.
Dawson, who often hears criminal and juvenile cases and has a reputation for toughness, shakes his head. Then he says something he will repeat over and over all day.
“You don’t come to court without a lawyer. This is the problem.”
That is a judge’s perspective. From the perspective of the ordinary citizen, one problem is landing in the courtroom of a judge who insists that everyone should get a lawyer.
At this point it is necessary to note that judges are not all alike. Some judges are better than others (demonstrating that the other judges could improve). Some judges, to their eternal credit, understand that people already drowning in a sea of debt are not in good position to pay a lawyer’s bills. Some judges appear to realize that most legal aid organizations—whether public entities or non-profits—provide lawyers only for proven indigents.
The unpalatable truth is that, if you are still in your house, you still have assets on the books—even if you are in arrears, even if you are facing foreclosure. And while you have assets on paper, forget about getting legal aid for free. Free legal aid has to go to the people who need it most urgently, in our system of legal triage—indigents on the street, mentally ill indigents who should never have ended up in the legal system to begin with, indigents facing the death penalty—whether or not their court-appointed defense counsel fell asleep during their capital trial.
Legal aid at reduced cost, at a sliding scale connected to income, is available only to a limited extent. The waiting lists of potential clients in any populous area far exceed the numbers of attorneys available to do pro bono work.
This particular newspaper article concerns people whose houses are being taken away from them by foreclosure. Sad to say, the basic situation is portrayed here with utmost realism: These people get dragged into court because they cannot pay their bills—and the first thing the judge says to them, with a certain obliviousness to the fact that lawyers cost money, is something along the lines of ‘You should have gotten a lawyer’ or ‘Where is your lawyer?’ or ‘Why didn’t you get a lawyer?’ And then the judge treats them like deadbeats for not hiring a lawyer—even while the legal system is punishing these hapless defendants for having run up bills. For having run up debt. For having spent money. For not having money left.
I can understand the impatience of a judge who—having put in years of hard work, first in law school and then in the legal system—has to put up with listening to uninformed people (of all classes/incomes) mangle legal language and degrade legal principles. I sincerely appreciate the occasional irritation of a judge faced with a party who clearly watched too much courtroom television at some point. More broadly, we can always find ways as spectators after the fact to divine what the out-of-money fellow citizen should have done, even if we did not do same ourselves: You should have lived with your parents until you got married, instead of renting an apartment. You should have postponed college until you could pay for it with cash. You should have waited to buy a car until you could pay for it outright, without financing.
Sure.
But even the most hard-nosed among us—that would be you, Mr. Will and Mr. Limbaugh, and by the way it’s not my country I’m blaming; it’s you—do not say, You should have waited to buy a house until you could pay for it outright. Lenders and the real estate agents themselves never, never, never took that line. (I bought my house in the go-go Eighties, and I still remember the puzzlement of the lender when I paid 20 percent of the price in down payment. His attitude was, since no one was forcing me to do so, why was I doing it?)
But back to our courtrooms.
Court
There are ironies in saying ‘You should have hired a lawyer’ to someone in court being foreclosed, or to someone in court declaring bankruptcy. But the Catch-22 problem is not confined to people in court for financial matters. It also faces people with difficulties in family court—not only in Prince George’s County but also in neighboring Montgomery County.
I watched firsthand, in one family court in Montgomery County, a Family Law Master who began every proceeding—child support, visitation, divorce, separation, every proceeding without exception—asking the party whether s/he had hired a lawyer. This in spite of large signs all over the courthouse, conspicuously saying that in Montgomery County, persons appearing pro se are (supposed to be) treated like those appearing with a lawyer.
Sure.
This particular Master took the same line even where the case was a simple matter of enforcing an agreement already settled by the courts, and even in cases so small that the amount of court award would be less than a lawyer’s bill.
In another courtroom devoted for the day to small family law cases, the judge entered—some minutes late—at exactly the same time as the attorney in the upcoming case. The opposing party, waiting in the courtroom, had no attorney, and lost a simple request that a previous court order, compelling the ex-husband to make a will to protect the minor in the case, be enforced.
In no way is this scene unusual. InMaryland, state and local judges are nominally elected by the people, but the judicial candidates are previously selected by—basically—other lawyers. A judge has every incentive to throw jobs to fellow attorneys.
Besides, attorneys are also hurting in the current economic downtown, particularly those in a small firm or in a solo practice who finished law school in debt, and they always need work.
Lawyers have to eat, too
However, hiring a lawyer, even if the client goes deeper into the hole to do so, is no guarantee of success:
“Terry Reeley of Bowie has an attorney. He speaks for her in court but is unable to convince Dawson that the bank failed to notify her about the default in a timely manner.
“”The judge didn’t want to hear anything,” Reeley says later. “We could see sitting there that he didn’t want to hear what people had to say. He was just tossing people and their lives out the door. Now I have no idea when the sheriffs will come and say ‘You’re out.’ ”
Reeley and her husband ran into financial problems after they lost their garage door business in October 2007. They fell behind on their mortgage, but she said she was unaware of the foreclosure and the sale of her four-bedroomCape Codhome until a notice was taped to her front door.
Dawson orders Reeley and her husband to pay $60.82 a day to the bank until they leave the property or are evicted. Reeley runs from the courtroom and falls into the arms of her best friend. “This isn’t fair,” she said, tears streaming down her cheeks. “They stole my house.”
As it happens, another Post article ran this morning on how Vice President Biden is going to head a task force on issues facing the middle class. This effort should be supported.
One issue is how inutile our courts too often are for protecting the middle class. There are some good places to start dealing with this broad and widespread problem.
1) Legal task forces. The legal profession could put up some of its money in a team effort, as trial lawyers have done on some other issues, to protect clients from attorneys who do not do the job they were hired to do.
2) Subsidized legal aid. Competent, qualified legal aid—could be subsidized for every individual in foreclosure for financial reasons, with some conditions. Many lawyers, as stated above, need work. Surely the talent could be found.
3) Legal aid for child support. Legal help could be subsidized for custodial parents trying to stay in the middle class with a little help from child support.
4) Better child-support legislation. Legislation might help more in getting the non-custodial parent to pay part of the minor’s educational expenses. (In Maryland, financial support for the minor ends when the minor turns eighteen; thus the non-custodial parent is free to wash his hands of college expenses. This, btw, is an incentive for divorce/family abandonment in hard times.)
5) Better oversight on foreclosures. Legislation could require any bank or other lender attempting to foreclose to meet certain conditions including subjecting itself to careful review of its lending practices, executive compensation, and investment practices.
Et cetera.
Scooter Libby Was Not Arrested
Scooter Libby Was Not Arrested —
Fox News Sunday interview with Dick Cheney: Dec 21, 2008, from
transcript: