We should expect people to do the right thing, even when the law doesn't explicitly spell out the right thing. If the executor of an estate takes money for himself, even if that action isn't specifically banned under the state's relevant laws, most people would consider that not only theft but also especially foul theft given the circumstances. Similarly when society allocates money for the feeding and care of those who are incarcerated, most of us would think it particularly wicked for someone to steal that money for his own use. In Alabama, however they do things differently. It's considered smart, not corrupt, for sheriffs to take state, federal and municipal tax funds meant to feed prisoners and use the money for personal purposes. Sheriff Todd Entrekin of Etowah County, Alabama, of whom it must be said does not look as if he has missed too many meals, argues that Alabama law allowed him to pocket more than $750,000 in tax dollars earmarked for prisoner food and instead use the money to eat millions of barbecued pigs feet to purchase numerous homes for his wife and himself.
In September, Etowah County Sheriff Todd Entrekin and his wife Karen purchased an orange four-bedroom house with an in-ground pool and canal access in an upscale section of Orange Beach for $740,000. To finance the purchase, Entrekin got a $592,000 mortgage from Peoples Bank of Alabama, according to public real estate records. The home is one of several properties with a total assessed value of more than $1.7 million that the couple own together or separately in Etowah and Baldwin counties.
Some Etowah County residents question how a county sheriff making a five-figure annual salary can afford to own multiple houses, including one worth nearly three-quarters of a million dollars.
If I stood in front of an audience which had a sizable proportion of Jewish Americans and claimed (even tongue in cheek) that my political opponent would have them "back in death camps" some people might consider that a desperate attempt for votes and something of a slanderous low blow. I might even get a verbal brush back from the ADL or AIPAC chiding me for lightly using such metaphors. But Vice-President Joe Biden is not a person who is worried about such things. In Danville, VA , a city that is roughly half black and happens to have been the final capital of the Confederacy, and in front of an audience which NBC News stated was representative of the city, Vice-President Biden spoke dismissively of Republican plans to change Wall Street regulation.
Vice President Joe Biden said Tuesday that a Republican-led effort to loosen new regulations on Wall Street would put voters "back in chains." "Romney wants to, he said in the first 100 days, he's gonna let the big banks again write their own rules," Biden said of the GOP nominee's proposals to roll back the Obama administration's financial reforms. "'Unchain Wall Street!'" Lowering his voice, Biden added, "They're going to put you all back in chains."
Now of course the Administration in the person of one Stephanie Cutter, Obama deputy campaign manager, strongly defended Vice-President Biden's statements.
We have no problem with those comments," said Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter on MSNBC's "Andrea Mitchell Reports." Pressed on whether President Obama himself agrees with those comments, Cutter said the full context of the remarks was important. "[Obama] probably agrees with Joe Biden's sentiments," Cutter said. "He's using a metaphor to talk about what's going to happen."
Ok. Fair enough. I think it's a bit odd to be using language that could be interpreted as fear mongering of a return to SLAVERY because of different ideas about Wall Street regulation but there you are. Perhaps leaving Wall Street to its own devices, free from regulation or the long arm of the criminal law really is akin to putting Americans -especially Black Americans - back in chains. So maybe I should thank Vice-President Joe Biden for having the courage and the commitment to stand up and say negative things about his political rivals, the Republicans. I mean it must take a lot of moxie to talk bad about your rivals. Not everyone has the guts to criticize people on the other side politically. As Biden implied, maybe those evil Republicans really do want to protect big banks and their executives from justice and not put those dastardly devils, those rascally reprobates, those piggish parasites into prison where they so richly deserve to be.
There's just one problem with Biden's self-serving narrative of the Administration being the one that wants to go after Wall Street while the Republicans want to coddle and protect Wall Street.
It's not true.
In news which was ignored by too many people the Justice Department recently announced that it would not be prosecuting Goldman Sachs or anyof its employees for financial wrongdoing arising out of the 2008 financial crisis. This would be the same Goldman Sachs that was selling crappy bundled mortgage backed securities to clients and telling them they were A+ rated while describing them as crap in internal documents. This would be the same Goldman Sachs that journalist Matt Taibbi famously described as a vampire squid. for its centrality to the financial rot at the heart of American finance. And this would be the same Justice Department that is headed by Eric Holder, whose former law firm has Goldman Sachs as a client and whose boss, the President, received over $1 million in campaign contributions from Goldman Sachs in 2008 alone. The relative lack of engagement in going after systematic misdeeds by financial institutions has been noticed.
The problem isn't a shortage of scandalous stories. We've seen a lot of those. What we haven't seen, at least here in the United States, is a single indictment of a senior Wall Street banker from the United States Department of Justice. And that's what has these political insiders concerned.
Questions raised
A growing number of people are privately expressing concern at the Justice Department's long-standing pattern of inactivity, obfuscation and obstruction. Mr. Holder's past as a highly-paid lawyer for a top Wall Street firm, Covington and Burling, is being discussed more openly among insiders. Covington & Burling was the law firm which devised the MERS shell corporation that has since been implicated in many cases of mortgage and foreclosure fraud. Wells Fargo has already been implicated in the laundering of money for the Mexican drug cartels that have murdered as many as sixty thousand people, as well as having been found to have engaged in some of the most egregious borrower fraud. Now, as attorney Field notes, it's even illegally closing the bank accounts of unfriendly bloggers to extract revenge.
Despite its massive rap sheet, which includes investor fraud and the bribing of Alabama officials, and despite the SEC investigation of its "London whale" debacle, JPMorgan Chase is is defying a subpoena in California and refusing to turn its emails over to a judge. It's charged with the same kind of criminal activity that was behind the Enron scandal: manipulating energy markets. And despite Jamie Dimon's suggestion that the head of the "London whale's" group would be forced to return her ill-gotten millions, she was allowed to resign and keep the money. There's no sign that a criminal investigation of this affair is underway, despite Dimon's own admission that laws may have been broken.
In short, Biden is in a very flimsy glass house when it comes to throwing stones about who's gonna be tough on Wall Street. Very flimsy indeed. So if Biden wants to make the argument that Romney and Ryan are going to put Americans "back in chains" based on their love of Wall Street I would ask Biden when did he or Obama ever take the chains off? Is Biden really going to argue that I should vote for him because the Republicans won't prosecute Wall Street either? O-kay.
The problem as I see it is that the political establishment and the financial establishment are far too closely intertwined. When you can throw millions at a candidate, they're going to listen to what you say and return your phone calls. And when there is a revolving door between government and business, there should be no surprise that some of the people in government who are supposed to be regulating or even prosecuting business, occasionally need reminders of what their job description really is.
The Republicans, who have spent the past four years calling President Obama everything but a child of God, certainly do not have any room for sanctimonious outrage over Biden's remarks. But just because their hands are dirty doesn't mean that Biden's (and Obama's) hands are clean. There's some other analysis I want to get into about fear mongering, black people, progressives and the fall election but that will have to wait for a later post. Suffice it to say for now that no I don't believe that the world as we know it will come to an end if the "wrong" man should win.
What's your take?
Were Biden's comments appropriate?
Are the Republicans misconstruing them? Is this minor league nonsense?
Is there any difference between the two parties and their devotion to capital?
When the shooting in Aurora occurred a lot of people (especially NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg) ran to the nearest microphone or blog and spoke or wrote with heartfelt indignation of their beliefs that no one needed an "assault rifle" and such things were only good for killing mass numbers of people, only the military or police should have "assault rifles" or large capacity magazines, and that those people who supported the right to own "assault rifles" had blood on their hands and so forth and so on. These people gingerly ignored the fact that the overwhelming majority of homicides carried out with guns are done with handguns, not rifles of any kind. These people also neglected to notice the inconvenient detail that the Founders did not want an unarmed populace and an armed to the teeth military and police. Now we just had the neo-nazi nut in Wisconsin who appears to have used a legally acquired handgun with normal capacity magazines to kill six people and wound four. The man was being monitored by certain private groups that keep an eye on noticeable hateful individuals mostly of the right-wing variety. There is of course a legitimate question, given how the right reacts to mass murders carried out by non-whites, if whiteness as a concept needs to have the same criticism directed at it as other nationalist or racially based identities. As the United States continues to change demographically will there be other such incidents? I don't think so but you never know...
‘‘The U.S. government will have to take a comprehensive look at this kind of tendency which certainly is not going to bring credit to the United States of America,’’ he said.
I'm not so sure that a country which regularly persecutes Muslims and Christians and has frequent mass outbursts of horrific violence directed at those groups has any room to lecture the United States about "culture" but whatever. India's murder rate is comparable to that of the United States and the actual number of people killed is about three times higher than in the United States. And for the most part missionaries in the US don't have to worry about being burned alive by people of different religions. People in the United States don't often become so livid that a Jehovah's Witness knocked on their door, that they gather a whole bunch of friends and start pogroms against Jehovah's Witnesses. But you know how it is, everybody thinks their own stuff doesn't stink. As a NYT column cogently pointed out we simply do not live in a society that allows punishment or incarceration for bad thoughts. With only a few exceptions, you can't incarcerate people for what they might do. Page had the freedom to be a Nazi and a white supremacist. He had the freedom to think that non-whites were inferior. He even had the freedom to call for unspecified action. It's only when you either take action or make a specific threat or plan of action that the authorities can legally intervene. There are of course many sting operations that the government carries out against groups it considers to be fringe or dangerous but one man's legally justified sting operation is another man's example of an out of control Leviathan government determined to criminalize political dissent and crush opposition by fair means or foul. And even in the sting operation you usually have to DO something illegal. As the NYT column points out, there are a lot of things to take into account when we start to consider ways to prevent crime. These aren't easy questions to address. No, not by any means.
The perfect prevention of crime asks us to consider exactly how far individual freedom extends. Does freedom include a “right” to drive drunk, for instance? It is hard to imagine that it does. But what if the government were to add a drug to the water supply that suppressed antisocial urges and thereby reduced the murder rate? This would seem like an obvious violation of our freedom. We need a clear method of distinguishing such cases.
One way is to keep in mind the distinction between thoughts and actions. A traditional rule in criminal law holds that there can be no crime unless the defendant committed some act: mere thoughts, no matter how horrific, are not sufficient. Thoughts cannot be regulated; everyone has a right to think what they wish without government intrusion.
As far as the gun, again it is important to point out that the gun was purchased legally. It is not illegal to be a tattooed Nazi and own guns. You can purchase hate literature and associate, date, marry or reproduce with someone who feels the same way that you do. You can teach your children racial hatred. You can spread racial hatred through your books, audio tapes, websites, speeches, music and radio or television shows. You can unabashedly call for expulsion and/or genocide of people who don't look like you. That is what freedom means. It's not just about the Second Amendment. It's about the entire Bill of Rights, which taken in whole, effectively indicates that you have the right to think what you want, say what you want and must be left alone by government except under very particular circumstances. If you're comfortable with the idea of getting rid of the right to bear arms are you also comfortable with the idea of government prior restraint on "bad" ideas? Or is that an assault on your freedom? I may not think anyone "needs" to listen to hate music. Do you want me deciding what hate music is? What test to purchase a gun could you devise that Page would fail and that other people would pass? Ironically this racist garbage was a Stevie Ray Vaughn fan. Stevie Ray Vaughn was a white man who openly admitted his love for black music, performed with black musicians and who created music that spoke of peace, love and brotherhood. How does a hate rock performer idolize such a man? Again, is there necessarily any music association test we could create that would be able to predict Page's actions? The "cost" of this freedom, bluntly, is that some people will use it for evil. There is no way to prevent this without tearing up the entire Constitution and starting anew with a radically different understanding of the proper relationship between the state and the individual. Maybe we should do that. I don't think we should. Even a much more interventionist and restrictive government can not prevent people from doing ill. So you may not like to hear that but unless you want to live in a A Clockwork Orange type of society, in a very real way evil is the price of freedom. I'm willing to pay that price. We can't un-bite the apple. Our eldil is bent and that is that.
What's your take?
Was there any way this massacre could have been prevented?
Should hate speech be outlawed? Should the First Amendment be repealed?
Should preventive detention be widely used?
Should the federal government infiltrate and destroy fringe groups?
Imagine that you (or a man you love) were wrongly accused of raping someone. You're arrested, fingerprinted and thrown into jail to await formal charges. Now in the 24 hours while you're familiarizing yourself with jailhouse protocol over telephone usage, how to avoid unwanted advances, which gang it would be proper for someone of your race and ethnicity to join, when not to look into another prisoner's eyes, the importance of responding promptly to guard commands and other important orientation action items, the victim admits to the police and prosecutors that she made it all up and actually signs a document stating so. Well that's lucky for you yes? You won't have to stay a minute more in jail and perhaps you can see about getting everything expunged from your record. No harm no foul. These things happen and maybe you and the arresting officers can have a beer summit at the White House some day. But wait, now imagine that the prosecutor decides to go ahead with charges anyway because either they think the supposed victim is lying or because they don't like you very much or maybe they figure they need to keep their conviction rates high and you look like an easy win. And in addition they don't tell you or your attorney that the victim lied. And they keep you in jail for a year... Such things couldn't happen in this country could they?
But sadly of course they do.
A Brooklyn man spent nearly a year behind bars on charges he raped an Orthodox Jewish woman — even though she recanted her accusation a day after making it. Darrell Dula, 25, was released Tuesday and will likely have the case against him dropped after being in jail since June 28, 2011. “I feel good. Thank God,” Dula told the Daily News Tuesday night as he played with his 3-year-old son for the first time in a year in front of his Crown Heights home.“I’m glad to be home with my family,” he said. “I’m still in shock. I’m traumatized. It wasn’t a good experience. They took me away on my son’s birthday. It was heartbreaking.” The stunning turn of events came after Brooklyn prosecutors turned over a newly discovered statement that Dula’s 22-year-old accuser made to cops in which she says he never raped her. The alleged victim made a complaint to police on March 31, 2010, accusing Dula and his pal Damien Crooks, 32, of being part of a crew who raped, beat and pimped her out since age 13. A day later, the woman told detectives she was a hooker for five years and made up the rape allegation, records show. “I once again asked [her] if she was raped,” a detective wrote in a police report after the interview. “She told me ‘no’ and stated to me, ‘Can’t a ho change her ways?’” The woman also signed a recantation, but the case proceeded and in spring 2011, a grand jury voted to indict Dula, Crooks and two others who were allegedly part of the crew.
And of course the prosecutor who directly handled the case, Abbie Greenberger, is now blaming her bosses for the situation. I guess that makes sense. No one wants to be the scapegoat. I understand and feel the same way. Of course when I mess up no one spends a year in jail....
Greenberger said she found inconsistencies in the 22-year-old accuser’s account, but couldn’t convince her boss there was a problem. “When I brought the inconsistencies to Lauren Hersh (chief of the sex-trafficking unit at the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office), I was told that I didn’t do my job right and that I’m trying to dismiss the case and that I should work harder,” Greenberger told the Daily News.
See the problem here believe it or not isn't just that the victim lied, although that is bad enough and she ought to face the same criminal penalties that the man faced. No the REAL problem (and perhaps Old Guru and/or The Janitor can weigh in on this) is that the prosecutor did not disclose this information to the defense attorney and/or judge. I'm no lawyer but I kind of thought that the prosecutor had a duty to do justice, not just win a conviction. Maybe not.
Now why did the prosecutor continue with this farce? Could it have been that the District Attorney has gotten a little too cozy with certain elements within the local Orthodox Jewish community? Could the DA have believed the so-called victim was telling the truth before she recanted? Could the DA have believed this fellow was better off in jail, regardless of whether or not he actually committed this crime? Could the DA have been responding to a feminist constituency that doesn't always seem to understand that women are no more moral than men and are just as capable of mendacity? I don't know. All I know is that I would like to have believed that if I were wrongfully accused and the police and prosecutors knew that then they would take the necessary steps to stop the machinery of justice from moving forward and throw that bad boy in reverse, to right before the time when they told me "You're under arrest". But honestly I knew that was an unreal expectation even before I read this story. All it takes is being in the wrong place at the wrong time and your life can suddenly change. I don't have tens of thousands of dollars sitting around for bail or attorneys. How do we fix this? My ideas are pretty simple.
Hold prosecutors and police personally and criminally responsible when they lie or hide evidence. They do a necessary if often unpleasant job. But they should not be above the law or get a free pass for this sort of thing.
When someone lies about rape and it can be proven as a lie, send them to prison for the same amount of time that the assailant would have served.
Stop with the fiction that women never lie about things. They do. The entire point of the adversarial justice system is to hopefully let the truth come out and in such a way that someone is not convicted of a crime without evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. This requires a defense attorney that is going to get after the accuser.
Stop hiding the victim's (or in this case liar's) name from the public. Perhaps if more people had been aware of who this woman was someone might have come forward earlier. Rape is a horrible crime and should be punished most severely. But in order to do that we must ensure we're punishing the right people. That's why we need as much transparency as possible within the system.
