And justice for all . . .

Amanda Knox may be guilty, or she may not, but at least she has had the opportunity to defend herself in an Italian court of law. The nonstop coverage of her case must reflect considerable interest among viewers in her fate, and tonight’s wrap-up made reference to the ‘judgment’ the Italian system of justice is facing along with Ms Knox given the criticism of its investigative and procedural performance in the case.

Curious, then, that a similar perspective on the U.S. counterpart continues to shine by its absence. There’s a new documentary film here in New York on the case of Omar Khadr, the 15-year-old Canadian picked up in Afghanistan in 2001 and accused of killing a soldier. Aside from the obvious detail that Afghanistan was a theatre of war in which killing is known to occur, we have since learned that this child was tortured by U.S. troops until he confessed and then shipped to the dungeons of Guantánamo where a stream of inquisitors tried to get him to reiterate his confession on videotape—without success.

The film, entitled ‘You Don’t Like the Truth’, is comprised mostly of excerpts from this chilling exercise in police interrogation techniques of a defenseless (and of course lawyerless) minor. Despite New York’s huge film scene where premières with directors present for Q&A are well attended, the crowd at Film Forum was measly. Indeed, the movie is not easy to watch, but then again it must have been a good deal more difficult to live through for Khadr, now in his 20s and still in prison although he’s due to be shipped to Canada for more years of incarceration next month.

What strikes me in observing these two very different legal proceedings with two completely different audiences is the facile racism of the double standards applied: Amanda, the white American girl, should be given a fair shot; Omar, the Muslim kid on a prayer mat, can rot in the Cuban sun because—as the Canadian interrogator says explicitly—an American soldier is dead. It’s pretty clear by the end of the picture that Omar couldn’t have tossed the deadly grenade because pictures from the scene, released to his lawyers years later, show him to be half-dead at the time, face down in a pile of rubble. But the point is not the guilt or innocence of a given prisoner, which does not really concern the jailers, nor their collaborators, nor I do not hesitate to add, us. It’s far simpler than that: the whole exercise is about revenge. Americans got killed on 9/11; Americans got killed in the Afghan firefight; someone has to pay. You’ll do.

A wonderful musical played on Broadway last year about the notorious 1930s Scottsboro Boys case, in which black men riding a freight train were accused of rape by a white woman, which of course in Alabama meant they were guilty or might as well be. Their obviously rigged trials dragged on for years, creating a cause celèbre and a nationwide solidarity movement that kept winning appeals and new trials, which were then rigged again. Eventually, the accused were offered their freedom, but only if they confessed. One refused and died in jail. Even seven decades later the case remains so sensitive that the spectacular production didn’t really catch fire even in liberal New York, and when the cast appeared on the Emmy awards show, they were reduced to performing a jolly-Negro number from Act I completely devoid of any of the play’s discomfiting content.

I think the Emmys producers knew intuitively that Americans today suffer from a gnawing discomfort about the operations of our legal apparatus, even if we remain only vaguely conscious of our anxiety. When political concerns trump the rule of law, the guilt or innocence of individual citizens fades into insignificance. This is a universal phenomenon that no legal system probably ever entirely escapes, but it’s unsettling to realize that the laws we think exist to protect us from unfair treatment, and often do, cannot withstand popular fury or even certain mundane bureaucratic pressures. Take the demented child-molestation-in-nursery-schools witchhunts of the ‘70s and ‘80s when suddenly fundamentalist Christians and liberal feminists alike were discovering anal sex orgies in daycare centers where they in fact had never occurred. Popular passions were assuaged, and many innocent lives were destroyed.

And yet the law is a wonderful thing. Americans, despite our weakness and complicity with the steady deterioration of our citizenship, also intuitively believe in suspects being read their Miranda rights and getting a chance to defend themselves in court. After all, we’ve grown up watching Law & Order, NCIS, CSI and before that The Defenders, Perry Mason and another dozen shows I can’t think of. We love courtroom drama, and we sense that the laborious procedures in place there set a minimum bar for the police and prosecutorial powers that could easily run roughshod over the rest of us as occurs in many countries around the world. It’s taken us at least 500 years to split the roles of judge, jury and executioner so that the high and mighty and their police agents couldn’t peremptorily subject us to the terror of impunity. Now, they say that ‘terror’ is the reason they should get all those roles back.

There is much more to say about the erosion of our precious judicial guarantees that Obama has now endorsed and aggravated. But today’s development merits a quick notice: it is now officially permitted for the president to determine that a U.S. citizen is an enemy of the state and can be targeted for liquidation with a remote-controlled drone. The White House insists Anwar al-Awlaki was guilty of terrorist acts but saw no need to charge him with any before carrying out extra-judicial murder in a foreign country. How long will it be before we discover that it can also be performed right here at home?

Requiem for a town

This is the front door of the house in Galion, Ohio, where I grew up. The papers on the front door are foreclosure notices and other legal information from Freddie Mac, apparently the owner of the mortgage note (no doubt collateralized and resold for quick profit to take advantage of the government guarantee). I was told by an old classmate at the reunion that I probably could pick up the property for less than my parents paid for it when we moved there in 1955.

Galion was once a booming industrial town made prosperous originally by its location at the intersection of the old Pennsylvania and Erie-Lackawanna railroad lines. High school graduates from my era could go get a job at the Perfection Auto Body plant, North Electric, Galion Iron Works, Fisher Body in nearby Crestline, Pittsburgh Plate Glass, two overcoat factories and a couple of steel grave vault makers. If you didn’t like that job, you quit and got another one. Now those factories are ruins, and the working class neighborhoods that surround them are wrecks. A local website says 700 houses in the town sit empty.

My only surprise was hearing that crystal meth labs are still rare. However, my old classmates say heroin is big.

So this is what a few decades of deregulation and ‘free trade’ have done to the industrial heartland, thanks to the joint efforts of Democratic and Republican regimes alike. In my early adult years the jobs in Galion started to move south to the anti-union ‘right to work’ states. North Electric, for example, shipped its production to Tennessee.

Not content with moving operations around the U.S. to de-unionize their workforces and save on wages and benefits, the companies soon discovered the marvelous advantages to be found in corrupt, repressive regimes overseas that could provide limitless streams of docile, powerless workers, China being the classic example. How ironic after our McCarthyite 1950s childhoods to find it wasn’t reds under beds that threatened our country but the business elites who would sell out the country to communism.

As many observers more knowledgeable than I have pointed out, despite all the quacking and howling about getting the nasty state out of economic affairs, the United States does have an industrial policy. That policy for decades has been to dismantle domestic manufacturing and globalize it so that the large corporations can shift a greater percentage of earnings to profits and pay out less to workers. Reagan, Bush, Clinton and the rest are in full agreement on this point.

If we had had a worker- or union-based political party with a radical bent, perhaps the industrial transformation, were it really necessary, would have been resisted so that the masters of our universe were forced to do it in a less brutal way. Perhaps transitional planning could have occurred in which communities such as Galion could have acquired the tools to adapt and grow in new directions to take up the slack created by the waning of its industrial golden age.

Instead, its inhabitants were thrown willy-nilly into their own future to sink or swim as they might. Many thousands moved on.

Instructions issued for U.S. Middle East policy

Smoke and Mirrors

We can now see the outlines of the dish we will be served for the next 14 months of the Great Distraction known as presidential elections: Obama will be accused, by the people he did everything to please, of doing everything he should have done but didn’t.

Take the accusation from the neo-Marlboro Man, Rick Perry, that Obama is guilty of ‘appeasement’ and hostility to Israel. (The ‘appeasement’ line is a direct reference to Britain’s disastrous handling of Adolf Hitler in the run-up to World War 2—always a popular meme with Zionist absolutists.) The criticism is bizarre given Obama and Hillary C’s acquiescence to continued settlement building and three years of enabling of Israeli intransigence and refusal to offer anything on Palestine. But Obama dared to suggest the 1967 borders as the basis for a permanent settlement, and he’s now cast as Neville Chamberlain handing over Czechoslovakia to the Nazis.

Meanwhile on the domestic front, Obama has rolled out his election-year populism by calling for a ‘millionaires tax’, which has zero chance of becoming law but may sound plausible to some of his Democratic base. That makes him guilty of ‘class war’ to Madame Bachmann and the party of the rich when in fact he has done a far better job than they could have dreamed of protecting the fabulously, obscenely and criminally wealthy financial sector.

All of which augurs a huge national yawn as we prepare for a full year of even more deeply debased political non-debate. But what else could we expect of embarrassing television spectacles like the CNN ‘Dancing with the Pols’ show last week purporting to be a serious discussion of our future? Why don’t we just ask Alec Tribec to stand the candidates behind the little Jeopardy boxes with smiley-face name tags (‘Newt!’, ‘Ron!’, ‘Mitch!’) and award the presidency to whomever can provide the best question for the answer, ‘Mental state characterized by lack of empathy and an inflated sense of self-importance’?

Legalized prostitution at CBS

CBS Evening News just ran a story about the explosion in prescriptions of the morphine-like painkiller Oxycontin—something like 3 billion doses per year (could that possibly be?)—much of it diverted to illicit use. The curious aspect of the report, which featured a Michael Moore-ish confrontation with a suspect pharmacist in Florida, was that there was not ONE mention of the company that produces this drug now being siphoned off in vast quantities to the contraband market.

We’re particularly aware of pharmaceutical opiates here in New York after the gruesome and terrifying pharmacy massacre that occurred on Long Island this past June in which a crazed addict mowed down two druggists and two unlucky bystanders during a robbery. The bizarrely casual mayhem gave us a clue to the dangers of this new mass addiction, one that hasn’t fully penetrated pop culture just yet.

A fellow I met a while back who works in drug counseling in an upstate New York city told me that addiction to pharmaceutical painkillers is the number one problem they see today. Once the addicted run out of pharmacy options, they then turn to street heroin buys—quite a reversal from the classic drug scenes of yesteryear.

For the record Oxycontin is produced Purdue Pharma of Stamford, Connecticut. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about Purdue’s Olympic-level figure skating along the edges of legality:

In May 2007 Purdue Pharma agreed to pay $19.5 million in fines relating to aggressive off-label marketing practices of OxyContin in 26 states and the District of Columbia. In specific, the company encouraged dosing more frequent than the recommended interval of 12 hours and did not fully disclose the risk of hazardous or harmful use.

Later in May 2007 Purdue Pharma and three of its top executives pleaded guilty in a Virginia federal court to charges that they misbranded OxyContin by representing it to have ‘less euphoric effect and less abuse potential’ than it actually has and by claiming that people taking the drug at low doses could stop taking it suddenly without symptoms of withdrawal. The FDA had not approved these claims. The company and the executives were to pay $634 million in fines for felony and misdemeanor misbranding.

In October 2007 officials in Kentucky filed a lawsuit against Purdue Pharma for misleading health care providers and consumers ‘regarding the appropriate uses, risks and safety of OxyContin’; as of mid-2008, however, the case had been ‘consolidated with other lawsuits into a single multi-litigation suit’ in a federal court in New York.

A lone pharmacist in a pathetic strip mall with a dubious prescribing history is an easy target for big, bad TV guys. But given the relevance of the producer company’s aggressive promotion of its drug and the increasing social cost of this vast web of over-prescription, wouldn’t it have been appropriate for the CBS ‘reporter’ to have unleashed his cameras on the top executives of Purdue also? Could the huge amount of televised drug-pushing, er, advertising, which earns large sums of money for CBS’s owners, have anything to do with this glaring omission?

Teeter-totter

Bipeds ruling nations are not, generally speaking, a healthy set of specimens, but in some periods of history the loonies have to dissemble. That doesn’t seem to be the case any more, and it makes the world is a more dangerous place than usual. All the talk this week is about banking crises and chronic unemployment. Let’s not forget war.

The teetering French banks, just downgraded this morning by one of the corrupt rating agencies, have been labeled ‘Credit-Anstalt 2.0’ by some wags. That was the name of the Austrian bank whose collapse marked the real start of the Great Depression, foreshadowed but not really caused by the 1929 stock crash. A Euro functionary sounded quite desperate when sounding alarms this morning about the dangers to the whole EU project.

Meanwhile, tectonic shifts are occurring in the Middle East as Turkish PM Erdogan is visiting revolutionary Egypt to openly forge an anti-Israel bloc. A Guardian correspondent wrote:

Erdogan arrived in the country accompanied by an army of 200 Turkish businessmen and has announced plans to increase investment and establish a formal strategic co-operation council between the two nations. With Egypt’s military junta on the back foot over recent pro-change protests and the breaching of the Israeli embassy during a protest in Cairo last week, this trip has come at a particularly sensitive time.

The report also called Erdogan a ‘media star’ as thousands of Egyptians cheered his arrival at the Cairo airport. ‘With his strong rhetoric on Turkish-Arab unity, high-profile satellite TV chatshow appearances and photogenic walkabouts in the capital—including an impromptu and warm meeting with street protesters campaigning for regime change in Syria and Yemen—Erdogan did little to hide his intention of positioning Turkey into a leadership role at the heart of the Arab spring’.

In case no one has noticed, Israeli leaders are not characterized by sober moderation. They operate from a permanent siege mentality even when on a winning streak; now, by alienating everyone, they’ve managed to give themselves real motive for concern.

How hard would it have been for the Israelis to apologize for killing civilians aboard the Turkish aid ship? For that matter, why not welcome Palestinian statehood at the UN and be done with it? Instead, the nutcase and openly racist Israeli foreign minister indulges in cheap, sophomoric insults with the result that the long-term alliance with Turkey is perhaps mortally wounded.

But apologies from the die-hards in Tel Aviv are as likely as polite debate at Fox News. These reactionary elements have been so empowered for so long and have intimidated and browbeaten their adversaries into such cowed defensiveness that they are no longer capable of behaving in their own best interests. This, IMHO, is a feature of our age, and an ominous one—we cannot expect our leaders to pursue even their own goals in a rational fashion.

The Israelis must be particularly edgy given that their only real ally in the world—us—is overstretched and weakened by domestic strife, including an economy that refuses to jump-start. So as things deteriorate on a variety of fronts simultaneously, the threat of sudden, game-changing reactions rises sharply.

On that note I observe that the inimitable Dick Cheney, instead of having to spend his time working with his lawyers to defend himself from the charges of crimes against humanity that he merits, is once again stirring the pot for the attack on Iran that he couldn’t convince W to authorize when they were in office.

Cheney phrases this war-mongering as a mere belief that Israel ‘would’ bomb Iran if the former felt threatened but then quickly adds that Iran is in fact ‘an existential threat’. Case closed.

It goes without saying that a little pre-electoral war-making never did any politician any harm—especially if it can be dressed up as victory. Is there any evidence that Obama would hesitate to go this route? I see none.

Insomniac early warning

Up at 3 a.m. reading the European papers online. Will the next banking crisis start today? Greek bailout deal collapsing. . . French banks to get a downgrade. . . Eurozone leaders have no strategy. . . markets signaling another big thumping. . . world economies in the toilet. . . .