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The Rule of Law Enforcement |
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Wednesday, 03 February 2016 14:51 |
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Brown writes: "There's more to prison life than just sitting around despising the New York Times."
Inmates. (illustration: Paul Davis/The Intercept)
The Rule of Law Enforcement
By Barrett Brown, The Intercept
03 February 16
 fter having spent the prior six months in a fruitless cycle of retaliation and counter-retaliation and counter-counter-retaliation with the administration of the Federal Correctional Institution at Fort Worth, where I managed to do about half of my time in the hole before finally getting kicked out altogether, I was delighted to arrive here at FCI Three Rivers, a medium security prison subject to occasional outbreaks of gang warfare that also happens to be quite a lot of fun. And though one’s first few days at a new prison are always given over largely to errands and social obligations, I did manage to get in some much-needed reading time when someone lent me a copy of Five Families, a history of the American mafia by the veteran New York Times crime reporter Selwyn Raab. I’ve never had much interest in organized crime of the non-governmental sort, but ever since 2009 when I read through the bulk of Thomas Friedman’s past columns in the course of researching a book on the subject of incompetence, I’ve been fascinated by the extent to which a fellow can be a bit of a dummy, with questionable writing abilities and a penchant for making demonstrably erroneous attacks on others, and still find regular employment with the nation’s most prestigious newspaper (though in fairness to the Times, they did eventually get rid of William Kristol).
I’m afraid I gave up on reading Five Families straight through after about the halfway mark, by which point it had become clear that Raab, contrary to all decency, was going to continue using the phrase “law-enforcement” thusly, with the unwarranted hyphen, something that would have been more tolerable did the term not necessarily appear every few pages due to the nature of the subject matter, often in the company of such other improprieties as “civil-rights,” “public-relations,” “stolen-car rings,” or “loan-shark,” and to such an extent that one could be forgiven for suspecting that Raab himself, for all his tough talk on crime, is in fact some sort of illicit hyphen smuggler.
Luckily, this is the sort of book from which one can extract the most telling instances of Gray Lady-caliber foolishness just by skimming around. At some point Raab seems to decide that the writers of The Sopranos must be punished for humanizing the mafia in the course of writing a drama about human beings who are in the mafia. And so, more in sadness than in anger, but more in confusion than either, he set out to debunk the show’s fictional plotline by way of his own fictional journalistic expertise: “Genuine capos and wiseguys would never emulate Tony’s behavior. … No top-tier mobster would last long if he behaved like Tony Soprano, who defies basic Mafioso caution by exposing himself as a ripe target, to be easily mowed down by rivals. He drives without a bodyguard; sips espresso in daylight at a sidewalk café.” This comes just a few chapters after we’re told the following about a real-life top-tier mobster: “Shunning bodyguards and bullet-proof limousines, the sixty-six-year-old godfather met with his Mafia associates in restaurants and travelled about Manhattan in taxis like any ordinary businessman.”
To his credit, Raab did manage to refrain from rendering this last bit as “ordinary-businessman,” which is just extraordinary, so we’ll give him another try: “Sex and psychiatry are prominent in The Sopranos’ story line. Confiding in a psychiatrist, however, would be a radioactive mistake for a boss or capo, who can never display symptoms of weakness or mental instability.” Naturally Raab has already forgotten having written the following about mafia boss Frank Costello: “Striving for inner peace while hovering between criminal affiliates and respected society, Costello tried psychoanalysis.”
Even had the author not been so sporting as to provide us with comically perfect counterexamples by which to disprove his various inane objections, one could have also pointed out that Tony Soprano’s decision to see a psychiatrist does in fact prove to be a “mistake” insomuch as that it directly leads to a rupture in his organization culminating in a botched assassination attempt in the very first season, so this objection wouldn’t have made any sense even had it gotten past that crucial directly-contradicted-by-your-own-fucking-book hurdle that seems to be giving Raab so much trouble. Now take a moment to reflect on the fact that this is the guy the New York Times assigned to report on one of the nation’s most complex and insidious criminal conspiracies — this plodding hyphen addict who cannot seem to follow a television show or even his own manuscript. One supposes that there is some alternate universe in which this might be considered a problem and where Ross Douthat manages a furniture store and everyone knows his place.
But there's more to prison life than just sitting around despising the New York Times. A week after arrival at Three Rivers, we new inmates were summoned to an “Admissions and Orientation” seminar in which the various department heads each speak for a few minutes about institutional policy. I’d attended one of these back at Fort Worth; usually the highlight is a short video clip of Bureau of Prisons Director Charles Samuels, who gives a little talk. No one knows what the talk is about, as whoever’s nephew was put in charge of producing the video has talked Samuels into pausing every couple of sentences to shift position and look into the other camera, just like the newscasters, something that the fellow can manage only with the most hilarious awkwardness, and so it proves impossible to follow what he’s actually saying — which is a shame, as it’s almost certainly something very non-formulaic and true.
Today, however, the chief attraction was to be our warden, Norbal Vazquez, a longtime BOP functionary from Puerto Rico who is proverbial for his deranged monologues as well as for being regarded with great contempt by staff and inmates alike. Here are some actual quotes from his exquisitely demented half-hour orientation talk, during which he waddled back and forth, wagging his finger in admonishment when appropriate and sometimes when not:
On his own qualifications for the job: “I am here because I earned it!”
On the assistant wardens upon whom lesser wardens depend: “I do not need them!”
On his inspiring biography: “I was a case manager before, and I was an OUTSTANDING one!” [wags finger]
On the status of we benighted inmates, sitting in darkness: “You are all my children!”
On who controls the prison: “Probably in some of your minds, is inmates! But you are wrong!”
On, er, violators: “I have no mercy for violators!”
On medical care: “You have a bullet in your leg and you want the bureau to heal you! Ha! Ha ha!”
On the insufficiency of our meals: “Don’t come complain to me about your meals. Because there are children with nothing!”
On gang warfare: “If you show force, I am going to show force!”
On homemade alcohol: “If you are drinking all that nasty thing, shame on you! When your liver fails, I don’t care!”
On inmates who are placed in the SHU and transferred to violent maximum security prisons because they’ve been caught with harmless contraband like synthetic marijuana: “They cry like babies! I have no mercy!”
The only disappointing thing about the presentation was that he didn’t end by exhibiting his medals and declaring himself President for Life; indeed, I almost cried when someone told me he was retiring a few weeks hence. And “all that nasty thing” is my new favorite hooch-related meme, edging out “PRISON MADE INTHOXICANT” from a few columns back.
All in all, it was an informative speech in spite of itself, even aside from the fellow’s suspicious insistence on his own competence and self-reliance and entirely meritocratic ascension to the top spot. There was quite a bit of talk, for instance, about how the gangs aren’t in control of the prison, something that obviously wouldn’t need so much triumphant emphasis were such a state of affairs not at least a possibility.
In fact, the gangs really don’t have control over the prison. But then neither does the administration, if by “control” we mean the ability to make uncontested decisions over what happens within a given space, in which case control is always a matter of degree. The federal and state governments of the United States, for instance, exercise some degree of overlapping control over their territory, but not to such an extent that the various law-enforcement agencies — er, law enforcement agencies — arrest any but a small minority of residents who violate the law. This is just as well, since the law requires that the tens of millions of Americans who use drugs or gamble or involve themselves in prostitution be imprisoned — and that’s not even counting federal law, which, as convincingly estimated by civil liberties attorney Harvey Silvergate in his book Three Felonies a Day, the average American unwittingly violates every day. And thus it is that the U.S. can continue to exist above the level of an unprecedented gulag state only to the extent that its laws are not actually enforced — an extraordinary and fundamental fact of American life that one might hope in vain to see rise to the level of an election issue, but which is at least worth keeping in mind when it comes to the debate over whether or not we should keep granting the state ever more powerful methods of surveillance until it becomes the All-Seeing God Against Whose Laws We All Have Sinned. (Personally I’d vote “no,” but then I’m a felon and can’t vote anyway.)
As is the case with the country at large, the rules within each federal prison are such that a large portion of everyday activity actually violates those rules — and in both cases, 99 percent of the violations go unpunished, while anyone who proves inconvenient to the powers that be can be singled out for retaliation. Technically it’s against the rules to give anything to another inmate, for instance, or to sell or trade or lend for that matter, but of course this is done all day without a second thought, often in plain view of the guards, not a single one of whom would consider objecting. There are other rules that are almost universally disregarded but can be invoked at whim; there is also a catch-all violation, “Anything Unauthorized,” on hand as a last resort. But rabble-rousers can usually be dispensed with via more specific regulations such as those barring the signing of petitions or holding of demonstrations. (I myself was thrown in the hole for months due to my supposed leadership role in one such demonstration against an abusive guard who’d just threatened an elderly man.)
Part of the justification behind those two regulations in particular is that there exists a means by which inmates can have their grievances addressed: the administrative remedy process. Naturally the BOP routinely conspires to prevent inmates from completing that process; the surreal lengths to which it’s gone to keep me from pursuing my own retaliation complaint, a process I’ve documented in this column over the course of the last nine months, are actually quite commonly deployed against inmates deemed to have a good chance of winning in court. Presumably this is why the Freedom of Information Act request that The Intercept filed with the BOP some months ago to obtain records of the administrative remedy process at FCI Fort Worth was denied with no explanation, even though the documents in question are specifically designated as being FOIA accessible. Any comprehensive examination of those records would reveal a systematic and highly effective effort by BOP officials to prevent inmates from bringing instances of major policy violations and even outright criminal activity by the bureau to the attention of the courts. The American people do not control their own prisons.
The reality is that control is shared by way of a sort of makeshift federalism that varies in particulars from prison to prison but in which real power is always divided among the various gangs, the staff, and local and regional administrators in an arrangement that’s best described as a cross between the old Swiss canton system and China during the Warring States period, which I’ll be the first to acknowledge is not especially helpful. Suffice to say that it will take me the remainder of my sentence to provide a real sense of this remarkable state-within-a-state and its inimitable politics — the politics of the literally disenfranchised, who live their lives in the very guts of government without being able to rely on its protections, and so are forced to provide their own. Really, it’s a state-within-a-state-within-a-state.
Complicating matters further is the great extent to which prisons can differ, with the most pronounced of these divisions being that between the state and federal systems. Broadly, we federals tend to look down upon our regional cousins as “not quite our sort, old boy,” although I’m probably the only one who puts it in exactly those terms. The state prisons tend to house the small-time dealers, whereas the feds are more often home to the guys who supplied them. The state is halfway filled with such actual criminals as thieves, rapists, and murderers, whereas the feds are made up largely of illegal immigrants and drug entrepreneurs — people who have neither hurt anyone nor deprived them of their property, but instead made the mistake of taking all of this “free market” talk seriously. The character of the federal prisons, then, will usually differ from those of the states. But then they’ll also differ among themselves, sometimes quite a bit, and not just along other readily obvious divisions such as those between minimum, low, medium, and maximum security designations, either. A few years ago the medium at Beaumont, Texas, to which I just narrowly avoided being sent myself, was considerably more violent than many of the maximums (also known as pens or, more technically, USPs). Back at the FCI Fort Worth, there was a marked degree of difference in how certain things were done even between the several 300-man units into which inmates were divided. And since the local administrators can disregard national policy more or less at will, as has been documented in this column repeatedly for two years, de facto policy will naturally vary from institution to institution as well. The result of all of this is that each prison is its own unique snowflake, fluttering about on gusts of cultural drift and BOP lawlessness.
The vital statistics of my stomping grounds here at Three Rivers, then, are as follows. The prison is home to a bit more than 1,000 inmates, of whom about 60 percent are Mexican nationals, another 20 percent are U.S. Hispanics, 10 percent are black, 5 percent are Latin American, and 5 percent are white (the ofay percentage of 15 percent I cited last time appears to have been out of date). About half of the Mexicans “run with” (institutional slang for “are affiliated with”) the Paisas, a relatively amorphous prison gang that draws its ranks almost exclusively from Mexican nationals; a smaller percentage of U.S. Hispanics run with Tango Blast, a more organized gang with a much cooler name; while blacks and whites for purposes of prison riots and dining arrangements both act mostly as race-based units.
As usual, there are all manner of qualifiers and exceptions plus a smattering of smaller groupings: The Muslims will usually constitute their own little umma, there are a couple of whites who run with Tango, and so on. The most amusing of these aberrations involved the fellow with whom I shared a cell before he transferred to a low a few weeks back. Aaron LeBaron was born into an ultra-fundamentalist Mormon cult led by his father, who had moved the wives and kids to Mexico after some members of his congregation started to question whether or not all of the voices he was hearing were actually from God. Aaron eventually inherited the family theocracy as well as the family hit list and the family international stolen car ring. In the end he was captured and sentenced to 45 years. Today Aaron is an agnostic and longtime Skeptic Magazine subscriber who was very excited to learn that I’d written for that magazine as well as for Skeptical Inquirer. (Come to think of it, he was the only person I’ve ever met who found either one the least bit impressive, and I’ve been working them into introductory conversations for years.) At any rate, having been raised in Mexico and speaking perfect Spanish, this gangly, bespectacled, white, Mormon-looking fellow had been accepted as one of the Paisas, with whom he sat every day to eat and watch television. Scientists cannot measure the extent to which I’m going to dominate every dinner party conversation for the rest of my life.
For a medium, Three Rivers isn’t particularly violent. The last major gang war, between the Tangos and the Paisas, was nearly a year ago; afterward the compound went on lockdown for about two weeks, itself a fairly typical gang intelligence investigation/cool-down period. In the three months since I’ve arrived, I’ve only had to “take a knee” once (inmates here are supposed to put at least one knee to the ground when officers run by screaming “Get the fuck down!” or some variation thereof as they proceed to the location of a conflict). And we’ve only been locked down in the aftermath of a fight on one occasion, for just a few hours.
This is just as well, as I’m thereby able to concentrate on the trickle of information coming in from the wicked world beyond the fence. Lately I’ve been getting garbled reports of hoverboards, as well as some sort of new fascist movement that could conceivably take control of the White House this year, though I find it difficult to believe that the boards actually float like the ones from the movie.
Meanwhile, I’m halfway through the newish first volume of Niall Ferguson’s biography of Henry Kissinger, which we shall examine in some detail next time. For now I will simply leave off with the following actual sentences from Ferguson’s introduction: “In this context, it is a strange irony of the Kissinger literature that so many of the critiques of Kissinger’s mode of operation have a subtle undertone of anti-Semitism. … This prompts the question: might the ferocity of the criticism that Kissinger has attracted perhaps have something to do with the fact that he, like the Rothschilds, is Jewish? This is not to imply that his critics are anti-Semites.” Well, the hyphens are all in their proper places, anyway.
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FOCUS: After Iowa ... Can Bernie Win a "Strip & Flip" Selection? |
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Wednesday, 03 February 2016 14:04 |
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Excerpt: "But the terrain will quickly shift. Bernie will obviously do well in New Hampshire. Then the race will move to southern and bigger states, where Hillary may have an edge. But we're not talking about demographics. The real terrain shift that concerns us is from a caucus state (where there have been plenty of questions about the vote count) to ones where the votes are counted on electronic voting machines."
Sen. Bernie Sanders. (photo: Getty)
After Iowa ... Can Bernie Win a "Strip & Flip" Selection?
By Mimi Kennedy, Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News
03 February 16
 Hear RSN founder Marc Ash and political correspondent Scott Galindez joining Greg Palast, Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman to talk about election protection on the “Green Power & Wellness Show” at WWW.PRN.FM TOMORROW (THURSDAY) AT 5 P.M. EASTERN TIME/2 P.M. PACIFIC.
 ernie Sanders has shown in Iowa that he’s a viable candidate … and more. Considering Bernie was down 50 points just a while ago, Iowa has sent a clear signal that this campaign must be taken seriously.
But the terrain will quickly shift. Bernie will obviously do well in New Hampshire. Then the race will move to southern and bigger states, where Hillary may have an edge.
But we’re not talking about demographics. The real terrain shift that concerns us is from a caucus state to ones where the votes are counted on electronic voting machines.
The key strategy in question is “strip and flip,” i.e., the stripping of electronic registration lists, and then the flipping of the vote count on machines that have no reliable system of verification.
The “strip & flip” realities are simple enough:
STRIP:
As Greg Palast has reported, the Republicans are now stripping the electronic voter rolls in some two dozen states. The primary program is “Crosscheck,” which strips citizens with the same or similar names from voter rolls in different jurisdictions, with the excuse that these citizens will otherwise illegally vote twice. Palast reports that once again in 2016, large numbers of voters have been targeted for being stripped. He also found that many of the names being purged don’t entirely match … and that despite the premise that these people might have voted twice in the past (and plan to again) no attempt is ever made to investigate their “crime.”
Of course, the primary disqualifying factor is skin color or ethnicity. The vast bulk of those being stripped from the voter rolls are African-American and Hispanic.
Palast reported in 2000 that more than 90,000 such voters were stripped from the voter rolls in Florida using a computer program that falsely tagged black citizens as ex-felons, ineligible to vote. All were innocent. The stripping was done primarily by Jeb Bush, then Governor of Florida. His brother George W’s alleged margin of “victory” was less than 600 votes.
In Ohio 2004, we reported at www.freepress.orgthat Republican election officials stripped more than 300,000 primarily urban, non-white citizens from the voter rolls. Bush’s alleged margin of “victory” was less than 119,000 votes.
Neither Al Gore nor John Kerry, the losing candidates who actually won, have ever spoken publicly about this.
This decimation of the voter rolls has been repeated in numerous federal, state, and local elections since 2000, and is being enhanced in the lead-up to Election Day 2016.
In addition to electronic stripping, official turnout at the polls is gutted by using Jim Crow demands for photo and other ID, discrimination aimed primarily at citizens of color.
Officially, the voter turnout in 2014 was the lowest in history. But much of this “low turnout” was in fact due to electronic stripping and other means of denying minority ethnic and racial groups’ ability to actually cast ballots.
The various stripping schemes alone could lower to virtually nil Bernie’s chances of winning in the primaries or the general election.
FLIP:
The ultimate back-up for corporate election theft is electronic flipping.
The bottom line here is that some 80% of the votes in 2016 will be cast or counted on electronic voting machines owned by private corporations. Courts have ruled the source code proprietary, and thus inaccessible to the public.
This means that much of the nation has no legally binding mechanism by which results can be publicly verified. In South Carolina, there’s no audit law to check the accuracy of results – and nothing to audit if there were, because Georgia’s statewide voting system is all-electronic machines with no paper trail. Other states have a mix of no-paper electronic voting machines and Scantron paper ballots counted by computer software that is also subject to manipulation. Six key swing states where elections will be run by Republican governors and secretaries of state will have unverifiable results: Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, and Arizona. But those results can decide the presidency and control of Congress – and much more.
The first modern instance of electronic flipping may have come in New Hampshire in 1988, when George H.W. Bush trailed Bob Dole in Election Day polling by 8%, but somehow won by 9%, a 17% flip that qualifies as a “virtual statistical impossibility.”
As Bev Harris and others have reported, thousands of votes were electronically flipped during a critical moment in the 2000 election in Volusia County, Florida.
In Ohio 2004, a 4.2% John Kerry lead in Ohio mysteriously flipped into a 2.6% George W. Bush victory during a “glitch” in vote count reporting between 12:20 a.m. and 2 a.m. election night. The process was controlled by Ohio’s GOP secretary of state, J. Kenneth Blackwell, who simultaneously served as co-chair of the Bush-Cheney re-election team. The electronic tallies were delivered by GovTech, a Bush-linked IT firm whose CEO, Michael Connell, died in a mysterious plane crash in 2008 while under federal subpoena (in a case in which we were attorney and plaintiff).
Furthermore, in a wide range of Congressional, state and local races, “impossible” outcomes have become commonplace. At least three US Senate races in 2014 were almost certainly flipped, giving the Republicans overwhelming control.
Unless accountability and verification are added to the mix, all this could happen again in 2016.
We support strict regulations on campaign finance; abolition of the Electoral College; an end to gerrymandering; non-partisan management of elections, and other democratic (small d) election reforms to retain our republican (small r) form of self-government.
But at this point, the key issue is for all eligible citizens to be able to vote and know their ballot will be counted as cast, not counted as flipped.
So we propose the “Ohio Plan,” as follows:
- Automatic universal voter registration when a citizen turns 18;
- Registration rolls maintained on verifiable records. Registering online has added tens of thousands of young voters, but the rolls must be continually re-checked right up to Election Day;
- A four-day national holiday for voting;
- Universal paper ballots printed on recycled or hemp paper;
- Voter verification by personal signature with fraud a felony (photo ID not required);
- All ballots hand-counted;
- Polls run and ballots counted by paid high school and college students.
The corporate media refuses to report on this agenda. Democrats often ignore it for fear they’ll discourage voters from coming out to cast ballots (that are then trashed). We understand the urge to ignore these issues and to focus on the hope that a high turnout can offset these electronic impediments. But that’s a risky bet, and gambling is not democracy.
Ironically, New Hampshire is where the first major electronic “flip” happened. In 1988, the Granite State was the first to use electronic voting machines in a primary. Bob Dole was leading George H.W. Bush on Election Day by 8% of the vote. That night, the official tally showed Bush the winner by 9%. That flip was a “virtual statistical impossibility,” and remains unexplained.
Bernie Sanders has endorsed hand-counted paper ballots. He could expose the problem and solve it. But first, Sanders supporters must produce a “tsunami” of votes that will drown the strippers and the flippers. Democracy-minded citizens must exercise oversight to guarantee independent polling is accurately done. And they must aggressively scrutinize every detail of the upcoming elections as the votes are cast and counted, beginning in New Hampshire.
CONSIDER THIS A WARNING LABEL: If the Sanders campaign fails to aggressively push for truly universal registration and a verifiable vote count, this thrilling attempt to restore American democracy might prove futile, heartbreaking, and infuriating.
Mimi Kennedy, Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman are election protection activists. Bob & Harvey’s The “Strip & Flip” Selection Of 2016: Six Jim Crows & Electronic Election Theft is at www.freepress.org along with the FreePress plan for monitoring the 2016 elections.
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One Crazy Hour With Buddy Cianci |
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Wednesday, 03 February 2016 09:37 |
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Taibbi writes: "Cianci, one of America's great wits and most legendarily corrupt politicians, died last week; I spent one of the funniest hours of my life with him."
Former Providence mayor Vincent 'Buddy' Cianci, pictured here in 2014, died last week at age 74. (photo: Brian Snyder/Reuters)
One Crazy Hour With Buddy Cianci
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
03 February 16
Cianci, one of America's great wits and most legendarily corrupt politicians, died last week; I spent one of the funniest hours of my life with him
 met Vincent "Buddy" Cianci, the legendary former mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, in September of 2013.
I was in Rhode Island to write a story about pension reform. The former chief of the city firefighters' union, Stephen Day, was one of the people I was interviewing. Day was one of many union advocates who was upset that State Treasurer Gina Raimondo was trying to slash the state's retirement obligations to public workers. He was also a longtime friend of Cianci, the wisecracking ex-mayor and felon who was planning yet another political comeback, using a radio talk show as a platform.
Day asked me if I wanted to be a guest on Cianci's show. I jumped at the chance. I'd spent part of my childhood in a southern Massachusetts town a half-hour from Providence, and my stepmother was a Providence TV reporter when Cianci was mayor. Even as a young person I was fascinated by Cianci, who in his younger days had a gorgeously ridiculous Sopranos-style wiseguy toupee (he nicknamed it "the squirrel") and whose public appearances were like a cross of Robin Williams and Sammy "The Bull" Gravano.
I was nervous. Cianci was a larger-than-life character. This was a man who had been re-elected mayor after pleading no-contest to beating his wife's lover with a fireplace log. He had his own line of pasta sauce. The judge who sentenced him on federal corruption charges, Ernest Torres, had compared him in court, with equal parts admiration and revulsion, to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
There were two Ciancis, Torres said. One was the most talented politician the state had ever seen, a legendary wit who could enthrall audiences. The other had turned the entire machinery of city government into a criminal enterprise. "My job is to sentence the second Buddy Cianci, because the first Buddy Cianci couldn't be here," he said.
At the studio, the grinning, diminutive Cianci shook my hand. I put on the headphones, and we started what seemed to be a fairly straightforward discussion about the state pension crisis.
During the interview, Day, the ex-union chief, sat in a corner of the studio. Buddy kept glancing over at him and smiling venomously. I wondered what was going on between the two of them. There was a video feed of the interview and Buddy kept killing the mic and shouting at Day to keep his face off the air. "Stay in the corner, Day!" he said. "Stay out of the fucking shot!"
We hit a commercial break and Cianci – who had been genial, pleasant and civilized on air – instantly changed personalities and started swearing like a sea captain.
"Steven Fucking Day," he said, pointing. "This guy, Matt, he's the only firefighter in history who shows up to a fucking fire with a briefcase!"
It was clear the mayor liked Day, who had a mouth of his own and could admirably match bluster with Cianci. But he decided to turn the next 45 minutes into an epic ball-busting session. While the commercials rolled, Cianci laid into Day, unloading decades of history with the union boss.
"This one time, we're signing a collective bargaining agreement," Cianci says. "There's cameras everywhere and when I'm done signing the paper, all of the sudden all of these firefighters are slapping me on the back and shaking my hand. And I'm panicking. Why are they so happy? I lean over and I say, 'Stephen, what the fuck did I just sign?'"
I laughed, trying to keep one ear on the commercials. Cianci was oblivious and next ripped off a story about how Day, as union chief, had once hassled him about underfunding the fire department. "Stephen, you've been like a son to me," Cianci had explained. "But now Daddy needs a little help. Your guys need to take a zero percent pay raise next year."
Day balked, so Cianci decided to teach him a lesson. He called Day on the phone one afternoon.
"And I said, 'Stephen, hey, it's me, Buddy,'" Cianci recounted. "'Listen, I know you're busy, but I've got this terrible budget problem, and I wondered if I could ask your advice. Since I can't cut the fire budget – what would you cut, if you were me?'"
Day, Cianci said, at first hesitated, then suggested cutting the zoo budget. Cianci egged him on: the zoo, absolutely, what else?
Again Day hesitated, then suggested the parks department. Then it was public works, the registrar of deeds. Soon Day was loosening up and cheerfully suggesting cuts to almost every department in the city. Finally Cianci interrupted him:
"Steve, listen to me. Are you listening?" he said. "Steve, you're on speaker phone. And I have sitting here the director of the zoo, the head of the parks department, the registrar of deeds, the public works chief. Everyone, say hi to Steve!"
"I didn't hear a peep about the pay raise after that. Later on I called and said, 'You see, that's how you lead! That's how you get shit done!'"
Day and I were both laughing as he was telling this story. But suddenly we were back on the air and in a heartbeat, Cianci stopped the F-bombs, leaned into the mic, and was seamlessly back in his Dick Cavett act again. "I'm here with Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi, and we're talking pension reform…"
It was dizzying. I barely made it through the segment. Soon we cut to another commercial break and Cianci ripped off his headphones and turned right back to me.
"These firemen, Matt, all they think about is overtime," Cianci ranted. "When Stephen Day reads his daughter a nursery rhyme at night, he starts every story, Once upon a time and a half…"
All that was missing was the nightclub drummer giving a rim-shot. Cianci went on:
"This other time," he said, "Steve tried to give me shit about a fire station on the East Side we were gonna close. I'm telling you, this neighborhood hadn't had a fire in it for 100 fucking years. But the instant I decide to close the station, suddenly one house after another goes up in flames. It's uncanny. I'm thinking, 'Stephen Day is running around pulling alarms all over the neighborhood. Then he's going door to door showing all the elderly people videos of The Towering Inferno to get them against me.'"
To protest the station closing, Day decided to stick it to the mayor. He organized a candlelight vigil to protest the closing, and invited all the press to come and hear how Buddy Cianci was letting the neighborhood burn down.
"But I got wind of it," Cianci said. "So here's what I did. I called up the chief of police, and I'm like, 'Chief, whaddya got today?'
"And he's like, 'What do you mean?' And I say, 'You arrest anyone interesting?' And he says, 'Well, we picked up this one guy on a suspected rape charge…'"
The mayor presses the police chief: Did you say he was a suspected serial rapist? And the chief says, well, I don't know if he's a serial rapist, Mr. Mayor, it's too soon to say... But by then Buddy'd already called a press conference to tell the world that they'd made this major arrest.
It led the 11:00 news, knocking out the fire station protest. As for the newspapers: Cianci apparently used to have police officers drive to the Providence Journal offices every night to pick him up a copy of next day's paper. At 2:00 a.m., 3:00 a.m. every morning, Cianci was getting a paper fresh off the presses delivered to him by cops.
So in the middle of that night, Cianci calls Day up on the phone. Day, groggy, answers: Who is this?
"It's Buddy, Steve," he says. "Listen to me. I'm looking at tomorrow's Journal. And we just might, might, might" – he said "might" three or four times – "we just might have caught a serial rapist."
The next day, he invited Day to dinner at Capriccio, one of Providence's great restaurants. When Day got there, the mayor was reclining in the swank surroundings, a copy of the Journal in his hands. The fire protest story was buried inside. The arrest was on the front.
"You see, I knocked you off the front page!" he shouted. "I knocked you off the front!"
We went back on air, talked about pensions some more, then cut to break again. Cianci kept moving effortlessly in and out of character, talking pensions in one moment and laying into Day over and over again in the next. He was like a fireball. I'd never seen anything like it. I left in a daze.
A year later, he ran for mayor again, but lost. He died last week after complaining of stomach pains. The cause of death hasn't been revealed.
I don't want people to get the wrong idea. There was a lot of darkness in Cianci's past, from the mountainous history of bribes to some very seriously ugly allegations about his relationships with women. But as personalities go, he was one of a kind. I learned more about politics in a few commercial breaks with him than I had in years on the campaign trail.
"He made his mistakes," says Day today. "But he was a man of wit and wisdom."
Day credits Buddy with the resurgence of the city of Providence, says he'll miss him. Quoting Providence's Bishop Thomas J. Tobin, he added, "All saints have a past, and all sinners have a future."
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Want Endless War? Love the US Empire? Well, Hillary Clinton's Your Choice |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=7263"><span class="small">Marjorie Cohn, Consortium News</span></a>
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Wednesday, 03 February 2016 09:35 |
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Cohn writes: "Hillary Clinton likes to extol her foreign policy credentials, particularly her experience as Secretary of State. She attaches herself to Barack Obama's coattails, pledging to continue his policies. But she is even more hawkish than the President."
Hillary Clinton. (photo: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
Want Endless War? Love the US Empire? Well, Hillary Clinton's Your Choice
By Marjorie Cohn, Consortium News
03 February 16
Surviving Iowa in a dead heat with Sen. Bernie Sanders, ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton now hopes her establishment-backed campaign will grind down her opposition and pave the way for her presidential nomination. But many Democrats remain leery of her hawkish foreign policy, writes Marjorie Cohn.
 illary Clinton likes to extol her foreign policy credentials, particularly her experience as Secretary of State. She attaches herself to Barack Obama’s coattails, pledging to continue his policies. But she is even more hawkish than the President.
Like Obama, Clinton touts American exceptionalism, the notion that the United States is better than any other country. In his State of the Union addresses, Obama has proclaimed America “exceptional” and said the U.S. must “lead the world.” Clinton wrote in her book Hard Choices that “America remains the ‘indispensable nation.’”
It is this view that animates U.S. invasions, interventions, bombings and occupations of other countries. Under the pretense of protecting our national interest, the United States maintains some 800 military bases in other countries, costing taxpayers tens of billions of dollars annually. Often referred to as “enduring bases,” they enable us to mount attacks whenever and wherever our leaders see fit, whether with drones or manned aircraft.
Obama, who continues to prosecute the war in Afghanistan 15 years after it began, is poised to send ground troops back to Iraq and begin bombing Libya. His aggressive pursuit of regime change in Syria was met with pushback by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to Seymour Hersh.
The President has bombed some seven countries with drones. But besides moving toward normalization of relations with Cuba, his signature foreign policy achievement is brokering the agreement to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
Although Clinton supports the nuclear deal, she talks tough about Iran. In September 2015, she provocatively declared, “I don’t believe Iran is our partner in this agreement. Iran is the subject of the agreement,” adding, “I will confront them across the board.” She said, “I will not hesitate to take military action if Iran attempts to obtain a nuclear weapon.”
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Clinton promised to “totally obliterate” Iran if it attacked Israel. Clinton was, in effect, pledging to commit genocide against the Iranian people.
In an August 2014 Atlantic interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, Clinton maintained, “There is no such thing as a right to enrich.” Apparently, she has not read the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which gives countries like Iran the right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. Article IV of the treaty says, “Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with Articles I and II of this Treaty.”
One country that does possess nuclear weapons is Israel, which refuses to ratify the NPT. Clinton has consistently and uncritically supported the policies of the Israeli government. In the Atlantic interview, she placed the blame for Israel’s 2014 massacre in Gaza squarely with the Palestinians.
From July 8 to Aug. 27, 2014, Israel killed over 2,100 Palestinians, 80 percent of them civilians including more than 400 children. Sixty-six Israeli soldiers and seven Israeli civilians were killed.
When Goldberg asked Clinton whom she held responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Palestinian children, she demurred, saying, “[I]t’s impossible to know what happens in the fog of war.” She blamed only the Palestinians, saying, “There’s no doubt in my mind that Hamas initiated this conflict.” Claiming “Israel has a right to defend itself,” she said, “I think Israel did what it had to do to respond to the rockets.”
But Israel did not act in self-defense. In the first 10 days of June 2014, Israeli forces abducted 17 Palestinian teenage boys in the occupied West Bank. On June 12, three Israeli teenagers were abducted in the southern West Bank; Israel accused Hamas. After those three were found dead, a group of Israelis tortured and killed a Palestinian teenager in Jerusalem.
On July 7, Israel launched a large military operation in the Gaza Strip, dubbed Operation Protective Edge. The Israel Defense Forces devastated Gaza. For 51 days, Israel bombarded Gaza with more than 6,000 airstrikes.
The United Nations Human Rights Council subsequently convened an independent, international commission of inquiry, which concluded that Israel, and to a lesser extent Palestinian armed groups, had likely committed violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law, some constituting war crimes. “The scale of the devastation was unprecedented” in Gaza, according to the commission.
Yet Clinton was puzzled by what she calls “this enormous international reaction against Israel,” adding, “This reaction is uncalled for and unfair.” She attributed the “enormous international reaction” to “a number of factors” but only mentioned anti-Semitism, never citing Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian lands or its periodic massacres in Gaza.
Indeed, in January 2016, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the Security Council it was an “indisputable truth” that “Palestinian frustration is growing under the weight of a half century of occupation and the paralysis of the peace process.” He noted that it was “human nature to react to occupation, which serves as a potent incubator of hate and extremism.”
Clinton didn’t ponder why so many people around the world are participating in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against the Israeli occupation. Representatives of Palestinian civil society launched BDS in 2005, calling upon “international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel.”
In her November 2015 article titled “How I Would Reaffirm Unbreakable Bond With Israel — and Benjamin Netanyahu,” published in the Jewish newspaper Forward, Clinton vowed to continue to oppose BDS. “As secretary of state, I requested more assistance for Israel every year,” she boasted, adding that she opposed “the biased Goldstone report,” explained below.
After Israel’s 2008-2009 Operation Cast Lead, in which nearly 1,400 Palestinians (82 percent of whom were civilians) and 13 Israelis were killed, a U.N. Human Rights Council report by a commission headed by Justice Richard Goldstone concluded that “Disproportionate destruction and violence against civilians were part of a deliberate policy [by Israel].”
Israel responded to the report with threats and harassment against Goldstone, leading him to backtrack on one of the findings in the report that bears his name, namely, that Israel deliberately targeted civilians. But the other members of the commission stood fast on all of the report’s conclusions.
Clinton’s vote in favor of President George W. Bush’s illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq cost her the 2008 election. It also cost more than 4,500 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis their lives. Yet Clinton cynically told corporate executives at a 2011 State Department roundtable on investment opportunities in Iraq, “It’s time for the United States to start thinking of Iraq as a business opportunity.”
The same year, Clinton led the campaign for forcible regime change in Libya, despite opposition by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Responding to the gruesome sodomizing of President Muammar Gaddafi with a bayonet, Clinton laughed and said, “We came, we saw, he died.”
Both the Iraq War and regime change in Libya paved the way for the rise of Islamic State and dangerous conflict in the Middle East. Obama is about to escalate his military involvement in Libya. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “The president has made clear that we have the authority to use military force.” The New York Times reports that the expanded campaign is “expected to include airstrikes and raids by elite American troops.”
The Obama administration is reportedly changing the rules of engagement to allow more civilian casualties in the “war” against Islamic State. A senior military official told The Daily Beast, “Now I think you’ll see a little more willingness to tolerate civilian casualties in the interest of making progress.” But the Geneva Conventions prohibit the disproportionate killing of civilians.
Clinton has promised to escalate the wars in Syria and Iraq, including a no-fly zone in Syria. Since Islamic State doesn’t have an air force, her no-fly zone is likely to capture Russian planes flying over Syria.
Talking tough on ABC’s “This Week,” Clinton declared, “We have to fight in the air, fight on the ground and fight them on the Internet.” She said nothing about diplomacy or an arms embargo to stop sending weapons that end up in the hands of Islamic State.
Although the corporate media fans the flames of fear about Islamic State, only 38 people in the United States have died in terror-related incidents since 9/11, according to Politifact.com. The “war on terror” has cost us more than $1.5 trillion, in addition to U.S. lives and those of untold numbers in other countries.
Nevertheless, there is little doubt that a President Hillary Clinton would continue our “perpetual war.” She would do everything in her power to ensure the robust survival of the American empire.
Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, and deputy secretary-general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. Her most recent book is “Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues.” See www.marjoriecohn. Follow her on Twitter at @marjoriecohn. [This article first appeared on Truthdig [http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/want_endless_war_love_the_us_empire_hillary_clintons_your_choice_20160201]
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