Is Equal Justice Ever Possible With Such Gigantic Income Inequality As We Have In The U.S.?

Remember that horrific story-- about a decade back-- about cops in New Orleans shooting unarmed civilians running for their lives from the Hurricane Katrina flood waters? In 2007 5 white police officers were indicted for opening up with shotguns and AK-47s on two families of black people on the Danziger Bridge looking for shelter from the deadly storm. Four people were severely wounded and 2, included a handicapped man, were murdered. The New Orleans Police Department worked to cover up the criminal behavior of their officers but eventually the murderous cops were found guilty and faced as much as 65 years in prison. The case was thrown out and a deal was made in which the officers admitted guilt but were given short sentences. I heard the story on the radio today and it made me think about how the establishment protects itself from equal treatment under the law--and protects its tools of enforcement as well. Obviously the white washing on the Flint lead poisoning catastrophe comes right to mind and how low level civil servants are being scapegoated while Gov. Snyder is still walking around a free man.

Thursday, writing for ProPublica and the New Yorker, Jesse Eisinger took at closer look into why the banksters haven't been punished for their criminal behavior that cost so many families their homes and life savings. My friend Brad put a political spin on Eisinger's point:

Sanders: the system is broken and we need to change it.
Clinton: the system is good and we need to protect it from a few bad apples

Eisinger discovered that the SEC was about to charge Goldman Sachs executives with a serious mortgage fraud case in 2009. But the lawyer whose job was to take the case to trial, James Kidney, sensed that "the SEC staff was more worried about the effect the case would have on Wall Street executives, a fear that deepened when he read an email from Reid Muoio, the head of the SEC’s team looking into complex mortgage securities. Muoio, who had worked at the agency for years, told colleagues that he had seen the 'devasting [sic] impact our little ol’ civil actions reap on real people more often than I care to remember. It is the least favorite part of the job. Most of our civil defendants are good people who have done one bad thing.' This attitude agitated Kidney, and he felt that it held his agency back from pursuing the people who made the decisions that led to the financial collapse."

Kidney became disillusioned. Upon retiring, in 2014, he gave an impassioned going-away speech, in which he called the SEC “an agency that polices the broken windows on the street level and rarely goes to the penthouse floors.”

In our conversations, Kidney reflected on why that might be. The oft-cited explanations — campaign contributions and the allure of private-sector jobs to low-paid government lawyers-- have certainly played a role. But to Kidney, the driving force was something subtler. Over the course of three decades, the concept of the government as an active player had been tarnished in the minds of the public and the civil servants inside working inside the agency. In his view, regulatory capture is a psychological process in which officials become increasingly gun shy in the face of criticism from their bosses, Congress, and the industry the agency is supposed to oversee. Leads aren’t pursued. Cases are never opened. Wall Street executives are not forced to explain their actions.

Kidney still rues the Goldman case as a missed chance to learn the lessons of the financial crisis. “The answers to unasked questions are now lost to history as well as to law enforcement,“ he said. ”It is a shame.”

There were fines but none of the greed-obsessed "good people who have done one bad thing" were ever charged. It's like the entity Goldman Sachs defrauded their customers out of billions of dollars with no humans ever making any decisions about the criminal patterns. While Eisinger was researching a book on the subject for a year, he discovered"case after case in which regulators were reluctant to use the laws and resources available to them. Members of the public don’t have a full sense of the issue because they rarely get to see how such decisions are made inside government agencies." Kidney helped him with his research and showed him how "the big banks had 'captured' his agency-- that is, that the SEC, which is charged with keeping financial institutions in line, had become overly cautious to the point of cowardice."

The Abacus investigation traces to a moment in late 2006 when the hedge fund Paulson & Co. asked Goldman to create an investment that would pay off if U.S. housing prices fell. Paulson was hoping to place a bet on what we now know as “the big short”: the notion that the real-estate market was inflated by an epic bubble and would soon collapse. To facilitate Paulson’s short position, Goldman created Abacus, an investment composed of what amounted to side bets on mortgage bonds. Abacus would pay off big if people began defaulting on their mortgages. Goldman marketed the investment to a bank in Germany that was willing to take the opposite side of the bet — that housing prices would remain stable. The bank, IKB, was cautious enough to ask that Goldman hire an independent manager to assemble the deal and look out for its interests.

This is where things got dodgy. Unbeknownst to IKB, the hedge fund Paulson & Co. improved its odds of success by inducing the manager, a company called ACA Capital, to include the diciest possible housing bonds in the deal. Paulson wasn’t just betting on the horse race. The fund was secretly slipping Quaaludes to the favorite. ACA did not understand that Paulson was betting against the security. Goldman knew, but didn’t give either ACA or IKB the full picture. (For its part, Paulson & Co. contended that ACA was free to reject its suggestions and said that it never misled anyone in the deal.)

When SEC officials discovered this in 2009, they decided that Goldman Sachs had misled both the German bank and ACA by making false statements and omitting what the law terms “material details” — and that these actions constituted a violation of securities law. (The SEC oversees civil enforcement of U.S. securities law and can charge both companies and individuals with violations. Its work can often be a precursor to criminal cases, which are handled by prosecutors at the Justice Department.)

Kidney was a trial attorney with two decades of experience at the SEC, and had won his share of courtroom battles. But the stakes in this case were particularly high. Politically, it was a delicate moment. The global financial system was only just recovering, millions of Americans had lost their jobs, and there was growing public anger about the bailout of the banks and car companies in Detroit. When Kidney looked at the work that had been done on the case, he found what he saw as serious shortcomings. For one, SEC investigators had not interviewed enough executives. For another, the staff decided to charge only the lowest man on the totem pole, a midlevel Goldman trader named Fabrice Tourre, a French citizen who lived in London, and who was in his late twenties when the deal came together. Tourre had joked about selling the doomed deal to “widows and orphans,” and had referred to himself as “Fabulous Fab,’’ a sobriquet that probably would not endear him to a jury. He was an easy target, but charging him was not likely to send a signal that Washington was serious about cracking down on Wall Street’s excesses.

Kidney could not understand why SEC staffers were reluctant to investigate Tourre’s bosses at Goldman or anyone at Paulson & Co. Charging only Goldman, he said, would send exactly the wrong message to Wall Street. “This appears to be an unbelievable fraud,” he wrote to his boss, Luis Mejia. “I don’t think we should bring it without naming all those we believe to be liable.”

Does anyone care? Sure, even if Bernie isn't getting more votes than she is, he's getting plenty of votes and those are the people who do care. People who vote for Hillary... they either can't comprehend, are complicit or don't care enough to be motivated by it. These people care; that's how they got on this list:

Christie, Who Unsuccessfully Prosecuted Middle-East Students Cheating On An Exam, Tries Re-Writing History To Make Himself Sound Like An Anti-Terrorist Warrior

Although Christie's term as a Bush-era prosecutor was primarily about prosecuting corrupt Democrats-- except for his uber-corrupt pals from the Norcross Machine-- suddenly he's trying to lay claim to the mantle of hero in the war against terrorism. Ted Cruz's campaign laughed in the Jersey slob's jowly face. During the last GOP debate in Vegas he boasted "I’m a former federal prosecutor. I’ve fought terrorists... for 7 years, I spent my life protecting our country against another one of those attacks." Christie's claim to terrorism-fighter fame is, at best, hugely inflated for obvious reasons. His endlessly repeated bragging about how he cracked "two of the biggest terrorism cases in the world" is just silly, as you can see from the This American Life episode on one of them below.

Yesterday, Alexander Burns and Charlie Savage. writing for the NY Times reminisced about Christie's days as a federal prosecutor in a a piece whose very headline laughs at it as a mere sales pitch. Christie's actual record, they wrote, "shows that he has, at times, overstated the significance of the terrorism prosecutions he oversaw-- he has called them 'two of the biggest terrorism cases in the world'-- and appears to have exaggerated his personal role in obtaining court permission for surveillance of terrorism suspects." He was clearly trying to mislead the audience when he bragged that "I'm the only person on this stage who’s actually filed applications under the Patriot Act, who has gone before the Foreign Intelligence Service Court. Neither pig-man nor anyone from his office went before the FISA court, something "[o]nly the Office of Intelligence at the Justice Department’s headquarters drafts and submits applications for surveillance and then litigates them before the court," despite the load of horseshit on Christie's campaign website that assigns the credit to him.

Christie’s campaign website credits his office with obtaining an indictment against the kidnapper of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was abducted and killed in Pakistan, and notes that the defendant, Ahmed Omar Sheikh, was “sentenced to death.” It does not mention a key fact: The trial took place in Pakistan. Mr. Christie’s office had no role in it.

...Christie has described his experience handling terrorism in vivid terms, returning to the theme during debates, and mocking his rivals for what he has said was their comparatively frivolous national security experience.

The most recent debate, in Las Vegas, gave Mr. Christie even more maneuvering room; the theme of the evening, after the terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., focused on national security. Mr. Christie seized every opportunity, saying that “New Jersey was threatened like no other region in this country” and branding several candidates who serve in the Senate as “people who’ve never had to make a consequential decision in an executive position.”

Mr. Christie has also repeatedly described himself as having been “named”-- and at least once as having been “appointed”-- United States attorney on the portentous date of Sept. 10, 2001. In fact, that was the date the Bush administration informed him he would be nominated for the job if he passed a background check; President Bush nominated him three months later, and he took office in January 2002.

...In 2005, [Christie's office] convicted an Indian-born British businessman, Hemant Lakhani, of trying to broker the sale of an anti-plane missile from a purported Russian military officer to a purported terrorist. And in 2008, it won the convictions of several Muslim-American men charged with plotting a mass shooting of people at Fort Dix, N.J.

Both cases were so-called stings by the F.B.I., which used confidential informants to create the situations in which the defendants implicated themselves. In the Lakhani case, both the purported seller and buyer of the missile were government agents. In the Fort Dix case, the suspects were under surveillance for over a year after an informant alerted law enforcement authorities to a possible threat.

Critics of such tactics portray them as entrapment, while proponents say they remove potential terrorists from the street before they can kill.

Either way, neither of the two New Jersey prosecutions involved actual attacks, such as the 1998 United States Embassy bombings in East Africa, the Sept. 11 attacks and the 2013 bombing of the Boston Marathon. They also did not involve plots that almost reached fruition without law enforcement knowledge, like the attempted bombing of planes with bombs concealed in an attacker’s shoes in 2002, and in underwear in 2009; a barely thwarted 2009 attack on New York City subways; and a 2010 bombing attempt in Times Square.

Mr. Christie defended his portrayal of the importance of the missile and Fort Dix cases, saying they exemplified the philosophy of averting threats before any attack.

“It is no longer enough to wait until the crime occurs,” Mr. Christie said. He argued: “The Boston bombing is a failure. It’s a failure of intelligence and a failure of law enforcement.”

Mr. Christie’s campaign website also gives the governor credit for what became known as Operation Arabian Knight, a prosecution of two men who wanted to travel to Somalia and join the Shabab, an Islamist group. They were arrested in 2010, after Mr. Christie was no longer the United States attorney, but had been under investigation since 2006.

The website does not mention one other case that brought Mr. Christie national media attention under a counterterrorism banner: In May 2002, he announced the arrest of 56 foreign college students, mostly from the Middle East, who were accused of cheating on English proficiency exams.

At the time, he told reporters the sweep was part of a strategy meant to arrest potential terrorists before they could strike, saying: “In light of what we saw on September 11, we all have an obligation to prevent domestic terrorism.”

None were convicted of anything related to terrorism.

Mr. Christie said he did not know why that case was not mentioned on his website, and that he did not review all of its content.

A proven serial liar, Christie gets very aggressive with anyone who points out he had virtually nothing to do with the war on terror. But it didn't work when Wisconsin asshat Scott Walker tried it and it's not likely to work for Christie, who is best known for physically confronting women school teachers and screaming at them. Ed Kilgore: "In the end, Christie, just like Walker, is relying on his image as a tough guy to buttress this new idea that he's a brilliant terrorist-hunter who can make Americans feel all warm and secure. Unfortunately, beating up on public employees may serve as soft porn for conservative voters in the heartland who view coastal blue states like New Jersey as enemy territory, but it doesn't make you a national-security asset."

Jewish Power Takes A Tragically Wrong Turn In Rockland County, New York

Rockland County, just northwest of NYC, has had some big demographic changes in the past decade, including relatively large emigrations of Romanians and Dominicans. And Hasids-- kind of Amish, but Jewish. Now two out of three children in the school district are Hasidic. 

The county has been a Democratic bastion for some time. In 2008 Obama beat McCain, 65,134 (52%) to 58,199 (47%), and four years later he beat Romney, 60,446 (52.8%) to 52,936 (46.2%). Nita Lowey (D) is the congressmember, and both state Assemblymembers are Democrats. One state Senator is a Democrat and one is a Republican. Of the 17 members of the county legislature, 12 are Democrats (including Majority Leader Aron Wieder from Monsey). All 5 Rockland County Town Supervisors are Democrats, including Christopher Lawrence from Ramapo, the most populous town in the county-- and the one we're going to look at today. If you listened to the September 12, 2014 This American Life broadcast above, you know exactly why.

There's a scandalous division in the community between public schools and Orthodox Jewish and Hasidic schools (yeshivas). There are only 2 Catholic schools, and yeshivas outnumber Christian private schools about thirty to one. There are also four nonreligious private schools. When the Hasids were first building their community in the area there was some discontent that they were paying property taxes to fund public schools that their kids don't attend-- at the same time they were funding the yeshivas for their own kids. They started taking over the school board. 

Harvey Katz, an Orthodox Jew who served as a school board member, said, "Just because my children are not in the public schools doesn't mean I don't care about all the children. Children are our future, wherever they may be." The district was one of five districts in New York State where more students were enrolled in private school than in public school due to religious reasons. But events didn't indicate that the religious extremists did care about the future of non-Orthodox/Hasidic children. By 2005, when they took over the school board, they began reducing the budget and lowering taxes, much to the chagrin of the non-Hasidic members of the community. 

The reduced budgets, in fact, were draconian, forcing students to take five- and six-year graduation plans instead of four-year plans, and in 2010 the school board of the East Ramapo Central School District voted to sell its Hillcrest Elementary School, which they had forced it close with massive budget cuts, to the Hasidic Jewish congregation Yeshiva Avir Yakov of New Square. In an official response to an investigation of the sale, New York State Education Commissioner David Steiner stated that the East Ramapo board "abused its discretion by hastily approving the sale." The 12-acre campus, assessed at $10.2 million (market value) by the Assessor’s Office of Clarkstown, was given only a $3.2 million appraisal by the school board's own attorney, Albert D’Agostino. A year later, the State Education Commissioner halted the sale of the building, saying the board failed its fiduciary responsibility to the district when it approved the $3.2 million deal.

Also in 2011, the vice president of the East Ramapo school board, Aron Wieder, now as noted the County Legislature Majority Leader, was arrested and charged with a misdemeanor violation of state election law after blocking the entrance to the Hillcrest Elementary polling place during the school district budget vote. Wieder was witnessed photographing voters entering the Hillcrest polling station and accused of intimidating voters and blocking the entrance to the site. 

A month after that arrest, Nathan Rothschild, former president of the school board and Fire Commissioner of Monsey, pled guilty to a mail fraud scheme where he was attempting to sell public land to eliminate his own private debt. The scheme involved selling public land to his creditors, then buying the land back at a higher price. The scheme was suspiciously similar to the attempt to sell Hillcrest Elementary School.

And that brings us to Wednesday's op-ed in the New York Times, "When A School Board Victimizes Kids." The editorial accuses the board of denying students their state constitutional right to a sound basic education by grossly mismanaging the district’s finances and educational programs. It demands that the state act to correct the injustice in East Ramapo.

East Ramapo is a divided community. Of the roughly 32,000 school-age children enrolled in schools in the district, about 24,000 attend private schools, nearly all of them Orthodox Jewish yeshivas. Of the more than 8,000 children in the public schools, 43 percent are African-American and 46 percent are Latino; 83 percent are poor and 27 percent are English-language learners.

The East Ramapo school board, dominated by private-school parents since 2005, has utterly failed them. Faced with a fiscal and educational crisis, the State Education Department last June appointed a former federal prosecutor, Henry M. Greenberg, to investigate the district’s finances.

Mr. Greenberg’s report, released in November, documented the impact of the board’s gross mismanagement and neglect. Since 2009, the board has eliminated hundreds of staff members, including over 100 teachers, dozens of teaching assistants, guidance counselors and social workers, and many key administrators. Full-day kindergarten, and high-school electives have been eliminated or scaled back. Music, athletics, professional development and extracurricular activities were cut.

The Greenberg report also detailed dismal outcomes for East Ramapo students. In 2013-14, only 14 percent of students in grades 3 through 8 were proficient in English Language Arts, and only 15 percent were proficient in math, according to the most recent statistics from the State Education Department. The graduation rate, 64 percent, is far below the state average of 76 percent.

While slashing resources in its public schools, the school board vastly increased public spending on private schools. The cost of transporting children, including gender-segregated busing, rose to $27.3 million in 2013-14 from $22 million in 2009-10, a 24 percent increase. Public spending on private school placement for special education students grew by 33 percent between 2010-11 and 2013-14, and the district placed students in private schools when appropriate spaces were available in public ones.

The report also exposed disturbing practices by board members. The board conducts 60 to 70 percent of its meetings in closed-door executive session. It does not tolerate, and is overtly hostile to, the complaints of public school parents, students and community members. Public protests against the board are now commonplace.

The report proposed the appointment of a state fiscal monitor, who would oversee all of the board’s financial and educational decisions and have the authority to override the board, when necessary, to protect the interests of the public-school community and improve education outcomes for public-school students. The report also recommended additional state funding to restore essential staff and services, but only if a monitor was in place to make certain the money was used effectively and efficiently to benefit all of the students.

A bill in Albany-- introduced in the Assembly by Ellen C. Jaffee and Kenneth P. Zebrowski and in the Senate by David Carlucci, who all represent parts of the school district-- would implement a fiscal monitor for at least five years. It is a crucial step toward reversing the district’s disastrous decline and repairing the deep rifts in the community. The New York State School Boards Association has found that the measure “respects the democratic electoral process by leaving the elected board of education in place.”

The bill would not go as far as the Legislature went in 2002, when the school district in Roosevelt, on Long Island, was put under state control because of poor management. It is similar to what occurred in Lakewood, N.J., a district with circumstances similar to East Ramapo’s.

In recent weeks, in response to a lobbying campaign by the school board, momentum for the bill appears to have slowed. Advocates for the local school board and some leaders in the Orthodox community have accused supporters of state oversight of having anti-Semitic motives.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The legislation is not about punishing one group because of its religious beliefs; it is about acting to make sure that the civil rights of a community of overwhelmingly low-income minority children are not denied and that their constitutional right to a sound basic education is enforced.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has endorsed the need for action in East Ramapo. Lawmakers should join him, reject the false attacks and act in the interests of the students, who have been failed terribly and must not be made to wait any longer.

The Hasids may be screaming anti-Semitism, but I didn't run across the word "racism" or "racist" even once in the reporting in the NY Times or anywhere else... although the report Tuesday from the Jewish Daily Forward, "An Immoral Use of Jewish Power in Upstate New York," certainly implies that that is the root of the problem in East Ramapo, calling the situation "the test case for the moral future of Jewish life in New York, perhaps even the whole country."

The board has drastically increased the funding going to yeshivas, but it has cut public school classes and extracurricular activities, attempting to sell public school assets at below market prices to private yeshivas, and more. These ethically and at times legally dubious actions have been documented by everyone from newspapers like this one to the New York City Bar Association to the New York State Supreme Court.

Frustrated by the school board’s intransigence, local students, parents, teachers, religious leaders and activists appealed to the state for help. Governor Andrew Cuomo appointed an independent fiscal monitor, Hank Greenberg, last year to investigate the district. From a removed, balanced perspective, Greenberg confirmed what thousands of public school students and parents had known for years: The board is responsible for “recklessly depleting the district’s reserves” and favoring “the private school community over the East Ramapo public schools.”

As Orthodox Jews grow in number, the question of how to flex our political muscle becomes more critical. The Jewish community has needs as well. We live in a golden era where we have can express those needs through the democratic process with pride. The question is not whether to use political power, but how.

One way is to use our power to get what our community needs, even if it means skirting the rules and steamrolling over the needs of other communities. That’s been the case in the East Ramapo School District. Those who support the actions of the school board say that this is democracy, this is the American way.

They are wrong. America is not an absolute, direct democracy where the will of the numerical majority is the law of the land. We live in a republic, a republic that seeks to protect the interests and welfare of all its citizens, including the minority, the disenfranchised and the vulnerable.

As an Orthodox Jew, when I first learned about what was happening in East Ramapo and about the attitudes of the board, I was shocked and disgusted. The Talmud teaches, “The world endures only for the sake of the breath of school children.” The public actions of this school board over the years have been in flagrant violation of that and so many other Jewish values and teachings. The Torah we share demands over and over again we never trample the stranger, the immigrant and the poor-- apt descriptions of many in the public school district. They have also caused a massive Chillul Hashem-- desecration of God’s name. The leadership of the school board to date has grossly violated both American and Jewish values. This is not the way to use Jewish power in America.

Instead, we need to find a way to both advance our interests and needs while taking the needs of our fellow citizens into account; rather than just grabbing more and more slices of the pie and leaving those around us hungry, we work together to grow the pie so there is enough for all. This would be a moral use of Jewish power, using it to call out those who are acting unjustly, even when they are from our own community. That is why thousands and thousands of Jewish New Yorkers are lobbying their legislators to pass these bills, which will provide needed oversight. Ultimately, this is about those school children in East Ramapo, and it’s about the very legacy that Jewish New Yorkers will leave on this great state.

School board meeting-- but not in Compton

Odd The Way The 1% Get Away With Their Crimes-- Even Murder Sprees. Are We In Russia?

I always knew him as "Bobby," another of Susan Berman's rich friends. Now he's Robert Durst. I didn't know any rich people-- only poor people like myself-- when I was hanging out with Susan, except for her and the rich friends she introduced me to. Bobby Durst was someone she knew from boarding school, after her parents were killed in Mob hits, if I remember correctly. Her dad was a Vegas Jewish Mafia big shot-- not on a Sheldon Adelson level-- but a real big shot nonetheless. David "Davie the Jew" Berman. She wrote a book about it and got famous. I'm pretty sure I took the inside jacket cover.

I don't know filmmaker Andrew Jarecki; he left a helpful comment on post I did about his Bobby Durst film in 2010, All Good Things, starring Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst, which he filmed in 2008. The release was successfully sabotaged the the powerful Durst family and didn't come out until 2010, when it flopped badly. In the movie, Susan was renamed Deborah Lehrman and played by Lily Rabe (Sister Mary Eunice McKee and Misty Day from American Horror Story). Jarecki isn't done. He just completed a 6-part HBO documentary on Durst-- The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst.

His estranged family is as unenthusiastic about this one as they were about All Good Things. This week, the NY Times reported that Jordan Barowitz, a spokesman for the Durst Organization, called the documentary "a self-indulgent work of fiction. Given that Robert is likely underwriting the film, it should rival the great works of propaganda."

[Durst]was investigated, but never charged, in the mysterious disappearance of his young, beautiful first wife and the mob-like execution of a close friend in Los Angeles. He beheaded a cantankerous neighbor in Texas in what he described as an act of self-defense, cross-dressed to conceal his identity and then escaped the police, whose nationwide manhunt took them to Northern California, then New Orleans and, finally, Bethlehem, Pa., where Mr. Durst had gone to college.

But other than a few cryptic asides to reporters, Mr. Durst, 71, has kept his own counsel.

Until now.

HBO is announcing this week that it plans to broadcast a six-part documentary called The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst. Made with Mr. Durst’s cooperation, HBO says, the documentary, to air this February, will unravel the disappearance of Mr. Durst’s wife, Kathie, in one of the most notorious unsolved mysteries in New York history, and expose long-buried information about the man suspected in that and other unsolved crimes.

It is based on nearly 10 years of research by the filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Marc Smerling, who made the 2010 film All Good Things, a lightly fictionalized account of Mr. Durst’s life. The filmmakers say they reviewed thousands of court documents and interviewed more than 100 friends, investigators, prosecutors, journalists (including this reporter), defense lawyers and relatives of Kathie Durst and Mr. Durst’s friend Susan Berman.

But the core of the documentary is more than 25 hours of interviews with Mr. Durst, who in his slow-paced, gravelly voice talks about his privileged upbringing as a member of a family that owns 10 Manhattan skyscrapers and numerous apartment buildings and became a force in New York City politics.

He describes a tangled relationship with his powerful father, Seymour, and the betrayal he felt when his younger brother, Douglas, was tapped to take the reins of the family business.

The documentary’s producers declined to detail the topics Mr. Durst discussed, but they seem likely to include his mother’s suicide when he was 7; his wife’s disappearance in 1982; the killing of Ms. Berman, his confidante, in 2000; and the dismemberment of his neighbor in a $300-a-month rooming house in Galveston, Tex., in 2001.

“Certainly the things he’s been accused of are tabloid-worthy,” Mr. Jarecki said. “But what’s clear about Bob, if you spend five minutes with him, is that he’s a deeply complicated person who cannot be summarized in a simple way.”

But why, after 32 years of silence, did Mr. Durst decide to talk now?

“I think he felt understandably frustrated by the fact that he has not been able to speak for himself,” Mr. Jarecki said.

Mr. Durst has long been estranged from his family, and 13 of his relatives have obtained orders of protection against him. The Dursts did not cooperate with the documentary and once threatened to sue Mr. Jarecki over All Good Things, which they said unfairly characterized their family.

...Durst severed connections to his father and family in the mid-1990s, roughly a decade after the disappearance of Kathie Durst, five months before she would have graduated from medical school. By most accounts, their marriage had descended into violent confrontations.

The case lay dormant for 18 years, until a New York State Police investigator began tracking new leads in 2000, setting off a bizarre series of events. Mr. Durst fled New York, renting an apartment in Galveston, disguised as a mute woman.

His friend Ms. Berman, who had been his spokeswoman after Kathie Durst’s disappearance, was found dead in her Los Angeles home on Christmas Eve, shot in the back of the head. No one has been charged in that case.

Mr. Durst was then charged with murdering and dismembering a former merchant seaman who lived across the hall from him in Galveston. A jury acquitted him of murder, accepting his account of an accidental shooting that occurred as he tried to defend himself. Mr. Durst did spend more than three years in prison for bail jumping and other crimes.

It should be interesting to see if HBO is really presenting a "propaganda" film financed by Bobby, as the Durst family claims. I was thinking, though, that a good way to prepare for it-- better than reading tabloid stories about the seedy Dursts-- like this one from last week-- would be to go back and get to know Susan, our mutual friend who he executed in Los Angeles. This is a transcript from an Ira Glass This American Life show, 1997, 3 years before Bobby killed her.

Act Two. Mobster Daughter.

Susan Berman

It was 1957, and I was 12. They said it was the largest funeral Las Vegas had ever seen. There were thousands of mourners. The pall bearers were men I had known, Gus Greenbaum, whose throat would later be slashed in Phoenix, Willie "Ice Pick" Alderman, who would die on Terminal Island, while serving time on a mob extortion rap, Joe Rosenberg, one of my father's partners, who was known as his mouthpiece, Nick the Greek, the famed odds maker. Squat Jewish men surrounded Uncle Chickie and me at the funeral, saying, "We don't expect trouble."

Ira Glass

Susan Berman's father was Davie Berman, a Jewish gangster who was one of the founders of modern Las Vegas, trusted confidant of Meyer Lansky, Frank Constello, and Bugsy Siegel. Susan Berman

The son of a Russian-immigrant rabbinical student, he built his own gambling empire when he was just 16 and went on to become a bootlegger and bank robber, whose face appeared on dozens of "Wanted" posters. He was the brazen kid who engineered one of the first kidnaps for ransom, escaped death in a Central Park shoot-out, and was described by a detective on the front page of the New York Times as "the toughest Jew I ever met."

Ira Glass

One of the most romantic and appealing notions about gangsters is the idea that they're cold-blooded tough guys while they're out in the world, but loving family men when they're at home. And while that's obviously not true for lots of real-life mobsters, it does actually seem to be true for Davie Berman. When his wife was ill and away from home for months, he was almost a new-age dad, 1990s-style dad, taking care of his daughter himself, spending time with her every day, helping her with her math homework in the casino's money counting room. Davie Berman was an owner of the Flamingo and Riviera hotels. And in those same rooms, they would skim the profits off for his mob bosses back east.

This is an excerpt from Susan Berman's memoir Easy Street. The book is filled with scenes of this odd collision of worlds. Her father's world, she writes, was dangerous and violent and severe. But he crafted a childhood that seemed to her at the time to be completely normal. She had no idea about his criminal ties.

Susan Berman

I thought we had no house key because, as he said, "Somebody is always home." Mob members never carry keys, because if they're kidnapped, a rival could get to their families. My father was austere. He didn't gamble, drink, or smoke.

He told me he didn't like to stay in small rooms for a long time because he felt confined. I later learned that he had served seven years in Sing Sing, four in solitary confinement on a 12-year sentence. I thought we had no checking account because, as he said, "Everybody knows us here. We just use cash." Mob members prefer to keep cash boxes and few visible assets.

He told me our late night jaunts to Los Angeles were a vacation. He'd wake me and tell me to get dressed. We'd drive to McCarran Field and fly to LA. I'd be kept at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel for a few days with a couple of his men friends.

They took me to Uncle Bernie's toy store in Beverly Hills to drink lemonade from the lemonade tree. And we ordered coffee ice cream in our room from MFK's drug store in the hotel. Then my father would reappear magically after two days and take me to the Brown Derby for dinner. We'd sit under Ingrid Bergman's picture. And he'd order "lamb chops with pink skirts for Susie" and put me on a red, leather child seat, so I could join in the conversation. In fact, these "vacations" were flights to freedom when there was mob unrest, and I was in danger.

I knew my father's partners only from a child's perspective, the same way I knew my father. There was Willie Alderman, called "Ice Pick" Willie in his youth because he allegedly killed people with an ice pick. Willie was my favorite, a big, lumpy, silent man who greeted me every day with, "How you doing, Susie?" He was always at my father's side.

There was Gus Greenbaum, a junkie and alleged killer. Gus was an older, dark-skinned man who smoked cigars and growled. He never paid any attention to me and never smiled. Once I kicked him as hard as I could in the ankle just to prove I existed. He said, "Davie, the kid takes after you." I asked my father if he had kicked big, mean men too. But my father said, no, and not to kick Gus again.

My father's mother, Clara, or Bubby to me, would show up unannounced at our home in Las Vegas once a month for her "pay-as-you-eat Shabbes dinner." Around 2:00 PM on a Friday, Bubby would pound on the front door, yelling, "Davie, Lou, Susie, let me in. Hurry up." Of course, my father was never home from the hotel in the afternoon, but she'd act as if he should have been. She'd run all over the house looking for him, then go right into the kitchen and sneer, "So where's Davie? Working again?"

Without waiting for an answer, she'd throw down her shawl and start unpacking two huge needlepoint bags full of groceries. She was in a frenzy, her white hair standing up in wisps as it came out of her bun. She was short, and stout, and smelled like old rouge. As soon as she washed the carrots for the matzo-ball soup, she yelled at our bodyguard, Lou, to "Come and chop these carrots into little pieces." Lou dutifully went into the kitchen. She took an egg beater from her purse and started making matzo balls and washing the chicken.

After about an hour of intense preparation, during which she yelled at me to, "Stay out of my goddamn way," and said, "ach" several times, and "oy vay" if Lou wasn't fast enough on the chopping. Bubby hit the telephone and had all my father's friends paged in the casino. "Hello, Gus? Clara Berman. I'm making a Shabbes meal at Davie's tonight. Be here at sundown. You eat good," she'd say, as she rang up Willy, Joe, Mickey Cohen, and others, usually about eight men.

Around 6:00 PM, the sleek, dark Cadillacs would roll up. Gus, Joe, Mickey, Willie, and others arrived, and the hungry Jewish men took their places around our table. My father entered with an expression that said, "Oh, no, not again." But he kissed Bubby hello and sat down too. They ate with the gusto of men starved for a matzo ball. It was always a silent dinner except for slurping noises from the soup bowls.

Bubby lit the menorah on the mantle. She kept shoving food onto my father's plate, saying, "Davie, you're too thin." And Gus came in for chiding if he didn't finish every drop. "Whatsa matter? You got an ulcer from the hotel business? You can't finish the tsimmes?"

When the strudel was gone, Bubby would remove her apron and announce, "Fine, first you eat, then you pay. I need gelt for my City of Hope project." And she'd go to each man and hold out her fat hand.

My father looked embarrassed to death and said, "Momma, I'll give you the money. You promised you'd never do this again. Please?" But she knew her victims. $100 bills flowed out of their pockets while I watched in fascination. She put a rubber band around the take and threw it into her needlepoint bag.

Ira Glass

...So let's say that your father is a big-time gangster and, like the men in The Godfather movies, actually does try to protect you from ever knowing what exactly he does for a living. What happens when you find out? Well, Susan Berman's father died of natural causes when she was 12. Her mother died a year later. And the first time anyone directly told her about her father's underworld ties was when she was in college. Another student told her about this new book that talked about what her father really did in Las Vegas.

Susan Berman

I rushed to Martindale's Book Store, which was in Beverly Hills, no longer existent, and quickly found this book The Green Felt Jungle. There was a huge display of them. And I quickly looked at the index, "Davie Berman." And it did. It had a whole chapter on the Flamingo Hotel and Ben Siegel's death.

And it said that after Ben Siegel was dead, that Davie Berman-- and then in parentheses, "Who could kill a man with one hand behind his back." And a little later in the chapter, it said that he had been "wounded in a shoot-out with an FBI man in Central Park and done 11 years in Sing Sing." And then it went on to talk about his other partners. Well, I started to throw up in the book store. I was so shocked.

Ira Glass

You literally threw up in the bookstore?

Susan Berman

Literally. How gross, right? It was just a visceral reaction. I couldn't believe it. And of course, I didn't think it was true.

Ira Glass

As Susan Berman describes in her memoir Easy Street, she worked so hard at believing this wasn't true that eventually, she forgot the incident ever happened. Years later, she was a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and interviewed Jimmy Hoffa just a month before he vanished. He and his men all knew her dad. One of them said he was, quote, "much smarter than the guys running the outfit now," end quote. And still, she did not want to believe that her dad was with the mob. Finally, when somebody showed her her father's FBI files, finally then, reluctantly, she believed.

There is literally not one friend of Susan's who isn't 100% certain that Bobby killed her.

Regulatory Capture-- A Story Of Democratic Dysfunction In The Face Of Increasingly Unfettered Capitalism

This is far more true today than it was in 1902

Last week's most important story wasn't that mini-states Belgium, the U.K. and Denmark are joining in the bombing of airforceless ISIL-- or even the birth of Charlotte Clinton Mezvinsky. The biggest news was broken by Ira Glass on NPR's This American Life. That one and change long YouTube at the bottom is the entire show but I suspect NPR will persuade Google to take it down so… if they do, you can listen to it here too and you can read the transcript here. And remember as you listen to one outrage after another, the Fed refused to speak on the record except to send a short comment saying that begins with "The New York Fed categorically rejects the allegations being made about the integrity of its supervision of financial institutions."

The story is about a Fed whistleblower, attorney Carmen Segarra-- and impressive compliance officer with degrees from Harvard, Cornell and Columbia-- who secretly recorded 46 hours of interaction between crooks at Goldman Sachs and the regulators who systematically are programmed to let them get away with it. Her goal was to expose the sickening deference by Fed regulators to the banksters that were supposed to be overseeing. A report the Fed commissioned in 2009 had already shown that there were a whole rang of alarming problems that had to be dealt with and weren't being addressed. In Glass' words, "what they found were a whole range of problems, all of them distressing to read about. They found deference to the banks, they found an unwillingness to take action, extreme passivity, and they found what experts call 'regulatory capture.' Regulatory capture is when a regulator gets too cozy with the company he’s supposed to be monitoring. He’s a watchdog who licks the face of an intruder, and plays catch with the intruder, instead of barking at him." The report shows how ineffective the Fed had become "And," says Glass, "one of his recommendations was to hire a new kind of employee: outspoken, unafraid, somebody who would not get captured" (i.e., Carmen Segarra). Her recordings, asserts Glass "raise serious questions about whether the Fed has changed enough since 2008 to protect us from another financial disaster."

Segarra's stint at Goldman for the Fed started with a comment from a Goldman exec saying that "once clients were wealthy enough, certain consumer laws don't apply to them," which Goldman denies was said and then claims the exec didn't really mean it. Early into the job the top Fed regulator at Goldman, a captured whore for the bank named Mike Silva, warned her that if she made waves, she'd be "frozen out" of the Fed. He also told her everything between the Fed and Goldman depended on perception rather than reality. She was stunned. Keep in mind that "employees of the Fed do go to work for banks. A quick Internet search reveals at least seven former Fed bank examiners who now work at Goldman. They include the colleague who, according to Carmen, asked her to change her meeting notes."

Carmen says she was so shaken by these incidents-- someone telling her she didn’t hear something she knew she heard, another colleague asking to alter minutes that Carmen believed were accurate, and then the Fed’s top guy at Goldman telling her that perceptions are more important than reality-- she says it was like reality itself was being questioned at the Fed. She realized she wanted a clear record of what was really happening in case there were ever any disputes about it. So she went to the Spy Store, bought a tiny audio recorder, put it on her keychain, and started switching it on secretly at important meetings.

…Segarra: "[T]hey were all sort of afraid of Goldman and I think they were a little bit confused as to who they were working for. What I was sort of seeing and experiencing was this level of deference to the banks. This level of fear. And just not really showing a lot of interest in putting two and two together."

According to Beim’s report, this culture of fear paralyzed the Fed in the years leading up to the financial crisis and prevented it from taking action. It’s not that the Fed regulators didn’t notice the problems accumulating in the financial system that eventually brought it down.

David Beim: "So I could just read the fear of speaking up list of quotations. And it goes like this: 'Don’t want to be too far outside from where management is thinking. The organization does not encourage thinking outside the box. After you get shot down a couple of times, you tend not to go there anymore. Until I know what my boss thinks, I don’t want to tell you.'"

Silva eventually summarily fired Segarra for forcing the Fed to confront the very inconvenient reality that Goldman, on of the most conflicted "legalistic" criminal enterprises in history had no conflict of interest policy. Silva-- the literal definition of regulatory capture, left not long afterwards and went to work for GE Capital. Segarra is suing the Fed and Silva for wrongful termination. Writing for Fortune Shawn Tully reported that Segarra says her spineless bosses at the New York Federal Reserve stymied her efforts to reform what she regarded as the storied institution’s rampant conflicts of interest and that is why she was fired. Those spineless bosses are still saying they "categorically reject the allegations being made about the integrity of its supervision of financial institutions."

I wonder if the Fed regulators would work better if they were incentivized with a percentage of the fines they got out of the criminal banksters. Or firing squads.

When Former Guatemala President Efrain Ríos Montt Gets Out Of Prison, He'll Be 166 Years Old

Reagan supplied the weapons, Rios Montt used them

We've mentioned Ríos Montt before-- first in 2007, when crooked Illinois Republican Congressman Jerry Weller (now retired) married the former dictator's daughter and absconded to Guatemala with all his loot. More recently we looked at Reactionary Mind author Corey Robin's review of a book by Greg Granlin, Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War. How, I wondered, could any serious examination of the reactionary mind-- particularly the American reactionary mind-- not deal with the enormity of what was visited (by reactionary minds) on the Mayan native people of Guatemala, the ones whose ancestors had managed to escape being slaughtered in previous centuries by Spanish imperialists? And whose reactionary mind-- albeit an extraordinarily weak one-- would be better to start with than Ronald Reagan's?

On 5 December 1982, Ronald Reagan met the Guatemalan president, Efraín Ríos Montt, in Honduras. It was a useful meeting for Reagan. ‘Well, I learned a lot,’ he told reporters on Air Force One. ‘You’d be surprised. They’re all individual countries.’ It was also a useful meeting for Ríos Montt. Reagan declared him ‘a man of great personal integrity... totally dedicated to democracy’, and claimed that the Guatemalan strongman was getting ‘a bum rap’ from human rights organisations for his military’s campaign against leftist guerrillas. The next day, one of Guatemala’s elite platoons entered a jungle village called Las Dos Erres and killed 162 of its inhabitants, 67 of them children. Soldiers grabbed babies and toddlers by their legs, swung them in the air, and smashed their heads against a wall. Older children and adults were forced to kneel at the edge of a well, where a single blow from a sledgehammer sent them plummeting below. The platoon then raped a selection of women and girls it had saved for last, pummelling their stomachs in order to force the pregnant among them to miscarry. They tossed the women into the well and filled it with dirt, burying an unlucky few alive. The only traces of the bodies later visitors would find were blood on the walls and placentas and umbilical cords on the ground.

Amid the hagiography surrounding Reagan’s death in June, it was probably too much to expect the media to mention his meeting with Ríos Montt. After all, it wasn’t Reykjavik. But Reykjavik’s shadow-- or that cast by Reagan speaking in front of the Berlin Wall-- does not entirely explain the silence about this encounter between presidents. While it’s tempting to ascribe the omission to American amnesia, a more likely cause is the deep misconception about the Cold War under which most Americans labour. To the casual observer, the Cold War was a struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, fought and won through stylish jousting at Berlin, antiseptic arguments over nuclear stockpiles, and the savvy brinkmanship of American leaders. Latin America seldom figures in popular or even academic discussion of the Cold War, and to the extent that it does, it is Cuba, Chile and Nicaragua rather than Guatemala that earn most of the attention.

But, as Greg Grandin shows in The Last Colonial Massacre, Latin America was as much a battleground of the Cold War as Europe, and Guatemala was its front line. In 1954, the US fought its first major contest against Communism in the Western hemisphere when it overthrew Guatemala’s democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, who had worked closely with the country’s small but influential Communist Party. That coup sent a young Argentinian doctor fleeing to Mexico, where he met Fidel Castro. Five years later, Che Guevara declared that 1954 had taught him the impossibility of peaceful, electoral reform and promised his followers that ‘Cuba will not be Guatemala.’ In 1966, Guatemala was again the pacesetter, this time pioneering the ‘disappearances’ that would come to define the dirty wars of Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and Brazil. In a lightning strike, US-trained security officials captured some thirty leftists, tortured and executed them, and then dropped most of their corpses into the Pacific. Explaining the operation in a classified memo, the CIA wrote: ‘The execution of these persons will not be announced and the Guatemalan government will deny that they were ever taken into custody.’ With the 1996 signing of a peace accord between the Guatemalan military and leftist guerrillas, the Latin American Cold War finally came to an end-- in the same place it had begun-- making Guatemala’s the longest and most lethal of the hemisphere’s civil wars. Some 200,000 men, women and children were dead, virtually all at the hands of the military: more than were killed in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Brazil, Nicaragua and El Salvador combined, and roughly the same number as were killed in the Balkans. Because the victims were primarily Mayan Indians, Guatemala today has the only military in Latin America deemed by a UN-sponsored truth commission to have committed acts of genocide.

And then there was the report almost exactly a year ago that the ex-Presidente was in custody, along with a This American Life program about one particular Guatemalan massacre. What struck me about it-- aside from the cold blooded and horrific murders of all the women and children-- was the impetus to "let bygones be bygones" and just move on. Oligarchs and ruling elites across the world have seen to it that social orders are organized by, of, and for the one percent. Under those circumstances accountability is almost nonexistent. The U.S. has no moral standing to complain about Syria, I wrote at the time, until Bush and his cronies are hanging or rotting in prison cells. Our entire society is rotting from inside because there is no accountability at the top.

Reagan ally and mass murderer, former Guatemalan dictator José Efraín Ríos Montt, now 85, has finally been arrested. Since he was responsible for the brutal deaths of between a hundred and two hundred thousand innocent Mayan Indians, it's nice he's been indicted and is languishing in his mansion under house arrest. But the drumbeat to let bygones be bygones is already sounding and the current fascist in control of Guatemala, Otto Pérez Molina, is carefully weighing his options.

For those not familiar with Ríos Montt, here's the briefest of summaries: In 1951 he attended the U.S. terrorism school in Georgia, School of the Americas, which indoctrinates budding young Latin American fascists and trains them to keep their countrymen down fight Communism. Three years later he was part of the CIA plot to overthrow populist Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. A religionist fanatic and close associate of both Pat Robertson's and Jerry Falwell's, Ríos Montt preached that a true Christian had the Bible in one hand and a machine gun in the other. He soon seized power with the help of the CIA. He immediately targeted labor unions-- literally targeted... and not with Bibles, with the other hand. Tens of thousands of deaths mounted and mounted, mostly of impoverished, maginalized Mayans, and over a million were displaced and forced to live in concentration camps and to work in the fields of Guatemalan land barons, that country's one percent.

This weekend, the American media is reporting-- without much of the grisly background material or the U.S. role-- the guilty verdict in Ríos Montt's genocide trial. I haven't seen many in the mainstream media asking when it will be Dick Cheney's turn or Henry Kissinger's turn.

A Guatemalan court on Friday found Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, the former dictator who ruled Guatemala during one of the bloodiest periods of its long civil war, guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity.

Judge Yasmín Barrios sentenced General Ríos Montt, 86, to 80 years in prison. His co-defendant, José Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez, who served as the director of intelligence under the general, was acquitted of the same two charges.

“We are completely convinced of the intent to destroy the Ixil ethnic group,” Judge Barrios said as she read the hourlong summary of the ruling by the three-judge panel. Over five weeks, the tribunal heard more than 100 witnesses, including psychologists, military experts and Maya Ixil Indian survivors who told how General Ríos Montt’s soldiers had killed their families and wiped out their villages.

The judge said that as the commander in chief of Guatemala’s armed forces, the general knew about the systematic massacres of Ixil villagers living in hillside hamlets in El Quiché department and did nothing to stop them or the aerial bombardment of the refugees who had fled to nearby mountains.

The crowd packed into the courtroom was quiet for much of Judge Barrios’s reading. But cries of “Justicia! Justicia!” erupted when she pronounced the lengthy sentence and ordered General Ríos Montt to begin serving it immediately.

As the general tried to walk out a side door, Judge Barrios shouted at him to stay where he was and called for security forces. An hour after the verdict and sentence were read, General Ríos Montt was escorted from the courtroom by a dozen police officers. He said he was ready to go to prison.

How long he will stay there is less clear than the verdict. His lawyers said they would appeal, and injunctions filed during the case still await rulings.

...For international human rights organizations, the trial took on a significance beyond Guatemala’s own history.

Adama Dieng, the United Nations special adviser on the prevention of genocide, said last month that the case was the first in which a former head of state had been indicted by a national tribunal on charges of genocide.

The “historical precedent,” and especially a guilty verdict, he said, could serve as an example to other countries “that have failed to hold accountable those individuals responsible for serious and massive human rights violations.”

Don't get excited; they're talking about Assad, not Cheney, Bush or Kissinger.

O-K-L-A-H-O-M-A, Oklahoma... OK

I wasn't born when FDR was president. We may have had a good one or two-- Eisenhower (in retrospect) and JFK (in dreams)-- while I was alive, but I have a desire for there to be one great one before I die. And there's one on the horizon: Elizabeth Warren. She's got to win her battle for a Massachusetts seat in the U.S. Senate first. Polls show she will and yesterday's amazing endorsement by the Boston Globe should help close the deal. Will Oklahomans be proud of their native daughter? Will they support the brilliant woman who was born just over 60 years ago in Oklahoma City, at a time when Oklahoma was very, very blue and very, very populist?

Oklahoma isn't blue anymore and whatever populism is left is strictly Know Nothing and neo-fascist right-wing populism. Oklahoma is one of the few places where they still admire the Tea Party. A week from Tuesday they'll be vying with far right Mormon bastions, Idaho, Wyoming and Utah, for who gives Obama the smallest percentage of votes. In 2008, Oklahoma gave McCain his biggest win anywhere-- 66-34%. Since gaining statehood in 1907, Oklahoma voted Democratic in all but two elections (in the Warren Harding landslide over James Cox in 1920 and in the Herbert Hoover landslide over Al Smith in 1928) through 1948, but has not gone Democratic since-- Elizabeth Warren's whole lifetime-- except in the landslide win for Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

The only Oklahoma Democrat holding federal office any longer is Blue Dog Dan Boren, who is so far to the right that in the current 2011-'12 session, 15 Republicans have higher ProgressivePunch scores, including die-hard conservatives like Tom McClintock and John Campbell of California. Boren, who used to brag he was George W. Bush's favorite Democrat-- and whose main function in Congress is to allow Boehner and Cantor to pass extremist insanity and call it "bipartisan"-- is finally retiring... and the weak, right-wing Blue Dog hoping to replace him, Rob Wallace, is likely to lose to Markwayne Mullin, a character right out of the Rush Limbaugh dittohead audience. Wallace appears to be running against President Obama and Nancy Pelosi instead of the Republican.

Time for an "on the other hand." Remember when we first met Oklahoma state Senator Andrew Rice, founder of the Progressive Alliance Foundation who ran against right-wing freak Jim Inhofe in 2008? Running as an unabashed strong progressive, he scored 5% better than Obama did and won 4 counties-- Okmulgee, McIntosh, Muskogee and Cherokee (unlike Obama who won none).

A few weeks ago Digby, Amato and I had a Blue America meeting at M.A.K.E. in Santa Monica. It's the brand new state-of-the-art raw food restaurant in Santa Monica, the crème de la crème of vegan dining. I knew it because the owner/chef, Matthew Kenney was the founder of my favorite restaurant in New York, Pure Food and Wine (Gramercy Park). It was delicious! I'm having dinner there tonight. But you know what? Oklahoma beat Santa Monica to the punch!

The Matthew Kenney Academy, located in Oklahoma City, is the first licensed and classically structured Raw and Living Foods educational center in the world.

Formerly called, 105degrees, the Matthew Kenney Academy was created in response to the increasing demand for chefs skilled in the art of raw and living food preparation.

The curriculum emphasizes the use of whole, organic, unprocessed, plant-based foods to achieve healthy, aesthetically refined and flavorful cuisine.

The Academy, along with the Matthew Kenney OKC restaurant, is the endeavor of celebrity chef and author Matthew Kenney and Oklahoma City resident Dara Prentice.

Forbes named Matthew Kenney OKC one of America’s Best New Restaurants in 2010.

Raw food is also referred to as living cuisine for the healthy natural enzymes protected in the food by keeping its temperature below 105 degrees Fahrenheit during preparation.

A graduate of the French Culinary Institute, Matthew Kenney started his career 20 years ago when he was named one of the Ten Best New Chefs in America by Food and Wine Magazine. He has received two James Beard Nominations for Rising Star Chef in America. He is the author of several cookbooks, including Raw Food Real World, Everyday Raw and Entertaining in the Raw.

...Wendy Thomas, from southern California is attending the academy and is blogging about her experience, she wrote: “For me, it’s about learning how to eat consciously and in agreement with nature. I came all the way to Oklahoma for two months to learn as much as I can and I want to make the most of this experience. I’ve learned a lot, made mistakes, learned from those mistakes and in the end, I am very thankful for every moment.”

Boris Lauser, a student from Berlin said, “I came into the Academy with 3 years of experience as a raw food chef. However, the Academy course starts at a contemporary high level of raw cuisine and only 2 weeks into the course, we started doing exciting fermentation, including coconut yogurt and tree nut cheeses. The school’s focus on artful plating and excellence in taste and quality has definitely left an imprint on my work.“

The intimate class size and personalized instruction, under the supervision of Megan Massoth, the Academy Director and lead instructor, allows for a hands-on experience within a state-of-the-art commercial living foods kitchen.

The one-to-two month long training for chef certification, prepares students for careers in the many areas of the fast-growing field of culinary arts emphasizing health and sustainability. It includes opportunities in spas and restaurants, catering outlets and culinary educational centers.

“I invite you to come learn with me to make the world a healthier place, one bite at a time.” said Matthew Kenney.

That's cute, huh? How about this story from This American Life a week or two ago? It's all about how Oklahoma, against huge odds, came to have the first and best publicly-funded pre-school system in the country. It's a story I've been trying to figure out how to share with DWT readers since I first heard it driving in my car.

Accountability... And Where Did We learn Native American Lives Are Worth Less?

Recently I finished a book, The Last Circle, that ties together arms dealers, an organized drug operation run by rogue elements of the U.S. government, covert operations, technology theft, murder, the Reagan Administration, MCA, native American exploitation, biological weapons and so much other dark stuff that it's hard to even say what the book was about. Towards the end, there's a detailed tangent about the case of an evangelical minister in Honduras who is a self-admitted former Mafia hit man, Jimmy Hughes.

Rachel Begley was 13 years old when her father, Ralph Boger, and his friends were murdered. She never gave up hope that the killers would be prosecuted, and consistently prodded local jurisdictions over a span of years to get the case re-opened. Her efforts were rewarded when Detective John Powers at the Riverside Sheriff’s department was assigned to the cold-case file in 2007.

Their respective findings resemble the stuff of spy novels, comprised of all the malevolent dynamics of clandestine government agents and organized crime figures involved in murder, money laundering and covert arms deals while exploiting Indian sovereignty (independent of most U.S. laws) at the Cabazon reservation.

...The public background to the story began with the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians, located 25 miles east of Palm Springs, California. According to public historical data, on May 15, 1876, President Ulysses S. Grant issued an executive order which officially created the Cabazon Reservation, consisting of 2,400 acres over three parcels of desert (later reduced to 1,700 acres).

After more than a century in the desert, the tribal nation began blazing the path for Native American gaming in California... According to a San Francisco Chronicle article entitled, “Tiny California Tribe’s Huge Clout,” dated September 4, 1991, in 1980 a rundown warehouse was transformed into the “Cabazon Indian Casino,” the first Indian card room in the nation. Tommy Marson, described in congressional hearings as a known associate of the Gambino crime family, “lent the Cabazon tribal administrator, John Philip Nichols, $50,000 to start the casino, according to Nichols’ son, John Paul. The manager of the casino was Rocco Zangari, a former bookie later indicted on racketeering charges.”

...Fred Alvarez, vice-chairman of the Cabazon Indian Tribal Council, wrote a letter to Ronald Reagan [in 1980] outlining criminal enterprises that he had uncovered at the reservation. This was one month prior to the Presidential election. It is unknown why Fred wrote to Reagan during a time when Reagan held no political position. All copies of the letter disappeared after Fred’s murder, but a response, signed personally by Ronald Reagan, dated October 6, 1980 was subsequently found in which Reagan said he found Alvarez’s comments to be “very interesting.”

Authorities explain that the cash nature of Indian gaming made it an ideal business to launder money. That same lack of accountability made it easy for an outside management company to skim the vast majority of an operation’s income. “Someone will come in and manage the operation, when in fact the purpose is to skim the profits,” said one FBI supervisor.

Reagan was elected president of the United States in November 1980, and took office in January 1981, almost six months before the Alvarez, Boger, Castro triple homicide occurred. With all resistance eliminated at the Cabazon reservation, it marked the beginning of government exploitation of the tiny band of Indians when “outside management” in the form of Cabazon tribal administrator John Philip Nichols formed a joint venture with Wackenhut International, a Florida-based security firm run by former FBI, CIA, NSA and military officials.

...In 1991 a series of events, including the death of Washington D.C. investigative journalist Danny Casolaro on August 10, brought the Cabazon-related triple homicide back into national scrutiny. Casolaro had been preparing to visit Indio to investigate the Cabazon/Wackenhut connections to a cabal of spooks, arms dealers, drugs and organized crime figures which he dubbed “The Octopus.”

In July 1991, one month prior to Danny Casolaro’s death, Anson Ng, a reporter for the Financial Times of London, was shot and killed in Guatemala, according to a 1991 TC Technical Consultant story. “He [Ng] had reportedly been trying to interview an American there named Jimmy Hughes, a one-time director of security for the Cabazon Indian Reservation secret projects.”

A San Francisco Chronicle article entitled, “Tiny California Tribe’s Huge Clout,” dated September 4, 1991, best summarized the failure of the justice system at every level to unlock the mystery of Cabazon’s forbidden secrets. Reporter Jonathan Littman mused:

“In all, federal and state agencies [have helped] to finance nearly $250 million worth of projects on the 1,700-acre reservation. That is particularly impressive in light of the tribe’s size-– the entire Cabazon population numbers no more than 30.

To observers in and out of government, these undertakings pose an obvious question: How did a tiny band of Indians, one of the smallest in the nation, give rise to a multimillion-dollar network whose influence reaches into all quarters of the U.S. government?

The answer lies in a maze of politicians, military officers, organized-crime figures, intelligence agents, foreign officials ranging from Saudi sheiks to Nicaraguan Contras-- and John Philip Nichols, a globe-trotting evangelical social worker with an uncanny ability to win federal grants, who once served 18 months in state prison for solicitation to commit murder.

...[In 2009] Rachel Begley called the California Attorney General’s office to learn the status of the arrest warrants. She had learned that FGBMFI [Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International] of which Jimmy Hughes was a high-standing member, would be holding a convention in Florida during the upcoming 4th of July weekend. She believed Hughes would be attending this convention and she wanted the arrest warrant implemented before Hughes departed Florida and returned to Honduras.

With no positive response from the DOJ, Rachel launched a desperate campaign with media, Internet websites, and political figures, including California Attorney General Jerry Brown, to motivate the DOJ to move forward with the warrant immediately. Rachel’s campaign, along with some prodding from John Powers, got the ball rolling on the warrant. However, it turned out that Jimmy Hughes never attended the FGBMFI conference in Florida after all. Possibly because his friends in the military and FGBMFI co-member, Gen. Daniel López Carballo, were busy designing a coup that very same weekend in Honduras. Jimmy Hughes Ministries (FGBMFI) is located in the village of Zambrano, north of Tegucigalpa, where Hughes ministered to the military and trained military personnel as well.

On June 28, 2009, the president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, was rousted from his home in Tegucigalpa and exiled at gunpoint to Costa Rica. The Wall Street Journal reported on June 29 in an article titled, “Coup Rocks Honduras” by Paul Kiernan, Jose De Cordoba and Jay Solomon, that Honduras’s Supreme Court gave the order for the military to detain the president. Later, Honduras’s Congress formally removed Mr. Zelaya from the presidency and named congressional leader Roberto Micheletti as his successor until the end of Mr. Zelaya’s term in January.

Mr. Zelaya called the action a kidnapping, and said he was still president. The U.S. and other countries condemned the coup. President Barack Obama said he was “deeply concerned” and called on all political actors in Honduras to “respect democratic norms.” Venezuela President Hugo Chávez, a close ally of Mr. Zelaya and nemesis of the U.S., said he would consider it an "act of war” if there were hostilities against his diplomats. “I have put the armed forces of Venezuela on alert,” Mr. Chávez said.

“Retired Honduran Gen. Daniel López Carballo justified the move against the president, telling CNN that if the military hadn’t acted, Mr. Chávez would eventually be running Honduras by proxy...” President Chávez had close ties to Iran and reportedly offered to commit his Venezuelan troops to Iran if war broke out between Iran and the United States.

...Finally, on September 26, 2009 self-described Mafia hit-man James “Jimmy” Hughes, 52, was arrested as he boarded a plane destined for Honduras at Miami-Dade International Airport. The fugitive warrant from the California DOJ listed three counts of murder and conspiracy to commit a crime for the 1981 execution-style murder of Cabazon Tribal Council Vice-Chairman Fred Alvarez, his friend Ralph Boger, and Patricia Castro in Rancho Mirage, California.

Last year Andrew Rice covered part of this story for Wired Magazine, particularly the Begley-Hughes part.

Hughes, a stocky 51-year-old with a graying buzz cut and raspy voice, bounded around, bellowing tales of his past brutality. Begley, nervous and bleary-eyed from a sleepless cross-country flight, exchanged incredulous text messages with an accomplice who had come along as backup: Mikel Alvarez, Fred’s son. When Hughes finished his performance, Begley and Alvarez came forward with a rush of adrenaline, introducing themselves to the sweat-soaked evangelist as the children of the murder victims.

“Can’t say nothing about that,” Hughes stammered. “It’s a long time ago-- it’s in the past.”

“Not for us,” Begley said, insistently. “We’re trying to get resolution.”

“I don’t care who got killed,” Hughes shouted, attracting the bewildered attention of others at the banquet. “I was trained in the military. I killed people all over the world, right or wrong, because the government ordered me to.”

Hughes stalked off, fuming, and Begley began to cry. That seemed to bother the minister, because he came back, speaking in a tone that was softer but full of veiled menace. Apparently, he had seen her web videos. “Are you aware that that goes all over the world? Are you a crazy lady?” Hughes said. “Think about your children. They need a mother.” He told Begley and Alvarez that the murder was a “mafia hit,” and though he didn’t explicitly admit to carrying it out, he intimated that he knew much more.

“Your parents were involved in some very dangerous things,” Hughes said. “It’s a lot bigger than just the murder of this guy or the murder of that guy. You’re talking political people. You’ve got babies to take care of, mama. Go home tonight and be at peace.”

...On the afternoon of July 1, the 29th anniversary of the murders, a grim-faced Begley walked into a courtroom in Indio, California, for an important hearing. The chamber was packed with an expectant crowd of reporters, members of Hughes’ family, and a few supporters from the Octopus community, including Cheri Seymour. Hughes was ushered in, wearing chains and an orange jumpsuit.

Then Michael Murphy, a dapper prosecutor from the attorney general’s office, rose and delivered a shocking blow. “We have lost confidence in our ability to proceed with the prosecution,” he said. Begley closed her eyes tightly as the prosecutor gave a vague reason for his sudden about-face, something about “new information” and a reassessment of the evidence. Begley was allowed to address the court. “How many people must die or suffer at the hands of Jimmy Hughes,” she asked, “before he is brought to justice?” But the judge dismissed the charges anyway. It was enough to make you wonder, if you were of a certain mindset, whether the fix was in.

Up top is a recording I listened to Saturday afternoon that was put together by Ira Glass' This American Life radio show. What struck me about it-- aside from the cold blooded and horrific murders of all the women and children (not unlike this week's mass murder of women and children by the ruling elites of Syria)-- was the impetus to "let bygones be bygones" and just move on. Oligarchs and ruling elites across the world have seen to it that social orders are organized by, of and for the one percent. Under those circumstances accountability is almost nonexistent. The U.S. has no moral standing to complain about Syria until Bush and his cronies are hanging or rotting in prison cells. Our entire society is rotting from inside because there is no accountability at the top.

Reagan ally and mass murderer, former Guatemalan dictator José Efraín Ríos Montt, now 85, has finally been arrested. Since he was responsible for the brutal deaths of between a hundred and two hundred thousand innocent Mayan Indians, it's nice he's been indicted and is languishing in his mansion under house arrest. But the drumbeat to let bygones be bygones is already sounding and the current fascist in control of Guatemala, Otto Pérez Molina, is carefully weighing his options.

For those not familiar with Ríos Montt, here's the briefest of summaries: In 1951 he attended the U.S. terrorism school in Georgia, School of the Americas, which indoctrinates budding young Latin American fascists and trains them to keep their countrymen down fight Communism. Three years later he was part of the CIA plot to overthrow populist Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. A religionist fanatic and close associate of both Pat Robertson's and Jerry Falwell's, Ríos Montt preached that a true Christian had the Bible in one hand and a machine gun in the other. He soon seized power with the help of the CIA. He immediately targeted labor unions-- literally targeted... and not with Bibles, with the other hand. Tens of thousands of deaths mounted and mounted, mostly of impoverished, maginalized Mayans, and over a million were displaced and forced to live in concentration camps and to work in the fields of Guatemalan land barons, that country's one percent.

As he said, Jimmy Hughes, ultimately, was working for Ed Meese and Ronald Reagan. This week Dana Frank has a story in The Nation about Hughes' adopted country-- and Guatemala's next door neighbor, Honduras-- and the role the U.S. is playing there-- still playing here. Now the U.S. is helping the current fascist regime target civilians in the name of the War on Drugs.

The United States has, in fact, been quietly escalating its military presence in Honduras, pouring police and military funding into the regime of President Porfirio Lobo in the name of fighting drugs. The DEA is using counterinsurgency methods developed in Iraq against drug traffickers in Honduras, deploying squads of commandos with US military Special Forces backgrounds to work closely with the Honduran police and military. The US ambassador to Honduras, Lisa Kubiske, recently said, “We have an opportunity now, because the military is no longer at war in Iraq. Using the military funding that won’t be spent, we should be able to have resources to be able to work here.”

Missing from the official story-- never mentioned by US officials, and left out of mainstream news coverage-- is that the US government’s ally in this campaign, the Lobo regime, is the illegitimate progeny of the military coup that deposed democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya on June 28, 2009. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at first criticized the coup government, led initially by Roberto Micheletti, but then legitimated it. After almost all the opposition candidates (as well as international observers) boycotted the post-coup election that brought Lobo to power, heads of state throughout the region refused to recognize his presidency; but the United States hailed him for “restoring democracy” and promoting “national reconciliation.” The State Department and Clinton continue to repeat both fictions, as did President Obama when he welcomed Lobo to the White House in October.

Meanwhile, US officials blame drug trafficking for almost all the country’s problems. “It may be gratifying to attribute Honduras’s problems to generals with sunglasses or to rigged elections,” former US ambassador to Honduras James Creagan insisted in a February 5 letter to the New York Times. “But it is not true. This is not the 1970s with Central American coups, contras and revolutionaries.” Rather, he asserted, the violence in Honduras “is caused by drugs, gangs and corruption…all driven by the market for coca leaf products.”

Only in the post-coup context, however, can we understand the very real crisis of drug trafficking in Honduras. A vicious drug culture already existed before the coup, along with gangs and corrupt officials. But the thoroughgoing criminality of the coup regime opened the door for it to flourish on an unprecedented scale. Drug trafficking is now embedded in the state itself—from the cop in the neighborhood all the way up to the very top of the government, according to high-level sources. Prominent critics and even government officials, including Marlon Pascua, the defense minister, talk of “narco-judges” who block prosecutions and “narco-congressmen” who run cartels. Alfredo Landaverde, a former congressman and police commissioner in charge of drug investigations, declared that one out of every ten members of Congress is a drug trafficker and that he had evidence proving “major national and political figures” were involved in drug trafficking. He was assassinated on December 7.

Far more than criminal gangs in the streets and drug traffickers acting independently, it is the Honduran state itself that has made Honduras, according to the Associated Press, “among the most dangerous places on earth.”

The administration argues that it is helping Honduras clean up its police by providing additional funding for “training.” But as former President Zelaya underscored in a conversation with me on May Day, “The police are the drug traffickers. If you fund the police, you’re funding the drug traffickers.”

When Lobo took office in January 2010, he reappointed to top positions the same military figures (sunglasses and all) who had managed the coup, including its leader, Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, as head of Hondutel, the state-owned telephone company. Last summer, Manuel Enrique Cáceres, a high-ranking minister in the cabinet of Micheletti’s post-coup government, was made director of the aviation authority.

The coup, in turn, unleashed a wave of violence by state security forces that continues unabated. On October 22, an enormous scandal broke when the Tegucigalpa police killed the son of Julieta Castellanos, rector of the country’s largest university and a member of the government’s Truth Commission, along with a friend of his. Top law enforcement officials admitted that the police were responsible for the killings but allowed the suspects to disappear, precipitating an enormous crisis of legitimacy, as prominent figures such as Landaverde stepped forward throughout the autumn to denounce the massive police corruption. The police department, they charged, is riddled with death squads and drug traffickers up to the very highest levels.

...Campesino activists have paid the highest price. In the lower Aguán Valley, at least 46 campesinos struggling over land rights have been killed since the coup, most of them allegedly by a combination of police, military and the private army of Miguel Facussé, the richest, most powerful man in the country and a key backer of the coup. The perpetrators enjoy near-complete impunity. On June 24, 2011, for example, seventy-five policemen destroyed the entire campesino community of Rigores, burning down more than 100 houses and bulldozing three churches and a seven-room schoolhouse; not one has been charged. At least ten security guards and others have died in the conflict as well. In an e-mailed response to questions for this article, Facussé admitted that in one incident four campesinos were killed in what he described as a “gun battle” with his security guards.

Overall, a Honduran man, woman or child is killed every seventy-four minutes. According to the UN, in 2011, the country had the highest murder rate in the world. Some of these killings are the kind that happen in a bar fight or domestic disagreement, when someone pulls out a gun or machete because they know nothing will happen to them in the dysfunctional Honduran judicial system. In February, the UN found “pervasive impunity” in Honduras. According to Human Rights Watch, women and LGBTI people have been particularly targeted for murder, including by police. In this free-for-all, gangs control whole neighborhoods in the capital, where they charge taxes on businesses and vehicles.

What difference does a coup make? Add up the rampant corruption of the Honduran state, the crime it unleashed and perpetrates, and its ruthless repression of the opposition, and it’s impossible to blame the crisis merely on drug trafficking and gangs; nor can organized crime and drug trafficking be separated from the criminal regime of Porfirio Lobo and the Honduran oligarchs.

The propriety of a US alliance with such a brutal and undemocratic government is finally being challenged in Washington. On November 28, Howard Berman, the top-ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, sent a letter to Secretary Clinton asking whether the United States was in fact arming a dangerous regime. Ninety-four members of the House, including many in the Democratic leadership, signed a March 9 letter sponsored by Representative Jan Schakowsky calling for the suspension of police and military aid, especially in light of the situation in the Aguán Valley. On March 5, seven senators signed a letter sponsored by Barbara Mikulski expressing concern over “the increasing number of human rights violations” in Honduras.

...The United States has long regarded Honduras, its most captive client state in Latin America, as strategically important. As in the 1980s, when Honduras served as the US base for the contra war against Nicaragua, the country is the regional hub for US military operations in Central America. It received more than $50 million in Pentagon contracts last year, including $24 million to make the barracks at the Soto Cano Air Base permanent for the first time since 1954. Soto Cano has great strategic significance as the only US air base between the United States and South America. Sixty-two percent of all Defense Department funds for Central America in 2011 went to Honduras.

Moreover, US corporate interests in Honduras are enormous, including mining and hydroelectric investments, Dole’s and Chiquita’s expansive banana operations (employing 11,000 people), and apparel, auto parts and other manufacturers that employ more than 110,000, including 3,000 at a Lear Corporation factory in San Pedro Sula that makes electrical distribution systems.

The military coup made possible what Hondurans call the “second coup”: the deeper economic agenda of transnational investors and Honduran elites, now given almost free rein to use the state as they choose. At the top of their list is privatization of basic state functions. Laws are moving through Congress privatizing the country’s electrical systems, water systems and ports. In an overt attack on Honduras’s powerful and militant teachers unions, Congress in March 2011 passed a law opening the door to privatization of the entire country’s schools.

Labor rights are under intense assault as part of this economic agenda. In November 2010 a law went into effect encouraging employers to convert permanent, full-time jobs into part-time and temporary employment—under which workers will no longer be eligible for healthcare and will lose the right to organize a union. A complaint to the US Labor Department filed by the AFL-CIO under the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) this past March documents a sea of systematic violations of the most basic labor rights since the coup, including the firing of hundreds of workers for attempting to organize unions, failure of employers to pay the minimum wage and failure to pay workers altogether. Honduran workers “have seen little meaningful enforcement of their labor rights, as national labor laws are ineffective and violated with impunity,” the filing concludes.

Perhaps most extreme is a new “Model Cities” law, passed in July, which allows for autonomous economic zones in which the Honduran Constitution, legal code and most basic democratic governance structures won’t apply, and where transnational investors will be free to invent their own entire society.

Within the State Department, the policy train is being driven by Bush-era experts on Latin America, still in power, working hand in glove with the Cuban-American right, whose leaders have celebrated the Honduran coup as a successful pushback against the democratically elected left and center-left governments that have come to power all over Latin America in the past fifteen years. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, echoing their arguments, attacked Obama in December for allegedly supporting Zelaya during the coup: “When Honduras wanted to toss out their pro-Marxist president, our president stood with him.”

The ultimate responsibility, though, lies with President Obama and Secretary Clinton, who are using Honduras to reassert US power in the hemisphere.

Accountability? Sure, Obama should be replaced... with Mitt Romney? How about John Galt? Is he available? Dagny Taggart? Just wait a little. They've already picked out Paul Ryan for the job. But that's another day. If you made it through this whole Memorial Day post, you've earned this: