Is Señor Trumpanzee Encouraging The Anti-LGBT Crackdown In Egypt?

Mashrou' Leila, a 5 piece alt-rock band from Beirut, is almost 10 years old. The sing about the some topics indie bands everywhere sing about-- like why stuff (like politics) sucks. But in their part of the world, those topics can mean trouble, especially now that they're hugely popular and draw gigantic crowds. Lead singer Hamed Sinno is openly gay-- which is dangerous in conservative Middle East societies. They were the first Middle East band ever featured on the cover of Rolling Stone but their controversial songs-- especially about tolerance of homosexuality-- have gotten them banned in Jordan. This is from their Facebook page:

We regret to inform you that the Mashrou’ Leila concert, which was supposed to take place on the 27th of June in Amman, has been cancelled following a decision by the Jordanian ministry of interior.

The decision was reminiscent of last year’s concert, when our performance was authorized, then banned, then the ban was lifted, all of which was surrounded by shameful coverage of Jordan in international press.

Again, after being invited to perform in Amman this year, and after the concert organizers obtained all the necessary licenses and permits, the Jordanian authorities have banned our performance.

We were genuinely under the impression that the Jordanian authorities were taking a clear stand with regards to freedom of expression, and the internationally sanctioned human rights pertaining to the LGBTIQ+ community, which the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and Jordan’s former Permanent Representative to the United Nations, HRH Prince Zeid Bin Ra’ad Al Hussein has been supporting.

The inconsistency of the Jordanian authorities in this respect (inviting us, then banning, then cancelling the ban, then inviting us again, then banning us again-- all within the course of 14 months-- has culminated in a clear message, that the Jordanian authorities do not intend to separate Jordan from the fanatical conservatism that has contributed in making the region increasingly toxic over the last decade.

We are terribly disheartened and sorry for our audience that this is happening again. We were extremely excited to return and play our music to our audience, friends and families who live in Jordan, and have been our foremost advocates since the band’s conception. We are sorry for being forced to exclude Jordan from our tour in the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas, which will still go on as planned.

Since all of this directly echoes the events of last year, we will reiterate our own statement from a year ago:

"An in-depth reading of the band’s stances and our songs reveals our interest in various social struggles, questioning the nature of freedom, and addressing various issues that we cannot ostrich ourselves from, be they oppression, censorship, gun control, sexual repression, the patriarchal oppression of both men and women, or the difficulty of just being, when being is in a society that constantly extinguishes our aspirations…..Saying that the band must be banned from playing in Jordan because our songs address themes of sexuality, homosexuality or support righteous democratic protests against social or political problems, is essentially saying that any artist addressing basic human rights through their work should be banned. This is a rather hostile approach towards human rights and democratic processes.”

Furthermore, pretending that these oppressive decisions are necessary under the guise of protecting “Jordanian customs and traditions” frames said traditions in a horribly regressive light. This is a misrepresentation of the people of Jordan, who we know are progressive supporters of human rights, and who respect intellectual and cultural pluralism.

Again, “one has only to look at the reaction of the Jordanian people to the cancellation, to see that the notion of a singular, homogeneous society that shares these “customs, and traditions,” does not seem to apply to Jordanian people, much as it cannot apply to anyone and anywhere else. Most importantly, the vile and absurdly fallacious smear campaign led by the Jordanian media and somehow supported by certain members of the Jordanian government, continues to go un-reprimanded, as though publishing defamatory imputations in the media to score some sort of petty “victory” against free speech, were not “at odds with Jordanian customs and traditions.”

On a more personal note, over the last 3 years of playing in Europe and the Americas, we have repeatedly leveraged our position in the public eye to be particularly vocal about defending the Arab and Islamic community in the face of US and European aggression, misrepresentation, and stereotyping.

It is disheartening to see a few members of that community trying to pit that very same community against us. We will not stop defending the Islamic community on account of this. Nor will we stop defending the LGBTIQ community on account of this. Nor will we change anything about how we go about making and performing our music. We are not afraid of the various death threats we’ve received over the last few days. We refuse to be ashamed of supporting our queer band-mate. We are proud of our work. We are proud of our audience, as always. If anything, today we are ashamed of the decisions of the Jordanian authorities.

And a few days ago they were in the NY Times, but not with a review. Field Marshal Abdel Fattah Saeed el-Sisi's fascist government is doing badly and Egyptians are growing restive. Scapegoating gays in the ultra-conservative society is an effective way to get people to stop thinking about el-Sisi's short-comings as a national leader. Tuesday the Times reported that Mashrou' Leila's Cairo concert led to an anti-LGBT crackdown in which at least 34 people have been arrested on suspicion of being gay and waving rainbow flags.

The crackdown has been fueled by social media, where images of the flag-waving were widely shared, and by dating apps and other websites, which the Egyptian police have used to entrap people suspected of being gay and transgender, activists and officials say.

Photographs and video of Ahmed Alaa, a 22-year-old law student, and others waving the flag at the concert by Mashrou’ Leila, a Lebanese band with an openly gay singer, stoked public outrage and vituperative news coverage that described the flag-waving as an assault on Egypt and its morals.

Ahmed Moussa, an influential talk show host, suggested last week that Mr. Alaa and the others had been funded by unidentified enemies who wanted to “disgrace” Egypt by making it appear to accept homosexuality.

“I am warning you against calling this a matter of personal freedom!” he told viewers. “This is about religions! This is about morals!”

In a telephone interview on Saturday, Mr. Alaa seemed unconcerned about the uproar. “Everything will be fine,” he said. “They just said that they arrested gays to calm down the public.”

The next day he was arrested and charged by national security prosecutors-- who usually investigate terrorism-- with membership in “an illegal group trying to promote homosexual ideas,” according to his lawyer, Ramadan Mohamed. His trial date has not been set.

The crackdown has primarily targeted gay men and transgender women, groups that the Egyptian state and mass media do not consider distinct from each other. Hundreds of them have been arrested since 2013 as part of a broad crackdown on social freedoms by the government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, which has killed hundreds of protesters and jailed thousands of political opponents.

The latest wave of arrests has drawn a stream of criticism from rights groups and condemnation from Mashrou’ Leila, which said in a statement on Tuesday that Egypt was “hellbent on executing the most atrocious of human rights violations.”

“What is happening now is unprecedented,” said Gasser Abed El Razek, executive director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, which has been monitoring the crackdown and providing legal aid to defendants. “We think they are doing this to respond to the fuss that the Mashrou’ Leila concert created.”

At least one recent detainee has been convicted, according to state media, which did not identify the person. It said the detainee had been sentenced last week to six years in prison for “committing debauchery.”

Most of the 34 people arrested since the concert were ensnared through social media and dating apps, prosecutors said. Egyptian authorities have long used online entrapment to arrest gay people, including during a crackdown in 2001. Officers lure someone to a date, arrest them and then use the messages sent during their flirtation as evidence in court.

...Members of Mashrou’ Leila, who are currently artists in residence at New York University’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, said through a spokeswoman, Hind Azennar, that they were “heartbroken that the band’s work has been used to scapegoat yet another crackdown by the government.”

“We denounce the demonization and prosecution of victimless acts between consenting adults,” the band said. “It is sickening to think that all this hysteria has been generated over a couple of kids raising a piece of cloth that stands for love.”

The band also called for the creation of an “internationalist solidarity movement” to pressure Mr. Sisi’s government “to immediately halt its ongoing witch hunt and release all detainees.”

The persecution of gay and transgender people began in earnest in the fall of 2013 when a military curfew imposed after the removal of former President Mohamed Morsi ended. That returned control of the streets to the police, who were eager to reassert the authority they had lost during the country’s 2011 revolution that toppled President Hosni Mubarak.

The final years of Mr. Mubarak’s government, the turbulent days of the 2011 revolution and Mr. Morsi’s brief tenure were a time of relative openness for gay and transgender Egyptians.

At the time, the police were more preoccupied with trying to crush dissent and then protecting themselves when Mr. Mubarak resigned. Little attention was paid to gay Egyptians, who had last been the target of a widespread crackdown in 2001. That repression gained international attention with the arrest of dozens of gay men on the Queen Boat nightclub.

Are you afraid I'm going to tell you there's a Trump connection? Your fears are well-founded... His regime has been sending signals, very disturbing and dangerous signals.



First the good news: the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution condemning the use of the death penalty as punishment for consensual gay relations. All the countries of Western Europe and Latin America (except Cuba, which abstained) voted for the resolution but the Trumpist Regime voted with several other barbaric fascist governments against it: Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Egypt, China, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia...

Can President Trump jack up the shrinking execution rate the way Americans seem to want?

Death Penalty Information Center [Click to enlarge]

"The Death Penalty Information Center report notes that public-opinion polls show some decline in support for the death penalty, but the opposition has never achieved close to a majority. And, notwithstanding ambiguous poll numbers, politicians from Trump to Barack Obama understand that support for the death penalty, at least in some form, is less politically risky than opposition to it."

-- Jeffrey Toobin, in today's newyorker.com "Daily Comment,"
"The Strange Case of the Ameican Death Penalty"

by Ken

The Death Penalty Information Center has issued its annual year-end report, and the DPIC press release is headlined: "Death Sentences, Executions Drop to Historic Lows in 2016." And the evidence is striking:

Death sentences, executions, and public support for capital punishment all continued historic declines in 2016. American juries imposed the fewest death sentences in the modern era of U.S. capital punishment, since the Supreme Court declared existing death penalty statutes unconstitutional in 1972. The expected 30 new death sentences in 2016 represent a 39 percent decline from last year’s already 40-year low of 49. The 20 executions this year marked the lowest number in a quarter century, according to a report released today by the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC). National public opinion polls also showed support for capital punishment at a 40-year low.

“America is in the midst of a major climate change concerning capital punishment. While there may be fits and starts and occasional steps backward, the long-term trend remains clear,” said Robert Dunham, DPIC’s Executive Director and the author of the report. “Whether it’s concerns about innocence, costs, and discrimination, availability of life without parole as a safe alternative, or the questionable way in which states are attempting to carry out executions, the public grows increasingly uncomfortable with the death penalty each year.”

For the first time in more than 40 years, no state imposed ten or more death sentences. Only five states imposed more than one death sentence. California imposed the most (9) followed by Ohio (4), Texas (4), Alabama (3) and Florida (2). Death sentences continued to be clustered in two percent of counties nationwide, with Los Angeles County imposing four death sentences, the most of any county. But death sentences were down 39 percent, even in those two-percent counties.
This year’s 20 executions marked a decline of more than 25 percent since last year, when there were 28 executions. Only five states conducted executions this year, the fewest number of states to do so since 1983. Two states – Georgia, which had the most executions (9), and Texas, which had the second highest number (7) – accounted for 80 percent of all executions in the U.S. Although Georgia carried out more executions than at any other time since the 1950s, juries in that state have not imposed any new death sentences in the past two years.

State and federal courts continued to strike down outlier practices that increased the likelihood a death sentence would be imposed. The United States Supreme Court struck down practices in Florida, Arizona, and Oklahoma that had disproportionately contributed to the number of death sentences imposed in those states. And state courts in Florida and Delaware ruled that portions of their statutes that permitted the death penalty based upon a non-unanimous jury vote on sentencing were unconstitutional.

In fact, a troubling later paragraph in the press release suggests that, if the states were sticking to our own legal principles, the number of people executed in 2016 would have been even lower, considerably lower, than that mere 20:

DPIC’s review of the 20 people executed in 2016 indicated that at least 60 percent of them showed significant evidence of mental illness, brain impairment, and/or low intellectual functioning. This suggests that, in spite of the constitutional requirement that the death penalty be reserved for the “worst of the worst” offenders, states continued to execute prisoners whose mental illness or intellectual disabilities are similar to impairments the Court has said should make a person ineligible for the death penalty.

But it's the paragraph in between the two chunks of the DPIC press release which got the attention of The New Yorker's legal eagle Jeffrey Toobin:

America’s deep divisions about capital punishment were reflected in voters’ action at the ballot box this year. Voters in California and Nebraska voted to retain the death penalty and Oklahoma voters approved a constitutional amendment regarding capital punishment. At the same time, prosecutors in four of the 16 counties that impose the most death sentences in the U.S. were defeated by candidates who expressed personal opposition to the death penalty or pledged to reform their county’s death penalty practices. In Kansas, pro-death penalty groups spent more than $1 million to defeat four state supreme court justices who had voted to overturn several death sentences, but voters retained all four justices.

"It’s a paradoxical moment in the history of the death penalty in the United States," Toobin begins his newyorker.com "Daily Comment" piece, "The Strange Case of the Ameican Death Penalty."

The number of executions has dwindled to just a few, but the voters, even in the most liberal states, seem to want the punishment to remain on the books. That’s the message of the annual report from the Death Penalty Information Center, which produces the most comprehensive analysis of the subject each year.

He proceeds to substantially flesh out the paradoxical picture painted in the DPIC report, then tries to figure out what the heck is going on here. We Americans love us our death penalty -- not least our soon-to-be president -- even as in practice it seems to be becoming all but obsolete. Huh?

The debate over the death penalty seems to have taken on some of the characteristics of the Presidential race this year, as a contest between populists and élitists. Judges play the part of the élites in this particular debate, and the judiciary, as a whole, has shown ever-greater hostility toward approving executions. This year, the Supreme Court ruled for prisoners in several high-profile death-penalty decisions, holding that racial bias infected jury selection, in Foster v. Chatman, a case from Georgia, and rejecting Florida’s system of allowing judges to impose the death penalty even when jurors support life in prison, in Hurst v. Florida. (The Florida legislature sought to correct the defects identified by the Supreme Court in the Hurst case, only to have the Florida Supreme Court overrule the new law as well.) Delaware’s Supreme Court also nullified its state’s death-penalty law this year.

But, as the election results in California and Nebraska illustrate, the voters—the populists—continue to back the death penalty, as does the President-elect. (Donald Trump notoriously called for the execution of the Central Park Five, fourteen-, fifteen-, and sixteen-year-olds who were charged with a high-profile rape and beating, in 1989. Even though the five were later exonerated, Trump, during this year’s campaign, reiterated his belief in their guilt.) The Death Penalty Information Center report notes that public-opinion polls show some decline in support for the death penalty, but the opposition has never achieved close to a majority. And, notwithstanding ambiguous poll numbers, politicians from Trump to Barack Obama understand that support for the death penalty, at least in some form, is less politically risky than opposition to it. (Obama, for example, has supported executions for “extraordinarily heinous crimes.”) Trump’s victory, and those of other Republicans, can only reinforce that view.

So what's the story? Well, it's pretty much what we've already said.

Many factors have led to the decline in the death penalty in recent years: less crime over all, with less fear among the public as a result; DNA exonerations leading jurors to pause before imposing death; the reluctance of pharmaceutical companies to provide lethal-injection drugs and the resulting search (still under way) for a drug protocol that passes constitutional muster; the length and expense of the appeals mandated by the Supreme Court. All those reasons for the decline remain, but so, too, does the United States remain a country that has had the death penalty in effect for virtually all of its history. That’s not likely to change, either. The death penalty may keep shrinking, but it will probably never entirely go away.

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Should Members Of Congress Pay For Their Complicity In Mass Gun Slaughter?

If you read DWT with any regularity you probably know we're pretty tough on law and order around here. This isn't an "abolish the death penalty" blog. This is a "let's use the death penalty much more" kind of blog-- albeit not until we have a perfected justice system that doesn't penalize suspects for being minorites or for poverty. Once that's all set, you better hope I'm not ever a judge. For example, all the Members of Congress who have carried out the diktats of the NRA in regard to ending the assault weapons ban-- how would you like seeing Heidi Heitkamp and every Republican senator on trial for the mass murders in Orlando's Pulse? You probably know the sanitized fictional version of what happened to Dan White, Harvey Milk's and George Moscone's assassin. Take my word for it, justice was rougher than than the official report of suicide. The LGBT community isn't a bunch of wimpy liberals who get pushed around by red necks who gravitate towards gun violence because of their penis-size insecurities. Sorry... off the topic there.

And how about the NRA's number one handmaiden in Congress, Paul Ryan? Should he be on trial for all those deaths? I'm not prejudging in case I wind up on the jury... which I'd sincerely want to be.

Eugene Stoner invented the AR-15, the implement of mass destruction used in the Orlando slaughter that the Republicans have allowed to permeate our country, bringing nothing but death and destruction in it's wake. His family told NBC News that Stoner never intended it for civilian use.

The AR-15 is the most talked about gun in America.

But the AR-15's creator died before the weapon became a popular hit and his family has never spoken out.

Until now.

"Our father, Eugene Stoner, designed the AR-15 and subsequent M-16 as a military weapon to give our soldiers an advantage over the AK-47," the Stoner family told NBC News late Wednesday. "He died long before any mass shootings occurred. But, we do think he would have been horrified and sickened as anyone, if not more by these events."

The inventor's surviving children and adult grandchildren spoke exclusively to NBC News by phone and email, commenting for the first time on their family's uneasy legacy. They requested individual anonymity in order to speak freely about such a sensitive topic. They also stopped short of policy prescriptions or legal opinions.

But their comments add unprecedented context to their father's creation, shedding new light on his intentions and adding firepower to the effort to ban weapons like the AR-15. The comments could also bolster a groundbreaking new lawsuit, which argues that the weapon is a tool of war-- never intended for civilians.

Eugene Stoner would have agreed, his family said.

The ex-Marine and "avid sportsman, hunter and skeet shooter" never used his invention for sport. He also never kept it around the house for personal defense. In fact, he never even owned one.

And though he made millions from the design, his family said it was all from military sales.

"After many conversations with him, we feel his intent was that he designed it as a military rifle," his family said, explaining that Stoner was "focused on making the most efficient and superior rifle possible for the military."

He designed the original AR-15 in the late 1950s, working on it in his own garage and later as the chief designer for ArmaLite, a then small company in southern California. He made it light and powerful and he fashioned a new bullet for it-- a .223 caliber round capable of piercing a metal helmet at 500 yards.



The Army loved it and renamed it the M16.

But after Stoner's death in 1997, at the age of 74, a semi-automatic version of the AR-15 became a civilian bestseller, too, spawning dozens of copy-cat weapons. The National Rifle Association has taken to calling it "America's rifle."

The bullets that tore through the Pulse nightclub in Orlando were Stoner's .223 rounds, fired from a AR-15 spin off made by Sig Sauer.

In all, an AR-15 style rifle has been used in at least 10 recent mass shootings-- including at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and a work party in San Bernardino, California.

"What has happened, good or bad, since his patents have expired is a result of our free market system," Stoner's family said. "Currently, a more interesting question is 'Who now is benefiting from the manufacturing and sales of AR-15s, and for what uses?'"

That's the question for the rest of us.

So just to be clear, yes, the Member of Congress who have voted to end the assault weapons ban should be put on trial. That may be a fantasy at this point-- unless you realize that elections are trials too. Think about that when you consider voting for Republicans in November. They're accessories to mass murder and they don't deserve public trust... to put it mildly. Hold them accountible:

Hillary Clinton Declares Support for the Death Penalty

Still tough on crime? Credit: Associated Press (source)

by Gaius Publius

The headline says it all, though there's detail below. One by one, Hillary Clinton, to her credit, is taking positions on issues. She now supports the death penalty.

I have to ask: Is there support for the death penalty in the Democratic Party, enough to carry her past Sanders, who with O'Malley opposes it? Or more narrowly, is there enough support among Democrats for the death penalty in the Super Tuesday states, especially states like Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina? I'll look at that below.

Cristian Farias in the Huffington Post:

Hillary Clinton Comes Out Against Abolishing The Death Penalty

This is the Democratic front-runner's first mention of the contentious issue on the 2016 campaign trail.

During a campaign stop in New Hampshire on Wednesday [October 28], Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton came out against abolishing the death penalty -- the first time she has addressed the issue during the current presidential campaign.

"I do not favor abolishing" the death penalty, she said, qualifying her position by adding that its use should be "very limited and rare," according to press reports.

Clinton has previously acknowledged how the plight of mass incarceration and police brutality affect communities of color disproportionately, and on Wednesday she conceded the death penalty is often administered in a discriminatory way, according to a reporter who attended.

Her view on state-sanctioned executions has remained consistent over the years. During her Senate campaign in 2000, she offered support for the death penalty -- in a seeming attempt to appear moderate on some social issues.

Farias notes, as you see, that her view on state-sanctioned execution has remained consistent — in one sense a plus, in another, not so much. And from the final link above, we find this, from her 2000 Senate race (my emphasis):

In her first extended interview devoted to her Senate candidacy, timed to coincide with her official announcement this afternoon, Mrs. Clinton took pains to present herself as a moderate Democrat. She went out of her way to note her support for the death penalty, welfare restrictions and a balanced budget.

"Death penalty, welfare restrictions and a balanced budget." A "moderate Democrat" indeed.

The Death Penalty and Super Tuesday

In the same HuffPost article, Martin O'Malley says that the death penalty is racially biased:

In a statement responding to Clinton's position, O'Malley said the death penalty "is [a] racially-biased, ineffective deterrent to crime, and we must abolish it."

"Our nation should not be in the company of Iran, Iraq, China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen in carrying out the majority of public executions," he said. "That's why I abolished it in Maryland, because it is fundamentally at odds with our values. As President, I would work to build consensus to end it nationally."

He's right, of course. So how will her death penalty support play in the March 1 Super Tuesday contests, Clinton's supposed "firewall"? Here are the 12 Democratic events:

Alabama
Arkansas
Colorado caucuses
Georgia
Massachusetts
Minnesota caucuses
North Carolina
Oklahoma
Tennessee
Texas
Vermont
Virginia

Without looking at polling, I see three states where Sanders ought to do well if he does well in New Hampshire — Massachusetts, Minnesota, Vermont. I see at least four states with large Democratic-voting minority populations — Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas. Seven wins on Super Tuesday would force Ms. Clinton to seek another firewall elsewhere.

Can Sanders (or O'Malley) make the case to minority voters that opposition to the death penalty is closer to their interest than loyalty to an existing party structure and its let's-not-hurt-the-wealthy "mainstream" candidates? Makes an interesting test for those voters, who certainly support the issues represented by "Black Lives Matter." I guess this is why we choose people by elections and not by polling.

(If you like, you can help Sanders here; adjust the split any way you wish at the link.)

GP

Death Penalty For Banksters? ANY Penalty For Banksters?

I understood the concept of class enemies from the very beginning. The son of a working class family, I never entertained the idea of identifying with conservatives-- never ever. That said, the first scholarship I ever won was a prize in a UN-sponsored elementary school contest about the death penalty. I came in second in Brooklyn, the most populous of New York's 5 boroughs, something like 3 million people back when I was in school, less than Los Angeles, but more than Chicago, Houston, or Philly. I took the pro-death penalty side. It was a theoretically argument because I didn't sense that the Justice system was competent to administer the death penalty without prejudice-- racial, class, etc. So, yeah, punish the evil doer and stop wasting money keeping him in prison but not 'til you figure out how to make sure the victims of that system aren't all minorities living in poverty.

More recently, I've come up with it-- the death penalty for banksters and other financial predators. I believe in trials, but just quick ones that don't drag on forever and then a quick bullet in the head for the criminals-- go Wyoming! Umm… wait up, Wyoming. Just banksters and financial predators (and, in case you guys ever catch one, war criminals). Like in China. Well, China kills too many people but they do execute wealthy corrupt businessmen; excellent idea. Every bankster execution should have an episode devoted to it on MSNBC's LockUp: Raw.

Yeah, I'm a hard core progressive but, I have to admit it… I'm a law and order kind of guy, albeit not just for impoverished minorities. If I was king, Nixon, Cheney, Bush, Kissinger, Lloyd C. Blankfein, Jamie Dimon, Michael O'Neill, Steve Cohen, John Paulson, Henry Paulson, Ken Griffin, Robert Citrione would have all had encounters with the judicial system that led right up to accountability for crimes committed. And if I can't see these enemies of society shot or electrified or chemically murdered, how how something? Some kind of real punishment for their monstrous criminal behavior?

Joe Pinsker, at The Atlantic laughed at the concept. Even though prosecutors declare victory over the financial criminals when massive penalties are handed down, he says "most of the money never gets recovered." Referencing The Wolf of Wall Street, Pinsker explains that the culprit, Jordan Belfort, pled guilty and was ordered to pay out about $110 million to those he wronged. 11 years later, though thriving a wealthy again, he’s only paid $11.8 million and served less than 2 years of an already far too lenient prison sentence of 4 years.

Belfort’s relatively consequence-free story is only one of the more prominent ones in a parade of aggravating numbers reported on earlier this week by the Wall Street Journal. There’s still $97 billion out there in penalties that the Justice Department has failed to recover, and between September 2012 and September 2013, the department collected only 22 percent of penalties doled out. One particularly demoralizing figure was that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission had collected about a tenth of a percent of the $3.7 billion owed to wronged investors.

So how do convicted felons go about avoiding their payments? Take the case of Paul Bilzerian, who owed the Securities and Exchange Commission $62 million and paid only $3.7 million over the course of 25 years. (The Journal reported a few days ago that the SEC was officially giving up on getting any more money from him, after having spent $8.6 million to get the meager amount that they did obtain.)

Bilzerian has systematically thwarted federal prosecutors by building a web of trusts, partnerships, and corporations established in sketchy tropical locales. He has passed on cash and assets to this sons. He delayed prosecutors for years with a bankruptcy filing. And he has transferred ownership of his 28,000 square-foot home to trusts that were owned by, at various times, his in-laws and his neighbor’s mom. “Do you think I’d be stupid enough to have a bank account?” Bilzerian told a Journal reporter.

Bilzerian’s son, Dan, who received an undisclosed amount of money from his father years ago, has built a sizable fortune of his own by gambling. He flaunts it on Instagram, where he has 4.6 million followers. Dan Bilzerian rarely posts a picture without a truck, a gun, a scantily-clad woman, or all three-- and one recent image involving a little person and four women (above) is, whether he knows it or not, an uncanny throwback to one memorable scene in The Wolf of Wall Street.

The press and public dwell on the comfortingly hard numbers of financial penalties-- "he owes $110 million" is a fact easily digested-- and not the messy job of following through on collecting them. And, just as dispiritingly, the attention of 4.6 million people shows itself again only when there are guns and girls involved, no matter the financial circumstances that explain their presence.

In 2011 AllGov.com asked why none of the banksters who financial crisis went to prison.

Following the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s, more than a thousand bank officials faced prosecution, with 800 of them winding up in jail for their financial misdeeds that ruined institutions and robbed Americans of their retirement.

Today, the 2008 financial crisis—considered the worst disaster on Wall Street since the 1929 crash—has yet to yield any bank executives going to prison.

A variety of reasons have been cited for why America’s financial titans have avoided criminal court…so far. The FBI scaled back a plan to assign more field agents to investigate mortgage fraud, while the Department of Justice rejected calls to create a task force devoted to mortgage-related investigations. Also, federal regulators, such as those at the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision, failed to compile information that could have helped build criminal cases against banking leaders.

“This is not some evil conspiracy of two guys sitting in a room saying we should let people create crony capitalism and steal with impunity,” William Black, a professor of law at University of Missouri, Kansas City, who worked on the savings and loan prosecutions, told the New York Times. “But their policies have created an exceptional criminogenic environment. There were no criminal referrals from the regulators. No fraud working groups. No national task force. There has been no effective punishment of the elites here.”

It is not out of the question that someone on Wall Street will have to answer for their decision-making in front of a jury. A new, bipartisan report from the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Investigation blasts the work of Goldman Sachs, accusing the powerful firm of “engaging in massive conflicts of interest, contaminating the U.S. financial system with toxic mortgages and undermining public trust in U.S. markets in the months leading up to the financial crisis.”

Not out of the question but-- with a Democratic Adminsitration in charge of the Justice Department not one single Wall Street bankster has been tried, let alone drawn and quartered. And you wonder why voters are discouraged and throw up their hands and say there is no real difference between the two corrupted Beltway political parties?

If predators are scamming billions and billions via for-profit hospice "care," isn't this why we have the death penalty?

Profits up in California: The average profit per patient has grown steadily. The combination of more patients and far greater profit per patient has pushed overall inflation-adjusted profit up more than tenfold. (click to enlarge; from washingtonpost.com)

by Ken

In a moment I'm going to back up a bit to try to enable you to understand why I was so shocked, and found my gut so clenched, upon reading an online teaser Thursday night for an investigative report in the Washington Post's "Cost of Healing" series which appeared on Friday's front page, "Medicare rules create a booming business in hospice care for people who aren't dying."

The gist of the article was that a mutibillion-dolar industry has sprung up in "for profit" hospice care, taking advantage of the daily amount Medicare pays for hospice care -- $150, according to the article, whether or not any care has been provided on any particular day -- by bulking up the rolls with large numbers of clients who, to put it bluntly, aren't really sick enough to be in hospice care, and therefore: (1) cost much less to care for than the dying people hospice care is designed for, and (2) for the same reason live much longer, thereby continuing to bulk up the predator-hospice companies' already outsize profits.

We'll come back to the article, but first, as I said, I have to back up.

In the years when -- from long distance -- I watched over my mother's final decline and passing, one lesson I kept relearning was that every situation and stage I encountered was a first time for me, all the people I was dealing with dealt with this all the time. Nearly all those people knew I had no idea what I was doing, and many of them not only counted on it but took advantage of it. Some were a little more helpful.

Miraculously, a very few people along the way showed genuine humanity, making it their business to try to help me understand what was happening and what could or needed to be done. In my state of perpetual apprehension and befuddlement, I doubt that I thanked those blessed souls enough.

The highest concentration of them worked for the hospice that was recommended to me when my mother's doctor, who had known her for many years, told me there was nothing more that could be done for her medically and he was recommending hospice care. He was aided considerably by the copy of my mother's "living will" I showed him, in which she made it absolutely clear that she wanted no heroic measures to prolong her life when there was no quality of life left to be preserved. When my mother was still relatively healthy, she had made a point of showing this to me and making sure I understood her wishes.

My first assumption was that "hospice" meant she would be "going to" a hospice when she was released from the hospital. I suspect I wasn't the first person to make the mistaken assumption that it was a place rather than a form of care for the terminally ill. I still had to figure out how to arrange her living situation.

But since my mother now needed around-the-clock care, and I thought a nursing home was our only option, there was someone at the hospice who guided me through every step of the Medicaid application, something I can't imagine how I would have managed on my own. It certainly wouldn't have occurred to me that I needed to talk to the funeral home (with which my mother had taken the precaution and taken on the expense of prepaying her funeral arrangements so that I wouldn't have to do that) and have them make her plan nonrefundable so that it wouldn't be counted as an "asset"! (And I should add that throughout the remainder of the process the funeral-home people, both in Florida, where my mother lived, and in New York, where she was to be buried, were also angels, handling everything with kindness and efficiency.)

There was another person at the hospice who made no secret of the fact that she hated the nursing-home option, and made me aware that there were now small assisted-living facilities where residents received invididual attention, and which might well be covered by the long-term care policy my mother had providentially scrimped to pay for, which up to that point had made it possible for her to have a home-care aide for a healthy chunk of the day. She wouldn't have been able to recommend a facility, but one of the people she suggested I talk to to better understand the small-ALF option did have a suggestion, of a facility not that far from where my mother lived run by a young woman who gave her residents the best possible care. Ana indeed turned out to be a saint, and took care of my mother till the end as if she were her own mother.

When I told the woman at the hospice of the arrangement I had made, I could hear her relief and happiness at the change from my nursing-home plan. She knew the facility, and considered it an excellent choice. As it turned out, she also made regular home visits to my mother, and in her new residence was able to provide me with information to supplement what I got from Ana. I know there were also regular visits by hospice nurses, and medical care when needed from those nurses and a doctor. The hospice also regularly supplied a range of supplies. When my mother died, there were kind expressions of sympathy from her hospice "unit."

This, then, is the background to the feelings I experienced when I saw the Washington Post report, whose online version began:

Hospice firms draining billions from Medicare


By Peter Whoriskey and Dan Keating

Hospice patients are expected to die: The treatment focuses on providing comfort to the terminally ill, not finding a cure. To enroll a patient, two doctors certify a life expectancy of six months or less.

But over the past decade, the number of "hospice survivors" in the United States has risen dramatically, in part because hospice companies earn more by recruiting patients who aren't actually dying, a Washington Post investigation has found. Healthier patients are more profitable because they require fewer visits and stay enrolled longer.

The proportion of patients who were discharged alive from hospice care rose about 50 percent between 2002 and 2012, according to a Post analysis of more than 1 million hospice patients' records over 11 years in California, a state that makes public detailed descriptions and that, by virtue of its size, offers a portrait of the industry.

The average length of a stay in hospice care also jumped substantially over that time, in California and nationally, according to the analysis. Profit per patient quintupled, to $1,975, California records show.

This vast growth took place as the hospice "movement," once led by religious and community organizations, was evolving into a $17 billion industry dominated by for-profit companies. Much of that is paid for by the U.S. government -- roughly $15 billion of industry revenue came from Medicare last year. . . .

It took me awhile to wrap my brain around this.

First I had to grasp that no, they weren't talking about he kind of hospice that had watched over my mother -- though already it occurred to me that most readers of the article wouldn't know enough about the subject to make the distinction; the message would likely be: Hospice care is a scam.

Then I had to overcome my automatic resistance to the idea that there's an entrepreneurial class so vile as to make a business out of phony hospice predation. Alas, once I understood the nature of the scam, it wasn't difficult to overcome this resistance, knowing as I do that if there's money to be made, there's no shortage of entrepreneurs for whom no degree of vileness would be an obstacle, and if there's a lot of money to be made, then it's likely to be more like a gold rush.

Today the Post published several letters to the editor about the Friday article ("The business of hospice"). But the response that struck the most responsive chord for me appeared only online, at the above link, in a comment by a reader who identified herself (wait, am I just assuming it's a woman?) as "ProgressiveCatholic":

As a former longterm social worker at a non-profit hospice in this area, my heart hurt to see the article in the Post not differentiate between the amazing care that local and national nonprofit hospices provide, but simply identify all hospice care as a way to abuse Medicare. The hospice I worked at for more than 8 years agonized over decisions about whether to take a patient and family off of our program, or to leave them on, receiving badly needed care, when they had elected the Medicare Hospice Benefit and lived longer than 6 months to a year.

Though I can easily imagine that for profit hospices have abused this benefit, the fact remains that many hospices who are in this field are here, and have been for decades, to provide care, not make a profit. PLEASE DIFFERENTIATE between hospices in this community, and in many, who have been providing care, many times at a financial loss, for those on the Medicare Hospice benefit, and those for-profit hospices who have moved in to the field in the last 20-30 years, and may be (?) abusing the Medicare benefit.

A long term joke among our workers was that Hospice care 'caused people to live,' in that when a patient and family have their stress relieved, when caregivers get respite and when patients get adequate pain management, they do indeed, get better for a time. This then leads to the difficult choice of taking that care away, because they no longer meet the Medicare Benefit criteria vs. leaving the care in place, but potentially misusing the benefit.

This is a drastically different issue than "making money" off of hospice care. Hospices face the dilemma of being sued for trying to take someone off of hospice care (it happened to our hospice) versus being sanctioned by Medicare if they leave someone on hospice care. Though I agree for profit hospices have created a number of problems, the way this article reads misleadingly indicates that all hospices out there are "making money off of" dying patients.

Yes, please differentiate, and then take the masterminds of the for-profit hospice ripoff and give them fair trials -- I'm thinking 15 minutes apiece should do it -- in preparation for their executions.

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Let's say you're Texas and you've run out of death drugs, how do you keep executing your death-row inmates?

Is it time to bring back the gas chamber (like San Quentin's old beauty, above), or maybe the electric chair? Death-penalty opponent Richard Dieter doesn't think so. "Those things just raise the spectacle level, and I don't think it's where states want to go."

by Ken

My friend Jon snagged this HuffPost Crime piece on his Facebook page, "Texas Execution Drug Shortage: State Running Out Of Pentobarbital." The problem facing the Texas Department of Criminal Justice is --

that its remaining supply of pentobarbital expires in September and that no alternatives have been found. It wasn't immediately clear whether two executions scheduled for next month would be delayed. The state has already executed 11 death-row inmates this year, and at least seven more have execution dates in coming months.

"We will be unable to use our current supply of pentobarbital after it expires," agency spokesman Jason Clark said. "We are exploring all options at this time."

Don't you just hate it when that happens? You're just humming along, executing away, right and left, and you glance at the expiration date on your remaining supply of death drugs and it's almost up! And apparently the "use by" date on your death drug is harder-and-faster than, say, the "best if used by" date on your can of ravioli.

Which brings me to the question Jon raised in circulating the post:

What's wrong with expired death penalty drugs? Expired drugs become too safe? Side effects now include not dying?

Because the HuffPost article, while it answers many interesting questions, most of which are questions I didn't know I had, it doesn't shed any light on this one.

Author Michael Graczyk explains, for example, that the Texas death-squad people got themselves into this fix by switching to pentobarbital as a single-drug offing agent after going through this same darned snafu last year with one of the drugs in its old three-drug cocktail -- their old supply expired and it was tough to score new product.

Another fascinating thing we learn in the article is that apparently drugmakers are becoming squeamish about having their products used in executions. HuffPost's Michael Graczyk quotes Richard Dieter, exec director of the Washington-based anti-death-penalty Death Penalty Information Center:

"The states really scramble to go all over to get drugs. Some went overseas, some got from each other. But these manufacturers, a number them are based in Europe, don't want to participate in our executions. So they've clamped down as much as they can."

They don't want to participate in our executions, eh? There don't seem to be any drugs you can buy off the shelf as execution drugs, even if you're officially authorized to be executing people, like Texas is, and the drugmakers seem to be developing thin skins about having products of theirs which are marketed as sedatives and such repurposed for executions. I guess it's not quite in step with Pharma World's general ethos of "better living through chemistry."

By the way, the Death Penalty Information Center's Richard Dieter says of the Texas situation: "When Texas raises a flag that it's having a problem, obviously numerically it's significant around the country because like they're doing half the executions in the country right now." (A statistic: Since 1982, six years after the Supreme Court reauthorized the death penaly in the U.S., "Texas has executed 503 inmates. Virginia is a distant second at 110." Go, Lone Stars!)

Michael Graczyk records some of the steps other states are exploring to deal with their death-drug deficit, including the suggestion by Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster that the state go back to the gas chamber, which is still allowed by state law, though as it happens the state doesn't happen to have one. (Richard Dieter, for one, doesn't think there's a widespread return to the gas chamber or electric chair in the offing. "Those things just raise the spectacle level, and I don't think it's where states want to go.")

Now you might think that, with Texas's pentobarbital supply expiring and all those executions piling up, there would be a rush to make the most of that existing supply. But according to Michael Graczyk's math, there may only be enough of the stuff left for three lucky winners.

As of May 2012, Texas had 46 of the 2.5-gram vials of pentobarbital, presumably enough to execute as many as 23 prisoners since each execution requires a 5-gram dose. The execution Wednesday of an inmate convicted in two road-rage killings was the 20th lethal injection since that disclosure.

On the plus side, at least the Texas death-drug inventory-control people won't have to see about dumping the expired stock abroad for Third World executions.

Which brings us back to Jon's original question, about how death drugs "go bad." Actually I think he's already nailed it. Expired death drugs probably just can't be counted on to produce, you know, death, and what good is a death drug that can't be counted on to kill the son of a bitch dead? It makes for lawsuits, not to mention embarrassing publicity, perhaps insinuating that your state's execution program has devolved into something resembling a Road Runner cartoon.

Just think, when you've got to execute your death-row inmate all over again and all you've got on hand is your unreliable expired death drugs, what do you do? Drop a safe on the poor bugger?

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For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."

Does Rape Merit The Death Penalty?

This is a horrible rape case-- some Saudi air force pilot stationed at San Antonio-Lackland, ground zero for the U.S. military's rape scandal and a horrendous coverup being orchestrated by House Armed Services Committee chairman Buck McKeon. Horrendous, yes. But worthy of the death penalty? Not to my mind.

I just got back from nearly a month in India and the big story dominating the news there for the entire month was the brutal gang rape and murder of 23-year old Indian medical student. Now that's a rape that deserves the death penalty. Virtually all the India women's groups agitating for social change based on the incident-- and on a culture of rape in their country-- oppose the death penalty. Progressives tend to oppose the death penalty. In theory I've always been a supporter. Because of the fallibility-- and bias-- in the Justice system, though, I'm reticent to embrace the death penalty the way I would if it was wealthy banksters getting executed instead of poor working people. So why do I think the Indian rape case calls for the death penalty?

I've been watching TV interviews with Indians about the incident since the day after it happened. Outside of Delhi-- and presumably a few other big cities-- there's a horrifying consensus. Everyone agrees that rape is detestable and really horrible. That's good. But then you get the bad news-- how you define rape. Let's keep Todd Akin, Richard Mourdock and the House Republicans out of this. Indians will denounce rape and then immediately pivot to women who dress immodestly inciting men sexually. Even women going out without a guardian is an excuse in the mind's of India's males to "legitimate" rape. A woman is raped every 20 minutes in India. It's got to stop... and it's tearing the society apart right now, a healthy thing.

The Times of India says “Rape is a notoriously under-reported crime, thanks to its social stigma and because the culprits in most of the cases are known to the victim. Yet, of all the major crimes, the incidence of rape has registered the highest growth in the country in the last four decades.”

Women are immediately blamed in most cases. India has a two-finger rule to check to see if the victim is promiscuous-- presumably in which case, it's what American Republicans (as well as primitive Indians) would call "legitimate" rape.

Delhi is the rape capital of the world.

The latest rape statistics released by the Indian National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) has once again put Delhi on top of the shame table with Mumbai is a close second on the list.

Rape cases in India more than doubled between 1990 and 2008, and national crime records show that 228,650 of the 256,329 violent crimes recorded last year had women as victims. The conviction rate for rape cases is 26 per cent.

According to experts only about ten percent of the rapes are reports. The TOI reports, that Delhi registered 568 cases of rape, compared to 218 in Mumbai in 2011 according to NCRB records. In the 2007-2011 period, Delhi topped the chart, followed by Mumbai, Bhopal, Pune and Jaipur.

While there is much chagrin in Bharat and the West over the latest rape in a moving bus–the Western media is silent. The Rape NGOs in America and Europe are silent, and the silence is deafening.

More than ten million Dalit women are raped. While they are untouchable but they are raped.

More than 2000 rape victims in Kashmir have come forward, but their cases are not heard, because the army is the culprit.

India stands third when it comes to rape cases, latest data of the Union Home Ministry suggest. Ahead of India are only the United States and South Africa.

According to the data, 18,359 rape cases were registered in India in the first three quarters of this year while in the US, 93,934 and in South Africa 54,926 rape cases were registered respectively.

There's a great need for a change of attitude in India. A decade of the death penalty in rape cases would get that ball moving.

One of the most shocking attacks happened in the state of Haryana where the victim waived her right to anonymity. There Sixteen-year-old Shabnam was gang raped by eight men from her village. Her attackers took videos on their mobile phones.

When Shabnam’s father discovered that the images were being shared around the village he committed suicide out of shame.

But the brave schoolgirl wants the world to know what happened because she says too many victims are either too afraid or too ashamed to speak out.

“I don’t want the sacrifice of my father to be wasted,” she said. “I’ve decided to get them all punished so that whatever happened with me should never happen to anybody else again.”

The rise in sexual assaults in Haryana reflects what is happening in other states across India.

The reasons:

• A preference for sons and the illegal practice of female infanticide and foeticide have left the state with a badly skewed sex ratio.
• In Haryana there are just 830 girls per 1,000 boys.
• Women’s rights campaigner Rishi Kant says the problems are deep rooted within Indian society.
• “Because of these problems we are facing with female infanticide and foetcide, due to (the fact there are) less girls, young boys are doing all these crimes which are very heinous crimes and they should be booked immediately with a fast track court so that a proper sentence can be given against them.”
• Campaigners say India’s laws for the protection of women are robust but are demanding better policing and stiffer jail terms.

Lok and Rajha Sabah have failed to bring about change. The protesters on the streets of Delhi is a heartening site. Hopefully their will bring about changes which find solutions to societal issues.

Rape has little to do with eroticism. Rape is a crime of violence-- it has little to do with sex. The young girl in question was abused with an iron rod!

In all the studies on this subject, societal norms play a big part in condoning violent behavior. Dalits are raped at random-- and this is acceptable for the society at large.

Would The Death Penalty Be Effective In Cases of Corporate Pollution?

The first in my family to go to college, I got through a state university on scholarships, student loans, and selling pot. The very first scholarship I ever won was a NYC essay contest sponsored by the UN. I came in second. The question was whether or not the death penalty should be abolished. The winner wrote it should be; I wrote it shouldn't. I was only 15 at the time but, unlike every friend I have, I still believe in the death penalty. The difference now is that I recognize it isn't fairly applied and innocent ppeople are killed... so it can't be used. I just voted to abolish it in the state of California earlier this month-- although, in principle, I'm still very pro-death penalty. I think of excellent ways to make the world a better place by applying it properly nearly every day.

This week I was driving along listening to a radio program, the one above, about hexavalent chromium water pollution in Hinkley, California and I came up with a GREAT idea that would make America an even more super-duper country. A public execution for a dozen people... on TV. These folks: (You're going to be disappointed if you look for Karl Rove and George Bush and Dick Cheney on the list.)

• David R. Andrews, Pepsico former chief lobbyist
• C. Lee Fox, former Vice Chairman of AirTouch Communications
• Fred J. Fowler, Chairman, Spectra Energy
• Roger H. Kimmel, Vice Chairman, Rothschild, Inc
• Forrest. E. Miller, former Vice President, AT&T
• Barbara L. Rambo, CEO, Taconic Management Services
• Lewis Chew, Executive VP. Dolby Labs
• Anthony F. Earley, Jr., Chairman and CEO, PG&E
• Maryellen C. Herringer, former Executive VP, APL, Limited
• Richard A. Meserve, President, Carnegie Institution
• Rosendo G. Parra, former Senior VP, Dell
• Barry Lawson Williams, Williams Pacific Ventures

Never heard of any of these people? You don't think they're the evilest scumbags that come immediately to mind? First, the hint is in the bolded name, Anthony F. Earley, Jr., Chairman and CEO, PG&E. The dozen people are PG&E's Board of Directors. That's where the buck stops for the giant $50 billion San Francisco-based energy (electricity and natural gas) company with 19,424 employees.

If you saw the classic 2000 film Erin Brockovich you know all the background already. Hinkley, California is in San Bernardino County and its 2,000 people-- that was when the movie came out; there are considerably fewer now-- are represented by one of the most corrupt congressmen in all of American history, Republican predator Jerry Lewis, who is passing the seat along to Paul Cook-- no, not the drummer from the Sex Pistols, his reactionary protégée who just beat out crackpot teabagger Gregg Imus earlier this month. Hinkley's groundwater was polluted with hexavalent chromium between 1952 and 1966, making the area nearly uninhabitable-- although people have their homes and businesses there. PG&E bought a lot of homes up after the contamination was first discovered but they told even more people that their homes were "safe." They weren't safe and those people are sick now-- and PG&E is offering to buy their homes now.

Julie Heggenberger, a 36-year-old mother of two, was just a teenager when PG&E agreed to pay $333 million to residents who claimed they had been made ill by toxic well water. For decades, workers at PG&E's nearby compressor station dumped the chemical hexavalent chromium into waste ponds that seeped into the town's groundwater.

"I sat and I listened, and I was just like — these are the words they were telling us in '97," Heggenberger says. "Even at the time, some people were like, 'Why are you staying?' But we really did feel safe. PG&E said this plume ... it'll never spread, the contamination was back in the '60s, it's over."

Heggenberger, who suffers from Crohn's disease, says she never considered leaving before. She has deep family roots here.

"But when I was in the hospital the second time and all of this has been brought up again ... I said I just want out. That's where I am now. I just want to leave."

Pacific Gas & Electric acknowledges the toxic plume is larger than once thought, but disputes that it is actually growing.

"The reason that it's larger is because we are testing in areas that haven't been previously tested," says Jeff Smith, a spokesperson for PG&E.

"A couple of options for local residents who live within a mile of the contaminated area from PG&E's past actions here-- what we offered was either a whole household water-treatment system or, for those that were interested, a property-purchase program," he says.

More than 200 property owners, over a quarter of the town, have elected to sell their homes to the utility. Along long stretches of asphalt, country mailboxes sprout like desert flowers amid scatterings of boarded-up houses.

Theresa Schoffstall says her home just outside the boundary of the contaminated area does not qualify for the buyout, but her next-door neighbor's home does.

"I'm not an expert in all of this, but to me it's just common sense in a way, the water flows and if it's 200 feet from me, how can mine be different?" she says. "That's what I don't understand."

Schoffstall fears the home she and her husband built 12 years ago is now worthless, but most of all she worries about her children. The family has stopped drinking the water.

"But I'm still cooking and we still shower and we have a swimming pool, and a lot of times people are telling you that's harmless, but I don't want 10 years from now, all of a sudden, [to hear,] 'Remember we told you it was harmless? Now, no its not,' " she says.

Anthony F. Earley, Jr.

So what does all this have to do with executing the Board of Directors on television? Well, this kind of corporate environmental pollution happens all over and all the time. Jerry Lewis did nothing for his constituents and someone like Paul Cook will do exactly the same now that they're his constituents. They're more interested in PG&E's corporate campaign contributions (and candidate Cook already accepted $2,000 from PG&E this year). But do you think any corporation would ever pollute another town again anywhere in the country if these twelve one percenters were given last cigarettes and blindfolds, lined up against a wall and shot? I say we take a chance and see what happens! And I say we send Jerry Lewis in there with them for good measure and see if it makes congressmen behave any better going forward.