Why Bernie, Iowans? Banks!

-by Skip Kaltenheuser

Banks, including on Wall Street, fear no one like they fear Bernie. I’m sure they’re not keen on Elizabeth Warren, but Bernie strikes a unique terror, because banks know anyone taking them on will have to wield the bully pulpit against them like FDR did. Bernie can do that. And heading up a ticket, no one else will do as well in critical precincts in the upper midwest, Pennsylvania and elsewhere that went for Obama twice, then flipped for Trump when people chose him as the middle finger to Washington, and to Democrats like Obama’s Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner who famously stated that housing policies were “foaming the runway for the banks.”

And no one should fear banks more than Iowans. They stand very naked, and very much at risk. My dad’s alma mater, Iowa State University, recently issued a report that Iowa farm finances are continuing to erode, with 44% of growers struggling to cover costs. Iowa farm debt hit $18.9 billion in the second quarter, the highest level in the country. As it is, government aid is now providing nearly 40% of US farm income.

Climate change isn’t helping prospects. Last year Iowa finished its wettest twelve months since records began, and it also had a rough drought. The most recent National Climate Assessment from the U.S. Global Change Research Program has nothing but grim news for the Midwest, including increased humidity and participation, eroded soils, rising temperature extremes, more pests and pathogens and major reductions in agricultural productivity. Worsening health conditions are also in the cards, with substantial loss of life by mid-century. Anyone for Medicare-for-All?

Now contemplate that the banks are about to do to us something similar to what they did to us in the Great Recession, from which many have still not fully recovered. If you don’t want to be blindsided, spend some time at Wall Street on Parade, where you can learn fun facts like a handful of banks are again up to their ears in derivatives exposure, and are trading their own stocks in dark money pools, and that since Fall the New York Fed has funneled $6.6 TRILLION to trading houses on Wall Street in the form of of repurchase agreement (repo) loans, keeping the details opaque. There’s speculation by market watchers that the Fed is fueling a Ponzi-like rally in stocks. What could go wrong?

We’d never know that after the financial meltdown the Fed pumped in various bailouts the equivalent of over $29 trillion, if Bernie hadn’t hammered away until he finally got that information.

Banks pulled plenty of tricks pursuing their business model of taking what doesn’t belong to them. Recently Citibank, which foreclosed on homes under an alias, was quietly revealed to have illegally held homes of the market for more than five years while rents are rising dramatically from a shortage of affordable homes for purchase. It got a slap on the wrist.

The people Bernie will put in charge won’t just give a slap on the wrist. They won’t keep the public from knowing what’s going on behind the scenes, or be pushing for further bank deregulation, like Wall Street’s revolving door minions Trump has put in charge. Or the revolving door minions like Obama put in charge at the behest of Wall Street. There will be no Eric Holder put in charge of the Department of Justice to make sure bankers are protected from the consequences of their misdeeds.

Revolving Door by Nancy Ohanian

I have found from personal experience in Iowa that inaction against bankers behaving badly is a seamless web between state and federal public offices. The tone is set at the top, and it flows down through all tangential government offices. One of Obama’s greatest failures was setting a tone that talked a good game but threw people under the bus on behalf of banks, which ushered in Trump, who of course has set that tone from day one.

How do I capsulize over a decade of horror stories, involving one bank that was shut down, and another bank that took it over, both of which used the same foreclosure artists? I’ll just give one little slice. I broke my back to pay off in full an unfair settlement that was forced on us, to the astonishment of everyone familiar with the case. I relied on a bank’s representations, both verbally and in emails, that it would cooperate with the payoff arrangement being structured. On the appointed day, it reneged on its promise, deliberately sabotaging my ability to pay it off in full by the agreed upon plan of having another lender buy the note. The bank knew there was no time for due diligence on another arrangement by the loan deadline. It refused to extend the deadline or modify the loan. It did so because my mom’s family farm, outside of Des Moines in a recreation area, was known to be worth far more than what was owed. The bank simply did not want to be paid off. So my mom, who lived with us in DC until we lost her a year ago at 101, had a very sad note at the end of a life that richly deserved much better. The loss of her farm, the family nest egg, and a great deal more. How does one begin to describe the wear and tear of a krap decade? How does one begin to describe the contempt with which I hold the bankers responsible, or the government officials who enabled them by averting their gaze?

I know what it’s like to go up against a bank on the bank’s home turf, where every decision is like rolling the dice on the cost of a college education. I know what it’s like to encounter the bipartisan fix for political darlings like family-owned and so-called community banks. And I include judges in the mix, because in Iowa they gather campaign contributions to run for retention elections. Over time that’s a recipe for courting pro-business decisions to the disadvantage of individuals. Judges know where the money’s at as well as Willie Sutton did. They can make a seemingly minor unexpected ruling a bank wants that in practicality throws the game. You like judges with a tin cup? Go to Iowa.

At every government level I encountered indifferent if not complicit public officials. It’s a hard education nobody should want, but I have enough stories to fill a book. And may yet do it. Public servants and in particular local prosecutors will claim to be overwhelmed and under-resourced. If you’re not a big headline providing political glory, and you don’t have local political backing and connected lawyers, you can forget about getting a measure of justice on anything that isn’t penny-ante. Prosecutors also fundraise from banks and their lawyers. If you’re an out-of-towner, a centenarian widow half way across the country, just have a laugh.

Consider the regulation of banks in Iowa, a state not known for robust consumer protections in the banking arena. The top bank regulator, at the Iowa Division of Banking, is appointed by the governor. The regulator who recently ended his term was a former bank CEO and was formerly the top state bank lobbyist-- Chairman of the Iowa Bankers Association-- and worked with government relations for the American Bankers Association. The top regulator before that fulfilled his role while serving as chairman of a state bank. The new top regulator was a president and CEO of a financial services holding company, a former chairman of the American Bankers Association and a former chairman of the Iowa Bankers Association, and I gather he will continue on various bank boards.

These are the people who are to protect Iowans from predatory and deceitful banks. Except that they are all about protecting bankers. They all know each other, it’s a tight little club in Iowa.

Several years ago I sent a well-documented history of my experience to the top regulator. His general counsel responded with a note that said “Mr. Kaltenheuser, you’ve made some very serious allegations.” It had that sort of legal attitude of “wouldn’t you really like to back off and not say those things about a bank.” I responded that “...yes, I think they're very serious allegations. But tell me, which ones do you find to be the most serious?” Crickets. Several followups asked the same question of both the chief regulator and his general counsel. Nothing but crickets. The regulator has a lot of power. If he finds something serious, like deceptive practices or fraud, he’s supposed to lift the bank’s license. Well, they’re not very keen on doing that to their buddies. So look away, don’t look close.

But what of the “people’s lawyer,” State Attorney General Tom Miller, famed for heading up the multi-state investigation of foreclosure fraud against major banks for misleading or fraudulent statements to evict struggling homeowners from their homes? A top finance writer, David Dayen, summed up the result, “…Miller, the attorney general of Iowa, ran the 50-state investigation of foreclosure fraud, which investigated nothing and moved directly to a weak settlement that delivered 90 percent less relief for homeowners than promised.”

It paid off well for Miller, though. According to Dayen, “Within days of being announced as the lead investigator, we learned that Miller received $261,000 from banking interests for his re-election campaign-- 88 times more than he ever took in the previous decade-- and that he personally asked bank lawyers for contributions. Miller then famously told community groups in Iowa that “we will put people in jail” for foreclosure fraud, only days later his office backtracked and said they weren’t referring to foreclosure fraud but some separate mortgage fraud investigation in Iowa (which he didn’t put people in jail for either), and then days after that he called the case “inherently civil,” and days after that he appeared at the Senate Banking Committee and admitted he had two settlement negotiations with Bank of America within the first month of the vaunted investigation.

In other words he’s a phony, he’s for sale, and you can’t afford him. Miller just endorsed another bankers’ favorite for President, Joe Biden, who’s long carried the water for the finance sector and its most onerous abuses.

Bernie will set a very different tone at the top, and if Iowans miss the opportunity to help him set it, they do so at their peril.

American Dream Revisited by Nancy Ohanian

Media Takes a Crack at Critiquing Itself, Sort of, at the National Press Club

- by Skip Kaltenheuser

Thursday night, Dec. 1st, the National Press Club in Washington, DC put up a panel discussion, The Trump Victory and 2016 Election-- What the Media Got Right & Wrong. A promising title, it filled every seat. I expected much would be made of media lost in a labyrinth of echo chambers, unable to dodge the bull-headed minotaur of Clinton surrogates, but I was wrong. Other than pesky polling, there wasn’t as much “why” in the journalists’ analysis as hoped. Or of what they got wrong. You can watch a video of the panel above.

Uncertain I could attend that night, early in the day I sent the panel written questions I’d welcome their consideration of. Two of the panelists were from the Washington Post, so among my questions was a request for comment on the Harper’s article by Thomas Frank, Swat Team, in which Frank noted a sustained editorial drumbeat throughout the primaries against Bernie Sanders that took its rhythm from Clinton campaign talking points. Another request was for comment on a Washington Post article that uncritically amplified the nonsense of an incognito organization-- my money’s on ? and the Mysterians. This group, Propornot.com, cries tears for a couple hundred online outfits the incognito’s claim are Ruskie tools.

I was disappointed that neither request found takers, as both relate to the why of what the media got wrong. To be fair, the panel allocated time to questions from the floor and I didn’t get one in before the clock ran out.

By the way, there is a Rootstrikers petition to give the Washingon Post a piece of your mind. Would I be shocked if the whole damn list of stooges and useful idiots was a hoax to see who’d take the bait of Russian caviar, if they’d get a big fish like the Washington Post? No. But it’s probably too much to hope for.

At the end of this post are excerpts of issues I sent to the panelists, on which I’d welcome any comment. The issues drifted into something of an essay, but they might form the bones of a good discussion in the future.

Though there wasn’t a great deal of introspection as to the why, there were still some good offerings. CNN Politics Senior Digital Correspondent Chris Moody gave an interesting account of a smart idea CNN had, to have him travel around with a crew avoiding campaign professionals, experts and strategists. Instead, they traveled in a Winnebago for a month, from New York City to Las Vegas.

Speaking with regular folks wherever they found them, the news crew soon picked up that for undecided voters, it wasn’t the normal response of "I like this candidate or that one." It was indecision over whether they could stomach voting for either one. Many people were honestly struggling right up to election day. Among those Moody spoke with were ranchers near the Mexican border, who were getting the brunt of immigrants passing through, as policies drove them from populated areas to rural areas, while government claimed it had solved the problem. They’d been very frustrated for a long time.

There were many besides ranchers who expressed similar disillusionment with government not working for them. A lot of people simply concluded that whatever Trump stood for, he was different, he was change, so what did they have to lose? Though surprised when watching the returns, Moody was no where near shocked. If I had cable, Moody is someone I’d look forward to.

Another item of interest, regarding the ubiquitous presence of Trump in media throughout the primaries, some of it has a simple explanation. Bookers lining up guests on shows would call all of the primary candidates. Often all but one would reject interview requests, and that one was Trump. And Trump was ever-ready on the dial to call in and hijack a program.

Also of note was RNC National Spokeswoman Lindsay Walters account of the strategy of the Republican ground game. They delved deep into data showing where Trump and get-out-the-vote troops had to focus to catch "unallocated voters" in areas in which Clinton was ahead. Areas that with a change of wind Trump might be in striking distance if he could reach and appeal to the unallocated voters still adrift, who might then be turned out to vote. So in the areas it most counted, the vaunted Clinton ground game operation got caught from behind.

Mike McCurry responded to a question of why Hillary didn’t put the email controversy to bed right away. McCurry, former Clinton White House Press Secretary and presidential debate commission co-chair, said it simply wasn’t in the Clintons mental makeup to believe that anyone would attribute mischievous motives to them. They think it’s self-evident that they act in the interest of the American people, and that people would understand that. They believe people would discount anything that raises questions about their own integrity and truthfulness. They don’t understand perception, the perception of negativity.

McCurry is known to be an honorable guy, and he knows the Clintons well, so he might be accurate that that’s really how they thought people would think.

But I have a difficult time wrapping my head around it. Of course, it doesn’t get to why the curious behaviors happened in the first place. And if, after all they have experienced, the Clintons were really that confident that people wouldn’t really think anything untoward might underlie their decisions and motives…what can one say? Victims of their own echo chamber?

Margaret Sullivan is media columnist for the Washington Post and was previously the public editor of the New York Times. I was surprised to see the emphasis she tried to put on the Comey letter’s impact, and heartened to see McCurry and the Post’s Abby Phillip put the letter’s cha-cha in what I view a more realistic perspective, as just another of many things in motion out there. Walters said RNC analysis showed that trends showing Trump rust belt gains were already in place.

From Phillip’s observations, a greater bellwether was how late in the game the Clinton campaign increased spending in Wisconsin and Michigan. Phillip noted the Clinton campaign realized they were losing momentum in the upper Midwest before the Comey letter came out.

One of the panel observations that had resonance: Media was too easily distracted by shiny things to look at-- tweets, for instance-- instead of insisting on more of a focus on the issues, on the details beyond the tweets. Tweets are easy.

Another impression that lingers is how meaningless campaign message themes ultimately are, which doesn’t mean the better ones won’t have an effect. "Stronger Together" didn’t fly as well as Bill Clinton’s “Bridge to the 21st Century.” But according to McCurry Bill Clinton was very frustrated coming up with a message. Clinton’s bridge slogan didn’t appear until Bob Dole said he wanted to build "a bridge to the past." After that, Clinton turned it to the future and sought out every bridge he could walk across.

I tried to get at the media’s tunnel vision in an early June post on why Hillary would be a far weaker candidate, including with independents, than Bernie.

In another post I gave an example of government’s soft treatment of wayward bankers that the public would see as a major fail, of the fix being in for privileged insiders.

Saturday I attended an Irish wake for John Patrick Cosgrove, age 98, a former president of the National Press Club who was an Irish force of nature and a class act. JFK came to Cosgrove’s 1961 inauguration, where Cosgrove made the President join the club and pay dues in full before entering. Cosgrove was sworn in by Chief Justice Earl Warren.

Attendees at the wake included many elder journalists with impressive institutional memories of how Washington works, and who understand the importance of shunning the herd instinct that underlies many of journalism’s shortcomings. I doubt many of them would have been as manipulated by either Trump or Clinton as so many journalists were this campaign.

FYI, issues I’d hoped would get more play from the press club panel, from a note I sent:

Dear Ms. Sullivan and panel members,

I'm not sure I can make it to the presentation, but I'd welcome any thoughts you'd offer on the following matters.

I've a theory on why so much of the mainstream media got the election so wrong. I believe you have to go back to the Democratic primaries to catch media's early derailment, as the media also got most of the significance and power of the Sanders campaign wrong.

My thinking is that much of media abdicated journalism early on to essentially sign on to the Clinton campaign, treating Hillary as inevitable, as the presumptive nominee from the git-go, and odds-on electoral college victor.

Once in that echo chamber, journalists adopted the Clinton campaign viewpoint wholesale. We now know from WikiLeaks how chummy the campaign was with a number of key journalists, including those attending the campaign's off-record cocktail parties.

Related to that, I would welcome any comment on Thomas Frank's Harper's article, Swat Team, in which Frank analyzed Washington Post coverage, particularly editorials, and found a clear pattern of grinding down Sanders with Clinton campaign talking points.

Even now, the Clinton campaign and a number of journalists seem hell-bent on blaming everyone else for the electoral college loss, but not blaming a highly flawed candidate and an arrogant campaign goofing around in Texas and Arizona, bragging about the coming blowout, instead of tending to the wounds of the Rust Belt.

Related to the deflected blame game, I'd welcome comment from the panelists on the Washington Post's uncritical article on a mystery organization's list of 200 online sites run by people who are either Putin stooges or useful idiots. I'm quite familiar with some of those sites, and the ones I know of, including Naked Capitalism, are nothing as described. How could such nonsense be passed along to readers without an investigation of those behind the website? It's not for nothing Joe McCarthy comes to mind to a number of critics of the Post article.

This gets to another related issue, how much of media has discredited itself to the point of people wanting to raise the middle finger to a media busy jamming the Clinton influence machine down our throats as much as the public wanted to raise the middle finger to the perceived political establishment.

Think of the media pile-on, from the Sabbath Gasbags to editorial writers, on Trump when, joking or not, he welcomed Russian hacking. I even heard the word "treason" bandied about, and musings on prosecution. But no thinking person reading and listening to the media reaction believes that Putin or anyone else waits outside America's Internet door like Dracula, unable to enter until Trump invites them across the threshold. There was something of the boy who cried wolf there.

Why wasn't more focus on the veracity and implications of the WikiLeaks emails? Instead we heard distress over doctored emails, with no examples forthcoming. This kind of drumbeat contributed to the belief that news organizations were not giving the public straight info, that they didn't trust the public to make up its own mind.

If you'd like a specific WaPo example, I recall an essay by Dana Milbank, lauding the superiority of Clinton for the Democratic party because unlike the well-meaning Bernie, with his quaint collection of little contributions, Clinton was also raising Big Money for down-ballot candidates. When it was revealed that this was something of a scam, that the Clinton campaign was clawing back the money for its own use, often before state organizations got a whiff of it, I don't recall even an "oops" from Milbank. But I might have missed it, because sooner or later one quits reading the predictable.

So that's my theory: much of key media organizations, of journalists and editorialists, were so vested in the echo chamber promoting a Clinton victory that they didn't fully grasp the public's disdain toward politicians earning vast fortunes solely because of their vaunted public service. Media didn't realize the public, including in the flyover states, easily understood that the only way for the Clintons to earn fortunes of that size is by the sale of influence.

Media also missed the extent of the anger at banks over their ongoing damage to so many families, banks becoming inseparable from the Clintons who deregulated them and who continued to benefit from bank patronage. The media didn't understand that the public instinctively knew that the Clintons were unlikely to bite the hands that lifted them into the oligarchy. The media didn't understand the anger at Eric Holder and the revolving door, of failure to prosecute even bankers who laundered money for violent drug cartels. The public was ready to make a statement, a protest, the only way it could, even if the result was Trump.

It's also hard to ignore the WikiLeaks revelation of the Clinton campaign's early objective of having Trump become the easy-to-beat Republican nominee, and not to wonder at media mostly averting its gaze during the Republican primaries from Trump's connections to Roy Cohn and other unsavories. Ratings and page reads appeared to take prominence over close study of worrisome material on Trump available for decades.

In any case, I give great credit to the media echo chamber, and the public's adverse reaction to it, for landing us in Trumpville.

Thanks much for considering these matters and for any comments at the press club. If I can't make the event, I'll look forward to catching it online later.

Best fortunes with your intriguing and important topic.

Sincerely,
Skip Kaltenheuser

John Cosgrove delivering a National Press Club membership card to President John F. Kennedy in 1961

Greasing the Bench

 

-by Skip Kaltenheuser

John Grisham, meister of legal thrillers, must look at the Dark Money flying about Supreme Court nominees and think, “You stinking thieves, give me my book plots back!”

In a logical world, in a sane US Senate resistant to corruption, Senators would give the bum's rush to nominees to the Supreme Court who are being promoted with millions, tens of millions, in dark money. Dark money, funding not readily traced to the actual donors, slithering through a labyrinth of shell corporations, donor trusts and 501(c)(4) organizations. And slithering around Senators voting on judicial nominee confirmations, not just for the Supreme Court but all Federal judges, whispering rewards and threats when they’re up for re-election. Dark Money groups like the Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, flowing into groups like the Federalist Society, which Trump brags picks his judges, and the closely connected Judicial Crisis Network.

During Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation hearings for the Supremes, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), asked Gorsuch who his angels were who provided seven million dollars to first deny Obama nominee Merrick Garland and then later drop ten million promoting Gorsuch to the bench. Gorsuch’s reply was that if Whitehouse wanted to know who they were, he should ask them. As if Gorsuch had no idea. And no idea of exactly what his hooded benefactors want from courts. In backing Brett Kavanaugh, one dark donation alone provided seventeen million. Many millions are now swirling to promote Amy Coney Barrett. Not to play down the importance of issues like reproductive rights, or the emphasis on preserving even the most meager opportunities for medical coverage, but it’s not hot-button issues that attract the incognito Big Money to such legal eagles of the Ayn Rand brotherhood. It’s their pro-corporate, anti-regulatory, anti-labor and anti-consumer histories. It’s their willingness to pay close attention to the Amicus briefs from the Big Money’s minions. It’s about suppressing the vote, rigging democracy with gerrymandering, etc.... It’s about insulating industries like fossil fuels, and their Wall Street investors, from accountability for the myriad pollution they knowingly cause. It’s about protecting the interests of those at the top.

And when the banks start making wholesale property grabs again, it’ll be about ushering them along as they ride roughshod over people, as the floodgates open for those tumbling into a fractured, pro-creditor bankruptcy system, peppered with self-serving “trustees”. Wait and see.

Redefining The Supreme Court by Nancy Ohanian

As Tom Neuburger recently detailed, Barrett has rung one alarm bell after another that she will be a grim reaper of the rights and protections of workers when they conflict with the Big Money, and injured consumers have little to rejoice about. In her brief time on the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit Barrett quickly joined the ilk of judges who are black-robed crowbars for prying wide the wealth gap via a legal assembly line of pro-corporate decisions.

David Sirota recently revealed an important case coming before the Supreme Court involving state and municipal government lawsuits against Shell Oil, for which Barrett’s father was a lawyer for decades. Oil companies want the Court to require climate cases be heard in the more corporate-friendly federal courts. Asked about climate change during her hearings, Barrett’s reply was that she does not have “firm views”, “...I’m not really in a position to offer any kind of informed opinion on what I think causes global warming.” How convenient. Isn’t that special? Cue the Church Lady.





During Barrett’s confirmation hearings, Senator Whitehouse schooled the Senate with this riveting presentation. Some of it drew from this 29 page treatise he published in the Harvard Law School Journal on Legislation. Both are worth the time. Whitehouse revealed 80 cases at the Supreme Court involving an identifiable Republican donor. Astoundingly, damningly, all were decided in the right-wing’s favor in 5-4 decisions. Many whittle down the concept of civil juries. Because why would fat cats suffer standing before a jury not of their board members? Eighty five-four partisan decisions. People with track records of defying odds like that wouldn’t be allowed through the door of a casino. What the hell are they doing on the Supreme Court?

But Whitehouse is moving the right direction, pushing reforms such as disclosure of big donors to groups that run political advertisements supporting or opposing judicial nominations. He seeks to add a few teeth to the Federal Election Campaign Act to cover judicial nominations and to report spending to the Federal Election Commission, (which could use any dentures it can get).

More generally, Democrats are also having their rolls in the hay with Dark Money. If doing things for principled reasons, why should their benefactors be secret? It’s a gutless position, and chips away at the moral high ground smart Democrats should lay claim to. No reason to go down that road unless you’re a Washington grifter and/or peddler of influence, unless you don’t want your motivations for giving or collecting money laid bare. Don’t Democrats realize voters would take note if they made a point of eschewing money from the shadows? Probably. But that’s not the road to riches. Look at the establishment alarm at Bernie's independence from the Big Money. Can’t have that. Society will crumble.

At the creation of the United States, elites were not in short supply but giant, powerful corporations weren’t a thing. Small corporations were created to develop infrastructure, but were tightly controlled by local political authorities. Now, corporate behemoths stride the land, including those connected to international corporations, often as US subsidiaries, even of foreign banks. Some are out of central casting for movies about dystopian futures. Much of political Washington floats on money these corporate interests pour in through ever more inventive ways to those addicted to it, tapping for fresh veins like junkies. Plenty of good people in Washington, but the city is increasingly a magnet for those who will do anything for money, for whom rationalization is an art form. Sooner or later they’re very well-connected. One doesn’t go up against one, on many issues one goes up against large swaths of them, including party leaders talking out of both sides of their mouths.

In 2010, Pam and Russ Martens, of the must-read site Wall Street on Parade, showed that Charles Koch of Koch Industries, for which fossil fuels are central, is joined at the hip with Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund. The Martens explored the money behind a race-baiting, Islamophobic film on DVDs circulated through major newspapers and direct mail as the 2008 election approached. Back then they wrote, “...the far right has assembled a $6 billion interlinked machine of think-tanks, lobbyists, PACs, astroturf front groups, media sycophants, endowed professorships, state-based political fronts and now even their own centralized headhunter; all to throw us off the scent that the real threat to the poor and middle class in America is corporate domination."

It’s impressive, how so few people could persist in causing so much harm, from the climate or to our judiciary.

“When you find hypocrisy in the daylight, look for the power in the shadows,” said Whitehouse. From his paper’s conclusion: “...Enormous effort has been put by large and powerful interests into a fifty-year project to capture the courts. These interests seek to maintain, and indeed further entrench, the corporate-friendly outcomes into which they have invested hundreds of millions of dollars...Dark money is a plague anywhere in ourpolitical system. Citizens deprived of knowing the identities of political forces are deprived of power, treated as pawns to be pushed around by anon-ymous money and message. Dark money encourages bad behavior, creatingthe “tsunami of slime” that has washed into our political discourse. Dark money corrupts and distorts politics. Bad as all that is, dark money around courts is even worse. The chances of corruption and scandal explode. The very notion that courts can be captured undercuts the credibility upon which courts depend. It is surprising that the Judiciary has not come to its own defense in these matters… As Justice Brandeis also said, 'If we desire respect for the law we must first make the law respectable.'”

And the influence diseases run rampant in the States

The purchase of the courts isn’t only about the Supremes or even the rest of the Federal judiciary. State courts are where the action is for the vast majority of Americans, and also where many Federal judges began. Citizens United revved up the ability to capture elected judges, or Governors who appoint them, by well-heeled business interests and their lawyers. Allow me to slip in this essay I did for Barron’s over six years ago. As with most tales of political influence, things only get worse.

IN CITIZENS UNITED V. FEC, FIVE JUSTICES of the U.S. Supreme Court found that the First Amendment protection of free speech prohibited Congress from banning political advocacy by organizations, including pushing for the election or defeat of candidates. Tightly blindfolded, Justice Anthony Kennedy concluded, “Independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” Justice Kennedy should observe what’s happening to state courts.

Citizens United was a campaign finance accelerant, and not just in federal races. It threatens the integrity of state courts, which hear 95% of the nation’s cases.

At the state level, a majority of judges and justices stand in some form of election. These elections are the minor leagues of U.S. politics, even more vulnerable to the power of money than elections for Congress and state legislatures. Donors who try to buy laws and lawmakers are interested in buying the interpretation of the laws, as well.

A poll conducted by 20/20 Insight last year found that nine of 10 American voters believe both direct contributions and inde- pendent spending affect courtroom decisions. Earlier polls have consistently shown citizens losing confidence in the courts. Other polls show sizable cohorts of state judges and justices believing decisions are affected.

It’s not just past contributors calling the tunes. It’s anticipation of getting contributions in the future, perhaps in a run for a higher court, as well as the chilling fear of being attacked by well-financed opponents. Though big majorities of judges say they want fixes for the campaign finance arms race, more of them are playing the game. Influence mischief was under way long before Citizens United, but a report from the Brennan Center for Justice, the National Institute on Money in State Politics, and Jus- tice at Stake shows the 2010 Citizens United ruling’s rising impact on judicial races.

There was a 50% rise over the prior record, of 2003-2004, in independent spending by interest groups in state Supreme Court races in 2011-2012. Spending that was not controlled by candidates or their campaign committees was 27% of total campaign spending, not counting spending by the political parties. More than a third of all funds spent on state supreme court races came from seven special-interest groups and three state political parties. Television ads backing candidates for high courts took a huge leap—over a quarter funded by special interests, much of it attack ads involving hot button issues and wild distortions of controversial rulings.

You might think that a judge should recuse himself if a party to a case contributed to the judge or spent money on supportive election materials, and 92% of the people responding to a Justice at Stake/Brennan Center for Justice poll would agree with you. But the grounds for a judge’s recusal are judged by the judge.

The U.S. Supreme Court took a half-step toward a higher standard in a case from the West Virginia Supreme Court. Anticipating an important case against A.T. Massey Coal Co., Massey’s CEO flooded money into ads attacking an incumbent justice, who lost the election. The winning beneficiary of the Massey money refused to recuse himself when the case reached the state Supreme Court. A majority opinion in 2009 by Justice Kennedy said that while not every litigant contribution requires recusal, “extreme facts” can create a “probability of bias” violating due process. On rehearing, the West Virginia court determined the case should have been filed in Virginia.

Throughout the land, significant campaign contributions haven’t generated many recusals. In some states, including Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, half of the cases before the highest court involved litigants who contributed to justices. John Grisham needn’t fear running short of plots based on reality.

Joanna Shepherd, an economist and professor at Emory University School of Law, wrote a study for the American Constitution Society examining the relationship between campaign contributions and state Supreme Court decisions in 2010-12. After excluding cases in which two businesses squared off against each other, Shepherd found strong patterns: The more contributions justices garner from business interests, the more likely their decisions will favor those interests.

Donor disclosure offers little solace. Dark money often travels through layers of obscurity, including through Super PACs and through 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organizations that needn’t disclose their donors. Anyway, voters show limited interest or limited ability to sort out conflicts of campaign interest. There are over 50 judges on a ballot in Harris County (Houston), Texas; such elections tend to be straight partisan votes.

However one comes down on whether the First Amendment sanctions unlimited spending on campaigns, judicial elections are different. And if judicial elections aren’t different, judges ought to be. States should insist that judges recuse themselves in cases involving their contributors and their campaign supporters. That would ease the arms race.

To thwart independent expenditures and dark money, the states should move from elections toward merit-based appointments. Insulate the process from politics, using a diverse, professional selection committee.

A U.S. Supreme Court justice discussed the loss of confidence in the courts in a 1999 interview on Frontline: “We weren’t talking about this 30 years ago because we didn’t have money in elections. Money in elections presents us with a tremendous challenge, a tremendous problem, and we are remiss if we don’t at once address it and correct it...if an attorney gives money to a judge with the expectation that the judge will rule...in his client’s interest.... It’s corrosive of judicial independence.” Justice Anthony Kennedy might review these words before writing his next campaign-finance decision. They’re his.

Give judges gavels; take away their tin cups.

Assessing Robert Mueller

Robert Mueller: Into The Swamp by Nancy Ohanian

-by Skip Kaltenheuser

I don’t want to genuflect to Robert Mueller as if his sainthood is imminent. Plenty of others are already busy at that task. Separating him from his legal environment is a challenge, as it’s difficult to ignore a stench floating above many aspects of the US Dept. of Justice. These include ethics matters and a grotesque lack of accountability in an agency where accountability ought to be the most prominent of any agency in government. Indeed, DOJ’s consistency in insulating Wall Street from real consequences for its criminal misdeeds-- the revolving door has turned DOJ into a wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street-- could set America up for another financial debacle like 2008. Or worse.

There is no murkier part of Washington’s swamp than at the Department of Justice, where the quicksand gets recycled. Consider the message DOJ sent to potential whistleblowers who might enlighten the public on banksters, prosecuting a very significant whistleblower as a wet kiss to Swiss banks and US subsidiaries who were very generous to the Clintons. Here’s a related item, a recent glimpse of the swamp’s revolving door, about a DOJ lawyer-- prominent in the whistleblower travesty-- now in the service of Paul Manafort. So I’ve come to view DOJ with a jaundiced eye. That was underway well before the current weasel was put in charge, a sugar magnolia eccentric whose latest itch is to rev up the death penalty, miscarriages of justice be damned.

Jeff Sessions by Nancy Ohanian

Mueller has had a worrisome intersection with entrapment. Here’s a first-hand account from a credible source, author and civil liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate, whom Mueller tried to entrap when Silverglate was a defense lawyer opposing Mueller on a Federal criminal case. Without solid grounds for such an effort by Mueller, that’s troubling in so many ways. An abbreviated version of Silverglate’s account, and a related radio interview, is here. It includes an experience indicating Mueller might willingly avert his eyes from prosecutorial misconduct done in the service of framing a man. Silverglate’s takeaway impression of Mueller, whom he’d known since Harvard Law School, became that of the Grand Inquisitor.

So I was prepared to entertain the worst when an email from the conservative legal hatchet Judicial Watch touted a statement by lawyer and former Harvard law prof Alan Dershowitz implying that Mueller had been complicit in keeping innocent men in prison to protect an FBI informant, the murderous organized crime figure Whitey Bulger. Dershowitz strikes me as something of a mixed bag, but his statement was so startling one can’t ignore it. "Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz: 'I think Mueller is a zealot. Look, he’s the guy who kept four innocent people in prison for many years in order to protect the cover of Whitey Bulger as an FBI informer. Those of us in Boston don’t have such a high regard for Mueller because we remember this story.’" The statement came from this April 8th segment on The Cats Roundtable Show, a radio show hosted by billionaire businessman John Catsimatidis.



There’s been a number of good books written about Whitey Bulger, a moral cretin but colorful enough to merit Johnny Depp playing him in the film Black Mass. Curious as to if Dershowitz’s statement had the ring of truth or was just ring around the collar, I sent a note to the authors of one of the best regarded books, Whitey Bulger: America’s Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him to Justice, Boston Globe reporters Shelly Murphy and Kevin Cullen, asking what they thought of the allegation of Mueller letting innocent people rot in prison to protect Bulger. Ms. Murphy sent me a piece on the topic she had just completed:

How do Hannity’s attempts to link Mueller to ‘Whitey’ Bulger hold up? Ms. Murphy’s analysis, to which reporter Martin Finucane contributed, follows below.

Fox News host Sean Hannity, an ardent critic of Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether President Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election, has recently cast aspersions on Mueller’s tenure as a federal prosecutor in Boston decades ago.

Hannity has tried to link Mueller to New England’s most notorious organized crime figure: James “Whitey” Bulger. In one segment, Hannity presented a sarcastic chart, dubbed “The Mueller Crime Family?” that listed Bulger as a member.

During one opening monologue this week, Hannity said it doesn’t seem to matter how “rogue” Mueller is. “It doesn’t matter what he did with Whitey Bulger.”

Hannity also said that while Mueller was a prosecutor in Boston, there were “four men, wrongfully imprisoned for decades, framed by an FBI informant and notorious gangster Whitey Bulger, all while Mueller’s office looked the other way.”

“In that case with Whitey Bulger-- a $100 million payout and two of the four people died in jail that were put in there and they were innocent,” Hannity added.

So what’s Hannity talking about, and is there any shred of truth to what he said? Here is what we know about Mueller’s record on those matters during his time in Boston.

What involvement did Mueller have with Bulger?

None. Mueller served in the US attorney’s office in Boston from 1982 to 1988, serving as chief of the criminal division, then first assistant US attorney, and later as acting US attorney for more than a year. During that time, Bulger ran a sprawling criminal enterprise and got away with murders because he was a longtime FBI informant who corrupted his handlers. The FBI and the New England Organized Crime Strike Force, a prosecutorial unit that worked independently of the US attorney’s office and reported directly to the Justice Department, used Bulger to build cases against the Mafia and gave him a pass on his own crimes. The FBI’s corrupt relationship with Bulger was exposed after he was indicted on federal racketeering charges in 1995 and became a fugitive. He was captured after 16 years on the run, convicted of 11 murders, and is currently serving a life sentence.

Were four men framed by an FBI informant and wrongfully imprisoned for years, while two died in prison?

Yes, but that informant was not Bulger. Mob hitman-turned-government witness Joseph “The Animal” Barboza was the key witness in a 1968 trial that led to the wrongful convictions of Joseph Salvati, Peter J. Limone, Louis Greco, and Henry Tameleo for the 1965 slaying of a small-time hoodlum named Edward “Teddy” Deegan. Tameleo and Greco died in prison. For years, the men proclaimed their innocence, but members of the FBI, the US attorney’s office, and the Suffolk district attorney’s office vigorously lobbied against clemency for Limone and Salvati throughout the 1980s and 1990s, insisting they were guilty and had ties to the Mafia.

Their case drew new scrutiny after details of the FBI’s corrupt relationship with Bulger and his sidekick, Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi, began to emerge in 1998, triggering a Justice Department investigation and a congressional inquiry into the agency’s mishandling of informants dating to the 1960s. In 2000, a Justice Department task force uncovered secret FBI documents indicating that Barboza framed the four men, while protecting one of the real killers-- the brother of the FBI’s star informant, Flemmi. Limone was freed in 2001 after spending 33 years in prison, and Salvati was pardoned four years earlier. They sued the government, alleging the FBI framed them.

Did Mueller know the four men had been wrongly convicted and look the other way?

There’s nothing linking Mueller to that case, according to several attorneys for the men, voluminous court records, and a former federal judge who presided over their wrongful imprisonment trial. In 2007, then US District Judge Nancy Gertner found that the FBI deliberately withheld evidence that the four men were innocent and that the bureau helped cover up the injustice for decades. She ordered the government to pay the men and their families $101.7 million. Gertner, who heard 22 days of testimony and waded through thousands of documents, found the FBI developed Barboza as a witness and turned him over to the state, without disclosing the agency’s documents that indicated he was lying.

“Absolutely nothing in the record that I saw suggested Mueller’s involvement in any way in either the initial acts that led to the four men’s imprisonment, or the acts that ended in their continued imprisonment and denying them parole or the coverup,” Gertner said Friday. “To suggest otherwise, in my view, is not true.”

Was Mueller among the prosecutors who wrote letters to the Massachusetts parole board opposing the release of the four before evidence emerged that they had been framed?

No, according to both Gertner and Limone’s attorney, Juliane Balliro, who was given certified copies of the parole board records for Limone, Greco, Tameleo, and Salvati before their 2007 trial.

“His signature never appeared on anything I ever saw or can recall," Balliro said. “[Mueller] just wasn’t on the radar screen.”

Former Massachusetts Parole Board member Michael Albano, who complained of intimidation and retaliation by the FBI after he voted in favor of commutation for Limone in 1983, said Thursday that he’s convinced that at one time he saw a letter from Mueller, written in the 1980s, opposing the release of either Limone or one of the other three men.

A 2011 column by The Globe’s Kevin Cullen has been cited in media reports that attempt to link Mueller to the wrongfully imprisoned men. At the time, Cullen said Mueller wrote letters to the parole and pardons board throughout the 1980s opposing clemency for the four men. But, in a column Friday, Cullen said he heard that from Albano but did not see any letters from Mueller.

The day in 2007 that Gertner announced that the FBI was “responsible for the framing of four innocent men” and awarded the multimillion judgment, Mueller, then the FBI director, was being questioned during an FBI oversight hearing in Washington, DC He characterized the case as a debacle and said, “I would suggest to you that that is isolated. Day in and day out over the years, FBI agents have been undertaking investigations and done them lawfully.”

White House by Nancy Ohanian

I should note that Kevin Cullen also wrote a piece on Friday that included some comments on Mueller and the Bulger era that seem more ambivalent about Mueller’s role, or at least Mueller’s responsibility to be more knowledgeable as to what was going on when he was in Boston’s US Attorney’s office during the Bulger saga, in various capacities including acting US Attorney.

Even though the FBI and the prosecutorial unit involved in the coverup of wrongful convictions reported directly to the Justice Department, one does wonder why the local head cheese didn’t know more of any miscarriage of justice on his turf, particularly related to a high-profile character like Barboza.

I believe cautions on Mueller such as that by Silverglate, author of Three Felonies a Day, How the Feds Target the Innocent are worth staying mindful of as Washington’s reality circus parades forth.

But on the matter of whether Mueller was a creep who let innocent men rot on behalf of Bulger, I’m deferring to the reporting of Whitey Bulger expert Shelly Murphy and to the assessment of then US District Judge Nancy Gertner, quoted in Ms. Murphy’s article above. As to Hannity’s credibility and his ready twist-up with a different cast of characters, well, what’s the point?

If Alan Dershowitz has evidence to the contrary, I encourage him to get in touch so we can present it in this happy-go-lucky forum.

However Mueller’s investigations sort out, the long-term harm from the jaw-dropping venality of the Trump Administration is where the country’s prime focus ought to be.

Whatever tactics Mueller pursues, they’d better prove better than a prosecutorial gotcha card like that played on Bill Clinton over a personal scandal, or he might make Trump a more sympathetic character than he deserves.

A personal aside on DOJ: I saw up close how laughable DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility is when I tried for some measure of accountability for a self-serving US Trustee who made a disgusting mockery of the concept of trust. That’s a digression I won’t go into now, other than to note the OPR is colorfully described as a Roach Motel-- complaints check in but they don’t check out. That doesn’t inspire confidence.

If Mueller sticks around, I hope he isn’t dragged down by the agency culture that surrounds him.

Closing In by Nancy Ohanian

Do You Know Voters So Disillusioned By Government They're On The Fence About Voting In The Midterms? Send Them These Essays By Conservatives Max Boot, George Will And Michael Gerson

-by Skip Kaltenheuser

Despite democracy’s diminishment by gerrymandering and the playbook of suppression, your vote is still your best Hail Mary defending against the Big Money’s low art of the thinly disguised bribe. It’s your best chance to sink the oligarchy floating in on the tides of captured government. Don’t toss it away in despair like another lottery ticket that didn’t pan out.

If you need fresh perspectives, try some from the conservative end of the spectrum. Here are several from writers unable to keep their heads in the sand.

Max Boot, a former opinion page editor for the Wall Street Journal who now writes for the Washington Post, sent a shock when he excommunicated himself from the Republican Party. Here’s a few lines from a July writing, I left the Republican Party. Now I want Democrats to take over.



“Should I stay or should I go now?” That question, posed by the eminent political philosophers known as the Clash, is one that confronts any Republican with a glimmer of conscience. You used to belong to a conservative party with a white-nationalist fringe. Now it’s a white-nationalist party with a conservative fringe. If you’re part of that fringe, what should you do?”

"Veteran strategist Steve Schmidt, who ran John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, is the latest Republican to say “no more.” Recently he issued an anguished Twitter post: “29 years and nine months ago I registered to vote and became a member of the Republican Party which was founded in 1854 to oppose slavery and stand for the dignity of human life,” he wrote. “Today I renounce my membership in the Republican Party. It is fully the party of Trump.”

Last Supper of the 2nd Year by Nancy Ohanian

On Halloween, Boot did a long riff off Joe Biden’s stump phrase, “I’m sick and tired of…”. After an impressive listing of nauseating things Republicans have averted their gaze from or been complicit with, Boot throws all Republican candidates into the abyss. Vote against all Republicans. Every single one.

“...Most of all, I’m sick and tired of Republicans who feel that Trump’s blatant bigotry gives them license to do the same-- with Rep. Pete Olson (R-TX) denouncing his opponent as an “Indo-American carpetbagger,” Florida gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis warning voters not to “monkey this up” by electing his African American opponent, Rep. Duncan D. Hunter (R-CA) labeling his “Palestinian Mexican” opponent a “security risk” who is “working to infiltrate Congress,” and Rep. Steve Chabot (R-OH) accusing his opponent, who is of Indian Tibetan heritage, of “selling out Americans” because he once worked at a law firm that settled terrorism-related cases against Libya."

"If you’re sick and tired, too, here is what you can do. Vote for Democrats on Tuesday. For every office. Regardless of who they are. And I say that as a former Republican. Some Republicans in suburban districts may claim they aren’t for Trump. Don’t believe them. Whatever their private qualms, no Republicans have consistently held Trump to account. They are too scared that doing so will hurt their chances of reelection. If you’re as sick and tired as I am of being sick and tired about what’s going on, vote against all Republicans. Every single one. That’s the only message they will understand."

Republican Values by Nancy Ohanian

George Will. Who can resist an opportunity to say you agree with George Will? I readily give him plaudits for his writings on the travesty of the death penalty, but there’s also this, from an essay in early summer, Vote Against the GOP This November.

"Amid the carnage of Republican misrule in Washington, there is this glimmer of good news: The family-shredding policy along the southern border, the most telegenic recent example of misrule, clarified something. Occurring less than 140 days before elections that can reshape Congress, the policy has given independents and temperate Republicans-- these are probably expanding and contracting cohorts, respectively-- fresh if redundant evidence for the principle by which they should vote.

The principle: The congressional Republican caucuses must be substantially reduced."

"In today’s GOP, which is the president’s plaything, he (Trump) is the mainstream. So, to vote against his party’s cowering congressional caucuses is to affirm the nation’s honor while quarantining him."

Will does go on to have things both ways, hoping that Senate and House machinery could be as gummed up under Democrats as it was under Republicans, which sort of loses his thread of logic. He’s best when avoiding tangential head-scratchers that show off his researchers' liberal arts kitchen sink approach. But he does get to a central point, “…the unimportance of Republican control.” I confess to admiring some turns of phrase, like “Consider the melancholy example of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (WI-01), who wagered his dignity on the patently false proposition that it is possible to have sustained transactions with today’s president, this Vesuvius of mendacities, without being degraded.” “Vesuvius of mendacities”, that's a keeper.

I was slower to include an August 9th essay by Michael Gerson, The only way to save the GOP is to defeat it.

That's not just because I see the GOP as irredeemably corrupt and in need not of saving but of slipping beneath murky waters for the third time, but because whenever I seen Gerson I think of the phrase he penned for Condoleeza Rice, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” That was a major pillar of the ruinous Iraqi WMD fraud by W and his band of neocons, and of all the hellish tragedy it continues to pour from Pandora’s Box. I can’t listen to Gerson without dubbing him “the smoking mushroom.”

     

But I digress. I don’t want to add legitimacy to Gerson’s recurring message that Democrats had best embrace so-called centrism, aka Republican Light. Or his notion that voters should vote strategically for Republican Senate candidates who are “mainstream". There are no mainstream Republican candidates. And there are certainly no Lowell Weickers, no Mark Hatfields. There are only those who will go along to get along, with Trump and Mitch McConnell. They’ll play the electorate for saps while doing the bidding of the Big Money, much of it dark in origin and purpose. And they'll pluck the strings that make the lowest common denominators sing.

But I do want to cherrypick a few of Gersen’s points, including the importance of exposing administration corruption. "Under Republican control, important committees-- such as Chairman Devin Nunes’s House Intelligence Committee-- have become scraping, sniveling, panting and pathetic tools of the executive branch. Only Democratic control can drain this particular swamp.”

Gerson gives a good account of the consequences of Republicans retaining control of the House:

Alternatively: If Republicans retain control of the House in November, Trump will (correctly) claim victory and vindication. He will have beaten the political performances of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in their first midterms. He will have proved the electoral value of racial and ethnic stereotyping. He will have demonstrated the effectiveness of circuslike distraction. He will have shown the political power of bold, constant, uncorrected lies. And he will gain many more enablers and imitators. Perhaps worst of all, a victorious Trump will complete his takeover of the Republican Party (which is already far along). Even murmured dissent will be silenced. The GOP will be fully committed to a 2020 presidential campaign conducted in the spirit of George C. Wallace-- a campaign of racial division, of rural/urban division, of religious division, of party division that metastasizes into mutual contempt.

The Emperor by Nancy Ohanian

Exactly why Gerson’s concerns don’t also apply to Republican control of the Senate escapes me. But after meandering with the conservative columnists’ obligatory genuflections to Reagan and Bush the Elder, he gets to a decent finish. "In a democracy, a vote is usually not a matter of good and evil. It is a matter of weighing competing goods and choosing lesser evils. The possible outcomes this November come down to this: Trump contained, or Trump triumphant... In this case, a Republican vote for a Democratic representative will be an act of conscience."

Because there are too many Democrats that are so-called centrists, an increasingly non-descriptive term that drips with wishy-washy, there needs to be a thumping victory by Democrats. It needs to be big enough to increase progressive heft that pulls the party back toward the traditions of FDR, and out of the clutches of the Big Money. That’s not a quick and easy, but the effort needs to get underway the day after the election, ignoring the pundits crowing about magic in the middle of the road. As Jim Hightower put it, “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos."

Much has been made that of those independent voters who view both Democratic and Republican parties as turkeys, there’s a growing shift to viewing Democrats as the lesser turkey. My worry is that voting for the lesser turkey isn’t all that much of a motivator to show up at the polls. But if you know potential voters who are sitting back until they see a solid dime’s difference, send these essays along to them, particularly the one by Boot that minces no words. More years of the current clowns in charge is not a luxury our democracy has, every day brings new risk.

And maybe send along the hour long version of that Clash song to aid their mulling things over.