Small Towns, Small Minds: Democracy Only Money Can Buy

Small Towns, Small Minds

excerpted from the book

The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

by Greg Palast

p298
To understand what I mean, let's begin with this. The United States is ugly. A conspiracy of travel writers have sold the image of America the Beautiful: Georgia O'Keeffe sunsets over New Mexico's plateau, the wide-open vistas of the Grand Canyon. But to get there, you must drive through a numbing repetitive vortex of sprawled Pizza Huts, Wal-Marts, Kmarts, the Gap, Jiffy Lubes, Kentucky Fried Chickens, Starbucks and McDonald's up to and . leaning over the Canyon wall.

From New Orleans jambalaya, to Harlem ham hocks, to New England crab boil, whatever is unique to an American region or town has been hunted down and herded into a few tourist preserves. The oppressive ubiquity of contrived American monoculture has ingested and eliminated any threat of character. The words of McDonald's late CEO Ray Kroc, ''We cannot trust some people who are nonconformists," have become our national anthem.

p299
The world's three hundred richest people are worth more than the world's poorest three billion.

p299
Dr. Edward Wolff, director of the Income Studies Project at the Jerome Levy Institute, New York, tells me that between 1983 and 1997, 85.5 percent of the vaunted increase in America's wealth was captured by the richest 1 percent. In that time, overall U.S. income rocketed-of which 80 percent of America's families received zero percent. The market's up, but who is the market? According to Wolff, the Gilded One Percent own $2.9 trillion of the nation's stocks and bonds out of a total $3.5 trillion.

Not coincidentally, the rise in the riches of the rich matches quite well with the wealth lost by production workers through the shrinking of their share of the production pie. U.S. workers are producing more per hour (up 17 percent since 1983) while keeping less of it (real wages are down 3.1 percent). So there you have it: The market did not rise on a bubble of fictions but on the rock-hard foundation of the spoils of the class war.

What's going on here? Let's start with computers. Forget Robert Reich's sweet notion that computers can make work more meaningful and worthwhile. The purpose of every industrial revolution, from the steam-powered loom to the assembly line, is to make craft and skills obsolete, and thereby make people interchangeable and cheap. And now, computerization is speeding the industrialization of service work.

p312
The United Kingdom has an Official Secrets Act, libel laws l that effectively privatize censorship of journalism, privacy laws protecting politicians-as do all nations in some form or other, except America. You may be surprised to learn that the mother of our Democracy has no legal freedom of the press, no First Amendment-no Bill of Rights. (Maybe they can borrow ours- we're not using it. And we may have no Official Secrets Act- yet-but we are on the cutting edge of creating an unofficial corporate secrets act.)

And that's why I'm so ornery about fighting for the First Amendment-which our president and bobbing heads in Congress would snatch from us in the name of "security." Just try working in a nation without the right to a free press, and worse, without the will to fight for it. I have. An unholy number of British journalists seem to have fallen in love with their shackles.

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Lacking a First Amendment, Britain has become the libel-suit capital of the world. Stories accepted elsewhere draw steep judgments in London. The Guardian papers receive notice of legal action about three times a day-that's one thousand libel notices a year... The Guardian papers operate on a small budget from a not-for-profit foundation.

p314
Truth alone is not a defense in English courts.

p331
[The USA], where nothing can be censored - but where nothing printed is worth censoring.

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Knox appeal highlights egregious flaws in American justice

The Lawless Lawyer

OCTOBER 4, 2011 11:32AM

Knox appeal highlights egregious flaws in American justice

As the sensationalist trials of Amanda Knox come to a dramatic end in Italy, commentators are beginning to highlight the striking differences between the American and Italian legal systems. These differences meant that Knox's appeal played out as a fully new trial rather than an American-style bench review restricted largely to procedural challenges, allowing her to present new evidence of faulty DNA testing to a jury of fresh eyes. The Italian system also ensured that Knox received a sentence of 26 years for the sexual asault and murder of her roommate, a slap on the wrist by American standards. As other commentators have pointed out on Salon and in the New York Times, had Knox been falsely convicted in the United States, she could well have shared the fate of Troy Davis, who was executed in Georgia two weeks ago after a conviction based solely on the testimony of witnesses who have since recanted.

But now that Knox's trial is over, and American legal commentators are largely in agreement that a wrong has been righted, the focus should turn to the glaring failures of the American system that are exposed by what went right in Knox's case. First, we should look at the failures of our appellate system, which are undeniable in light of a case like Knox's (or any case where a defendant is found guilty in spite of a dearth of evidence.) Knox's fate hinged on her ability to show a new, unbiased jury that the DNA evidence upon which she and her ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito had been convicted was so flawed that it was thoroughly incredible. In contrast, a 2009 U.S. Supreme Court opinion authored by Chief Justice John Roberts embeds in the American legal system the notion that defendants have no constitutional right to even test new DNA evidence that surfaces or becomes technologically available after a conviction. In fact, Justice Antonin Scalia dissented when the Supreme Court stepped in to order new DNA testing in the Troy Davis case, arguing that "[T]his court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is 'actually' innocent." (As noted above, Davis was eventually executed anyway; there is no scientific test to determine the credibility of eyewitness testimony.)

In addition to scrutinizing our appellate system, which at least one Supreme Court justice believes does not guarantee the right of an innocent person to escape execution, Americans must have a conversation about the disproportionately long sentences meted out by our judicial system. The sentence lengths for almost all crimes, from drugs to murder, are unfathomable to most of the developed world. The United States incarcerates the highest percentage of its population of any country, and does so for such lengthy periods of time that states are beginning to open geriatric prisons focused on the health needs of the growing elderly prison population. But Knox's case is an excellent jumping off point in particular to highlight the sentences given to young people, even children. In Florida, prosecutors are attempting to charge 12-year-old Christian Fernandez as an adult for the murder of his 2-year-old brother, in spite of numerous factors in his case pointing to the need for leniency: the mother waited over six hours to bring her younger son to the hospital, and Christian's numerous behavior problems - including aggression toward his brother - did not stop his mother from leaving him alone with the younger boy . If convicted and sentenced to life, Christian could conceivably spend an astounding 90 years of his life behind bars. In 2010, the Supreme Court stepped in to bar states from handing out life sentences to juveniles for crimes other than murder; three justices, including Justice Scalia, dissented in full, and Chief Justice Roberts dissented in part. As a result of this ruling, over 100 children around the country were resentenced to shorter terms.

As Amanda Knox's appeal drew to a close, her alleged victim Meredith Kercher's family begged the media not to forget her. While there is no way to bring Kercher back to life, her memory can be honored by any justice done as a result of the steps - and grave missteps - taken to bring her killer to justice. The media should look beyond the Italian system, and beyond Amanda Knox herself, to put pressure on all legal systems to save innocent defendants and grieving families from the pain of a broken justice system. Regardless of differences of opinions regarding Knox's particular case, we can start by demanding justice right here at home.

Author tags:

crime, juvenile justice, italy, supreme court, justice, legal system, law, amanda knox

We Used to Be a Country; Now We’re a Staging Area

by David Macaray / October 1st, 2011

If any of us were wondering where the United States ranks, relative to the rest of the world, in the general category of “worker protection,” there is now a precise answer available—one supplied by Professor Kenneth Thomas of the University of Missouri (St. Louis), who based his findings on statistics supplied by OECD members.

The OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) is a group of 34 comparatively “rich” industrialized nations that was founded in 1961 and whose stated purpose, more or less, is to meet semi-regularly to discuss ways of increasing economic progress through world trade. It might help to think of the OECD as an international version of the Chamber of Commerce. Its headquarters are in Paris, France.

The following countries are members of the OECD: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

So what did Professor Thomas learn from his survey? Where does the proud and accomplished United States rank? Shockingly, the U.S. not only finishes dead last overall, but in many of the specific categories (maternity leaves, medical leaves, education, etc.) we’re not even within shouting distance of the rest of the pack.

Now a sharp-eyed realist might attempt to mitigate these findings by arguing that getting beaten in these categories by Denmark, Sweden and Norway is no disgrace and certainly no surprise. After all, Scandinavia is/was known as a veritable “workers paradise.” But Estonia and Mexico? Chile and Slovenia? Surely, someone is joking.

But it’s no joke. Thomas shows that the U.S. not only lags well behind its fellow OECD members in worker protection, it even trails the so-called BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries in many areas. Among the categories considered in the OECD study: being fired unfairly, not receiving severance pay, not getting enough notice on mass layoffs, and the use of non-vested, non-permanent employees.

Arguably, the U.S. is undergoing a shift in self-identity. Instead of seeing ourselves, collectively, as a “country”—a society, a culture, a national community—we now see ourselves as nothing more than an economic arena—a gladiatorial arena where it’s every man for himself, where there are only winners and losers. And while no one knows how all of this will ultimately play out, it’s safe to say it will end badly for the majority (formerly known as “citizens”; now referred to as “losers”).

There are two (and only two) sources of worker protection: federal and state labor laws, and union contracts. In the absence of these two safeguards, it’s economic free-fall. As for our laws, they’re being tested and challenged every day by predatory corporations looking for shortcuts and loopholes. Making it worse, the courts and media reflexively defend these corporations. Meanwhile, the Democrats—labor’s putative “friends”—are terrified of doing anything that will make them look pro-labor.

Which leaves only the unions to provide a modicum of worker protection and dignity. And, as everyone knows, union membership now hovers at a mere 12.4%, down from a high of nearly 35% back in the glory days of the 1950s, when the middle-class was thriving and prosperous. Who would’ve thought it possible? Who would’ve dreamed the day would come when the American worker looked to Estonia for inspiration?

David Macaray, a Los Angeles playwright and author (It’s Never Been Easy: Essays on Modern Labor), was a former union rep. He can be reached at: dmacaray@earthlink.net. Read other articles by David.

This article was posted on Saturday, October 1st, 2011 at 8:02am and is filed under Labor, Unions.