Banking and Securities Deregulation Started in 1999

Back in 1999, Nader was opposed to deregulation of the financial services sector via a weakening of the Community Reinvestment Act, which was passed by a Republican Congress and signed by a Democratic President.  These bipartisan-approved changes allowed the intermingling of banks and securities that helped prepare the way for the current crisis.

Now Congress is icing down the champagne again in celebration of the new and much more grandiose deregulation package, this time of the entire financial services industry – combining banks, securities firms, and insurance companies (and in some cases, nonfinancial corporations) under common ownership in soon-to-be trillion-dollar conglomerates. In the process, Congress is creating a financial system designed for the affluent customer in which low- and moderate-income families and small businesses will face less access, fewer choices, and higher fees.

…

Congress is wading into the deregulation swamp in good economic times with a roaring stock market and quarter after quarter of record financial profits – the worst possible time to ask Congress, with its short-term memory, to make tough decisions against the wishes of the industry. Amid the economic euphoria, it is little wonder that warnings about the safety and soundness of financial institutions, inadequate deposit insurance reserves and the weaknesses of an uncoordinated, overlapping and outmoded regulatory system are greeted with legislative yawns.

A study released by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) last month found that consolidation in the banking industry just between the years of 1990 and 1997 had “increased the risk of insurance fund insolvency by 50 percent.” The report warned that the risk had increased further during the past two years.

The risk of insolvency is “becoming inseparable from the health of the 25 largest banking organizations which control 54.5 percent of the assets,” the FDIC researchers found. These are the very institutions that will be combined with insurance companies and securities firms in the new, too-big-to-be-allowed-to-fail conglomerates.

But that wasn’t the kind of testimony sought by the House and Senate banking committees, which instead used the hearings largely for the purpose of painting simplistic rosy scenarios and providing a platform for the corporate executives, lobbyists, and campaign donors to promote the legislation.

Ralph Nader is founder of Public Citizen. This piece originally appeared in the Washington Post, Friday, November 5, 1999; Page A33.

Nader vs Obama vs McCain: open the debate

Nader’s campaign has posted a condensed version of what a 3-way debate would look like here.

I’d like to see the debates opened up to all six candidates on the ballot in a majority of states. That would be Ralph Nader (Independent), Cynthia McKinney (Green), Bob Barr (Libertarian) and Pastor Chuck Baldwin (Constitution), plus the other two.

People should be contacting the Commission on Presidential Debates, the media, and the campaigns of the two major parties to demand that the debates be opened up.

Nader’s history and regulatory expertise means that he is the most qualified candidate to speak on the current financial crisis. (I wrote a post on this previously). Given Nader’s precience of the current crisis, I think its especially important that he be included in the Presidential debates. He may also be the most qualified person to be President.

Nader’s campaign has said elsewhere, that if they can get in front of the public in the debates, they can make it a three way race. If people hear Nader’s stance on the financial crisis, and that has been hs principled stand forever, then it could be a three way race.

Helpful links:

Open Debates

Contact the Commission on Presidential Debates at 202-872-1020

Media contacts, from “How To Help The Nader-Gonzalez ‘08 Campaign“ by by Gilles d’Aymery & Jan Baughman on Swans.com.  Its very well put, and recommends a good course of action for supporters of Cynthia McKinney as well.  I’m excerpting their recommendation for speaking with the media below at length.

Without media exposure Nader and Gonzalez’s message and policies won’t be heard by the American people — potential voters who may well be attracted by that message and those policies. Thus, once more, their message will only reach their loyal followers — a tiny minority. It’s worth recalling here that when Matt Gonzalez ran for mayor in San Francisco he started with a base of 3 or 4 percent of the voters. Once he had access to the local media and was able to present the policies he intended to implement were he to be elected, he ended with about 47 percent of the votes in the run-off election. (He narrowly lost because the Republicans voted in masse for the Democratic millionaire candidate, Newsom). Media exposure, dignified exposure (aren’t you tired of the “spoiler” bogus narrative?), is a sine qua non endeavor.

You need to contact the news organizations (and your local media — print and TV) and demand (that word again) that they invite Ralph and Matt on their shows, and write about them and their platform in the national and local newspapers. Demand need not be rough and accusatory. It should be a polite request. According to Ralph Nader, written letters carry more weight than phone calls. Last on the list of positive return are e-mails. Letters should be mailed to the news organizations’ main address and addressed to the particular person you want to contact. Here are a list of contacts:

ABC

ABC News
77 WEST 66th Street
New York, NY 10023
212-456-7777

ABC News Network Programming Feedback
http://abcnews.go.com/Site/page?id=3271346

Links to feedback forms for specific shows are at
http://abcnews.go.com/Site/page?id=3068843

Submit comments to (among others):

World News with Charles Gibson

This Week with George Stephanopolous

Primetime

Nightline

CBS

CBS News
555 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019
(212) 975-4114

Go to www.cbsnews.com
Click on “contact us” at the bottom of the page
Submit comments at links to (among others):

CBS Evening News
CBS Evening News w/Katie Couric
Face the Nation
CBS News Sunday Morning

NBC

NBC News
30 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, N.Y. 10112
212-664-4444

The Chris Matthews Show
202-885-4600
Submit comments to:
http://www.thechrismatthewsshow.com/html/contact.html

Meet the Press
Submit comments to:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6872152/

Send an E-mail to the following programs:

Today: Today@NBCUNI.com

Nightly News with Brian Williams: Nightly@NBC.com

Dateline NBC: Dateline@NBCUNI.com

CNN

CNN
1 CNN Center
Atlanta, GA 30303
Phone: 404-827-1700

Submit comments to:

CNN Election Center
http://www.cnn.com/feedback/forms/form4.html?125

CNN Newsroom
http://www.cnn.com/feedback/forms/form5.html?92

General Feedback
http://www.cnn.com/feedback/forms/form.sound.off.html

FOX

Fox News
1211 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10036
212-301-3000

Send an E-mail to the following programs:

America’s Election HQ: americasnewsroom@foxnews.com

Fox News Specials: Fncspecials@foxnews.com

Fox News Sunday: FNS@foxnews.com

Special Report w/ Brit Hume: Special@foxnews.com

PBS

Public Broadcasting Service
2100 Crystal Dr.
Arlington, VA 22202-3785
703-739-5000

Submit comments to:

NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/letters.html

E-mail: onlineda@newshour.org

Other media personalities to contact to ask that they cover the Ralph Nader-Matt Gonzalez ‘08 Campaign:

Charlie Rose
Charlie Rose, Inc.
731 Lexington Avenue
New York, NY 10022
212-617-1600
E-mail: charlierose@pbs.org

Diane Rehm
The Diane Rehm Show
WAMU 88.5 FM University Radio
4000 Brandywine Street, NW
Washington, DC 20016-8082
202-885-1231
E-mail: drshow@wamu.org 

 

*Sung With A Boston Accent*

Life long professionally trained church singer, trained by three nuns and two lay church workers.

South Carolina Voting Machines: worst in the United States?

Probably.  There is a of evidence that we do have the worst electronic voting machines in the country: other states have banned them,  The SC Election Commission wants to buy the used and banned machines, and the things don’t even leave a paper trail. The Commission is either out to lunch or in bed with the vendor.

Congresses General Accounting Office released a report on severe lapses in the federal oversight of voting machines. In light of the slack attitude of the SC Election Commission spokesperson Baum, the poor reputation of its machines, and the lack of federal oversight, South Carolina voters should be really concerned about protecting their ballots.

“Other states have had problems, which have led to questions about our system,” [South Carolina Election Commission spokesman Gary] Baum said. “But things that apply to other states don’t apply to South Carolina.”

Unless South Carolina provides an error free environment, Baum’s words aren’t encouraging.  The lack of concern is worrisome, but would be less so if the Feds were on the case.  A GAO report relased at the end of September shows that they are not.

The GAO found that the Electronic Assistance Commission has not defined an effective approach to testing and certifying voting systems, consequently hasn’t followed any consistent approach to systems over time and has no mechanism for developing better approaches for the 2008 election:  Federal Program for Certifying Voting Systems Needs to Be Further Defined, Fully Implemented, and Expanded. Government Accounting Office. September 20, 2008 http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-08-814

The EAC hasn’t tracked the problems and hasn’t notified state electoral commissions of the problems.  SC Electoral Commission (SCEC) spokesman Baum indicates that he is aware of problems with South Carolina’s iVotronic voting machines, but his attitude shows that he’s taking his lead from ES&S’s defense.   But there is a lot to be concerned about.  The GAO found that Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Missouri, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin have had significant voting problems that have not been addressed since the last election.

Ohio, Florida and California have all dumped expensive electronic voting systems experiences and audits of the 2006 elections convinced them that the machines are unreliable, insufficiently secure, and open to manipulation.  As a result of these reports, states began to replace their touch-screen machines and returned to machines that produce paper receipts for traceable results. Links to news articles and reports that compelled these states to make the switch are found at the bottom of this post.

South Carolina already has some of the most questionable electronic voting machines on the market, and the SCEC is sticking with them.  In fact, in the same interview in which he said “things that apply in other states don’t apply in South Carolina” SC Election Commissioner Baum said he was looking at purchasing some of Florida’s dumped machines.

The SC Electoral Commission website doesn’t name the voting machines they purchased , but is possible to figure out from a ES&S flash video on the SCEC site that South Carolinians vote on ES&S iVotronics. The build of the iVotronic software isn’t publicized, but a recent version used in Ohio was found to be hackable by hand held Treo devices.

The electronic machines are also vulnerable through tainted memory cards, although again, SC Election Commission personnel don’t think so.

“They are computers, and anybody who has a computer knows they are subject to intrusion,” [Spartanburg County Director of Registration and Elections Henry] Laye said. “But they are not hooked up to the Internet, and they are standalone units.”

The machines may not be connected to the internet, but they do use memory cards, as does Diebold, which a 2006 Princeton technical study found to be easily hackable.  AP ran a story on the same topic called “Who’s Counting: Hacking Diebold Voting Machines, Mathematician John Allen Paulos Examines the Questions Raised About Some Voting Systems.” by John Allen Paulos on October 1, 2006.  Laye is taking ES&S’ marketing line, without justification given the findings of researchers working for more curious state electoral commissions.

Even if SC’s software was certified by the EAC, there is no requirement for states to actually run certified software. The EAC doesn’t track the changes in software to see when they go out of certification, either. (GAO report, page 4). Given Baum’s blase attitude, there’ no reason to presume the Electoral Commission is using federally certified software.

ES&S’ consistent response to mistakes with it machines in elections is to blame the poll workers.  This begs the question, are the machines too complicated for reliable set-up and use?  Don’t the fixes and updates to the voting software introduce new complexities and opportunites for mistakes and manipulation?  If the stuff is just inherently buggy, why not go back to a verifiable paper ballot?

How buggy is it? The Voters Unite Project collected a 51 page list of errors with ES&S voting machines in the period of 2004 through 2006.  IVotronic systems appear on the list 46 times. I’ve made a table of these occurances at the bottom of this post.

SC Electoral Commissioner Baum must be aware of these problems, especially if he is going to buy the rejected Florida machines in a fire sale.  To suggest that the machine deficiencies will not travel over the SC border is dishonest at worst, and insulting to SC voters at best.

The real reason for keeping the machines, and indeed buying more of them, is probably cost.  Electronic voting machines are very expensive.   Spartanburg County alone bought 694 machines in time for the 2004 election, costing $ 3,500 each or at least $2,400,000 in total for this county alone.    South Carolina has 46 counties.  Most are smaller than Spartanburg, so a low estimate of the statewide cost would be at least $35,000,000 for only 10,000 machines.  Service contracts with ES&S may or may not be included in that estimated cost per machine.

Baum may be right about one thing being different in SC: unlike Florida, SC can’t afford to admit its mistakes.

Recent general news stories:

Company admits voting machine error [Premier Election Solutions Inc touch screen machines]. USA Today. AP. August 21, 2008.

Record number of U.S. voters may cast paper ballots. Times Online. By Allison Hoffman, Associated Press Writer Published: Wednesday, August 6, 2008 10:10 PM EDT

Vote machine flaws force scramble back to paper. With electronic systems at risk, some states return to scanning ballots. updated 3:46 p.m. ET, Mon., Dec. 31, 2007

South Carolina:
State bucks trend, keeps touch-screen voting machines: S.C. election officials have faith in systems. Spartanburg Herald Journal. By Robert W. Dalton. bob.dalton@shj.com. Published: Monday, August 25, 2008 at 3:15 a.m. Last Modified: Monday, August 25, 2008 at 9:49 a.m.

Voting Chaos Again. [ES&S iVotronic failures in 2008 South Carolina Republican Primary] UK Independent online blogs. By Leonard Doyle. January 19, 2008.

S.C. to use voting machines banned in other states. Charleston News & Courier. Associated Press. Monday, January 7, 2008

South Carolina Electoral Commission: http://scvotes.org/
The SCEC’s only mention of the voting system is in this URL:  http://www.scvotes.org/voting_system/2006/05/03/iVotronic_flash_demo (the demo itself may not be functional)

It doesn’t seem like any of the news stories even mention the Horry County debacle of only 8 months ago this Google news search. This is the subject of the UK Independent post above.

Ohio:
Ohio Report Reveals Voting Machine Weaknesses [Voting machines of ES&S, Diebold, Hart InterCivic, and Premeire Election Systems]. by Kirsten Anderson. Huffingtonpost.com. Posted December 18, 2007 | 12:32 AM (EST)

Florida:
News article on ES&S on the kinds of problems that influenced Florida to switch from all-electronic voting.

2007 St. Petersburg Times article on ES&S:
“Top vote-machine maker also tops complaint list: Vendor discounts woes, blames poll workers.”
By ANITA KUMAR. St. Petersburg Times. Published May 27, 2007

Report slaps Florida’s provisional voting record. Olando Sentinel blog. posted by Aaron Deslatte on Sep 24, 2008 9:54:01 AM

The FSU report on the ES&S iVotronic used in Sarasota County [analysis of longer report linked below.]. Avi Rubin’s Blog. Friday, March 09, 2007.

Arkansas:

iVotronic E-Voting Machines Give Results for a Non-Existent Race: It turns out the VVPAT may NOT be useless; but the electronic totals are. [11% failure rate in June 2008 Arkansas election]. Voters Unite. By Ellen Theisen. June 2, 2008

General technical reports on electronic voting:

Software Review and Security Analysis of the ES&S iVotronic. 8.0.1.2 Voting Machine Firmware. Security and Assurance in Information Technology Laboratory. Florida State University. Tallahassee, Florida. February 23, 2007: Discussed on the SAIT website here: http://www.sait.fsu.edu/news/2007-03-05-essr.shtml. Full technical report found here (large PDF file).

Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine. Ariel J. Feldman, J. Alex Halderman, and Edward W. Felten. Center for Information Technology Policy. Princeton University.  September 13, 2006

AP ran a story on the same topic called “Who’s Counting: Hacking Diebold Voting Machines, Mathematician John Allen Paulos Examines the Questions Raised About Some Voting Systems.” by John Allen Paulos on October 1, 2006.

Southern Studies overview of all 4 major systems here: http://www.southernstudies.org/reports/votingmachines-new.htm

ES&S iVotronic problems from 2004 – 2006:

The Voters Unite has collected a list of documented errors with ES&S voting machines from 2004 through 2006, including references.  The report runs to 51 pages and covers all the voting systems sold by ES&S, including the iVotronic system.   The full report can be found here: http://www.votersunite.org/info/ES&Sinthenews.pdf

Date	ES&S System	Location. Brief description
November 2000	iVotronic	Pulaski County, Arkansas 24+ voters report screen registered wrong choice.
February 2002	ES&S	Arkansas Secretary of State Bill McCuen pleaded guilty to felony charges that he took bribes, evaded taxes and accepted kickbacks. Part of the case involved Business Records Corp. [now merged into Election Systems & Software ], a Dallas company that sold Arkansas computerized systems for recording corporate and voter registration records.
April 2002	iVotronic	Miami-Dade County, Florida. Technician reorders ballot during voting.
April 2002	Optical Scan and iVotronic	Dallas County, Texas. A ballot programming error tallies 18 results incorrectly. Here is one case when flawed ballot data on a paperless electronic voting machine caused a serious election miscount. It was detected only because voters also used optical scan paper ballots in the election.
September 2002	iVotronic DRE firmware 7.2.5	Miami-Dade County, Florida. An analysis of the September election by the Florida ACLU determined that 8.2% of the votes were “lost” in 31 problem precincts. Significantly more votes were lost in predominantly black areas.
October 2002	iVotronic DRE	Dallas County, Texas. Machines register incorrect choices on the screen. 21
November 2002	iVotronic DRE Broward County, Florida.	A software error caused 103,222 (22%) votes cast on ES&S iVotronic paperless voting machines not to be counted in the initial tally.
November 2002	iVotronic DRE firmware 6.2.0.1	Wake County, North Carolina. Machines lost 436 ballots in early voting.
November 2002	iVotronic	Broward County, Florida. Machines register votes for opponents.
Fall 2003	Votronic	Guilford County, North Carolina. Votronic voting machines lose 354 ballots.
November 2003	iVotronic	Louisiana. Tom Eschberger admits making campaign contributions to a potential customer.
January 2004	iVotronic DRE firmware 7.4.5	Broward County, Florida. Machines showed 134 blank ballots. The winning margin was 12 votes. Since Florida law required an examination of the invalid ballots, and no ballots were available to examine, the county could not comply with Florida law.
March 2004	iVotronic	Sarasota County, Florida. According to the county Board of Elections, the votes of 189 people were never counted, but the County Commissioners are content.
March 2004	iVotronic uncertified firmware 7.4.5; certified, flawed firmware 6.1.2	Indiana – four counties. It was discovered that ES&S had installed an uncertified version of firmware in the iVotronics in four counties. When confronted, representatives agreed to reinstall the certified version. Then it was determined that the certified version doesn’t tabulate the votescorrectly, so the county allowed the use of the uncertified version but required ES&S to put up a $10 Million bond to insure against problems and lawsuits.
April 2004	iVotronic	Indiana. Specifically in response to the unethical behavior of ES&S, the Indiana state legislature passed a law providing penalties for voting machine vendors who act on their own initiative without the permission of the state.
May 2004	iVotronic firmware 7.5.1 and 7.4.5	Miami-Dade County, Florida. Information provided to the California Voting Systems and Procedures Panel meeting on April 22, 2004 brought to light serious audit problems with the iVotronic.
May 2004	iVotronic	Miami-Dade, Florida. Another memo surfaces, this one regarding an election in Homestead in October 2003.
May 2004	iVotronic	Indiana. ES&S employee resigns from ES&S after telling Indiana county clerk about the software switch.
May 2004	iVotronic	South Carolina. After ES&S won the bid to install the state’s voting systems, a local company challenged the decision. During the process of evaluating the bid, the state’s chief procurement officer said that a new round of bidding was needed since ES&S had provided a deflated bid.
July 2004	Unity election management software	All U.S. Counties that use ES&S voting systems. More and more bugs surface in the ES&S software, but only in response to public records requests.
August 2004	iVotronic	Miami-Dade County, Florida. The iVotronic touch-screen machines — the ones with the software bugs that caused an uproar last May — showed evidence of the same problems in the August primary. Not only was the low battery problem (which ES&S claimed was repaired) still impacting the elections, problems also showed up with the features that are supposed to allow blind voters to vote independently.
October2004	iVotronic	Craven County, North Carolina. Voters’ choices register incorrectly on the touch screen.
October 2004	iVotronic	Bexar County, Texas. Touch screens register votes incorrectly on the screen.
November2004	iVotronic	Broward County, Florida. Fifty voters waited for hours to vote early, but then they were turned away because the paperless electronic voting machines at the site malfunctioned.
November 2004	Votronic	Craven County, North Carolina. All vote totals in nine of the county’s 26 precincts were electronically doubled. Correcting the mistake changed the outcome of at least one race.
November 2004	iVotronic	Lexington County, South Carolina. Officials can’t figure out how to retrieve 200 electronic votes from a malfunctioning iVotronic electronic voting machine. Lexington town leaders criticize slow vote count. The State. November 4, 2004. By Tim Flach, Staff Writer.
November 2004	iVotronic	LaPorte County, Indiana. The electronic voting machines reported 300 votes in every precinct, eliminating over 50,000 voters.
November 2004	iVotronic	Broward County, Florida. In addition to severe mix-ups in polling places (some of which were moved at the last minute) and disenfranchisement of voters who cast invalid provisional ballots because of the mix-up, Broward County experienced many electronic voting machine malfunctions. Some broke down, others registered votes incorrectly.
November 2004	iVotronic	Mahoning County. Many problems plagued the ES&S iVotronic touch screen voting machines in 16 of the 312 Mahoning County precincts.
November 2004	iVotronic	Vanderburgh County, Indiana. Phantom votes appear in the electronic totals … and other troubles.
March 2005	iVotronic	Miami-Dade, Florida. A computer error failed to count votes during the March 8 special election, calling into question five other local elections.80
March 2005	iVotronic	Broward County, Florida. One of the two items on the March 8 ballot failed to appear on the screen for many of the voters who participated in the Parallel Election Project.
April 2005	iVotronic	Kershaw, South Carolina. Initial results for the County Council seat showed 2440 phantom votes — 3208 votes, 768 voters. The corrected results overturned the Democratic primary. Counting error overstates votes. [see article in The State. April 29, 2005. By Kristy Eppley Rupon.]
May 2005	iVotronic	Charleston, South Carolina. Software problems cropped up on the new ES&S touch screen machines. New Voting Machines. [ See article on ABCNews4.com. May 5, 2004. By: NeYama Duncan]. (see also.)
May 2005	iVotronic	Miami-Dade, Florida. New evidence shows both phantom votes and lost votes in the November election. The number of voters reported by election workers didn’t match the number of ballots cast in 260 (35%) of Miami-Dade’s 749 polling places. Some showed more votes than voters (“phantom votes”); others showed significantly more voters than ballots cast.
March 2006	iVotronic V9.1.2.0	Chatham County, North Carolina. Early Voters get Wrong Ballot.
May 2006	IVotronic with Optech Eagle	Jackson County, Indiana New ES&S voting machine equipment is not interfacing with older models, forcing workers to manually count votes in each machine in each precinct.
May 2006	iVotronic and optical scanners	Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. Unofficial tallies differ by nearly 6,000 votes from official ballot counts. Candidates are considering calling for recounts.
May 2006	iVotronic and optical scanners	Mahoning County, Ohio. May 2 primary elections encountered many problems, including poor training and malfunctioning equipment.
May 2006	iVotronic and optical scanner	Arkansas. Voting machine malfunctions in three counties affect 10,000 voters. Touch screens fail and ES&S mis-programs ballots.
May 2006	iVotronic and optical scanner	Arkansas. 12 counties report problems in tabulating ballots from their electronic vote machines.
May 2006	iVotronic and optical scanner	Benton County, Arkansas. Lack of training by ES&S caused problems on the iVotronics.
May 2006	iVotronic and optical scanner	Washington County, Arkasas. Untrained poll workers had to bring the new iVotronics to the courthouse to be shut down.
May 2006	Optech Eagles, Unity Election Management System, iVotronic printers	Pulaski County, Arkansas. ES&S election software malfunctions, and ES&S programmed the ballots incorrectly.
June 2006	iVotronic	White County, Arkansas. Flaws in the ballot programming furnished by ES&S are only one of the problems that made the runoff election “a royal mess.”
June 2006	iVotronic	Horry County, South Carolina. Problems occurred in 13 precincts. Gilland regains Horry chair. [via The Sun News. June 14, 2006. article by Travis Tritten.]

Hollings won’t endorse Obama – for some reason

This gets back to my question: just what is the Democratic Party, anyway.

‘I’m trying to stay out of that’: Hollings holds back on endorsing Obama
By Wayne Washington – wwashington@thestate.com
Former U.S. Sen. Ernest “Fritz” Hollings twice spurned opportunities to endorse his party’s presidential nominee, Illinois U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, in remarks to reporters at the University of South Carolina on Friday.
Hollings, an icon in the S.C. Democratic Party whose public career spanned the 1940s into this century, said he has not endorsed a candidate for president. Asked if he would take the opportunity to make an endorsement, Hollings replied: “No, I’m trying to stay out of that. I’ve sort of stayed out of the endorsements and that sort of thing.”
Four years ago, Hollings did offer an early endorsement of the party’s nominee, Massachusetts U.S. Sen. John Kerry.
…
Carol Fowler, chairwoman of the S.C. Democratic Party and an Obama supporter, said: “In all the years I’ve known Sen. Hollings, I’ve never known him not to support the Democratic nominee, and I’d be surprised and disappointed if he didn’t this time.”
Source: The State. Columbia, SC. September 20, 2008
http://www.thestate.com/local/story/530323.html 

Hollings is a fixture of SC politics. He was elected as Governor in 1960. He beat out the Donald Russell in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in 1966. With the mantle of South Carolina incumbency upon him, Hollings cannot be voted out of office much less challenged in a primary, until his retirement in 2004.

Hollings may be a retiree, but he was the national face of the South Carolina Democratic Party for 40 years. He’s a transitional figure from the old all-white party. But any party that accepts neoconfederate Bob Conley as its Senatorial nominee, when it might have run against him (with Micheal Cone on the Working Families Party) is in some way comfortable with its fundamental racism.

Previous Post
Flattop Bob Conley: Republican vs Republican in SC Senate Race. Some Carolinian Blog. September 15, 2008.

Ralph Nader, Media Complicity and the Current Financial Crisis

Columbia Jounalism Review dissects the current coverage of an economic disaster as a natural occurance, then digs back to find that journalists have been reporting on the dangers of securitizing bundled mortgages for years, and not just in the Monthly Review. In fact, though CJR doesn’t mention it, Nader was right about these financial market abuses leading to a housing crisis back in 2000.

Boiler Room: the business press is missing the crooked heart of the business crisis
By Dean Starkman
Columbia Journalism Review
http://www.cjr.org/essay/boiler_room.php

“It seems to me that well into Year II of the Panic, the business press is in the process of making the same mistake it made in the run-up to the debacle: focusing on the esoteric Wall Street concerns and ignoring the simplest, most basic, but the most important one – the breathtaking corruption that overran the U. S. lending industry, including and especially the brand names, and the exent to which Wall Street drove that corruption.”
…
“And one suspects cultural problems. There does seem to be a tendency in big financial newsrooms to zoom in on esoteric stories on the margins—backdated stock options comes to mind—and ignore the big, dumb, honking ones at the heart of the financial system. In the current case, an entire industry’s business model—“selling” consumer debt—is problematic on its face. And was subprime lending ever not the domain of sleazeballs?”

The business press suffers from an accountability problem. They are too close to the subject to talk in a general way about the problem or even recall the route that led to the crisis.

One reason for lack of oversight is the influence wielded by big actors like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.  Conservative thinktanker Peter Wallison recently spoke about this at length on C-Span (interview in flash player here).  And Nader wrote preciently about this influence in an AEI book back in 2000.  Wallison and Nader are coming at this from completely different directions.  Wallison wants these quasi-public agencies completely privatized.  Nader wants the government to take over and run the agencies as a non-profit public trust.  Yet both Nader and Wallison were frozen out of the discussion until the crisis broke.

While the financialization of securities has been known for years, it grew dramatically in this century, when sophisticated trading programs made extremely complex bundlings of securities possible.

According to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, aggregate global CDO  [Collateralized debt obligations] issuance totaled US$ 157 billion in 2004, US$ 272 billion in 2005, US$ 552 billion in 2006 and US$ 503 billion in 2007.^[6] Research firm Celent estimated the size of the CDO global market to close to $2 trillion by the end of 2006.

Source: Wikipedia: Collateralized debt obligations – Market history and growth

Since the mortgage institutions were able to force through these changes against the advice of thinktanks like the AEI and Ralph Nader, the amount of money available to to Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae insured that their influence over the media, government and ultimately the public would only grow.  

Wallison mentions late in the C-SPAN interview linked above that at one point during this century Fannie Mae had 42 lobbyists working for it on Capitol Hill.  Not because they needed 42 lobbyists, but because they wanted to keep those lobbyists from working with anyone else.

Working from the other direction, Fannie Mae and Feddie Mac gave tens of millions of dollars to community organizations, who in turn lobbied Congress whenever necessary to stifle reform. They weren’t unique in doing this, but its almost criminal that something as apparent as this corruption was not part of the reporting until the crisis broke. Wallison even says you’d need a “political revolution” to clear out the system.

Sourcing of expert authorities n the middle of all this noise is a problem for the mainstream media.  Only vetted true believers in the free market appear in the business press. There is an interesting post on Nader’s blog about trying to get Nader on cable news to talk about the issue. Nader’s been critical of the financial corporations for years and he is running for President in 46 states. McCain and Obama get asked, and you’d think Nader’d get asked too, since he is qualified to make an answer. Of course Nader gets the runaround, with one producer saying they’d love to have him on for the corporate analysis, but he’s a presidential candidate, the other says they’d like to have him on as a presidential candidate, but they’re a financial show and won’t have any similar coverage of the other campaigns, so…no.

You’re either piggybacking on the biggest story in the world or you’re a critic – neither position endear you to the nonobjective press. If the business press had not been so intent on getting the ‘inside story’ then they would have had critical voices from the get-go discussing regulatory changes that permitted the finanicialization of bundled subprime mortages.

Of course there are exceptions, and the truth was there if you wanted to see it.

So I’m putting up links to some of the precient articles analysed by Starkman.

Some stories cited by Starkman’s “Boiler Room”

• 2005 LA Times articles on Ameriquest by Mike Hudson, E. Scott Reckard and/or Josh Friedman

Doubt Is Cast on Loan Papers: Plaintiffs say identical entries for 3 different Ameriquest borrowers bolster claims of fraud. Page A-1. March 28, 2005. here

States Follow Long Trail of Complaints Against Lender. Page A-1. March 15, 2005.
http://articles.latimes.com/2005/mar/15/business/fi-ameriquest15

Workers Say Lender Ran ‘Boiler Rooms’. Page A-1. February 4, 2005
http://articles.latimes.com/2005/feb/04/business/fi-ameriquest4

• Mike Hudson at the Wall Street Journal:

The Debt Bomb—Lending a Hand: How Wall Street Stoked the Mortgage Meltdown—Lehman and Others Transformed the Market for Riskiest Borrowers. June 27, 2007. (subscription only).
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118288752469648903.html?mod=todays_us_page_one

• Ira Glass et al. on This American Life

“The Giant Pool of Money,”  This American Life. No. 355. May 9, 2008.  PDF transcript. http://thisamericanlife.org/extras/radio/355_transcript.pdf

Other articles of interest:

Wikipedia: Securitization: History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securitization#History

Nader Predicted Wall Street Meltdown. Nader/Gonzalez campaign. The Beachwood Reporter. September 17, 2008.

Writings by Ralph Nader

“Predatory Lending” [payday lending and refinance mortgages].  Nader.org.  Wednesday, December 12, 2001.

Testimony of Ralph Nader on THE HOUSING FINANCE REGULATORY IMPROVEMENT ACT U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Securities, and Government Sponsored Enterprises Committee on Banking and Financial Services, June 15, 2000.  H.R. 3703. Nader.org. Thursday, June 15, 2000.

2000 American Enterprise Institute book about Fannie & Freddie Mac in which Ralph Nader wrote a chapter – Serving Two Masters, Yet Out of Control – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

Ralph Nader’s chapter: “How Fannie and Freddie Influence the Political Process.” (starts on pg. 110)

C-SPAN interview with Peter Wallison, AEI fellow

Interview page / Interview in flash player. September 9, 2008.

From the Left Business Observer by Doug Henwood

The magnificence in housing: Frothing at the house. August 2005. http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Housing.html

Reflections on the Current Crisis [the housing bubble]. June 2007.  http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Turmoil.html

Rescue Party!: Reflections on the current crisis (part two). February 2008. http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Turmoil2.html

Sources yet to be found:
Illinois v. Countrywide, Cook County Circuit Court, 6/25/08;
Ferguson v. IndyMac Bank, Brooklyn federal court, 2/14/08,
“Citigroup Settles FTC Charges,” Federal Trade Commission press release, 9/19/02;
Chain of Blame, Muolo and Padilla, Wiley, 2008;
Deceptive Ads at Bottom of Sub-prime Mortgage Crisis, McClatchy Newspapers, 8/31/07;
‘The Party’s Over at Kirkland [Washington] Mortgage Company, Seattle Times, 12/3/06

Just how much do corporate sponsors give to the Commission on Presidential Debates?

Update, October 15, 2008 – The New York Times as published an article on corporate sponsorship of this year’s debates.  The article can be found here.  You will need a NYT login to read the article. (h/t to Ballot Access News)

Also George Farah, executive director of Open Debates, was on C-Span’s Washington Journal program this morning.

—————

I have spent a few hours searching and cannot find an accounting of the corporate donations to the Commission on Presidential Debates.

The Commission on Presidential Debates is a 501 (c) (3) organization established by the Democratic and Republican Parties in 1988. Presidential debates had previously occurred in 1960 and then again in 1976, 1980 and 1984 under the aegis of the League of Women Voters. The GHW Bush and Dukakis campaigns requested changes in the format of the debates which the LWV rejected:

…the demands of the two campaign organizations would perpetrate a fraud on the American voter. It has become clear to us that the candidates’ organizations aim to add debates to their list of campaign-trail charades devoid of substance, spontaneity and answers to tough questions. The League has no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public.

The debates staged by the CPD are funded by private corporate sponsors, who evidently do not share the scruples of the LWV.  The debate agreements between the DP and RP campaigns are private, all other candidates are effictively excluded, the participation and questions are restricted to vetted party supporters, and questions are prescreened.  The CPD is simply a tool of the two parties.

The CPD is apparently not required to file itemized declarations of its finances.  It does list donors here on its website, but it is not clear if the list is complete and the donation totals are omitted.  The donors listed for 2008 are Anheuser-Busch Companies, BBH New York, The Howard G. Buffet Foundation, Sheldon S. Cohen, Esq., EDS, an HP Company, International Bottled Water Organization, The Kovler Fund, Kaiser Family Foundation, YWCA USA.

The involvement of corporate sponsors in this key and ostensibly public event is a depressing indication of the privatization of politics.  Certainly the two main political parties essential own the debates and behave accordingly.  Thresholds for including other candidates are reconifigured to exlude anyone other than the DP or RP nominees. Ross Perot got into the 1992 debates only because GHW Bush insisted, although the race in the summer was a three-way tie.  In 1996, Perot was excluded from the debate even though he got 18% of the vote in the previous election!

In the aftermath, the CPD set a threshhold of 15% in 5 national polls of the CPD’s chosing for inclusion.  As the nominees of the Green, Libertarian and Nader campaigns have noted, the 1996 Perot campaign would have passed that test only after his participation in 1992.  It is impossible to be seen as a viable candidate unless you appear on the same stage and are treated in the same regard as the DP or RP nominees.

What I did find that is of interest follows.  It may be that there is some breakdown of the funding from years past that I haven’t found or some upcoming news item will reveal all…

• http://www.opendebates.org/ Works to make the debate agreements between the RP and DP candidates public, to open the debates, and to ultimately with a public nonpartisan entity.

• From the National Voting Rights Institute, this June 19, 2000 complaint to the Federal Election Commission:

HEIDI BECKER, MEDEA BENJAMIN, PHIL DONAHUE, MARK DUNLEA, ANNE GOEKE, ELIZABETH HORTON SCHEFF, RALPH NADER, JAMES O’KEEFE, SUSAN SARANDON, NADER 2000 PRIMARY COMMITTEE, INC., ASSOCIATION OF STATE GREEN PARTIES and GREEN PARTY USA, Plaintiffs, v. FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION, Defendant
“The CPD has solicited and raised millions of dollars from for-profit corporations to help it stage its presidential debates. The corporate sponsors of its 1992 debates included: AT&T, Atlantic Richfield, Ford Motor Company, IBM, J.P. Morgan & Co. and Philip Morris Companies, Inc. The corporate sponsors of its 1996 debates included: Anheuser-Busch, Lucent Technologies, Philip Morris Companies, Inc., Sara Lee Corporation and Sprint Corporation.
The CPD has announced that Anheuser-Busch will serve as one of the national financial sponsors for its 2000 presidential debates, as well as the sole national financial sponsor of CPD’s scheduled October 17, 2000 presidential debate in St. Louis, Missouri. Anheuser-Busch will pay $550,000 to underwrite the upcoming St. Louis debate.”

• A softball interview with the current ED of the CPD.  Apparently the barriers to political participation are nothing compared to the excitement of corroeographing well-executed political theater, she says, not in so many words, of course:

http://www.buyingofthepresident.org/index.php/interviews/janet_h_brown/
“Janet H. Brown is the executive director of the Commission on Presidential Debates, a tax-exempt organization that was established in 1987 to sponsor and produce presidential and vice presidential debates during each general-election period. Brown, who previously was a Reagan administration official and press secretary to Republican Senator John C. Danforth, has led the organization since its inception. John W. Mashek interviewed Brown on April 17, 2007. “

• A copy of the 2004 debate contract negotiated by the Bush and Kerry campaigns is available here:

http://www.opendebates.org/news/documents/debateagreement.pdf

• Here’s a description of the mechanics behind the 2004 debates as described on a George Washington University website:

http://www.gwu.edu/~action/2004/chrndebs.html

• A fairly general treatment of campaign finance and the CPD from Oct 26 2000…:

Heads or Tails You Lose: The Commission on Presidential Debates Knows a Thing or Two About Odds.

• The abstract of the case brought by John Haeglin and the Natural Law Party where minor parties contested the impartiality of the Commission on Presidential Debates, charging that the FEC had to investigate whether the CPD was in fact a political group.  The case in the end failed on the Apellate level.

John HAGELIN, et al., Appellees v. FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION, Appellant, 411 F.3d 237 (D.C. Cir. 2005)

Flattop Bob Conley vs Lindsey Graham: Republican vs Republican in SC Senate Race

The South Carolina Democratic Party did not pay any attention to challenging Lindsey Graham in this year’s US Senate election.  Apparently the cost of running a winning campaign combined with the enormous fundraising advantage Graham enjoys as an incumbent ruled out a serious contest in the state’s other national election this year.

This is fundamentally unserious, it indicates the extreme unhealthy state of the two major parties and democracy in general.  When more than 90% of incumbents are returned to office, the position of challenger to a sitting U.S. Senator becomes essentially worthless.  The role was not sought by a mainstream state Democrat like Inez Tannenbaum.  Instead two outsiders entered the primary, probably only interested in the contest as a political platform for future organizing.  One candidate was backed by the SC AFL-CIO, the other by a collection of political outsiders who ought not have been competitive. 

When choosing between two underfunded candidates with similar sounding names, voters in the Democratic primary nearly split the vote.  It seems unlikely that the majority of voters knew who they were voting for, given the virtual media blackout on the Senate race.  

Robert M. ”Bob” Conley won the SC Democratic primary on June 10, 2008. At the time SCDP chairman Don Fowler said, “That’s the Democratic Party. We welcome anybody.”  The writer of the AP article proved more prescient than Fowler:

“Democrats didn’t put much effort into recruiting a big-name candidate to take on Republican U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham in November. Now, it’s possible their chosen politician will be tough for many in the party to support.”

Tough to support is an understatement.  Conley was a member of the Horry County GOP Committee until he won the Democratic Primary.   That in itself would not rule him out from being a DP candidate,  but Conley is seriously out of step with the majority of DP voters. 

Conley is endorsed by neoconfederates, and he is proud enough of the support to include youtube videos of these endorsements on his campaign website.  Neoconfederates position themselves as small government isolationists.  Support for the CSA as a social model is implicitly a position of apology for slavery and a carefully rebranded exposition of white nationalist extremism. 

Whatever else his campaign may run on (and its taken on an isolationist foreign policy and a return to the gold standard), the association of Conley with the neoconfederates completely alienates the African-American South Carolinians who are a majority in the SCDP and without whom no Democratic victory is possible.  Unquestionably, the majority of Conley’s voter’s were African-American citizens who would never have supported a Confederate apologist had they known who he was.

Democrats had the opportunity to run Michael Cone on the Working Families Party line, as he had previously been endorsed by that ballot-qualified party.

The South Carolina Working Families Party has declined to forward its nomination of Mr. Cone to the SC Electoral Commission, so Cone will not appear on the ballot.  The SC WFP hasn’t updated its webpage to reflect the fact that none of its nominees won the DP primaries.  Nor did they forward the nomination of Eugene Platt, who had been endorsed by the Green Party, and who is being opposed by the SCDP.

Conley’s support runs the gamut from neoconfederates to the fundamentalist religious right.  He has been endorsed by the southern secessionists such the Southron Liberation News Service, Charleston radio host and local columnist the “Southern Avenger”, and by the Constitution Party’s presidential nominee, Pastor Chuck Baldwin.

The decision to roll over after the selection of Conley was hardly justified.  Less than 1,500 votes separated Cone and Conley and a recount was necessary to determine the final result.  By his own account, Conley raised and spent only $30,000 to the end of June.  Cone raised less money but spent about as much, leaving his campaign with $9,500 debt.  Conley apparently won the race based on chance rather than any substantive factors.   Cone has removed his campaign website, but on  the google cache of his Issues page, he defines himself as a Populist and endorses national health care.  Cones’ issues page is otherwise light on specifics, something he may have been thinking of when he told AP reporter Jim Davenport that he wished he’d paid more attention to his opponent.

Cone could have campaigned on national health care, if nothing else, and might even have taken a reconciliation stand  on immigration and distinguished himself from the exclusionary panic of Conley and the unworkable compromise of Graham.    The failure to run even a token campaign against Graham on the WFP line is an acknowlegement that no candidate would have offered much an alternative to the Republican and a contempt for the political process.

No one doubts that Graham will win the election.  He’s raised more than $10,000,000.   The DP’s decision to throw the Senate election in SC concedes the political space of state’s other national election to apologists for slavery.   The party would have formulated any kind of challenge to Graham, given is lackluster effort in the primary.  It has turned the field of civil liberties and anti-war vote over the the right wing.  The only possible reason for not contesting the election of two anti-immigrant, anti-health care candidacies would be because the SCDP would rather trust to the ignorance of the polity than contest the election.

Graham will be 90 years old in 2045.  The SCDP is apparently willing for Graham to hit Strom Thurmond’s seniority before they spend the money necessary to seriously contest the election.  Alternatively, they might admit that the political system is sick and needs serious reform to overcome the powers of incumbency – not likely considering how they sought to block third party candidacies while rolling over on the hijacking of their ballot line by right wing extremists.

== Further Reading ==

See Baldwin’s endorsement on Hunter’s radio show here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnK8pw2yyMg

Google Search for State Working Families Parties showing identical templates and language: http://www.google.com/search?q=Working+Families+Party+South+Carolina&rls=com.microsoft:*:IE-SearchBox&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=ie7&rlz=1I7DKUS

SC Working Families Party: http://scwfp.org/endorsements.php

Individual donations to the Robert M. Conley campaign to June 23, 2008: http://query.nictusa.com/cgi-bin/can_ind/S8SC00126 (mostly from outside the state of SC)

Committee donations to Robert M. Conley campaign to June 27, 2008: http://query.nictusa.com/cgi-bin/com_rcvd/C00448845/ (single $5000 donation from the National Committee For An Effective Congress, a DP clearinghouse for funds.  The donation belies the Wikipedia assertion that the NCEC “backs candidates who support freedom of choice, separation of church and state, gun control, equal rights, and environmental protection”. Conley opposes “abortion, same-sex marriage, gun control, and amnesty for illegal immigrants…“.  The NCEC uncritically backs the DP: http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?ID=D000000146&Name=National+Cmte+for+an+Effective+Congress.

U.S. Strategic Interest in Georgia and a New Cold War

The supposition that the US more or less provoked Georgia into war with Russia is the likely truth, given Dick Cheney’s recent statements blaming Russia entirely, and swearing that Georgia will enter NATO no matter what.

Tony Wood, who wrote a very good recent book on Chechnya, has this to say in part in the September 11, 2008 issue of the London Review of Books.

So why would the US approve a military adventure it had no intention of materially supporting? Not every development is part of an infernal neocon conspiracy, but it is nonetheless clear that the White House would make palpable gains from the Georgian crisis, whatever the outcome. If Saakashvili succeeded in retaking South Ossetia, he would have faced down Russia and demonstrated Georgia’s increasing readiness for Nato membership. If, on the other hand, Russia defeated Georgia, it would re-emphasise to Eastern Europe the need for US security guarantees. Sure enough, within two days of the start of fighting in Tskhinvali, Poland and the US finally reached agreement on the missile shield. Georgia itself appears all the more in need of US backing, and several politicians and commentators have suggested that the crisis is grounds for the country’s immediate admission to Nato. It could also justify the US increasing its military presence in Georgia, from a mere 100 Special Forces troops to, say, a long-term base. Moreover, the war has created ample opportunity for ramping up the discourse of a New Cold War – considerably improving the electoral prospects of John McCain, whose foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann worked for Saakashvili until May this year. All this, in exchange for a short war the US didn’t have to fight.

–>Read the Rest: “What Condoleezza Said”, September 11, 2008.  London Review of Books. Tony Wood.

The US leadership now finds a return to cold war type tensions something of a relief, because it at last makes explicable the adversarial approach to Russia that the US has always pursued and with which the leadership is most comfortable.

If the rhetoric about encouraging freedom in the post-Soviet states were to be taken at face value, then the US would have permitted the democratic upsurge of the 1990s to take its course and restrained itself from directing the meltdown of the Russian economy (a long process lasting throughout the Clinton presidency).

Instead, the US has dogmatically pursued free-market solutions within Russia and encouraged the growth of autocracy to that end.  Putin was viewed favorably so long as he did not overly oppress the oligarchs.

Putin would never have come into power in the first place without the continued US support for his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin.  Who knows where we’d be now if Yeltsin hadn’t suppressed the Duma?  Its impossible to say, but its easy to see that the US and Russia have had their first proxy war since 1991 and that is a disastrous development.

Links:

Putin and the Oligarchs, Marshall I. Goldman, From Foreign Affairs, November/December 2004

Billionaires boom as Putin puts oligarchs at No 2 in global rich list: Super-wealthy Russians enjoy golden age – as long as they stay well clear of politics,  Tom Parfitt in Moscow,  The Guardian, Tuesday February 19 2008

The Mutation of The Russian Secret Service. Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan. In Russian published by “Index on Censorship”. 2006. Argentura.ru.

Wikipedia: Russian_financial_crisis

Wikipedia: History_of_post-Soviet_Russia#Shock_therapy

Wikipedia: Economy_of_Russia

Wikipedia: South Ossetian War

Salon: Outrageous Police Raids before RNC, Arrests during RNC

UPDATE 2: The Uptake. Independent video journalism from the 2008 Republican National Convention.   Includes dozens of videos, including many referenced in the posts below.

——-

UPDATE: From the photographs that are appearing on the web, St. Paul looks to be heavily militarized.  Salon’s Glenn Greenwald is reporting the arrests have started at the RNC, including that of well known journalist Amy Goodman.  Tom Walsh, St. Paul Police spokesperson, can be seen responding to a question from Greenwald about the arrest of Goodman here. Walsh states “we don’t believe that this person was simply a nonparticipant or a reporter of incident.”

The mainstream media do not appear to be asking questions about police behavior.  You have to assume that the guy who followed up with the question about dollar value on any damage has never heard of Goodman.  (The city spokesperson says a few “picture windows” have been broken.)

CNN conflates police teargassing with Walsh’s observations on “splinter groups”, glass breaking, and an attempt to block a street.  They do not mention Goodman.

AP mentions Goodman’s arrest, but still leads with “some turn violent”

At the end of the end of the press conference clip, linked above Walsh says that fear is not part of the police strategy.  He starts to respond, “Simply the presence of a police officer…” then just walks off.

I think it will be shown later that the massive police presence was intended to intimidate the public, to drive away people who would otherwise participate, and to limit the visibility of the general march and rally, and to keep the group of people that did show out small and manageable.

Twin Cities Indy Media: http://twincities.indymedia.org/

—————

Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald has the story on the big raids on anti-war activists now occurring in Minneapolis and the coincidental lack of major media coverage.  This despite the fact that the demonization of legitimate protest is a virtual repeat of what happened at the 2004 RNC.  The template of fabricated law enforcement justifications and illegal police actions is readily available in the stream of news reports on the 2004 arrests that are still forthcoming in in the NY media and in the reports of the NYCLU released in 2005.

The police arrests seem to be directed not only at groups that came to participate in the anti-war, anti-RNC rally, but in the groups that document police arrests themselves.

Thanks to the efforts of groups like I-Witness and the National Lawyer’s Guild Legal Observers at the 2004 RNC “of the approximately 1,500 arrests for which criminal proceedings had been completed as of July 2005, over 90% of the cases had been dismissed, conditionally dismissed, or had ended in acquittals.” [ "Rights and Wrongs at the RNC: A Special Report about Police and Protest at the Republican National Convention". NYCLU Report. August 2005. PDF. Page 7].  In many cases, referenced in the NYCLU report and in subsequent articles in the NY media (a few here) the police were shown  in documentary videos to be arresting without cause and to have subsequently lied about their arrests in their reports.

As Greenwald reports, several raids were conducted on August 30, including this raid on an I-Witness video meeting:

The Uptake has this amazing video interview with the Democracy Now producer who was detained today. As the DN producer explains, she was present at a meeting of a group called “I-Witness” — which videotaped police behavior at the 2004 GOP Convention in New York and helped get charges dismissed against hundreds of protesters who were arrested. The police surrounded the St. Paul house where they were meeting even though they had no warrant, told them that anyone who exited the house would be arrested, and then — even though they finally, after several hours, obtained a warrant only for the house next door — basically broke into the house, pointed weapons at everyone inside, handcuffed them, searched the house, and then left. Here is a blog post from one of the members of I-Witness asking for help during the time when they were forced to stay inside the house (see the second post — it reads like a note from a hostage crying out for help). This is truly repugnant, extreme police behavior designed to intimidate protesters, police critics and others, and it ought to infuriate anyone and everyone who cares about basic liberties.

Video of the August 30 raid, including an argument with the cops over the address on belated warrant here:

Greenwald’s subsequent entry shows that the raids not only continued on Sunday, August 31, but that federal involvement is apparent;

Today’s Star Tribune added that the raids were specifically “aided by informants planted in protest groups.” Back in May, Marcy Wheeler presciently noted that the Minneapolis Joint Terrorist Task Force — an inter-agency group of federal, state and local law enforcement led by the FBI — was actively recruiting Minneapolis residents to serve as plants, to infiltrate “vegan groups” and other left-wing activist groups and report back to the Task Force about what they were doing. There seems to be little doubt that it was this domestic spying by the Federal Government that led to the excessive and truly despicable home assaults by the police yesterday.

The index of groups named in 2004 RNC documents runs over 225 names, including everyone from the 1199 Bread and Roses Cultural Project and  Alicia Keyes and to Youth Channel (Manhattan Neighborhood Network) and “Zombie Flash Mob”.   It seems that the police and federal agencies are continuing to cast a wide net, while now specifically targeting independent journalists.

The role of videographers is well known in New York, where this footage was recently taken at a Critical Mass bike rally:

Youtube: NYPD Assault Cyclist In Times Square – 29 July 2008

Without such coverage, the wrongful arrest of the cyclist would almost certainly have succeeded. That is exactly what local police and federal agencies are hoping to accomplish by targeting the Minneapolis videographers: make bad arrests stick.

Links:

Wikipedia: Joint Terrorism Task Force

Three articles on spying by NYPD before and during the 2004 RNC:

• “NY Law Enforcement Caught Doctoring Video of RNC Arrests“. Democracy Now.  April 14, 2005.
• “NYPD Spy Tactics Exposed: Democracy Now! Airs Exclusive Police surveillance Footage Recorded From Blimps, Helicopters and “Lipstick Cams” During Republican National Convention“  February 19, 2007.

• “City Police Spied Broadly Before G.O.P. Convention” By JIM DWYER, New York Times. March 25, 2007
• PDF: “Rights and Wrongs at the RNC: A Special Report about Police and Protest at the Republican National Convention“. Christopher Dunn, Donna Lieberman, Palyn Hung, Alex Vitale, Zac Zimmer, Irum Taqi, Steve Theberge and Udi Ofer. New York Civil Liberties Union. August 30, 2005.
• The New York Civil Liberties Union index of police documents relating to the 2004 RNC is here: http://www.nyclu.org/rncdocs. Documents were obtained via the courts February – May 2007.

I-Witness Video’s list of news articles is here: http://iwitnessvideo.info/news/index.html

2008 RNC protester’s site: http://www.protestrnc2008.org/. Hosted by Indymedia.

Google News on search string: ‘”Ramsey County Sheriff” convention’.  Note that one columnist quotes the sheriff as saying the raids netted “”edged weapons,” Molotov cocktails, buckets of urine and tools for disabling buses”.  Similar reports were released during previous conventions and have proved to be disinformation.

Timothy Carr on Huffington Post. St. Paul Mayor and Media Mum on Journalism Crackdown.  September 3, 2008.