America's New Reality - An Imaginary Constitution

The article needs to be repeated. Juan Cole writes on his blog October 25, 2013, How the US Government Betrayed the Constitution and invented an Imaginary Fascist One

[Fascism: a governmental system led by a dictator having complete power,forcibly suppressing opposition and criticism, regimenting all industry, commerce, etc., and emphasizing an aggressive nationalism and often racism.] -Dictionary.com

---

How the US Government Betrayed the Constitution and invented an Imaginary Fascist One

Posted on 10/24/2013 by Juan Cole

The idea of having a strong Federal government was controversial in the early United States, and one of the ways Federalists reassured Americans that it wouldn’t become tyrannical was to append a Bill of Rights to the Constitution.

That attempt to prevent despotism has failed, because the Federal government and its various agencies have set aside the Bill of Rights as a dead letter, substituted for them a bizarre set of interpretations of law, and either avoid having the courts adjudicate their fascist fantasies or managed to have appointed to the bench unethical or authoritarian judges that will uphold virtually anything they do.

How corrupt our system has become is evident when even the New Yorkeremphasizes that a secret Senate report found that torture in the Bush years was “unnecessary” and “ineffective.” Not that it was “unconstitutional.”

The Eighth Amendment of the US constitution forbids ‘cruel and unusual punishment.’ US courts have found that the Framers’ injunction was intended to be dynamic, and did not only forbid those things thought barbaric in 1789 but those things contemporary Americans would find cruel and unusual. As Cornell Law school put it,

‘in Weems v. United States it was concluded that the framers had not merely intended to bar the reinstitution of procedures and techniques condemned in 1789, but had intended to prevent the authorization of “a coercive cruelty being exercised through other forms of punishment.” The Amendment therefore was of an “expansive and vital character”41 and, in the words of a later Court, “must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” ‘

If a sheriff in a small town arrested a shoplifter and waterboarded him 54 times, the sheriff would go to jail. Federal officials? Not so much.

Let us just underline the Supreme Court’s diction here in Weems. The Framers had sought, they said, to forestall “a coercive cruelty being exercised through other forms of punishment.”

Coercive cruelty. Coercive cruelty was the hallmark of treatment of Federal detainees in the Bush era. That was what Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guantanamo were about. Some prisoners were likely victims of manslaughter by coercive cruelty (it is hard to know when to stop).

Waterboarding is illegal (not to mention setting German shepherds on people to viciously bite them). Professor of Law Wilson R. Huhn writes:

“Three major treaties that the United States has signed and unambiguously ratified prohibit the United States from subjecting prisoners in the War on Terror to this kind of treatment. First, Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, which the Senate unanimously ratified in 1955, prohibits the parties to the treaty from acts upon prisoners including “violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; . . . outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment.”[18] Second, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which the Senate ratified in 1992, states that “[n]o one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”[19] Third, the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment, which the Senate ratified in 1994, provides that “[e]ach State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction,”[20] and that “[e]ach State Party shall undertake to prevent in any territory under its jurisdiction other acts of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment which do not amount to torture . . . .”

The United States has enacted statutes prohibiting torture and cruel or inhuman treatment. It is these statutes which make waterboarding illegal… The four principal statutes which Congress has adopted to implement the provisions of the foregoing treaties are the Torture Act,… the War Crimes Act…,and the laws entitled “Prohibition on Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment of Persons Under Custody or Control of the United States Government”… and “Additional Prohibition on Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.”… The first two statutes are criminal laws while the latter two statutes extend civil rights to any person in the custody of the United States anywhere in the world.

The Torture Act makes it a felony for any person, acting under color of law, to commit an act of torture upon any person within the defendant’s custody or control outside the United States…. Torture is defined as the intentional infliction of “severe physical or mental pain or suffering” upon a person within the defendant’s custody or control… To be “severe,” any mental pain or suffering resulting from torture must be “prolonged.”[29] Under this law, torture is punishable by up to twenty years imprisonment unless the victim dies as a result of the torture, in which case the penalty is death or life in prison.”

But somehow employees of the US military, the CIA and other Federal agencies managed to ignore all that. So yes, unnecessary and ineffective. But also, illegal and unconstitutional and treasonous.

Then of course there is the National Security Agency’s gutting of the Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable search and seizure. As long as the unreasonable search and seizure happens on the internet, apparently that is all right. What arrogance, what hypocrisy, what fascism.

An honest appeals court just ruled that the government needs a warrant to put a tracking device on your car and follow you around by GPS. But your cell phone metadata also reveals your movements, and the NSA is scooping that information up, effectively following you around without a warrant, exactly what the court just found unjustified. But the Federal government (yes, the Obama administration) has succeeded in keeping NSA practices out of the courts.

While few Americans care that the NSA was intensively spying on the Mexicans, French and Germans, even on German chancellor Angela Merkel’s private cell phone, they should. The Bill of Rights were once a point of inspiration for human rights activists around the world. Much of what the youth who led the Arab upheavals of 2011 wanted was enshrined in the Bill of Rights. American ideals and rule of law were part of America’s soft power in the world. The European Union is suddenly less cooperative because of our allies’ outrage at being spied on. No one wants to be like creepy peeping toms or vicious torturers, and that is what Americans have become.

Moreover, the NSA foreign spying is racist. Yes, on top of everything else, it involves a racist hierarchy. The US doesn’t intensively spy on Canadians, British and Australians, i.e. on what were called in the 19th century ‘Anglo-Saxons.’ It is only the inferior races that Washington subjects to surveillance.

But all that is crashing and burning as the US government has betrayed those ideals over and over again. We’re being massively spied on by our government, our location, the people we call, the websites we visit, all being monitored constantly. And if the government decides we are terrorism suspects, we could well be tortured. Martin Luther King’s principle of civil disobedience would be categorized as terrorism today, and if he were active in our time, instead of naming a Federal holiday after him, the government would have MLK waterboarded by police dressed up as military commandos.

---

-Joe

Sobering Assessment of America's Future

If you want a sobering assessment of America's future take the time to read this article written by Paul Craig Roberts, who is a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal posted on CounterPunch October 23, 2013, No Way Out.

I've posted the complete article here as well.

---

As Ye Sow, So Shall Ye Reap

No Way Out

by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

The year 2014 could be shaping up as the year that the chickens come home to roost.

Americans, even well-informed ones, don’t know all of the mistakes made by neoconized and corrupted Washington in the past two decades.  However, enough is known to see that the US has lost economic and political power, and that the loss is irreversible.

The economic cost of this lost will be born by what remains of the middle class and the increasingly poverty-stricken lower class.  The one percent will have offshore gold holdings and large sums of money in foreign currencies and other foreign assets to see them through.

In the political arena, the collapse of the Soviet Union presented Washington with the grand opportunity to reallocate the Pentagon budget to other uses. Part of the reduction could have been returned to taxpayers for their own use. Another part could have been used to improve worn out infrastructure.  And another part could have been used to repair and improve the social safety net, thus insuring domestic tranquility.  A final, but perhaps most important part, could have been used to begin repaying the Treasury IOUs in the Social Security Trust Fund from which Washington has borrowed and spent $2 trillion, leaving non-marketable IOUs in the place of the Social Security payroll tax revenues that Washington raided in order to fund its wars and current operations.

Instead, influenced by neoconservative warmongers who advocated America using its “sole superpower” status to establish hegemony over the world, Washington let hubris and arrogance run away with it.  The consequence was that Washington destroyed its soft power with lies and war crimes, only to find that its military power was insufficient to support its occupation of Iraq, its conquest of Afghanistan, and its financial imperialism.

Now seen universally as a lawless warmonger and a nuisance, Washington’s  soft power has been squandered. With its influence on the wane, Washington has become more of a bully.  In response, the rest of the world is isolating Washington.

The prime minister of India, Manmohan Singh, recently declared China and Russia to be India’s “most important partners” with whom India shares “common strategic interests.” Prime Minister Singh said: “ India and Russia have always had a convergence of views on global and regional issues, and we value Russia’s perspective on international developments of mutual interest.”

India joined China in expressing concerns about the Federal Reserve’s practice of printing money in order to cover Washington’s vast red ink.  The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) are taking steps to create their own method of settling trade accounts in order to protect themselves from the looming dollar implosion, China has forcefully called for a “de-Americanized world.” After watching the “superpower” offshore a large part of its GDP to China and then add to the diminished tax base the burden of $6 trillion in wars that brought no booty and served no US interest, China has concluded that American power is spent.  The London Telegraph thinks “it is only a matter of time before the renminbi replaces the dollar as the primary currency for trading commodities and resources.”

The Obama regime attempted to attack Syria based on the sort of lies that the Bush regime used to invade Iraq, only to be slapped down by the British Parliament and Russian government. This rebuke was followed by the childishness of the government shutdown and threat of default. Consequently, the Washington morons have lost their monopoly on economic and political leadership. A few days ago the British government announced a historic agreement that permits British investors direct access to China’s markets and allows Chinese banks to expand their operations in Great Britain.

In Australia, the US dollar will no longer be used as the currency in which to settle the Australian trade accounts with China.  Instead of dollars, trade will be settled in the Chinese currency.

Washington served as cheerleader, as did most economists and libertarians, while US corporations, greedy for short-term profits and executive bonuses, offshored US industry and manufacturing, calling it free trade. The obvious and predicted result is that China’s demand for resources needed to fuel its industrial and manufacturing power now dominates markets. This means that the US dollar is being displaced as world currency.  The only market that America dominates is the market for financial fraud.

When industrial, manufacturing, and tradeable professional service jobs are offshored, they take US GDP and tax base with them. The foreign country gets the benefit of the relocated economic activity. Due to the revenues lost from jobs offshoring, there is a large gap between federal revenues and federal expenditures. As Washington’s irresponsible behavior has raised so many doubts about the dollar’s value and the government’s commitment to stand behind its massive debt, foreign countries with trade surpluses with the US are less and less willing to recycle those surpluses into the purchase of US Treasury debt.

Today the two largest holders of US Treasury debt are not investors or even foreign central banks. The two largest holders are the Federal Reserve and the Social Security Trust Fund.

As for those $6 trillion wars, that’s to pay for national defense to protect us from women, children, and village elders in far away countries devoid of air forces and navies, and to provide those recycled taxpayer monies from the military/security complex that find their way into political contributions.

The Wall Street gangsters sighed for relief over the last minute debt ceiling agreement.

This shows how short-term Wall Street’s outlook is. All the October agreement did was to push off the crisis to January and February. The “debt ceiling agreement” did not produce a new debt ceiling that would last beyond February, and it did not resolve the large difference between federal revenues and expenditures.  In other words, the can was again kicked down the road. A repeat of the October fiasco won’t play well.

Obamacare is causing the premiums on private insurance polices to rise substantially, almost doubling in some situations unless people move to the uncertain exchanges, and Obamacare’s raid on Medicare payroll tax revenues has resulted in a cut in Medicare payments to health care providers. The result is a further reduction in consumer discretionary income and a further drop in the economy.

This in turn means a larger federal budget deficit and the need for the Federal Reserve to purchase more debt.

Another reason the Federal Reserve is faced with increasing, not tapering, quantitative easing (money printing) is the decline in foreign purchases of US Treasury bills, notes, and bonds.  As the instruments pay interest that is less than the rate of inflation, holding Treasury debt makes no sense when the dollar’s value and the potential of default are open questions.

According to reports, not only are foreign governments, such as China, ceasing to buy US Treasury debt, China has started to sell off its holdings, substituting gold in the place of US Treasury debt.

This means that the bonds must be purchased by the Fed or interest rates will rise as the increased supply of bonds on the market drives down bond prices.  The only way the Fed can purchase a larger supply of bonds is by printing more money, that is, by more quantitative easing.

With the world moving away from using the dollar to settle international accounts, as the Fed prints more dollars the rate at which foreign holders of dollar assets sell off their holdings will rise.

To get out of dollars requires that the dollar proceeds from selling Treasuries, US stocks and US real estate be sold in the currency markets.  The selling of dollars drives down the exchange value of the US dollar and results in rising US inflation. The Fed can print money with which to purchase Treasury debt, but it cannot print foreign currencies with which to purchase dollars.

The decline in the dollar’s exchange value and the domestic inflation that results will force the Fed to stop printing.  What then covers the gap between revenues and expenditures? The likely answer is private pensions and any other asset that Washington can get its hands on.

Initially, private pensions will be taxed at a rate to recover the tax-free accumulation in the pensions. The second year a national emergency will be used to confiscate some share of pensions.  Those relying on the pensions will find themselves with less income. Consumer spending will decline. The economy will worsen. The deficit will widen.

You can see where this is going, and there seems to be no way out.  Policymakers, economists, and corporation executives are in denial about the adverse effects of offshoring, which they still, despite all the evidence, maintain is good for the economy.  So nothing will be done about offshoring. Republicans will blame the budget deficit on welfare and entitlements, and if those are cut consumer spending will decline further, widening the budget deficit. Inflation will rise as incomes fall, and social cohesion will break down.

Now you know why Homeland Security purchased 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition, enough ammunition to fight the Iraq war for 12 years, has its own para-military force and 2,700 tanks.  If you think the “terrorist threat” in America warrants a domestic armed force of this size, you are out of your mind. This force has been assembled to deal with starving and homeless people in the streets of America.

September employment report:  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), September brought 148,000 new jobs, enough to keep up with population growth but not reduce the unemployment rate.  Moreover, John Williams (shadowstats.com) says that one-third of these jobs, or 50,000 per month on average, are phantom jobs produced by the birth-death model that during difficult economic times overestimates the number of new jobs from business startups and underestimates job losses from business failures.

The BLS reports that 22,000 of September’s jobs were new hires by state governments, which seems odd in view of the ongoing state budgetary difficulties.

In the private sector, wholesale and retail trade produced 36,900 new jobs, which seems odd in light of the absence of growth in real median family income and real retail sales.

Transportation and warehousing produced 23,400 new jobs, concentrated in transit and ground passenger transportation.  This also seems odd unless the price of gasoline and pinched budgets are forcing people onto public transportation.

Professional and business services accounted for 32,000 jobs of which 63% are  temporary help jobs.

So here you have the job picture that the presstitutes, hyping “the jobs gain,” don’t tell you.  The scary part of the September job report is that the usual standby, the category of waitresses and bartenders, which has accounted for a large part of every reported jobs gain since I began reporting the monthly statistics, shows job loss. Seven thousand one hundred waitresses and bartenders lost their jobs in September.  If this figure is not a fluke, it is bad news.  It signals that fewer Americans can afford to eat and drink out.

The unemployment rate that is reported is the rate that does not count as unemployed discouraged workers who are unable to find jobs and cease to look. This favored rate,

the darling of the regime in power, the presstitutes, and Wall Street, also is not adjusted for the category of “involuntary part-time workers,” those whose hours have been cut back or because they are unable to find a full-time job.  Obamacare, as is widely reported, is causing employers to shift their work forces from full time to part time in order to avoid costs associated with Obamacare. The BLS places the number of involuntary part-time workers at 7,900,000.

The announced 7.2% unemployment rate is a meaningless number.  The rate can decline for no other reason than people unable to find jobs drop out of the work force. You are not counted in the work force if you are discouraged about finding a job and no longer look for a job.

The phenomena of discouraged workers shows up in the measure of the labor force participation rate, which has declined in the 21st century.  The opportunities for American labor are so restricted that a rising percentage of the working age population have given up looking for jobs.

Yet, the Obama regime, the Wall Street gangsters, and the pressitute media tell us how much better the economic situation is becoming as more small businesses close, as memberships decline in golf clubs, as more university graduates return home to live with their parents, who are drawing down their savings to live, as Fed Chairman Bernanke has made it impossible for them to live on interest payments on their savings.

According to the US census bureau, real median household income in 2012 was $51,017, down 9% from $56,080 in 1999, 13 years ago. In contrast, annual compensation in 2012 for US CEOs broke all records.  Two CEOs were paid more than $1 billion, and the worst paid among the top ten took home $100 million. When the presstitutes speak of economic recovery, they mean recovery for the one percent.

America is in the toilet, and the rest of the world knows it.  But the neocons who rule in Washington and their Israeli ally are determined that Washington start yet more wars to create lebensraum for Israel.

Early in the 21st century the liberal Democrat Senator from New York, Chuck Schumer, and I coauthored an article in the New York Times about the adverse effects on the US economy of jobs offshoring. The article caused a sensation.  The Brookings Institution in Washington quickly convened a conference which was covered by C-SPAN.  C-SPAN rebroadcast the conference several times. During the conference I said that if jobs offshoring continued, the US would be a third world economy in 20 years.

Wall Street quickly shut up Senator Schumer, but I am sticking by my forecast.  Indeed, I think we are already there.

Paul Craig Roberts is a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. His latest book The Failure of Laissez-Faire Capitalism. Roberts’ How the Economy Was Lost is now available from CounterPunch in electronic format.

---

"As Ye Sow, So Shall Ye Reap"

-Joe

Accountable - One and All

That's right. All Americans are accountable and answerable for what George W. Bush did.
Juan Cole lays it out in spades in his post today October 17, 2013.
This is worth posting and repeating. (I hope Juan Cole doesn't mind.)

The American Genocide Against Iraq: 4% of Population Dead as result of US sanctions, wars  Posted on 10/17/2013 by Juan Cole

A new household survey of Iraqis has projected the civilian death toll from the Bush administration’s invasion and occupation of Iraq at roughly 450,000. Passive information-gathering techniques like logging deaths in the Western press have produced estimates closer to 150,000, but such techniques have been proven to miss a lot of people. (To my knowledge no one was counting all the deaths reported in the some 200 Arabic-language Iraqi newspapers in the 2000s, so even the passive information-gathering was limited. And, the Wikileaks US military log of civilian deaths did not overlap very much with e.g. Iraq Body Count, so both of them were missing things the other caught.) 

Of those extra deaths beyond those who would have died if the US had never invaded, some 270,000 died violently, with US troops responsible for about 90,000 civilian deaths and militias for another 90,000. Of those killed violently, 60 percent were shot, and 12 percent died from car bombs. Some 180,000 died because of the destruction of the public health infrastructure (lack of access to hospital treatment, e.g.). 

Despite the horrific total, this estimate for 2003-2011 is smaller than the Lancet study of some years ago, which was done under wartime conditions. The authors admit, however, that the death toll could have been even higher; this total is a projection based on 2000 interviews. 

The US/ UN sanctions on Iraq of the 1990s, which interdicted chlorine for much of that decade and so made water purification impossible, are estimated to have killed another 500,000 Iraqis, mainly children. (Infants and toddlers die easily from diarrhea caused by gastroenteritis, which causes fatal dehydration). 

So the US polished off about a million Iraqis from 1991 through 2011, large numbers of them children. The Iraqi population in that period was roughly 25 million, so the US killed or created the conditions for the killing of 4% of the Iraqi population. 

If Iraq had killed 4% of Americans, it would be 12 million people dead. 

Iraq did not attack the United States. It did attack Iran in 1980, but by 1983 the US was an ally in Iraq’s war against Iran. It also attacked Kuwait, which it occupied quite bestially, but it was out by spring 1991. There was no casus belli or legitimate legal cause of war in 2003. Iraq’s main crime appears to have been to be an oil state not compliant with US demands. 

All this is horrible enough. Even more horrible is that the US occupation of Iraq sparked a Sunni Arab insurgency, which is still vigorous. Insurgencies typically take 10 to 15 years to subside. Some 5000 Iraqi civilians have been killed so far this year by that insurgency. US occupation is the gift that goes on giving. 

Despite the Bush administration’s violation of the UN charter and its war crimes in Iraq, none of its high officials has faced prosecution. Some of them even have the gall to come on television from time to time to urge more killing.

I would point out one problem I have with a lot of these kinds of reports from people like Juan Cole is their reluctance to actually call a spade a spade. Point of fact:  "civilian death toll from the Bush administration’s invasion and occupation of Iraq" and continues, "Despite the Bush administration’s violation of the UN charter and its war crimes in Iraq".  The person responsible for the deaths, invasion, occupation, violations and war crimes was specifically President George W. Bush. Justice demands the same accountability that Saddam Hussein got.

-Joe

UPDATE: Singled Out - Adam Laird Case

This hasn't happened yet, but based upon what I read in today's Sunday, October 13, 2013, Times-Standard news paper, I fully expect the judge to throw out the criminal complaints against former Eureka Police Sargent Adam Laird. Front page headline: "Prosecutors oppose motion to dismiss EPD assault case."

Here is a clear-cut case of Paul Gallegos and his "Prosecutors" doing things that give Laird's lawyers legal rights to have the matter dismissed. When Laird is caught red-handed and really has no legitimate defense what does the District Attorney do to protect the police? He makes a little mistake, something you can attribute to his fervor or his staff's fervor - an excusable mistake. Ultimately, there is no justice or accountability.

The problem doesn't end there. Such action is a tacit defense of these kinds of people to continue totally justified committing such crimes. As a consequence, the EPD, Murl Harpham and the District Attorney's Office and Paul Gallegos are totally without any credibility. As it is, all actually, are without any justifiable legitimacy to exist in any capacity now - they really only represent and defend one another.

-Joe

Worth The Cost?

You tell me.

Every decent, law-abiding citizen in Eureka, if not Humboldt County, should be offended and OUTRAGED - Murl Harpham's ingratiating nonsense not withstanding. Are we in Iraq or Afghanistan where everyone is suspected of being a terrorist or a terrorist supporter? What's next? An Abrams tank? I wouldn't be surprised if they were already using drones.

The priority here is obvious and it has nothing to do with policing a peaceful civilian population. This is a flagrant, in-your-face accusation of violent criminal intent against everyone. The police already operate like a Special Forces Commando Unit now. Just look at how the Federal Government has co-oped the police with their variation called SWAT. Almost everything they do requires escalating violence into the mix. When was the last time anyone can recall the police confronting a gang of marijuana growers protecting their gardens armed with heavy weapons and RPGs (Rocked-Propelled Grenades). What does the Times-Standard newspaper say about the monstrosity? It is a "mine resistant, ambush protected vehicle-known as an MRAP." Violence pours out of that vehicle's every pore.

The priority here is police protection at whatever cost, when it should be protecting the general population at every cost. Have you had to call of the EPD for assistance in some matter or report a crime lately? You take your life in your own hands when you do. It seems like everyone that does not wear a badge and carry a gun is either treated like a suspect or a violent criminal. Bringing this military monstrosity into Eureka couldn't make that statement anymore vivid and real if they wanted. Murl Harpham's "Tough Cop" philosophy is carried to an extreme. Is this the symbol of the new Eureka Police Department?

-Joe

"Singled Out" - No Doubt

Add caption

Chief of Eureka Police, Murl Harpham solidifies his legacy.

On Thursday, September 26, 2013, the Times-Standard newspaper awarded their readers with the picture of a beaming Police Chief Murl Harpham as he finished hiring a whole raft of new employees. Harpham is slated to retire when  the new Police Chief Andrew Mills is installed in November. Normally this action should not cause a second look, but when you read this morning's front-page headline, (Saturday, October 5, 2013) "Singled out: Defense attorney claims police sergeant was targeted for political views," Harpham's tenure in the EPD begins to make since. For years now, he's been running the EPD whether he was the police chief or not. After the last fiasco the City Fathers had with Garr Nielsen, it all begins to make sense - Harpham's stacking the deck and clearing out the refuse, all to solidify his legacy. You can be your bottom dollar everyone of these new hiree's fits the bill perfectly, including Andrew Mills.

Let there be no doubt, this kind of policing belongs in Egypt and Syria:

Laird, who has been with EPD since 2005, has pleaded not guilty to charges that he committed assault under the color of authority during a Dec. 6, 2012, arrest of a juvenile suspect and knowingly filed a report that included a false statement, or false statements, about the incident. His trial is slated to begin Dec. 16.  

Prosecutors allege that Laird used excessive force when he allegedly kicked a teenage suspect in the back while he was lying on the ground being handcuffed by another officer after a foot chase. The incident -- which was reported by another EPD officer and investigated by both the DA's office and EPD -- was caught on video through another officer's dash-mounted recording system.  

Former Humboldt County Chief Investigator Mike Hislop, who recently retired, and EPD Sgt. Rodrigo Reyna-Sanchez both said the video appears to show Laird used excessive force. According to Griego, a defense expert who reviewed the video found Laird acted appropriately when faced with a high-risk, noncompliant suspect. 

But, then this kind of obscenity is Murl Harpham's "tough" kind of "cop," isn't it?

Laird's lawyer says: "According to Griego, a defense expert who reviewed the video found Laird acted appropriately when faced with a high-risk, noncompliant suspect." "A high-risk noncompliant suspect"? Notice! This kid is not guilty of anything, he's a "suspect" only. "High-risk"? He's on the ground with his hands behind his back subdued and controlled by another officer putting him in handcuffs. The District Attorney, local judges and police agencies should understand, that while this kind of brutality as been standard fair during Murl Harpam's tenure, the world is changing. All of these people that swear an oath to uphold and enforce the had better understand that conduct OUTSIDE the law is reserved for criminals whether they wear a badge or not.

Don't forget, this guy was a trainer in the police department. Someone agreed with his policies or philosophies justifying such abhorrent conduct.

-Joe

Fair Is For Fools

Yep! Just like I figured, Eureka California has a new police chief. The Eureka City Council on October 1, 2013, voted UNANIMOUSLY to hire Andrew G. Mills. What does he get? Well, first he get Murl Harpham's leftovers to choke on. And second, he gets $142,500 a year, plus whatever else we don't know about.

The question is what do the taxpaying property owners of Eureka, the people that finance all of this high-powered policing, get for their money? Do they get a police department that is responsive to their needs? Do they enforce the law or do they strut around and act Harpham-Style "tough"?

Whatever they do you can blame the people in this picture. Yeah! All those highbinders cheering on the rubber-stamping. They are the ones responsible for whatever happens and they are the ones to be held accountable - if that's ever possible.

Am I being "fair" to this new hiree? Do we, the tax-paying property owners and business people of Eureka owe this guy, just to be "fair," time to prove himself? Maybe, but I, personally don't know a damned thing about him one way or another, and that's the problem. All anyone knows is whatever the most worthless opinion is of the local power-mongers that cares to share. And we all know what that's worth... A pig in a poke.

-Joe