Why the FCC will ignore our comments.
Category: Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
The Times kicks Gary Webb’s corpse
He was right. The Times, with a lot more money and access, is far too frequently wrong (sometimes on purpose). They can’t forgive him for it.
So, it is perhaps nice that the Times stated quite frankly that the long-denied scandal “really happened” – even though this admission is tucked into a movie review placed on page AR-14 of the New York edition. And the Times’ reviewer still can’t quite face up to the fact that his newspaper was part of a gang assault on an honest journalist who actually got the story right.
Thus, the review is peppered with old claims that Webb hyped his material when, in fact, he understated the seriousness of the scandal, as did Barger and I in the 1980s. The extent of Contra cocaine trafficking and the CIA’s awareness – and protection – of the criminal behavior were much greater than any of us knew.
The Times’ review sums up the Webb story (and the movie plot) this way: “‘Kill the Messenger,’ a movie starring Jeremy Renner due Oct. 10, examines how much of the story [Webb] told was true and what happened after he wrote it. ‘Kill the Messenger’ decidedly remains in Mr. Webb’s corner, perhaps because most of the rest of the world was against him while he was alive.
“Rival newspapers blew holes in his story, government officials derided him as a nut case and his own newspaper, after initially basking in the scoop, threw him under a bus. Mr. Webb was open to attack in part because of the lurid presentation of the story and his willingness to draw causality based on very thin sourcing and evidence. He wrote past what he knew, but the movie suggests that he told a truth others were unwilling to. Sometimes, when David takes on Goliath, David is the one who ends up getting defeated. …
“Big news organization like The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and The Washington Post tore the arms and legs off his work. Despite suggestions that their zeal was driven by professional jealousy, some of the journalists who re-reported the story said they had little choice, given the deep flaws.
“Tim Golden in The New York Times and others wrote that Mr. Webb overestimated his subjects’ ties to the contras as well as the amount of drugs sold and money that actually went to finance the war in Nicaragua.”
The reviewer gives Golden another chance to take a shot at Webb and defend what the Big Papers did. “Webb made some big allegations that he didn’t back up, and then the story just exploded, especially in California,” Golden said in an email. “You can find some fault with the follow-up stories, but mostly what they did was to show what Webb got wrong.”
But Golden continues to be wrong himself. While it may be true that no journalistic story is perfect and that no reporter knows everything about his subject, Webb was if anything too constrained in his chief conclusions, particularly the CIA’s role in shielding the Contra drug traffickers. The reality was much worse, with CIA officials intervening in criminal cases, such as the so-called Frogman Case in San Francisco, that threatened to expose the Contra-related trafficking.
The CIA Inspector General’s report also admitted that the CIA withheld evidence of Contra drug trafficking from federal investigators, Congress and even the CIA’s own analytical division. The I.G. report was clear, too, on the CIA’s motivation.
Why no revolution?
I gotta say, when even the right-wing Telegraph says it…
Why aren’t the middle classes revolting?
Words you probably never thought you’d read in the Telegraph. Words which, as a Gladstonian Liberal, I never thought I’d write. But seriously, why aren’t we seeing scenes reminiscent of Paris in 1968? Moscow in 1917? Boston in 1773?My current fury is occasioned the Phones4U scandal (and it really is a scandal).
Phones4U was bought by the private equity house, BC Partners, in 2011 for £200m. BC then borrowed £205m and, having saddled the company with vast amounts of debt, paid themselves a dividend of £223m. Crippled by debt, the company has now collapsed into administration.
The people who crippled it have walked away with nearly £20m million, while 5,600 people face losing their jobs. The taxman may also be stiffed on £90m in unpaid VAT and PAYE. It’s like a version of 1987’s Wall Street on steroids, the difference being that Gordon Gecko wins at the end and everyone shrugs and says, “Well, it’s not ideal, but really we need guys like him.”
I’m not financially sophisticated enough to understand the labyrinthine ins and outs of private equity deals. But I don’t think I need to be. Here, my relative ignorance is actually a plus. You took a viable company, ran up ridiculous levels of debt, paid yourselves millions and then walked away, leaving unemployment and unpaid tax bills in your wake. What’s to understand? We should be calling for your heads on a plate.
Continue reading “Why no revolution?”
You know what I really hate about Republicans?
They make it so hard not to hate them:
My reporting on the Michigan Republican Party’s odious mailer encouraging people to call the phone of the ailing mother of Democratic candidate for Michigan’s 61st House district John Fisher has gotten LOTS of attention. It’s had thousands and thousands of views and the cross-posted version at Daily Kos has given it national exposure. It’s been picked up by other sites, as well, including Raw Story, Wonkette, and others.
Fisher’s opponent, Republican Kalamazoo County Commissioner Brandt Iden, issued a statement that stops very short of repudiating or condemning the mailer, saying, “Obviously, as you know, it was not sent out by our campaign. I don’t condone negative campaign tactics and it’s not something my campaign has done or anticipates doing. I hope Mr. Fisher would do the same.”
Why he would suggest that Mr. Fisher, a pastor, “would do the same” is perplexing. There’s been nothing like this coming from the Michigan Democratic Party or Fisher’s campaign.
We’re all screwed
I picked up my work laptop yesterday because it was so slow, it was impossible to use with any reasonable speed. My computer repairman told me it was clogged up with viruses. He said Norton sucks, and said the free anti-virus program I use is the one he prefers (AVG). He warned that it was basically impossible to avoid them if you spent much time online — he compared them to potholes. He advised me to be vigilant about updating Java, Flash, and Adobe, because their vulnerabilities were the most popular point of entry for malware and viruses. That’s why I have a backup service — you never know when you’ll need it.
Oh, and by the way, did I mention tomorrow is the beginning of the Mercury retrograde?
Karsten Nohl demonstrated an attack he called BadUSB to a standing-room-only crowd at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, showing that it’s possible to corrupt any USB device with insidious, undetectable malware. Given the severity of that security problem—and the lack of any easy patch—Nohl has held back on releasing the code he used to pull off the attack. But at least two of Nohl’s fellow researchers aren’t waiting any longer.
Caudill and Wilson reverse engineered the firmware of USB microcontrollers sold by the Taiwanese firm Phison, one of the world’s top USB makers. Then they reprogrammed that firmware to perform disturbing attacks: In one case, they showed that the infected USB can impersonate a keyboard to type any keystrokes the attacker chooses on the victim’s machine. Because it affects the firmware of the USB’s microcontroller, that attack program would be stored in the rewritable code that controls the USB’s basic functions, not in its flash memory—even deleting the entire contents of its storage wouldn’t catch the malware.
But he (Karsten Nohl) warned that even if that code-signing measure were put in place today, it could take 10 years or more to iron out the USB standard’s bugs and pull existing vulnerable devices out of circulation. “It’s unfixable for the most part,” Nohl said at the time. “But before even starting this arms race, USB sticks have to attempt security.”
On the way to a funeral
Wendell Pierce is one of my favorite actors and I can’t believe this cop didn’t recognize him. But I’m sorry that this happens to anyone:
Wendell Pierce: And the fact is… The fact is while we have this very comfortable, colloquial debate about it, when the lights go out and I go out in the street and I get behind the wheel of my car, the most dangerous moment I ever have in my life is when a police officer pulls me over. Every black man in America knows that when that happens, there’s actually a possibility his life may come to an end and that shouldn’t happen. It actually happened to me in Louisiana, dressed as I am, going to my uncle’s funeral, two toddlers in the back. I had just picked up my cousin from Chicago. A 100 degrees on the road in Louisiana, I’m pulled over and I sat there waiting for the cop to come. I have a habit of always taking my wallet out and putting it on the dash to make sure he doesn’t think this is going for a gun. I sat there and sat there and sat there and I realized he hadn’t come. Air conditioner on, 100 degrees and I look in the mirror and I see… That’s all I heard.
As I turned down the window you hear, “Motherfucker get out that car, I’m gonna blow your fucking head off.” Now he didn’t have the training to say, “I’m going to come up to the car.” I have to tell these toddlers, “Be cool. Everything’s fine. Uncle Wendell’s going to get out of the car. Everyone don’t move.” I put my hands up, get out the car, opened the door from outside. But I told the officer, “Why didn’t you use your P. A.? Simple, get in your car…” “Well why didn’t you get out of your car?” I said “I had the window’s up, it’s 100 degrees, and I had the air conditioner on. I can’t hear you.” That’s poor training, that he didn’t know that I wasn’t going to be able to hear him in the car. He’s going to fire. So it’s that sort of incident that happens too often all the time, that white America has to understand that Wendell Allen in New Orleans, Mr. Garner in Staten Island, Michael Brown in Ohio, is a constant all over this country. And if we’re going to sit here and pretend that we are post-racial, you have to realize that I can’t afford for your belief or denial that my life isn’t in danger.
Via Ed Tayter.
The quality of mercy is not strained
Remember, prosecutors have some degree of discretion about what they chose to prosecute. This is a perfect example:
A Minnesota prosecutor will proceed with a child endangerment case against a mother who provided medical marijuana to her son to treat symptoms of a traumatic brain injury — despite the fact that Minnesota recently passed a law allowing cannabis oil to be used for medical purposes — ThinkProgress reports. That law, however, will not go into effect until 2015.
Angela Brown’s son, Trey, suffered the injury at a baseball game three years ago.
“It just hurts in my brain everywhere,” Trey said. “I really can’t explain the pain.”
Along with the pain, he suffers from uncontrollable muscle spasms and seizures so severe that he had to stop attending school and caused him to be suicidal.
“I was afraid to go to the bathroom,” his mother Angela Brown said, because “he’d be harming himself.”
Last winter, she took Trey to Colorado, where they found a doctor who prescribed a particular strain of cannabis oil to treat him. “Within an hour of him taking it, we could tell a difference,” Angela Brown said.
When he returned to school, teachers and administrators wondered about his seemingly miraculous recovery. When Trey informed them, however, they were less than pleased.
“It was a week later when my mom called and said, ‘The cops are looking for you,’” Angela Brown said. Police seized the oil and charged her with child endangerment and causing a child to need protection.
His father, David Brown, said that Trey’s symptoms have returned since he stopped using the oil.
Thanks, David Benowitz.
Shorter Richard Cohen
If only those damned Palestinians hadn’t resisted when Israelis tried to take their land, we wouldn’t have to keep killing them!
Alex Pareene on Richard Cohen, 2013:
“I am a deeply ignorant and cloistered old man,” should be the next sentence, “and no one should pay me for my views and opinions, because they are worthless.”…
This Richard Cohen column — and perhaps all Richard Cohen columns — should be read as a memo to Jeff Bezos, the new owner of the Post. Cohen is saying, perhaps subconsciously, that he has nothing to offer the Washington Post. He adds no value. “Buy me out,” Richard Cohen begs, between the lines. “Pay me to go away and stop embarrassing this once respected newspaper.” How much will it take? I am not sure, but Jeff Bezos is a very rich man, and I think he can afford it. Indeed, if his mission is to invest in quality journalism, paying Richard Cohen to go away would be one of the quickest and simplest ways to advance that mission.
Too big to fail — again
Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism:
As a new story by Shahien Nasiripour in the Huffington Post tells us, the Administration is now giving student loan servicers the “too big to fail” kid gloves treatment. The apparent justification is that correcting the records of borrowers who may have gone into default through not fault of their own would lead schools with bad servicers to lose access to Federal student aid, which could prove to be crippling to them.
So understand what that means: the law was set up to inflict draconian punishments on schools that used servicers that screw up and/or cheat on a regular basis, presumably because the consequences to borrowers were so serious. But rather than enforce the law, which would have such dire consequences for bad actors as to serve as a wake-up call for everyone else, the Administration has thrown its weight fully behind the education-extraction complex.
The key parts of Shahien’s story:
The U.S. Department of Education is turning its back on at least 1,000 borrowers in favor of shielding their former colleges from potentially crippling sanctions that would have resulted from high rates of default on federal student loans…
“Borrowers aren’t getting any relief or similar consideration from the Education Department,” said Debbie Cochrane, research director at the California-based Institute for College Access & Success, which advocates affordable education. “If the school isn’t held accountable for the default, then the borrower shouldn’t either.”
As many as 20 schools won’t lose access to critical federal student aid programs, an Education Department official said Wednesday. Losing access to taxpayer-provided student aid would be the equivalent of a death sentence for most colleges. The institutions that were let off the hook include for-profit schools, private and public colleges, and historically black colleges and universities, the official said on a conference call organized for news media.
“As many as 20 schools” being given a waiver they clearly don’t deserve suggests that the number of borrowers being thrown under the bus is considerably larger than 1000. Huffington Post identified 13, of which seven are for-profits and four started out as black colleges. And mind you, the schools have to be abjectly bad at making and servicing loans to be subject to the loss of Federal aid:
Schools whose former students subsequently default on their federal student loans at unacceptably high rates can cost their current and future students access to federal grant and loan programs. Penalties kick in once a school’s default rate exceeds 30 percent over three straight years.
The “get out of jail for free” card applies to servicers that screwed up by billing students for only some of their loans, and later declared the students to be in default on loans they didn’t know about. While that may sound nuts, recall that students typically sign loan agreements and the proceeds go to the educational institution. Moreover, payments are usually deferred while the student is still in school. So it isn’t hard to see that a student, having signed loan documents over the years, might not realize that they were to different lenders and hence they’d down the road be facing multiple bills.
Kill the messenger
I am happy that, after all this time, Gary Webb’s amazing investigative work will finally be vindicated — but sorry the journalism establishment helped push him to suicide:
Kill the Messenger, an actual film coming soon to a theater near you, is the true story of Sacramento-based investigative reporter Gary Webb, who earned both acclaim and notoriety for his 1996 San Jose Mercury News series that revealed the CIA had turned a blind eye to the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan Contras trafficking crack cocaine in South Central Los Angeles and elsewhere in urban America in the 1980s. One of the first-ever newspaper investigations to be published on the Internet, Webb’s story gained a massive readership and stirred up a firestorm of controversy and repudiation.
After being deemed a pariah by media giants like The New York Times, Los Angeles Timesand The Washington Post, and being disowned by his own paper, Webb eventually came to work in August 2004 at the alt-weekly Sacramento News & Review. Four months later, he committed suicide at age 49. He left behind a grieving family—and some trenchant questions:
Why did the media giants attack him so aggressively, thereby protecting the government secrets he revealed? Why did he decide to end his own life? What, ultimately, is the legacy of Gary Webb?
Like others working at our newsweekly in the brief time he was here, I knew Webb as a colleague and was terribly saddened by his death. Those of us who attended his unhappy memorial service at the Doubletree Hotel in Sacramento a week after he died thought that day surely marked a conclusion to the tragic tale of Gary Webb.
But no.
Because here comes Kill the Messenger, a Hollywood film starring Jeremy Renner as Webb; Rosemarie DeWitt as Webb’s then wife, Sue Bell (now Stokes); Oliver Platt as Webb’s top editor, Jerry Ceppos; and a litany of other distinguished actors, including Michael K. Williams, Ray Liotta, Andy Garcia and Robert Patrick. Directed by Michael Cuesta (executive producer of the TV series Homeland), the film opens in a “soft launch” across the country on Oct. 10.
Members of Webb’s immediate family—including his son Eric, who lives near Sacramento State and plans a career in journalism—expect to feel a measure of solace upon the release of Kill the Messenger. “The movie is going to vindicate my dad,” he said.