Don’t Blame The Democrats…Yet

I have been both encouraged and appalled by the recent public outcry advocating a meaningful compromise to end the latest Spaghetti Western standoff in Washington.

Never mind that raising the debt ceiling has nothing to do with this year’s budget, but rather is simply a means for allowing the federal government to pay off the debt that the idiots in Washington had previously voted to incur.

Never mind that the crisis never should have been a crisis, but for the arrogance and stupidity of some of the newer Tea members of congress and the GOP in general, who have a real problem with a Democrat, especially a black Democrat, telling them what is right for the country.

Never mind that these folks, who are not qualified to manage their local sanitation districts have been elevated to national prominence by some pretty darned reckless, heartless, and ruthless billionaires, corporations and ideologues, who I will refer to herein as bastards.

Never mind that the blitzkrieg of proposals conceived by said bastards and advocated by those improvidently elevated nincompoops would cost jobs, increase the cost of living, and decrease the quality of life for most Americans, with the singular intent of widening the chasm between the obscenely rich and the rest of us.

Never mind that that GOP gerrymandering has created so many safe congressional districts that said nincompoops need only to play to their ultra right-wing base, in order to get reelected and therefore have no incentive whatsoever, to actually act in the best interests of the country.

Never mind that the Tea/GOP has been mounting efforts to disenfranchise the young, the old, minorities, and the working class in general, because they tend to vote Democratic.

But my title implies that I want to talk about the Democrats. I do and I will; right now.

Although not to blame for thinking up this latest cluster %&#@, occasionally Progressives/Democrats have been known to succumb to various comically embarrassing human frailties, without any poking or prodding (sorry, I couldn’t help it) from the other side.

Aside from those occasional acts of Wienerism/Clintonism, they are generally just too darned trusting of their opponents and also have a really obnoxious tendency to turn the other cheek before they have been slapped. To Progressives, Democrats especially, the words compromise and capitulate seem to be synonymous.

As an example, I once thought that President Obama had agreed to extend tax breaks for the wealthy a few months ago, not just to keep precious dollars in the hands of the middle class and the poor as well, but as a bargaining chip to be used later in budget negotiations with the nincompoops.

It had all the makings of a perfect political strategy. The nincompoops had insisted that lower taxes on the rich and super-rich were necessary to create jobs. Since the time we allowed the wealthy and corps to keep their extra cash, 2.9 million jobs were lost in the U.S., while U.S. corporations created 2.4 million jobs…overseas. I am pretty sure that the rest of us were thinking that they meant the creation of actual U.S. jobs, in the U.S.A. Okay, our bad. We didn’t specify.

But anyway, I thought that the President and the Progressives were going to pounce on the whole lack ‘o quid pro quo thingy when it came time to divide the pie, but instead, they allowed the bastards and the nincompoops to turn a routine and otherwise unrelated rise in the debt ceiling into an international financial crisis. One wonders which on-watch genius in the Progressive caucus was hugging a tree while this huge pile of dog poo was being dumped on the House floor.

Were the Progressives too busy responding to distractions such as two unfunded wars, a bloated  prescription drug program, massive unemployment, the stock market crash, the bank bailout, the largest recession since 1927, the BP oil disaster, rampant anti-unionism, wide spread voter disenfranchisement, anti-choice guerrillas, white supremacists, radical Islamist congressional subcommittees, etc?

Okay, I will give them a pass on the natural disasters and the other disasters allowed by lax government oversight institutionalized during the Dark Ages (IYL 2000-2008), but, in 2010, the Tea/GOP made it their top (and it appears their only) goal to make Obama a one-term President. In furtherance of that goal they have squelched every single piece of people-friendly legislation that came down the pike. Shouldn’t that have tipped at least one big-D person that they were up to no good? Time to rally the troops? No?

The Tea/GOP folks passed either meaningless or downright hateful legislation and the Progressives/Democrats responded with weak-kneed rants and raves and appearances on  Rachel Maddow. Progressives were so busy wringing their hands over inane crap that had no chance of passing in the Senate, (much less becoming law) that the bastards and the nincompoops insidiously took over several states and are now smacking their lips at the prospect of blowing up the country in the name of an ideological purity heretofore worthy only of Dr. Strangelove.

And what is the present Progressive/Democratic response to this patently obvious, unbridled power play for corporate hegemony?Oh, let's just give them what they want…again. We’ll get em next time!

No, dudes. Not next time. Now. Get a friggin spine and stand up to these insane thugs.

The American people are the nerds on the school playground and you are all the protection that we’ve got. Most of us understand the possible repercussions and are willing to get a little bruised and bloody. We can take it. We have taken it since 1980. The real question is, can you?

Don’t turn the other cheek. Hit back. Now. And hit them hard. Otherwise it is all on you.  

J. Brandeis Sperandeo

Lying Witnesses: Justice Subverted In A Court Of Law

I just read some absolutely shocking, shocking news on the front page of the Denver Post and it had nothing to do with Casey, or Anthony, or Whitey, or even O.J.

Cops Testify Amid Doubt, was the headline. Wow, like, after 22 years of daily in-court work as a Deputy Colorado State Public Defender, I was formerly unaware that cops lie and cheat at work; about personnel issues, about not following police procedure, about unlawful arrests, about hiding exculpatory evidence, about beating citizens into unconsciousness for no good reason; and even when they lie and cheat and beat so often that their superiors are forced to reprimand them on their permanent record, defense attorneys still don’t get the memo.

Despite having been recently been treated to the stylized rantings of certain legal pundits, you probably still remember that a person who has been accused of a crime is entitled to challenge the testimony of her accusers in open court. Secret witnesses are not allowed, no matter what Nancy Grace envisions in her little fantasy world where all prosecutors are appointed by God to rid the world of evildoers and are therefore entitled to a pass at trial on actual proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

An accused human is also entitled under both Colorado law and the U.S. Constitutional to challenge the credibility of all witnesses called to testify against her. If the witness is known to be a liar or a thief, or has a habit of lying about or cheating on similar cases, or has a demonstrated bias against one side or the other in a particular case, then the jury is supposed to get to hear about it and then give this information whatever weight they think it deserves in their deliberations. The jury alone decides whether to believe all, some, or none of what any witness has to say on the stand.

There is no state law or constitutional exception that allows cops to lie and cheat, especially in court. A cop is simply a witness, just like any other. In fact, a U. S. Supreme Court case called Brady v. Maryland specifically requires prosecutors to disclose all evidence, which might prove beneficial to the defense, including evidence affecting the credibility of any prosecution witness. Yet some prosecutors and even a few judges sometimes act as if Brady had been decided on some other planet, when it becomes inconvenient. Please let me give you an actual case in point:

I had a client who was accused of selling a small amount of drugs to an under-cover informant. The informant (who I will refer to affectionately as the snitch herein) claimed to have been the only alleged eyewitness as he was the alleged under cover buyer. The snitch, also a drug dealer, had decided to…uh…cooperate with the police just after he had been arrested on his 8^th and 9^th felony drug cases and was rotting in a local jail, unable to make bail.

And so, in my pretrial motions hearing in front of the judge, I made what a thought was a reasonable demand for discovery as to the parameters of the cooperator’s deal with the cops and prosecutors in exchange for an otherwise inexplicable desire to aid their efforts in the war on drugs.

At the motions hearing, the prosecutor and the North Metro Task Force detective said, on the record, right to the judge’s face, that there had been no deals express or implied with said snitch.

So I asked the judge if he ever heard of a crack dealer, with nine convictions, still breathing free air, without a deal from the prosecution. I pointed out that this guy had two pending felonies that should have sent him back to the joint on habitual counts for the rest of his life. No deals? Are you serious?

Okay, then how did the snitch send word out from his jail cell? Homing pigeon? Where are the police reports about the contact? How did he get out of jail on his own recognizance, (get out of jail free card) during pending felonies 8 and 9 without a deal? Surly the lead North Metro Task Force detective had a dossier on this snitch or at least record of the facts and circumstances surrounding their developing relationship. I knew that North Metro routinely required their snitches to perform at least three undercover operations, per deal. What other “work” had he done on other cases? Was he one of their itinerant or professional snitches?

Nothing. The prosecutor told the judge that there was nothing; the North Metro cop told the judge that there was nothing. And the judge, who you would think would be all over these guys about them hiding exculpatory evidence, instead just chuckled, until I suggested that there might be a credibility issue with the badged, Brooks Brothers guys on the other side of the room and then he yelled at me. And I got nothing.

At trial, the snitch swore under penalty of perjury and before the jury that he contacted the authorities, after being inspired by God to turn his life around and that there was no relationship between his current probationary status (upon his 9^th  felony conviction) and the volunteer work he did for North Metro. Then the cop took the stand and said that there had been neither any effort by the authorities get the snitch out of jail nor deals made to keep him from returning to prison, in exchange for his services.

After a 20 page, 25-year criminal history dating back to age 12, he just had a religious epiphany, that’s all. That is all the jury got to hear. And every time I would try to cross examine the snitch about the unlikely nature of said epiphany, the judge would shut me down, while the cop and the prosecutor just sat there smirking.

Needless to say, my client was convicted and the judge sentenced him to prison, because the His Honor felt that a drug dealer should not be allowed to walk around free in our community.

About three months after my client went to prison, a colleague asked me for some advice about how to handle a drug-snitch case. Even after I reminded her that I might not be the best one to ask, as my only trial loss in the last 10 years was on a drug-snitch case, she went ahead and showed me the discovery anyway, because she knew that her case involved the same snitch and the same cop as in my case and that both controlled-buys happened at virtually the same time.

She also suspected that the discovery on her case was a bit more complete than mine had been. An inexperienced prosecutor had obeyed the law and turned over an extensive dossier on the snitch, complete with a letter, written by the snitch from his jail cell to the cops, virtually promising to sell his mother to keep from going back to prison where he felt certain he would be murdered, him being a snitch and all.

Her discovery also contained a records from two different counties, showing that two different prosecutors had asked two presiding judges for two different P.R. bonds on behalf of this 7-time loser and a preliminary discussion by the authorities with said dude about possibly keeping him out of prison, in exchange for setting up a to-be-determined number of his old buddies and truthful testimony leading to their convictions. My client was of course, one of those old buddies.

I just hope that anyone reading this is not naive enough to believe that the example above was a rare exception. Unfortunately, various versions of the same scenario happened to my clients in court with frightening regularity. It was the kind of frustrating subversion of justice that made me curse a lot and feel helpless and made me work even harder.

In my business, experienced defenders know to expect many cops to make up stuff or hide stuff and at certain percentage of the local prosecutors to wink, nod, and look the other way. That getting a fair trial before a fair judge is sometimes less than guaranteed is generally the bane of every defender’s existence. The judge in my case had formerly been a prosecutor in that same county and is very smart man. He knew better and he just gave them a green light to screw my client. And the second-hardest part of it all was that I had really wanted to believe that the judge was a much better man than that.

Why do cops feel free to lie over and over and over again on the job and under oath in court? Because they can, of course, but also because some folks in positions of authority whom you would never think to suspect, tacitly accept if not encourage their misconduct.

Do not hold your breath for some newspaper articles and a few firings to change a systemic problem. As I said, I am absolutely shocked that it is still happening. Shocked.

J. Brandeis Sperandeo

Colorado Health Exchange: Interlocking Directorates On Steroids

Among only a handful of scholarly pearls of wisdom I managed to retain from the last century, during my tenure as an undergrad at C.U. Boulder, was the concept of interlocking directorates, which is just an unnecessarily fancy name for the time-honored tradition of mutual job-swapping between private corporations and the government agencies that are supposed to keep them honest. The rationale for occasional swappage went like this:

A banker, who ostensibly gained institutional knowledge of her industry during a stint at Morgan Chase, might later, as a government regulator, be in a better position to recognize and prosecute those who engaged in say, bank fraud.

A government bank regulator, who ostensibly gained institutional knowledge of say, bank fraud, might later as a banker, be in a better position to appreciate the virtues of confining her bank’s activities in conformation with the applicable law.

A certain small amount of this necessary evil was duly noted by learned professorial types, taught like an Aristotelian apology to a whole bunch of budding economists and political scientists like myself and then largely ignored for thirty years or so, as the puerile practice spread like a virus throughout the land.

Nowadays, the selfless public servants who swapped private for public jobs insist that they are NOT giving sweetheart deals to their former business buddies, and are definitely NOT otherwise looking the other way, when their former bosses are thumbing their noses at government rules and regulations. It must be hard for an under-funded government agency to go up against a corporation full of hired guns, especially when most of them are personal friends. How can you prosecute the guy you play golf with; the woman who manages your portfolio?

The entrepreneurially-inclined, who swapped public for private, insist that their brand new multi-million dollar salaries are justified and that they are scrupulously adhering to the no-lobby clause which they had agreed upon as a condition of working for the government.

If a newly-minted private swappee just happen to be on Capitol Hill when a juicy government contract or profitable rule-change is being considered for her new BFL’s, and she just happen to wine and dine, snort and snog with a politician on the deciding committee, this fortuitous co-mingling, which to the rest of us would constitute an unethical and shameless act of whoring, is known by those in private industry as nothing more than a fortuitous informational session. No lobbying going on here! Conflict of interest? Whaaa?

Job-swappers at both ends also insist that they have fully and irrevocably traded one hat for the other, even when they swap jobs (and hats) several times during their careers. They get all mopey and indignant when you point out to them that exactly zero banking/insurance CEO’s were prosecuted by government regulators the last time bankers almost destroyed our economy.

Job swapping has now become the norm, the continuation of which is assured, as the practical effect of this Ozarkian relationship is that both the private movers/shakers and the gummint rule-makers are making out like bandits (the operative word being bandits, not making out).

For those of you who are afraid of the havoc potentially wrought upon the Dow Jones Industrial Average by an outright prohibition against business/government incest, please keep in mind that the very/super/corporate rich own over 80% of all the stocks on the market today. Every time you get all warm and fuzzy as the Dow tops 12,000, you can rest assured that your tax dollars are paying the dues for members of a highly exclusive club which you will never be asked to join.

You steal an iPod, you go to jail. They steal billions; they get a promotion or at worst, a multi-million dollar retirement package in the Cayman Islands. That’s how it works. La Familia Governmentia protects their own, because they are bought and paid for by their malefactor/kinfolk.

So the rest of us have to swallow hard and pretend that those who have swapped-public have genuinely also swapped hats (and Manolos and Armanis and Versaces and jock straps, etc.). We are basically forced to trust that these government officials du jour are actually doing the job we pay them to do. We have to trust that they are working to protect those of us who toil beneath the clouds, even thought they treated us like chattel, while they were sucking down ambrosia on Mt. Olympus. So it goes. Waddaya gunna do? Fuggetaboudit.

Regarding the new Colorado Health-Insurance–Exchange-Board, the ever-innovative Hon. Governor John Hickenlooper has taken government-business incest to the next level. In fact, The Hon. Gov. Hick has completely dispensed with pesky gummint intervention by allowing the mega-medical business to wear both hats at once. They get to regulate themselves. No more duplicitous, burdensome job swapping or even the pretense of conflict-free decision making for this board!

According the Governor’s press release this June:

"This will be a Colorado-based health exchange that is created by Coloradans, for Coloradans. The exchange represents a broad collaborative effort between businesses, consumers, providers, the insurer community and the state legislature. The Colorado Health Exchange will be an independent public entity not affiliated with an existing state agency or department and initially funded by gifts, grants and donations. The exchange will be governed by nine board members of whom the majority will be individuals and business representatives who are not directly affiliated with the insurance industry. The board will hire the exchange’s executive director."  Emphasis added.

Sounded promising until the names of the nine members came out. Four out of the nine members are CEOs of managed- healthcare companies or health insurance companies, who stand to make a bundle off of these insurance pools, as long as the volume of enrollee participation increases (except for sick people), the premiums are kept high, and the payout on claims are kept as low as possible in order to continue obscene profits. The fifth board member, who will presumably cast the deciding vote, is an E.R. doctor who hates the federal Affordable Health Care Act and would like to see all aspects of the plan fail, including, presumably, the health insurance exchanges.

As always, I just know that I can trust these folks to act in the best interest of my family and me.

The in-your-face hubris highlighted by Hick’s picks is jaw-dropping, but I guess allowing the foxes to enforce self-promulgated hen house rules while simultaneously committing wholesale henocide is a great way to streamline the whole process. Streamlining gummint is very popular these days.

Does anybody who is not affiliated with the health insurance industry really think that middle class folks or small business are going to get lower health insurance premiums and/or better health care under the watchful eye of this board? Obviously, this little set-up is designed to scam federal funds under the Affordable Health Care Act, while subverting any real benefits for the people it was designed to help.

Congratulations Governor, in such a short time you have graduated from merely mayoral to major-league politics. I see a future for you in Washington.

J. Brandeis Sperandeo