JPBlog

Oliver Diaz was appointed by Governor Ronnie Musgrove to the Mississippi Court of Appeals and then to the Mississippi Supreme Court. In the subsequent election he defeated Republican-supported state judge Keith Starrett, a childhood friend of U. S. Attorney Dunn Lampton. Several months before the ensuing gubernatorial election, Lampton had him indicted for bribery. After he was acquitted of all charges, Lampton unsealed a further indictment against him and his wife for tax evasion. He was again acquitted on all charges after the jury had met only 15 minutes, but not until after the Feds intimidated his wife into pleading guilty in return for her promise to cooperate in the prosecution of her husband. (she was never called as a witness.)

The prosecution of Diaz follows the pattern followed in other states by federal prosecutors, targeting popular Democratic officeholders, often on vague and ominous charges shortly before close elections. In Diaz's case, it was loans to his campaign by plaintiff lawyer Paul Minor, that the prosecutors claimed influenced Diaz and gave Minor an advantage when his cases came before the Mississippi Supreme Court. The problem with that theory was that Diaz had recused himself on every single case of Minor's and could not have possibly had anything to do with the outcome of Minor's cases.

The Raw Story recently featured an interview with Justice Diaz telling what happened. Every Mississippian with the slightest interest in what is going on in this state should read it:

Diaz: One of the main reasons that I feel that I as an individual was targeted rather than my conduct was targeted was because there were actually other judges that I served with who also had campaigns loans guaranteed by Paul Minor and these judges were not prosecuted. Specifically, the Chief Justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court, Edwin Pittman, also had a campaign loan guaranteed by Paul Minor.

The main difference between me and Pittman was that Pittman voted in all of Minor’s cases and even authored opinions that were favorable to Minor and his clients while I did not participate. Now, I am not saying that Pittman did anything wrong. However, I could never understand, and it has never been explained to me, how his conduct and active participation and favorable rulings were ignored and I was indicted and prosecuted for bribery and I had never been involved in Minor’s cases.

The only reasonable explanation seems to be that prosecutors were more interested in specific individuals and not the conduct of an individual. James Thomas (who has since died) was another judge I served with who had a campaign loan guaranteed by Minor. Judge Thomas also participated in Minor’s cases and was not prosecuted. I do not believe, and do not want to be seen as implying, that Thomas did anything inappropriate, just that under similar circumstances I was prosecuted and others were not. Federal prosecutors were fully aware of these other loans but chose not to prosecute them, even though these judges ruled in Minor’s favor in cases before them. Again, I did not participate in any of Minor’s cases and was indicted and tried for bribery [and eventually exonerated]. The only reasonable explanation is that prosecutors were more interested in prosecuting particular individuals.

There are many facets to the story of the events surrounding the much-publicized trial of Diaz, Minor and state trial judges John Whitfield and Wes Teal, and hopefully someone will eventually write a book that weaves together the numerous threads spun by Karl Rove, the Justice Department, Dunn Lampton, and the FBI. When and if the whole story is told, it will likely be revealed as a part of a nationwide project by the Bush administration to use the justice system—judges, prosecutors, and the FBI—to further its own partisan political ends. It will not reflect well on any of the officials involved in the proceedings, least of all District Judge Henry Wingate, whose rulings on critical issues invariably favored the prosecution.

Hannaford Brothers Cos., a large grocery chain in the Northeast, recently announced that an many as 4.2 million credit cards used by its customers had been compromised by a trojan horse that had been installed on all its servers used to process the information from the "swiped" cards.

http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2008/03/28/advanced_tactic_targeted_grocer/

Undoubtedly all of Hannaford Brothers's servers were running the same software using the same communications protocols, and most likely they were all running on the same hardware. Standardization cuts costs, and large corporations have been especially diligent in standardizing their information technology resources.

Standardization also made it easy, once the cyber-thieves learned how to compromise one server, to commandeer all of Hannaford Brothers's servers, quickly and quietly.

HB's information structure was a monoculture. In the natural world of living things, monocultures are highly vulnerable to disease, pests and changes in environment. Industrial agriculture requires heavy applications of pesticides, herbicides. and fertilizer to grow monocrops. The same goes for corporate IT, where at least part of the savings from standardization must be spent on anti-virus software and anti-spybot software for every organizational computer and on sophisticated firewalls between the local network and the rest of the world. And IT is still vulnerable to hackers, no matter how carefully the systems are engineered.

It might have cost Hannaford Brothers more to diversify their software and hardware, but the diversity would have made it almost impossible for thieves to have compromised the entire network and probably would have made it more likely that the exploit would be discovered.

Amory Lovins came to Jackson as a speaker for one of the Alternative Futures conferences sponsored by Mississippi 2020 during the '80s and made a deep impression on everyone who heard his talk or attended his energy workshop. Now that oil is hovering around $100/bbl and the dollar is plunging against other currencies, Lovins's message is particularly pertinent: our use of oil can be drastically reduced by policies that make it profitable for the private sector to reduce its energy costs.

The following is a talk Lovins made in 2005.

According to the Treatment Advocacy Center, there is a nationwide crisis in mental health treatment that is stressing the legal system and society in general: the shortage in public psychiatric beds—100,000 of them.

The history of public institutional psychiatric care since the 1050s has been a story of deinstitutionalization and treatment with new drugs for schizophrenia (Thorazine), depression (tricyclics), bipolar disorder (lithium and valproic acid), and numerous other mental disorders for which the only treatment had previously been involuntary confinement, too often under inhumane and squalid conditions. It has also involved policy decisions by Federal and state governments as to Medicare and Medicaid funding (patients in public hospitals not eligible) and a series of civil rights lawsuits that restricted the ability of states to confine the mentally ill indefinitely without due process or treatment.

The 15 experts consulted by the Center consistently estimated that 50 (range 40 to 60) public psychiatric beds per 100,000 population are needed for hospitalization for individuals with serious psychiatric disorders. This assumes the availability of good outpatient programs and outpatient commitment.

Mississippi, at 49.7 beds per 100,000, barely meets that minimum (at least within a margin of error), but it is the only state to do so, followed by South Dakota at 40.3.

The consequences of this negligence are not speculative:

1. Marked increase of persons who are homeless.

The effect of mentally ill homeless persons on the quality of life on nation’s sidewalks and in parks and public libraries are known by all who live in cities. According to one observer: “A simple visit to the local elementary school, post office or grocery store . . . can be a Dantean journey through the dark underside of our society. Violence, harassment and an astonishing list of antisocial behavior are commonplace.” These social costs are matched by fiscal costs. In Los Angeles it was estimated that the cost of “arrests, incarcerations, emergency medical care and other crisis interventions” runs between $35,000 and $150,000 per person per year for individuals who are chronically homeless. In Reno “a chronically homeless mentally ill man . . . cost the county at least $1 million during his 10 years on the streets before he died in 2005.” Fiscal conservatives thought that they would save money by emptying state mental hospitals, but they in fact only shifted the fiscal burden from the department of mental health to departments of corrections and social services and to the courts.

2. Massive increase in severely mentally persons in jails and prisons:

The three largest de facto psychiatric institutions in the United States are the Los Angeles County Jail, Chicago’s Cook County Jail, and New York’s Riker Island Jail. We have been unable to identify a single county in the nation where the county psychiatric inpatient facility is holding as many mentally ill individuals as the county jail. And once a person is in jail, it is almost impossible to find them a bed in a psychiatric hospital. In Virginia, for example, Sheriff Paul Lanteigne of Virginia Beach “estimates that it typically takes at least six months to find an available bed for a deranged inmate.”

3. Concentration of mentally ill persons in emergency rooms, waiting for psychiatric beds to be found:

In North Carolina, for example, Doug Trantham at the Smoky Mountain Mental Health Center described “an inpatient crisis so bad that what it does is backup the entire system.” Officers there have sometimes had to drive patients across the entire state—a seven- to eight-hour drive one way—to a hospital with a bed. Emergency rooms are said to have mentally ill people waiting “four or five days in our ICU just waiting for a place to go. . . . You may have somebody in there all weekend, screaming for 12 or 18 hours,” said a nurse. It is the same in every state; in Arlington, Virginia, county officials had to call 31 hospitals before finding one that would accept a patient. The impact of overburdening the ERs with patients needing hospital beds goes far beyond psychiatric patients; rather, it interferes with all medical and surgical care in the ER.

4. Violent crime:

Because there are so few beds available, individuals with severe psychiatric disorders who need to be hospitalized are often unable to get admitted, and those who are admitted are often discharged prematurely. Fred Markowitz, in his 2006 study of 81 American cities, reported a statistically significant correlation between the number of public psychiatric beds available in that city and the prevalence of violent crimes, defined as murder, robbery, assault, and rape.11 This is not surprising, since studies have shown that between 5 to 10 percent of seriously mentally ill persons living in the community will commit a violent act each year, almost all because they are not receiving treatment. Such individual are responsible for at least 5 percent of all homicides.

Many readers will recall the death on April 18, 1993 of Matt Devenney, shot by a mentally ill man in front of the Community Stewpot where Devenney was the director. What most people did not know was that a Hinds County Chancery judge had previously found the killer to be insane and dangerous, but could not convince the powers-that-were to keep him confined at Whitfield. Each time, while the judge watched helplessly, they released him after a short stay. Eventually, he killed somebody.

It ought not to take a murder to convince a shrink that a patient is dangerous.

I suspect, however, that they did know that he was dangerous, but just didn't have a long-term bed or a cell. Now he does.

So while we may be ahead of the rest of the nation in the statistical tables, what we are doing is still inadequate.

So much to write about, so little time.

Via Stan Goff:

Southerners are the most crazy, dysfunctional folks in the nation, perhaps in the world. I sometimes think that we love our guns so much because without them, we couldn't shoot ourselves in the foot so often and with such devastating consequences.

Along with the dysfunction, however, occasionally comes insight. You acquire it at the cost of leaving home and settling in a strange land for a time and then returning to live. That is the plot of the modern southern novel, and it is nothing more than a retelling of a journey that repeats itself in real life over and over. The south is a mother one must leave in order to grow up.

Joe Bageant has made that journey. Here is a recent interview of his on Australian TV:

Click here for video of Joe Bageant interview on Australian TV.

P.S. Posting will be infrequent for another week while I finish what I hope will be my last legal brief and become more proficient on the Dvorak keyboard.

Robert Fisk, almost certainly the wisest and most knowledgeable correspondent on and in the Middle East, has written a deeply pessimistic report from darkened Beirut. Lebanon is on the verge of dissolution. People are scared; many are leaving. It is the quiet before the storm.

So what can a Middle East correspondent write on a Saturday morning except that the world in the Middle East is growing darker and darker by the hour. Pakistan. Afghanistan. Iraq. "Palestine". Lebanon. From the borders of Hindu Kush to the Mediterranean, we – we Westerners that is – are creating (as I have said before) a hell disaster. Next week, we are supposed to believe in peace in Annapolis, between the colourless American apparatchik and Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister who has no more interest in a Palestinian state than his predecessor Ariel Sharon.

I don't recall a more foreboding column from Fisk. It is clear that he believes we are about to reap, in Churchill's phrase, a "bitter harvest," all of it completely predictable.

Robert Fisk: Darkness falls on the Middle East

Like many others, this writer has puzzled over the unwillingness of most Christians and their church leadership to acknowledge the looming climatic and environmental catastrophe being brought about by our out-of-control industrial civilization. The evidence is overwhelming. There is a rare unanimity among scientists not in the employ of corporations contributing to the catastrophe that the danger to the human race is real and the situation is indeed grave. The churches are silent. Why?

Recently, I came across an essay by Wendell Berry, who, along with Matthew Fox, Thomas Berry, and a host of other thinkers, authors, scientists and teachers, has established a spiritual basis for the care of the earth, that, while it does not explain why fundamentalists have ignored the crisis, sets out a compelling case for Biblical environmentalism.

http://www.crosscurrents.org/berry.htm

Berry suggests that Christians read their Bibles:

If we read the Bible, keeping in mind the desirability of those two survivals--of Christianity and the Creation--we are apt to discover several things that modern Christian organizations have kept remarkably quiet about, or have paid little attention to.

We will discover that we humans do not own the world or any part of it: "The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof: the world and they that dwell therein" (Ps. 24:1). There is in our human law, undeniably, the concept and right of "land ownership." But this, I think, is merely an expedient to safeguard the mutuality of belonging without which there can be no lasting and conserving settlement of human communities. This right of human ownership is limited by mortality and by natural constraints upon human attention and responsibility; it quickly becomes abusive when used to justify large accumulations of "real estate," and perhaps for that reason such large accumulations are forbidden in the twenty-fifth chapter of Leviticus. In biblical terms, the "landowner" is the guest and steward of God: "the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me" (Lev. 25:23).

We will discover that God made not only the parts of Creation that we humans understand and approve, but all of it: "all things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made" John 1:3). And so we must credit God with the making of biting and dangerous beasts, and disease-causing microorganisms. That we may disapprove of these things does not mean that God is in error, or that the creator ceded some of the work of Creation to Satan; it means that we are deficient in wholeness, harmony, and understanding--that is, we are "fallen."

We will discover that God found the world, as he made it, to be good; that he made it for his pleasure; and that he continues to love it and to find it worthy, despite its reduction and corruption by us. People who quote John 3:16 as an easy formula for getting to heaven neglect to see the great difficulty implied in the statement that the advent of Christ was made possible by God's love for the world--not God's love for Heaven or for the world as it might be, but for the world as it was and is. Belief in Christ is thus made dependent upon prior belief in the inherent goodness--the lovability--of the world.

We will discover that the Creation is not in any sense independent of the Creator, the result of a primal creative act long over and done with, but is the continuous, constant participation of all creatures in the being of God. Elihu said to Job that if God "gather unto himself his spirit and his breath; All flesh shall perish together . . . " Job 34:15). And Psalm 104 says: "Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created.... " Creation is God's presence in creatures. The Greek Orthodox theologian, Philip Sherrard, has written that "Creation is nothing less than the manifestation of God's hidden being." Thus we and all other creatures live by a sanctity that is inexpressibly intimate. To every creature the gift of life is a portion of the breath and spirit of God. As the poet, George Herbert, put it,

Thou are in small things great, not small in any.... For thou art infinite in one and all.

We will discover that, for these reasons, our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most horrid blasphemy. It is flinging God's gifts into his face, as of no worth beyond that assigned to them by our destruction of them. To Dante, "despising Nature and her gifts" was a violence against God. We have no entitlement from the Bible to exterminate or permanently destroy or hold in contempt anything on the earth or in the heavens above it or in the waters beneath it. We have the right to use the gifts of Nature, but not to ruin or waste them. We have the right to use what we need, but no more, which is why the Bible forbids usury and great accumulations of property. The usurer, Dante said, "condemns Nature. . . for he puts his hope elsewhere."

I have omitted the footnotes, which can be found in the original document linked above.

In the poorest state in the nation, the average Mississippian is still clueless as to why his circumstances are so dire. The so-called tort-reform legislation and its sorry history give a clue. The stacking of the Mississippi Supreme Court with business-serving judges explains a great deal, as well.

Read an article in the Jackson Free Press on The Reality Of Tort Reform.

George Lakoff of the Rockridge Institute explains the difference between the conservative, progressive and neo-liberal approach to healthcare reform. Progressives should read and heed.

The Logic of the Health Care Debate

Senator Dodd has put a hold on the foreign intelligence surveillance bill that would retroactively immunize the telecoms for cooperating with the Bush administration in illegally wiretapping Americans' communications. If the hold is disregarded by the Democratic leadership, he is willing to filibuster the bill.

That's impressive, a Democrat that not only cares about the U.S. Constitution, but is willing to fight to preserve it. Clinton, Obama and others: Where are you? Here's a presidential candidate that is taking some real action, not just talking.

Via Daily Kos, the Houston Chronicle featured a story on October 2 recounting numerous accidents that have occurred in biological laboratories around the nation involving exposure by employes to extremely dangerous viruses and bacteria as well as the accidental release of dangerous organisms into the environment. As one would expect, the Bush administration has suppressed information about some of the most serious of the accidents on grounds of national security. According to the Chronicle:

American laboratories handling the world's deadliest germs and toxins have experienced more than 100 accidents and missing shipments since 2003, and the number is increasing as more labs do the work.

No one died, and regulators said the public was never at risk during these incidents. But the documented cases reflect poorly on procedures and oversight at high-security labs, some of which work with organisms and poisons that can cause illnesses with no cure. In some cases, labs have failed to report accidents as required by law.

The mishaps include workers bitten or scratched by infected animals, skin cuts, needle sticks and more, according to an Associated Press review of confidential reports submitted to federal regulators. They describe accidents involving anthrax, bird flu virus, monkeypox and plague-causing bacteria at 44 labs in 24 states. More than two dozen incidents were still under investigation.

The Federal Government is now deciding whether or not to relocate the biological facility on Plum Island to a site near Flora, and state officials are trampling each other in a lemming-like rush to convince the Department of Homeland Security to put it here.

According to the Government Accountability Office publication, High-Containment Biosafety Laboratories: Preliminary Observations on the Oversight of the Proliferation of BSL-3 and BSL-4 Laboratories in the United States, the risks created by such labs are significant:

According to the experts, there is a baseline risk associated with any high- containment. With expansion, the aggregate risks will increase. However, the associated safety and security risks will be greater for new labs with less experience. In addition, high-containment labs have health risks for individual lab workers as well as the surrounding community. According to a CDC official, the risks due to accidental exposure or release can never be completely eliminated, and even labs within sophisticated biological research programs—including those most extensively regulated—have had and will continue to have safety failures. In addition, while some of the most dangerous agents are regulated under the CDC-USDA’s Select Agent Program, many high-containment labs work with agents not covered under this program. Labs outside the Select Agent Program also pose risks, given that many unregulated agents can cause severe illness or even death (see appendix IV for a list of some agents, but not select agents, recommended to be worked on in high-containment labs). These labs also have associated risks because of their potential as targets for terrorism or theft from either external or internal sources. Even labs outside the Select Agent Program can pose security risks in that such labs represent a capability that can be paired with the necessary agents to become a threat. While the United States has regulations governing select agents, many nations do not have any regulations governing the transfer or possession of dangerous biological agents.

Putting the facility in Flora is a bad idea. We don't need dangerous microorganisms cultured and kept here. One nasty accident (and human beings and institutions are prone to accidents by their very nature) and we could be faced with a Katrina-sized health disaster. And we know by experience how much help Mississippi will be getting from the Bush administration (or any other Republican administration) if that disaster comes about. The facility should be located on an island away from the mainland U.S.

Houston Chronicle: Accidents rise at labs handling deadliest germs

Previous posts in the JPBlog:

What is a "National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility"?

Update: "National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility"?

Children can't vote. That's the beginning and end of it. Quit listening to what Republicans say and watch what they do.

Bush, Barbour, Cochran, and Lott can count the votes. That's all that matters to them.

Update 10/18/2007 20:02: The House of Representatives failed to override Bush's veto of the Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act.

Rep. Bennie Thompson did the right thing and voted to override the veto.

Robo-republicans Wicker and Pickering predictably voted to sustain the veto, but amazingly Gene Taylor, a Democrat, also voted to sustain. How representatives from the poorest state in the U.S. can square their consciences voting for gigantic tax cuts for the rich and an illegal and costly war but not for the health of Mississippi's children is a mystery.

But children can't vote. That's all that matters to them. They apparently have no consciences to square.

It pains me to see highly educated economists shilling for industry when they know better. Case in point: Dr. William F. Shughart II, who holds the F.A.P. Barnard Distinguished Professor chair of Economics at the University of Mississippi, wrote a guest editorial in the October 1, 2007 Clarion- Ledger entitled "New taxes would cut oil production, harm small stockholders," wherein he wrote the following propositions:

1. Imposing additional taxes on the U.S. oil and gas industry undermines the goal of providing stable and cost-effective supplies of energy for consumers and discourages the enormous capital investments needed to meet the nation's growing energy demands. The House energy bill would reduce incentives to develop domestic energy resources and would discourage investment in new refinery capacity–thereby increasing our dependence on foreign suppliers.

2. We haven't built a new refinery since 1976, in part because of "not-in-my-backyard" attitudes and costly environmental regulations. As a result, U.S. oil refining capacity is nearly 4 million barrels a day below current consumer demand, a shortfall that must be met by importing petroleum products.

3. The absurd windfall profits tax on oil companies imposed during the Carter administration reduced U.S. oil production, cost thousands of jobs and let to an increase in imports.

The very heart of the argument for Capitalism is that the system rewards those who create wealth, as opposed to systems that merely siphon off wealth from the many for the benefit of the few. There is no other moral argument that justifies the enormous concentration of wealth and power that characterizes the modern capitalistic system.

The record profits reaped by Exxon, BP and the other major oil producers, however, have not come about through their own efforts (other than perhaps backing George W. Bush and his Iraq invasion), but through the increase in the price of oil. Speculative profits amount to a transfer of wealth from someone—in this case, the purchaser of petroleum products—to the speculator, who has created no wealth in return. Translated into simple terms, we pay more at the pump and Exxon makes higher profits without lifting a corporate finger. No capital investments are necessary, no sacrifice required. Just rake in the dough and contribute to friendly politicians who will let you keep that dough.

Keeping this in mind, we first examine points 1 and 3. I happened to work for a small independent oil company during the time that the windfall profits tax was in effect. The tax was an effort to recoup some of the windfall profits of oil producers when OPEC raised the price of oil in the late 1970s. The statute made a distinction between existing production (old oil) and production from newly-drilled wells (new oil). Only the old oil was subject to the windfall profits tax.

The result was an explosion of oil exploration in the U.S.A. During the early '80s the most valuable piece of property you could possibly own was an oil rig, because the demand for oil rigs was astronomical. The oil companies were spending money like drunken sailors and the wealth seemed inexhaustible.

Then it all went away.

Shughart indirectly blames the WFT for the collapse of the domestic oil industry in the early '80s, but that signal honor must go to Ronald Reagan, who cut a deal with the Saudis to increase production and lower the price of oil close to $10/bbl. All the independent oil producers went out of business in short order, including the company I worked for. It was good for the economy overall, but it made domestic exploration unprofitable. Thousands of producing wells were plugged and abandoned in the '80s. Oil at $10/bbl rendered the WFT irrelevant and inoperative. It expired by its own terms shortly thereafter. It had no effect whatever on exploration.

With respect to point 2, the investment argument, stark reality refutes Dr. Schughart. If it had been profitable to construct refineries, then the major oil companies would have been building them all along. They have never lacked the resources to do whatever they needed in that respect. The fact that they have not been building, are not now building, nor are they planning to build new refineries any time soon is a dramatic demonstration that they are satisfied with their capacity as it now stands. The environmental regulations that prevent them from operating unsafe and unhealthy workplaces and poisoning the groundwater and air are neither onerous nor unreasonable. In planning and operating new refineries they would merely have to pay costs that were formerly paid by their employes, their neighbors and the environment.

Most likely, the petroleum industry has not constructed new refineries because world oil production has either peaked or will soon peak, and thus additional refining capacity will never be needed. Considering the 5-10 years it takes to bring a refinery on-line from the planning stage, it would be insane to begin the process now, no matter how much money is available to invest.

Dr. Shugart's curriculum vitae reveals that he is an apologist for powerful corporations, with ties to the right-wing Heartland Institute, George Mason University, and a number of other pro-corporate organizations. The ideological threads that run through all these institutions are the sanctity of private property, corporate profits and the highly-managed and controlled industrial/financial system whose plutocratic nature is concealed by the term "market economy."

Always beware of economists that seek to justify the powerful acquiring more power and the wealthy acquiring more wealth.