Patrick Fitzgerald, United States Department of Justice Office of Special Counsel to the Grand Jury, has indicted I Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Chief of Staff to the Vice President of the United States on multiple charges. Here’s the PDF indictment.
The charges are: Obstruction of Justice, two charges of False Statement, and two charges of Perjury.
It is a bittersweet day when deception and deceit is officially alleged to be found in one of the closest advisors to the Vice President of the United States and consequently within the White House.
If this charge is true, then what other lies have the citizens of the United States been told? If a high Executive Branch official is brazen enough to make false statements to the Grand Jury under oath, then what other false statements have been made to reporters, and hence to citizens, over the years?
According to a Justice Department press release, KPMG LLC, the US member firm of KPMG International, a major international accounting and consulting firm, has agreed to pay $465 million in fines, restitution, and penalties, the result of tax evasion and shelters that cost the United States $2.5 billion in taxes not received.
How does this settlement deter future corporate fraud? If I said to you, “I’ll give you change for $1.00 if you give me $5.00,” would you be dim enough to take the deal? The actual figures were $465 million in exchange for $2.5 billion.
Shades of Enron and Arthur Anderson? When does the pattern of Robber Baron behavior consume all corporations? Is the corporate structure itself the problem?
CEO Timothy P. Flynn, in a PDF file says: “The resolution of this matter allows KPMG to confidently face the future as we provide high quality audit, tax and advisory services to our large multinational, middle market and government clients.”
In an unrelated(?) news item of the day, the Small Business Administration has reported that 23% of federal contracts awarded were to small business, but according to the Small Business League, this is likely not true.
“The latest SBA small business statistics ignore the findings of seven separate government investigations and two private studies that have all concluded the SBA has dramatically overstated the governments true level of contracts with small businesses by reporting billions in awards to many of the largest firms in the country as small business awards.”
One of the reasons given for the awarding of contracts to some of the largest U.S. firms is reported by the SBA to be “vendor deception.” The American Small Business League needed a court ruling upholding a FOIA request in order to obtain this information.
“What is in this report that the SBA doesn’t want the public to know?” asked Lloyd Chapman, president of the ASBL. “Instead of spending six months in court trying to suppress evidence, the SBA should be working to stop big corporations from stealing small business contracts.”
Well, now we know: Corporatist Crime still Pays
Yesterday, the same day of the Michael Jackson acquittal, mentioned by Progressive Ink, another bit of supreme court news regarding the juror selection system was published by the LA Times.
I remember the last several times I was called for jury duty: I spent most of the time sitting and waiting, reading a book, filling out questionnaire forms, thinking . . . and more waiting. One of my thoughts was how we’re told by the courthouse that it’s our duty as citizens to sit on juries, and how constitutionally important the citizen jury is to the freedom we have.
Rarely have I been allowed to actually sit as a juror in a trial.
Once, while waiting in the courthouse, I imagined how the courts might have been back in the early days of this country, and further thought that a jury summons back then probably meant you’d get to sit on a trial. Today, that is not so. Potential jurors are examined, questioned, prodded, and probed, by private attorneys and the courthouse. After this, one might be asked to sit as a juror; but more than likely one is, in my experience, dismissed. In many ways, the current juror selection system reminds me more of a classroom examination and summary judgement against the potential juror in the preponderance of times I’ve experienced it, than the citizen’s executing of a solemn duty to a fellow citizen & the community by actually sitting as a juror to hear a trial.
What happens to all the information the courthouse and the private attorneys have collected on citizens called to sit on juries, but who rarely do get to sit on an actual case? Is the potential juror’s data safe and secure? Is it recognized as the property of the source citizen? Or has that data been usurped for another’s use and eventual profit? Has it been placed in a database somewhere? Has that data been aggregated?
While I don’t have the answers to the above questions, I do remember being examined by attorneys several times after being summoned by the courthouse to show up for jury service. The people sitting at the attorney’s table would scribble on their legal pads after I gave my answers to the questions asked by another attorney. What is done with that data they recorded? Had I refused to answer their questions, what courthouse-sanctioned punishment could I have expected?
The larger point I intend is that instead of sitting on a jury, which is a U.S. citizen’s duty, today one is forced to divulge personal and private information to a system that may not protect that data adequately. How does the requirement of citizens to be examined before sitting on a trial impact each citizen’s and potential juror’s privacy?
Has a citizen’s solemn duty to an accused citizen been transformed into another lie The Rulers tell citizens to collect and exploit their personal information?
Perhaps juror selection should be entirely random. At least that way, a citizen’s time is not taxed by the state in an off-the-books transaction.
So what’s your opinion of the USDA’s new food pyramids? I note that all twelve listed pyramid versions contain large amounts of “milk.”
As a human, I’d like to know what grocery store has ‘human milk’ priced competitively to cow’s milk? It’s curious that the pyramid itself doesn’t specify the type of milk, leading me to wonder if it’s an implicit form of the advertizing slogan from the 70s, “Milk is Good for EveryBody”, and which is not true for about 75% of the world’s population when considering the milk commonly found in U.S. grocery stores. Furthermore, nature doesn’t appear to prescribe human milk for more than the first few years of human life.
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This morning, according to a UPI news item, the public rendition of Saddam’s capture shown on TV was fiction.
In case you haven’t heard, ChoicePoint, a personal information data aggregator, has had 145,000 records stolen from them: was your personal data among the records stolen? If so, be on the lookout for your identity to be used by criminals.
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Greenspan appears to have a new take on the government’s often-repeated citizen’s meme: homeonwership is “The American Dream.” Might it soon become The American Nightmare?
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