Conflicts-of-Interest and the Clinton Dynasty

Hillary: Her True Story by Norman King described how 2008 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s Rose Law Firm connection became an issue during a 1992 Democratic presidential primary debate:

“…On March 15, 1992…in a Washington Post article…Michael Weisskopf and David Maraniss wrote `…The Rose Firm offers the full range of representation before the government, from getting environmental approval from the State Pollution Control and Ecology Commission, to lobbying to protect the poultry industry from strict regulations on animal waste’…

"[Jerry] Brown zeroed in on Tyson Foods, a poultry-products corporation and Rose client.
“… Brown said, `It’s not only corruption. It’s an environmental disaster, and it’s the kind of conflict of interest that is incompatible with the kind of public servant we expect in a President.’
“Moving out from behind the lectern as if about to attack his opponent physically, Bill Clinton shouted: `…You ought to be ashamed of yourself for jumping on my wife. You’re not worthy of being on the same platform with my wife.’
“Brown was amused…`You never answer the question.’
“But Clinton did: `I’m saying that I never funneled any money to my wife’s law firm, ever!’
“Hillary…did not dispute any facts in the Washington Post story…Hillary…said that she had done legal work for Madison Guaranty…She remarked, `For goodness’ sake, you can’t be a lawyer if you don’t represent banks.’

Hillary Clinton: The Inside Story by Judith Warner also noted:

“Rose, Arkansas’s second largest law firm, representing the major financial powers of the state, ranked 5th on the list of firms receiving state contracts a few years ago…

“The Rose Law Firm had served as either bond counsel or underwriter’s counsel on every bond issue by the Arkansas Development Finance Authority…Clinton acknowledged his wife had benefited financially, but denied a conflict-of-interest problem…

“Hillary’s positions on the boards of Wal-Mart, TCBY, and Lafarge, from which she earned close to $200,000 in director’s fees over 1986 to 1991, hardly made her a foe of industry…It was reported in April [1992] that an Ohio subsidiary of the Lafarge Corp. from which Hillary was earning $31,000 a year in director fees, was burning hazardous waste in fuel cement plants…”
(Downtown 2/2/94)

Next: Grit TV Host and Blue Grit Author Laura Flanders: A 1991 Downtown Interview—Part 6

`The Hollywood Ten'

(chorus)
The Hollywood Ten
Were labeled “Reds”
And Washington
Jailed all of them.

(verses)
Once the movies they were written well
And real feelings touched your heart and mind
Then an Inquisition began
And the ones with talent all got expelled. (chorus)

Their crime was their social awareness
And not being just careerist
Friends of labor and all oppressed
The courts were used to make their lives a mess. (chorus)

Ain’t it plain when you walk into the theatre
That the films they show just mask all the lies
The plots don’t ring very true
The hacks who write them seem so very blind. (chorus)

The U.S. courts and HUAC committees
The right-wing answer to good minds
To make a war they must control the culture
And wreck a lot of literary lives. (chorus)

The Hollywood Ten was written during the late 1970s after reading books by Alvah Bessie, John Howard Lawson, Dalton Trumbo and Herbert Biberman, a biography of Dalton Trumbo and watching the 1950s film Salt of the Earth a few times.

To listen to The Hollywood Ten , you can click on the following links:

http://www.last.fm/music/Bob+A.+Feldman/Protest+Folk+Songs/The+Hollywood+Ten

or

http://www.mp3.com/artist/bobafeldman/songs/

Next: Conflict-of-Interests and the Clinton Dynasty

Civil Liberties and the 1981 Brink's Case: A 1991 `Downtown' Inquiry--Part 8

Asked by Downtown in 1991 whether she thought the same kind of false arrest and civil liberties violations could happen in the 1990s to any individual political activist, Eve Rosahn answered: “It could absolutely happen again and last much longer.” According to Rosahn, “You have to prove a very high degree of intention” to win a false arrest suit, so it was not too likely that an individual activist who was falsely arrested in the 1990s could win such a lawsuit.

Rosahn remained politically active in the 1990s in support of U.S. political prisoners, worked with the Lesbian and Gay Folks political group and was also a law school student in the early 1990s. [and by the late 1990s, Rosahn was working as a community-service-oriented Movement lawyer]. Asked by Downtown why some activists drop out of politics after they’ve been jailed, but other activists, like her, remain politically involved, Rosahn replied: “I think there’s an experience that is shared by many people. Not only is it difficult or frightening. You can also get through it and come out at the other end much stronger, having been arrested and having survived. Having been on the inside of a legal process, it can also make you want to work harder to support others who have also been victimized by the courts.”

Tipograph still hoped in 1991 that continued public concern in the 1990s over civil liberties violations related to the Brink’s Case would lead to the eventual release of the Brink’s Case defendants, but she noted that “hundreds and thousands of people in New York State and elsewhere” who are also imprisoned, have also received “unjustly excessive” sentences after unfair trials.

Asked by Downtown whether the same kind of media hysteria which helped to violate the civil liberties of the people arrested on October 20, 1981 could also be whipped up in the 1990s in relation to any similar politically-related case, Tipograph replied: “Yes. Look at the media hysteria on Iraq. Without necessarily supporting Saddam Hussein, you would have thought there would have been more concern for the 150,000 Iraqi people killed.” [in the first Gulf War in 1991]

Downtown asked the now-deceased Kunstler in 1991 to compare the atmosphere during the 1969-70 Chicago Conspiracy Trial, after which he was cited for contempt, with the atmosphere after the arrest of the Brink’s Case defendants in 1981.

“Totally different. Most of the Chicago defendants were out on bail and allowed to go out on speaking tours,” Kunstler recalled.

Asked by Downtown why the atmosphere surrounding the 1969-1970 Chicago political trial and the 1981 Brink’s Case trials was so different, Kunstler replied: “They were afraid of revolutionaries. And the fact that in the belly of the beast there were people who believed in armed struggle and who carried guns scared the hell out of them.”

In the 1990s, Gilbert thought that “however we are portrayed in the media—or even however more sincere people might see us and agree or disagree with some of the approaches—the basic social injustices go on. And that’s why they are vaster and more serious than any of these events. And so I think the big issue is people have to say `what are we going to do about these issues of social injustices?’ There are many forms to respond in many ways through struggle. But that struggle has to go on. We can’t just let it be deflected into saying that a handful of people who resisted are this terrible problem and terrible people. Let’s start looking at the nature of State power, police power and how it’s used in this society.”

As we approach the 40th anniversary of the 1968 Columbia Student Revolt, perhaps the time has now come for a 21st-century amnesty for 1968 Columbia Student Strike Leader Dave Gilbert and all other U.S. political prisoners?
(end of article)

Next: The Hollywood Ten lyrics

Civil Liberties and the 1981 Brink's Case: A 1991 `Downtown' Inquiry--Part 7

Downtown asked Attorney Tipograph in 1991 why she thought legal establishment groups like the American Bar Association or the ACLU didn’t act to protect the civil liberties of the Brink’s Case defendants.

“It was a very hot case. The case was so controversial that you were painted by the broad stroke if you became involved. So people incorrectly avoided getting involved and refused to discuss the civil liberties question in a rational way,” said Tipograph. As a result of her own involvement as an attorney in the Brink’s case and the unfavorable way the Establishment media tried to portray her, Tipograph received a number of personal death threats, herself.

Downtown also asked the now-deceased Kunstler in 1991 why legal establishment groups didn’t step in to prevent the civil liberties violations?

“They couldn’t do anything because the courts are the enemy of the people. It’s not just in Bull Connor’s area now. It’s nationwide. They sanction civil liberties violations like anonymous juries and they influence the press,” Kunstler replied.

Although Gilbert has been treated as a common criminal by New York State since his arrest on Oct. 20, 1981, he thinks that people who regard the Brink’s Case defendants as criminals have “a ridiculous position that goes and flies in the face of all the facts of the history of the people and what the group was about. And it’s because certain people don’t want to admit that armed struggle can be part of political struggle, an important form of political struggle.

“We all had long, long Movement histories and no criminal histories…I went on my first Civil Rights picket line in 1960 when I was about 15 years old. I was involved in the Civil Rights and anti-war movement, in SDS, Weather Underground, for years and years. I’ve never been charged with so much as shoplifting a candy bar for personal use or criminal purposes or involved in drugs or anything like that…

“People tend to forget that there was a campaign of annihilation against the Black Liberation Movement in this country, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, where literally scores of Panthers and other militant Black activists were assassinated and many more were put in jail and many mass organizations were destroyed. It was only in response to that type of attack that people felt that they had to develop an ability—that the Movement as a whole to survive, to develop, had to have an ability—to have clandestine and even military forms of struggle. Any serious revolutionary movement in the world in history has developed that.”

Gilbert, Clark and the deceased Kuwasi Balagoon received sentences of 75 years-to-life in September 1983. According to Gilbert, there were two reasons for the severity of his sentence:

“One is that it was police who were killed. To the System that’s the most heinous crime. People who would rape children or kill little babies or something would get out a lot sooner than people who fire back at police. So, really, even in nonpolitical cases—to be honest—they give `the max’ when it’s police who are killed. And then, in addition to that, in all political cases of revolutionaries against the System they’ve given out extraordinarily high sentences. When you look at other cases, political people—by which I mean people who fight against oppression, who fight against racism, who fight against U.S. intervention in Third World countries—they’ll get, like Linda Evans [who was finally released in early 2001], 35, 40 years for one count of possession of a gun. Whereas other people in the same jurisdiction, like the Ku Klux Klan who got busted with a boatload of guns, got out in three to ten years. So there’s a tremendously disproportionate sentencing for people who are revolutionaries.”

Gilbert is currently serving his sentence at Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York. Clark is currently serving her sentence in Bedford Hills State Prison in New York. Unlike Clark and Gilbert, Boudin chose to conduct a legal defense before finally copping a plea in 1984 in exchange for a lesser sentence of 20 years-to-life [and she was finally released on parole in 2003]. Despite becoming an informant, Brown was still sentenced for his part in the Oct. 20th events, but Gilbert doesn’t know where Brown is today [in 1991] because Brown is in protective custody.
(end of part 7)

Next: Civil Liberties and the 1981 Brink’s Case: A 1991 Downtown Inquiry—Part 8

Civil Liberties and the 1981 Brink's Case: A 1991 `Downtown' Inquiry--Part 6

Within the African-American community, the post-Brink’s robbery/expropriation violation of civil liberties was more intense than it was in white radical political circles, according to Eve Rosahn, a 1990s anti-imperialist activist who had also previously participated in the 1968 Columbia University Student Revolt.

“The BAAANA [Black Acupuncture Advisory Association of North America] clinic was pretty well-crippled by the police and F.B.I. A tremendous amount of force and violence was used by the State which produced a crippling effect, by example. Mtayari Sundiata was killed. Sekou Odinga was beaten and tortured. In March, 1982, the F.B.I. raided a farmhouse in Mississippi and arrested two women and twelve children in a tremendous military raid,” Rosahn recalled. “This level of force probably had a greater effect than anything else in pressuring people not to ever speak in support of armed revolutionaries.”

The BAAANA clinic in Manhattan was crippled by the police and F.B.I., according to Rosahn, because “the clinic, in addition to being an acupuncture clinic, was also a center of revolutionary Black nationalist education,” which also “exposed the collusion of both police and the U.S. government in aggravating the entrance of drugs in the Black community.”

“The institute was visible in support of the B.L.A. and the Brink’s defendants. And the government had had a 10-year campaign to close down the clinic. Since the government was attempting to isolate the Brink’s Case defendants, any public or political support needed to be quashed. BAAANA could have been used to build political support,” noted Rosahn. For this reason, according to Rosahn, the government labeled BAAANA a “terrorist” and “criminal” enterprise, as a pretext for finally succeeding in closing it down after the Oct. 20th events.

Rosahn’s own civil liberties were personally affected by the Brink’s Case. She was falsely identified as being involved in the Brink’s robbery because “the government didn’t do the investigative work” that would have readily indicated that she was not involved, and the government “only took the time necessary to go through a process of incorrect identification,” before falsely arresting her.

A week after the Oct. 20, 1981 events, Rosahn was arrested and held for a week on criminal charges. Then, after the criminal charges were dropped, she was incarcerated for civil contempt for refusing to collaborate with a grand jury investigation, released on bail on Dec. 31, 1981, and then re-imprisoned for 15 months because of her refusal to cooperate with the Grand Jury investigation.

Recalling how she felt when she was erroneously arrested on Oct. 27, 1981 for being involved in the Brink’s robbery, Rosahn told Downtown in 1991:

“I think, in part, it was frightening—since I had just been a public political activist—to suddenly see 12 F.B.I. agents with guns come to arrest me in a friend’s apartment. They picked the lock, opened the door, and took me up to the F.B.I. office. At no point did they read me my rights. Then they swept me up to Rockland County Jail. I knew people had been seriously beaten there and I went fully expecting to get beaten, myself.”

In the car on the way up to Rockland County Jail from Manhattan, the F.B.I. agents attempted to get Rosahn to talk with them, although she was not allowed to speak with a lawyer until a day after she had been placed in Rockland County Jail. In Rockland County Jail, she was held in segregation, after being arraigned in the same kind of armed camp atmosphere that surrounded the arraignment of the people arrested on Oct. 20, 1981. When the criminal charges against her were dropped on Nov. 3, 1981, Roshan was moved back to Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center [MCC] prison and held for non-collaboration with the Grand Jury.
(end of part 6)

Next: Civil Liberties and the 1981 Brink’s Case: A 1991 Downtown Inquiry—Part 7

Civil Liberties and the 1981 Brink's Case: A 1991 `Downtown' Inquiry--Part 5

The civil liberties of many other political activists in New York City were also immediately affected by the events in Rockland County of Oct. 20, 1981.

Eve Rosahn is a veteran New York City political activist who worked in antiwar and SDS circles in the late 1960s, did Black Panther 21 political support work, and was active in the Puerto Rican independence and anti-apartheid solidarity movements during the 1970s. In 1991, Downtown asked Rosahn in a telephone interview how the civil liberties of political activists in New York City were affected following the Oct. 20th events in Rockland County.

According to Rosahn, it wasn’t like McCarthyism in the 1950s. The political repression and arrests differed from McCarthyism in that “the section of both white and Black activists whose civil liberties were violated was much smaller and much more focused,” Rosahn said. “People were intimidated by example.” Another difference from the 1950s McCarthyism was that the buzzword for the targets of the civil liberties violations was “terrorism” and “cop-killers” and, particularly, “Black terrorism,” and not “communism,” in Rosahn’s view.

The Grand Jury method of repression was also used to violate people’s civil liberties following the Oct. 20th events, according to Rosahn. “Since the early 1970s, there had been a political use of grand juries which, initially had focused on the Weather Underground, the non-violent clandestine Catholic Left and the lesbian community. Grand juries have been used to both collect intelligence about clandestine political groups and to create an atmosphere of fear and political isolation in the communities they focused on. The use of federal grand juries to subpoena F.A.L.N. supporters of Puerto Rican independence started happening in the 1970s,” Rosahn recalled.

The grand jury that was established following the arrest of the Brink’s defendants “focused on people who were political supporters of Black nationalism that did public work” and established a “second ring of oppression” for those political activists who weren’t falsely charged with involvement in the robbery itself, according to Rosahn. The post-Oct. 20th grand jury also focused on the personal friends of the people arrested on Oct. 20, 1981. “People who were subpoenaed were often just friends, and not political,” said Rosahn.

In Rosahn’s view, the U.S. government “underestimated the strength of commitment to non-collaboration” with the post-Brink’s robbery/expropriation Grand Jury investigation that would be expressed. “They assumed that people subpoenaed before the grand jury would cooperate with them and provide them with information, but they didn’t get that,” recalled Rosahn. “Only 1 of around 25 who were subpoenaed by the grand jury collaborated.”

Downtown asked Rosahn in 1991 why she thought people in the 1980s seemed to resist the pressure of Grand Jury subpoenas more than people had during the era of McCarthyism in the late 1940s and 1950s?

“There had been a good 10-year struggle among people in the Catholic Left, the lesbian community and in the Puerto Rican movement to establish a tradition of non-collaboration with the Grand Jury. And the Grand Jury investigation following Brink’s took in a smaller section of people—the people tended to be stronger and more committed,” Rosahn observed.
(end of part 5)

Next: Civil Liberties and the 1981 Brink’s Case: A 1991 Downtown Inquiry—Part 6

Civil Liberties and the 1981 Brink's Case: A 1991 `Downtown' Inquiry--Part 4

Before being sentenced in September 1983, Clark and Gilbert had already been imprisoned nearly two years and Kuwasi Balagoon had already been locked up for 21 months. Gilbert recalled that “a lot of the delay was their security arrangements—which I think also became a boondoggle for the various sheriff’s departments to buy off the supplies and hire people and so forth that they had wanted to do to pad their payroll and supplies. One delay was that there was a change of venue. But most of the delays—you have to realize that Kuwasi, Judy and I did not put on a legal defense. We just put up a political stand and we justified this fight against a racist and oppressive regime. Under international law, it requires you to do that. So we didn’t even go through a lot of legal motions, the hearings and so forth that a vigorous criminal defense would have—and yet the whole trial took two years. I think the main factor, along with the change of venue, was their going through all their so-called security arrangements.”

During the long period of pre-trial detention, according to Gilbert, “They cut us off from contact with all other prisoners. And they tried to keep us as isolated as possible. They tried to use that to break people down. With Sam Brown, a combination of that and his medical condition, and his incredible pain and fear that he’d be paralyzed if he didn’t get an operation, did break him down. It was a very heavy psychological warfare that was going on with all of us.”

According to The Big Dance, after Sam Brown’s arrest, F.B.I. agents began to interview him in prison, without Brown first waiving his right to legal counsel in the presence of his lawyer. The first two F.B.I. agents to visit the severely beaten Brown visited him on Nov. 12, 1981. On Nov. 21, 1981, two Special Agents of the F.B.I.-N.Y.P.D. Joint Terrorist Task Force also began to interview Brown in prison and these Special Agents continued to meet with Brown on at least seven more separate occasions. Under New York State law, however, according to Castellucci’s book, “once a defendant is indicted, no law enforcement official can interview him unless he waives his right to legal counsel in the presence of his lawyer.”

There is disagreement about the reliability of two people, Yvonne Thomas and Kamau Bayete, who were used by the F.B.I. as informants in relation to the Brink’s Case. Castellucci states in a footnote in his book that “I would be less than candid if I characterized them as reliable. Thomas has been in and out of mental hospitals. Bayete is an admitted liar.”

Although Castellucci does reveal certain civil liberties violations and certain inconsistencies in the Rockland County D.A.’s case against the people arrested on Oct. 20th, Gilbert does not regard most of Castellucci’s The Big Dance as either accurate or fair. According to Gilbert, The Big Dance “is misleading because it is written in such a detailed, factual style. I think that many people might feel that while the interpretations might be hostile to us, the facts are more or less accurate. They’re not.

“Before I read the book I assumed it was biased in the following ways: 1) relied on the police and informant versions of events and 2) based on that, put us in the worst possible light. But in reading the book, he goes way beyond that. He actually makes a whole lot of shit up, whole cloth. I saw it most clearly in his extensive account of Kathy and my relationship since this is an area (as opposed to some stuff about other comrades) where I knew all the facts. So much of it was so far off that I was actually laughing at this opera buffo. I would say that about 80 percent of what he presented as fact about us is plain wrong. And for most of that he couldn’t have any conceivable `source.’

“The purpose of the book can be summarized in one sentence: to strip any and all moral credibility from the revolutionaries involved. Beyond the factual fabrications, he takes steps inside our heads—as though it were factual reporting—to discredit our motivation.”

One apparent inaccuracy in Castellucci’s The Big Dance deals with the events surrounding the arrest of the still-imprisoned former Black Panther Party activist, Sekou Odinga, in Queens, which occurred at the same time that another African-American activist, Mtayari Sundiata, was killed near 127th Street and Northern Blvd. In the Oct. 24. 1981 edition of the New York Times, it was reported that “workmen in the area said” that Sundiata “was shot as he climbed a chain-link fence attempting to flee” and “his body fell on the other side of the fence,” yet Castellucci portrays Sundiata as firing at a policeman when he was slain.
(end of part 4)

Next: Civil Liberties and the 1981 Brink’s Case: A 1991 Downtown Inquiry—Part 5