Dave Lindorff – USA

Linked with The American Economy Is Not Coming Back.

Dave Lindorff (born 1949) is an investigative reporter, a columnist for CounterPunch, and a contributor to Businessweek, The Nation, Extra! and Salon.com. He received a Project Censored award in 2004 … // … Lindorff gained national attention when he ran a false story, just days before the 2004 presidential election, accusing President George W. Bush of using a remote wireless cueing device under his jacket and embedded in his ear during the Presidential debates against Democrat John Kerry. The article, which ran in Mother Jones magazine’s online edition, included photographs that had been edited by a leading photo analyst based at NASA’s Jed Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA. Born in Washington, DC in 1949, Lindorff lives just outside Philadelphia with his wife, harpsichordist Joyce Lindorff. He has two children, Ariel (a gifted vocalist) and Jed … (full text).

Dave Lindorff is a columnist for Counterpunch magazine and author of several recent books including ‘This Can’t Be Happening! Resisting the Disintegration of American Democracy’ and ‘Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal’. His latest book, coauthored with Barbara Olshanshky, is ‘The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office’ /St. Martin’s Press, May 2006. (on his website).

His website named This Can’t Be Happening. And his blog The Smirking Chimp.

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Dave Lindorff – USA

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A few articles:

Two Google download books:

Further he writes:

  • Many of the current administration’s “crimes” are not statutory violations. They are so called “high crimes” as defined by the Founders. That is to say they are abuses of power that threaten the nation’s very essense. They are not crimes in the sense that they violate a law, but, even more seriously, they undermine our political system and consequently threaten the very continued existence of our free and democratic society … (full text, January 16, 2009).
  • … Missile Defense is big business.  In addition to the billions of dollars already spent and millions more requested by the Bush administration, giving lucrative contracts to defense industry corporations and military agencies and high-level personnel, in late October, according to Mark Thompson, Time  Magazine/CNN, the Pentagon began work on a new missile defense « Headquarters Command Center » at Fort Belvoir, Virginia about 10 miles south of the Pentagon.  The $38.5 million building will be home to 300 Missile Defense agency workers. A key question we need to ask ourselves is will a renewed arms race, including the proliferation of nuclear weapons, between the U.S. and Russia on European soil and elsewhere provide security and gain trust among all nations concerned. Or would deterrence, containment and diplomacy, including talks with Iran, serve us far better in the long run. The time is now for the U.S. to withdrawal its plans for the missile defense system in Europe and for Russia to accept that withdrawal as a victory for peace by all sides and demonstrate to the world that diplomacy and disarmament can help lead us foward into more peaceful times – that give opportunities for progressive growth and development for millions of people worldwide. (full text, January 20, 2009).
  • … Obama, running for the White House, initially talked of restoring the constitutional order, and of prosecuting crimes where they had occurred, much as he talked of ending the war in Iraq. But now, as he increasingly assumes the role of President, he is backing away from that kind of talk, with plans instead to extend the war and occupation in Iraq for years, while actually expanding the war in Afghanistan, and to give the outgoing administration of criminals and Constitution-wreckers a free pass, in the name of “letting bygones be bygones” … (full text, January 19, 2009).
  • … The remaining unspent Treasury Assets Relief Program (TARP) money Congress authorized should be withdrawn and applied to a real stimulus program, and the tax rebate Obama is proposing should be dropped. If the new president wants to help lower income individuals, that’s one thing, but just giving everyone a tax credit is nonsense. Economist James Galbraith, a professor of economics in Texas, has proposed some good uses for federal stimulus dollars’ a Home Owners Loan Corp. that would refinance bad mortgages at the true value of the homes in question, and grants to struggling state and local governments that are otherwise going to be laying off workers and killing critical programs like health and education. He is also calling for a supplement to Social Security for people nearing retirement whose private 401(k) funds and IRAs have been killed. These are all good ideas. A better one would be to slash military spending by 50 percent and to close the 800 or more US military bases that are scattered across the globe. Do all this and the country has a shot at avoiding a new depression and a slow slide into third world status. (full text, 11 January 2009).
  • … As for the active duty troops fighting alongside them, while some may just be patriotic kids from military families who wanted a little excitement, and some may be sadists with a passion for killing, torture and fancy weaponry, most are there because there were no other jobs available. They’re not stupid, John. But neither are they happy to be there, George. They’re there because both of you have betrayed them in the name of « globalization. » In the end, the joke’s really on us, because ever since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, we Americans have accepted uncritically the idea that our political leaders will be simply animated noisemakers for transmitting the carefully scripted « talking points, » sound bites, polemics and yes, even jokes written for them by a backroom group of political strategists – all presented as though they were coming from the brains of the people doing the talking. We get the government, and the politicians, we deserve. Let’s at least be thankful for the laughs they give us, inadvertently. (full text, November 2, 2006).
  • … Read that again please. A federal judge says he has the full authority to consider whether a terrorism detainee is being properly held—which clearly infers that at least some of the hundreds of detainees in US custody may be improperly held—but he is not allowed to rule on the conditions of their detention? This would be like saying a state court has the right to rule on whether a foster child has been properly assigned to a foster family, but no right to rule on how that child is being cared for! A foundation principle of American justice is supposed to be “equal justice under the law.” Yet here we have a federal judge awarding $65 million to the crew of the spy ship Pueblo, in large part because of allegations regarding the conditions of their confinement as POWs in North Korea, while other judges in the same court system have ruled that a man falsely captured and sent off to be tortured by a foreign dictatorship’s secret service has no right to even bring his case and that another cannot has no right to sue to get a mattress to sleep on or a blanket to keep himself warm! The promise of equal treatment under the law is honored in the breach in many ways in courtrooms across America every day, of course, but in the case of terrorism and POW issues, there isn’t even an attempt to pretend American courts are fair. (full text, 07 January 2009).
  • … Look what happened to the workers at Chicago-based Republic Windows and Doors. The company was losing business, and according to some of its employees, had been in recent weeks secretly moving some heavy equipment out of the plant, possibly in preparation for relocation to some lower-wage location. Then its bank, Bank of America, one of the nation¹s largest financial institutions, and a recent recipient of $25 billion in federal bailout funds from the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve Bank, informed the company that it would not supply credit for the firm to meet payroll. The workers were told by management that the plant would be shut down in three days. At many companies across America, such news would be met by groans and tears, but by little else. What can an employee do when the boss says the company is closing its doors? Well, Republic¹s workers, members of the United Electrical Workers union, didn¹t take the news lying down. They took it sitting down on the factory floor. The company’s 300 workers quickly organized a round-the-clock sit-in occupation of the plant, vowing to stay until they got the 60 days notice that the law requires in the event of relocations. They also demanded that they be paid accrued vacation pay, which the company had said would be lost … (full text, December 11, 2008).
  • … A truth & reconciliation commission would have to be authorized by an act of Congress, I believe, because only Congress could offer the necessary waiver from prosecution for a capital crime like torture in which victims have died, as is the case with the torture that US military forces and CIA agents have engaged in over the past eight years. But the new Congress should be willing to support such an act, because, far from being retribution, the truth & reconciliation process, which was used in South Africa, and which has been used in other countries recovering from past criminal rule, could be presented as a way of getting out the facts, and of restoring the country’s international reputation, without trying to put anyone behind bars. Moreover, I think that the vast majority of the American public wants to see some kind of reckoning made with the past eight years of secret government, official lying, and criminal actions by many of the top officials of the land. If South Africans can respond to generations of a criminal apartheid regime and a police state with a truth & reconciliation process, so can we in America. It is, after all, the truth, not the punishment of criminals, however heinous, that sets us free. (full text, January 23, 2009).
  • … Meanwhile, the financial system did not collapse and while a few banks were failing, there were no runs on them, and martial law wasn’t invoked. One reason things didn’t fall apart when Congress didn’t immediately act as Paulson and Bernanke demanded, may be that there wasn’t any danger of a meltdown in the first place. So say three senior economists working at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, who in October examined the Fed’s own data, and concluded in an article titled Facts and Myths About the Financial Crisis of 2008 that the claims that interbank lending and commercial lending had seized up were simply not true. “Bank lending to consumers and to non-financial companies had not ceased, and banks were lending to each other at record levels,” says V.V. Charri, an economist at the Minneapolis Fed. “Maybe Bernanke and Paulson had information that they were not making public, but the available data simply did not support what they were saying.” Charri and his colleagues and co-authors Lawrence Christiano and Patrick Kehoe agree that with companies like Lehman Brothers, AIG and Citigroup foundering because of toxic debt instruments, there was a sense of a financial crisis brewing, but they say it wasn’t a credit freeze. “This was a lot like the run-up to the Iraq invasion in 2003,” says Charri. “You had people in government saying: ‘We’re smart guys, trust us.’ But they were either wrong or they were lying” … (full text, January 31, 2009).

links:

Joyce Lindorff, Harpsichord, Award Year: 1983;

Categories on wikipedia: Investigative journalists, American political writers, Investigative journalism, Researchers.