AG Eric Holder resign

[jah_yout]

Obama showed Russia and Putin he does not have the balls to be a true leader. Putin laughs at Obama.

i guess he should invade & bomb russia...that would show a lot of ballz

We still have our weapons, and the number one fear of the old soviet union for invasion of the US was private ownership of weapons by the American people.

why does this sound like old-style mccarthy-ism;
american people still buying into mccarthy-ism? ...with obama as the black marxist boogeyman out to steal the american way of life with his african witchcraft;
it's silly----
obama is bush is clinton is bush1 is reagan, etc...presidents are just the front-men....
the agenda has already been set by the real power-brokers---who put these stories in the sheeples' heads to distract them from what's really going on...

[blugiant]

Earl Ofari Hutchinson: Eric Holder Was Our Firewall against GOP Bigotry


One of the most poignant moments in Attorney General Eric Holder Jr.’s six year tenure heading the Justice Department came in February 2009 barely a month after he had been confirmed as Attorney General.

He told an overflow crowd celebrating Black History Month at the Justice Department that America was “cowardly” when it came to facing race and racism. That did it.

From that moment on the lines were sharply and brutally drawn. The pack of right wing bloggers, web sites, and of course, the GOP, made Holder their Public Enemy Number 1. They would hector, hound, harass, demean, insult, and batter him at every turn.

He was hauled before countless GOP controlled House committees and grilled mercilessly on everything from his alleged bungling and deceit in the fast and furious gun running sting to the reporter leak flap in which he supposedly vindictively went after reporters in an effort to uncover damaging security leaks.

The topper was the House’s frivolous lawsuit, a contempt citation and an equally, frivolous and clumsy threat to impeach him.

The vicious baiting was never really about Holder. It was about President Obama and race. Obama, in the sense, that Holder became the softest of soft target in the GOP’s no holds barred campaign to hamstring Obama with the odor of scandal and in effect straightjacket his presidency. The race part was even more insidious. Holder meant what he said that the nation had marched backward for every step it went forward in dealing with racial bias. He backed up his words with repeated actions on voting rights abuses, grotesque racially skewed sentencing disparities, and defense of gay rights. This was crowned by his rush to St. Louis following the slaying of Michael Brown and putting dozens of FBI and Justice Department attorneys boots on the grounds there with the strong hint that a civil rights prosecution could be in the offing if there was no state prosecution of Ferguson cop Darren Wilson for the killing of Brown. This sent the professional Holder baiters into a tizzy and again the shouts were long and loud for his head.

But Holder each time held fast and didn’t buckle. He even doubled down again on his blast at racism noting on several occasions that he, as Michael Brown and countless other young black males, had been profiled by police once as a law student and later as a federal prosecutor. To add even more to the GOP and Holder baiters’ vitriol, he had the audacity to make the claim and the revelation of his personal experience with racial profiling in a keynote speech before Al Sharpton’s National Action Network convention last April.

Sharpton went further in that speech and frontally called out the GOP about its ruthless, cynical and politically calculating war against Obama. He noted that Obama had been vilified as no other president in living memory, and race was the reason. Holder could say that. Obama couldn’t at the risk of creating another firestorm and laying himself open even wider to the accusation that he was a race baiting president. Holder in essence had license to say what Obama didn’t dare say but well knew to be true. So Holder continually and effectively provided a protective cover over Obama in taking on the critics on racial matters. And he provided the same protective cover over the key areas of civil rights and voting rights protections that no other Attorney General had provided since Attorney General Ramsey Clark had done during Lyndon Johnson Administration in mid latter 1960s.

The proof of Holder’s effectiveness was the back hand perverse compliment the Holder baiters paid him in their euphoria over his resignation. They dredged up all the old distortions, myths, and lies about him in their rush to maliciously tar him as “the worst attorney general” the nation ever had. This spoke volumes how Holder was able to get under their skin to the point where they had to shout in glee at his departure.

The beauty is that Holder has left a solid legacy of accomplishment in the areas that have been and continue to be the greatest flashpoints of public controversy, namely civil rights, and racial justice and fairness. A final testament to Holder’s commitment here was his announcement three weeks before he announced his departure that the probe he ordered into the killing of Trayvon Martin was still active and that there were new developments to be announced. The implication was that there was still the possibility of civil rights charges being filed against Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman. Holder then ended his tenure as he began still taking controversial stances on issues that would surely send his army of detractors back into froth. But that was vintage Holder. He was our firewall against GOP bigotry and we’ll sorely miss him.

http://www.eurweb.com/2014/09/earl-ofari-hutchinson-eric-holder-was-our-firewall-against-gop-bigotry/

[Tuff Gong]

i guess he should invade & bomb russia...that would show a lot of ballz

Then put on a gay Paratrooper Combat Suit, descend to the deck of a parked Aircraft Carrier (see Shrub). Declare Mission Accomplished, even a thousands of Americans, gets maimed and mangled in the various wars that Amaurica has its fingers in.

[lonewolf]

is that what the article you posted was about? ..explaining why he was held in contempt?

was his "dont go there buddy" a response to his being held in contempt? I appears to me that the reason you posted that article is you would have readers believe that this was the reason he was held in contempt



the intent of my posting additional dialog was to show readers who are not informed that Nolders response was in keeping with the tone of the questioning and not a response to being held in contem but rather a response to the denigrating way the congressman was was questioning him characterizing his behavior.

Rich D, I don't believe you. This is more of your game playing. If others don't know why he was being held in contempt, then they don't have any business being involved in the conversation.
So, what you are telling me is that you have deliberately missed the point of the conversation, because you want to help others that refuse to keep up with current events?
Really? lol

[RichD]

Rich D, I don't believe you. This is more of your game playing. If others don't know why he was being held in contempt, then they don't have any business being involved in the conversation.
So, what you are telling me is that you have deliberately missed the point of the conversation, because you want to help others that refuse to keep up with current events?
Really? lol

you were the one who choose a deliberately dishonestly worded article to use to support your position. i am pointing out the dishonesty of the piece. It is clear intent of the author was to mislead the uninformed...so following on that i assume your use of the article was to continue this deception.

[lonewolf]

you are asking for some thought...not going to happen.

Now wait one minute, RichD, I did not see Wahalla's response until today. I missed it while answering others...I give all my responses thought, so, why do you have to go there just because we disagree on this issue?

[lonewolf]

Posted by Wahalla

think of it that they both Holder and Obama actually believe in the US constitution..so did Mcain, and Romney, Bush. Yes i actually beleive bush is a constiutionalist....They are IMHO are aware of its fragility and pushj against the restraints..

The Constitution authorizes the President of the United states to propose and veto legislation. It does not give him authority to change existing laws as Obama did with Obamacare. He violated the constitution and rewrote his own laws. He was and is in violation. Our government is designed with checks and balances with a reason.
He ignores it.

forget the press... ask ur self this .. why does Barry and Eric not close Gitmo ???? Who put the prisoners in Gitmo ???Is this because he is a member of the illuminati or there are bad people in there ??? Why does he not hold a public trial as he promised ? could it be that there are limits on the proof ? If he did hold a non military public trial as he promised and the prisoners will be freed because of the lack of credible "legal obtained evidence"....

Ask yourself, WHAT DID HE PROMISE TO DO DURING HIS CAMPAIGN? Are we just to forget what elected officials promised us they were to do during election?
Isn't this why we elect them , based on their promises and ideals?

u think Bush did not protected the legacy of Clinton ? He never did a full inquiry into the bombing of that aspirin factory in Sudan that killed a innocent Guard and his child ??????.

all Presidents and administration abused the system... From Jefferson buying Lousiana without congress approval, the purhase of Alaska, the Saintly Lincoln who suspended Habeous Corpus... Roosevelt the Republican who misled congress on Columbia and Roosevelt the Democrat who misled congress on the sale of war materiel to the UK which was illegal under the neutrality act

..

Because one did it it is ok for the rest of them to break the law? Using your criteria means we should excuse all of them and not hold them accoutable for their actions? No, I reject that on mere principle.

Barry uses drones to kill people his military and intelligence sees as threat... this is in countries without which the US has not declared war on??? the president was set by his predesesors..if he does not protect Bush then his entire basis for doing this will be questioned... both Eric and he have sailed close to the line of legality...

I understand your point, and it is taken, but if I disagree with these acts and the morality of them, I should not express my disdain?

But i am stupid sell out unconsious dont listen to me... is lie me ah tell...

Nonsense, I've always respected your opinion regardless if I agree or disagree.

stop being viserally opposed to Obama and see him in the context of a flawed man like all other presidents and u will realise that he is less flawed athan he is portrayed

Again, It's my right as a US citizen to oppose my elected leaders decisions when I feel they are abusing the system. I call them the way I see them and these are facts.

Holder is in contempt and Obama has violated the constituion. These are truths not opinion. You can't dispute these truths.










?

[lonewolf]

you were the one who choose a deliberately dishonestly worded article to use to support your position. i am pointing out the dishonesty of the piece. It is clear intent of the author was to mislead the uninformed...so following on that i assume your use of the article was to continue this deception.

I disagree. There is no deception. It's an op/ed piece of information that I agree with. It's an opinion based on facts. You have every right to have the opinion of it to be dishonest, as I have every right to find it honest and on target.

[lonewolf]

Earl Ofari Hutchinson: Eric Holder Was Our Firewall against GOP Bigotry

I'll make the comment that the above drivel you posted is not worth comment.... it's rediculous.

[RichD]

I disagree. There is no deception. It's an op/ed piece of information that I agree with. It's an opinion based on facts. You have every right to have the opinion of it to be dishonest, as I have every right to find it honest and on target.

well if you cannot see the dishonesty of taking a snippet of a dialogue out of context and conflating it with other events in an attempt to make an argument then i can fully understand the foundation for many of your opinions. just because the conclusion coincides with yours(accurate or inaccurate) does not mean the argument he used to come to that conclusion is honest and valid.

[Wahalla]

The Constitution authorizes the President of the United states to propose and veto legislation. It does not give him authority to change existing laws as Obama did with Obamacare. He violated the constitution and rewrote his own laws. He was and is in violation. Our government is designed with checks and balances with a reason.
He ignores it.

and the military actions that Bush, roosvelt, Reagan, Kennedy, clinton, grant undertook were illegal... so are the drone attacks are illegal...the laws that were past post 9-11 were unconstituional, the entire basis of the intelligence service is unconstitutional, the iran contra affair was unconstitutional, the repeal of the laws demanding that internal combustion engines improve year by year by the Reagan adminitration, the EPA was uncontitutional as formed by Nixon, the clean air act by Nixon infringed on the opening paragraph of the constitution, the entire anti drug laws are against the spirit of the right to happiness as enshrined in the constitution, the entire debt is illegal, the civil rights legislation is against the original constitution, the rights of women to vote is against the original constitution, the idea that native Americans are citizens is against the constitution, and the Chinese Exclusion act was more in line with the intention of the constitution, the US joining the UN is unconstituional, the rights of non anglos to vote is unconstituional as originally proposed .... the list goes on and on, the . and as i pointed out every single president has pushed the constitution... the lucky thing about the united states its constitution is rombus and organic... with the instiututions to ensure that its rights are generally followed....

it is the second best constitution in the world.. The best constitution is the British constitution which is unwritten but endorsed by parliament...much more subtle and based on ironic humour...

[blugiant]

Eric Holder’s Damnable Legacy: Impunity for the Rich and the Death of Due Process


Eric Holder’s Damnable Legacy: Impunity for the Rich and the Death of Due Process
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
“They have laid the legal cornerstones for fascism under the rule of the white filthy rich.”

By any rational standard, Eric Holder has done unprecedented harm to the most fundamental principles of due process and equal protection of law in the United States. Over the course of six years, and in closest collaboration with fellow Black Ivy league lawyer Barack Obama, Holder has also tinkered around the (mainly rhetorical) edges of the Mass Black Incarceration State, and sought to preserve some safeguards against the return of certain Jim Crow electoral practices. However, on balance, the first Black attorney general’s record is an insult to the very concepts of human equality and the rule of law – a societal disaster.

Eric Holder’s legacy must be weighed and measured in ways that history is likely to judge him, based on the effects of his decisions and actions on future generations. Legacies are not yesterday’s headlines; they are the enduring impacts of men and women on their fellow humans and the physical world. It is true that Benedict Arnold was a very capable general and Adolph Hitler achieved full employment with rising wages in Germany, but such facts do not define these men’s historical legacies. Eric Holder’s record on voting rights and criminal justice reform – a mixed bag, at best – pales in historical significance to his explication and application of his boss’s preventive detention law. In interpreting the National Defense Authorization Act of 2011 as meaning that due process does not necessarily mean having access to the courts, Holder quite literally puts the lives and liberties of every human being within reach of American “law” in heretofore unprecedented danger, subjecting them to imprisonment without charge or trial for as long as the State feels necessary. It is as if the Magna Carta never happened.

Although President George W. Bush claimed inherent executive power to imprison without trial, he never dared attempt to enshrine that claim in statute, knowing Congress would reject it. It took two Black Democrats – a Constitutional lawyer and his “most liberal” cabinet member – to push preventive detention through Congress.
“On balance, the first Black attorney general’s record is an insult to the very concepts of human equality and the rule of law – a societal disaster.”

Having abolished due process, this dynamic duo vastly expanded the dark universe of “secret law” – laws that cannot be defined, or their justifications explained, to the public that is governed by these laws. “Secret law” is, of course, no law at all; it is whatever the State says it is, or refuses to say – the slamming of the prison gate on the rule of law.

Under Eric Holder’s supervision, the U.S. Justice Department has institutionalized immunity from prosecution for the ruling financial class. There is no precedent in U.S. history for such an abomination except, possibly, the impunity enjoyed under slavery and the post-Civil War Black Codes by white men who committed crimes against Blacks. Blacks were effectively barred from testifying against whites in criminal cases, to protect the white supremacist order. In testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Holder admitted that, in deference to the harm that might befall the national and world economic order, he hesitates to prosecute large banks – they are too big to jail.

With these two history-shaking initiatives Obama, with Holder on point, has negated due process of law for the general public of all races, while simultaneously bestowing impunity from criminal prosecution to an overwhelmingly white male financial class. The word “regression” does not begin to describe the giant leap backward that is Eric Holder’s historical legacy. Nothing else Holder or Obama has said, done, or verbally indicated they would like to do, remotely compensates for the immense barriers to civilizational progress they have jointly erected since 2009. They have laid the legal cornerstones for fascism under the rule of the white filthy rich. Damn them to eternity!
“’Secret law’ is, of course, no law at all; it is whatever the State says it is, or refuses to say.”

As a counterpoint to these high crimes against democracy in general – and, especially against those classes historically oppressed by wealthy whites in the U.S. – Holder’s boosters and apologists cite his defense of the Voting Rights Act, most notably, the Justice Department’s opposition to Voter ID laws. There is nothing heroic about Democrats defending the voting eligibility of Black people, who make up 25 percent of the Democratic Party. On a practical and moral level, nothing less should be expected. Yet, the Holder Justice Department refused to challenge Michigan’s draconian emergency financial manager legislation that effectively disenfranchised the people of Detroit and over one-half the Black population of the state. Clearly, Holder and his boss don’t give a damn about Black voting rights when it conflicts with corporate plans to bankrupt and then remake the nation’s largest remaining “Chocolate City.” The financial ruling class’s interests trump Black citizenship rights every time, at the Holder Justice Department. Moreover, the Detroit bankruptcy precedent will be applied to cities across the nation in coming years, as corporations move ever more aggressively to seize public assets and ethnically cleanse valuable urban land through relentless gentrification. Eric Holder has helped set the stage for a new wave of assaults on urban Blacks and their electoral rights as a class – a legacy that far outweighs his politically required due diligence in opposing Voter ID laws.

Regarding mass Black Incarceration, the Obama administration has not led the way in criminal justice reform, although it has talked a good propaganda game. Since the mid to late Nineties, even right-wing Republicans have spoken out against mandatory minimum sentencing and unsustainable growth in prison populations – a stain on the American international image that is comparable to the stench of Jim Crow in the Forties, Fifties and early Sixties. The U.S. Congress had for some time been in a mood to repeal 100 to 1 crack cocaine penalties (in favor of 18 to 1). The administration didn’t need to spend much political capital in supporting these issues, and showed its true colors by opposing retroactive release of thousands of inmates convicted under the old law.
“The Holder Justice Department refused to challenge Michigan’s disenfranchised of the people of Detroit and over one-half the Black population of the state.”

Holder brags that the federal prison system, over which he is boss, last year registered its first decline in population since 1980. However, federal prisons have lagged behind the states on that score during most of Holder’s tenure. Aggregate state prison populations declined for three straight years – 2010, 2011 and 2012 – before registering a slight increase in 2013. The general trend is widely attributed to state government cost cutting, while Holder has regularly asked for and gotten budget increases for the federal prison system. On balance, Holder’s performance on prisons compares badly with the aggregate of the 50 states, 29 of which are run by Republican governors. His prison reform legacy is weak, if not outright phony.

Black people want desperately that the Obama administration be viewed as “successful” – by whatever standard is employed. African Americans fear the fitness of The Race will be judged by the Obama team’s performance – that the Obama-Holder legacy is Black America’s collective legacy. Most white people probably think that way, too. However, the reality is that Eric Holder and his boss have done incalculable damage to the life prospects of Black people, who are most in need of a society based on the rule of law, rather than the whims and prejudices of whites, and who have been most victimized by the rich white financial class that Eric Holder has made immune from all legal constraints. If anyone should condemn these men to a legacy of eternal shame, it is Black people.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford

http://blackagendareport.com/node/14445

[blugiant]

Eric Holder: Like the Rest of the Black Political Class – Powerful But Powerless
by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

Nobody showed the hollow opportunism of Eric Holder's individual claim, and the collective claim of the black political class to be champions of justice, equity and civil rights more clearly than Rev. Michael Eric Dyson did on a panel discussing the outgoing Attorney General last Friday's DemocracyNow show. Unleashing his customary wall of words, the fast talking black preacher praised Holder as the “the second-most-powerful black person in the history of American politics...” but claimed that because they're black neither Holder nor the president could ever be reasonably expected to hold the banks to account for crashing the economy. Sure, he allowed crooks on Wall Street to get away with stripping trillions in wealth from black families through predatory loans and illegal foreclosures and get trillions more from the Fed itself. But those were issues “of the white left”, Dyson declared in his opening statement less, important to black folks than police brutality, voting rights and just not being locked up.

“So, while—yes, get the criminals who have continued financial malfeasance in this country. But what he’s done for the criminal justice system, what he’s done for sentencing, what he’s done for mandatory sentencing, what he’s done for racial profiling, what he’s done to combat police brutality, what he’s done to say that the American Voting Rights Act should be protected, and his, I think, creative use of different aspects of, you know, different sections, when others were gutted by the Supreme Court, has to be acknowledged. And my colleagues on the left sometimes neglect what is important to the masses and millions of people who were never under the purview even of the white left to be concerned about some of the issues that African-American people and Latino people and many others, religious and ethnic minorities, have been concerned about. I think, in that case, he will stand tall in the history of American jurisprudence, and certainly as one of the great attorneys general of all time.”

It was downhill from there. Dyson swiftly absolved Holder from any taint due to actual misconduct on the part of the FBI, DEA, federal prosecutors and the legions of other cops and lawyers working for him over the last six years.

“...whereas Eric Holder has much more direct control over events, forces and realities within the context of the Department of Justice, when we’re talking about the other issues that my colleagues have alluded to, then you’re talking about the interaction between the president of the United States of America and the Justice Department. Then you’re talking about the bailiwick being extraordinarily expanded. And in that case, Eric Holder alone can’t shoulder the burden of that. Are there conflicts and contradictions? To be sure. But in terms of ascribing, you know, responsibility, I think that’s a much more muddy kind of context.

Dyson went on to excuse Holder for his vicious claim that a US president had the right to target and murder anyone, anywhere in the world without trial or anything much in the way of evidence. When the conversation circled back around to Holder's and Obama's contention that Wall Street banks were too big to fail, and their crooked officers too important to jail, Dyson played his opportunist version of the race card in two directions, claiming that perhaps because they were white they were less concerned with economic justice for black folks than they were with punishing the banksters, and repeating that because Holder and Obama were black they couldn't serve the interests of black people anyhow.

“First of all, you know, the people who took the brunt of the mortgage crisis happened to be African-American people. The greatest bleed-off of black wealth in the history of this nation occurred there. So, if anybody is invested in trying to recoup some of that, it would be those people, and to redound to them significantly. The redistributive mechanism that might restore some of the capital to those folk is, again, of course, never the interest of many of my colleagues who are concerned about it. They just want to put in jail the CEOs and the others who did all this stuff, but they’re not really concerned about the redistributive mechanism that allows these people to regain, because even if you put those guys in jail, the people at the bottom continue to suffer...”
Number two, if we’re going to talk about this in the actual political context... If President Barack Obama can’t be seen as too gruffly treating white Americans... what do you think will happen then if Eric Holder, as the first African-American attorney general, is seen to be going after mostly white CEOs and other corporate titans within the economic infrastructure?...”

Clearly Rev. Dyson's, Eric Holder's and the world of the entire black political class are upside down and backward. We're supposed to elect them to high offices, and we must praise them for the achievement of us having uplifted them. And once in office they are under no particular obligation to use their supposed power and influence for the black masses they allegedly represent. And any white people who question why they don't serve the interests of their constituents can be threatened with the race card. After all, the critic is white, the criticized is black, what else do you need to know?

The panel discussion lasted a good 20 minutes, and toward the end, Rev. Dyson didn't even try to mount a defense of Eric Holder's prosecution of the press and whistleblowers, his refusal to go after torturers, his invocation of the Espionage Act, or his deportation of 2 million undocumented after his boss the president promised them a road to citizenship.

Beyond Dyson's troubling display on DemocracyNow, the fulsome praise heaped on Attorney General Eric Holder for being “a champion of voting rights and civil rights,” a contention none of the panelists questioned, is a Big Lie. It's a major rewrite of history and fact to serve the black political class, and more broadly the system it upholds.

It was nationwide enforcement of the Voting Rights Act of 1967 that gave birth to our current black political class. The numbers of black faces elected to high places multiplied six, almost seven times between 1970 and 2000, at almost the same time and proportion as the number of black people in US prisons and jails. During this entire time, and another decade beyond the black political class held the strategic legal and political high ground, with courts and editorial boards in much of the country ruling routinely in their favor, forcing fifty states and thousands of local jurisdictions closer to counting every vote and allowing every vote to count. But the Voting Rights Act was a temporary victory. Since the right to vote was not guaranteed in the supreme law of the land, the US Constitution, any state legislature, any judge, any city or county official was free to throw up inventive barriers. Only a Supreme Court majority and the coalition of public opinion sympathetic to the civil rights movement of the sixties sustained the Voting Rights Act, and these would not last forever. The only way to make the victory of voting rights permanent was to campaign for a constitutional amendment...

“A constitutional right to vote would provide easy grounds for removing corporate money and the contributions of wealthy individuals from political campaigns, ending felony disenfranchisement, banning gerrymandering, voter caging, discriminatory voter ID laws, and a thousand other ruses and schemes employed to keep minorities and the poor away from the polls and to minimize the effect of their votes when these are cast...”
Amending the US Constitution however, is hard work, not for the lazy or faint of heart. It requires a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress and ratification by 38 state legislatures, a herculean task unthinkable without the creation of a powerful grassroots movement, the like of which black leaders no longer knew how to build. On the positive side, opponents of such an amendment would be stuck having to explain why the right to vote should NOT be a constitutional right. But the negatives won.”
The black political class instead crossed its fingers, complacently pretended the partial victory of the Voting Rights Act was “settled law,” and concentrated on boosting their own and each others' illustrious careers, and ceaselessly commemorating the victories of the sixties, since beyond those careers there was little indeed to show.”

The truth is, the kind of sustained, 24-7-365 peoples grassroots mobilization required to pass a constitutional right to vote isn't just something totally outside the experience of the black political class, it would be a mortal threat to sitting black politicians everywhere.

Eric Holder, President Obama and the rest of the self-aware black political class might have seen the assault on voting rights coming years off. There was plenty of time to counter it, but they didn't. Now that the Voting Rights Act has been kneecapped, they want to bill their hollow half-measures after the fact as courageous defenses of voting rights. Again, the world of the black political class is upside down, and centered on themselves, not the people they pretend to represent.

Eric Holder's, and by extension President Obama's record on beginning to roll back the prison state is pretty much the opposite of what our black political class wants to pretend. The Federal Bureau of Prisons comes under the US Department of Justice, and its budget has risen every year under Holder and Obama. While citizens in the president's home state mobilized to close a brutal state supermax prison, Holder's and Obama's Bureau of Prisons is opening up a new federal supermax in Illinois, Thomson ADX, a landlocked Guantanamo North. Holder hasn't prevailed upon his boss to free a single long serving political prisoner, not Leonard Peltier or Imam Jamil Al-Amin or Mutulu Shakur, and clemencies of nonpolitical prisoners too are at an all time low.

Eric Holder smoothly adopted this boss's technique of talking one game and walking another, as his Department of Justice went to court prevent their retroactive release for time served, keeping thousands of prisoners behind bars for what it admits are unjustly long and punitive sentences, while opining in public that too many black people are locked up for too little and too long. Holder's DEA, along with hundreds of state and local police departments across the country, thanks to data released by Edward Snowden and Wikileaks, are known to access illegal surveillance data from the NSA, to routinely use it to build cases, and commit perjury to conceal the illegal evidence. Holder's been looking into this for a more than a year, with no word on how many cases it affects or how long this atrocity has continued.

Eric Holder is not a champion of civil rights under law, or voting rights, or an advocate for the poor and minorities victimized by the drug war. His career is not that of a dedicated public servant. He's been a vicious prosecutor, a look-the-other-way strategist on voting rights, a high priced corporate lawyer in private practice, and an even more vicious defender of a lawless police and surveillance state. He's paid his dues at the highest levels of our Evil Empire, and with private practice he will now be free to cash in, perhaps representing some of the same telecoms and banksters he refused to prosecute as Attorney General. Maybe he can get a few of them to kick in a few bucks for My Brothers Keeper. That should cement his reputation a philanthropist as well.
Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report.

http://blackagendareport.com/node/14443

[blugiant]

Good Riddance to Eric Holder

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley



“Obama and Holder get away with their hypocrisy in large part because the black political class is silent when they ought to be outraged.”

Barack Obama is nearing the end of his second and last term in the White House. With just a little more than two years before he leaves office, his top cabinet members and aides have begun making the inevitable exit for more lucrative pastures. Attorney General Eric Holder announced last week that he will resign after a successor is nominated and confirmed.

Holder is like all political appointees. They may have high positions but in the end they are like every mid-level manager in the country. They must do what their bosses tell them to do. If Obama said that reporters and whistle blowers must be prosecuted under the Espionage Act Holder did that. If he told him not to prosecute the criminal mortgage bankers who destroyed the lives of working people, he did not do that. If the president wanted to concoct justifications for assassinating United States citizens then the attorney general did that too.

On March 5, 2012, Holder gave a speech at Northwestern University law school which was meant to explain why the president ordered the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki and his sixteen year-old son Abdulrahman.

“Some have argued that the president is required to get permission from a federal court before taking action against a United States citizen who is a senior operational leader of Al Qaeda or associated forces. This is simply not accurate. ‘Due process’ and ‘judicial process’ are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.”

“The Obama/Holder partnership gave black Americans nothing but sleight of hand.”

The only thing more noteworthy than the horror of the president proclaiming his right to kill at will was the lack of reaction to the attorney general’s bizarre assertion. The uproar that should have erupted never did. In a familiar pattern, Holder and the president weren’t called out by people who would have protested the same actions from a Republican administration. That silence allowed the two men to get away with the al-Awlakis murders and more.

Holder’s tenure as attorney general ends with one of his and the president’s worst betrayals of their most loyal constituency, black Americans. After Michael Brown was shot to death while surrendering to a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, the people in that town rose up in a protest which has now lasted for nearly two months. Obama was forced to reckon with Ferguson.

He first sent Al Sharpton to quell the righteous anger but Brown’s murder was clearly different from other issues which the shifty minister has used to give Obama cover. The sustained pressure and media attention finally forced him to send the attorney general to give higher level lip service in person.

When Holder arrived in Ferguson he performed an Obama-like impersonation. He said he had been stopped by the police as a young man, sort of like Obama saying that if he had a son he would like Trayvon Martin. He gave vague assurances that the Justice Department will review the case but only time will tell if the Brown family receives justice.

The Obama/Holder partnership gave black Americans nothing but sleight of hand, the appearance of doing things they had not done. The president and attorney general had the opportunity to free thousands of people from jail who were prosecuted under the draconian drug sentences of the 1980s and 1990s. Instead they made sure they stayed behind bars. In the U.S. v. Blewett case the Obama justice department asked a federal court of appeals to prevent 5,000 people, almost all of whom are black, from requesting resentencing. Instead of actually getting people out of jail, the partners in high crime came up with a toothless plan to reduce mandatory minimum sentences and were credited with a non-existent triumph.
“The Holder legacy is like the Obama legacy.”

It is telling that as Holder departs, Al Sharpton emerged to show his true colors as the buffoonish presidential snitch. First he got a bit more impressed with his position than he should have when he claimed that he would assist in choosing Holder’s successor. Just a few hours later Sharpton contradicted himself and said he would not really be doing that at all. Oh to have been a fly on the wall when King Rat Sharpton got the smack down from on high.

Sharpton is an easy target of derision but he isn’t alone in trying to put lipstick on the political pig. Obama and Holder get away with their hypocrisy in large part because the black political class is silent when they ought to be outraged. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund issued a press release decrying the court decision in the Blewett case without once mentioning that the court did so with the support of the Obama justice department.

Holder’s failings are Obama’s failings. Barack Obama is a putative black man who wants nothing to do with black people. When Holder gave his mealy mouthed “cowards on race speech” Obama was so angry that the attorney general was kept on a short leash with the media. The Holder legacy is like the Obama legacy. Millions wished and hoped that he would represent their concerns and uphold the laws as they wanted but they were bound to be disappointed. Obama’s defenders love to say that he isn’t just the president of black people. He is in fact never the president for black people and the Holder legacy tells that sad story.

Good riddance to Eric Holder. He will not be missed. On January 20, 2017 we will at last be able to say good riddance to Barack Obama too. He won’t be missed either.
Margaret Kimberley's Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well as at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com.

http://blackagendareport.com/node/14440

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