Another even numbered year coming up, another national election. That can mean only one thing. It's time for the Department of Justice to start indicting African-Americans, the darker the better. In 2006, I posted about this phenomenon in
FBI Wages War on Black Folks: Southern Strategy Rises Again .
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/McCamy%20Taylor/13The defeat of Harold Ford Jr. in Tennessee must have convinced the GOP that these dirty tricks work, because the FBI and the prosecutors at Justice have got quite a line up for the country this election season. I guess they want to be ready in case Obama is the democratic nominee.
First up, William Jefferson has been indicted, after being the target of an FBI sting. Keep in mind the the Ashcroft Justice Department
fired one of its own back in the early days of the Bush administration for the crime of attempting to indict Jack Abramoff, who was so obviously guilty that no one had to waste a dime of tax payer money entrapping him. When they could no longer cover up for Abramoff, the DOJ started investigating him and his Republican Congressional partners in crime. Sort of. But prosecutors like Carol Lam who tried too hard were fired or hired away. Guilty Congressmen were encouraged to accept quick plea deals and disappear from the public view, like Bob Ney of Ohio.
Funny that the same DOJ which was so solicitous of Congressional Republicans was so eager to find a Black Democratic Congressman to prosecute. The FBI set up a sting operation for Congressman Jefferson and then raided his Congressional office (in violation of the law), something it knew would capture headlines all across the country.Then, they dragged the whole affair out over two election cycles for maximum political effect.
If you think William Jefferson was conducted like a media circus, check out what the FBI has been doing in the City of Dallas. For over two years, almost every African-American politician in that city's government was under investigation. Wow! That is some kind of racial profiling. After the 2006 elections, in which Democrats won in Dallas by a landslide, despite the on-going investigation, the feds got quiet. However, recently they dropped a bombshell:
http://www.star-telegram.com/news/story/253395.html Fourteen people, including current or former elected officials, were named Monday in a 31-count federal indictment, alleging a bribery and extortion scheme at Dallas City Hall.
<snip>
-- It accuses state Rep. Hodge of supporting Southwest Housing's projects. In exchange, the Potashniks paid her rent, some utilities and bought her new carpet at the SWH community in which she was living, according to the indictment.
Two years of valuable FBI time that could have been spent ferreting out terrorist cells to determine that some woman got new carpet and some free utilities. The Department of Justice sure has some screwy priorities. If the FBI had spent two years investigating Abramoff as tirelessly as they investigated the African-American Democrats in Dallas, we would have that whole sordid mess taken care of by now (and a lot fewer Republicans in Congress). If they had spent two years investigating the Ohio 2004 election, maybe we would know why the exit polls did not match the official tallies and why so many Democrats were stripped from the voting rolls by the GOP Secretary of State. If they had spent two years investigating those missing suitcases full of money in Iraq, maybe the taxpayers of this country would be several billion dollars richer.
The unusual racial distribution of these indictments has not escaped the attention of the press. Here is an article in the Dallas paper entitled
Black Residents Hope for Justice in City Hall Case .
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/100207dnmetsouthdallasreax.12cf8b102.html Twelve of the 16 people indicted are black – a fact some people said suggests the 27-month prosecution was biased. Others said no matter how the case turns out, it will cast a shadow over the political fortunes of blacks in Dallas.
"I studied statistics in grad school," said Michael Sorrell, interim president of Paul Quinn College, the state's oldest black liberal arts college. "You could call it a statistical anomaly, but I can certainly understand why that would give some people pause."
It has made the national press wonder, too:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21122384/ A sweeping City Hall corruption probe that has produced federal charges against a dozen black civic and political leaders is renewing suspicions of racism in a city with a long history of combative minority relations.
"It makes Dallas look bad," said Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins, who is black, "because people just have the general sense of the city being unfair to people of color."
Yes, Dallas has long been unfair to people of color, however at the moment it is our Department of Justice (which is supposed to be there to protect citizens from local racism) that is the guilty party. Rather than enforcing the Voting Rights Act, it has fired or forced out career lawyers in its civil rights division and replaced them with political hacks who have attempted to change the law to allow states to disenfranchise minority voters. While it whines and moans that it must have the ability to wiretap and torture in order to protect us from "terra" which is supposed to be its number one priority, it wastes valuable resources going after African-American---but not white---athletes who have used steroids.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003654926 "Sources familiar with the investigation into perjury and tax evasion charges against the all-time home run leader told the Daily News that the U.S. Attorney's office in San Francisco remains determined to indict Bonds by the time the grand jury expires in January.
"The grand jury investigating Bonds was due to expire in July, but prosecutors were granted a six-month extension while they pursued charges against Jones and other targets related to the BALCO steroid-trafficking scandal.
"The grand jury stopped meeting after the extension was granted, and is expected to resume shortly."
Does not the world of professional sports have enough money to take care of its own drug problems? And what about white athletes---and team owners and former team owners like W. who condone steroid use? The federal attorney's office has been after Bonds for years, even going so far as to illegally leak secret grand jury testimony to San Fransisco Chronicle journalists so that they could write a book about the case, in order to increase public attention to the story. In essence, they created a perjury trap, much like the one Star used against Clinton. Why do the feds only seem interested in the dark skinned African-American athletes?
Speaking of dark skinned celebrities, how many movie stars have we seen arrested for something that their tax accountant did in the past few years? That's right. Just the one. Wesley Snipes. Usually, mobsters get arrested for failing to pay their taxes. Idols, movie stars, musicians have their attorneys talk to the IRS and everything gets worked out. Willie Nelson did not get arrested for tax evasion in 1990. He just had to pay a lot of money. And when Willie Nelson is riding in his bus, smoking weed, he doesn't get arrested for that either. How many hip hop artists could say the same thing?
Then there is Michael Vick and dog fighting. Dog fighting is a terrible thing, but guess what. African-Americans did not invent it, nor are they the only people who do it. Out of all the dog fighting that goes on in this country, why did the feds decided to take the Vick case out of state hands and make it a federal case?
http://sports.aol.com/fanhouse/2007/06/07/michael-vick-dog-fighting-now-a-federal-investigation/ Federal authorities have taken over the investigation into dog fighting on property owned by Falcons quarterback Michael Vick, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is reporting.
That's bad news for Vick for two reasons. One is that federal charges can carry stiffer penalties than state charges. The second is that the local prosecutor, Gerald Poindexter, had seemed reluctant to take Vick on, and probably lacked the resources to win a case against a defendant who can afford the best legal defense available. That's not the case with federal prosecutors.
And let me repeat, this is a multiracial atrocity.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14698643 The two biggest recent busts on the dog fighting front were of white men. One was described as the Al Capone of Dog fighting and lived in suburban N.Y. Earlier this month in Dublin, Ireland, the star of the Gaelic football league was exposed as a director of an illegal dog fighting ring.
He was not black Irish.
In Texas, where I grew up, whites and Hispanics were more commonly associated with dog fighting than Blacks. Here is an author describing his experiences in Florida:
http://www.poppolitics.com/articles/2007/07/25/history-culture-and-vick In my own experience in Florida, I know there has been a very strong dog fighting culture in the past, although it may have faded as the state has changed. Dog fighting had its center in the Central Florida area. There were at least two regular newsletters published that promoted dog fighting, and in the mid-1970s it was decidedly white in its public racial persona.
The Bush Justice Department is aided in its "Fear the Black Man" campaign by the mainstream media, which just loves to plaster the photos of Black perps across its pages or screen. And by the right wing crazies, who love to talk about the Black defendant du jour. Hell, if the case isn't interesting enough to get much coverage, the right wing will make
that a topic of discussion, claiming that any case with an African-American accused which isn't slapped across the headlines everyday is being suppressed by the liberal media. Until all you see and hear and read is "African-American accused" and "Blacks convicted" and "members of minority community sentenced".
The so called Southern Strategy is a nasty political tactic. It is used to persuade working class whites to vote against their economic self interest. Convince them that all African-Americans are 1. thieves, 2. swindlers, 3, violent, and they are supposed to vote against the party that includes African-American politicians (the Democrats) and for the party that promises them school vouchers that can be used to get their kids into all white schools. The Southern Strategy makes white Americans look the other way when African-Americans are stripped of their voting rights---they would just misuses those rights, people like Bill Frist's attorney argued in Ohio, when he lied that the NAACP gave out crack cocaine to persuade Blacks to vote. The Southern Strategy makes it "ok" that African-American infants die at an alarming rate and toxic waste tends to be dumped near their neighborhoods and their schools are underfunded. It is the Bush administration's only excuse for what it has done and failed to do in NOLA.
This year, it looks like the Southern Strategy is going to be wielded by the Republican Party more blatantly than we have seen it since Willie Horton. I guess we know what kind of orders Karl Rove gave his new US Attorneys, before he set off into the Texas sunset.
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