Paul Richmond’s Blog

Recently I was told the story of a Colorado man who approached then Vice President Dick Cheney and raised questions of his policies. Within minutes the man was arrested and handcuffed by a Secret Service agent for “assaulting” the vice president.[i] Thank God that stuff’s over the person telling the story said to me.

Ironically, I’ve been having similar concerns over one of President Obama’s recent appointments, Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske. While he’s being hailed by many as an enlightened, even brilliant choice my experience may temper that unbridled optimism. As attorney who’s worked in the Seattle area, doing support for demonstrators I have genuine concerns about his actions regarding the First Amendment, including several with parallels to the Cheney episode above. As a researcher who tracked much of the militarization of law enforcement around the drug war, I’m concerned about programs he’s already implemented.

I found Kerlikowske had a marked disdain for critics. I experienced it personally when he appeared at UW Law School where I was enrolled and finishing a J.D. Kerlikowske responded to a difficult question I asked by singling me out by name and claiming I followed him everywhere – it was in fact the second time I’m aware I’d been at the same event as him. Of course I was a white law student and that was as far as it went.

Shortly after I graduated, I came to represent Anwar Peace, a young black man who was concerned about the number of black men shot by the Seattle Police. Peace who had no criminal history, wanted to have a meeting with Chief Kerlikowske to discuss this. Peace left phone messages, would attempt to speak with Kerlikowske at public events, and ultimately set up a table on the sidewalk in front of the police department. Kerlikowske’s response was to file a Restraining Order, (which was granted as these usually are) and then pursue criminal charges the next time Peace contacted him.[ii] The criminal trials dragged on and on, and the police invested an incredible amount of time and money into this. Rather astounding when you consider GWB never sought a restraining order against Cindy Sheehan.

This also seemed to follow a pattern of little tolerance for any dissent. From my experience I can say, Kerlikowske has shown a record of contempt for the rights of demonstrators and a history of responding to them with disproportionate force. This has included:

• Overseeing the mass arrests of people trying to leave the site of the first anniversary of the WTO demonstrations, on November 30, 2000. Demonstrators were promised if they left the area they would be free to go. They were directed down a street where they were surrounded by fences and riot police. Over a hundred were arrested, the first of these being the legal observers.[iii] A year later, on the third anniversary, police spent over $300,000 in overtime to march 200 demonstrators about 10 blocks down a hill, making a liberal number of arrests along the way for things like stepping off sidewalks.[iv]
• When the October 22 group attempted to have their annual demonstration in 2003, police not only limited them to the sidewalk, but drove a line of vans on the lane alongside that sidewalk, hiding the march from sight. This resulted in a federal suit from the ACLU filed in federal court as C04-860Z.
• Also in 2003 Kerlikowske spearheaded the prosecution of a few women from the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) who dropped a banner off of a construction crane under an old felony statute enacted to go after the Wobblies. Let me be clear these women were facing many years in prison for simply hanging a banner from a crane. As one of the lawyers involved in defending these women, I believe that the owners of the construction site had no interest in this prosecution, the push coming from Kerlikowske’s office and the prosecutors.
• During the first days of the Iraq invasion, Kerlikowske’s police not only terrorized demonstrators with a heavy show of force, again corralling demonstrators and making liberal numbers of arrests. We also began noticing a number of them carrying highly lethal rifles, many of them M-16 variants.
• In June of 2003 the Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit (LEIU) held it’s annual convention in Seattle and hundreds of demonstrators came out. Kerlikowske’s police responded by penning the demonstrators in a small area for twenty five minutes, firing less lethal weaponry and chemical agents at them through this time.

Kerlikowske’s adherence to these military tactics against demonstrators is not surprising. His earlier role in the federal was the COPS program. This was the part of the 1995 Crime Bill designed to put 100,000 new cops on the street. Funding was short term with long term funding depending on asset forfeiture by these new cops. This corresponded neatly with the spread of paramilitary SWAT units throughout the country. Kerlikowske’s love for these tactics was shown in an early editorial he did for the Seattle Times (August 30, 2000) praising the tactics of his officers who showed with two paramilitary vehicles, SWAT Teams dressed in camaflage carrying military weapons to apprehend a single unarmed suspect. [v]

In short then, though Kerlikowske has received even some praise for not opposing policies (that he did not bring) to lower the priority of marijuana enforcement, these policies did not come from him. His history and future actions can probably be more accurately seen by looking at the intolerance he has had for dissent including both heavy handed tactics in the street and heavy handed prosecutions as well as his earlier promotion of what are in essence programs that militarized the police and vastly expanded some of the worst aspects of the war on drugs.

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The author, Paul Richmond is a long time community activist and independent media reporter. He produced several thousand hours of local television in Portland, was one of the founders of the independent media center during the WTO, and one of the coordinators of the legal observer program. He authored the report “Waging War on Dissent,” and was a consultant on the documentary Urban Warrior. As a lawyer he has represented dozens of activists and has recently gotten dismissals of criminal charges brought by the U.S. Border Patrol at their checkpoints on the Olympic Peninsula.

A good overview of the current economic collapse, and it’s appears in the Village Voice Article “What Cooked the World Economy.” http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-01-28/news/what-cooked-the-world-s-economy/

The problem is not bad loans which were worth a trillion or so dollars, but junk Derivatives, now worth about $600 trillion dollars, or several hundred times the value of the Iraq Invasion and Occupation.

Derivatives are bets made that financial instruments would fail. The bad Mortgages were bundled in Derivatives so that they would fail and pay off to the insured. The insurance on these bad debts is what’s dragging the economy down, down, down.

Author James Lieber is succinct in detailing what caused this collapse.

“By plunking down millions of dollars, a hedge fund could reap billions once these fatally constructed securities plunged. Again, the funds did not need to own the securities; they just needed to pay for the derivatives—the insurance policies for the securities. And they could pay for them again and again. This was known as replicating. It became an addiction. About $2 trillion in credit derivatives in 1989 jumped to $8 trillion in 1994 and skyrocketed to $100 trillion in 2002…At almost $600 trillion, over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives dwarf the value of publicly traded equities on world exchanges, which totaled $62.5 trillion in the fall of 2007 and fell to $36.6 trillion a year later.”

“The heart of darkness was the AIG Financial Products (AIGFP) office in London, where a large proportion of the derivatives were written…The president of AIGFP, a tyrannical super-salesman named Joseph Cassano, certainly had the experience. In the 1980s, he was an executive at Drexel Burnham Lambert, the now-defunct brokerage that became the pivot of the junk-bond scandal that led to the jailing of Michael Milken, David Levine, and Ivan Boesky. During the peak years of derivatives trading, the 400 or so employees of the London unit reportedly averaged earnings in excess of a million dollars a year. They sold “protection”—this Runyonesque term was favored—worth more than three times the value of parent company AIG….In mid-September, when it was on the ropes, AIG received an astonishing $85 billion emergency line of credit from the Fed. Soon, that was supplemented by another $67 billion. Much of that money, to use the government’s euphemism, has already been “drawn down.” Shamefully, neither Washington nor AIG will explain where the billions went. But the answer is increasingly clear: It went to counterparties who bought derivatives from Cassano’s shop in London.”

“In 2000, the 106th Congress as its final effort passed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA), and, disgracefully, President Clinton signed it. It opened up the bucket-shop loophole that capsized the world’s economic system. With the stroke of a presidential pen, a century of valuable protection was lost….Will Obama re-criminalize these financial weapons by pushing for repeal of the CFMA? This should be a no-brainer for Obama, who, before becoming a community organizer in Chicago, worked on Wall Street, studied derivatives, and by now undoubtedly knows their destructive power.”

Highly recommended.

There will of course be disappointments following this evenings’ Academy Awards. It’s a simple fact that many of the best, and most prescient work is simply ignored in its time. Citizen Kane, for example, considered by many to be the best movie of all time was a box office failure. Director Orson Wells was never able to make a film he wanted to after it.

One feature that was released with minimal fanfare by the academy was the first feature born of Fox’s cancelled television series Futurame, called Bender’s Big Score, Its premise was simple and prescient. A group of scammers come to Earth and con the entire population out of everything on the planet. The main characters attempt to deal with this, run away from this, and ultimately everyone on the planet gets miffed and launches an all out attack on the scammers and the robot army the scammers have built with the wealth of everyone on Earth.

Amazingly, Bender’s Big Score was released in 11.27.2007 on DVD and aired 3.23.2008 on Comedy Central - long before the collapse of Lehman Brothers and popular acknowledgement of the collapse, or near collapse of so many banks, that have spurred trillions of dollars in bailouts.

How prescient the writers’ of Bender’s Big Score were is something I ponder. Presently financiers such as George Soros and Paul Volcker say they see no end to the present collapse[i] and the head of Russia’a foreign academy has predicted the United States will have totally disintegrated by July 4, 2010.[ii] As writer Kevin Phillips pointed out in his book ­Bad Money, published as the collapse was starting to be talked about, the dollar value of the derivatives and other financial junk, was actually larger than most parts of the economy connected with real good and services. Despite the fact that these “too large to fail” banks have hired some of the best mathematicians on the planet to disguise their financial junk, it doesn’t require being particularly versed in mathematics to see where this is now going. The junk economy has a higher economic value than (what is left of) the economy of real goods and services. The economy of real goods and services (what is left of it) is being taxed to make up the lost value of the junk economy. Since the economy of real goods and services has a smaller financial value than the junk it will, if we continue on the present course, be completely drained to pay off the “value” of the junk. This is the basic math most of us were introduced to around First Grade.

I wonder if those involved in Bender’s Big Score were looking at our past. There were many earlier examples of scammers taking over economy. One can look at the “Dot-Com Bubble” where incredible things were promised for a new technology. Scammers got investors to invest many times the value of what any of the services might possibly be worth. Stocks were traded and traded the values rising, ever rising. When the music stopped, those who’d sold their shares made mint, and the rest were fleeced. This was the same game that accompanied the selling and reselling of shares of stock which never made profit that prompted the Great Depression begun in 1929,[iii] it was the same game that accompanied the building of the railroads where investors were emcouraged to invest many more times the cost of the railroad’s construction for tracks that were never built. Nor is it a new concept that such scams would dominate the world’s of finance. One has only to look at the Savings and Loan Meltdowns of the 1980’s where a property with no value would be sold back and forth between several dummy savings and loans, each sale commanding a higher price. And when eventually the thing collapsed, the taxpayers picked up the bill in the Savings and Loan Bailout.

In fact, Bender’s Big Score cannot claim complete prescience here. The scam was first laid out in Mel Brook’s movie, The Producers, where Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder realize they can make more money by promoting a play that will fail, than one that is a success. Their scheme is to sell many times the value of the play in shares to investors knowing it will fail. Perhaps some of those who came up with the plans that collapsed the Savings and Loan, and now the Banking industries saw this movie, or its more recent incarnation as a Broadway musical and took the wrong inspiration.

What is different though about the current collapse from the prior ones is its scale. This (present and ongoing) financial collapse is of such a scale that it threatens, (per our First Grade math), to crush the entire society, leaving us with something resembling the scenario of the Road Warrior movies and its siblings such as Doomsday, Resident Evil, and some of the more recent work of George Romero. What could prompt such level of recklessness that the ultra-greedy would seek to destroy the entire system?

A model I found useful in understanding what was going on was laid out by author Robert Kaplan in his piece The Coming Anarchy. First published in February 1994 as an essay in the Atlantic[iv], and then as a book in 2,000[v] as GWB came and Al Gore campaigned for the presidency. Kaplan is writing from the perspective of those who own most of what can be owned on this planet. His premise is that the ecology of the planet is collapsing, and with the collapse of the ecology a collapse of the economy, (and of course vast social unrest) follows. [vi] We are then left with two choices: One is the repair of the ecology (which isn’t happening). The other, is that we set up systems of control so that as the ecology and economy collapse, power relationships are maintained. What we are devolved to in this second scenario is a world of armored limousines moving from fortified enclave to fortified enclave in the new global village.

Kaplan then goes into some length describing the second scenario. We will see merging of military, law enforcement, intelligence and private security. Such mergers seem almost common place when we look at Homeland Security, Blackwater, Halliburton and the like. But consider that Kaplan wrote this before September 11, 2001, before the PATRIOT Act, before the Project for a New American Century, and even before the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, and 1995 Crime Bill which gave us most of what Bush’s critics associate with PATRIOT.

To understand this is not to acknowledge it as inevitable. If we are to have any chance in this we are to proceed with our eyes open to what is going on. The continued ramping up of law enforcement, Homeland Security, Wars on Terrorism, Wars on Crime, Wars on Drugs are there to build and feed this infrastructure that will maintain power relationships as the economy and ecology collapse. Most of the other stuff is noise and pretext.

For this reason I ask the Academy to give Bender’s Big Score some form of special award. And I urge those who share this concern to commit to memory the scene where everyone from Santa to the Harlem Globe Trotters unites to drive the scammers off of Earth. The soundtrack for this scene will get you through some bad times.

Once upon a time, you could learn the law by reading a few books and hanging out a shingle. It wasn’t the way all lawyers learned, but it enabled there to exist a type of lawyer that’s a vanishing species today – the community lawyer.

One of the factors that brought the community lawyer and many other small town species to the brink of extinction is the industrial revolution and the rise of large monopolies. With the creation of the railroads and the rise of new industries there came a need for more lawyers to do the work of these expanding monopolies. One challenge was to train a large number of lawyers in a profitable manner. Another was to eliminate lawyers who’d stand up for the little people against these monopolies.

About 1870, a Harvard professor devised a system to teach large numbers of law students in an economically efficient way. That method relied on large classes, and minimal feedback and supervision. It was purely academic. It taught nothing about how to actually practice. If you weren’t of money when you came in, you were working for those with money when you got out, and because you knew nothing but academics, your ability to actually practice on your own was limited.

The law school that exists today is a descendant of that 1870 Harvard model. It takes three years to impart the same information given in a 6-week bar review class, and many practicing attorneys admit that the bar review class does a better job.

I experienced an epiphany about the level of control exercised by the law school institution when I watched an orientation of 1L’s during my second year. It just so happened that PBS had recently aired a documentary on the indoctrination tactics of cults. I found the parallels frightening:

• Cult members are made to break connections with their existing friends and family.
• Law students are told during orientation that their friends won’t see them for several years. They’re also told to expect hard times in their relationships – in fact, more than half the students who enter law school either married or in a relationship break up before it’s over.

• Cult members are made to go long hours with inadequate sleep or nutrition.
• Law students routinely do the same.

• Cult members are told to give up all worldly possessions.
• Law students are forbidden from working during their first year. They also leave the institution burdened with tremendous amounts of debt.

• Cult members are subjected to random instances of abuse. They are usually directed to seek the answers for why this happened within themselves; after all, their abusers are there to help them learn.
• Law students are subjected to arrogant faculty, the Socratic method, and exams that are graded by a few scribbles without feedback.
  
  
• Cult members are eventually robbed of a sense of self.
• Law students complain of feeling completely inadequate.

• Cult members are told that if they endure these deprivations they will acquire mystical powers, usually after a few years.
• Law students are told that when they become lawyers, after a few years, they will acquire all kinds of respect and prestige. Taking this last analogy one step further they will be given the duty of addressing black robed figures, speaking arcane phrases in Latin and other dead languages, and participating in something closely resembling a Masonic ritual.

What makes this completely insidious is that law schools attract many who come with idealistic motives. They become acclimatized to working inhumane hours, to giving up friends and family, and to giving up everything they love. They leave law school with the habit of working inhumane hours, shunning non-lawyers, and possessing no skills that will help them start their own businesses. To pay their massive debts they are drawn or perhaps sucked into the corporate firms, which compel them to continue to work inhumane hours. With little else to do they acquire more debt, such as long-term payments on homes and cars. At that point they become functionally dead both intellectually and critically. They mate a few times and die.

Law schools need to teach functional skills in how to run a practice, communicate effectively with clients, and use the law as a vehicle for social change. On top of this, law schools need to offer opportunities for formal apprenticeships. What is needed even more is a teaching system that does not dehumanize, overstress, and burn people out. That allows them time for family and friends, for personal interests and does not pit them against each other.

Paul Richmond was raised and grew up a little in Yonkers, but mostly in New Rochelle, New York. The house he was raised in was down the street from the Cottage given to the ideological father of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine. However, New Rochelle is better known as the setting of the old Dick Van Dyke Show. Paul graduated New Rochelle High in 1979, sometime later than Musketeer Annette Funicello.

Paul spent his first year in college at University of Bridgeport, a school established by P.T. Barnum, and funded at the time by the Shah of Iran, (later apparently bought by the Moonies.) Ever chasing status and social respectability, Paul transferred to California Institute of the Arts, a school established by Walt Disney. Majoring in Film and Video he is remembered during this time for rarely wearing shoes, dancing frenetically and having a dog named Sonya who reminded many of the other students of the dog they’d left at home. During this time he began production on a 90 minute 16mm feature and a 40 minute stop motion animation. Both annoyed the faculty whose dominant teaching method was to tell students to shoot every scene from every possible angle and do multiple takes of each shot. This was in the days of film stock whose image is made out of actual particles of silver. Typically students would spend $10-15K on films 10-15 minutes long. (Paul managed to complete each of these projects for under a thousand prior to release print.)

Paul moved back to New York for a few years to complete these projects. He did an internship at Film Video Arts in New York, to get access to equipment, took classes at the SUNY Purchase and the New School for Social Research, and wrote a lot. During this time he got his first of what were to become many arrests as one of three hundred or so people who tried to block the entrance to the Reagan White House.

The completed work was good enough to get Paul accepted at the American Film Institute. Paul came with the idea of making great socially conscious work he would shepherd through the Hollywood system. During this time he learned that the movie Fatal Attraction had begun as a statement on how men needed to be more responsible in relationships, and that the movie Top Gun had begun as something somewhat critical of the military. He also saw independent producer John Sayles receive a lifetime achievement award. Sayles wrote scripts for movies like Piranaha and Alligator and used it to pay for the movies he liked making. “When did you get to the point where people were paying you to do what you want to do?” someone asked. Sayles replied he still hadn’t.

Paul bounced around a bit after that and landed in Portland, Oregon. While being turned down for a job at a community access station that he’d read about in the classifieds, Paul learned that Portland had the best endowed public access television facilities in the country. Paul threw caution to the wind, and for the next ten years produced an average twenty to forty hours of aired public affairs television a week for the better part of the next decade. He also wrote for many of the smaller local publications and produced his own newspaper the Portlandian for a time. Paul was incredibly influential helping among other things to end a program that had the national guard accompanying police on drug raids, stop clear-cutting in the city’s main watershed, redistrict a police precinct that had one of the highest per capita kill rates in the country, get a few corrupt people out of office, and get a dark horse into the State Senate. None of these of course brought a constant income, for example he was paid $50 for an article that many credited with helping to defeat a $1.3 billion pork barrel project at the ballot. Bread and butter jobs included driving forklift, delivering pizza, packing fish and selling electronics.

Having given himself about ten years to make a living at this, Paul went back to school to get a law degree, figuring it would be a way to deal with the issues he’d dealt with through media and activism and maybe make a living at it. He took Gerry Spence’s advice and went to the school that cost the least, University of Washington Law School. He figured this would be a chance to take a break from activism. For reasons that are unclear, the WTO Ministerial followed him to Seattle. Paul spent much of his time in school setting up a program for Legal Observers, and helping to start the first of the Independent Media Centers. He played a role in numerous lawsuits that arose out of these protests, participated in several documentaries about these protests and wrote several reports and numerous articles.

As a lawyer, Paul runs a small solo practice. He’s done a lot of work defending the rights of activists and protesters, protected a bunch of medical marijuana users, pulled the Secret Service into Court, and gotten a cat into a condominium that didn’t allow pets. He’s taught video at several local colleges, lectured at others, and writes articles and opinion pieces.

A year and a half ago he moved from Seattle to Port Townsend, a seaside community, chasing quality of life. There are lots of beautiful beaches and woods and he adopted a dog form the local shelter with whom he takes many long walks.

Recently the area he lives in has become a hive of activity for Homeland Security. The Border Patrol has increased 2500% and now has set up checkpoints around the Peninsula where people are stopped and questioned. There is a new Homeland Security facility planned with 125 new agents. Paul has been active, lobbying his government, filing Freedom of Information Act requests and speaking out wherever he can. He recently was able to get the U.S. Attorney to issue a statement to the Border Patrol that it would not prosecute low level offenses, and to dismiss charges against four people detained at these checkpoints.

Life is good.