Mike Papantonio: Jail Time for Marijuana Smokers but Not for Corporate Killers
Ed Schultz talked to environmental lawyer Mike Papantonio about whether it's likely we'll see any criminal prosecutions of anyone at BP or the other companies that caused the disaster in the Gulf. Pap pointed out that our laws are structured where those convicted of having three ounces of marijuana can wind up thrown in jail, but if you run a large corporation and your decisions kill people nothing happens.
Now that BP has decided to hire former Dick Cheney campaign press secretary Anne Womack-Kolton to run their PR for them (What in the hell were they thinking?), Papantonio said he's going to file a RICO case next week. He still wants some answers about who was in that secret Dick Cheney energy task force meeting now that it looks like the old players are coming back. Here's more on Womak-Kolton.
BP Hires Former Dick Cheney Spox To Run PR Ops:
BP, struggling to maintain its image while taking responsibility for the worst oil disaster in U.S. history, has hired someone new to head its American public relations operation: Anne Womack-Kolton, the former campaign press secretary for Vice President Dick Cheney.
Womack-Kolton ran Cheney's press shop during the 2004 campaign, and worked as an assistant press secretary in 2000. She was also an assistant in the White House press office.
She begins today, the BP press office tells TPM.
In the private sector, she's worked for the Brunswick Group and APCO Worldwide.
BP, in announcing the hire to Reuters, only mentioned that she was the director of public affairs for the Department of Energy under President George W. Bush. A 2005 press release from the DOE mentions that she worked for Cheney, and a slew of articles from 2004 cite her as Cheney's spokeswoman.
Womack-Kolton has also been the director of public affairs for the U.S. Treasury and a senior adviser to an SEC chair, according to the DOE press release, and was the Washington liaison for Sen. John Cornyn when he was the Texas attorney general.
Up here in the great white north you can be charged with impaired driving, doing almost double the speed limit, with possession of cocaine and only pay a $500 fine. BUT you have to be a former member of parliament, and it also helps if your wife is a current (Conservative) member of parliament. Same shit, different country.
They have allowed corporations to kill millions of people around the world with little or no consequense for them. It really is a crying shame but the only way to fix it is to start by emptying washington out. WE have to really shake it up and put all new faces in there. Then we can do something real about corporate lobbying, lying and bribery. We can start regulating banks and businesses and requiring honesty and fairness in all dealings.
Over that same 40 year period, at least 10 million people have been ground down by the USA justice system because of this war on illicit drugs, many for a harmless plant used for 10's of thousands of years, called cannabis. Today illicit drugs are more readily available, more potent, and generally less expensive than 40 years ago. By any metric except the number of persons incarcerated, the number of civil liberties surrendered, or the amount of monies expended, the "War on Drugs" has been a failure.
That doesn't even factor in the other collateral damage, like the repeat of the corruption of the 1st (alcohol) Prohibition, rise of violent street crime, gangs and drug lords, or private militias and narco-terrorism that threaten our Latin American neighbors.
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Obama Repeating the Mistakes of the Drug War
By Rhonda Swan, Palm Beach Post - Tuesday, June 01 2010
[ http://www.palmbeachpost.com/opinion/columnis... ]
"Forty years. One trillion dollars. Hundreds of thousands of lives. That's the cost of the U.S. war on drugs. And the tab continues to rise."
"This week, President Obama announced that he will send 1,200 National Guard troops to boost security along the U.S.-Mexico border. He also will request $500 million for border protection and law enforcement. That's a lot of Benjamins for a failed policy."
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[snip]
The "Hope" and "Change you can believe in" were, surprise surprise, nothing more than throw-away campaign talking points. Welcome to the new boss, same as the old boss! While Obama talks liberalization on one hand with the curtailing of DEA raids on State-approved MMJ dispensaries, he doubles down on the repression of Prohibition 2.0 with the appointment of yet another fascist for Drug Czar, increasing anti-drug funding, and expansive new measures like Federal DUI enforcement based upon faulty testing.
There will be no regression or elimination of Police State tactics imbued in the misnamed "War on Drugs" -- really a war against people's rights, from either the Republican or Democratic Parties. Both are heavily committed to the organized special interest groups that benefit from Prohibition 2.0. The only politicians of those parties which are dedicated to repeal of Prohibition 2.0 are Republican Ron Paul and Democrat Dennis Kucinich. Only the Green Party has a stated party plank of repeal of Prohibition 2.0.
It's too bad that Obama has cast off his populist past in favor of Crony Capitalist special interests -- does he actually remember that lucky happenstance that he, as a young adult involved in the consumption of marijuana and cocaine, was not arrested, prosecuted, and convicted as a drug abuser -- no college, no law school, and no Presidency even possible in that alternate future.
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
-- John F. Kennedy
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