There are a lot of Johnny and Jane Come Lately’s out and about these days bad mouthing BP (British Petroleum) as though they just discovered corporate malfeasance on its part. I actually have a track record of opposing the rotten graft-infested oil industry’s record of political manipulation and environmental degradation.
In 1971-72 I was one of the People’s Lobby’s “fanatic fifty” that helped put the Clean Environment Act on the 1972 primary election ballot in California as Proposition 9. It was written by Roger Jon Diamond, an attorney who has become a lifelong friend and colleague. It went down to defeat because the oil companies, chemical companies, and utilities spent millions to oppose it with scare tactics. They lied then just as they continue to lie to the American people now.
In 1978 when I ran for Lieutenant Governor on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket I was the only candidate running against incumbent Democrat Merv Dymally and Republican winner Mike Curb to oppose the proposed SOHIO oil terminal and supertanker port facility that they wanted built in the Los Angeles Harbor. I opposed it on environmental grounds — just as PFP City Council Candidate Jim Stanbery had earlier been propelled to prominence in his race when the Italian Sansenina Oil Tanker blew up in the Los Angeles Harbor. On the Sam Yorty show on Channel 13 I told the television audience that I also opposed the project because giving half the Alaskan oil reserves and control of the largest supertanker port on the West Coast to a foreign owned company ran contrary to the American goal of energy independence.
Sam Yorty asked me, “doesn’t SOHIO stand for Standard of Ohio?”
Of course I pointed out, but it’s a subsidiary of BRITISH PETROLEUM which in turn at the time was owned 55% by the British government.
In spite of Dymally, Curb, and both the Democratic and Republican parties campaigning for the project, it never came about. I hope my campaign had something to do with that.
In the early 90′s I was the only non-Armenian founding vice president of ARAMAC, the Armenian American Action Council, having previously been a founder of one of its constituent groups, the L.A. based Anti-Blockade Committee. I formulated the plan to boycott L.A. based UNOCAL and AMOCO, two of the big oil company players in developing the Azerbaijani Caspian Sea oil fields, providing economic support to the military backed dictatorship of Azerbaijan which was blockading Armenia. AMOCO eventually merged with BP.
Today it’s school teacher Tonya Craft on trial in Georgia for supposedly molesting young girls at her home. Yesteryear it was the cases of Gerald Amirault in Massachusetts, Margaret Kelly Michaels in New Jersey, Debbie and Alvin McCuan in Kern County, California, and Raymond Buckey and Peggy McMartin in Manhattan Beach, California. When are law enforcement and prosecutors going to learn that if you interrogate young children over and over and over again that eventually they will answer your leading questions the way that you think the interrogator wants them to be answered?
Some years ago, I was court appointed defense investigator in the case of a retired deputy sheriff on a so-called “repressed memory” case that was filed something like 25 years after the purported molestation of his former step-daughter. The so-called victim was so nutty that she’d been repeatedly in lock up psychiatric facilities, at least once in a catatonic state. Her room mates were convicted felons (who naturally were not exactly disposed to like a retired sheriff who came from a fourth generation family of deputies: his father, son and grandson were also deputies). Because the case was so old, and because California and Los Angeles county don’t give court appointed private investigators access to locating data bases that they do allow law enforcement and public defender investigators to use, the court appointed lawyer eventually had to plead the client guilty because the court wouldn’t give us reasonable continuances to find witnesses.
When the case came up for sentencing, the “victim’s” treating psychologist demonstrated just how bizarre the prosecution’s case really was. The psychologist broke down crying on the witness stand, testifying about how it had been necessary for him “to bond with my patient” to get through the trauma of the repressed memories of her molestation. He testified that he had convinced her to report the purported molestation to law enforcement. Every psychologist I’ve ever described this too pointed out to me that (a) for the psychologist to claim to have “bonded” with the patient was unprofessional at a minimum and (b) his having urged her to bring criminal charges against somebody was both unprofessional and unethical on its face. His having broken down crying on the witness stand rose to the level of mondo bizarro.
Thankfully, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out the retroactive effect of the extended statutes of limitations California had passed on these so-called “repressed memory” cases so my client got out of prison relatively soon. But for these mondo bizarro continuing prosecutions based upon child witnesses who get put through the ringer by prosecutors, law enforcement officers, child welfare officers, and psychologists until they say what the adults want to hear, states need to enact strict guidelines and to implement by law what the Massachusetts Supreme Court laid out in what are known as Amirault Taint Hearings.
Orange County does it right. They have a one – interview policy for children in which there are molestation allegations. Instead of a myriad of people interviewing a child over and over and over again, everybody who needs to be in the loop comes together for a single interview to insure that the child isn’t coerced or led into inventing an incriminating story like a fairy tale.
For those cities and counties that don’t get it right even with all the experience and literature about wrongful prosecutions on molestation charges, we need Amirault Taint Hearings legislated as mandatory where there is a reasonable inference that a child was led into inventing a story for a prosecution so that some deputy prosecutor could make some headlines and advance their career.
In case people missed this little asterisk on the British election results, a full 5% — in raw numbers just under 1.5 million Britons — voted for the United Kingdom Independence Party and the British National Party. These parties are the spiritual descendants of Sir Oswald Mosley’s pro-Nazi movement and try to maintain a polite veneer of supposedly being non-racist enough to meet the qualifications of parties to run in British elections.
This poses a BIG problem for electoral reform in Britain.
One thing that is a must for either the Conservative or Labour parties to come to power in a coalition government is to get the support of the Liberal Democrats. There is simply no other possible coalition formula that doesn’t include them, and the Lib-Dem bottom line is going to include some form of proportional representation or electoral arrangement that enables them to reflect with parliamentary seats a closer measure of the votes they actually get.
Many “list” systems of straight proportional representation systems that nations use also have a minimum proportion necessary for a party to receive any seats at all. If I recall correctly, Germany has a 5% minimum threshold. If Britain went to a system like that, an electoral alliance between the BNP, UKIP and other far-right groups looks like they could easily attain a 5% threshold, inasmuch as they just did it standing on their own.
What the Lib-Dems and the Labour Party might want to agree on as a method of keeping the Nazis out of parliament while still instilling fairness to the system would be a French type of system, where there are two rounds of elections with every party able to participate. What happens in effect in France is that after the first round, whoever came out on the left with the best chance of winning and whoever on the right has the best chance of winning goes on to the second round, with the other parties that they can align themselves with dropping out of the race.
This latter type of election is similar to what some Labour Party cabinet members were already suggesting de facto, when in the last days before the election they openly promoted “strategic voting,” urging their own members to vote Liberal Democratic where that party was the best chance of beating the Conservative candidates and imploring Liberal Democratic voters to vote Labour where their candidates, likewise, were in a better position against the Conservatives.
No matter how you configure election rules, somebody will get and advantage and somebody will lose an advantage. When California used, for a couple of elections, an open primary system, I was the hands down primary winner against the leadership of my own party, the Peace and Freedom Party. I set the all-time high vote record for the PFP primary for any candidate for any office in any election in history. Partially as a result, PFP’s leadership teamed up with the Democrats and Republicans to challenge the open primary in court. They got rid of the Open Primary, which was immensely popular with California’s voters, but they are stuck with the fact that I will now always hold the high primary vote record as long as we have a closed primary.
This is the second in my series of anecdotes about Kevin Akin, Chair of the California Peace & Freedom Party.
In 1994, when I was the PFP’s nominee for State Treasurer, I had repeatedly sought a resolution from the State Central Committee of the party to take a strong stand against the Turkish-Azerjaijani blockade of Armenia that was literally killing Armenians. The party had twice tabled a resolution I’d proposed and I was getting insistent upon having the matter heard. Over dinner with Tom Condit at the Oakland Airport Hilton, where I’d stopped for a campaign appearance in the Oakland area, I outlined the issues for him and he promised that he would use his influence for me to get a fair hearing on the matter from the PFP’s executive committee.
This was when I first found out that people I’d thought of as friends, ideological allies, and comrades were in fact back-stabbing, sectarian, and incompetent fruitcakes who were completely out of touch with real issues that were important to real people. Not only did Condit later deny that we’d even discussed the matter, Bob Evans — a then perennial party candidate for Attorney General — later denied knowing what the party position was even though he’d been on the conference call that decided the issue. But Kevin Akin’s role in the whole affair was even more insidious.
Various party activists had gathered at different locations around the state. In Los Angeles we were at the Paul Robeson Center in South Central L.A. linked with the other sites.
The one really choice bit of insanity that is seared into my memory during the Alice in Wonderland type discussion that emanated from my request to go on record for having the Commerce Department apply the anti-boycott law to Armenia to protect it from corporations that were complicit with the Turkish/Azeri blockade was the one by Kevin Akin. Let me preface his statement by explaining that PFP, which was founded by people with a real concept of opposing racism and bigotry of all sorts, had degenerated into a clique of sectarians who only had a concept of anti-racist struggles if they were radical chic as in Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic and Mau Mauing the Flak Catchers. Because there was no existing left-wing radical chic movement about dealing with the Turkish genocide of World War I in which 1.5 million Armenians were slaughtered, and the ongoing legacy of that conflict, most of the PFP leadership couldn’t grasp what to average people who read the New York Times or the Los Angeles Times or virtually any daily newspaper would understand.
Let me also point out that under the leadership of Kay McGlachlin and Marilyn Seals, two eminent leaders of PFP during the seventies, PFP had adopted novel parliamentary procedures including points of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. that could be called during meetings just like more traditional “points of order.” Unfortunately for me, since I wasn’t a voting member of the executive committee, I wasn’t in a position to invoke a point of racism against what Kevin said.
The inane (and insane) discussion that ensued on my proposal for a resolution centered around everybody else’s ignorance of the history of the Caucusus region and the issues surrounding Armenia’s relations with Russia, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and the United States role in the area. So, people like Kevin would insert tid-bits of misinformation that they’d heard from lord-knows-where as though they were contributing to a sensible discussion. But the worst was not even the substance of what Kevin said, but with the language that he prefaced it with: “….all the Armenians I ever knew…..” believed or espoused thus and so.
Now, if he’d substituted the word “Blacks,” or “Chicanos,” or “Native Americans,” for Armenians, everybody on the call would have been up in arms because it would immediately be apparent to them that he had maligned a radical chic cause celebre group of people. Not one word of protest, not one point of racism, not one gasp was to be heard from the assemblage, who apparently considered that this was some sort of wise and legitimate comment, i.e., what Kevin had heard anecdotally from “all the Armenians” he ever knew.
Bottom line: I had to repudiate PFP’s leadership position because what they came out with was an abomination that placed the party to the right of Dick Cheney, and that was really hard to accomplish given that Cheney, as President of Halliburton, had received the Azeri-American Chamber of Commerce “Freedom Support Award” around that time. In fact, the position they took was to the right of the position of the Turkish embassy. They wound up calling for ‘sanctions against both sides” in the dispute, which, since under Section 901 of the Freedom Support Act there already were sanctions against Azerbaijan under American law, put PFP in the place of supporting extension of sanctions to Armenia for the crime of the nation’s having been blockaded by its neighbors (which led to the death of 1% of the population in a single year). Whereas Dick Cheney and the Turkish government wanted Section 901 sanctions taken off Azerbaijan, not even they advocated sanctions against Armenia.
Now, Kevin claims to be a somewhat religious Jew. I on the other hand am a thoroughly secular and blasphemous Jew at best, even though I’m the great-great grandson of a Rabbi. But at least I understand the concept of why Jews traditionally call themselves the “chosen people.” Being the “chosen people” is not a privilege. It’s a duty. Supposedly, god chose us to do his/her bidding and to bring justice to Earth. So, if we have any duties imposed on us by history in the spirit of our tribal mythology, then we should assume the duty to speak for all other nations, like the Armenians, the Roma (Gypsies), the Garifuna and all other peoples who like the Jews live for the most part in a diaspora and who have been routinely persecuted.
But then Kevin’s opinion on the subject was predicated on his anecdotal experience of what he was told by “all the Armenians” he ever knew.
In 1973 I was a first-time, off-year freshman at California State University at Northridge, one of only two off-year freshman (meaning I’d gotten out of high school a semester early) enrolled in Dr. Dennis Beller’s Political Science 100 course. This is the kind of course that’s requisite for any political science major where one learns the differences between “power” and “authority” and the structures of social and political order, i.e., the structure of power, the structure of authority, the structure of society, and the structure of ideology. It is the same or similar to a beginning class in anthropology, where one learns the differences between simple societies like the Kalahari Bushmen, where all four structures would be the same and complex societies like Britain, where for example all authority lies in the Queen but all the actual power of government resides in parliament.
When Dr. Beller was explaining the British scenario, given that it was late in the year and the polls suggested the possibility of a hung-election in Britain, with the Liberal Party holding the balance of power between the Conservatives and Labour, I asked whether during such a situation the Queen would actually exercise actual power rather than only her nominal authority which lacked power. Dr. Beller deftly swept aside the question as being too theoretical, since there was such a remote possibility of the Liberals holding the balance of power that it wasn’t worth discussing.
Dr. Beller was wrong on that one. My prediction came true: Labour came in first with a plurality of seats, the Conservatives second, and Liberals holding the balance of power. With the Conservatives being the outgoing government, the outgoing prime minister insisted that the Queen should give him first crack at forming a governing coalition. Labour had more seats than anybody else and demanded that they be given the first shot as the largest party. The Queen chose Labour.
So, my question was well put: did the Queen assume a degree of power that she normally doesn’t have? Will Queen Elizabeth wind up with power again when as is this time very likely, that on Thursday the British electorate will produce a hung parliament with the Liberal Democrats getting more votes than one or both of the major parties but fewer seats than either?
Regardless of how one answers or debates the theoretical questions that only political scientists seem to care about, as an American I’m glad that my country solved the problem of monarchical power by revolting against it in 1776.
Honorable President Felipe de Jesus Calderon Hinojosa:
In light of the latest outrage committed by the United States of America (E.E.U.U.) against the rights of Mexican citizens and persons descended Mexican citizens residing in the E.E.U.U., I am requesting that the United States of Mexico (USM) invoke the provisions of Article XXI of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (hereinafter “Treaty”) to demand the creation of a bilateral commission to address a series of issues that have arisen. Amongst these are:
The entire history of E.E.U.U. violations of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Protocols of Quaretaro
The legitimacy of the E.E.U.U. / USM border in the context of perennial E.E.U.U. violations of the Treaty and the Protocols (hereinafter “Protocols”)
E.E.U.U. systemic violations of the rights of Mexican nationals under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations
E.E.U.U. systemic violations of the rights of Mexican nationals under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
The State of Arizona’s enactment of SB 1070.
In the event that E.E.U.U. declines to participate in a bilateral commission or in the event that such a commission is unable to resolve issues arising under the Treaty rights of Mexico, Mexican nationals, and the descendants of Mexican nationals, Mexico should publicly declare an intention at the outset to seek third-nation neutral arbitration of any outstanding disputes as its right under Article XXI of the Treaty.
At the risk of belaboring the history reasons for why invocation of Article XXI is necessary and appropriate, to the extent that any treaty is a contract between nations, the E.E.U.U. has never been in compliance with the express terms of the Treaty or the Protocols in the context of E.E.U.U. domestic constitutional standards and domestic statutes. To cite just a few examples:
In California, following the cession of land to E.E.U.U. following the Mexican – American War, former and current citizens of Mexico were denied the right to bring charges or testify in court against “white” people, on the theory that Mexicans were defined as being at least one-quarter of indigenous extraction and were therefore denied by statute the right to testify against “white” people. A concrete example of how this impacted Mexicans following the war was that it sparked the rebellion against E.E.U.U. authority by Joaquin Murrieta, who was denied the right to bring charges against Americans who had gang raped his wife and lynched his brother. Murrieta’s rebellion was defined as “crime” by the authorities of the E.E.U.U.
Organizations such as the Texas Rangers operated with state authority to simply run Mexicans off their land by means of threats and violence
Thousands of Mexican, like African-Americans, were subjected to lynching without legal recourse throughout the “Southwest” of the E.E.U.U.
During the ‘Great Depression,’ the administration of President Herbert Hoover instigated the forcible deportation and flight to escape threats and violence of 2,000,000 persons of Mexican origin or descent, approximately 1.2 million of whom are estimated to have actually held citizenship in the E.E.U.U.
Mexican children were systematically subjected to segregation in education and other social institutions
Indigenous U.S. “Indian” tribes, formerly recognized by the USM before the conquest of the “Southwest,” are repeatedly subjected to the desecration of their tribal burial grounds
E.E.U.U. authorities systematically violate the rights of Mexican nationals that are accorded to by the Vienna Convention on Consular Affairs to consular notification and access.
Returning to my theme of treaties being akin to contracts between nations, E.E.U.U. has consistently and flagrantly violated its contract with USM and must be held to account for those violations, especially in light of the latest outrage perpetrated by Arizona. The mechanisms of Article XXI to address these issues should be immediately invoked by Mexico to protect its rights as a nation-state party to the Treaty and the rights of its citizens.
I stand ready to assist USM in any endeavors it chooses to undertake to enforce the basic human rights placed in jeopardy by the actions of E.E.U.U. and its constituent states and local authorities.
Respectfully Yours,
Jan B. Tucker
cc: Patricia Espinosa Cantellano, Secretariat of Foreign Affairs (SRE)
Governor Huey P. Long of Louisiana once warned that “If fascism came to America, it would come on a program of Americanism.” If anybody has any doubt that SB 1070 of Arizona and other draconian measures people keep proposing about so-called “illegal aliens” is any different from the way that Jews, Gypsies, and political refugees from the Nazis were treated in pre-World War II Europe, they should read Erich Maria Remarque’s book, Flotsam. Anyway, these are the responses that I am proposing for how LULAC (of which I am a national civil rights commissioner) and other civil rights organizations should respond to the passage of SB 1070. This is from a memo I just fired off to some top level LULAC people:
Jews forced to wear Yellow Star of David
1. In World War II, on the day that had been decreed by the Nazis for the Jews of Denmark to wear Yellow Stars of David on their clothing so that they could be singled out and identified, the King of Denmark took his morning horse ride wearing a Yellow Star of David himself. By that afternoon, the King’s message to the Danish people resulted in every Dane who was not a Nazi and a traitor wearing the Yellow Star of David. This act of civil disobedience made it impossible to implement the law.
LULAC calls on all Arizonans and everybody visiting the state to wear a Yellow Star of David in protest against the law with the word’s “undocumented immigrant to Arizona” written on it. It will throw a big monkey wrench into what constitutes probable cause for police officers who want to enforce the law, especially if they fail to stop and attempt to identify gringos wearing the Yellow Star of David with that message.
Additionally, we call on everybody in Arizona to state the following if questioned by law enforcement about their immigration status: “Disobedience to an unconstitutional law is not punishable before or after the law is declared unconstitutional. I therefore respectfully decline to comply with your request as it violates my constitutional right to privacy and my right to be free from unlawful search and seizure.”
2. We demand that Arizona enact a law to make the provisions of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations self-executing so that anybody who is detained for two hours or longer for suspicion of being unlawfully in the United States be advised of their right to contact the consular officials of their nation and that their consular officials be notified by law enforcement of their detention and given access to the prisoner.
3. We call upon Mexico to invoke the provisions of Article XXI of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to demand formation of a bilateral commission to formulate proposed solutions to ALL ISSUES INVOLVING IMMIGRATION INCLUDING THE QUESTION OF THE LEGITIMACY OF THE BORDER ITSELF BECAUSE OF CONSISTENT U.S. (E.E.U.U.) VIOLATION OF THE TREATY AND THE PROTOCOLS OF QUERETARO. If such a commission cannot resolve these issues, we expect Mexico to invoke Article XXI rights to third-nation neutral arbitration of the disputes.
As people know, I’m serving my seventh consecutive term as Chair of the Board of Directors of the California Association of Licensed Investigators (CALI). As a natural consequence, I know a few things about what goes on in the private investigator world.
A rival organization was founded by some former dissident directors of CALI years ago. It started out hostile to CALI, then voted in sane leadership and morphed into a still-rival but competent organization.
Fast forward. In its last elections, there is a knock-down, drag-out fight between factions. The new faction that gets in, reinstalling one of the founders to leadership (i.e., the guys who founded the group with one of its goals being to prevent a “good ‘ole boy” style of leadership from becoming entrenched.
So, who gets appointed as the group’s legislative leader, the person who’s supposed to influence the legislature about what bills to pass and which ones to defeat and how to amend bad bills into good ones? A guy who has publicly referred to prominent members of the legislature on both sides of the aisle as “whores,” accusing them of taking unlawful payoffs for legislation. Not just publicly, but PUBLICLY!!! This is a guy whose behavior was interpreted to be so bizarre and outlandish that a prominent legislative staffer thought it prudent to talk to the legislature’s sergeant at arms about him, wondering if she had to fear for her safety at a legislative hearing.
Remember Lenny Bruce’s How to Talk Dirty and Influence People? Well appointing this guy as legislative chair is worse than talking dirty!
U.S. District Court Judge Florence Marie Cooper died Friday.
I had the distinct honor of seeing her courage in doing the right thing when I was defense investigator for Gyula Tamas Zubovicz (aka Dracula) when the LAPD and the District Attorney’s office were dead set on framing him. It’s not that Zubovicz was an upstanding example of morality, but when the authorities couldn’t get him for anything real, they just invented a case.
Zubovicz was accused to conspiracy to possess explosives in a residential area. The evidence came down to the word of a notorious snitch, Gregory James Bartole. Bartole is still on the scene and still as delusional as he was before: he recently convinced some other ex-con that he was the head of the Sicilian Mafia on the West Coast, as though LCN would have anybody in its ranks that had ever testified as state’s evidence before.
The LAPD didn’t put the detective on the witness stand who’d taken certain evidentiary photos of where dynamite wrappers had supposedly been burned in a fire place and the ashes supposedly recovered. Maybe they were worried that his having been sued by his wife for divorce on the grounds of extreme cruelty would come out, or maybe the D.A. — John C. Spence III — was worried that the photos he’d taken clearly showed the electrical cord that went to the fire place which had long since been cleaned out and converted to a faux electrically lit up fireplace.
Long story short, there had been a motion in limine granted by Judge Cooper before the trial even began precluding the prosecution from referring to the Hungarian Mafia, the Jewish Defense League or the initials JDL or introducing any evidence about those entities. Spence had claimed that he’d given us his entire file during discovery and there was nothing in any of that evidence that he was introducing — or so he claimed — that had anything to do with the Hungarian Mafia.
At the last minute of the trial, literally, he showed us (the defense team at counsel table) a two page document without showing us the second page which he wanted to introduce to prove Zubovicz’s co-defendant’s address at a certain point in time. The second page he didn’t show us, which the jury saw, contained the claim that the co-defendant was a purported hit-man for the Hungarian Mafia.
The jury hung on Zubovicz but convicted the co-defendant. I spoke with one of the jurors who’d held out for Zubovicz acquittal and found out that the reference to the Hungarian Mafia was why the jury convicted the co-defendant.\
I filed an affidavit with Judge Cooper alleging violation of her order on the motion in limine by the prosecutor, Spence. I asked her to jail him for contempt of court.
She didn’t do that but she went one step better: she declared a mistrial and threw out the jury’s verdict against the co-defendant. Judge Cooper was a courageous woman and an honorable judge of the highest order.
