Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder Leaves Office (Good Riddance) [View all]

[woo me with science]

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/09/25/obamas-attorney-general-eric-holder-leaves-office-good-riddance

Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder Leaves Office (Good Riddance)
by Dave Lindorff
CommonDreams

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A corporate lawyer with the Wall Street law firm Covington & Burling, Holder will be remembered for his timid defense of civil rights; his overseeing and even encouragement of the massive militarization of the nation’s police forces; his anti-First Amendment efforts to pursue not just whistleblowers but the journalists who use them; threatening both with jail and in fact jailing a number of them (particularly in the case of whistleblower extraordinaire Edward Snowden, and WikiLeaks journalist Julian Assange, both of whom reportedly face U.S. treason charges); and his weak enforcement of environmental protection laws.

But Holder, who came into his position as the nation’s top law enforcement officer in early 2009 at the start of the Obama administration and at the height of the financial crisis, will be best remembered for his overt announcement that there would be no attempt to prosecute the criminals at the top of the nation’s top banks, whose brazen crimes of theft, deceit, fraud and perjury during the Bush/Cheney years and beyond sank not just the U.S. but the global economy into a crisis which is still with us.

Holder not only did not make any effort to put Wall Street’s banking titans behind bars for their epic crimes, he did not even make them step down from their exalted and absurdly highly compensated executive positions when his office reached negotiated settlements with the banks in civil cases involving those crimes—civil cases that almost always allowed the banks to settle without even having to admit their guilt. (His ludicrous excuse: punishing these criminal executive might jeopardize the banks’ stocks and hurt “innocent” shareholders!) Nor was this legal benevalence limited to purely financial crimes. Banks like Citicorp and HSBC, which were found to have knowingly laundered millions—even billions—of dollars in drug money for drug cartels, were also allowed by Holder to escape with petty fines, and no prosecution of a single bank executive....
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The illegal and unconstitutional wars continue in Iraq and Afghanistan, and are now being expanded into Africa and Syria and, at least by proxy, but most dangerously, to Ukraine. Civil liberties are under attack at least as severely as they were back in the McCarthy period, with whistleblowers being jailed, the president asserting the unfettered right to order the killing without trial of American citizens, and a spying system in place run by the National Security Agency that is monitoring and storing, by its own admission, virtually all electronic communications of the American people. The government is also as closed and secret in its operation as it has been since 1974, when it was broadened following the Watergate and Cointelpro scandals, and is certainly less transparent and open than it was even under Bush/Cheney. The Obama administration has also done little to nothing about tackling carbon emissions despite the president’s lies to the contrary in his address to the UN.

In all of this extraordinary list of treachery and cowardice, Holder has played his sycophantic role as a defender of corporate America, of white privilege, and of Washington power. He has been both the John Ashcroft and the Alberto Gonzalez of the Obama administration. (Actually, that comparison is unfair to John Ashcroft, who at least was a man of conviction—repellent as some of those convictions may have been. In Holder’s case, we have a man not of principle, but who is simply a corporate lawyer, ready to do his clients’ bidding, however sordid and corrupt.)
(more at link)