RSN: Jeffrey Toobin | A Past Case May Dictate How the Michael Flynn Inquiry Proceeds

23 May 20

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23 May 20

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Jeffrey Toobin | A Past Case May Dictate How the Michael Flynn Inquiry Proceeds

Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker
Toobin writes: "Michael Flynn, President Trump's first national-security adviser, pleaded guilty to lying to F.B.I. agents, in December, 2017, in a case brought by the special counsel Robert Mueller."

EXCERPT:

Last week, John Gleeson, a retired federal judge, published an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, denouncing the Justice Department’s attempt to dismiss the case. “The record reeks of improper political influence,” Gleeson wrote. “Government motions to dismiss at this stage are virtually unheard of.” He offered the court a suggestion: “It can appoint an independent attorney to act as a ‘friend of the court,’ ensuring a full, adversarial inquiry, as the judge in the Flynn case has done in other situations where the department abdicated its prosecutorial role.” Sullivan clearly read the piece, because he promptly appointed Gleeson himself, who is now in private practice, to argue against the dismissal of the case against Flynn.

Gleeson’s passing reference to Sullivan’s history “in other situations” as a foe of prosecutorial misconduct is the clue to what may happen this time. It was a reference to a disgraceful episode in the recent history of the Justice Department: the failed prosecution of Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska. In brief, Stevens was charged with neglecting to report as gifts certain renovations that had been made on his vacation home in Alaska. He was convicted in a trial before Judge Sullivan in 2008, shortly before he lost a bid for a seventh term in the Senate. During and especially after the trial, it came out that prosecutors had withheld a variety of exculpatory material from Stevens’s defense. In light of this, Eric Holder, in one of his first acts as Attorney General, in 2009, dropped the prosecution. Not satisfied with simply ending the case, Sullivan ruled that “the interest of justice requires the appointment of a non-government disinterested attorney”—in that case, it was Henry F. Schuelke III, a Washington lawyer—to investigate the prosecutorial misconduct. While Schuelke was conducting his inquiry, Stevens died in a plane crash, and one of the prosecutors committed suicide. (I wrote about the Stevens prosecution saga here.)

In other words, Sullivan has appointed Gleeson to much the same role as he had named Schuelke, a decade earlier. Of course, there is a major difference between the Stevens and Flynn cases. Stevens was about an excess of prosecutorial zeal, while Flynn is about insufficient effort by the Justice Department: cheating to win versus cheating to lose. “Nothing has changed on the merits of the case against Flynn, therefore there is no credible explanation for the motion to dismiss, other than there might be some kind of improper behavior going on here,” Sam Buell, a professor at Duke Law School and a former federal prosecutor, told me.

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Donald Trump arrives for a campaign rally in Toledo, Ohio. (photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)

ALSO SEE: Behind Trump’s Demand to Reopen Churches:
Slipping Poll Numbers and Alarm Inside His Campaign

Trump Deems Places of Worship 'Essential,' Claims He Can Order Their Reopening
Shannon Pettypiece, Kristen Welker and Carol E. Lee, NBC News
Excerpt: "President Donald Trump said Friday that places of worship are 'essential' and should open this weekend, threatening to override governors who have ordered churches, synagogues and mosques not to reopen in the coming days."
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Esperanza Camargo, who works at a grocery store, poses for a portrait in her protective gloves and mask. (photo: William Camargo)

Essential Workers Fight for Their Lives
Michelle Chen, In These Times
Chen writes: "At a time of record unemployment, Cintya Medina feels lucky to have a job at the Barnes & Noble warehouse in Monroe, N.J. - but she does not want a job that puts her in danger."
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'As the nation remains focused on COVID-19, the U.S. government has aggressively begun to rush the deportations of some of the most vulnerable migrant children in its care.' (photo: Eric Gay/AP)

The Trump Administration Is Rushing Deportations of Migrant Children During Coronavirus
Lomi Kriel, ProPublica
Kriel writes: "Their father was missing. Their mother was miles away. Two sisters, ages 8 and 11, were survivors of sexual assault and at risk of deportation. With the nation focused on COVID-19, the U.S. government is rushing the deportations of migrant children."
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Jeff Bezos. (photo: David Ryder/Getty Images)

Jeff Bezos Shouldn't Be a Billionaire, Much Less a Trillionaire
Mindy Isser, Jacobin
Isser writes: "Jeff Bezos is reportedly on pace to be the world's first trillionaire. That's a grotesque indictment of our society - and the only way to change it is to organize Amazon workers to wrest back the extraordinary power and wealth that Bezos is hoarding."

eff Bezos may become the world’s first trillionaire. The Amazon founder’s net worth grew by an average of 34 percent over the last five years, and according to a recent analysis, he is on track to reach trillionaire status by 2026.

The nauseating news arrived amid a pandemic that has thrown millions out of work and sent unemployment skyrocketing to rates rivaling those of the Great Depression. Bezos has long been the richest man on the planet, but the fact that he continues to pile up interminable mounds of money, Scrooge McDuck style, during such an intense economic downturn, exposes anew the depravities of our economic system. For one person to be so obscenely wealthy while so many people are barely hanging on is not just disturbing and immoral, it is an attack on democratic principles and the ability for everyone to live a dignified life.

Amazon, which employs nearly 1 million people worldwide, is the second-largest private employer in the United States. While the company brags about the way it treats its employees — a $15 minimum wage, “comprehensive health care,” paid time off — Amazon workers tell a much different story. From tech workers to warehouse workers, Jeff Bezos’s employees have been ringing alarm bells about both their working conditions and the company’s wider practices.

In Amazon’s “fulfillment centers,” employees are on their feet for their entire shift, finding, grabbing, and moving items that eventually make their way to customers. A worker can expect to walk twelve miles per shift, and it’s not uncommon for people to collapse or get sick from heat or exhaustion. The company “suggests” that workers only use the bathroom during designated breaks, which has led some to resort to urinating into bottles and others to wear diapers during their shift. Because these warehouses are massive — ranging from four hundred thousand to 1 million square feet — walking to the bathroom ends up being a fair amount of “time off task,” which Amazon tracks automatically. Too much time off task can result in termination, even if that time was just used to go to the bathroom. And because so many workers are temporary employees, hoping to be made permanent, they face significant pressure to stay as productive as humanly possible.

For white-collar workers, conditions are less physically dangerous, but they can be equally deflating. A 2015 New York Times report quotes a former book marketing worker whose “enduring image,” the Times wrote, “was watching people weep in the office, a sight other workers described as well. ‘You walk out of a conference room and you’ll see a grown man covering his face,’ he said. ‘Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.’” Others reported going through traumatic events like cancer or miscarriages (or even happy ones like becoming a parent) and being pushed out. A human resources executive recalled being forced to put a woman who had just had a stillborn child on a performance improvement plan.

Perhaps not surprisingly, median tenure at Amazon is only one year, and turnover at the warehouses exceeds 100 percent. This constant churn makes organizing difficult — workers don’t stick around long enough to form the relationships necessary to build lasting organizations, let alone to have union elections. And the Amazon workers who have spoken out about their conditions and tried to organize have been hit with retaliation and oftentimes fired. Earlier this spring, New York Amazon worker Chris Smalls was booted after he organized a work stoppage at a warehouse on Staten Island, protesting the lack of hazard pay and protective equipment during the COVID pandemic. (Amazon denies that Smalls was terminated for his organizing.) User experience designers who spoke out against conditions at Amazon warehouses in solidarity with their lower-paid colleagues have also been shown the door.

Although retaliation for organizing is illegal, it’s difficult to prove and the consequences are negiligible, so it remains rampant in the United States. When workers see their colleagues lose their jobs for speaking out, they’re less likely to stick their necks out to organize — especially when unemployment is sky-high. That’s why bosses do what they do, and it’s one of the reasons Jeff Bezos is the richest boss around.

Despite these odds, groupings of Amazon workers have come together, both as Amazonians United and Amazon Workers International, and formed coalitions with other low-wage workers — recognizing that organizing at the point of production is the only way to claw back Bezos’s wealth and power. They will need support from existing unions and the organized left (up to and including getting a job at Amazon itself). Forming a union or even fighting for demands is difficult under the best circumstances, but these workers are up against one of the most powerful men in the world.

Jeff Bezos’s empire spans far beyond Amazon: he owns Whole Foods and the Washington Post, along with scores of other online retailers and social media companies. He boasts investments in Airbnb, Uber, Google, and Business Insider, among others. His reach is already massive, which means his workforce is, too — and the accumulation of the unpaid wages of these workers are what made him so obscenely rich.

Just imagine if Bezos’s wealth, rather than being used to buy the priciest house ever sold in California, went to funding universal health care, housing, childcare, and so much more for millions of workers. Just imagine if Bezos was knocked from his plutocratic pedestal, and unionized Amazon workers became the anchor of an economy that had no use for billionaries, much less trillionaries.

Now that would be something worth celebrating.

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Riot police detain an anti-government protester during a protest at Mong Kok, in Hong Kong, China, May 10, 2020. (photo: Tyrone Siu/Reuters)

Hong Kong Police Arrest More Than 200 as Pro-Democracy Protests Return
Reuters
Excerpt: "Hong Kong authorities said on Monday they arrested 230 people during pro-democracy protests on the weekend after a sing-along demonstration at a shopping mall spilled out on to the streets of the Chinese-ruled city."
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White storks forage at a landfill. (photo: Jasper Doest/National Geographic)

Birds Are Eating Hundreds of Plastic Bits Daily, New Studies Find
Jordan Davidson, EcoWatch
Davidson writes: "The gruesome image of whales and deer dying after mistaking plastic for food has helped put into perspective just how severe the plastic waste crisis is."

he gruesome images of whales and deer dying after mistaking plastic for food has helped put into perspective just how severe the plastic waste crisis is. Now, a new study finds that it is not just land and sea animals eating our plastic trash. It turns out that birds are eating hundreds of bits of plastic every day through the food they eat.

The scientists from Cardiff University, the University of Exeter and the Greenpeace Research Laboratories found that birds along Britain's rivers are eating hundreds of fragments of microplastics daily because the worms and insects they feast on have also swallowed the plastics, making this the first study to show how plastic pollution makes its way up the food chain, as the BBC reported. The study was published in the journal Global Change Biology.

Previous research has noted that half of the insects in the rivers of south Wales contain microplastic fragments.

"The fact that so many river insects are contaminated makes it inevitable that fish, birds and other predators will pick up these polluted prey — but this is the first time that this type of transfer through food webs has been shown clearly in free-living river animals," said Joseph D'Souza, one of the study's researchers, to the BBC.

The Cardiff University researchers analyzed at plastic pollutants found in a bird known as a dipper, which wades or dives into rivers in search of underwater insects. They looked at droppings and regurgitated pellets from the birds and found microplastic fragments in roughly half of 166 samples taken from adults and nestlings at 14 of 15 sites studied.

"These iconic birds, the dippers, are ingesting hundreds of pieces of plastic every day," said Steve Ormerod, a professor at Cardiff University's Water Research Institute to the BBC. "They're also feeding this material to their chicks."

"In almost 40 years of researching rivers and dippers, I never imagined that one day our work would reveal these spectacular birds to be at risk from the ingestion of plastics — a measure of how this pollution problem has crept upon us," said Ormerod, as iNews in the UK reported.

Similarly, another study published in the journal Environmental Pollution recently found that birds of prey in Florida swallow tiny bits of plastic debris at a rate of hundreds a day, particularly microplastic fragments made of polyester, polypropylene and nylon, as Sustainability Times reported.

In that study, the researchers examined dozens of birds of prey, including hawks, ospreys and owls retrieved from the Audubon Center for Birds of Prey in Florida. From the 63 birds examined, representing eight different species, all were found to have microplastics in their GI tract, according to the study.

"Birds of prey are top predators in the ecosystem and by changing the population or health status of the top predator, it completely alters all of the animals, organisms and habitats below them on the food web," said Julia Carlin, the study's lead author, in a University of Central Florida press release.

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