Fein, Bruce
ntbcw ron fsfppl
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re clements, who ref
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2014/10/06/the-fight-for-living-wages-is-for-workers-not-corporations/
ron fein oct 2014
industry trade groups are now challenging Seattle’s new minimum wage law as unconstitutional. They claim the city’s $15 an hour rate violates the 14th Amendment. Passed just after the Civil War to ensure equal rights for the newly freed slaves, that amendment says no state may “deny to any person . . . the equal protection of the laws.”
According to the industry lawsuit, the minimum wage law violates this Equal Protection Clause because it phases in the higher wage at a different schedule for franchised companies than for small local businesses.
But the trade groups’ argument twists the real intent of the 14th Amendment. Its drafters had a special interest in whether workers could earn “fair, living wages,” our research has revealed. That phrase was often used by Senator Jacob Howard, a staunch Republican who served as the 14th Amendment’s Senate floor manager in 1866.
During congressional hearings, Howard repeatedly asked witnesses whether employers were paying the newly freed slaves “fair, living wages.”
Howard had reason to emphasize this point. Even before the Civil War ended, the Union Army was deeply concerned about whether freedmen were receiving fair wages. An 1865 Army work plan, for example, instructed officers to assist freedmen in obtaining “fair wages for their labor.”
Sometimes it was a struggle to achieve this. When employers in two recalcitrant South Carolina counties persisted in underpaying the freedmen, one Army general contemplated moving those counties’ entire freed population to areas that would pay them “fair wages.” By 1866, a special military unit established to assist freedmen during the post-Civil War Reconstruction had resorted to distributing standard labor contracts, with fixed labor rates, that would promote “prosperous relations between capital and labor” and be “satisfactory to the freedmen.”
Many Americans viewed “fair, living wages” as an integral part of the struggle from slavery to full citizenship. The influential abolitionist editor Horace Greeley — famous for his 1865 editorial that advised “Go West, young man” — wrote a widely reprinted open letter to “the Colored People of North Carolina” on September 14, 1865. He urged them to take immediate steps to demand “fair, living wages” as part of their larger struggle for equal rights.
So when members of the special congressional committee asked whether freedmen could earn fair or living wages, they understood the issue as intimately connected with the equality that the 14th Amendment ultimately enshrined.
That wasn’t the only concern behind the 14th Amendment, of course. But, unlike protection of the economic advantages that franchised businesses have over small local businesses, it was part of the 14th Amendment’s overall goals.
Given how important obtaining “fair, living wages” was to the 14th Amendment’s authors, industry lawyers have no basis to argue that the Equal Protection Clause protects the companies, rather than the workers. But it’s not surprising. Ever since the 14th Amendment was passed, corporate lawyers have tried to leverage it to strike down laws like Seattle’s.
In 1938, a frustrated Supreme Court justice complained that of the cases in the court in which the 14th Amendment was applied during the first 50 years after its adoption, “less than one-half of 1 percent invoked it in protection of the negro race, and more than 50 percent asked that its benefits be extended to corporations.”
Just this year, the Equal Protection Clause has been invoked on behalf of coal companies and multinational agribusiness conglomerates.
We need to put a stop to this unfounded constitutional argument. The businesses had their opportunity to make their case to the city of Seattle — and they lost. They shouldn’t be allowed to run to court under the banner of the 14th Amendment.
When Abraham Lincoln was just a rookie congressman, he wrote that securing “to each laborer the whole product of his labor, or as nearly as possible, is a most worthy object of any good government.” That’s what Seattle’s law does. Sixteen years after Lincoln wrote that, he vowed at Gettysburg to preserve a “government of the people, by the people, [and] for the people.” That’s what the industry’s lawsuit threatens.
The congressmen of Reconstruction sought to carry forward Lincoln’s legacy with the 14th Amendment. Their vision of full equality is not yet realized. But if they could see what Seattle is trying to achieve, they would be proud.
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stone hell
In 2004, there were two incidents involving Arlen Specter’s campaign which felt eerily similar to those long ago Nixon dirty tricks. Specter was facing a hard fight in the Republican primary against a more conservative challenger, Pat Toomey. Snyder assembled a PAC called Pennsylvanians for Honest Politics, which put together a radio ad that attacked Toomey for failing, during an interview onHardball with Chris Matthews, to call for criminal sanctions against a woman who gets an abortion. “Somebody who claims to be on our side had the opportunity to say abortion is murder,” screeched the ad. “Instead of showing the nation real pro-life leadership, Toomey shrunk like a frightened turtle.” Specter would pull off a narrow win, doing far better in conservative counties than expected. Then, in the general state election, yard signs began appearing that declared “Kerry & Specter: for Working Families.” Pennsylvania is a majority democratic state, Specter was a Republican (though a moderate one, who would, in his last term in office switch party affiliation), and Kerry had not endorsed Specter. The signs were set up by a group called the Philadelphia Education Project. A number of the people involved in the Philadelphia Education Project – a New York consultant named Steve Pigeon, a lawyer named Paul Rolf Jensen who would also work on a Barack Obama birth certificate lawsuit – were Stone associates. Stone would be described as a former partner in Ikon, though Snyder would say that he and Stone hadn’t worked together in three years. Specter’s campaign manager would deny knowing about either effort116(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote116).
The most interesting piece of reading related to Ikon isn’t journalism, but a lawsuit. It was Mattie Lolavar versus Fernando de Santibanes (*Lolavar v. de Santibanes*), along with Roger Stone, other Ikon associates, and another infamous consultant, Dick Morris. According to the suit, Lolavar and her own firm, Triumph Communications, were brought in to work with Ikon on two contracts. The first involved Argentine President Fernando de la Rua’s visit to the United States in June 2000. The second was a year long contract to improve the image of Fernando de Santibañes, the Secretary of Intelligence of Argentina. The following is an excerpt from the suit alleging the nature of the contract work, and what would cause the rupture between Lolavar and Ikon:
Pursuant to this second contract, Miss Lolavar went to Argentina in August 2000 to assist de Santibañes with preparations for his testimony in Argentine congressional hearings inquiring into allegations that he and the Argentine intelligence agency, known as SIDE, were responsible for bribing various Argentine senators in exchange for political support.
Morris and Stone assigned other tasks to Miss Lolavar while she was in Argentina. Among other acts, they instructed her to contact SIDE and obtain a list of journalists who accepted bribes from that organization in order to harm the credibility of those same journalists in reporting on a bribery scandal surrounding de Santibañes and President de la Rua, as well as requiring her to spread false information to the press concerning de la Rua’s political opponent, Dr. Carlos Menem.
A request that occasioned controversy between Miss Lolavar and the defendants was Morris and Stone’s request that she serve as an intermediary in an anonymous wire transfer of funds to an official in Israel. These funds were to be paid to secure intelligence files from the Israeli government to assist de la Rua’s political domestic disputes with Menem, and to imply a corrupt relationship between Menem and George W. Bush, who was then running against Albert Gore for the United States presidency. These files were to be altered by Miss Lolavar to appear to be SIDE documents.
When the defendants became concerned that this plot would be discovered and traced back to them, they ordered Miss Lolavar to orchestrate a press response to blame Vice President Gore for the dissemination of the documents, since it was known to them that the Gore campaign had been attempting to connect Menem with the Bush campaign.
When Miss Lolavar refused to cooperate with these demands, the defendants undertook a series of reprisals. First, they refused to pay her fees under the contract until she executed the wire transfers. Additionally, they made a number of false defamatory statements concerning her, including that she was anti-Semitic, that her efforts to disclose these transactions were the result of a political bribe by Menem’s Peronist Party, and that she forged the correspondence that was evidence of the defendants’ wrongdoing.
The suit would be dismissed on grounds of jurisdiction – that Santibanes had insufficient contacts in Virginia to subject him to a lawsuit filed in Virginia. Judgement would be upheld on appeal. In an affidavit, Santibanes would deny ever having met Lolavar except on a single social occasion117(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote117).
Lolavar was herself one of the fascinating shadow characters of politics. There she is, in a MarketWatch story, **“Chavez ouster bodes well for oil: Venezuela**exports likely to rise as strike ends” by Carolyn Pritchard, on the overthrow of Hugo Chavez by the country’s military, as a “president of international business communications and strategies firm Triumph Communications Group and former consultant to the government of Argentina.” Says Lolavar: “Politically, this was bound to happen. I think Chavez was losing ground not only internationally but within his own constituency.” Her statements are the usual empty pro-free market easy reading quotes that you expect from this kind of business story. “This is going to refocus the verticalization of trade toward Latin America, especially in oil and energy,” she says. And: “Knowing the situation in Middle East and looking at Iraq,” she says. “I think the U.S. will do everything possible to help Venezuela, if need be.” How could they do this? Well, by helping Venezuela privatize its oil companies118(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote118). More interesting was the editorial in the Washington Times from June 30, 2007, “A new strategy for Iran”. “A new strategy is needed to effectuate regime change in Iran,” it began:
Success is plausible through one of two means: Either hope for an internal rupture fueled by economic hardship; or, encourage an indigenous revolt with a covert promise of military support. Skeptics of regime change in Iran based on the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan are wrong. In contrast to the latter, Iran’s history, culture, and constitutional experience provide fertile soil for a regime change in 2007.
The editorial was not under the name of Mattie Lolavar, but Mattie Fein. The editorial listed Mattie Fein as founder and president of the Institute for Persian Studies. “New Iran Regime-Change Think Tank Opens in DC” by Spencer Ackerman had an interview with Mattie Lolavar, but now she was Mahtaub Hojjati, a well-connected government and business consultant trying out for the role of revolutionary provocateur. The Institute for Persian Studies only had a humble web site, but its goals weren’t humble at all. They wished to shape the government of Iran after regime change. Hojjati wanted to put forth a constitution, a blueprint, to have people say “this is the plan”, and the planwould be Lolavar’s, I mean, Hojjati’s:
“We have to be able to have people say, ‘this is the plan.’ They don’t know what happens in Iran after the regime falls,” Hojjati says. That’s where the IPS comes in. Over the next few months, Hojjati intends to unveil a constitution promising democracy and the total separation of Islam from the public sphere, so that Iranians will have a blueprint for what comes after the mullahs. “It’s going to fill a void,” she says. “Right now, no one’s saying anything further than ‘regime change.’” It’s a deliberate response to the compounded mistakes of Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which suffered from uncertainty over what political structure followed the destruction of the Saddam and Taliban regimes.
The Institute for Persian Studies would soon disappear. Hojjati would run, as Mattie Fein, against Jane Harman. She would lose badly. Her campaign ad would place great emphasis on Harman’s supposed appeasement of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The ad, a take-off on Young Frankenstein with Harman as Frau Blucher, ends with Harman declaring Ahmadinejad her boyfriend119(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote119).
Mahtaub “Mattie” Hojjati was sometimes well-connected government and business consultant Mattie Fein because of her marriage towell-connected GOP lobbyist Bruce Fein,another fascinating obscurity of D.C. Easily the best overview of his career is “Libertarian Bum Fights” by Mark Ames. Bruce Fein was someone who took unrelenting hard-right positions in foreign and domestic policy for nearly thirty years. Fein fought for Bob Jones University to get taxpayer subsidies despite its segregationist policies. He was opposed to affirmative action. He was opposed to the Americans with Disabilities Act. He was in favor of mandatory drug testing and against Miranda rights. He felt national security easily trumped free speech; he attacked journalists who refused to name their sources as part of the Valerie Plame investigation. When Time reporter Marc Cooper and NBC’s Tim Russert were subpoenaed as part of the Plame investigation, they refused to name sources on the grouds that that was a violation of a free press. That defense, wrote Bruce Fein, relied on the idea “that confidential sources are indispensable to investigative journalism. But the assertion is dubious,” according to his Washington Times editorial “Losing sight of free press aims”, “and in any event should bow in a narrow category of cases where the sources themselves are government officials implicated in national security crimes.”
The editorial in the New York Times, “A Tight Plug on Intelligence Leaks” was written during the 1987 Iran-contra scandal, when the executive sold arms to Iran to fund a weapons buy for the Nicaragua contras, a secret sale to avoid congressional oversight and legislation which forbid the U.S. arming the contras. The editorial did not argue for more congressional oversight, but less: “a lean, muscular Joint Congressional Intelligence Committee” to replace “the separate and cumbersome House and Senate intelligence committees to oversee the intelligence community.” The problem was not executive overreach, but congressional leaks. “By sharply curtailing the likelihood of leaks, a joint intelligence committee would encourage the executive branch to be more forthright with Congress and would help rebuild foreigners’ trust in our intelligence community,” he writes. “Congressmen opposing such commendable results shoulder a heavy burden.” The editorial “Terrorism’s murky origins”, again in the Washington Times, made clear that he was a full-throated supporter of the war on terror: “the best way to handcuff terrorism is by killing, capturing and punishing terrorists period, with no commas, semicolons or question marks.” The editorial’s conclusion was equally blunt: “Since reasoning is futile, killing, capturing and punishing is the only moral answer to the terrorism wickedness.” This, I should emphasize, was no written in the days after September 11th, when the city’s ashes inflamed an uncontrolled fury, but on June 21st, 2004120(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote120).
At some point, something in Fein changed. In June, 2007, He would write the opinion piece,“Impeach Cheney” for Slate. Suddenly, executive overreach was a problem. “In grasping and exercising presidential powers,” goes the Slate piece, “Cheney has dulled political accountability and concocted theories for evading the law and Constitution that would have embarrassed King George III.” Fein had argued for death, punishment, capture, without “commas, semicolons or question marks,” and now suddenly this was a problem. The Slate piece is outraged at commaless, semicolonless, unquestioned pursuit of the war on terror: “The vice president initiated kidnappings, secret detentions, and torture in Eastern European prisons of suspected international terrorists.” Now, the problem wasn’t those who published leaks, but those who tried to punish them. Confidential sources are indispensable to investigative journalism. “Cheney scorns freedom of speech and of the press,” writes Fein in Slate. “He urges application of the Espionage Act to prosecute journalists who expose national security abuses, for example, secret prisons in Eastern Europe or the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program.” Fein would act as “senior legal adviser” on Ron Paul’s 2012 campaign. Fein would lecture college campuses throughout the United States alongside Glenn Greenwald on a “Civil Liberties College Tour.”Both Mahtaub Fein and Bruce Fein worked for the Lichfield Group, which might be a lobbying shop, or an “image-management firm”, since image-management firms don’t have to register, while lobbyists do. The Lichfield Group would boast on its about page of their “high level connections with the Department of Justice, the Department of State, and the Central Intelligence Agency,” which made sense if you were trying to set up a post-regime change government in Iran, but less so if you agreed with the isolationist policies of Ron Paul. This about text would eventually be scrapped, and replaced with an “under construction” page121(http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote121).