The American Government Is Open for Corruption + U.S. P.I.G.: Promotion Given To US Cops Who Shot Occupy Activist + Call Me When You're Free

By Brandon Turbeville: As if there was any doubt that police departments all across America are rewarding their officers for egregious acts of violence, the Oakland police department has recently promoted two of the police officers involved in the shooting of Occupy activist Scott Olsen.Olsen, readers may remember, was an Occupy activist and Iraq war veteran who was shot in the head with beanbag bullets by Oakland police in 2011. Olsen was only about fifteen feet away from the officer who shot him, fracturing his skull and sending him to the hospital in critical condition. Police also fired flash grenades at activists who rushed to Olsen’s aid and continued to assault the demonstrators as they attempted to drag Olsen to safety and provide him with medical attention. Olsen temporarily lost his ability to speak, perform basic motor functions, and concentrate adequately. While he has recovered the ability to speak, his speech is still slurred and his memory and concentration are still significantly impaired.
Yet despite the fact that the City of Oakland was forced to pay out $4.5 million to Olsen in a settlement, the Oakland Police Department has now promoted two of the cops involved in the shooting.
Even more concerning is the fact that one of the officers, Paul Figueroa, has been promoted to the position of Assistant Police Chief and is now the second in command of the Oakland Police Department.

Roland Holmgren, a Sergeant with a “Tango Team,” a type of Oakland tactical squad consisting of five officers and one sergeant each, was also involved in Olsen’s shooting. Like Figueroa, he was also promoted. Holmgren was awarded the title of Lieutenant earlier in 2014.

As Ali Winston of East Bay Press writes,

At the time of the shooting, Figueroa had no business being the incident commander or accepting the position: He was the head of the department’s internal affairs division. As such, he would be responsible for investigating any misconduct stemming from that incident. It was a clear conflict of interest. As it turned out, OPD botched both the administrative and criminal investigations into the Olsen shooting. To this day, the department has yet to identify the officer responsible.

Still, Interim Police Chief Sean Whent, who had himself been head of the department’s Internal Affairs division (which speaks volumes as to the worth and credibility of that agency), went forward with promotions for both Figueroa and Holmgren.
East Bay Press also points out that Holmgren has quite the history of violence. As Ali Winston writes,

Holmgren also had been involved in the illegal use of force against anti-war protesters at the Port of Oakland in 2003. And he was involved in a drunken brawl with prison guards at a charity boxing event in 2010. He also was disciplined for turning off his chest-mounted camera during clashes with Occupy Oakland demonstrators on January 28, 2012.

Although the OPD conveniently “botched” the investigation of the shooting, Winston and other investigators were able to identify Officer Robert Roche as the individual who actually shot Olsen. However, while Roche was fired, the Alameda County District Attorney never filed charges against him. Neither did they file charges against the officers in charge, Holmgren and Figueroa.
An Iraq war veteran, Olsen apparently believed that when he returned to the United States the war was over and he no longer had reason to be in fear for his life. Olsen mistakenly believed that he was returning to a free country.
Unfortunately, Olsen did not fully grasp the concept that he was now in a new kind of war zone, one in which he now faced an enemy that was much more dangerous to American citizens than the “insurgents” he encountered in Iraq.
You can see additional details of the event surrounding the shooting of Scott Olsen, as well as hear from him in the video below:

Edited by WD

*P.I.G. Prisoner Industrial Gulag

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The American Government Is Open for Corruption

By Charles P. Pierce: The remarkable story of how we have come to privatize political corruption in this country reached another milestone Wednesday as the Supreme Court, John Roberts presiding, handed down its decision in McCutcheon v. FEC, effectively demolishing the aggregate, two-year limit on contributions by individuals, and taking a big chunk out of Buckley v. Valeo, the misbegotten 1976 decision that got the ball rolling in the first place. It was a 5-4 vote, with the court split exactly as it had in the Citizens United case. In writing the opinion for the court, Roberts further emphasized the equation of money with speech, and also seemed to agree with Anthony Kennedy's famous assertion in Citizens United that the ability of megadonors to shovel gobs of money into the election process,"We now conclude that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption." Roberts writes:

Significant First Amendment interests are implicated here. Contributing money to a candidate is an exercise of an individual'sright to participate in the electoral process through both political ex-pression and political association. A restriction on how many candi-dates and committees an individual may support is hardly a "modestrestraint" on those rights. The Government may no more restrict how many candidates or causes a donor may support than it may tella newspaper how many candidates it may endorse. In its simplest terms, the aggregate limits prohibit an individual from fully contrib-uting to the primary and general election campaigns of ten or more candidates, even if all contributions fall within the base limits. And it is no response to say that the individual can simply contribute lessthan the base limits permit: To require one person to contribute atlower levels because he wants to support more candidates or causesis to penalize that individual for "robustly exercis[ing]" his FirstAmendment rights. (Davis v. Federal Election Comm'n, 554 U. S. 724, 739.) In assessing the First Amendment interests at stake, the proper fo-cus is on an individual's right to engage in political speech, not a col-lective conception of the public good. The whole point of the FirstAmendment is to protect individual speech that the majority might prefer to restrict, or that legislators or judges might not view as use-ful to the democratic process. The aggregate limits do not further the permissible governmental interest in preventing quid pro quo corruption or its appearance.

What's good for Koch Industries is good for Sheldon Adelson, I guess. Roberts goes on.

This Court has identified only one legitimate governmental interest for restricting campaign finances: preventing corruption or the appearance of corruption. See Davis, supra, at 741. Moreover, the only type of corruption that Congress may target is quid pro quo corruption. Spending large sums of money in connection with elec-tions, but not in connection with an effort to control the exercise of an officeholder's official duties, does not give rise to quid pro quo corrup-tion. Nor does the possibility that an individual who spends large sums may garner "influence over or access to" elected officials or political parties.

And John Roberts apparently resides on Neptune. And, in case you didn't get the point.

Finally, disclosure of contributions minimizes the potential for abuse of the campaign finance system. Disclosure requirements are in part "justified based on a governmental interest in ‘provid[ing] the electorate with information' about the sources of election-related spending." Citizens United, 558 U. S., at 367 (quoting Buckley, supra, at 66).They may also "deter actual corruption and avoid theappearance of corruption by exposing large contributionsand expenditures to the light of publicity." Disclosure requirements burden speech, but, unlike the aggregate limits, they do not impose a ceiling on speech.

Having earlier argued that there was a First Amendment issue to be found in the aggregate limits because they hindered an individual's right to participate in the political process -- It is here helpful to note the everlasting irony of Antonin Scalia's view of Bush v. Gore. There is no individual right to vote, but an individual's right to purchase a candidate must be untrammeled -- but here, Roberts is saying it plain. To restrict money is to restrict speech. Period. And the only real legal restraint on the wholesale subletting of American democracy is John Roberts's strange devotion to "disclosure" as some sort of shaming mechanism within the electorate. Good luck with that one.
Justice Stephen Breyer takes up a lot of these points in his dissent, most notably, the majority's laughably narrow definition of what political corruption actually is -- that political corruption exists only if you buy a specific result from a specific legislator. But it hardly matters. The five-vote majority in favor of virtually unlimited corporate and individual spending in our elections is a rock solid one. Four days after almost every Republican candidate danced the hootchie-koo in Vegas to try and gain the support of a single, skeevy casino gazillionnaire, the majority tells us that there is no "appearance of corruption" in this unless somebody gets caught putting a slot machine in the Lincoln Bedroom on behalf of Sheldon Adelson. Money talks. Big money repeats itself, over and over, age after age.

(Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

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