New Jersey settles major environmental pollution lawsuit with ExxonMobil

Philip Guelpa

Recent news accounts, based on confidential informants, indicate that a long-standing lawsuit brought by the state of New Jersey against ExxonMobile Corporation for extensive environmental pollution from oil refineries and petrochemical plants in the northeastern part of the state has been settled for pennies on the dollar.

Since the late 19th century and continuing to the present day, operations at a complex of oil-related facilities have dumped huge amounts of toxic materials, including over 9 million cubic yards of tar, left by accident or design, into more than 1,500 acres of industrial plants in the vicinity of Bayonne and Linden, New Jersey.

A web site devoted to the Bayway, as the area is known, describes the pollution as resulting from “Spilled supplies from pipeline ruptures, tank failures or overflows, and explosions have resulted in widespread groundwater, soil and sediment contamination.” The state’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) found that these actions resulted in serious pollution of the wetlands, marshes, meadows and open waters in this area. Over 600 chemical pollutants have been identified.

The state’s lawsuit places the direct cost of cleanup and restoration of the contaminated area at $2.6 billion, and is asking for another $6.3 billion in compensatory damages reflecting the public’s loss of use of the contaminated area, for a total of $8.9 billion. Unofficial reports indicate that the 11-year-old lawsuit, extending across the tenures of four governors, is being quietly settled out of court by the administration of Republican Governor Chris Christie for a mere $250 million, or less than 3 percent of what the state’s own experts had originally requested. Even if only direct costs are considered, the settlement represents less than 10 percent of the estimated price of cleaning up the mess left by the oil companies, leaving the remaining $2.35 billion to be paid from public funds or simply left undone.

Court arguments in the case had already been concluded and the company had been found responsible for causing the pollution. All that remained was a ruling from the presiding judge on the size of the penalty, which was reportedly imminent. In the meantime, however, the Christie administration twice requested delays to the announcement of the judgment, stating that a settlement was being negotiated directly between the state and the corporation.

On February 20, state officials informed the judge that a settlement had been reached. The reported agreement, the details of which have not yet been officially disclosed, is intended to preempt the legal process, which was expected to result in a judgment against ExxonMobil much closer to the amount originally sought by the state than that which has been worked out in the Christie deal. Both the administration and the company have refused to comment.

The proposed settlement, which must be approved by the trial judge, constitutes a blatant attempt to let ExxonMobil off with barely a slap on the wrist. Former state officials, who were responsible for originally bringing the lawsuit in 2004, are quoted as stating that the proposed deal is a “betrayal of environmental law enforcement”. The paltry amount of this settlement brings into sharp focus Christie’s hypocrisy. Last fall his administration said in court documents, “The scope of the environmental damage resulting from the discharges is as clear as it is staggering and unprecedented in New Jersey."

This incident is only the latest New Jersey case in which settlements in environmental cases have been made for substantially less than what was originally sought. In one example, three companies were sued for causing pollution along the Passaic River. The cleanup plus associated damages were estimated at $5 billion. The state settled for $355 million, about 7 percent of costs.

Governor Christie, who styles himself as a “man of the people,” and is known for his brazen arrogance, has a long record of outright support for corporate interests and disdain for the working class.

Among the most egregious examples is the so-called “bridgegate,” in which members of his administration ordered a bogus traffic study that caused massive rush hour traffic delays for several days on the New Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge crossing into Manhattan. The action was apparently taken as political retribution against a local politician who had not supported Christie in his re-election campaign. Christie has denied any responsibility. 

Christie has earned the enmity of many of the state’s coastal residents for grossly underfunding and mismanaging the recovery effort from the devastation of Superstorm Sandy. To add insult to injury, in his constant efforts at self-aggrandizement, Christie diverted money from disaster funds to pay for a video supposedly touting the success of the response effort, but which was effectively a campaign ad for his re-election campaign. In addition, the governor’s budgets have substantially underfunded the state’s public employee pension system, which is now in severe danger of not being able to meet its obligations to retirees. A recent court ruling states that the governor has broken the law by making insufficient payments to the pension system. Christie has proposed cuts in benefits. 

While no evidence of a direct connection between Christie’s proposed sweetheart settlement and any actions by ExxonMobil has yet been revealed, the New York Times reports that the corporation has made consistent, large donations to the Republican Governors Association, of which Christie was the chair last year. Collectively, the oil and gas industry donated nearly $18 million to the RGA during the first nine months of 2014, including $500,000 from Exxon. Currying favor with the energy industry is undoubtedly part of Christie’s strategy for his widely anticipated bid for the Republican presidential nomination next year.

There is no guarantee that even this paltry settlement will be used for the Bayonne-Linden area cleanup. New Jersey regulations allow the diversion of all but the first $50 million of such moneys to the general fund. The state is facing a severe budget crisis. The Christie administration, therefore, is free to loot the remaining $200 million for other purposes, leaving the people and the environment of the area to suffer the consequences of chronic, toxic pollution. Similar actions have been taken by Christie in past environmental cases.

The protection of a major energy corporation from suffering the consequences of its actions represented by the proposed settlement with ExxonMobil is starkly reminiscent of the favorable treatment afforded BP by the Obama administration following the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Whether from the Democrats or the Republicans, people can expect that the energy industry, as well as banks and major corporations in general, will always receive absolute favor from the capitalist political establishment that represents them.

The way forward for oil workers

Socialist Equality Party

As the strike by oil workers in the US enters its second month, it is necessary to draw a balance sheet of the key strategic and political issues at stake in order to determine the way forward.

Although the corporate media conceals it, there is enormous support for oil workers throughout the country and indeed the world. Tens of millions of workers—dockworkers, teachers, telecommunication workers, auto workers, postal workers, health care workers and other sections of the working class—have suffered years of eroding wages and working conditions.

The biggest obstacle to mobilizing the strength of the working class is the United Steelworkers union, which has limited the walkout to only a fraction of the 30,000 USW workers in the industry. USW officials have ignored demands from rank-and-file workers for an all-out national strike, while providing a pittance in strike pay from its $350 million strike fund.

Meanwhile, the AFL-CIO executive council, which held its annual meeting last month in Atlanta, took no action to defend striking oil workers. The inaction of the AFL-CIO recalls the backstabbing of the PATCO air traffic controllers fired by Reagan in 1981, which paved the way for a decade of union busting, mass layoffs and wage and benefit concessions.

The actions of the unions have encouraged the oil giants to maintain their hard line against workers’ demands. While they shovel billions to their top executives and investors, the Big Oil bosses insist there is no money to improve safety, hire full-time workers or to relieve workers of crushing out-of-pocket health care costs. With production near pre-strike levels, the corporations have refused to even seriously negotiate and are simply waiting for the USW to wear down workers and condition them to accept another sellout agreement.

The intransigence of the companies must be met with an equal intransigence from the working class. But for this, a new strategy is needed. The Socialist Equality Party calls for:

Form independent rank-and-file action committees to expand the strike!

If this struggle is not to be isolated, strangled and led to defeat, oil workers must take matters into their own hands. On every picket line and in every non-striking refinery, workers should elect the most militant and class-conscious workers as representatives to a rank-and-file action committee. The committee must take over the conduct of the strike while fighting for the fullest mobilization not only of oil workers but the entire working class.

These committees must be entirely independent of and organized in opposition to the unions. The unions, which have spent decades collaborating with the corporations and the state in imposing concessions and shutting down entire industries, are not working-class organizations, but corporatist entities—arms of management that function as labor contractors and policemen.

Shut down the entire oil industry! Mobilize the working class behind striking workers!

The first matter of business must be sending out pickets to call out workers in the non-striking refineries, chemical plants and oil terminals to shut the entire industry down. Delegations of oil workers should be sent to the steel mills, auto factories, ports, hospitals, public schools and other workplaces to call for solidarity action, including mass demonstrations and sympathy strikes, to back oil workers.

For the international unity of the working class!

An appeal must be made to workers throughout the world who are fighting the same multinational corporations. This includes the 20,000 North Sea construction and oil rig workers fighting BP, Marathon and other oil giants, which are demanding that they work an extra 28 days a year, with no increase in pay, while the workforce is slashed by 20 percent. The nationalism of the USW, which subordinates workers to the profit interests of US-based multinationals, must be rejected and a fight waged to unify all workers, regardless of race, ethnicity or nationality.

It is not an accident that the struggle by the US for control of the world’s energy supplies has been a chief factor behind the wars in Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries and the current confrontation with Russia and China, which threatens mankind with nuclear destruction. In the wars for world domination, the Democrats and Republicans function as tools of Big Oil and Wall Street, just as they do in the war against the working class in the United States.

For a political struggle against the capitalist system! 

If workers are to be successful, their struggle must be expanded and developed into a confrontation not just with the oil companies, but the entire corporate and financial aristocracy and the two big-business parties—the Democrats and Republicans—that defend it.

The USW and the AFL-CIO are politically aligned with the Democratic Party and are undying defenders of the capitalist system. USW bargaining team member Jim Savage let the cat out of the bag when he declared that the union was opposed to a broader mobilization of workers to “keep the government from interfering with this labor dispute.” In other words, the union wants at all costs to prevent the struggle from developing into a conflict with the Democratic Party and the Obama administration.

But this is precisely what is required. As a spokesman of the financial aristocracy, Obama has overseen the greatest transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top in American history. After bailing out the banks, he slashed the wages of new auto workers in half during the forced bankruptcy and restructuring of General Motors and Chrysler and implemented Obamacare and pension “reform” to shift the cost of health care and retirement benefits from the corporations to the backs of workers.

The White House has given a free pass to JPMorgan, BP, Tesoro, GM and other corporations—whose criminal actions have laid waste to workers’ jobs, lives and communities. But if workers rose up in opposition, the Democrats and Republicans would not hesitate to use strikebreaking laws, militarized police forces and anti-terror measures in an effort to stop them.

The United States is not a democracy, but a plutocracy, where the super-rich control the political system and government. The only way to break this dictatorial hold over society is by mobilizing the working class in a powerful revolutionary movement that is aimed at putting political power in the hands of the vast majority of the population—the masses of working people whose labor in the refineries, factories, offices, schools, and hospitals produce society’s wealth.

Only in this way can economic life be organized in a rational and egalitarian, i.e., socialist basis. This includes transforming the multinational oil giants into publicly owned and democratically controlled utilities, as part of a scientific plan for the production of global energy to meet human needs, not private profit.

Cuts to pensions of Detroit retirees go into effect

Thomas Gaist

Retired Detroit city workers began receiving diminished pensions checks on Sunday, in accordance with the bankruptcy plan drawn up by former Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr and approved by the federal court system.

In all, some 32,000 active and retired city workers will be impacted by the cuts to constitutionally protected Detroit city worker pensions called for in Orr’s plan.

Cuts to pensions were authorized in December 2013 by federal bankruptcy judge Steven Rhodes in defiance of clear language in Michigan’s state constitution stating that public pensions cannot be “diminished or impaired.”

Most retirees will endure a 4.5 percent “base cut” in addition to the loss of their cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) payments and the “clawing back” by the city of nearly $240 million in annuity payments distributed to city workers over the past decade. City-funded health care benefits are to be reduced by 90 percent, from $4.3 billion to $450 million, under the bankruptcy plan.

In a transparent effort to divide and conquer the different sections of Detroit’s working class, the bankruptcy plan demands slightly less severe cuts to the pensions of retirees from Detroit’s police and fire departments, who will lose most of their COLA but will not see any immediate cuts to their pension checks.

An “Income Stabilization Fund” established by the state treasury is offering a minimal amount of supplemental payments to a small group of some 1,500 retirees, who will receive monthly checks ranging from $1 to $180. Only those pensioners who receive less than 140 percent of the federal poverty line will even be considered for the payments.

Given the rising cost of living and especially health care costs faced by retirees, many of whom pay thousands of dollars per month in health care costs for doctor’s visits and essential medications and treatments, such puny sums, offered to only a fraction of the retiree population, do not even amount to a drop in the bucket, and have clearly been devised for propaganda purposes.

The brutal fact is that Detroit retirees are facing the loss of their homes, access to medical care, impoverishment and death as a result of the cuts contained in the plan. The cuts will have much broader ramifications, as retirees will no longer be able to offer much needed support to children and grandchildren struggling amid the most desperate economic conditions since the 1930s.

The imposition of emergency management and the Chapter 9 bankruptcy filing were carried out with the full support of the Democratic Party and the Obama administration, and aimed at not only stealing the pensions of Detroit workers, but also opening the floodgates for the looting of public sector pensions and benefits nationwide.

Judge Rhodes openly revealed this agenda when he called last week for ending defined pension benefit plans across the US, and commented that failure to eliminate city worker pension plans completely during bankruptcy was a “missed opportunity.”

In a piece published Monday, “A warning to cities: Watch your pension plans,” Crain’s Detroit Business noted that the Detroit suburb of Lincoln Park’s emergency manager Brad Coulter has launched similar attacks on retiree health care and pensions along the lines of the Detroit bankruptcy.

Under Coulter’s reign, Lincoln Park has imposed cuts to pensions and ended retiree health care, offering small cash payments for retirees to purchase their own independently. This despite the fact that Lincoln Park’s pensions have not missed a single payment to retirees in the past decade, Crain’snoted.

Signaling the beginning of a new wave of attacks against tens of billions of dollars of pension obligations owed to public workers, Moody’s credit rating service downgraded Chicago’s municipal debt last week, citing the city’s supposedly unfunded pension obligations.

The New York Times published an article last week, with a headline that crowed of the “Cracks Starting to Appear” in public pension plans throughout the country. “First in Detroit, then in Stockton, Calif., and now in New Jersey, judges and other top officials are challenging the widespread belief that public pensions are untouchable,” the Times gloated.

The World Socialist Web Site spoke Monday with two retired city workers about the impact of the cuts on their pensions and health care.

Steve, who previously worked as master plumber for the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD), expressed his frustrations with the outcome of the bankruptcy. “We the retirees were supposed to be the largest creditor, and we didn’t get anything,” he said.

“Syncora, the financial insurance guarantee corporation, they ended up getting assets. They got assets that are producing income and are worth money. These were insurance companies, they collected premiums based on the city’s borrowing. Now when the city is supposedly bankrupt, they are actually receiving property, parking garages. We, the civil servants, are having everything stripped away,” Steve continued.

“With this claw back, they took the highest earning year from my account and just take 20 percent from, saying that is what you gotta pay. When we signed on with the city, they told us, ‘when you retire you will have healthcare for life.’ The city was supposed to guarantee us $1,200 per month. Now, I won’t even be able to help my kids get health insurance. They don’t have insurance, they are both students and they both work, and they can’t afford health care. They don’t know whether they will be fined or what is going to happen.

“When I took this job, I thought, what could happen to the city of Detroit? It’s been around since 1703. Instead, I could have gone to work for Weiss Plumbing. I wouldn’t have been buried alive. I wouldn’t have gotten a spinal surgery. I thought I was providing a service to the community, I thought I was trying to make it better. As city workers, we did work for 15 to 35 percent less than the private sector,” he concluded.

The World Socialist Web Site also spoke to Robert, a retired Detroit bus mechanic, who denounced the imposition of an emergency manager and the bankruptcy process as undemocratic. “Actually, Governor Snyder put us into a dictatorship with that emergency manager law. We voted it down, the whole state voted it down, and he just changed the word or two and put it through because he wanted it,” Robert stated.

“Now, they are stealing employee’s personal money with that claw back. This is our own personal money that we put in. The city did not contribute anything. A lot of retirees are right now below the poverty level and this cut is going to be terrible. And then they want to cut more? To take their own money. How hardhearted can you be?

Robert concluded by connecting the attack on workers in Detroit to the breaking of the PATCO strike in 1981. “All this stuff started with Reagan back when he fired to those air-traffic controllers. I thought the whole country should have been shut down. A strike like that would have lasted one day and it would’ve been all over.”

Obama administration bows to Israel on eve of speech by Netanyahu

Bill Van Auken

On the eve of a provocative speech to the US Congress by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Obama administration officials bent over backwards to proclaim their commitment to support and defend the state of Israel.

Netanyahu organized the speech in a deal with Republican House Speaker John Boehner without informing the White House, an unprecedented violation of international protocol. The Israeli prime minister’s aim in delivering the address, scheduled for Tuesday morning, is, on the one hand, to scuttle any negotiated agreement over Iran’s nuclear program, and, on the other, to raise his own flagging fortunes in an Israeli election to take place in little more than two weeks.

On the eve of his speech to a joint session of Congress, Netanyahu spoke to the annual meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the premier pro-Israel lobby in the US. Netanyahu declared that his impending speech before Congress “is not intended to show any disrespect to President Obama or the esteemed office that he holds.” He added, “I have great respect for both.”

This is entirely disingenuous. Netanyahu is deliberately provoking Obama by delivering a speech against his administration’s express wishes. He is betting that a confrontation with a US president who is widely unpopular in Israel will serve to mobilize his right-wing base in the upcoming election.

Recent polls have shown Netanyahu either in a dead heat with or trailing his main opponent, the Labor Party’s Isaac Herzog. The latter has condemned Netanyahu’s decision to address the US Congress as “endangering US support for Israel.”

Netanyahu told AIPAC, “The purpose of my speech is to speak up about a potential deal with Iran that could threaten Israel’s future.” Before flying to the US, the Israeli prime minister self-servingly described his controversial trip as a “fateful, even historic, mission.”

The Israeli government has long held the position that any deal with Iran on its nuclear program is unacceptable. It has persistently pushed to draw the US into a military confrontation with Iran.

While both Tel Aviv and Washington have charged that Iran has used its nuclear program to pursue the development of nuclear weapons, Tehran has insisted that it is directed solely toward peaceful purposes.

Iran and the P5+1 group—comprised of the US, Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany—are set to resume negotiations this week in Switzerland. The outlines appear to be taking shape of a potential deal that would freeze Iran’s nuclear enrichment for a lengthy period—according to some reports, for ten years—in exchange for the lifting of punishing economic sanctions imposed upon the country.

Iranian Prime Minister Javad Zarif stated Monday that any deal would be contingent on the swift ending of sanctions. “If they want an agreement, sanctions must go,” he said. “We believe all sanctions must be lifted.”

Ultimately, under the deal, Iran’s nuclear status would be normalized based on its status as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Israel, which has refused to sign the treaty, rejects any such normalization. With its arsenal of hundreds of warheads, the Zionist state is determined to maintain its monopoly on nuclear weapons in the Middle East, not as a means of self-defense, but as a military club to impose its will on neighboring countries.

While the Netanyahu government and the Zionist lobby continuously insist that Tehran is bent on Israel’s annihilation, it is Israel that constantly threatens unilateral military aggression against Iran, while using assassinations and other covert operations to destabilize its government.

The Israeli press reported Monday that Washington and Tel Aviv have ceased sharing intelligence on Iran’s nuclear program. One of the fears expressed by the Obama administration is that Netanyahu will use his speech to Congress to disclose classified information about the talks in Switzerland in an attempt to derail any agreement. Last month, US officials charged that the Israeli regime had leaked such information to the Israeli media for the same purpose.

Netanyahu is also expected to use his appearance before the US Congress to lend support to two bills that would impose further US sanctions upon Iran and give Congress the power to block the treaty. Obama has vowed to veto the measures.

With the controversy over Netanyahu’s speech being described as a low point in US-Israeli relations, the Obama administration bent over backwards on the eve of the address to affirm its unwavering commitment to Israel’s security. It also renewed threats against Iran.

Washington provides Israel with $3.1 billion in annual aid, most of it military, and gives Tel Aviv virtually unconditional support in the United Nations and other international bodies.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters Monday that a nuclear deal with Iran would not preclude new rounds of sanctions or even a US military attack on the country. In the event Tehran was deemed to be out of compliance with the agreement, he said, “We can add additional sanctions to the mix if we feel like that would be successful.” He added, “We’ll even have a military option that continues to be available to the president.”

Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the United Nations, was dispatched to the AIPAC conference Monday to deliver a speech implicitly threatening US military action against Iran. “Talks, no talks, agreement, no agreement, the United States will take any steps that are necessary to protect our national security and that of our closest ally,” she said. “We believe that diplomacy is the preferred route to secure our shared aim, but if it should fail, we know the stakes of a nuclear-armed Iran as well as everyone here. We will not let it happen.” Power’s bellicose remarks won a standing ovation from the right-wing Zionist audience.

Earlier, Secretary of State John Kerry delivered remarks at the annual session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva in which he denounced the body for its “obsession with Israel” and an “unbalanced focus” on the Israeli government’s wars, occupations and apartheid policies.

Kerry’s defense of Israel came just as the Palestine Liberation Organization announced that it will bring its first complaint over Israeli war crimes to the International Criminal Court on April 1. The case will deal with last summer’s Israeli war on Gaza, which claimed the lives of 2,200 Palestinians, most of them civilians. The PLO is also planning to sue over Israel’s illegal building of settlements in the occupied territories.

Both Washington and Tel Aviv vehemently opposed the move by the PLO in January to join the ICC. In retaliation, Israel has withheld millions of dollars in monthly taxes that it collects for the West Bank’s Palestinian Authority, throwing it into deep financial crisis.

While much has been made of a supposed Democratic Party boycott of Netanyahu’s speech, as of late Monday, just 30 members of the House and two senators were reportedly planning to skip the speech—out of at total of 535 members in the two houses. Even those criticizing the Israeli prime minister’s actions are doing so from the standpoint of his injecting “partisanship” into the US-Israeli alliance, not from the standpoint of opposing the crimes for which Israel is responsible.

Millions view video showing police murder of homeless man in Los Angeles

John Burton

Shortly after noon last Sunday raw video appeared on Facebook within minutes after multiple Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers shot and killed an unarmed man on the sidewalk outside the Union Rescue Mission on Skid Row, where many of the City’s homeless live in makeshift tents on the street.

Within hours, the video had been shared on thousands of Facebook pages and racked up millions of views. While the original Facebook post has been taken down, the video can be seen in its entirety on YouTube.

Details, including the victim’s name, age and background, have not yet been released. The Los Angeles County Coroner’s office reports that he is black and in his mid-30s. Andy Bales, president of the Union Rescue Mission, has stated that the victim used the name “Africa,” and may have been an immigrant from Cameroon.

According to Bales, the victim stayed nearby and helped Mission workers keep the area clean. Other people have told reporters that the victim spoke to them of having spent long stretches in a mental hospital before showing up on Skid Row a few months ago.

A significant number of the homeless who populate Los Angeles’ Skid Row and similar neighborhoods in other major US cities suffer from serious mental illness, and there are no effective programs to house and treat them.

Skid Row has been targeted by developers who see driving the homeless away as the key to profiting through gentrification. The officers involved in Sunday’s shooting were assigned to the so-called “Safer Cities Initiative,” an LAPD task force assigned to target Skid Row residents and force them to move out.

The video, which appears to have been made by a cell phone, begins abruptly with officers rousting the victim from his small plastic tent on the sidewalk almost directly in front of the Mission. As the man spins around, waving his arms harmlessly, surrounded by four officers, a small woman can be seen standing in the background. It is not yet known whether she and the victim were associated in any way.

One of the four officers drops his billy club, leaving it on the sidewalk, to draw his firearm. The woman walks over, picks up the nightstick, and holds it as if to defend herself from officers, who by this time have knocked the victim to the ground, piled on top of him, and started beating him.

The woman was herself knocked to the ground violently by two officers, as more officers arrived and joined in the beating of the victim.

At the 20-second point in the video, the distinctive clicking sound made by a Taser during its discharge of electricity can be heard, and one of the officers appears to be jamming the Taser’s electrodes into the victim. A voice is heard yelling, “Drop the gun!” three times, and then five shots rang out in the space of three seconds.

Officers continued to point their weapons at the victim’s lifeless body for almost a minute and a half before one of them finally checked for a pulse, as stunned onlookers became increasingly angry, yelling denunciations of the police.

No gun was recovered, and there is nothing in the video suggesting that the victim ever had his hand on an officer’s weapon.

The LAPD later confirmed that two officers and one sergeant fired bullets.

At a press conference, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, a Democrat, defended the officers and called the LAPD “the most progressive force in the country.” He announced that at least two officers were wearing body cameras. Neither video has been released, however.

LAPD Chief of Police Charlie Beck immediately rushed to the defense of the officers at a Monday morning press conference, using the same lame “he was going for an officer’s gun” excuse used by Officer Darren Wilson after killing Michael Brown last summer in Ferguson, Missouri.

When officers approached, the victim “refused to comply with the officers’ commands and then began to fight with them,” according to Beck. The video clearly shows the officers as the aggressors.

Beck claimed that the victim “forcibly grabbed one of the officer’s holstered pistols,” for proof pointing to a blurry screen shot from the video that shows the victim’s hand extended into the air, not touching a gun.

Beck did not explain why, if the prostrated man was grabbing at his gun, the officer did not simply stand up, removing it from his reach.

Beck called his officers’ sickening one-sided beating and execution of a mentally ill, homeless man “a very intense situation and a brutal, brutal fight.”

Surveillance cameras mounted outside the Mission captured events before and after the shooting. The victim had been involved in a minor altercation with another homeless man. After his tent was pointed out, the officers dragged the victim out, leading to the events captured on the cell phone camera. The surveillance cameras also captured the paramedics arriving and pronouncing the man dead at the scene.

Police officers have extensive training on weapons retention, and they use special holsters that make taking weapons away from officers very difficult. No officer in a situation like this one is going to allow a vastly outnumbered, unarmed transient access to a firearm unless he is looking for a pretext to use deadly force.

Officers have been known to shout lines such as “Stop resisting” to cover up for their own brutality. Yelling “Drop the gun” signals other officers to use lethal force.

Sunday’s shooting is part of a surge in police violence throughout the United States, which is itself a direct response to deepening social tensions arising from the growth of social inequality. According to killedbypolice.net, law enforcement agencies in the United States have killed over 175 people already this year, a rate of about three people a day. In contrast, no police officers have been killed by criminal suspects so far in 2015.

Obama administration whitewashes police killings

Andre Damon

Only one day after the world was shocked and horrified by the release of a bystander video showing Los Angeles police murdering yet another unarmed man in broad daylight, the Obama administration’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing released its interim report, offering a handful of toothless recommendations that amount to a green light for police violence and murder.

In December, in the wake of mass protests against the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York and 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio, the Obama administration announced it was establishing the task force to “strengthen the relationships between local police and the communities they are supposed to protect and serve.”

Apologists for the Obama administration such as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson sought to present the task force, together with federal investigations into several high-profile police killings, as evidence that the White House was seriously seeking to bring killer cops to justice and put a halt to police brutality.

From the beginning, however, Obama made clear that the task force would have no real power. It was staffed with many former and current police officials, including Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, who functioned as its co-chair.

At the same time as it announced the creation of the task force, the administration released a report endorsing federal programs that have transferred billions of dollars in military-grade hardware from the Pentagon to local police agencies.

In establishing the task force, Obama implied that the fundamental problem was not that police murdered hundreds of people every year, but that the population did not sufficiently support the police. He decried the “distrust that exists between too many police departments and too many communities of color.”

In announcing the task force’s findings on Monday, Obama declared that this distrust “means we’re not as effective in fighting crime as we could be.” He called the task force report “a great opportunity, coming out of some great conflict and tragedy,” to make “our law enforcement officers feel, rather than being embattled, feel fully supported.”

The recommendations in the report are in line with this goal of defending and strengthening the police. There are no proposals for significant nationwide legal or administrative measures to rein in the police. Rather, there is a laundry list of recommendations for law enforcement agencies to carry out or ignore, entirely at their pleasure.

These include calling on local police departments to implement “outside” investigations of police killings by referring probes to “neighboring jurisdictions or to the next higher levels of government.” This would mean in practice shifting investigations to other police-friendly agencies and jurisdictions.

There are no demands that killer cops or their superiors be held criminally or legally accountable for the deaths and injuries they inflict. There are no demands for the removal of officials guilty of whitewashing police killings, such as Robert McCulloch, the St. Louis County prosecutor who rigged the grand jury proceedings to prevent the indictment of Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, the killer of Michael Brown.

The task force report notes that there is no mandatory federal database of police killings, and that the submission of this information by local police to the federal government is voluntary. Its response to this scandalous situation is merely to urge police departments to be more forthcoming with data.

The only substantial nationwide proposal is for the creation of a federal “Law Enforcement Diversity Initiative” to encourage the hiring of minority police officers. This is aimed at giving ammunition to the White House’s apologists, who will hail the proposal as evidence that the White House is “sensitive” to the needs of minority communities.

It is in line with the administration’s attempt to define the nationwide epidemic of police killings of unarmed people—white as well as black—as a racial question, obscuring the more fundamental class issues.

It is noteworthy that the central premise of the task force—that the problem is a “lack of trust” between the police and the population, is the same as that advanced by Obama following the exposure of massive, illegal spying on the American people by the National Security Agency. The task, Obama declared at that time, was to restore the trust of the American people in the NSA and other police and intelligence agencies.

Obama established a task force, packed with defenders of the NSA, to look into the issue and make recommendations. The result was a series of toothless proposals that in no way challenged the “right” of the NSA to violate the Constitution and intercept the communications of every single person in the US and tens of millions more around the world. The result is a level of mass surveillance today that is, if anything, even more pervasive than when the spying revelations emerged two years ago.

It will be no different with the policing task force and the epidemic of police killings.

The White House report is the product of a calculated political operation that began with the eruption of protests following the killing of Michael Brown last August. The administration responded by backing the police-military crackdown carried out by the local authorities, while carrying out maneuvers aimed at tamping down public outrage.

After the sham grand jury proceedings that exonerated Wilson, the White House announced a “civil rights” investigation. Predictably, the Justice Department has, according to media reports, found no grounds to bring charges against Wilson.

Since the killing of Brown, more than six hundred more people have been killed by police, according to an online compilation of local media reports. The murders of Brown, Garner and others, followed by the exoneration of the killer cops, sparked nationwide protests. But what have been the results?

The police have been given a virtual license to kill, secure in the knowledge that they will not be prosecuted. Meanwhile, hundreds of people have been arrested for protesting and dozens detained for posting criticisms of the police on social media.

The basic lessons is that democratic rights—including the right to live—cannot be defended by appealing to or relying on Congress, the courts, the Democratic Party or any other official institution. Basic rights can be defended only through an independent political movement of the working class in opposition to the existing economic and political system, that is, on the basis of a socialist program.

The endless series of sociopathic police killings expresses something much deeper than the individual psyches of the backward people recruited by the state to do its dirty work. These killings are ultimately an expression of the cancerous growth of social inequality, which is intrinsic to capitalism and the corporate and financial aristocracy that runs America.

Murder in Moscow: Why was Boris Nemtsov assassinated?

David North

The assassination of Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov is a significant political event that arises out of the US-Russia confrontation and the intense struggle that is now underway within the highest levels of the Russian state. The Obama administration and the CIA are playing a major role in the escalation of this conflict, with the aim of producing an outcome that serves the global geo-political and financial interests of US imperialism.

The relations between the United States and Russia are approaching a point of breakdown, with potentially catastrophic consequences. The Obama administration has concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin must be removed from power, based on the Kremlin’s refusal to accept, as a fait accompli, the overthrow last year of the democratically elected Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, and its opposition to the complete economic and military integration of Ukraine into the US sphere of influence.

Especially in the aftermath of Russia’s interference in US plans to attack Syria in 2013 and its granting of political asylum to NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden, Putin’s continued presidency has been deemed incompatible with US geo-political interests. Thus, the decision has been made to instigate—through international political pressure, economic sanctions, and covert operations of various sorts—Putin’s removal from power.

It is all but obvious that the Obama administration is hoping a faction will emerge within the Russian elite, backed by elements in the military and secret police, capable of staging a “palace coup” and getting rid of Putin. The personal fate of the Russian president—whether he goes the way of Serbia’s Milosevic, Romania’s Ceausescu, Iraq’s Hussein or Libya’s Gaddafi—is to be decided by the circumstances of his ouster.

In any event, Putin would then be replaced with a representative of a section of the oligarchy—a Russian version of the billionaire Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko—who is prepared to follow the US line without equivocation. The US media, of course, would hail such a development as a “democratic revolution.”

The United States is not seeking to trigger a widespread popular revolt. That is the very last thing it wants. The administration’s actions are directed entirely at convincing a section of the oligarchy and emerging capitalist class that their business interests and personal wealth depend upon US support. That is why the Obama administration has used economic sanctions targeting individuals as a means of exerting pressure on the oligarchs as well as broader sections of the entrepreneurial elite.

Significantly, Garry Kasparov—the émigré Russian neo-con who speaks for the most right-wing and aggressively anti-Putin forces in the US foreign policy establishment—wrote an opinion piece appearing in Monday’s Wall Street Journal which makes clear that the US is in close contact with the elites, discussing with them such issues as the overthrow of Putin. He calls on Western leaders to respond to Nemtsov’s killing by treating the Kremlin as a “criminal rogue regime.” He calls for the breaking off of negotiations between Russia and the West over the situation in eastern Ukraine and the immediate dispatch of weapons to the right-wing regime in Kiev.

Finally, Kasparov urges the US and EU to escalate pressure on the oligarchs in order to break their support for Putin. “Tell Russian oligarchs, every one of them,” he writes, “that there is no place their money will be safe in the West as long as they serve the Putin regime.”

It is in the context of this international power struggle that one must evaluate Nemtsov’s murder. Of course, it is possible that his death was the outcome of his private dealings. But it is more likely that he was killed for political reasons. Certainly, the timing of the killing—on the eve of the opposition’s anti-Putin demonstration in Moscow—strongly indicates that the killing was a political assassination, not a private settling of accounts.

The demonstration itself has particular significance. The organization of such demonstrations has become something of a CIA specialty, serving as a vital political backdrop and pretext for the implementation of regime-change. Individuals such as Alexei Navalny and other opposition figures are trumpeted in the US media as leaders of a “pro-democracy” movement.

There are two possible plot lines (each of which has innumerable variants) behind last Friday’s assassination:

The first is that Nemtsov was killed by elements in the Putin faction—with or without the knowledge of the president—as a warning to those in the elite who may be considering jumping ship. However, it is hard to see how such a reckless action would strengthen the regime.

The second is that he was killed by elements within the anti-Putin faction as a means of providing the fake democracy movement with a martyr. It is worth noting that in his Wall Street Journal comment, Kasparov refers to differences he had with Nemtsov over anti-Putin tactics, with Nemtsov taking a more cautious approach than Kasparov.

“Boris and I began to quarrel after Mr. Putin returned as president in 2012. To me, the Putin return signaled the end of any realistic hopes for a peaceful political path to regime change. But Boris was always optimistic. He would tell me I was too rash, that ‘you have to live a long time to see change in Russia.’ Now he will never see it.”

This statement seems to suggest significant tactical divisions in the US-backed anti-Putin camp. Perhaps Nemtsov was seen as an impediment to the implementation of violent regime-change. In such a situation, it is hardly beyond the realm of possibility that he came to be seen as someone whose “martyrdom” could best serve the anti-Putin cause.

The figure of Nemtsov is significant, as his career is rooted in the years of Russia’s first post-Soviet president, Boris Yeltsin. In the early 1990s, he emerged as a representative of a thoroughly corrupt layer of pro-capitalist compradors who were engaged in a fire sale of Soviet assets. Nemtsov formed close relations with US businessmen and was the subject of fawning treatment by the US press.

At the same time, Yeltsin, utterly corrupt and perennially drunk, had absolutely no concept of Russian national interests. The United States did whatever it wanted—in the Balkans, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia—without any opposition from Russia.

While Putin also emerged during the Yeltsin years—though in its later stages—it appears, in contrast to Nemtsov, that he represented sections of the old state intelligence agencies that were alarmed by the total abandonment by Yeltsin of any defense of Russian interests. Under Putin’s leadership, the traditional Russian preoccupation with a “strong state” has reemerged.

Eventually, this brought Putin into conflict with American—and, it must be added, European—imperialism. Clearly, Putin is trying to rally support for his nationalist-capitalist agenda. But this is inherently reactionary and politically bankrupt, involving Russia in an endless series of geopolitical conflicts for which it lacks the economic and military resources.

Moreover, the deep dissatisfaction of the working class with the outcome of capitalist restoration—devastating poverty and social inequality—will be intensified by the economic consequences of escalating military operations. Finally, Putin’s present-day allies in the oligarchy, beneath the weight of sanctions, grow increasingly disenchanted and are continually reassessing their options.

The Russian tragedy, arising out of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, cannot be resolved on a progressive basis except through the reemergence of the working class, armed with a revolutionary socialist and internationalist program. A mass movement of the working class, inspired by the political heritage of October 1917, is the only antidote to the poisonous atmosphere of conspiracy and counter-conspiracy that presently dominates Russian politics.

At the same time, the incredibly reckless operations of US imperialism, which can at any point escalate into a full-scale military-nuclear confrontation with Russia, must be opposed and ended through the development of a new mass anti-war movement, spearheaded by the working class and based on the principles of socialist internationalism.

Finding Peace Through Culture: A Triqui Vision

A.G

Walking down the streets of the city of Oaxaca, Mexico, one can hear merchants speak to their family and friends in many indigenous languages, such as variations of the Zapoteco and Mixteco. With 15 out of the 62 recognized ethnolinguistic groups in Mexico, Oaxaca is one of the most diverse states in the country.

As a state rich in ethnic diversity, Oaxaca attracts a good deal of cultural tourism. The need has arisen, consequently, to assist in these cultures’  reservation. The foundation Alfredo Harp Helu, for instance, participates in the preservation of Zapotecan culture. Through the foundation’s support, different centers can host workshops on indigenous textile techniques developed in the region, and provide lessons to learn native dialects. This type of philanthropy is valuable for Mexican society, as it helps preserve the colorful and millenary cultures that we often associate with Mexico.

Unfortunately not all ethnic groups in Oaxaca receive enough help to maintain their culture. There are places beyond the capital where poverty, violence and illiteracy persist. The Triqui, for example, can speak their native language, but most can no longer read or write it. Despite their recent successes in international basketball, the Triquis of Oaxaca are currently in the midst of a cultural crisis. As Federico Anaya Gallardo writes in his essay titled Contexto político y social de la reforma constitucional en la materia indígena del estado de Chiapas, “Modernization produced the surge of new social identities and new political and social groups that societies were unfamiliar with in the best of cases, and in the worst, despised.” The same explanation may be extended to Oaxacan society. In the 70’s the Triquis began organizing to fight an abusive agricultural system. In the pursuit of political rights, factions of Triqui groups were created. They all wanted peace and respect for their human rights, but had different political interests and identities, and ended up working separately.

“Some groups weren’t as peaceful as others and the clashes between them escalated into violence”, explains Emelia, a young Triqui woman whose face shows the passage of few, but cruel years. “We are famous for our violence,” she says, “but with respect to our culture, we haven’t advanced much. We have lost a lot of culture from our writing because there have been too many murders. All of the knowledge that we have goes to the grave, it worries us.”
“We are looking for a strategy on how to lessen the violence, it’s difficult, it’s not easy. But that is our vision, that someday the Triquis can live well, like humans, like we all deserve. Little by little we have advanced and accomplished things. In 2012 we signed a peace treaty amongst the Triquis.”

Even if the Peace and Concord Treaty has brought some relief to the region, the scar of past violence has kept trumping overall stability. Emelia’s eyes fill with tears as she speaks about her cousins who disappeared in 2007, yet, her voice is filled with the conviction that she will not stop trying to bring peace amongst the Triquis. “And like that, little by little we have been working with several groups, little by little with the communities, and like that, we have been advancing. And it was really hard because two of my cousins disappeared. And like that, with all the pain we worked, and we advanced, and now we have had some peace for four years.  Effectively, yes, there have been murders, but it isn’t like it was back in 2006 to 2010. Just because you weren’t a member of a certain community, you were an enemy, you were sexually attacked, physically. It was a critical situation. There’s a lot of widows and orphans thanks to the violence.”

Three years after the treaty was signed, the organization called Movimiento Unificación y Lucha Triqui (Triqui Struggle and Unification Movement, MULT) has attempted to create a house of Triqui culture in Oaxaca. This house, the MULT says, would bring together the Triquis under one same roof, and through the preservation of their culture, attain peace between the factions. There still are groups that clash, but the house promises to bring unity. “In this house there will be peace for everyone, not one group, but all of us, but we don’t have the means to start, that’s the problem. If we could receive some financial or cultural help from anyone, they could help us preserve our culture,” says Juan Domingo Pérez Castillo, natural leader and founder of the
MULT. “We want the house to be a sort of embassy amongst Triquis. For the Triquis of Oaxaca, we want this to be a place where we can document so many things from our culture. There are many young Triquis outside of Oaxaca, even in the U.S., who know they are Triqui but do not know much about us. So we want this house to be the place where they can go online, too, and do their research there.” Some of the things Juan says the house would have is a database of the curative plants they use, and have extensive information on the way the Triquis of the mountains sustain themselves. There is even talk of making a small documentary and going around the Triqui communities to have them all chip in their bit of Triqui wisdom. A major challenge they face in the creation of the house, says Emelia, is that very few living Triquis know how to read and write their language. The cost of reaching old Triqui speakers and writers is too high. “There are areas where the Triquis don’t even know how to read and write Spanish. So by keeping us ignorant, we stay separated,” says Juan. “Then alliances start forming, where groups look only to benefit themselves, instead of all the Triquis.” This does not mean that the Triqui language has been lost. There is a woman named Elena Erickson de Hollenbach who has a website where one can find books about the Triqui language. “The problem,” says Juan, “is that she came with intentions of evangelizing us too, rather than just documenting our language.” Juan says that they’re open to collaborating with any foreigner as long as they respect their beliefs and customs.

On February 2, 2015 there was a march in the city of Oaxaca where numerous MULT members walked down the main streets of the city. They were asking for the state and federal governments to implement projects that would improve the Triqui social structure including diminishing poverty and  marginalization. It culminated with the state government promising a dialogue on the 9th of February. This dialogue could lead to the creation of the House of Triqui Culture with the help and respect of the Oaxacan government. While those dialogues develop, Emelia and Juan say they will dedicate themselves to unify the Triqui communities through the maintenance of their culture, in any way possible.

House of Cards collapses

Andre Damon

In reviewing television programs, it has become customary to give readers a “spoiler warning” before discussing specific details of the plot. In the case ofHouse of Cards, Season 3, this will not be necessary, because the season has no significant plot to speak of.

House of Cards

The program, produced by Netflix, began as a sharp and scathing portrayal of the violence and corruption behind the official facade of American politics. It has been turned into an utterly trite and complacent celebration of the political establishment.

In the first season of the show, Democratic Congressman Francis Underwood, snubbed in his nomination to a cabinet post in a presidential administration he helped put in power, orchestrates his own appointment as vice president through conspiracy, in the process murdering a junior congressman.

In the second season, Underwood secures his ascension to the presidency through a plot to have the sitting president impeached. The body count rises: Underwood personally throws his mistress, reporter Zoe Barnes—whom he was using to plant stories in the press—under a subway train. He has the FBI entrap Barnes’s fellow reporter, who suspects Underwood in the murder, and convict him on trumped-up charges, locking him up for decades.

In the third season, Underwood somehow emerges from this baptism of blood as a thoroughly conventional president, although with his fair share of personal and political difficulties. The “drama” of the season largely revolves around petty, boring and completely unconvincing squabbles between Underwood and his wife, in the context of geopolitical and domestic events drawn uncritically from contemporary headlines.

The first two seasons presented a story that was half Macbeth, half Richard III. The show’s dramatic success depended on Underwood’s sangfroid, ruthlessness, cynicism and lack of sentimentality, which made for a believable character. At the same time, there were human, and even sometimes humane elements to Underwood that gave his character a certain complexity and richness.

A viewer watching season three will proceed through the first few episodes waiting for the shoe to drop, asking: When will the narrative resume? But at some point, he or she will realize that the third season bears no significant relationship to the first two. The characters are the same, the cinematography similar, but any trace of political criticism has been entirely removed, and the direction and purpose of the show have changed. The whole thing unfolds as one big bait and switch.

The political content of the show ends up supporting and justifying various pressing policy interests of the America ruling class. In dealing with international geopolitics, all the tropes of American foreign policy are parroted uncritically. The Russian state is painted as a totalitarian autocracy, clamping down on gay rights and political dissent, while the US seeks to counter Russian “aggression” while working for stability and peace in the Middle East.

Members of the pro-US, anti-Russian protest group Pussy Riot make a cameo when they are invited to a state dinner at the White House with Russian President Victor Petrov (a stand-in for Vladimir Putin). And after a jailed American political dissident in Russia commits suicide, Claire Underwood throws caution aside and does the “right thing,” denouncing the authoritarianism of the Russian state in a press conference. The irony of a First Lady of a country whose policy is torture and extrajudicial murder denouncing Russia for authoritarianism is not even considered.

Underwood’s ordering of assassinations—a reference to the unconstitutional drone murder program of the Obama administration—is presented in uncritical fashion and largely in passing. To the extent that the moral or constitutional questions involved are even considered, it is to justify these crimes.

A scene in which the Supreme Court hears testimony from the civilian survivor of a drone strike is counterpoised to a scene of Arlington National Cemetery, perpetuating the lie that drone murders are necessary to save American lives. The viewer is meant to draw the conclusion that, though drone assassination and the dozens of civilian casualties each one entails may be somewhat distasteful, they are ultimately necessary, and the real victims are the politicians and soldiers who have to carry out the killings.

Underwood’s main piece of domestic legislation, a proposal aimed at eliminating the “entitlement programs” of Social Security and Medicare, is presented as visionary, aimed at cutting through the “gridlock” of Washington and finally “getting something done.” The makers of the show seem to assume that this measure would be broadly popular, and rule out the possibility that it would evoke social opposition from the tens of millions of people who would find themselves cut off from their only source of income.

In the original 1990 British television show House of Cards, Francis Urquhart, on whose character Underwood is based, is ultimately undone both by his own crimes and the social forces he has unleashed. But in the third season of the American show, there is no consideration of any broader social forces outside of Washington.

Instead, Underwood and his wife, who once threatened to let an unborn child “wither and die” inside a woman who crossed her, are recast in the mold of affluent middle-class professionals. The action might as well have taken place in the home of a high-powered husband and wife team of proctologists.

The show’s executive producer, Beau Willimon, basically said as much in an interview with Variety magazine, declaring, “All we’re trying to do is tell the story of Frank and Claire Underwood. They happen to be politicians. Their story of ambition and power hungriness is a story you could have told on Wall Street or in a law firm or in a lot of different worlds. I don’t think House of Cards is about politics at all.”

This conception, that the broader social and political context is irrelevant to understanding the personal actions of anyone, much less of politicians, is stupid and childish, and applying it to House of Cards results in a show that resembles a daytime soap opera with desaturated colors.

All of this speaks ultimately to the views and values of the show’s affluent, well-connected actors and creators, who have accepted uncritically the broader views of the American ruling class. It has become a production of the political establishment. Indeed, it has incorporated much of the state apparatus, with cameos from major figures in the American media establishment, including Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert and NBC special correspondent Meredith Vieira.

In the process, the criminality that lay at the center of the first two seasons has been sanitized. In the first season, Underwood remarked that he came into high office with “not a single vote cast in my name,” declaring “democracy is so overrated.” But the horrible crimes committed by Underwood on his road to power have almost no relevance to the entire third season. Could there be any doubt that Underwood’s presidency would bear the marks of the crimes he committed to obtain it?

For the ruling elite and its media hangers-on, a crime, even a high crime, if committed by the rich and powerful, is seen largely as a public relations issue. If it is spun right, or even ignored, it simply goes away.

This past December, the US Senate released portions of its report on government torture, decisively proving the personal culpability of the entire Bush administration in planning and orchestrating the most horrific crimes, of which “rectal feeding” was only the most memorable. The New York Timescalled for criminal prosecutions of top officials in the Bush administration. And what now? The media has stopped reporting on it, and politicians do not raise the issue. Life goes on.

One could envision a different trajectory for House of Cards, one that would also be closer to the reality of American politics. Let us imagine for a moment what would happen if the show’s creators had held true to the characters and approach they created in the first two seasons.

In the third episode of the third season, Underwood displays his “toughness” by cancelling a scheduled joint press conference with Russian President Petrov, instead holding his own press conference where he denounces the Russian government. But to be true to his original character, Underwood should have been able to display a degree of criminality in his interaction with Petrov that would have left the Russian leader frightened and horrified. For example, taking Petrov through a secret corridor below the White House to an interrogation room where Underwood personally tortures and murders a “terrorist” suspect.

But nothing like this ever occurs. The show’s creators are afraid of what would happen if they carry Underwood’s bent for murder and terror into the White House: they would have approached a realistic depiction of the sadism and violence that pervade the highest levels of the American state. It would have been too close to the truth for comfort.