Chief Manhattan Prosecutor Cyrus Vance Jr. is a Criminal Who Is About To Be Reelected Unopposed In Soviet-Style Election

That's right, Cyrus Vance (Jr.) is the only name on the ballot. People wanting someone else will have to write in a name. Needless to say, it will be impossible for anyone else to win this race in a borough of New York City of about 1.6 million inhabitants.

Vance has taken bribes in two major cases in return for quashing prosecutions, thus committing another crime on two occasions, obstruction of justice. The bribes were in the form of hefty campaign contributions. These are just the two cases that have come to light so far. There's a good chance there are others.  I'll just review the details in brief, as the cases are thoroughly delineated in separate pieces in establishment media organs. [1]

The first case, from 2012, came to light just last month. It involved major fraud by two of Donald Trump's (you've heard of him) children, Ivanka and Donald Jr. Prosecutors in Vance's office, the Manhattan District Attorney, spent a year building a powerful case against the duo. The evidence was damning and conclusive, including emails clearly showing criminal intent and knowledge of wrongdoing. Yet Vance overruled all the prosecutors on every level, ruling there was no case there. This happened after Trump Sr. sent one of his fixer-lawyers to "discuss" the case with Vance, after the failure of hired criminal defense attorneys to get prosecutors under Vance to drop the case, and the fixer-lawyer made some campaign contributions to Vance. (After the media spotlight was shone on Vance, he returned the money.)

The second case has been exposed with the explosion of coverage of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein's 30-year career of sexual molestations, harrassments, and assaults, including rape anf forced fellatio. In 2015, Police made a case against Weinstein, including a recording of him admitting to assaulting an Italian model by grabbing her breast. Weinstein sent two lawyers to lobby Vance- Vance’s former law partner Elkan Abramowitz, plus a former prosecutor. One of them gave Vance $10,000 days after the meeting. A third Weinstein attorney, David Boies, contributed to Vance. Vance duly refused to prosecute the case.

On October 11 of this year, Vance was forced to justify rejecting the police case against Weinstein, which included a recording made by the Italian model he molested on that particular occasion and whom the NYPD wired for sound for a return visit to Weinstein the day after the assault: "I as the DA have to be guided by the evidence by the elements of the crime..." sayeth the Upright Prosecutor of Wrongdoing. "If we had a case my experts thought we could prosecute we would have." "If my experts felt we could have prosecuted we would have." Thus spake Vance. (WNYC radio broadcast.)

Really Cyrus? But Vance OVERRULED ALL his prosecutors in the Trump case! Weren't they "experts"? And prosecutors can ALWAYS PROSECUTE, whether the charges are valid or not. Given how many innocent people they frame up, and how often they harass political activists that way and "neutralize" those they convict and imprison, his statement is particularly cynical. Vance himself targeted and imprisoned Occupy Wall Street activist Cecily McMillan for the crime of having her breast groped by a violent cop. Vance invokes "the law."

After Weinstein's shit hit the fan, Vance had the gall to urge people to come forward! One very big reason they DON'T is that guys like HIM don't PROSECUTE the cases!

He also struck a Nobler Than Thou pose: "I was sickened (by the surreptitiously recorded police tape of Weinstein in the Italian model case) but at the end of the day we operate by law not by public opinion," he sniffed self-righteously. See, he's better than us! He won't be moved by our outrage! (Cash contributions to his campaign coffers are another matter.) Those in power habitually hide behind the skirts of Mother Law to justify their base actions.

While Vance may have a soft spot for rich and privileged criminals, he's plenty tough on political dissidents rounded up by police for protesting things the power establishment doesn't want protested. Dissidents assaulted by the police especially come in for Vance's brand of "justice" and "rule of law." For example, the aforementioned case of Occupy New York Movement participant Cecily McMillan. A sadistic NYPD cop with a history of violence and brutality against defenseless citizens, Grantly Bovell, assaulted her at the Occupy site in Manhattan, grabbing her breasts from behind and mauling them. She instinctively and blindly swung her elbow backwards, catching the thug cop in the head, slightly bruising him. As is the usual practice when American police assault people, the victim was charged with assault on a police officer, a serious felony in a police state like the U.S. A jury of pro-government stooges duly convicted McMillan, ignoring the evidence, including medical records and photos of her injuries at the hands of her attacker-in-Blue. She was sentenced to 6 months in the infamous, Dickensian New York City jail complex, Rikers Island, plus 5-years of probation during which time she is forbidden from engaging in political activity on pain of reimprisonment, (Yet another in an endless stream of thousands and thousands of examples of the cynical hollowness of all the breast-beating propaganda proclaiming the U.S. to be positively the acme of "freedom.")

McMillan had simply been sitting among the crowd of protesters in Zuccotti Park (named after a member of the city's permanent ruling class) when she was singled out for attack and arrest, probably because she was a regional organizer for Young Democratic Socialists of America.

McMillan was denied access to an attorney, supposedly "guaranteed" by the U.S. Constitution and Supreme Court rulings- so much for "rule of law." Apparently "law" is merely a club for those in power to beat the rest of us into submission with, not something they have to obey themselves. She was also denied timely medical care for her cop-inflicted injuries. [2]

Add false prosecution to the indictment of Vance, along with bribery and obstruction of justice.

As for the background of the criminal Vance; Vance's father was Cyrus Vance, a made-member of the nomenklatura. Among other things, Vance Sr. was Secretary of State under President James Earl Carter. That is, until he resigned. He resigned because he objected to Carter's "hostage rescue" mission, a raid on the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, iran, in which a slaughter of up to 1,000 Iranians was anticipated to forcibly spring the embassy personnel who were seized after the U.S. ignored Iran's warnings and gave sanctuary to the fleeing, murderous dictator the Shah, whom Carter had earlier politically blessed as a "great friend." Vance Sr. had certain scruples, but apparently Vance Jr. didn't inherit any.

1]  See "How Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump, Jr., Avoided A Criminal indictment," The
New Yorker, October 4, 2017; "Why Didn’t the Manhattan D.A. Cyrus Vance Prosecute the Trumps or Harvey Weinstein?,"  The New Yorker, October 13, 2017; "Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance needs a better explanation for why he didn’t charge Harvey Weinstein," Slate, October 11, 2017; "NYPD Was Ready to Arrest Harvey Weinstein in 2015 After Model Said She Was Groped," The Daily Beast, October 10, 2017.


2]  McMillan was far from the only victim of police violence. Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama had the Federal government arrange coordinated, simultaneous "crackdowns" in various cities with Occupy Protests. A Marine veteran was almost murdered in Oakland by police who fired a tear gas canister at his head, and then attacked fellow protesters trying to come to his aid. In New York City, according to an eyewitness:

JEN WALLER: It is when we speak out against the 1 percent and defy them by fighting for public space that we are brutalized. On Saturday night as I simply sat in a park, I was violently arrested with my friends and watched as bloodthirsty cops stomped on their faces, knelt on their necks, pulled them by their hair, and slammed them into windows. I watched as one friend was treated as a battering ram as they carried him into an MTA bus, slamming his head on every step and seat as they went along. I watched as a young woman’s rib was broken, as she hyperventilated, convulsed and seizured in the middle of the street. ["Exclusive: OWS Activist Cecily McMillan Describes Seizure, Bodily Injuries in Arrest by NYPD," Democracy Now, March 23, 2012.] See also "Cecily McMillan's guilty verdict reveals our mass acceptance of police violence," Guardian (UK), 5 May, 2014, which has interesting details such as the fact that thug cop Bovell didn't even remember which of his eyes McMillan allegedly injured. And if it fact it was injured, it was accidental and provoked by his assault.

One small additional note, pertinent to the notion that if only more racial minorities were in U.S. police forces, things would be much different: Bovell is African-American. I'm not implying that police departments shouldn't be integrated and more representative generally of the populace, just that that is no panacea, absent the kind of systemic political and cultural changes needed in U.S. policing.

"I'm holding a number in my hand for the size of the "contribution" 

that will make your case go away. Guess what it is..."

 Like father, Not like son.

 

Obama Regime Codifies Policy of Murdering Journalists U.S. Doesn't Like

Another day, another U.S. outrage. Under the Obama regime, the Pentagon has issued a manual on how the U.S. military is to deal with journalists they don't like. They are to be deemed “unprivileged belligerents,” treated as enemy spies, and subject to assassination. [1]

The “privilege” being stripped from journalists would be the Geneva Conventions, an allegedly binding treaty obligation of the U.S. But as the regime of Bush the Younger already declared  those solemn Treaties null and void, Treaties which under the U.S. Constitution carry the same status as Constitutional law, they already are dead letters. The U.S. does what it wants, whenever it wants, as long as it thinks it can get away with it. The only thing that is new here is its open declaration of the fact that journalists are targets of its lethal violence. Although the declaration was done in a smarmy, matter-of-fact way that belies its awful significance. As happens so often in the Obama Regime, they want to slip one past us, reflecting the character of the Con-Man-In-Chief.

And make no mistake- murder is the real intent here. The New York Times asked an unnamed “senior Pentagon official” for an example of  a journalist as “unprivileged belligerent” (i.e. someone it's okay to murder, torture, imprison in secret “black sites” or the Guantanamo Bay military gulag, etc., since there are no rules once you discard the Geneva Conventions) and this creature gave the example of the Al-Qaeda assassins who murdered the leader of the Northern Alliance on September 10th, 2001. Who, of course, were not journalists but assassins masquerading as journalists.[2]

In other words, if they don't like what a journalist is doing, they'll be treated as a “terrorist.” You know what that means.

In fact, we know what it means from how the U.S. conducted itself in Vietnam, especially with the CIA's mass assassination program, Operation Phoenix. Or in Latin America, where it created and directed fascist terrorist regimes to slaughter all told hundreds of thousands. Or in Indonesia, where a minimum of 800,000 people were exterminated in a U.S.-instigated and CIA-planned mass murder.

Once the U.S. labels you a terrorist, your life is in grave peril.

The targeting of journalists actually isn't new in practice, as the U.S. has been murdering journalists for years. What's new is the overtness, the declaration of this vileness as official policy. As with torture and assassination generally, the U.S. no longer feels the need to put up a false front. As with outsourcing CIA subversion to the “National Endowment for Democracy,” the U.S. now does matter-of-factly what it used to try and hide. Whereas before U.S. hypocrisy was the tribute its vice paid to virtue, now the mask is off. Increasingly the U.S. sinks lower and lower into the abyss of immorality. [3]

But typically, the Obama White House was smarmily evasive when asked by the New York Times [2] about the Pentagon's newly declared official policy of targeting journalists, as if somehow Obama wasn't Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces and chief of the executive branch of the U.S. Government. He does that a lot, trying to fob off responsibility as if he's just a bystander. He's been doing it on other issues to, like “criminal justice reform,” running around saying “Hey, we lock up too many folks,” instead of ordering his Attorney General to stop seeking maximum charges against people, deprioritize “drug” offenses, and use his own powers of commutation and pardon to free Federal prisoners. He's commuted fewer than 100 sentences- and pardoned no one- in all his years in office, vs. “dictator” Vladimir Putin of Russia freeing at least 1,000. Of course, Russia is oppressive, and the U.S. is “free.” That's why the U.S. has three times the prison population as Russia, and a much higher percentage of its adult population imprisoned.

Or maybe, rather than the U.S. sinking deeper into immorality, it is merely the U.S. returning to its roots. It is, after all, an evil empire founded on the twin pillars of genocide and slavery. Many have struggled mightily over the centuries to make it something better, with mixed results. After a brief upsurge of resistance, protest, and rebellion lasting about a decade from the early 1960s to the early 1970s which consisted of disparate strands of black struggle, opposition to the Indochina war, and the Counterculture, the power structure has worked assiduously, using all its arms (every branch of government at every level, the media, corporations, schools, religion, and more) to beat back these movements and especially to delegitimize the ideological content of those movements and re-brainwash and re-indoctrinate the populace in the “correct” attitudes and ideas.

Another factor was the demise of the main force in the world that could check U.S. power and arrogance, the Soviet Union. This emboldened the U.S. tremendously. Bush the Elder even declared a “New World Order.” Meaning an era of unchallengeable U.S. hegemony.

It hasn't worked out that way, due to various factors, including the rise of China, and the stubborn spread of Islamofascism, a huge example of “blowback” from the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan,where the U.S. allied with the most reactionary Islamic elements and with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the two crucial patrons of Islamofascism.

But the U.S. elites are still drunk on power. Unfortunately for them, this arrogance makes them behave stupidly. So instead of seriously countering the rise of the most dangerous rival that looks set to become the next world hegemon in a few decades, China, they've decide to focus on attacking Russia. The U.S. and its Eurostooges creates a crisis in Ukraine, blamed that crisis on Russia, and used that as a pretext to restart the Cold War (and claiming it was Russia restarting the Cold War, for good measure!).

Meanwhile China repeatedly rips off Western businesses in China, and massively infiltrates U.S. computer networks and steals data, including critical information on weaponry, which China has used to build its own advances jets and missiles. The latest (announced) attack was the theft of personal data on 20 million people in Federal databases. Other than scapegoating the (female) head of the agency in question by firing her (Obama is constantly throwing women overboard like that- the same thing happened with Lois Lerner of the IRS and with the first female head of the Secret Service) the U.S. has taken it lying down. It is afraid to retaliate. It is afraid of China. It is afraid to confront China. And you better believe the Chinese rulers know this.

Thus China now has the psychological upper hand. This makes China the dominant “partner” in the “relationship.”

Some reactionary American demagogues will of course blame this on Democratic “weakness” and fecklessness, a card they've been playing since 1946 or so. (Hey, it still works, so why not?) Of course Republican regimes have also practiced appeasement towards China. U.S. policy towards China should rightly be called appeasement, punctuated by occasional “stern” talk. (Shades of Neville Chamberlain!)

The underlying reasons for this effective surrender and submission to China are two-fold. First, big corporations drive U.S. policy. And those corporations are still blinded by the chimera of “a market of 1.3 billion consumers.” The Chinese have cleverly played foreign corporations like fiddles, stringing them along, forcing them into “partnerships” with Chinese businesses that take all their knowledge and technology and methods, and then grab the whole or most of the pie. But the stupid foreigners never learn. GE has handed over critical jet engine technology (nothing like a capitalist selling the hangman the rope to be used to hang the capitalist!) which the U.S. government permitted. (Can you imagine the Chinese government permitting the reverse to occur?) China is a one-party dictatorship in a society that historically is very conformist and regimented, making it far easier to set coherent policies.

The other factor is U.S. cowardice. The U.S. has been spoiled by two centuries of weak enemies and easy expansion. I think the U.S. is basically a big bully, and deep down, bullies tend to be cowards. They fear adversaries they might actually lose to. (Obviously that is not to belittle the personal bravery of the cannon-fodder who do the actual fighting and dying. Don't confuse me with Donald Trump.)

Unfortunately, a world dominated by China (assuming the current one-party dictatorship is still in power) will be no real improvement over a world dominated by the U.S. So from the human perspective, there is no side to root for in this competition for global hegemony.

But at least it won't be total hegemony. True hegemony over the entire planet is a rainbow in the eyes of imperialists. They think it is real, and they constantly chase it, but they can never attain it. Global dominance however is attainable. So unfortunately the crushing oppression they CAN inflict on humanity is very much in the realm of the possible. Indeed, it has been the actual state of (sub)humankind for millennia.

I MAKE THE CONNECTIONS YOU NEED TO KNOW.

1] “The Pentagon’s Dangerous Views on the Wartime Press,” New York Times editorial, August 10, 2015. The manual is cynically titled “Department of Defense Law of War Manual June 2015.” Obviously the actual content is “There Is No Law For US, We Do What We Want!” If you want the Pentagon to capture your computer's IP address, and maybe plant spyware on you, the manual is in .pdf form here or here, Better, just get the pdf from public intelligence. 

The Pentagon had it's very own lawyers concoct this 1,204 page pile of excrement, so it MUST be “legal.”

The manual makes a nice bookend to the U.S. Army Field Manual, which instructs soldiers on torture techniques. That's not just my opinion. These torture methods are defined as torture by the United Nations. (But the U.S. holds the UN in contempt, so who cares?)

2] Ibid.

Meet the "public servants" who legalized the murder of journalists. Thank you for your service!

3] Examples of the U.S. targeting of journalists for death include the bombing of the Belgrade TV center in Serbia (one could argue whether those were journalists or propagandists, but just as one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, one man's journalist is another man's propagandist); the attack by U.S. Army tank on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, killing a Spanish journalist (the Spanish government, a quasi-satrapy of the U.S., helped the U.S. quash legal cases in the matter); the repeatedly bombings of the Al-Jazeera offices in Kabul and Baghdad (interesting footnote that is deeply buried in the memory hole- British Prime Minister and accomplice to U.S. aggression Tony Blair had to talk Bush the Younger out of bombing Al-Jazeera in its home country, the oil sheikdom of Qatar- you'd think that was an important enough fact NOT to systematically suppress); and the murder of American journalists Danny Casolaro, and of Michael Hastings in California, using a bomb planted in his car and the remote seizure of his car's accelerator, brake, and steering via the car's computer systems. Nor is this an all-inclusive list.

Casolaro was murdered on this very date in 1991 while investigating the secret deal Ronald Reagan and his henchmen made with the Khomeini regime in Iran to delay the release of the U.S. "hostages" until Carter was no longer president. (The "hostage crisis" was the key factor in Carter's defeat in the 1990 election. ABC even started a nightly "news" program, Nightline, to harp on the "hostage crisis" every single night. It was hosted by notorious propagandist and Kissinger sycophant Ted Koppel.  It's obvious purpose was to oust Carter, which the ruling class had soured on. The New York Times also spent a year portraying Carter negatively, even running a photo of him out of breath in a marathon and describing him as "panting," i.e. weak and pathetic. Real subtle.)

We should mention in passing U.S. pals that murder journalists. Two of the U.S.' favorite Latin American nations murder scores of journalists- Colombia and Mexico. In fact it is obviously their policy to do so as they've been doing it for years.

But not to be one-sided about this, “bad guy” nations kill journalists too. Iran, for example. And Russia has killed a few- a mere handful, far fewer than those two U.S. buddy nations I mentioned have killed. Which is not to exonerate those execrable regimes. The totalitarian theocrats of Iran hate the “wrong” kind of writers so much that they tried to murder an entire busload of them whom they lured to a fake “conference.” The bus driver tried to drive the bus over a cliff (after jumping out) but flubbed the hit. So the writers all had to be arrested and charged with “crimes” instead.

That latter move is standard procedure in dealing with dissidents and “subversive elements;” paint them as criminals. To return to my own country, that Beacon of Freedom, the U.S. does it incessantly. Just two recent examples (out of innumerable thousands over U.S. history): Randy Credico, who had the temerity to run for Governor of New York State, was punished for this infraction by being arrested and charged wih a non-existent “assault” on police, and Cecily McMillan, who was grabbed by her breasts from behind and mauled by a sadistic New York City cop with a history of violence. (Grantley Bovell, who happens to be black, another example of the fallacy of thinking that the way to change this repressive system is with more black cops.) McMillan blindly swung her elbow backwards, catching her assailant in the head. The Manhattan District Attorney, one Cyrus Vance, Jr., a scion of the ruling class and made member of the U.S. nomenklatura (his daddy was  Secretary of State in the Carter regime), following standard operating procedure when the police brutalize someone, indicted Cecily for felonious assault on a police officer. A group of sheep was impaneled as a jury, and Cecily was duly convicted after a “fair” trial (all U.S. trials are “fair” by definition) and imprisoned at the notorious Rikers Island prison complex, where beatings and deaths are commonplace. Also, she was enjoined from engaging in political activity for five years, on pain of reimprisonment. Because the U.S. is a “free” country, you see. (Reminds me of the South African apartheid regime's practice of “banning” people, to politically neutralize them. Come to think of it, the U.S. was an ally and protector of that regime until almost the very end. Hmmm.)

During McMillan's trial, the female prosecutor very convincingly explained the documented bruises on Cecily's breasts by saying she deliberately created  them herself. (You detected my irony there, I presume.)

But Credico and McMillan are two of  the “lucky” ones. The “unlucky” ones get imprisoned for decades, or are beaten, tased, gassed, or are victims of arson attacks, or are assassinated. (Note to dissidents: whatever you do, don't interrupt a speech by Barack Obama!)

Of course, all the attention of the Western propaganda systems go towards the crimes of enemy nations like Russia and Iran while completely ignoring the often more numerous crimes of the U.S. and its “partners.” (The U.S. media of course is completely despicable in this regard, but the BBC is no better. I have yet to hear a mention on BBC of the murder of journalists and labor organizers, among others, in Colombia. They only “report” on Colombia to demonize FARC, the guerrilla movement there. So is the BBC journalism or propaganda?)

I MAKE THE CONNECTIONS YOU NEED TO KNOW.