Monday, January 28, 2013

ANS -- 'We're all living longer'? No, we're not.

this is in response to the idea that we should make the retirement age older.  No, we aren't living longer.  Look at this. 
find it here:   http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/01/28/1182711/--We-re-all-living-longer-No-we-re-not  
--Kim



Mon Jan 28, 2013 at 08:02 AM PST

'We're all living longer'? No, we're not.

by Joan McCarter Follow Elderly man with cane  
Older Americans, a threatened species.
Raising the retirement age for Social Security and Medicare is one of the very favorite "solutions" of the deficit peacock crowd for punishing the American people for getting older. They justify this idea, always, with the demographically challenged assertion that Americans are living longer, so it just has to be done. That's most lately the assertion in op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, which tells us that the benefits of longevity "aren't just enjoyed by 'privileged' Americans."

Wrong, as Kevin Drum illustrustrates in a simple graph with data taken from this study in Health Affairs.

[]
attribution: None Specified

Men are represented by the lighter colors and women the darker. The more education, the greater the earning potential, the longer the lifespan. That's the empirical data based on the Multiple Cause of Death data files from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). And the rate of growth in the gap in education and lifespan is so fast and so wide, it's astonishing.

The Very Serious People in Washington, all with their 16+ years of education and comfortable existences, continue to pretend that there isn't income inequality, that there isn't opportunity inequality. Because everyone they know is old and healthy and plans to work until they die, that must be true of all of America. They are completely blind to the fact that there's a big segment of the population that is in fact dying earlier than they did just two decades ago.

That's reality.

ANS -- President Obama Tells the Progressive Story of America

Here is Doug Muder's comment on President Obama's second inaugural address.  It's poetic. 
Find it here:  http://weeklysift.com/2013/01/28/president-obama-tells-the-progressive-story-of-america/#comment-4833  
--Kim


President Obama Tells the Progressive Story of America

[] What made President Obama's Second Inaugural the best speech of his presidency was its great theme: He told the story of America as progressives understand it, and connected it with the progressive mission today.

In recent years, liberals have let conservatives own the big-picture story of America. If you hear somebody talking about the Founders and the Constitution, probably it's Michele Bachmann or Ron Paul or some other hero of the self-styled "patriots" of the Tea Party.

Liberals have been more comfortable talking about peace and justice in the here and now: How are we going to get our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan? What can we do about levels of inequality last seen in the Gilded Age? How are we going to stop gun violence? How can we make sure that the sick, the old, and the disabled get the care they need? Can we stop profit-privatizing/risk-socializing bankers from crashing the economy again? And so on.

Facts vs. visions. I believe liberals actively shy away from this big-picture mythologizing because of our disgust at how conservatives abuse it: They must talk about their grand vision, because when you get down to the nitty-gritty of facts, they are just plain wrong. Rape causes pregnancy. The globe is warming. The rich are getting all the money. The economy has a demand problem. Taxes are low, spending is not out of control, and the federal government can't go bankrupt.

Let Glenn Beck spin stories about the last 5,000 years, we'd rather point to things that are actually happening and say, "Look! Look!"

And yet … " Where there is no vision the people perish." Without some larger context, day-to-day political efforts can seem meaningless. Why waste your energy? Make a nice dinner for your family. See a movie. Get ready for that thing at work. The immediate benefits of those efforts are clear. Politics? Not so much.

If conservatives offer their followers a role in the drama of History and we don't, we will never match their intensity. Worse, by not offering a larger vision, we can seem to consent to the conservative narrative, in which "socialists" from FDR to LBJ to Obama have usurped the " libertarian" Republic of the Founders.

But progressives have their own story of America, and can offer a different role in the drama of History.

Progressive vs. fundamentalist mythology. In general, there are two main ways ­ fundamentalist and progressive ­ to turn history into a motivating myth. The generic Fundamentalist Myth begins with a Golden Age of divinely inspired prophets and larger-than-life heroes. From there, we devolved and corrupted their legacy. But deep inside our fallen shells glows the same spark that burned so brightly in them. So if we stoke fire of greatness and scour away the rust of corruption, we can recreate the world they meant for us to have.
[]

a cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night

The Progressive Myth reveres its past in a different way. Our legacy consists not of perfect past to which we should strive to return, but of a vision that has shone through the ages, always just out of reach, and of a journey towards that vision.

The Biblical motif is not the Garden of Eden, the Davidic Kingdom, or the Apostolic Church, but the Israelites wandering through the desert: We were slaves in Egypt when Moses gave us ­ not Freedom ­ but a vision of Freedom and the hope of a Promised Land. God is with us not as a once-and-future King, but as a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, wordlessly marking the direction of our march. We move forward because the only permanent encampment behind us is Pharaoh's.

It is not hard to see the Fundamentalist Myth in the Tea Party's version of American history. The Founders are prophets, and the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are scripture.

But the Progressive Myth can also apply to American history. And like so much liberal/conservative disagreement, the progressive version stays closer to the facts.

The Second Inaugural Address. President Obama began his speech with the holiest words in the American canon:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

But that was not the establishment of a Golden Age to which we must return. It was the start of a journey with no turning back.

Today we continue a never-ending journey, to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time. For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they have never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth.

That journey has had two pieces: Change that became necessary as circumstances changed, and change that became necessary as we reached a clearer vision of the meaning of our founding principles. And so our journey included the abolition of slavery

Through blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by sword, we learned that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free. We made ourselves anew, and vowed to move forward together.

the construction of modern infrastructure from the Erie Canal to the interstate highways

Together, we determined that a modern economy requires railroads and highways to speed travel and commerce, schools and colleges to train our workers.

the trust-busting of Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt's creation of the SEC and other modern regulatory bodies

Together, we discovered that a free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play.

and Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid

Together, we resolved that a great nation must care for the vulnerable, and protect its people from life's worst hazards and misfortune.

These are not corruptions or usurpations of the Founders' dream, but its continuing realization.

We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths –- that all of us are created equal –- is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone.

And we are not done yet.

It is now our generation's task to carry on what those pioneers began. For our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts. Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law ­ for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well. Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote. Our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity ­ until bright young students and engineers are enlisted in our workforce rather than expelled from our country. Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia, to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for and cherished and always safe from harm.

That is our generation's task ­ to make these words, these rights, these values of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness real for every American.

Looked at with clear eyes, American history is meaningful only as a place to be from, not a place to go back to. Where would you go? To the slave plantations? To Jim Crow? To the Trail of Tears? To the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory? To Love Canal? To marriages where wives own no property and have rights only through their husbands? To a time when old age and poverty were practically synonymous? Where?

As a nation, we can rightfully take pride in the challenges we have overcome, but not in where we have been. To go back, to give up all that progress, would betray our revolutionary heritage. Our forebears kept moving forward, and so will we. 

Sunday, January 27, 2013

ANS -- David Brooks Is Pathological

This is about how crazy the Republicans have become -- and they are blaming it on Obama, as in, Obama is to blame for making Republicans look extreme by being so moderate and conciliatory it makes the Repubs look as unreasonable as they actually are.  Yes, that's kookoo. 
Find it here:  http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/15607-david-brooks-is-pathological   
--Kim




New York Times columnist David Brooks. (photo: unknown)  
New York Times columnist David Brooks. (photo: unknown)

go to original article


David Brooks Is Pathological

By Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine

18 January 13

 

[] oderate Republicanism is a tendency that increasingly defies ideological analysis and instead requires psychological analysis. The psychological mechanism is fairly obvious. The radicalization of the GOP has placed unbearable strain on those few moderates torn between their positions and their attachment to party. Many moderate conservatives have simply broken off from the party, at least in its current incarnation, and are hoping or working to build a sane alternative. Those who remain must escape into progressively more baroque fantasies.

The prevalent expression of this psychological pain is the belief that President Obama is largely or entirely responsible for Republican extremism. It's a bizarre but understandable way to reconcile conflicting emotions - somewhat akin to blaming your husband's infidelity entirely on his mistress. In this case, moderate Republicans believe that Obama's tactic of taking sensible positions that moderate Republicans agree with is cruel and unfair, because it exposes the extremism that dominates the party, not to mention the powerlessness of the moderates within it. Michael Gerson recently expressed this bizarre view, and the pathology is also on vivid display in David Brooks's column today.

Brooks begins by noting that the Grand Bargain on the deficit, which he has spent the last two years relentlessly touting, is not actually possible. Why is it impossible? Because, he writes, "A political class that botched the fiscal cliff so badly are not going to be capable of a gigantic deal on complex issues."

Oh, the political class? That's funny. In 2011, Obama offered an astonishingly generous budget deal to House Republicans, and Brooks argued at the time that if the GOP turned the deal down, it would prove their "fanaticism." Naturally, they turned it down. Obama continues to offer a bargain including higher revenue through tax reform in return for lower spending on retirement programs, but Republicans refuse to consider higher taxes. So, in summary, this proves "the political class" is to blame.

What Obama should be doing in response, Brooks argues, is push for policies that provoke no opposition even from the craziest of the Republicans: "We could do some education reform, expand visa laws to admit more high-skill workers, encourage responsible drilling for natural gas, maybe establish an infrastructure bank." Brooks argues that these issues would be uncontroversial enough to "erode partisan orthodoxies and get back into the habit of passing laws together." Then, maybe we could pass some laws under a future president.

Note that solving actual problems is besides the point here. Brooks is almost explicit about this. He begins with the need for initiatives that he thinks will lead to happiness and comity between the parties in Washington, and then comes up with policies that might fit the bill. Not surprisingly, viewed from the standpoint of an agenda designed to make life better for Americans in some way, shape or form, Brooks's proposed agenda is strange. Let's consider his ideas:

Education reform. I love education reform. Obama passed a sweeping education reform in 2009. Brooks writes a column the next year fulsomely praising it. (Obama "has used federal power to incite reform, without dictating it from the top.") Is there more education reform to be done? There may be, but I don't know what it would be, and Brooks doesn't seem to know or care.

Expand visa laws to admit more high-skill workers. Would this really pass right away without partisan animosity? Brooks says yes. We don't have to guess. Democrats tried this last month. Republicans loaded it with poison pills and killed it dead. So instead they're trying to do it as part of comprehensive immigration reform.

Encourage responsible drilling for natural gas. Wait, how much more encouragement do we need? The country is undergoing a massive natural gas boom:

Is there some element to natural gas policy that needs fixing? Does Brooks just think the two parties should get together and congratulate each other for all the natural gas being produced?

Establish an infrastructure bank. Okay, this one is a good policy idea. But is it something Republicans would easily pass without rancor? In fact, Obama has been asking for this very thing for years now. And Republicans have called it dead on arrival.

So Brooks's proposed alternative agenda consists of either empty list-filler or actual policies that Obama has proposed and Republicans have killed. But instead of this happy term of modest accomplishment, Obama is pursuing a nasty, partisan agenda. Step one of this devious ploy is to, as Brooks puts it, "invite a series of confrontations with Republicans over things like the debt ceiling - make them look like wackos willing to endanger the entire global economy."

Right - Obama is the one inviting confrontations over the debt ceiling. Never mind that, before 2011, the debt ceiling was just an occasion for routine posturing, and Republicans insisted on turning it into a showdown with real, dangerous stakes. Also never mind that Obama offered to sign the plan - proposed by Mitch McConnell! - to permanently defuse the debt ceiling and let Republicans use it to posture against him rather than actually threatening a global meltdown. And never mind as well that, by refusing to cave in to extortion, Obama seems to actually be defusing the real danger to the world economy.

This is all Obama's fault because it makes Republicans "look like whackos willing to endanger the entire global economy." Brooks displays an almost surreal lack of interest in the underlying reality that Republicans actually are whackos willing to endanger the entire global economy. It is his responsibility to conceal this reality from America.

Worse, argues Brooks, Obama is nastily choosing an agenda intended only to harm Republicans. Obama's proposals on gun safety and immigration, he writes, are "wedge issues meant to divide Southerners from Midwesterners, the Tea Party/Talk Radio base from the less ideological corporate and managerial class."

Brooks asserts, but does not actually explain, that Obama chose these issues for the purpose of dividing the opposition - as opposed to trying to cut down on mass murders and fix a huge field of broken policy. Brooks concedes that Obama's proposals here are moderate, but believes that the moderation is what makes them so nasty. By appealing to mainstream Republicans, he is splitting them from the most extreme Republicans!

You would think proposing policies that large numbers of Republicans agree with would qualify as the kind of centrism and bipartisanship Brooks has spent the entire Obama presidency calling for, but now that it's here, it turns out to prove just the opposite to him.

ANS -- Worrisome Change to NYT Climate Coverage

This is from ten days ago, but I hadn't heard it anywhere else.  Have you?  I'd say this means the human race is suicidal.  Very short article.
find it here:  http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/276-74/15587-worrisome-change-to-nyt-climate-coverage   
--Kim




Worrisome Change to NYT Climate Coverage

By Al Gore, Reader Supported News

17 January 13

 

[] his past week, the New York Times announced the closure of their environmental desk. Along with many, I am sorry to see this team disbanded; over the last several years they have consistently provided high-quality reporting on critical environmental issues, especially the climate crisis. Newspapers generally are under economic stress, and unfortunately, the Times is also profoundly affected by the tectonic shifts in the media landscape. Its role in informing U.S. policy debates, however, is unique.

While I am sad to see this dedicated desk come to an end, I hope that its tremendous reporters can, as the newspaper's leadership promised, continue their crucial work and can help influence the general newsroom by incorporating important environmental perspectives throughout the paper.


Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

Friday, January 25, 2013

ANS -- the issue of unraveling social norms

This is about "unraveling social norms".   That means civilization as we know it is dying.  Apparently, when libertarian types say they want everyone to be on their own, they really mean they want an end to civilization and a return to prehistoric pre-tribal anarchy. 
this is from Doug Muder, and he didn't say it that way, I did.  And this is an excerpt. 
Find it here:  http://weeklysift.com/2013/01/14/too-simple/ 
--Kim



James Fallows suggests The Two Sentences That Should Be Part of All Discussion of the Debt Ceiling:
  1. Raising the debt ceiling does not authorize one single penny in additional public spending.
  2. For Congress to "decide whether" to raise the debt ceiling, for programs and tax rates it has already voted into law, makes exactly as much sense as it would for a family to "decide whether" to pay a credit-card bill for goods it has already bought.

An analogy I've used before: It's like eating out when you don't have cash, but then refusing to pay with your credit card because you're taking a principled stand against running up more debt. The time to take the principled stand is when you decide what you're going to do, not when the bill comes.

… which once again brings up the issue of unraveling social norms

The coin and the debt-ceiling hostage crisis it's supposed to avert are both examples of something I've tried (and mostly failed) to describe before: unraveling the norms that make society governable. Maybe Chris Hayes expresses it better:

Behavior of individuals within an institution is constrained by the formal rules (explicit prohibitions) and norms (implicit prohibitions) that aren't spelled out, but just aren't done. And what the modern Republican Party has excelled at, particularly in the era of Obama, is exploiting the gap between these two. They've made a habit of doing the thing that just isn't done.

He goes on to give examples: filibustering everything the Senate does, refusing to confirm qualified candidates to positions because you think the position shouldn't exist, and now "using the debt ceiling as a bargaining chip with which to extract ransom".

He might also mention the proposal that Republicans should rig the Electoral College in states where they control the legislature. The point, pretty clearly, is to be able to win presidential elections even if the People vote for the other guy. (That's what would have happened in 2012 under at least one plan: Obama gets 5 million more votes, but Romney becomes president.) It's all perfectly legal, but this is the United States. We don't do things like that. Or at least we didn't used to.

The meta-question of the trillion-dollar coin is whether Democrats should strike back with their own inside-the-rules-but-outside-the-norms actions, recognizing (as Chris puts it) that "There is no way to unilaterally maintain norms."

We need to get a handle on this trend somehow, because it doesn't go anywhere good. That's one of the themes in Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series: Ultimately, even respect for the written law is just a norm. At some point you start to think, "Why shouldn't I stick my enemies' heads on spikes and display them in the Forum?"

… and racism

[] Republicans hate it when you point to the implicit racism in the intensity of their hatred for Obama and all his works. But Colin Powell went there Sunday on Meet the Press, talking about the "dark vein of intolerance" in the Republican Party. He pointed to voter suppression, to racial code phrases like "shucking and jiving" applied to Obama, and to Birtherism.

But racism is also part of the willingness to violate previously accepted norms (that I was just talking about). Republicans feel justified in doing things that just aren't done because (until now) electing and re-electing a black president just wasn't done. Racism is the ultimate root of the Tea Party certainty that we are in uncharted waters that require unprecedented means of resistance. Just voting and campaigning and giving money to your favored candidates isn't enough any more. We need to arm ourselves and prepare for " Second Amendment solutions" because … because why, exactly?

If you doubt the racial subtext here, think about how different it would sound for a black CEO to threaten that if a white president's policy " goes one inch farther, I'm gonna start killin' people." Fox News would play that clip 24/7 for weeks.

ANS -- How do you know what you know?

Here's an interesting article from Doug Muder, about journalism and information overload.  There's an interesting parallel between the internet information overload and the Gutenberg revolution, and it makes people polarized.  Read this.
Find it here:  http://weeklysift.com/2013/01/21/how-do-you-know-what-you-know/   
--Kim


January 21, 2013 – 11:52 am

How do you know what you know?


why the internet isn't making us wiser

[] []

If you'd never experienced the flood of information that comes from a revolutionary new technology, you might expect it to power growth in everything downstream from information: knowledge, understanding, and even wisdom. If it's easier to find things out, then people should know more, understand more, and make better choices. You might even expect more consensus. Ignorant people can come to blows debating whether Kansas is north or south of Nebraska, but the more we know and understand about the world we all live in, the more agreement we should find.

Since you're living through the internet revolution right now, though, you know better. More knowledge? Maybe. Understanding? Hard to say. But wisdom? Surely you jest. And consensus … some days we seem lucky just to avoid civil war.

Nate Silver thinks we could have seen this coming, because the same thing happened in the last information revolution. Eventually Gutenberg's printing press led to the Enlightenment, democracy, modern science, and the Industrial Revolution. But that light came at the end of a nasty 300-year tunnel of constant strife and near-genocidal religious wars. In the Thirty Years War alone "the male population of the German states was reduced by almost half."

But why? Nate explains:

The informational shortcut that we take when we have "too much information" is to engage with it selectively, picking out the parts we like and ignoring the remainder, making allies with those who have made the same choices and enemies of the rest.

Reducing that to a bumpersticker: TMI equals polarization.

Picture it: Before Gutenberg, baptism was baptism. The priest did it, and if we wondered what it meant or why he did it that way, maybe we could ask him and maybe he'd explain by waving in the direction of a Bible that some monk had spent years producing by hand. (You could get your own ­ in Latin, a language that neither you nor Moses ever spoke ­ for about the cost of a Mercedes today.)

After Gutenberg, you say babies can be baptized by sprinkling water on them, while I accept only full-submersion adult baptism. We each own pamphlets from our own theologians, quoting passages of scripture that we have each checked in our translated Bibles at home. We each belong to religious communities that agree with us, and our respective church libraries are stocked with many other pamphlets listing the outrages that the opposing community has committed against us and providing reams of evidence proving that the conflict is all their fault.

What can we do but kill each other?

Information is great when you have some reasonable way of processing it. But when you don't, it's overwhelming and even threatening. If you try to pay attention to all of it, you'll freeze. And then the people who didn't freeze will eat your lunch ­ or eat you for lunch.

There are two easy ways to deal with information overload:
  • Submit unquestioningly to an authority who decides what's what.
  • Find a simple worldview that pleasingly organizes the wild flood of facts and interpretations, and then ally with people who subscribe to that worldview.

Both choices are cultish, but the second can seem downright enlightened, at least from the inside. Unlike the unquestioning follower, you're always learning new facts and interpretations. You're getting better and better at explaining why your tribe's view is right and the opposing view is wrong. And you do ask questions, but you've learned to ask the right questions ­ unlike those mindless sheep in the opposing tribe.

In other words, you live inside a tribal bubble that lets pleasing information in and keeps disturbing information out. The information flood actually helps you do this, because the more details, the easier to cherry-pick support for whatever you want to believe.

These delusions are easy to see in other people: conspiracy theorists, global-warming deniers, Birthers, and so on. You can never win an argument against such folks, because there is always more information you haven't explained, some new micro-analysis that "proves" Obama's birth certificate is fake or explains why the world is really cooling. You never reach the end of it, precisely because the 21st-century information barrel is bottomless.

That's why liberals like me ­ and probably Nate Silver more than anybody ­ had to love watching Republicans cope with the election returns. Nate had dispassionately put together a prediction model and he faithfully ran new polling data through it every day. It turned out to be down-the-line accurate, but until the votes were actually counted he was vilified by people who wanted to believe Romney would win. And not just ignorantly vilified, vilified with spreadsheets and graphs and detailed explanations of what he must be doing wrong.

It's rare to run into such a perfect bubble-pricking.

But Silver's book (published before the election) isn't about self-congratulation. It's about why accurate prediction is hard and how to do it better. Each chapter describes a prediction-making community ­ meteorologists, baseball stat geeks, poker players, etc. ­ and draws some general lesson from their collective success or failure.

Some of those lessons are technical, but a few general-public themes come through:
  • Foxes beat hedgehogs. People who have one big idea do badly in an information flood, because they can always explain away their failures without changing their big idea. But people who juggle multiple competing ideas can use new data to develop the good ones and discredit the bad ones.
  • Data doesn't interpret itself. The best predictions don't come from pure pattern matching, but from a plausible theory that is then proven by experiment. If you just pattern-match, you'll end up modeling the noise rather than the signal.
  • Make specific predictions so you can recognize your mistakes. Since it always rains eventually, if you aren't specific about when you expect rain and how much, you'll always be able to claim you were right ­ and you won't learn anything.
  • Be methodical. If you don't define how you're going to judge your results, the temptation to cherry-pick will overwhelm you.

Always in the background lies this lesson: Bubbles don't just happen to other people. It's a universal human tendency in the face of too much information. If you're not constantly on guard ­ and maybe even if you are ­ you will fall prey to it.

Western civilization came out of the Gutenberg Tunnel when it developed more rigorous collective methods of handling the increased information flow: Science, most obviously, but also market capitalism, journalism, and constitutional democracies that could balance majority rule with tolerance for minority rights. Maybe a similar leap will get us through the Internet Tunnel eventually ­ better sooner than later.

Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel have a less sweeping focus: How are you personally going to cope?

If we continue the Gutenberg analogy, there's a clear analog to the priest and the universal church he represented: the editor and the culture of journalistic objectivity.

Once upon a time, national news outlets were few and were controlled by gatekeepers who told you "the way it is". Every evening, the remarkably similar news departments of the three major networks told you what you needed to know. If you wanted more detail, you read a daily newspaper or weekly news magazines, but even they wouldn't give you a fundamentally different worldview.

As I've described in more detail elsewhere, this system was both good and bad. (The same could be said of the pre-Gutenberg Catholic Church). The gatekeepers tried to be accurate, and they had the power to hold a story back until they could verify it. So rumors got squashed, hucksters were weeded out, and special-interest groups couldn't trump up a story out of nothing. And because the gatekeepers defined news by what people should know rather than what they wanted to know, the Vietnam War never vanished from public awareness the way the Afghan War often has.

On the downside, the range of views presented was narrow. Only by staging artificial public events (like Martin Luther King's March on Washington) could marginalized groups push their message through the editorial bottleneck.

Now that's all gone. There is no priest, or rather there are too many would-be priests sprinkling dubious holy water in all directions.

In essence, we are all editors now. We used to get a filtered flow of information, pre-tested and pre-sanitized by experts. Now we're exposed to the raw flood, which we have to test and sanitize for ourselves. So we all need to learn the ways of thought that used to only be taught in journalism school.

That's what Blur is about.

A lot of Kovach and Rosenstiel's advice is common sense. Before you react to a news article or factoid, you need to take a step back and judge it like an editor: Where does this information come from? Are the sources in a position to know? Do they have reason to lie? Am I just being told a story, or are there checkable facts here? Has anybody checked them? What is left out of this article? Does it raise obvious questions that are not answered? If the article focuses on only a few characters in the story, would other characters tell it differently? And so on. If you have a critical, analytical mind, the questions aren't hard to generate once you realize that you need to take a step back and judge.

I found one piece of their analysis very insightful, and I may start using their terminology. They identify three models of journalism: verification, assertion, and affirmation. I don't like how they present affirmation (probably because they belong to the verification tribe and the Weekly Sift is affirmation journalism), but the distinctions themselves are worthwhile.

Journalism of verification. This is the gatekeeper model of the Cronkite Era and the ideal that you will hear expressed by the editors of publications like the New York Times. (For now let's leave alone the question of how well they live up to that ideal.) Check everything. Get it right before you publish. Be objective. Be complete. Put a wall between news and opinion.

Journalism of assertion. The model most often seen on CNN. Put newsmakers on camera and see what they say. (If you can only get them on camera by agreeing not to raise certain subjects, fine.) Let viewers judge for themselves whether they're being lied to. Get information out as quickly as possible, even if you haven't checked that it's true. Strive for balance rather than accuracy; let liberals and conservatives alike spin the story for your audience, and then " leave it there" rather than check who's right.

Journalism of affirmation. The model shared by Fox News, the nighttime line-up of MSNBC, and (mostly) the Weekly Sift. Have a point of view and attract an audience that (mostly) shares that view.

Reading Blur, you will get the idea that verification is the gold standard, while assertion and affirmation are in some way illegitimate. (I was struck by how often Rachel Maddow ­ who I admire ­ came up as a bad example.) I'd express this differently: assertion and affirmation journalism are illegitimate if they pretend to be verification journalism.

That is my biggest objection to Fox News ­ the pretense that they're "fair and balanced". If they billed themselves as "interpreting the world through a conservative prism", I'd respect them more.

Affirmation journalism is legitimate to the extent that it's honest and tries to serve its audience rather than pander to them so their attention can be sold to advertisers. Like verification journalists, an affirmation journalist should be trying to get it right, and also should provide a verification trail (that's what the links are for on the Weekly Sift), honestly represent the people s/he quotes, endorse only arguments s/he believes are valid, not intentionally hide facts or points of view from its audience, and so on. (That's my other problem with Fox. I don't think they're just conservative. I think they repeat talking points they know are false and use frames designed to deceive.)

In short, I think affirmation (and assertion too) can be done well. Rachel Maddow isn't just Sean Hannity's mirror image.

Tying this back to Nate Silver and the bubble tendency: Part of being honest and doing affirmation journalism well is recognizing the constant danger of winding up in a delusional bubble. Because there is a real world out there, and it will bite you if you turn your back on it, as Fox News viewers discovered on election night.

So serving you as a reader means not pleasing you too well. I could tell you a lot of things that would make you feel good about yourself and say "Hell yes!". But some of them would set you up for a comeuppance.

And as for the horrors that might still await in the Internet Tunnel: Wishing to be out the other side doesn't make it so, and affirmation journalism is popular because the priesthood of verification journalism is broken; it doesn't know how to handle the flood. Maybe someday they will figure it out, or some new information-processing methodology will burst onto the scene the way science did in the 1600s. But for now, all I know how to do is to choose my simplifying assumptions as best I can, revisit them from time to time, and proceed honestly from there.

ANS -- Justice Dept. Criminal Division Chief Lanny Breuer Resigns After PBS' Frontline Appearance (Updated)

This was from Wednesday.  It's about the resignation of the head of DoJ criminal division, because he didn't prosecute the Banksters who wrecked our economy.  There may be more news on this front soon.  I hope someone will prosecute, but if they don't, I suspect some form of blackmail or threats or bribes is stopping them....
Find it here:  http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/01/23/1181548/--Justice-Dept-Criminal-Division-Chief-Lanny-Breuer-Abruptly-Resigns-After-PBS-Frontline-Appearance   
--Kim



Wed Jan 23, 2013 at 05:19 PM PST

Justice Dept. Criminal Division Chief Lanny Breuer Resigns After PBS' Frontline Appearance (Updated)

by bobswern Follow
As of just a few hours ago, the public is now being told that the DoJ's top person responsible for allowing our country's most egregious pillagers to walk away, scot-free failing to prosecute Wall Street's senior-most exec's during our country's record-breaking Recession, Lanny Breuer, soon will no longer be employed by our government. (See "Update #2," near the bottom of this post.)

Apparently, the WaPo broke this story, about four hours ago, here: " Lanny Breuer, Justice Department criminal division chief, is stepping down."

For a taste as to why this is a damn good reason for progressive Dems to celebrate, here are links to posts from Kossacks joanneleon and taonow, HERE and HERE, respectively, from just earlier today and both concerning Breuer's hubris-filled Frontline appearance, before his resignation story broke, mid-afternoon!

And, last but not least, here's Naked Capitalism Publisher Yves Smith, from about an hour ago…

For Once, Maybe Lying Does Not Pay: DoJ's Lanny Breuer Resignation Leaked After Frontline Appearance
Yves Smith
Naked Capitalism
January 23, 2013    6:57PM

I am delighted to be proven to be wrong on the premise of the last post, which is that lying pays and it has become so routine that an op-ed writer for a liberal newspaper can point that out without being concerned about the broader ramifications. But this is almost certain to fall into "the exception that proves the rule" category.

Lanny Breuer, former Covington & Burling partner and more recently head of the criminal division at the Department of Justice, had his resignation leaked today. The proximate cause is a Frontline show that ran two nights ago, part of a series on the financial crisis. The segment in which Breuer speaks is below and of course on the PBS website (the last of four segments)…


…Breuer has been criticized for his lack of interest in prosecuting banks and more important, bank executives for their conduct during the crisis (and before you argue that such cases are difficult to make, please read Charles Ferguson's Predator Nation, which selects specific banks and shows how, simply based on public information, a clear and compelling case exists, or look at some of our posts, for instance, here). He also was the DoJ co-chairman on the do-virtually-nothing residential mortgage task force formed as a way to suborn Eric Schneiderman, who was leading a group of state attorney generals that were on their way to putting in place tougher sanctions in the banks…

There's much more to Yves' post, and I strongly recommended that you check it out, in its entirety (link is up above).

Now, THIS is change I can believe in!

Links to Breuer's Frontline appearance are available, above, as well as within Yves' post over at Naked Capitalism.

(I'll return with an update to this over the next couple of hours; but, in the meantime, bon appétit!)

#         #         #

UPDATE #2 (12:15AM Eastern Time, 1/24/13):

The WaPo noted on November 20th that Breuer might leave by the END of 2013. But as Bloomberg editor Kieran Beer††† just noted in a tweet with colleague Amy Resnick, the WaPo and Bloomberg are running a story that Breuer "is stepping down." When? Well that's not being publicly stated yet. However, it would appear to be a lot earlier than the WaPo speculated roughly/just nine weeks ago. (Gotta' love that spin!)

†††=Disclosure: Kerry Beer is a personal friend. I've known him for almost 40 years.

#         #         #

UPDATE #1 (11:00PM Eastern Time, 1/23/13):

Interestingly, as noted in the comments, below, nary a peep from the MSM on this story! (Obviously, there's a lot of damage control going on behind the scenes on this one.) It'll certainly be interesting to see/read the spin.

Meanwhile...

Here's a link from late this (Wednesday) morning, to a story over at the NY Times' Dealbook blog--a Peter Eavis interview with Frontline producer Martin Smith. Quite interesting! " Q. & A. on Wall Street's Untouchables."

And, then there's this from masaccio over at FDL, less than an hour after the WaPo story broke:
Breuer Identifies Real Clients on Frontline then Quits
By: masaccio Wednesday January 23, 2013 4:03 pm    

Lanny Breuer is out as head of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, according to the Washington Post. After his ratlike performance on Frontline (transcript here) it won't be long before we find him at some creepy New York or DC law firm defending his best friends, the banks and their sleazy employees. His legacy is simple: too big to fail banks can't possibly commit crimes, so minor civil fines and false promises of reform are punishment enough. Jamie Dimon couldn't have put it better.

Breuer tried his best to dodge questions about why he violated his promise to Senator Kaufman that he was actually conducting an investigation of Wall Street fraud. Martin Smith, the interviewer, asks:
We spoke to a couple of sources from within the fraud section of the Criminal Division, and through mid-2010 they reported that when it came to Wall Street, there were no investigations going on; there were no subpoenas, no document reviews, no wiretaps.

Breuer responds: "we looked very hard at the types of matters that you're talking about." He doesn't deny that there were no investigations; no subpoenas, no document reviews, no wiretaps. Instead, he tries to shift the subject to his pointless insider trading cases, his Ponzi cases, the Lee Farkas case (the mortgage firm Taylor, Whitaker and Bean), and a few hapless mortgage originator cases, and even a policeman defrauded by some fraud or other. Smith won't let that pass. Eventually we get to the heart of the problem...
...

...Breuer keeps talking, but he can't worm out of this one...

Followed by Marcy Wheeler, 45 minutes after masaccio's post...
Day after Frontline Exposure, Lanny Breuer Resignation Reported
Posted on January 23, 2013 by emptywheel

Last night, Frontline had a good show exposing how derelict DOJ has been in not prosecuting any of the banksters who ruined the economy. It could have been far, far worse, as it dealt solely with the securitization crimes that were ignored. Nevertheless, it showed Lanny Breuer to be an arrogant jerk who insisted DOJ couldn't prosecute, in spite of the abundant evidence of crime presented in the show.

Nevertheless, DOJ spent part of the day threatening Frontline to never cooperate again...

Of course, more folks will issue press releases and "behind-the-scenes" spin, and the narrative will go wherever the status quo wishes it. But, the pertinent fact here is Breuer's resignation was sudden. And, it's rather self-evident why it occurred, regardless of any spin that may arise to the contrary.

And, judging from (just) a few (not too many) of the comments, below, a little cognitive dissonance is setting in...

Originally posted to http://www.dailykos.com/user/bobswern on Wed Jan 23, 2013 at 05:19 PM PST.


Also republished by Occupy Wall Street.

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

ANS -- Two Hopeful Signs The Obama Administration Will Not Approve The Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline

How about some possible good news for a change?  Read this short article about the chances that Obama will not okay the XL pipeline. 
Find it here:  http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/01/23/1485541/two-hopeful-signs-the-obama-administration-will-not-approve-keystone-xl-tar-sands-pipeline/?mobile=nc  
--Kim


Two Hopeful Signs The Obama Administration Will Not Approve The Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline

By Joe Romm on Jan 23, 2013 at 12:25 pm

[]

50-50. Those were the odds you could get in DC for a bet on whether or not Obama would ultimately approve the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

But this week I think the odds turned against the pipeline, for two reasons:
  1. Obama devoted far more of his second inaugural address to climate change than anybody expected ­ and framed the issue in stark, moral terms.
  2. The State Department decision won't come until after March, which means it will almost certainly be made by the new Secretary, climate hawk John Kerry.

Since so much as been written about the first point, let me start with the second. NBC reports:

"We don't anticipate being able to conclude our own review before the end of the first quarter of this year," said Victoria Nuland, a spokeswoman at the State Department, which had previously said it would make a decision by that deadline.

The review is followed by a public comment period and then a final decision. That timeline means State's decision will very likely be made by the man Obama nominated to replace Hillary Clinton.

Recall Kerry's Senate speech this summer slamming the U.S. political discussion as a " conspiracy of silence … a story of disgraceful denial, back-pedaling, and delay that has brought us perilously close to a climate change catastrophe." He goes on to say:

It is a conspiracy that has not just stalled, but demonized any constructive effort to put America in a position to lead the world on this issue….

Climate change is one of two or three of the most serious threats our country now faces, if not the most serious, and the silence that has enveloped a once robust debate is staggering for its irresponsibility….

I hope we confront the conspiracy of silence head-on and allow complacence to yield to common sense, and narrow interests to bend to the common good. Future generations are counting on us.

Does that sound like a person who is going to start his term as Secretary approving the expansion of one of the dirtiest sources of fossil fuels in the world? (see " New Analysis Shows Simple Math: Keystone XL Pipeline = Tar Sands Expansion = Accelerated Climate Change.">") The tar sands is far dirtier than conventional oil:

[]

X-axis is the range of potential resource in billions of barrels. Y-axis is grams of Carbon per MegaJoule of final fuel.  [Graph source: Farrell and Brandt, " Risks of the oil transition," 2006.]

Approving Keystone wouldn't exactly be leading the world on this issue ­ and Kerry has invested more time and effort on climate than any Senator since Al Gore. He is a true climate hawk.

Moreover, Kerry's outspokenness came before the ultimate decider, President Obama, surprised everyone by abandoning his own climate silence in strong words to the nation that bear repeating:

We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity.  We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.  Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms.

The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult.  But America cannot resist this transition; we must lead it.  We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries – we must claim its promise.  That is how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure – our forests and waterways; our croplands and snowcapped peaks.  That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God.  That's what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.

Does that sound like a person who is going to start his second term as President signing off on what the nation's top climatologist called "game over" for climate change? (see James Hansen slams Keystone XL Canada-U.S. Pipeline: "Exploitation of tar sands would make it implausible to stabilize climate and avoid disastrous global climate impacts.")

You can't frame climate change in terms stronger than our moral obligation to our children and a commandment by God. Let's remember just what unleashing unconventional oil (and gas) means to our chances of preserving a livable climate:

[]

CO2 emissions by fossil fuels [1 ppm CO2 ~ 2.12 GtC, where ppm is parts per million of CO2 in air and GtC is gigatons of carbon] via Hansen. Significantly exceeding 450 ppm risks several severe and irreversible warming impacts. Hitting 800 to 1,000+ ppm ­ which is our current emissions path and the inevitable outcome of aggressively exploiting unconventional fuels like the tar sands ­ represents the near-certain destruction of modern civilization as we know it as the recent scientific literature makes chillingly clear. [Estimated reserves and potentially recoverable resources are from EIA (2011) and GAC (2011).]

Given that the Keystone decision is ultimately one that Kerry and Obama have to make, I think the smart bet now is that the Obama administration will make the right decision and disapprove the pipeline.

Related Post:
 

Tags:

Monday, January 21, 2013

ANS -- The Martin Luther King Conspiracy Exposed in Memphis

Here is more than you ever wanted to know about the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination.  I can't vouch for this, but it sounds right, and has lots of links. 
Find it here:  http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/Unspeakable/MLKconExp.html   
--Kim


PDF | ASCII text formats )
The following appeared in the May-June 2000 issue of Probe magazine, (Vol.7,No.4) and is mirrored from http://ctka.net/pr500-king.html with permission of the author. We are grateful for Jim Douglass' "being there" and for his penetrating exploration and accounting of the 20th Century's true "trial of the century". September 2012: New links are now added to directly reference the transcript of the 1999 Trial in Memphis.


The Martin Luther King Conspiracy
Exposed in Memphis
by Jim Douglass
Spring 2000
Probe Magazine


According to a Memphis jury's verdict on December 8, 1999, in the wrongful death lawsuit of the King family versus Loyd Jowers "and other unknown co-conspirators," Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a conspiracy that included agencies of his own government. Almost 32 years after King's murder at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968, a court extended the circle of responsibility for the assassination beyond the late scapegoat James Earl Ray to the United States government.

I can hardly believe the fact that, apart from the courtroom participants, only Memphis TV reporter Wendell Stacy and I attended from beginning to end this historic three-and-one-half week trial. Because of journalistic neglect scarcely anyone else in this land of ours even knows what went on in it. After critical testimony was given in the trial's second week before an almost empty gallery, Barbara Reis, U.S. correspondent for the Lisbon daily Publico who was there several days, turned to me and said, "Everything in the U.S. is the trial of the century. O.J. Simpson's trial was the trial of the century. Clinton's trial was the trial of the century. But this is the trial of the century, and who's here?"

What I experienced in that courtroom ranged from inspiration at the courage of the Kings, their lawyer-investigator William F. Pepper, and the witnesses, to amazement at the government's carefully interwoven plot to kill Dr. King. The seriousness with which U.S. intelligence agencies planned the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. speaks eloquently of the threat Kingian nonviolence represented to the powers that be in the spring of 1968.

In the complaint filed by the King family, "King versus Jowers and Other Unknown Co-Conspirators," the only named defendant, Loyd Jowers, was never their primary concern. As soon became evident in court, the real defendants were the anonymous co-conspirators who stood in the shadows behind Jowers, the former owner of a Memphis bar and grill. The Kings and Pepper were in effect charging U.S. intelligence agencies – particularly the FBI and Army intelligence – with organizing, subcontracting, and covering up the assassination. Such a charge guarantees almost insuperable obstacles to its being argued in a court within the United States. Judicially it is an unwelcome beast.

I can hardly believe the fact that, apart from the courtroom participants, only Memphis TV reporter Wendell Stacy and I attended from beginning to end this historic three-and-one-half week trial. Because of journalistic neglect scarcely anyone else in this land of ours even knows what went on in it. After critical testimony was given in the trial's second week before an almost empty gallery, Barbara Reis, U.S. correspondent for the Lisbon daily Publico who was there several days, turned to me and said, "Everything in the U.S. is the trial of the century. O.J. Simpson's trial was the trial of the century. Clinton's trial was the trial of the century. But this is the trial of the century, and who's here?"

Many qualifiers have been attached to the verdict in the King case. It came not in criminal court but in civil court, where the standards of evidence are much lower than in criminal court. (For example, the plaintiffs used unsworn testimony made on audiotapes and videotapes.) Furthermore, the King family as plaintiffs and Jowers as defendant agreed ahead of time on much of the evidence.

But these observations are not entirely to the point. Because of the government's "sovereign immunity," it is not possible to put a U.S. intelligence agency in the dock of a U.S. criminal court. Such a step would require authorization by the federal government, which is not likely to indict itself. Thanks to the conjunction of a civil court, an independent judge with a sense of history, and a courageous family and lawyer, a spiritual breakthrough to an unspeakable truth occurred in Memphis. It allowed at least a few people (and hopefully many more through them) to see the forces behind King's martyrdom and to feel the responsibility we all share for it through our government. In the end, twelve jurors, six black and six white, said to everyone willing to hear: guilty as charged.

We can also thank the unlikely figure of Loyd Jowers for providing a way into that truth.

Loyd Jowers: When the frail, 73-year-old Jowers became ill after three days in court, Judge Swearengen excused him. Jowers did not testify and said through his attorney, Lewis Garrison, that he would plead the Fifth Amendment if subpoenaed. His discretion was too late. In 1993 against the advice of Garrison, Jowers had gone public. Prompted by William Pepper's progress as James Earl Ray's attorney in uncovering Jowers's role in the assassination, Jowers told his story to Sam Donaldson on Prime Time Live. He said he had been asked to help in the murder of King and was told there would be a decoy (Ray) in the plot. He was also told that the police "wouldn't be there that night."

In that interview, the transcript of which was read to the jury in the Memphis courtroom, Jowers said the man who asked him to help in the murder was a Mafia-connected produce dealer named Frank Liberto. Liberto, now deceased, had a courier deliver $100,000 for Jowers to hold at his restaurant, Jim's Grill, the back door of which opened onto the dense bushes across from the Lorraine Motel. Jowers said he was visited the day before the murder by a man named Raul, who brought a rifle in a box.

As Mike Vinson reported in the March-April Probe, other witnesses testified to their knowledge of Liberto's involvement in King's slaying. Store-owner John McFerren said he arrived around 5:15 pm, April 4, 1968, for a produce pick-up at Frank Liberto's warehouse in Memphis. (King would be shot at 6:0l pm.) When he approached the warehouse office, McFerren overheard Liberto on the phone inside saying, "Shoot the son-of-a-bitch on the balcony."

Café-owner Lavada Addison, a friend of Liberto's in the late 1970's, testified that Liberto had told her he "had Martin Luther King killed." Addison's son, Nathan Whitlock, said when he learned of this conversation he asked Liberto point-blank if he had killed King.
" [Liberto] said, 'I didn't kill the nigger but I had it done.' I said, 'What about that other son-of-a-bitch taking credit for it?' He says, 'Ahh, he wasn't nothing but a troublemaker from Missouri. He was a front man . . . a setup man.'"

The jury also heard a tape recording of a two-hour-long confession Jowers made at a fall 1998 meeting with Martin Luther King's son Dexter and former UN Ambassador Andrew Young. On the tape Jowers says that meetings to plan the assassination occurred at Jim's Grill. He said planners included undercover Memphis Police Department officer Marrell McCollough (who now works for the Central Intelligence Agency, and who is referenced in the trial transcript as Merrell McCullough), MPD Lieutentant Earl Clark (who died in 1987), a third police officer, and two men Jowers did not know but thought were federal agents.

Young, who witnessed the assassination, can be heard on the tape identifying McCollough as the man kneeling beside King's body on the balcony in a famous photograph. According to witness Cobey Vernon Smith, McCollough had infiltrated a Memphis community organizing group, the Invaders, which was working with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In his trial testimony Young said the MPD intelligence agent was "the guy who ran up [the balcony stairs] with us to see Martin."

Jowers says on the tape that right after the shot was fired he received a smoking rifle at the rear door of Jim's Grill from Clark. He broke the rifle down into two pieces and wrapped it in a tablecloth. Raul picked it up the next day. Jowers said he didn't actually see who fired the shot that killed King, but thought it was Clark, the MPD's best marksman.

Young testified that his impression from the 1998 meeting was that the aging, ailing Jowers " wanted to get right with God before he died, wanted to confess it and be free of it." Jowers denied, however, that he knew the plot's purpose was to kill King – a claim that seemed implausible to Dexter King and Young. Jowers has continued to fear jail, and he had directed Garrison to defend him on the grounds that he didn't know the target of the plot was King. But his interview with Donaldson suggests he was not naïve on this point.

Loyd Jowers's story opened the door to testimony that explored the systemic nature of the murder in seven other basic areas:

  1. background to the assassination;

  2. local conspiracy;

  3. the crime scene;

  4. the rifle;

  5. Raul;

  6. broader conspiracy;

  7. cover-up.

[The seven areas listed below each link to the given subject in Dr. William Pepper's Closing Statement on 8 December 1999.]

  1. Background to the assassination
  2. James Lawson, King's friend and an organizer with SCLC, testified that King's stands on Vietnam and the Poor People's Campaign had created enemies in Washington. He said King's speech at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, which condemned the Vietnam War and identified the U.S. government as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today," provoked intense hostility in the White House and FBI. Hatred and fear of King deepened, Lawson said, in response to his plan to hold the Poor People's Campaign in Washington, D.C. King wanted to shut down the nation's capital in the spring of 1968 through massive civil disobedience until the government agreed to abolish poverty. King saw the Memphis sanitation workers' strike as the beginning of a nonviolent revolution that would redistribute income.
    "I have no doubt," Lawson said, "that the government viewed all this seriously enough to plan his assassination."

    Coretta Scott King testified that her husband had to return to Memphis in early April 1968 because of a violent demonstration there for which he had been blamed. Moments after King arrived in Memphis to join the sanitation workers' march there on March 28, 1968, the scene turned violent – subverted by government provocateurs, Lawson said. Thus King had to return to Memphis on April 3 and prepare for a truly nonviolent march, Mrs. King said, to prove SCLC could still carry out a nonviolent campaign in Washington.


  3. Local conspiracy
  4. On the night of April 3, 1968, Floyd E. Newsum, a black firefighter and civil rights activist, heard King's "I've Been to the Mountain Top" speech at the Mason Temple in Memphis. On his return home, Newsum returned a phone call from his lieutenant and was told he had been temporarily transferred, effective April 4, from Fire Station 2, located across the street from the Lorraine Motel, to Fire Station 31. Newsum testified that he was not needed at the new station. However, he was needed at his old station because his departure left it "out of service unless somebody else was detailed to my company in my stead." After making many queries, Newsum was eventually told he had been transferred by request of the police department. The only other black firefighter at Fire Station 2, Norvell E. Wallace, testified that he, too, received orders from his superior officer on the night of April 3 for a temporary transfer to a fire station far removed from the Lorraine Motel. He was later told vaguely that he had been threatened.
    Wallace guessed it was because "I was putting out fires," he told the jury with a smile. Asked if he ever received a satisfactory explanation for his transfer Wallace answered, "No. Never did. Not to this day."
    In the March-April Probe, Mike Vinson described the similar removal of Ed Redditt, a black Memphis Police Department detective, from his Fire Station 2 surveillance post two hours before King's murder.
    To understand the Redditt incident, it is important to note that it was Redditt himself who initiated his watch on Dr. King from the firehouse across the street. Redditt testified that when King's party and the police accompanying them (including Detective Redditt) arrived from the airport at the Lorraine Motel on April 3, he "noticed something that was unusual." When Inspector Don Smith, who was in charge of security, told Redditt he could leave, Redditt "noticed there was nobody else there. In the past when we were assigned to Dr. King [when Redditt had been part of a black security team for King], we stayed with him. I saw nobody with him. So I went across the street and asked the Fire Department could we come in and observe from the rear, which we did." Given Redditt's concerns for King's safety, his particular watch on the Lorraine may not have fit into others' plans.

    Redditt testified that late in the afternoon of April 4, MPD Intelligence Officer Eli Arkin came to Fire Station 2 to take him to Central Headquarters. There Police and Fire Director Frank Holloman (formerly an FBI agent for 25 years, seven of them as supervisor of J. Edgar Hoover's office) ordered Redditt home, against his wishes and accompanied by Arkin. The reason Holloman gave Redditt for his removal from the King watch Redditt had initiated the day before was that his life had been threatened.
    In an interview after the trial, Redditt told me the story of how his 1978 testimony on this question before the House Select Committee on Assassinations was part of a heavily pressured cover-up. "It was a farce," he said, "a total farce."

    Redditt had been subpoenaed by the HSCA to testify, as he came to realize, not so much on his strange removal from Fire Station 2 as the fact that he had spoken about it openly to writers and researchers. The HSCA focused narrowly on the discrepancy between Redditt's surveiling King (as he was doing) and acting as security (an impression Redditt had given writers interviewing him) in order to discredit the story of his removal. Redditt was first grilled by the committee for eight straight hours in a closed executive session. After a day of hostile questioning, Redditt finally said late in the afternoon, "I came here as a friend of the investigation, not as an enemy of the investigation. You don't want to deal with the truth." He told the committee angrily that if the secret purpose behind the King conspiracy was, like the JFK conspiracy, "to protect the country, just tell the American people! They'll be happy! And quit fooling the folks and trying to pull the wool over their eyes."
    When the closed hearing was over, Redditt received a warning call from a friend in the White House who said, "Man, your life isn't worth a wooden nickel."

    Redditt said his public testimony the next day "was a set-up": "The bottom line on that one was that Senator Baker decided that I wouldn't go into this open hearing without an attorney. When the lawyer and I arrived at the hearing, we were ushered right back out across town to the executive director in charge of the investigation. [We] looked through a book, to look at the questions and answers."
    "So in essence what they were saying was: 'This is what you're going to answer to, and this is how you're going to answer.' It was all made up – all designed, questions and answers, what to say and what not to say. A total farce."

    Former MPD Captain Jerry Williams followed Redditt to the witness stand. Williams had been responsible for forming a special security unit of black officers whenever King came to Memphis (the unit Redditt had served on earlier). Williams took pride in providing the best possible protection for Dr. King, which included, he said, advising him never to stay at the Lorraine " because we couldn't furnish proper security there." ("It was just an open view," he explained to me later, "Anybody could . . . There was no protection at all. To me that was a set-up from the very beginning.")
    Hatred and fear of King deepened, Lawson said, in response to his plan to hold the Poor People's Campaign in Washington, D.C. King wanted to shut down the nation's capital in the spring of 1968 through massive civil disobedience until the government agreed to abolish poverty. King saw the Memphis sanitation workers' strike as the beginning of a nonviolent revolution that would redistribute income. "I have no doubt," Lawson said, "that the government viewed all this seriously enough to plan his assassination."
    For King's April 3, 1968 arrival, however, Williams was for some reason not asked to form the special black bodyguard. He was told years later by his inspector (a man whom Jowers identified as a participant in the planning meetings at Jim's Grill) that the change occurred because somebody in King's entourage had asked specifically for no black security officers. Williams told the jury he was bothered by the omission "even to this day."

    Leon Cohen, a retired New York City police officer, testified that in 1968 he had become friendly with the Lorraine Motel's owner and manager, Walter Bailey (now deceased). On the morning after King's murder, Cohen spoke with a visibly upset Bailey outside his office at the Lorraine. Bailey told Cohen about a strange request that had forced him to change King's room to the location where he was shot.
    Bailey explained that the night before King's arrival he had received a call "from a member of Dr. King's group in Atlanta." The caller (whom Bailey said he knew but referred to only by the pronoun "he") wanted the motel owner to change King's room. Bailey said he was adamantly opposed to moving King, as instructed, from an inner court room behind the motel office (which had better security) to an outside balcony room exposed to public view.
    "If they had listened to me," Bailey said, "this wouldn't have happened."

    Philip Melanson, author of The Martin Luther King Assassination (1991), described his investigation into the April 4 pullback of four tactical police units that had been patrolling the immediate vicinity of the Lorraine Motel. Melanson asked MPD Inspector Sam Evans (now deceased), commander of the units, why they were pulled back the morning of April 4, in effect making an assassin's escape much easier. Evans said he gave the order at the request of a local pastor connected with King's party, Rev. Samuel Kyles. (Melanson wrote in his book that Kyles emphatically denied making any such request.) Melanson said the idea that MPD security would be determined at such a time by a local pastor's request made no sense whatsoever.

    Olivia Catling lived a block away from the Lorraine on Mulberry Street. Catling had planned to walk down the street the evening of April 4 in the hope of catching a glimpse of King at the motel. She testified that when she heard the shot a little after six o'clock, she said, " Oh, my God, Dr. King is at that hotel!" She ran with her two children to the corner of Mulberry and Huling streets, just north of the Lorraine. She saw a man in a checkered shirt come running out of the alley beside a building across from the Lorraine. The man jumped into a green 1965 Chevrolet just as a police car drove up behind him. He gunned the Chevrolet around the corner and up Mulberry past Catling's house moving her to exclaim, " It's going to take us six months to pay for the rubber he's burning up!!" The police, she said, ignored the man and blocked off a street, leaving his car free to go the opposite way.
    I visited Catling in her home, and she told me the man she had seen running was not James Earl Ray. "I will go into my grave saying that was not Ray, because the gentleman I saw was heavier than Ray."
    "The police," she told me, "asked not one neighbor [around the Lorraine], 'What did you see?' Thirty-one years went by. Nobody came and asked one question. I often thought about that. I even had nightmares over that, because they never said anything. How did they let him get away?"

    Catling also testified that from her vantage point on the corner of Mulberry and Huling she could see a fireman standing alone across from the motel when the police drove up. She heard him say to the police, "The shot came from that clump of bushes," indicating the heavily overgrown brushy area facing the Lorraine and adjacent to Fire Station 2.


  5. The crime scene
  6. Earl Caldwell was a New York Times reporter in his room at the Lorraine Motel the evening of April 4. In videotaped testimony, Caldwell said he heard what he thought was a bomb blast at 6:00 p.m. When he ran to the door and looked out, he saw a man crouched in the heavy part of the bushes across the street. The man was looking over at the Lorraine's balcony. Caldwell wrote an article about the figure in the bushes but was never questioned about what he had seen by any authorities. In a 1993 affidavit from former SCLC official James Orange that was read into the record, Orange said that on April 4, "James Bevel and I were driven around by Marrell McCollough, a person who at that time we knew to be a member of the Invaders, a local community organizing group, and who we subsequently learned was an undercover agent for the Memphis Police Department and who now works for the Central Intelligence Agency . . . [After the shot, when Orange saw Dr. King's leg dangling over the balcony], I looked back and saw the smoke. It couldn't have been more than five to ten seconds. The smoke came out of the brush area on the opposite side of the street from the Lorraine Motel. I saw it rise up from the bushes over there. From that day to this time I have never had any doubt that the fatal shot, the bullet which ended Dr. King's life, was fired by a sniper concealed in the brush area behind the derelict buildings.
      "I also remember then turning my attention back to the balcony and seeing Marrell McCollough up on the balcony kneeling over Dr. King, looking as though he was checking Dr. King for life signs.
      "I also noticed, quite early the next morning around 8 or 9 o'clock, that all of the bushes and brush on the hill were cut down and cleaned up. It was as though the entire area of the bushes from behind the rooming house had been cleared . . .
      "I will always remember the puff of white smoke and the cut brush and having never been given a satisfactory explanation.
      "When I tried to tell the police at the scene as best I saw they told me to be quiet and to get out of the way.
      "I was never interviewed or asked what I saw by any law enforcement authority in all of the time since 1968."

    Also read into the record were depositions made by Solomon Jones to the FBI and to the Memphis police. Jones was King's chauffeur in Memphis. The FBI document, dated April 13, 1968, says that after King was shot, when Jones looked across Mulberry Street into the brushy area, " he got a quick glimpse of a person with his back toward Mulberry Street. . . . This person was moving rather fast, and he recalls that he believed he was wearing some sort of light-colored jacket with some sort of a hood or parka." In his 11:30 p.m., April 4, 1968 police interview, Jones provides the same basic information concerning a person leaving the brushy area hurriedly.

    Maynard Stiles, who in 1968 was a senior official in the Memphis Sanitation Department, confirmed in his testimony that the bushes near the rooming house were cut down. At about 7:00 a.m. on April 5, Stiles told the jury, he received a call from MPD Inspector Sam Evans " requesting assistance in clearing brush and debris from a vacant lot in the vicinity of the assassination." Stiles called another superintendent of sanitation, who assembled a crew. " They went to that site, and under the direction of the police department, whoever was in charge there, proceeded with the clean-up in a slow, methodical, meticulous manner." Stiles identified the site as an area overgrown with brush and bushes across from the Lorraine Motel.
    Within hours of King's assassination, the crime scene that witnesses were identifying to the Memphis police as a cover for the shooter had been sanitized by orders of the police.


  7. The rifle
  8. Probe readers will again recall from Mike Vinson's article three key witnesses in the Memphis trial who offered evidence counter to James Earl Ray's rifle being the murder weapon:
    1. Judge Joe Brown;

    2. Judge Arthur Hanes Jr.;

    3. William Hamblin.
    4. Judge Joe Brown, who had presided over two years of hearings on the rifle, testified that " 67% of the bullets from my tests did not match the Ray rifle." He added that the unfired bullets found wrapped with it in a blanket were metallurgically different from the bullet taken from King's body, and therefore were from a different lot of ammunition. And because the rifle's scope had not been sited, Brown said, " this weapon literally could not have hit the broadside of a barn." Holding up the 30.06 Remington 760 Gamemaster rifle, Judge Brown told the jury, " It is my opinion that this is not the murder weapon."
    5. Circuit Court Judge Arthur Hanes Jr. of Birmingham, Alabama, had been Ray's attorney in 1968. (On the eve of his trial, Ray replaced Hanes and his father, Arthur Hanes Sr., by Percy Foreman, a decision Ray told the Haneses one week later was the biggest mistake of his life.) Hanes testified that in the summer of 1968 he interviewed Guy Canipe, owner of the Canipe Amusement Company. Canipe was a witness to the dropping in his doorway of a bundle that held a trove of James Earl Ray memorabilia, including the rifle, unfired bullets, and a radio with Ray's prison identification number on it. This dropped bundle, heaven (or otherwise) sent for the State's case against Ray, can be accepted as credible evidence through a willing suspension of disbelief. As Judge Hanes summarized the State's lone-assassin theory (with reference to an exhibit depicting the scene), "James Earl Ray had fired the shot from the bathroom on that second floor, come down that hallway into his room and carefully packed that box, tied it up, then had proceeded across the walkway the length of the building to the back where that stair from that door came up, had come down the stairs out the door, placed the Browning box containing the rifle and the radio there in the Canipe entryway." Then Ray presumably got in his car seconds before the police's arrival, driving from downtown Memphis to Atlanta unchallenged in his white Mustang.
    6. Concerning his interview with the witness who was the cornerstone of this theory, Judge Hanes told the jury that Guy Canipe (now deceased) provided "terrific evidence": "He said that the package was dropped in his doorway by a man headed south down Main Street on foot, and that this happened at about ten minutes before the shot was fired [emphasis added]."

    7. Hanes thought Canipe's witnessing the bundle-dropping ten minutes before the shot was very credible for another reason. It so happened (as confirmed by Philip Melanson's research) that at 6:00 p.m. one of the MPD tactical units that had been withdrawn earlier by Inspector Evans, TACT 10, had returned briefly to the area with its 16 officers for a rest break at Fire Station 2. Thus, as Hanes testified, with the firehouse brimming with police, some already watching King across the street, "when they saw Dr. King go down, the fire house erupted like a beehive . . . In addition to the time involved [in Ray's presumed odyssey from the bathroom to the car], it was circumstantially almost impossible to believe that somebody had been able to throw that [rifle] down and leaave right in the face of that erupting fire station."
    8. When I spoke with Judge Hanes after the trial about the startling evidence he had received from Canipe, he commented, "That's what I've been saying for 30 years."

    9. William Hamblin testified not about the rifle thrown down in the Canipe doorway but rather the smoking rifle Loyd Jowers said he received at his back door from Earl Clark right after the shooting. Hamblin recounted a story he was told many times by his friend James McCraw, who had died.
    10. James McCraw is already well-known to researchers as the taxi driver who arrived at the rooming house to pick up Charlie Stephens shortly before 6:00 p.m. on April 4. In a deposition read earlier to the jury, McCraw said he found Stephens in his room lying on his bed too drunk to get up, so McCraw turned out the light and left without him – minutes before Stephens, according to the State, identified Ray in profile passing down the hall from the bathroom. McCraw also said the bathroom door next to Stephen's room was standing wide open, and there was no one in the bathroom – where again, according to the State, Ray was then balancing on the tub, about to squeeze the trigger.
    11. William Hamblin told the jury that he and fellow cab-driver McCraw were close friends for about 25 years. Hamblin said he probably heard McCraw tell the same rifle story 50 times, but only when McCraw had been drinking and had his defenses down.
    12. In that story, McCraw said that Loyd Jowers had given him the rifle right after the shooting. According to Hamblin, "Jowers told him to get the [rifle] and get it out of here now. [McCraw] said that he grabbed his beer and snatched it out. He had the rifle rolled up in an oil cloth, and he leapt out the door and did away with it." McCraw told Hamblin he threw the rifle off a bridge into the Mississippi River.

    13. Hamblin said McCraw never revealed publicly what he knew of the rifle because, like Jowers, he was afraid of being indicted: "He really wanted to come out with it, but he was involved in it. And he couldn't really tell the truth."
    14. William Pepper accepted Hamblin's testimony about McCraw's disposal of the rifle over Jowers's claim to Dexter King that he gave the rifle to Raul. Pepper said in his closing argument that the actual murder weapon had been lying " at the bottom of the Mississippi River for over thirty-one years."
    Maynard Stiles, who in 1968 was a senior official in the Memphis Sanitation Department, confirmed in his testimony that the bushes near the rooming house were cut down. At about 7:00 a.m. on April 5, Stiles told the jury, he received a call from MPD Inspector Sam Evans " requesting assistance in clearing brush and debris from a vacant lot in the vicinity of the assassination. . . . They went to that site, and under the direction of the police department, whoever was in charge there, proceeded with the clean-up in a slow, methodical, meticulous manner. . . ." Within hours of King's assassination, the crime scene that witnesses were identifying to the Memphis police as a cover for the shooter had been sanitized by orders of the police.


  9. Raul
  10. One of the most significant developments in the Memphis trial was the emergence of the mysterious Raul through the testimony of a series of witnesses. In a 1995 deposition by James Earl Ray that was read to the jury, Ray told of meeting Raul in Montreal in the summer of 1967, three months after Ray had escaped from a Missouri prison. According to Ray, Raul guided Ray's movements, gave him money for the Mustang car and the rifle, and used both to set him up in Memphis.
    Andrew Young and Dexter King described their meeting with Jowers and Pepper at which Pepper had shown Jowers a spread of photographs, and Jowers picked out one as the person named Raul who brought him the rifle to hold at Jim's Grill. Pepper displayed the same spread of photos in court, and Young and King pointed out the photo Jowers had identified as Raul. (Private investigator John Billings said in separate testimony that this picture was a passport photograph from 1961, when Raul had immigrated from Portugal to the U.S.)
    The additional witnesses who identified the photo as Raul's included: British merchant seaman Sidney Carthew, who in a videotaped deposition from England said he had met Raul ( who offered to sell him guns) and a man he thinks was Ray (who wanted to be smuggled onto his ship) in Montreal in the summer of 1967; Glenda and Roy Grabow, who recognized Raul as a gunrunner they knew in Houston in the '60s and '70s and who told Glenda in a rage that he had killed Martin Luther King; Royce Wilburn, Glenda's brother, who also knew Raul in Houston; and British television producer Jack Saltman, who had obtained the passport photo and showed it to Ray in prison, who identified it as the photo of the person who had guided him.

    Saltman and Pepper, working on independent investigations, located Raul in 1995. He was living quietly with his family in the northeastern U.S. It was there in 1997 that journalist Barbara Reis of the Lisbon Publico, working on a story about Raul, spoke with a member of his family. Reis testified that she had spoken in Portuguese to a woman in Raul's family who, after first denying any connection to Ray's Raul, said "they" had visited them. "Who?" Reis asked. " The government," said the woman. She said government agents had visited them three times over a three-year period. The government, she said, was watching over them and monitoring their phone calls. The woman took comfort and satisfaction in the fact that her family (so she believed) was being protected by the government.

    In his closing argument Pepper said of Raul: " Now, as I understand it, the defense had invited Raul to appear here. He is outside this jurisdiction, so a subpoena would be futile. But he was asked to appear here. In earlier proceedings there were attempts to depose him, and he resisted them. So he has not attempted to come forward at all and tell his side of the story or to defend himself."


  11. A broader conspiracy
  12. Carthel Weeden, captain of Fire Station 2 in 1968, testified that he was on duty the morning of April 4 when two U.S. Army officers approached him. The officers said they wanted a lookout for the Lorraine Motel. Weeden said they carried briefcases and indicated they had cameras. Weeden showed the officers to the roof of the fire station. He left them at the edge of its northeast corner behind a parapet wall. From there the Army officers had a bird's-eye view of Dr. King's balcony doorway and could also look down on the brushy area adjacent to the fire station. The testimony of writer Douglas Valentine filled in the background of the men Carthel Weeden had taken up to the roof of Fire Station 2. While Valentine was researching his book The Phoenix Program (1990), on the CIA's notorious counterintelligence program against Vietnamese villagers, he talked with veterans in military intelligence who had been re-deployed from the Vietnam War to the sixties antiwar movement. They told him that in 1968 the Army's 111th Military Intelligence Group kept Martin Luther King under 24-hour-a-day surveillance. Its agents were in Memphis April 4. As Valentine wrote in The Phoenix Program, they "reportedly watched and took photos while King's assassin moved into position, took aim, fired, and walked away."
    Testimony which juror David Morphy later described as "awesome" was that of former CIA operative Jack Terrell, a whistle-blower in the Iran-Contra scandal. Terrell, who was dying of liver cancer in Florida, testified by videotape that his close friend J.D. Hill had confessed to him that he had been a member of an Army sniper team in Memphis assigned to shoot "an unknown target" on April 4. After training for a triangular shooting, the snipers were on their way into Memphis to take up positions in a watertower and two buildings when their mission was suddenly cancelled. Hill said he realized, when he learned of King's assassination the next day, that the team must have been part of a contingency plan to kill King if another shooter failed.

    Terrell said J.D. Hill was shot to death. His wife was charged with shooting Hill (in response to his drinking), but she was not indicted. From the details of Hill's death, Terrell thought the story about Hill's wife shooting him was a cover, and that his friend had been assassinated. In an interview, Terrell said the CIA's heavy censorship of his book Disposable Patriot (1992) included changing the paragraph on J.D. Hill's death, so that it read as if Terrell thought Hill's wife was responsible.


  13. Cover-up
  14. Walter Fauntroy, Dr. King's colleague and a 20-year member of Congress, chaired the subcommittee of the 1976-78 House Select Committee on Assassinations that investigated King's assassination. Fauntroy testified in Memphis that in the course of the HSCA investigation " it was apparent that we were dealing with very sophisticated forces." He discovered electronic bugs on his phone and TV set. When Richard Sprague, HSCA's first chief investigator, said he would make available all CIA, FBI, and military intelligence records, he became a focus of controversy. Sprague was forced to resign. His successor made no demands on U.S. intelligence agencies. Such pressures contributed to the subcommittee's ending its investigation, as Fauntroy said, " without having thoroughly investigated all of the evidence that was apparent." Its formal conclusion was that Ray assassinated King, that he probably had help, and that the government was not involved. When I interviewed Fauntroy in a van on his way back to the Memphis Airport, I asked about the implications of his statements in an April 4, 1997 Atlanta Constitution article. The article said Fauntroy now believed "Ray did not fire the shot that killed King and was part of a larger conspiracy that possibly involved federal law enforcement agencies," and added: "Fauntroy said he kept silent about his suspicions because of fear for himself and his family."

    Fauntroy told me that when he left Congress in 1991 he had the opportunity to read through his files on the King assassination, including raw materials that he'd never seen before. Among them was information from J. Edgar Hoover's logs. There he learned that in the three weeks before King's murder the FBI chief held a series of meetings with "persons involved with the CIA and military intelligence in the Phoenix operation in Southeast Asia." Why? Fauntroy also discovered there had been Green Berets and military intelligence agents in Memphis when King was killed. "What were they doing there?" he asked.
    When Fauntroy had talked about his decision to write a book about what he'd "uncovered since the assassination committee closed down," he was promptly investigated and charged by the Justice Department with having violated his financial reports as a member of Congress. His lawyer told him that he could not understand why the Justice Department would bring up a charge on the technicality of one misdated check. Fauntroy said he interpreted the Justice Department's action to mean: "Look, we'll get you on something if you continue this way. . . . I just thought: I'll tell them I won't go and finish the book, because it's surely not worth it."
    At the conclusion of his trial testimony, Fauntroy also spoke about his fear of an FBI attempt to kill James Earl Ray when he escaped from Tennessee's Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in June 1977. Congressman Fauntroy had heard reports about an FBI SWAT team having been sent into the area around the prison to shoot Ray and prevent his testifying at the HSCA hearings. Fauntroy asked HSCA chair Louis Stokes to alert Tennesssee Governor Ray Blanton to the danger to the HSCA's star witness and Blanton's most famous prisoner. When Stokes did, Blanton called off the FBI SWAT team, Ray was caught safely by local authorities, and in Fauntroy's words, "we all breathed a sigh of relief."
    The Memphis jury also learned how a 1993-98 Tennessee State investigation into the King assassination was, if not a cover-up, then an inquiry noteworthy for its lack of witnesses. Lewis Garrison had subpoenaed the head of the investigation, Mark Glankler, in an effort to discover evidence helpful to Jowers's defense. William Pepper then cross-examined Glankler on the witnesses he had interviewed in his investigation:
      Q. (BY MR. PEPPER) Mr. Glankler, did you interview Mr. Maynard Stiles, whose testifying –
      A. I know the name, Counselor, but I don't think I took a statement from Maynard Stiles or interviewed him. I don't think I did.

      Q. Did you ever interview Mr. Floyd Newsum?
      A. Can you help me with what he does?

      Q. Yes. He was a black fireman who was assigned to Station Number 2.
      A. I don't recall the name, Counsel.

      Q. All right. Ever interview Mr. Norville Wallace?
      A. I don't recall that name offhand either.

      Q. Ever interview Captain Jerry Williams?
      A. Fireman also?

      Q. Jerry Williams was a policeman. He was a homicide detective.
      A. No, sir, I don't – I really don't recall that name.

      Q. Fair enough. Did you ever interview Mr. Charles Hurley, a private citizen?
      A. Does he have a wife named Peggy?

      Q. Yes.
      A. I think we did talk with a Peggy Hurley or attempted to.

      Q. Did you interview a Mr. Leon Cohen?
      A. I just don't recall without –

      Q. Did you ever interview Mr. James McCraw?
      A. I believe we did. He talks with a device?

      Q. Yes, the voice box..
      A. Yes, okay. I believe we did talk to him, yes, sir.

      Q. How about Mrs. Olivia Catling, who has testified –

      A. I'm sorry, the last name again.

      Q. Catling, C A T L I N G.
      A. No, sir, that name doesn't –

      Q. Did you ever interview Ambassador Andrew Young?
      A. No, sir.

      Q. You didn't?
      A. No, sir, not that I recall.

      Q. Did you ever interview Judge Arthur Haynes?
      A. No, sir.

    So it goes – downhill. The above is Glankler's high-water mark: He got two out of the first ten (if one counts Charles and Peggy Hurley as a yes). Pepper questioned Glankler about 25 key witnesses. The jury was familiar with all of them from prior testimony in the trial. Glankler could recall his office interviewing a total of three. At the twenty-fifth-named witness, Earl Caldwell, Pepper finally let Glankler go:
      Q. Did you ever interview a former New York Times journalist, a New York Daily News correspondent named Earl Caldwell?
      A. Earl Caldwell? Not that I recall.

      Q. You never interviewed him in the course of your investigation?
      A. I just don't recall that name.
      MR. PEPPER: I have no further comments about this investigation – no further questions for this investigator.


Pepper went a step beyond saying government agencies were responsible for the assassination. To whom in turn were those murderous agencies responsible? Not so much to government officials per se, Pepper asserted, as to the economic powerholders they represented who stood in the even deeper shadows behind the FBI, Army Intelligence, and their affiliates in covert action. By 1968, Pepper told the jury, "And today it is much worse in my view" – "the decision-making processes in the United States were the representatives, the footsoldiers of the very economic interests that were going to suffer as a result of these times of changes [being activated by King]."
        To say that U.S. government agencies killed Martin Luther King on the verge of the Poor People's Campaign is a way into the deeper truth that the economic powers that be (which dictate the policies of those agencies) killed him. In the Memphis prelude to the Washington campaign, King posed a threat to those powers of a non-violent revolutionary force. Just how determined they were to stop him before he reached Washington was revealed in the trial by the size and complexity of the plot to kill him.


The vision behind the trial

In his sprawling, brilliant work that underlies the trial, Orders to Kill (1995), William Pepper introduced readers to most of the 70 witnesses who took the stand in Memphis or were cited by deposition, tape, and other witnesses. To keep this article from reading like either an encyclopedia or a Dostoevsky novel, I have highlighted only a few. (Thanks to the King Center, the full trial transcript is available online at http://www.thekingcenter.com/tkc/trial.html.) [The transcript is no longer available at the King Center. Hypertext, PDF, and text-only representations are available at ratical.org/ratville/JFK/MLKACT/Editor] What Pepper's work has accomplished in print and in court can be measured by the intensity of the media attacks on him, shades of Jim Garrison. But even Garrison did not gain the support of the Kennedy family (in his case) or achieve a guilty verdict. The Memphis trial has opened wide a door to our assassination politics. Anyone who walks through it is faced by an either/or: to declare naked either the empire or oneself.

The King family has chosen the former. The vision behind the trial is at least as much theirs as it is William Pepper's, for ultimately it is the vision of Martin Luther King Jr. Coretta King explained to the jury her family's purpose in pursuing the lawsuit against Jowers: "This is not about money. We're concerned about the truth, having the truth come out in a court of law so that it can be documented for all." " I've always felt that somehow the truth would be known, and I hoped that I would live to see it. It is important I think for the sake of healing so many people – my family, other people, the nation."

Dexter King, the plaintiffs' final witness, said the trial was about why his father had been killed: "From a holistic side, in terms of the people, in terms of the masses, yes, it has to be dealt with because it is not about who killed Martin Luther King Jr., my father. It is not necessarily about all of those details. It is about: Why was he killed? Because if you answer the why, you will understand the same things are still happening. Until we address that, we're all in trouble. Because if it could happen to him, if it can happen to this family, it can happen to anybody.
"It is so amazing for me that as soon as this issue of potential involvement of the federal government came up, all of a sudden the media just went totally negative against the family. I couldn't understand that. I kept asking my mother, 'What is going on?'

"She reminded me. She said, 'Dexter, your dad and I have lived through this once already. You have to understand that when you take a stand against the establishment, first, you will be attacked. There is an attempt to discredit. Second, [an attempt] to try and character-assassinate. And third, ultimately physical termination or assassination.'

"Now the truth of the matter is if my father had stopped and not spoken out, if he had just somehow compromised, he would probably still be here with us today. But the minute you start talking about redistribution of wealth and stopping a major conflict, which also has economic ramifications . . . "

In his closing argument, William Pepper identified economic power as the root reason for King's assassination:
" When Martin King opposed the war, when he rallied people to oppose the war, he was threatening the bottom lines of some of the largest defense contractors in this country. This was about money. He was threatening the weapons industry, the hardware, the armaments industries, that would all lose as a result of the end of the war.

"The second aspect of his work that also dealt with money that caused a great deal of consternation in the circles of power in this land had to do with his commitment to take a massive group of people to Washington. . . . Now he began to talk about a redistribution of wealth, in this the wealthiest country in the world."

Pepper went a step beyond saying government agencies were responsible for the assassination. To whom in turn were those murderous agencies responsible? Not so much to government officials per se, Pepper asserted, as to the economic powerholders they represented who stood in the even deeper shadows behind the FBI, Army Intelligence, and their affiliates in covert action. By 1968, Pepper told the jury, "And today it is much worse in my view" – " the decision-making processes in the United States were the representatives, the footsoldiers of the very economic interests that were going to suffer as a result of these times of changes [being activated by King]."

To say that U.S. government agencies killed Martin Luther King on the verge of the Poor People's Campaign is a way into the deeper truth that the economic powers that be (which dictate the policies of those agencies) killed him. In the Memphis prelude to the Washington campaign, King posed a threat to those powers of a non-violent revolutionary force. Just how determined they were to stop him before he reached Washington was revealed in the trial by the size and complexity of the plot to kill him.

Dexter King testified to the truth of his father's death with transforming clarity:
" If what you are saying goes against what certain people believe you should be saying, you will be dealt with – maybe not the way you are dealt with in China, which is overtly. But you will be dealt with covertly. The result is the same.

" We are talking about a political assassination in modern-day times, a domestic political assassination. Of course, it is ironic, but I was watching a special on the CIA. They say, 'Yes, we've participated in assassinations abroad but, no, we could never do anything like that domestically.' Well, I don't know. . . . Whether you call it CIA or some other innocuous acronym or agency, killing is killing.

"The issue becomes: What do we do about this? Do we endorse a policy in this country, in this life, that says if we don't agree with someone, the only means to deal with it is through elimination and termination? I think my father taught us the opposite, that you can overcome without violence.

" We're not in this to make heads roll. We're in this to use the teachings that my father taught us in terms of nonviolent reconciliation. It works. . . . We know that it works. . . . So . . . we're not looking to put people in prison. What we're looking to do is get the truth out so that this nation can learn and know officially. . . . If the family of the victim, . . . if we're saying we're willing to forgive and embark upon a process that allows for reconciliation, why can't others?"

When pressed by Pepper to name a specific amount of damages for the death of his father, Dexter King said, "One hundred dollars."


The Verdict

The jury returned with a verdict after two and one-half hours. Judge James E. Swearengen of Shelby County Circuit Court, a gentle African-American man in his last few days before retirement, read the verdict aloud. The courtroom was now crowded with spectators, almost all black.

"In answer to the question, 'Did Loyd Jowers participate in a conspiracy to do harm to Dr. Martin Luther King?' your answer is 'Yes.'" The man on my left leaned forward and whispered softly, "Thank you, Jesus."

The judge continued: "Do you also find that others, including governmental agencies, were parties to this conspiracy as alleged by the defendant?' Your answer to that one is also 'Yes.'" An even more heartfelt whisper: "Thank you, Jesus!"

Perhaps the lesson of the King assassination is that our government understands the power of nonviolence better than we do, or better than we want to. In the spring of 1968, when Martin King was marching (and Robert Kennedy was campaigning), King was determined that massive, nonviolent civil disobedience would end the domination of democracy by corporate and military power. The powers that be took Martin Luther King seriously. They dealt with him in Memphis.
        Thirty-two years after Memphis, we know that the government that now honors Dr. King with a national holiday also killed him. As will once again become evident when the Justice Department releases the findings of its "limited re-investigation" into King's death, the government (as a footsoldier of corporate power) is continuing its cover-up – just as it continues to do in the closely related murders of John and Robert Kennedy and Malcolm X.

David Morphy, the only juror to grant an interview, said later: "We can look back on it and say that we did change history. But that's not why we did it. It was because there was an overwhelming amount of evidence and just too many odd coincidences.

"Everything from the police department being pulled back, to the death threat on Redditt, to the two black firefighters being pulled off, to the military people going up on top of the fire station, even to them going back to that point and cutting down the trees. Who in their right mind would go and destroy a crime scene like that the morning after? It was just very, very odd."

I drove the few blocks to the house on Mulberry Street, one block north of the Lorraine Motel (now the National Civil Rights Museum). When I rapped loudly on Olivia Catling's security door, she was several minutes in coming. She said she'd had the flu. I told her the jury's verdict, and she smiled. "So I can sleep now. For years I could still hear that shot. After 31 years, my mind is at ease. So I can sleep now, knowing that some kind of peace has been brought to the King family. And that's the best part about it."

Perhaps the lesson of the King assassination is that our government understands the power of nonviolence better than we do, or better than we want to. In the spring of 1968, when Martin King was marching (and Robert Kennedy was campaigning), King was determined that massive, nonviolent civil disobedience would end the domination of democracy by corporate and military power. The powers that be took Martin Luther King seriously. They dealt with him in Memphis.

Thirty-two years after Memphis, we know that the government that now honors Dr. King with a national holiday also killed him. As will once again become evident when the Justice Department releases the findings of its "limited re-investigation" into King's death, the government (as a footsoldier of corporate power) is continuing its cover-up – just as it continues to do in the closely related murders of John and Robert Kennedy and Malcolm X.

The faithful in a nonviolent movement that hopes to change the distribution of wealth and power in the U.S.A. – as Dr. King's vision, if made real, would have done in 1968 – should be willing to receive the same kind of reward that King did in Memphis. As each of our religious traditions has affirmed from the beginning, that recurring story of martyrdom ("witness") is one of ultimate transformation and cosmic good news.