Discussion for article #228304
Yes, Holder was a champion of civil and voting rights, but he was lousy on National Security.
The idea that terrorists should be tried in a civilian court with Constitutional rights is frankly ludicrous.
I’ve had the sense that most people could give a fuck about Black people and their concerns and when Holder stepped up regarding civil and voting rights, it rubbed a lot of people - who aren’t really affected by those issues - the wrong way
Holder was fantastic on making sure voting laws were followed. He was great on Equal Rights. I also applaud him on trying terrorists in civilian court. We’ve had some successes with that, despite many on the right getting their panties in a bunch.
I understand the Black Caucus and other leaders in the community being alarmed at Holder’s resignation. It really is a loss because I don’t see any other person putting their necks out the way he did. Bravo to him.
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That seemed to work just fine with Timothy McVeigh and Ramzi Yousef.
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Yeah, keep rewriting history all you want but Holder was a major fail for people of all colors.
May 20 2013 Colorlines.com
"Homeowners and former homeowners rallied in front of the Department of Justice Monday to demand the Attorney General Eric Holder hold banks accountable for foreclosures. The groups are asking the Department of Justice to prosecute banks and to protect the 13 million homeowners who struggle today with underwater mortgages.
The groups organizing the protest, the Home Defenders League and Occupy Homes, are pushing for aggressive prosecutions of banks responsible for the foreclosures. They’re also demanding the government act to reset underwater mortgages that now threaten millions more families with foreclosure.
But these demands appear to be a long shot. The protest comes several months after Attorney General Eric Holder said that some banks may too big to prosecute.
“I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them,” Holder said in March.
Black and Latino families have been hit the hardest by the foreclosure losses. As Colorlines.com’s Imara Jones wrote last week about a new report released by The Alliance for a Just Society:
Despite recent headlines trumpeting a return of America’s real estate market to its boom-time highs, a report released today by the Alliance for a Just Society shows how little of that has trickled into communities of color. The document, entitled “Wasted Wealth,” is a sobering reminder of the gap between top-line economic cheerleading and the reality of what’s happening on the ground.
As “Wasted Wealth” lays out, close to 2.5 million families lost homes in just three years. Communities that were majority people of color saw foreclosures take place at almost twice the rate as white communities, with an average loss of wealth 30 percent higher per household.
This foreclosure tidal wave is why wealth for blacks and Latinos is at the lowest level ever recorded. Housing is the leading wealth asset for these two communities.
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Funny, the banksters who crashed the world’s economy said the same thing.
And even funnier, because the lack of prosecutions and plea deals exacted not on the perpetrators but on the shareholders, right wing media is able to perpetuate the lie that it was the government forcing banks to loan money to irresponsible black people who couldn’t afford their mortgages that caused the crash.
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As I’ve asserted, this is what would have been termed a “moderate conservative” administration, somewhere to the right of Nixon.
There will be no prosecutions. As has been often said, what was just “too big to fail” before so-called banking reform is now clearly “too big to jail.”
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Why is it ludicrous? We’ve done it hundreds of times, and I’ve yet to see anyone able to point to a problem.
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The idea that they shouldn’t is what’s ludicrous. Be afraid! Be very, very afraid!
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Except that there have already been prosecutions and record fines, your point about there not being any prosecutions is very sound.
Well, on second thought, no, it’s not. Even if you weren’t wrong about that, attributing the Big Lie about minorities homeowners to the actions of the Justice Department doesn’t make any sense, either.
I also feel a deep sense of sadness and alarm over Holder’s departure. He is the only AG since the 60’s to turn his attention to the resurgent fascism in our local police departments and the frequent occurrences of summary executions and lynching-by-cop of black men in our communities. And he was just getting started. In fact, his record on civil rights – voting rights, institutional racism in justice, sentencing disparities, LGBT rights – is unparalleled.
And he had to completely rebuild the Department of Justice from the ground up after the bush years. Remember Alberto Gonzales and the firing of the Attorneys General, Monica Goodling and the hiring of unqualified rightwing ideologues out of Liberty University for high-level positions at Justice. It took years just to get the DoJ working again.
Of course, he didn’t attend to the narrow little priorities of the Greenwaldian cult or the Loooey Gohmert types on the left and the right. But he leaves a fine, fine legacy, and I’m sorry to see him go.
Now Jane effin Harman is urging Obama to hire a Republican for Attorney General. Are you fucking serious???
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Oh, because if we don’t process them in a lopsided and fixed justice system that frees the Haditha killers yet jails the patriot Chelsea Manning… if we instead dare to stand by the standards of justice we claim to hold dear as an example to the world… that might lead to the release of some evildoer at some point in the future, and that individual might some and behead Our Pet Goat.
Besides, we all know that evidence gained under duress of torture can’t be admitted in a court of law, but the torturers aren’t as picky.
See, that’s what I don’t get: since when is being investigated for terrorism by the FBI, charged by the Department of Justice, tried in federal district court, and imprisoned in high-security federal penitentiaries some kind of softie, kids glove approach?
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Same here, TomBlue.
Well said.
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My point is that those “record fines” are hardly a disincentive to the perpetrators, save whatever value they may have lost in share price from their enormous cache of stock options. As I said, they were extracted from the shareholders, not the perps.
The actions of the Justice Department, in not prosecuting any of these individuals, serves to perpetuate that Big Lie. Had the head of Goldman Sachs gone to prison, accountability would be clearer than just punishing the shareholders. Nothing is as clear as a video tape of a perp walk.
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It isn’t. But some oppose it because we have to play by the rules. Playing by the rules is soft to some. Some fear even reciting Miranda, and make a big hairy deal out of that, as if doing so would somehow tip off the evildoer to not cooperate. It’s laughable.
save whatever value they may have lost in share price from their enormous cache of stock options.
That’s a pretty meaningful qualification there.
Your confidence that perp walks would have put a dent in the perceptions of racists doesn’t seem warranted to me.
In other ways, Holder helped families of color. Whether it was voting rights, civil rights, the laws concerning mandatory drug sentences, helping defenders with legal assistance, confronting the racial issues -no he did not solve all the problems in one fell swoop but he did do a lot while he was Attorney General. The people quoted in the article believe so as well.
But something tells me you don’t give a fuck about people of color. I remember your earlier posts at TPM ClarenceVine/Darcy…
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I didn’t say perp walks would put a dent in the perception of racists. Just because some people are unreachable doesn’t mean everyone operating under the Big Lie is unreachable, or racist.
In other words, Obama didn’t stand up for principles. Obama is a very weak politician…lots of words and no action.
Obama: All hat and no horse!
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