I'm a little slow on catching things this week, but in case you missed it:
See Greenwald's post about this here. Also Amy Goodman here talks about the whole financing of the conventions. As Greenwald says, "What's most striking about the Convention bag -- aside, of course, from its stunning design -- is how the parties no longer bother even trying to hide who it is who funds and sponsors them."
Chances are after the negative publicity the bag is getting, the Dems will pull it by the time the convention rolls around. But it's amazing, isn't it, after all the bad feeling about the Dem capitulation on Telecom amnesty, that the Dems would be so obtuse as to allow this kind of thing. It shows that they know who butters their bread. And it's certainly not the people who object to this kind of crass co-optation.
P.S. If you have the time, Democracy Now did a show on corporate financing of the conventions on 7/22, and the same show features Greenwald debating Cass Sunstein for his position justifying why an Obama administration should not hold players in the political class accountable for their crimes because you shouldn't criminalize policy disputes. Sunstein embodies the stereotype so many Americans have come to loathe when it comes to an intellectualized personality that presents itself as "liberal": always looking for a way to rationalize what is so clearly wrong so as to avoid a fight on principle. It's the kind of thing that the conservative wing of my family loathes about Democrats, and it is quite understandable that they should feel that way. Listen to the tone of Sunstein's voice--it's the voice of a man who has been co-opted, someone who uses his prodigious intelligence, whether consciously or unconsciously, to defend a dangerously corrupted status quo.
Greenwald in repsonding to Sunstein's mealy-mouthed rationalizations says this:
You know, I think this mentality that we’re hearing is really one of the principal reasons why our government has become so lawless and so distorted over the past thirty years. You know, if you go into any courtroom where there is a criminal on trial for any kind of a crime, they’ll have lawyers there who stand up and offer all sorts of legal and factual justifications or defenses for what they did. You know, going back all the way to the pardon of Nixon, you know, you have members of the political elite and law professors standing up and saying, “Oh, there’s good faith reasons not to impeach or to criminally prosecute.” And then you go to the Iran-Contra scandal, where the members of the Beltway class stood up and said the same things Professor Sunstein is saying: we need to look to the future, it’s important that we not criminalize policy debates. You know, you look at Lewis Libby being spared from prison.
And now you have an administration that—we have a law in this country that says it is a felony offense, punishable by up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine, to spy on Americans without the warrants required by law. We have a president who got caught doing that, who admits that he did that. And yet, you have people saying, “Well, there may be legal excuses as to why he did that.” Or you have a president who admits ordering, in the White House, planning with his top aides, interrogation policies that the International Red Cross says are categorically torture, which are also felony offenses in the United States. And you have people saying, “Well, we can’t criminalize policy disputes.”
And what this has really done is it’s created a two-tiered system of government, where government leaders know that they are free to break our laws, and they’ll have members of the pundit class and the political class and law professors standing up and saying, “Well, these are important intellectual issues that we need to grapple with, and it’s really not fair to put them inside of a courtroom or talk about prison.” And so, we’ve incentivized lawlessness in this country. I mean, the laws are clear that it’s criminal to do these things. The President has done them, and he—there’s no reason to treat him differently than any other citizen who breaks our laws.