Watch Your Back, Jack

Former GOP super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff was sentenced last week to an additional 48 months in prison for conspiring with his business partners to defraud clients, corrupt public officials and hide the profits from their sordid criminal enterprise by evading federal taxes. He’d originally plead guilty to three counts back in January of 2006, and was sentenced to almost six years; however, his lawyers managed to get that sentence cut almost in half. Which once again proves that the American legal system is not blind: It recognizes wealth, power and connections. But another federal judge sentenced him on another case, which will mean that he'll serve just shy of six years behind bars. And if, as he said in court, the last two years he has been incarcerated have been pure hell, his life is perhaps about to get a whole lot worse.

You see, prison is a place where you can do time, or you can do hard time... which of course means time is doing you. However, some wealthy, high profile prisoners -- like Abramoff -- can obtain what is known as a "Joint Pass." While it's not real document, it nonetheless confers on the holder the right to "roam" about the prison compound (some fed joints cover many acres) with relative ease and with no hassles from the guards. This type of "freedom" -- even in a proscribed environment -- makes the time go by much, much faster. Rumor has it that Abramoff, with his skills of manipulation, has secured just such a pass and is strutting around the Florida federal prison compound as if he owns the place.

At the other end of the incarceration scale is "Protective Custody," the cells where prisoners have to reside if their lives would be endangered by being out in the general prison population. Time in "PC" drags by so slowly that each day can seem like a week; and that’s the kind of time Abramoff should be doing.

With the help of Thomas Frank (the author of the 2004 bestseller What's the Matter With Kansas?, and the 2008 masterwork, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule), I’m going to see if I can cause Jacki-Boy to "PC-up" -- that is, to voluntarily ask prison officials to lock him away from the other prisoners for his own safety. With my ability to still reach inside of any federal prison in the country via my pen, I'm going to see if I can extract a measure of revenge for all of the people he fucked over during his long career.

Why, you might ask, do I want to be so mean to Abramoff? Well, if you were to read of his various and sundry misdeeds as chronicled in The Wrecking Crew, you'd personally want to step off in his ass, too. Although he was only sentenced for defrauding Native American tribes he represented as a lobbyist (along with the tax code violations), according to Frank, his global sins were far more insidious and harmful. If Abramoff had been charged, convicted and sentenced in accordance to the damage he's done around the world he would have received what convicts call "Buck Rogers Time," a release date so far into the future that it's beyond comprehension; they would have welded shut the gate on his prison cell the minute he stepped inside. The lengths he (and his cohorts) went to in their efforts to enrich themselves at the expense of others by manipulating the levers of power is sickening — absolutely revolting.

That $700 billion foreclosure bailout the American taxpayer just got stuck with? Abramoff and his cronies helped to set the table for this unprecedented rip-off years ago — and then provided the wheelbarrows for the CEOs of the failing financial institutions to cart away their millions of Golden Parachute dollars.

It's as if Frank had a crystal ball when he was writing The Wrecking Crew. His detailed, documented and extremely well-researched work lays out a pattern of behavior embarked on years ago by Republican conservatives that could only result in the market meltdown we’re currently faced with.

The foreclosure crisis didn't -- as government officials would now have us believe -- just "happen." You know, as in "Dude, shit happens." No, it was an engineered train robbery and lobbyists like Abramoff were (and still are) the bagmen that act as go betweens... shuttling back and forth between members of Congress, ex-members of the Bush administration, and the investment houses that grew rich off all of the grifting.

In order for a swindle of this magnitude to take place the watchdogs that had the responsibility of protecting the public had to first be removed. This, boys and girls, is done by a process conservatives call by the sensible-sounding name of "deregulation." You hear of it every time an economic train runs off the track. This is the rightwing form of governance that basically says "we can just close our eyes and trust Wall Street to look out for the little guy on Main Street," but nothing trickles down to the little guy but the bill to set the matter right... or risk another Great Depression. They got us by the balls, and they’re swinging on them.

When Bush, like Reagan before him, began gutting federal agencies that oversaw industries like finance, energy and pharmaceuticals, and replacing career employees with political appointments, it was lobbyists like Abramoff that kept the lists of loyal Republicans that were tapped to fill the positions, according to Frank's book. Inept political flunkies replaced dedicated public officials and then, when they purposely screw things up the neo-cons cry that "since the government didn’t know what it was doing, so let’s do away with government."

Frank cites numerous cases where individuals who were the sworn enemy of certain government agencies were put in charge of those agencies... just so they could destroy them. The lack of competent government oversight has left us, the American taxpayer, at risk of all kinds of preventable catastrophes -- simply because regulations get in the way of profiteers. Abramoff's job was to kill those regulations.

While Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke scratched their heads in front of Congress last week (when they were being asked how the current crisis came about), everyone in the room knew that when Bush forced out the CEO of Fannie Mae, Franklin Raines, back in December of 2004, he was setting up a scenario which would allow modern-day Robber Barons to rape the housing industry. And they also knew that the perennial sucker, the American taxpayer, would once again bail the market out.

A close friend of mine, who once ran the local Fannie Mae office here in Cleveland, laid out for me in early 2005 exactly what has come to pass -- down to the letter. If he knew, from his outpost here in Cleveland four years ago, what was being set up... why didn't they? The truth is, they did; they just can’t speak the truth now because it would lead to the impeachment of the current president, and who needs that kind of drama all over again? Better to let Bush ride off into ignoble retirement rather than tear the country apart trying to play a useless game of "pin the tail on the donkey." We know what he did, and history will most certainly punish him enough for his actions.

But we can take our anger out on Jacki-Boy. Here's how: A simple fact of life is that prisoners run prisons — the guards are just there to make sure no one leaves before their sentence is up. One prison joke is that the barbed-wire fence is actually in place to keep people out, not to keep convicts in. And, as the economy worsens, that just might be truer. Another truism is that Blacks run prisons in America; men who are power-less on the streets are power-ful in prison. One more thing about prison... other than in PC, there is no place to hide.

Not even the Jack Abramoffs of the world have expensive lawyers to hide behind while incarcerated, and the accouterments of power -- $50,000 watches, $5,000 custom-made Brioni suits, and extravagantly-priced Gucci loafers -- are non-existent: Everyone is wearing government-issue khaki. In other words, prison is a great leveler and retribution can be swift, predictable and harsh. Even in PC, it's other prisoners who prepare and bring the food — you didn’t really think that guards are serving dinner to prisoners, did you? "Hey Jacki-Boy, what's that white stuff floating on top of your gruel today?"

Now you may ask why Black prisoners would be upset with Abramoff for assisting in setting up the plunder of the housing market, and the truth is they would not be. But they would be upset if they knew that, starting on page 101 of The Wrecking Crew author Frank begins to fill us in on how Abramoff, in 1983, went to South Africa to partner with Russell Crystal to form the International Freedom Foundation, a front group paid for by the racist, apartheid regime from Pretoria.

Yep, 'ol Jacki-Boy, though his Washington lobbying firm, was one of the prime architects of the effort to discredit Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress so that the White rulers could stay in power as long as they could — and he did it all for the great god profit. Indeed, the continuing strife and destabilization we see in South Africa today can be blamed, in part, on the efforts of Abramoff and his henchmen: Black people continue to die so that White people can grow richer.

From South Africa to Saipan (the American territory officially known as the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands where workers are shamelessly exploited for their labor and their humanity... the sexual slavery trade flourishes there), to the Native American tribes he bilked for millions while referring to them as "monkeys" and "troglodytes" as he literally raped them of their assets, Jack Abramoff went out of his way to shit on people of color every time he got the opportunity.

As Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." And, as Malcolm X once said, "Chickens come home to roost." So, Jacki-Boy, unless you PC-up, you'd better get some eyes in the back of your head as you walk around the prison compound; you need to learn to sleep with one eye open; and if you drop the soap in the shower, never, ever bend over to pick it up. Here's an even older saying: "Payback is a bitch."

Am I attempting to get Abramoff hurt? No. Am I attempting to get him to go into protective custody where he will be as miserable as his actions have made others? Has Pinocchio got a wooden pecker?

From Cool Cleveland contributor Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com
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