PUTIN'S HARD HAT OF INDIFFERENCE

BALLOON PAYMENT FOR SOCHI OLYMPICS

INVADE NOW FOR BEST FINANCING TERMS

THE VIEW FROM THE U.S. VIRGIN ISLANDS

 

By John McCarthy

Moderate Voice Columnist

 

     Remember when the worst thing we had to fear from Vladimir Putin was another garish bare-chested, bareback photo opportunity?

     There had come a time in the career of President Putin when he was even taking flack from Pussy Riot band members and seemed destined for irrelevance.

     Not any more.

     The erstwhile and current president always wanted us to look at him as a tough guy (what’s a former KGB guy supposed to do?) hence the pictures of him in black belt karate gear, on horseback as a half-suit Lord Godiva and supine in the snow with his big dogs and guns.

     Putin wasn’t eligible to run for a third consecutive presidential term in 2008, so he did the next best thing, put in a puppet (Dmitry Medvedev) to run for president and win in his place and then have him appoint himself (the former president) as “Prime Minister” for the next four years.

     Vlad the Deplaner put up with Pussy Riot’s taunts in the days leading up to his coming out party at the Sochi Olympic Games this year – because he wanted to appear statesmanlike in the international press – and because he knew he was planning something even bigger at the conclusion of the sporting contests.

      Four days after the closing ceremonies of the $50 billion Russian-sponsored Olympic games, Putin marched his troops less than 300 miles away from Sochi into Crimea and seized 233,090 square miles of beachfront property and 45 trillion cubic meters of strategic gas reserves – it’s the kind real estate deal that you won’t see on Million Dollar Listing.

      At the beginning of the year, Putin was on the verge of going the way of Yeltsin and Gorbachev, but the patina of a successful Olympic games put his name back in the news rundowns as a bear claw to the rainbow community and possible exterminator of wild dogs.

     Now, the parallels to Adolf Hitler and the appeasement that the 1936 Olympic Games represented – seem ominous – you don’t have to look twice to see Putin’s Yeti-like cojones. Vlad had to pay for the Olympics somehow – how else are you going to raise $50 billion in five months?

     The question is: what are we going to do about it? President Obama was out front on stepped up economic sanctions against Russia when he got the news live via telephone from his presidential peer that “someone” had taken down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17. Sanctions have never kept any nation from doing what it felt it was autonomous to do.

     At the beginning of the year Putin faced political oblivion with a trending loss of support at home. What he needed to keep ordinary Russians from wondering if their lives had improved under him was a wag-the-dog-type diversion. He’s definitely got that and more now.

     According to Gallup polls, Putin’s popularity rating had sunk to an all-time low of 54% last year. In April of 2014, after the Olympics and Crimea – his popularity had tied for his highest ever mark at 83 percent approval.

     Meanwhile, the EU leaders who are doing everything right by international law standards have seen their popularity ratings fall beyond low into single digit numbers. And President Obama’s Gallup poll numbers have also tied for a notable mark – in his case a low point of 38 percent approval tying him with August 2011 polling numbers – and a recent Quinnipiac University poll that rated him the worst American president since 1945.

     It’s OK to keep talking about increasing economic sanctions against Russia in the summer of our discontent, but when winter approaches, there are 18 nations that get five to 100 percent of their gas from Moscow. Thirty percent of Europe depends on Russia for oil.

     Ultimately, the international community must galvanize one and all to oppose Putin in a way that not only hurts his bank account – but most importantly – his pride.

     No amount of black market Viagra will be able to lift his swelling pride if it is unmistakable to his people.

     That means the international community should call on FIFA to take away the World Cup Games from Russia in 2018.

     Failing that, a boycott of the upcoming FIFA World Cup Games is in order for all nations that value the rule of law – just as the United States did in 1980 with the Moscow Olympic Games.

     The Carter and Obama administrations have been tagged with the “malaise” label, it’s time we passed the uneasiness buck to where it belongs – back to Putin.

     Right now he’s riding high on his horse and preaching to the choir. A national tide of rising pride is not likely to diminish in the next four years if the status quo is maintained.  People who supply irresponsible people with surface-to-air missile systems and then train them to shoot down passenger planes must pay a meaningful price.

     Photo ops never showed if Putin plays an instrument.

     It’s time we teach him how to play taps on his home turf.

 

© 2014 John Francis McCarthy/Secret Goldfish Publishing House, LLC

John McCarthy is a reporter, fine artist and photojournalist based in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Please send comments to: johnfmccarthy807@msn.com

A GENERATIONAL SLAP IN THE FACE

BETTER THAN THE TWINKIE DEFENSE

THE COBB COUNTY CRUCIBLE ON HLN

THE VIEW FROM THE VIRGIN ISLANDS

 

By John McCarthy

TMV Columnist

If the O.J. Simpson trial was the crime of the last century, then the “hot car death” of Cooper Harris is the “alleged” murder of the new century.

H.L. Mencken called the kidnapping and murder trial of the Lindbergh baby’s killer in 1932 “the biggest story since the Resurrection.”

The trial of 33-year-old Justin Ross Harris promises to not be all that, but it may be a bag of chips for the cable TV news networks and their endless 24-7 cycle seeking to replace Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 as the new “go to” story.

The differences in the three crimes of the last two centuries are telling: 1) Charles Lindbergh was the biggest celebrity in America at the time his 18-month-old child Charles Jr. was stolen from his home in East Amwell, New Jersey. 2) “OJ” was a known AVIS rental car spokesman and ABC sports commentator, but merely part of the ensemble casts in “Towering Inferno” (1974) and “Airplane” (1980). His alleged victims Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were not celebrities. 3) Harris is a web designer for Home Depot by trade and only came to prominence with his arrest last month in Marietta, Georgia.

If the national news media builds the Harris Hot Car Death into the “Crime of the Century” it will give Andy Warhol’s fabled “15 minutes of fame” even more credibility because neither Justin or his son Cooper were celebrities before Cobb County Police identified Mr. Harris as a cold blooded killer. German immigrant Bruno Richard Hauptmann became a celebrity when he was arrested two years after the Lindbergh baby disappearance and was then executed by the electric chair two years after his conviction.

In modern-day America, O.J. Simpson was released after his double murder trial ended in a not guilty verdict so that he could commit other sports memorabilia felonies in Las Vegas 14 years after his initial arrest, including armed robbery and kidnapping. In 1971 (three years before “Towering Inferno,” Charles Manson was convicted for masterminding the Tate-LaBianca murders. But a year later the California Supreme Court outlawed capital punishment.

The Cooper Harris murder trial represents the constantly shifting paradigms of American society, from West Coast to Southern industrial dominance; and geographically America’s population is moving westward and southward, just as the trial of OJ was in LA, the new showstopper is in ATL - which is known affectionately as "Hot-lanta." We have gone from Baby Boomers on ordinary trunk land lines in 1994 to Generation Y, the so-called “Millenials” sex text messaging, or “sexting” in 2014.

The current group, Generation Z, aka the “Homeland Generation” or “digital natives” not only are too young to remember the Lindberg baby kidnapping, but likely don’t even know who Johnnie Cochran was, after all – they weren’t even born when Nicole Brown Simpson was murdered in Brentwood. And the generational gap represented by these three or four Crimes of the Century was never more obvious than when watching Headline News network last night.

The cheerleading style of nightly justice outrage was stoked to a fever pitch by “Nancy Grace” who used a full-screen Chyron graphic to illustrate not only that Harris was sexting six women at the same time he was supposed to be watching his son, but that one of them was only seventeen years old. The opening act for Grace is Jane Velez-Mitchell’s show. Velez-Mitchell came to prominence as a commentator during the Michael Jackson sexual abuse trial and apparently developed an affinity for Jacko’s style of plastic surgery following that 2003 media circus.

Velez-Mitchell emphasized almost as many times as Nancy Grace, that when Harris was texting his six sextuplets, he was sending along pictures of his “erect penis” to his chosen few. Grace, who was thrust into national prominence first on Court TV as a reporter when ratings soared on the glovetails of the O.J. Simpson trial, mentioned “erect penis” at least five times during her hour-long show.

Grace, in her visibly-angered persona looking scarier than Bruce Nauman in full “Clown Torture” video mode, showed that the 22-year age difference between her and the accused is significant. Because that generational gap was never more apparent than when she and near sexogenarian Velez-Mitchell were gagging on the “erect penis” pictures that they said Harris was including in text messages to his “friends with benefits.” Presumably, the two women would have been equally upset if Harris had jaywalked with his child – but sexted at the same time.

The voice of reason came when the 55-year-old Dr. Drew Pinsky was included in a telephone beeper on Velez-Mitchell’s “Issues” show. Substance abuse expert Dr. Pinsky stated that if Harris had gotten drunk and run over Cooper, everyone would have understood it as an accident. “Dr. Drew” said the line of reasoning that best fits Harris’ crime is that the Alabama-born father is a “sex addict.”

And the sexual perversion angle is not just important to Nancy Grace and Jane Velez-Mitchell and their respective shows' ratings, it was also important to Harris before going to court yesterday. Because Mr. Harris chose Maddox Kilgore as his defense attorney, a lawyer who has never before represented a murder defendant - Kilgore has typically defended sexual predators and people accused of harboring child pornography in the past.

As the prospect of a Justin Ross Harris capital murder trial is dangled in front of a federal grand jury, prosecutors must now come to grips with the fact that it is inconsistent to argue on the one hand that Harris was distracted by titillating pictures of six women other than his wife – while at the same time saying the negligent father coldly, analytically plotted to kill his baby son by leaving him unattended in that hot car.

The balding, pasty-white, morbidly-obese Cobb County Chief Magistrate Judge Frank R. Cox told his standing-room-only courtroom that there was not only probable cause to bind Harris over for trial, but that sufficient evidence might exist for the death penalty to come into play.

Cobb County Police Detective Phil Stoddard had argued that Harris’ sexting suggested that the defendant was living a criminal “double life” and should not be set free on bail. Prosecutors also said that Harris researched hot car deaths on the Internet just five days prior to Cooper dying of hypothermia.

Court testimony revealed that the Harris’ purchased a $25,000 life insurance policy on Cooper in 2012. An additional $2,000 life insurance policy was included in Harris’ compensation package as a Home Depot employee.

Prosecutors and defense attorneys will be able argue whether or not Harris intended to kill his son on that fateful 18th day in June.

What is not debatable is that cable TV news networks see the case only as a distraction until they can cut to more commercials. 

 

AN ANIMAL SLURRY OF ACTIVITY

GAGGING ON THE G.O.P.’S AG-GAG BILLS

MUCKRAKING DIGS UP ANIMALS BURIED ALIVE

THE VIEW FROM THE VIRGIN ISLANDS

 

By John McCarthy

TMV Columnist

 

Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, North Dakota, South Carolina and Utah already have ag-gag laws.

Now 18 other states – roughly half the country – also want to use legislation to keep investigative journalists from using undercover videos to expose animal cruelty.

All of the bills – which seek to take cameras out of the hands of photojournalists or impose criminal penalties on activists who try to hide their intentions on job applications – have been proposed by Republican lawmakers.

Prince Poultry near Raleigh, North Carolina had one poultry worker burying live chickens in a pit with dying and decaying birds. In one scene shown on OutFront with Erin Burnett, the farm hand is asked by the undercover intern whether he plans to first kill the chicken before he puts it in the burial pit.

“No, we’re going to drop them in the pit just like they are,” the worker told CNN. “You dump them in there and then Mother Nature takes care of the rest. You go in there in the summertime, and it smells real nice over there. If you look down in there, it’s like a gravy that’s simmering and squirming.”

The television report also played an undercover video shot by a PETA employee depicting lame and sick pigs on a farm in the Midwest owned by Babcock Genetics in which the animals’ insides were left hanging outside of their bodies with no veterinary care. The Holmen, Wisconsin-based company has as its motto: “bigger pigs, bigger profits.”

If animal farms are left to their own devices – with no oversight by government or private concerns – the question becomes: will the public good be served as well as it might with the occasional surprise inspection by amateur videographers?

“These investigations have exposed not only animal abuse but also food safety, workers’ rights, environmental issues,” Matthew Dominguez of the Humane Society of the United States said. “These ag-gag bills should scare every American because Americans have a right to know what’s happening with their food. They have a right to know where their food is coming from.”

How Americans find out where their food is coming from has become the issue to these G.O.P. representatives. They say it is unfair to businesses to have animal rights activists pose as interns to surreptitiously gain access to animal farms in the United States.

One could argue that animal cruelty could be exposed without the help of video documentation, but in the age of TMZ, CNN and YouTube – if it doesn’t exist on video – it might as well not exist at all. Undercover journalism has been practiced since at least the beginning of the last century when Sinclair Lewis became famous with “The Jungle.”

“The Jungle” not only exposed the health hazards of early 20^th Century meatpacking plants, but also cast a jaundiced eye at human rights abuses by corporations that Jack London said engaged in “wage slavery.”

When told that his North Carolina farm was burying chickens alive, the owner of Prince Poultry, Tim Prince, initially denied the allegations. But when confronted with the video evidence, Prince acknowledged that some mistakes were made.

“She's taken six weeks of work and narrowed it down to a few bad things I’ve done,” Prince complained about the intern. “And I’ve done it. It's obvious. She took just a few very minute little things that we’ve done wrong.”

And it is these kinds of “minute little things” that Sen. Brent Jackson (R-NC) and his Republican colleagues hope to remove from public scrutiny with legislation. The politicians are responding to big farming’s interests in having as little oversight as possible of their operations. But the question is why?

“I don’t have anything to say to CNN,” state lawmaker Jackson told the Atlanta-based news source when asked for comment.

Meanwhile Dominguez said that recent undercover investigations were key to exposing chickens being buried alive in North Carolina, pigs left with their intestines hanging out in Wisconsin and cows being sexually assaulted in Idaho.

"At the heart of the matter, it's unconstitutional," Dominguez said. "It says a lot about an industry that wants to criminalize someone for simply taking a picture of their operation."

As Kristen Rasmussen of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press writes, at least one of the proposed laws would prohibit any person – including a non-journalist – from snapping a photo of livestock in a public place.

"For example: a photograph taken from a public road of a farm animal grazing in an open field would expose the journalist to up to a year in prison or a $1,000 fine," Rasmussen said.

If Republican lawmakers hold sway nationwide, the food producing industries of America will be subject to watchdog public inspections when pigs fly.

 

© 2014 John Francis McCarthy/Secret Goldfish Publishing House, LLC

John McCarthy is an investigative reporter, fine artist and photojournalist based in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Please send comments to: johnfmccarthy807@msn.com