On the broadest level, attorneys collectively create their own code of ethics (via the ABA and various groups of jurists that write the conduct rules for judges). Then attorneys stand back and tell the rest of us how great their collective judgement on this topic is.

What I see is a group that includes incredibly well-paid corporate servants writing precisely the set of rules that allows corporate attorneys to make fortunes precisely for advancing corporate positions and acts that harm the rest of us.

I don’t find corporate attorneys — or those who were corporate attorneys – persuasive on this topic: they have glaring conflicts of interest.

Corporate attorneys, after all, gave us the legal fiction that the dead entities known as corporations have the same rights as living persons.

In deflecting critiques of corporate counsels’ fundamentally antisocial acts on behalf of serial murders and serial posioners (oops: that would be fatal workplace safety violations and fatal pollution), members of the Bar always deflect the topic over to respresentation for living persons accused of criminal acts.

Uhh….Monsanto is a non-living entity. Chiquita is a non-living entity.

The people I’ll be hearing about today in the grand jury are living persons (it’s a criminal grand jury).

Nothing I’ve written advocates depriving people of defense counsel.

Nothing I’ve written advocates depriving people – individual beings – of legal representation.

When Eric Holder chose to represent Chiquita, he was a partner in a prestigious law firm. He didn’t have to keep working there. Colombia’s attorney general states the firm Eric Holder chose to represent funded death squads precisely in order to kill union members:

The attorney general of Colombia, Mario Iguaran, and other Colombian officials have dismissed Chiquita’s assertions that it was a victim of extortion and paid AUC to protect its workers. An Organization of American States report in 2003 said that Chiquita participated in smuggling thousands of arms for paramilitaries into the Northern Uraba region, using docks operated by the company to unload thousands of Central American assault rifles and ammunition.

Iguaran, whose office has been investigating Chiquita’s operations, said the company knew AUC was using payoffs and arms to fund operations against peasants, union workers and rivals

More from Conde Nast:

The firm’s lawyers have struggled to explain publicly that Chiquita had to make a choice between “life and law” and that it chose the “humanitarian” route of protecting its workers. “This company was in a bad position dealing with bad guys,” says Eric Holder, a Washington attorney representing Chiquita. “There’s absolutely no suggestion of any personal gain here. It’s not a case like Tyco, where someone is squirreling money away. No one is out buying great shower curtains.”

As a corporation, though, Chiquita stood to benefit greatly from the lethal cleansing that Castaño delivered. At the time, the Marxist guerrillas routinely kidnapped U.S. executives, blew up railroads, and sabotaged oil pipelines. Chiquita says it became increasingly difficult to protect its workers and their families. Castaño’s death squads, however, were squarely pro-business. They were not just ridding Urabá of guerrillas; they were killing leftists and eradicating unions.

“The payments Chiquita made to the paramilitaries were part of a project that the A.U.C. called Operation Genesis,” says Gloria Cuartas, who was the mayor of Apartadó from 1995 until 1997, when Castaño threatened her life and drove her out of the area. “It called for the elimination of the left and of all social groups that were supposedly contributing to instability for investors and the multinationals.” Francisco Ramirez, a leading labor lawyer with the United Confederation of Workers, the largest labor union in Colombia, says that money from Chiquita and other companies “created these paramilitary groups and helped destroy the unions.”

The A.U.C.’s wave of terror was swift and brutal. Among the most savage of its many massacres was a 1998 attack on an Urabá village in which paramilitaries murdered 11 peasants after burning them with acid to force them to confess they were guerrillas.

That’s what Eric Holder and his firm chose to represent.

The First Amendment allows Eric and his fellow law partners in their lucrative DC practice to associate with anyone they damn well please.

The same First Amendment allows the rest of us NOT to associate with people who chose to enrich themselves by accepting money from corporations that fund death squads.

The same First Amendement allows political appointees to shun people who chose to enrich themselves by accepting money from corporations that fund death squads.

We don’t have to allow people like Holder into our living rooms: acting collectively, we don’t have to allow them into our public offices. Calling out the lawyers who are complicit in protecting the corporations who fund death squads – calling our the lawyers who are complicit in protecting serial posioners – that’s the start of changing opinion about creeps like Eric Holder.

Forty years ago drunk driving was a reliable punch line on the Tonight Show. Now drunk driving’s an automatic trip to jail. Collectively, pollution, workplace deaths, and other corporate misdeeds – the same misdeeds the corporations choose to commit in furtherance of maximal profits – they kill more Americans than drunk drivers do.

Unlike the drunk drivers, the corporate attorneys profit from their work.

Keeping people who chose to use their legal education in this way out of public life is our choice: if Glenn or other attorneys don’t like that advocacy, that’s their choice.

Those of us who’ve never had corporations as paying clients in a legal practice may well choose differently. I know I have.

Chicago is a huge Laundromat that’s protected by many which includes the news papers and radio station(s) and armies of people who protect and make sure the system runs smooth. Chicago gets a weekly $100 million shipment in cocaine that’s split with New York and Florida and it’s been going on for decades. Other areas of the US receive frequent huge shipments of drugs also. But there is more….

Over the last few years investigations have surfaced a 100 fleet of planes used by Companies and Elites with some busted in shipping tons of cocaine. My ex-sister-in-law’s brother “Clyde O’Connor” was busted in Mexico along with “Greg Smith” with 3.5 tons of cocaine. Both somehow got away and are still at large. Plus two separate investigations (on recent international investigation) surfaced that Clyde’s plane tail number was also used in CIA Rendition flights. It’s important to know that in the early 90’s Clyde, my brother-in-law and I were talking at a family gathering at my house. My brother-in-law then started to discuss with Clyde a new business opportunity to work with others with air shipping in huge amounts of drugs into the US and elsewhere. Shortly following this conversation, my brother-in-law put together their business, which is believed to include Obama’s law firm and Obama himself with organizing and preparing the documents registering the new company. (Needs to be proven) I want to add, that the family learned about Obama from the law firm and were told that Obama is considered the criminals system’s “Budding Shinning Star”. My brother-in-law was directly involved with Obama’s law firm back during that time while I was still married.

However, I’ve written many times around the Internet about the huge Drug System and what it is used for. As told to me by the family, the proceeds from the Drug System are to FUND “Black Op’s” which are to support another “White House Coup”. The family’s involvement with laundering money for decades has made them CIA Assets to where they brag about not worrying about ever being prosecuted. If you look at where the current investigations are, they seem to be blocked. In Mexico however, the families from people involved in the Drug system that shares with the drug system I’m talking about are complaining. Mexico has been aggressively pursuing shutting down the drug cartels. The families complain that NO ONE in the US who is involved in this huge drug system has been arrested. They want to know why?

Chiquita as told to me by the family is directly involved in this latest WH Coup and so are all that are linked to Chiquita. If you understand how huge this criminal system is, it’s easy to understand WHY Chiquita got off so easy. And it’s also easy to understand WHY Holder is being selected to be our new AG. It’s important to remember that as told to me, “Corruption protects and safeguards the drug system from the point of origin all the way to each individual destination”.

Make no mistake about this, I’ve known about this for years. Plus I was told about 911 in 1996 only then it was explained “Something huge is going to happen that will start everything”. Also realize that Sebel Edmonds’s story explains who in the Federal area is involved in the Coup. There are Federal FBI Whistleblowers – Listen to what they have to say! The real story behind all of this insanity is we are in the midst of a WH Coup. I know the DuPont family is directly involved in this Coup as well.

There really isn’t any easy short way to explain this, so I’m sorry for the long post. I’ll answer questions if asked.

Marty Didier
Northbrook, IL

http://votenader.org
http://kucinich.us

Have a day.

Re “methods and tactics”: the post doesn’t really address that. All he is accused of is getting a favorable plea deal and helping with preparation for a 60 minutes interview. The rest of the accusations are not specific to Holder.

Yes justice should be blind and sometimes isn’t. Yes the rich and powerful can hire good lawyers that the rest of us can’t afford. But is that a reason to say that Holder should not be AG? I am agnostic on that question, but I just didn’t care for the tactics embodied in Murphy’s post, which is why I delurked. If that’s a word.

I find this kind of hysterical accusation offensive, and it is unhelpful juxtaposed with discussing the qualifications of the AG nominee:

The most prosperous positions for attorneys are as corporate counsel – the consiglieri for the serial poisoners and serial killers otherwise known as corporate America. Members of the Bar.

Lawyers are favorite targets for the left and right. But most get up in the morning wanting to do a good job, and most are not dishonest, evil criminals. Some of the most honorable upstanding people I know are lawyers. That is not a popular view in this location on this date.

The good news is that Holder couldn’t possibly be worse than what we have had in the Bush years.

Yet still, our ‘grasp’ is meager and the magnitude of our collective failure is debated from the comfort of our intellects as we seek, desperately, for scapegoats and someone handy to blame, the full weight of reality has not come home and we all imagine that the ‘worst’ of it will happen to someone else, somewhere else …

We cling to images and ‘feelings’ of our yesterdays, not quite able to be ‘present’, and, except for a courageous few, ‘tomorrow’ is far too much, too frightening, to contemplate …

We are teetering on the brink, as a nation, as a world society and as a species.

Please understand, I do not say these things to frighten, enervate or heighten despair.

I say these things because they must be said.

For only by acknowledging the reality of our quandry, may we realistically and reasonably hope to find a better way.

The lessons of history have fallen on deaf ears, indeed they are ignored and even denied by those who wish to play out their pathologies, unrestrained and unfettered, by thought or consequence …

For the first time in our collective journey as beings, we can see the end of our species, not by supernatual fiat, but by our own hands, by our own efforts, through greed, through indifference, and through denial of truth.

Shall we have the courage to let go our myths, our conceits, our ‘indulgences’ and our overweening pride?

Or, shall we be small, timid and obsequiously quiet?

Now is the time for powerful imagination, not frightened conformity.

Now is the time to entertain out better angels, not for advocating devils.

Heretofore we have chosen to recognize but a small swath of our genius, when, truth to tell, genius resides within all of us and capacity as well.

What refuge may be found in anger and petulant withdrawal, wrapped in fear and suspician?

What future lies in the ‘beliefs’ that only a few should always decide, that only some self-appointed elite are best able to see the truth and
that ‘power’ is something to be hoarded and kept in the hands of the few?

We need a broader, more honest view of the human experience than the models which today are at ‘play’. Whence (where and from whom) shall they come?

DWB

Career wise, to not take a case on grounds of principle while working Independently is not breach of any code I know of. So I respectfully disagree with Greenwald’s inference that good lawyers are still worthy of higher office after taking bad cases -meaning the representing EXXON kind of bad- just for profit.

We only have Chief Justice Roberts to use as an example of the danger lurking behind a good attorneys’ mind. The business community under his tutelage has a score of a 100-0.

Obama too, has choices. And sadly, this good man has revealed through a series of very bad choices -primarily the support of Clinton, Lieberman and Emanuel, that a President Obama intends to represent us along the same good faith lines as that promised by Chief Justice John Roberts.

I said I hoped he would do well at DOJ, which I did hope.

He did not do well, but I never personally endorsed the guy. I had a grand total of one case infront of him, and did not feel like I knew him well enough to judge the content of his soul, which is why I confined myself to talking about his general reputation in the NY legal community.

I think it is the result, the insider with money gets soemthing better than justice while regular folk don’t. The same staink that attaches to the Marc Rich pardon, that you can buy your way out of criminal prosecution.

There should not be a different standard for the rich and powerful. justice is supposed to be blind to weatlh and station.