[E]ric Holder has announced that he is leaving his post of Attorney General, which he has sullied and degraded for six years.

A corporate lawyer with the Wall Street law firm Covington & Burling, Holder will be remembered for his timid defense of civil rights, his overseeing. and even encouragement of the massive militarization of the nation’s police forces, his anti-First Amendment efforts to pursue not just whistleblowers but the journalists who use them, threatening both with jail and in fact jailing a number of them (particularly in the case of whistleblower extraordinaire Edward Snowden, and Wikileaks journalist Julian Assange, both of whom reportedly face US treason charges), and his weak enforcement of environmental protection laws.

But Holder, who came into his position as the nation’s top law enforcement officer in early 2009 at the start of the Obama administration and at the height of the financial crisis, will be best remembered for his overt announcement that there would be no attempt to prosecute the criminals at the top of the nation’s biggest so-called “too-big-to-fail” banks, whose brazen crimes of theft, deceit, fraud and perjury during the Bush/Cheney years and beyond sank not just the US but the global economy into a crisis which is still with us.

Holder not only did not make any effort to put Wall Street’s banking titans behind bars for their epic crimes; he did not even make them step down from their exalted and absurdly highly compensated executive positions when his office reached negotiated settlements with the banks in civil cases involving those crimes — civil cases that in almost all cases allowed the banks to settle without even having to admit their guilt. (His ludicrous excuse: punishing these criminal executive might jeopardize the banks’ stocks and hurt “innocent” shareholders!) Nor was this legal benevolence limited to purely financial crimes. Banks like Citicorp and HSBC, which were found to have knowingly laundered millions — even billions — of dollars in drug money for drug cartels, were also allowed by Holder to escape with petty fines, and no prosecution of a single bank executive.

It is being suggested that Holder may opt to go back to his old post as a partner at Covington & Burling, which would be the final, though hardly surprising, insult to the American people, providing a particularly galling example of Washington’s revolving door between government regulators and enforcers and the industries that they were supposed to be regulating or keeping honest.

Eric Holder is leaving his post of Attorney General, which he has sullied and degraded for six years.

God, how far we have fallen from the days when Ramsey Clark was attorney general, and left to become a leading critic of Washington’s imperial government at home and abroad!

At this point the Obama Administration is little more than a place holder until the next presidential election in 2016. President Obama, who campaigned as a fire-breathing liberal who would restore constitutional government, end the Bush/Cheney wars, re-open the government so that transparency instead of secrecy would be the default position, and take decisive action against climate change, has abandoned [betrayed] all those false promises.

The illegal and unconstitutional wars continue in Iraq and Afghanistan, and are now being expanded into Africa and Syria and, at least by proxy, but most dangerously, to Ukraine. Civil liberties are under attack at least as severely as they were back in the McCarthy period, with whistleblowers being jailed, with the president asserting the unfettered right to order the killing without trial of American citizens, and with a spying system in place run by the National Security Agency that is monitoring and storing, by its own admission, virtually all electronic communications of the American people. The government is also as closed and secret in its operation as it has been since 1974, when it was broadened following the Watergate and Cointelpro scandals, and is certainly less transparent and open than it was even under Bush/Cheney. The Obama administration has also done little to nothing about tackling carbon emissions despite the president’s lies to the contrary in his address to the UN.

In all of this extraordinary list of treachery and cowardice, Holder has played his sycophantic role as a defender of corporate America, of white privilege, and of Washington power. He has been both the John Ashcroft and the Alberto Gonzalez of the Obama administration. (Actually, that comparison is unfair to John Ashcroft, who at least was a man of conviction — repellent as some of those convictions may have been. In Holder’s case, we have a man not of principle, but who is simply a corporate lawyer, ready to do his clients’ bidding, however sordid and corrupt.)

Given the depths of unpopularity to which President Obama has sunk after six years of selling out his own electoral base and catering to the interests of the rich and powerful, the military establishment and neo-con right-wing of the Washington policy elite, it is safe to say that Holder’s replacement, still unknown, will be no better, though given Holder’s tenure it’s also hard to imagine his successor being much worse either.

So good riddance to Holder. But it will be worth while, and indeed important, to watch carefully this departing Obama official’s behavior back in the private sector, from under which rock he emerged to be attorney general six years ago.

Dave Lindorff is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

[W]hen a journalist in a news article refers to a woman as “strident,” you know what you’re reading is a hit piece, not a dispassionate report, and that’s what the New York Times offered up to readers in today’s piece about a court appearance yesterday by Occupy Wall Street activist Cecily McMillan.

The Times reporter, Monique O. Madan, as a professional journalist, surely knows that the meaning of “strident” is, as the Oxford English Dictionary says, “loud, harsh and grating” and that it implies the slanted presentation of a point of view in an “unpleasantly forceful way.” If she somehow didn’t know this, her editors certainly do, and yet they were okay with her disparaging and loaded word choice.

Supposedly Madan was writing a news report on McMillan’s appearance in a Manhattan criminal court on a misdemeanor charge of “obstructing governmental administration.” This related to an incident in 2013 in which she allegedly advised two people being ordered to show their identification to a Transit Police officer in the Union Square subway station that they did not have to comply.

Madan referred to McMillan as a “cause célèbre” because of her earlier arrest at a March 2012 rally in lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park commemorating the months-long Occupy Wall Street action that had begun six months earlier in September, 2011. McMillan, in that earlier arrest, had been charged with second degree felony assault of a police officer and, following a trial earlier this year, was convicted and sentenced to three months in jail at Rikers Island plus five year’s probation.

Not mentioned by the reporter was the reality that McMillan’s fame and notoriety is deserved (she received thousands of letters of support from around the world, and even a supportive jailhouse visit by two recently freed members of the celebrated Russian protest rock group Pussy Riot). Not only was McMillan grotesquely overcharged by Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, Jr. She was also treated by both prosecutor and judge throughout the trial as though she were a dangerous menace, not even being granted bail after the verdict was rendered and she was awaiting her sentence hearing (a courtesy routinely granted to first offenders and to the powerful and well-to-do). The reporter might also have noted that, once convicted, McMillan’s incredibly short felony sentence (the charge carried a maximum term of seven years!) and her subsequent release from jail after serving just under two months’ time at Rikers, probably rank among the shortest punishments for someone convicted of “felony assault” of a cop in the history of US jurisprudence.

Unless one believes that Judge Ronald Zwiebel caved under the pressure of all those letters of support and the daily rallies outside the courthouse (I doubt it), the conclusion has to be that the judge’s sentencing decision reflected an admission that McMillan in fact never posed any threat to either society or to the police. The point of her prosecution then was not about protecting the police, but rather about sending a message to all New Yorkers about the high personal cost of political protest — and that message was sent by simply saddling her with a permanent felony record. Regarding the incident in question, it was evident from video images and from testimony at the trial that she had been grappled and groped from behind by the officer, who grabbed her right breast so hard that it caused clearly visible bruising. It was also clear that the cop’s action caused McMillan to involuntarily throw back her arms, elbowing the officer in an eye (that is to say, she didn’t even know who had grabbed her when she involuntarily struck out in self-defense). Even the jurors who convicted her expressed shock that she was jailed for this “offense,” with nine of the twelve, once they learned that she would be facing jail time as a result of their decision, writing the judge to ask that she not be jailed.

The Times article leaves readers thinking that McMillan is some kind of a cop-hating whacko, with reporter Madan relying entirely on the comments of the arresting officer in the complaint filed in the latest misdemeanor case.

At no point in her article does Madan bother to give McMillan’s side of the case. She evidently didn’t even ask McMillan or her attorney for their position on the charge, or on the allegations made by the officer in the complaint (of if she did, she didn’t include their answers). There’s no sign of any “no comment” reported in what is about as one-sided a piece of journalism as one could write.

I’ve taught journalism classes, and this is an article that would have received at best a D from me.

Given that McMillan, now out of Rikers confinement — at least pending the outcome of this latest case — has been using her high visibility and her recent experience to condemn the violence and abuse that she observed and personally experienced while locked up, it’s ironic that the Times would trash her on its pages in this manner on the very day that it was also running an editorial condemning an epidemic of prison guard violence in the city’s jails.

In that editorial, headlined “Violence in New York City Jails,” the paper describes a culture of violence against prisoners by jail guards, who particularly abuse the mentally ill, a group that constitutes nearly half of the city’s incarcerated inmate population. Citing the investigative work of its own reporters, the paper says jail authorities have covered up the problem for years, that guards often remove inmates to remote locations without video monitors in order to conduct their beatings, and concludes:

“…the problem of brutality may be too deeply entrenched for the city itself to cure. If rapid improvements cannot be made, the Justice Department, which is already investigating the treatment of juveniles at Rikers, should step in to remedy what is clearly a barbaric situation.”

This is exactly what McMillan, who rejected on principle a plea bargain offer from the DA at her first trial which would have kept her out of jail in return for accepting a felony conviction, has been saying she saw going on during her two months’ incarceration on Rikers Island. Surely her courage in speaking out about conditions there, even as she faces the possibility of being sent back to Rikers at her coming trial, clearly deserved a paragraph or two in Madan’s and the Times’ hatchet job.

Dave Lindorff is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, an online newspaper collective, and is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).