PROTESTERS BLAST COUNTY, SCHOOLS ON CUTS

Outside the Guardian Building in downtown Detroit on Thursday, a charged-up crowd of at least 150 pickets had no shortage of targets for its ire: Detroit Mayor Dave Bing,  Wayne County Executive Robert Ficano and Detroit Public Schools Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb.

 “Hey hey, ho ho, _____ [fill in one of the above] has got to go.”

County workers, DPS employees and other demonstrators circled for at least an hour on the sidewalk in front of the county’s new headquarters at the art deco-style building. Of particular issue, the forced furlough days for county workers, Bobb’s reduction of teachers and other school district employees and Bing’s support of both.

“No layoffs, no cuts, Detroit won’t move to the back of the bus.”

Wayne County Commissioner Keith Williams stopped by but declined to take the microphone.

“The commissioner is next,” the crowd chanted its warning to him.

Chuck Lidenmuth, a 16-year county maintenance worker — he salts I-275 from Monroe County to I-94 during snowfalls — says more demonstrations are planned.

“How much more can they cut?” he asks.
 

Remembering Howard Zinn

The word “hero” gets tossed around a lot, but we’ve just lost someone who was the real deal. Historian, author, playwright, teacher and social crusader Howard Zinn is dead at the age of 87.

Best known for his groundbreaking book A People’s History of the United States, Zinn was both an academic and activist. Having served as a bombardier in World War II, he was an early and important opponent of the war in Vietnam.

Talking to The Boston Globe about the death of his friend and fellow left-wing intellectual, Noam Chomsky said, “He opened up approaches to history that were novel and highly significant. Both by his actions and his writings, for 50 years he played a powerful role in helping and in many ways inspiring the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement.”

Back in 2006, I did an interview with Zinn before he came to town to accept an award from the Cranbrook Peace Foundation, placing him in the company of such notable lefties as John Kenneth Galbraith, South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu and folk singer Pete Seeger.

Two the things I remember most about that interview — and the subsequent speech Zinn gave upon receiving the award — were the intellectual acuity and vigor he displayed well into his 80s, and his persistent good humor. Looking back at our interview again this morning, I see reference to him laughing a few times during a fairly short conversation.

Another item of interest in that interview is his response to a question about the U.S. economy, asked two years before the meltdown, when the stock market was still booming.

“What we saw in the 1920s was a constantly widening gap between the rich and the poor, and a kind of false prosperity with huge fortunes being made on one hand and the buying power of the population not keeping up with that, and the collapse of the economy,” he said. “I think that, although it’s not exactly the same situation, the American economy is heading for a fall right now. One difference is that we were a creditor nation in the 1920s and we’re a debtor nation now. That adds to the economic danger we face. We owe huge sums of money to the Chinese and other people. I think we’re on an economic bubble. You hear people gloating about the Dow Jones average as people gloated about the stock market in 1929 until it exploded.”

Rooted in history, he also proved to be a prophet.

It is a voice that will be surely and sorely missed.

POT EXPO IS STILL A GO, BUT CONTEST ON HOLD

The judges for this weekend’s canceled medicinal marijuana contest at the Caregivers Cup will wait until October to decide which Michigan grower produces the best “medicine” for their condition, says Anthony Freed, executive director of the Michigan Marijuana Chamber of Commerce.

A second Caregivers Cup is planned for then — the time of year when the harvest is better — and organizers will better formulate the contest format to avoid legal questions, Freed says.

“I don’t consider having to postpone the main event a failure. I’m doing it so I can make sure everyone can still come and enjoy this great event,” he says.

The judges — people with valid state cards for medicinal marijuana use — are being offered refunds of their $250 judges’ fees, but Freed says those that have been contacted have opted to wait until the October event.

Up to 8,000 people are expected at the three-day event in Ypsilanti this weekend that features seminars and exhibits about legally growing, dispersing and using medicinal marijuana. Tickets are $15 for a day pass, and exhibitors paid $1,000 for their space. Organizers expect to make tens of thousands of dollars and will, in part, use proceeds to fund a hospice center for cancer patients, as well as other events this year. Metro Times is a media sponsor of the event.

Freed announced earlier this week that the marijuana contest would be canceled after Deputy Chief Assistant Washtenaw County Prosecutor Steve Hiller publicly questioned its legality. Freed asserts that his attorneys and staff believe the contest is legal, but he doesn’t want to push it with Hiller, though the two men have not spoken.

“It just seems like he doesn’t have a full understanding of the law. I believe he is totally wrong,” Freed says.

One of the issues, Freed says, has to do with marijuana that a grower doesn’t sell to his five allowed customers.

“What’s he supposed to do when there’s leftover medicine, throw it away? When there’s people with cancer who can’t afford it? I don’t believe that’s the intent of the law. If it is, there’s some dramatic changes that need to be made to it,” Freed says.

JUDGE MAY GET TOUGH OVER MISSING POLICE FILES

Defense attorneys are asking for sanctions and a Wayne County Circuit Court judge says he may get tough with the Detroit Police Department over a set of missing files in a murder case.

Calling it an act of “last resort,” Wayne County Circuit Judge Tim Kenny told defense attorneys Wednesday that if Detroit police don’t produce missing files, he’ll step in.

“If there is a problem with you being ignored by the Detroit Police Department,” he said during a motion hearing, “then I would intervene.”

Kenny did not make clear what he would do were he to “intervene” except to ask that police show up at a hearing later this year if the files are not found. Police representatives were not in court to give their side.

But attorneys and law students from the University of Michigan Innocence Clinic have asked that if they do not receive information from the files, that a jury be instructed to assume the missing evidence proves their client did not commit the crime.

“The court has discretion to grant a remedy for the prosecution’s failure to comply. The court has the discretion to order the exclusion of testimony or evidence relating to that discovery request or order,” they wrote in a motion asking for sanctions.

The attorneys and students from the law school clinic want to review Detroit investigators’ files from the two murder cases because they believe they could contain information that could help clear their client, Dwayne Provience.

Assistant Wayne County Prosecutor Bob Stevens says he hasn’t seen the files either, despite asking that they be located in the department’s storage facility in the Upper Peninsula.

“That’s the police department’s problem, not mine,” he said.

Provience  was convicted in 2001 of shooting Rene Hunter on Detroit’s northwest side and served nearly nine years before Kenny last year granted him a new trial, ruling that information that should have been turned over to his then-defense attorney was not.

Stevens maintains Provience will be retried and says he is preparing his case against him.

But Provience’s attorneys and law students working with them have found records that were not turned over to Provience’s defense before his 2001 trial that they say help clear him.

Among them is a statement from another Detroit man that two other men shot and killed Hunter, and motor vehicle records that show one of those men owned a vehicle that matched the description that witnesses to the shooting gave police including three digits of its license plate.

“Every time we shake a file, something exculpatory falls out,” said Bridget McCormack, co-director of the Innocence Clinic.

Because Provience’s defense attorney at the time did not have the information — as required by court rules — he could not question another witness about discrepancies between his testimony and the other people who saw the shooting.

That witness, Larry Wiley, an admitted crack-user, was the prosecution’s main witness against Provience, but Wiley has since said police forced him to testify.

Kenny also ruled Wednesday that transcripts of Wiley’s testimony could not be introduced at Provience’s new trial in lieu of his actual testimony in court.

That will give Provience’s attorneys the opportunity to question him about his conflicting testimony.

Kenny set a hearing for March 5 where attorneys will advise him if police have found and shared the files.

Provience, meanwhile, is free on bond and on a tether. He must be at his mother’s house when he is not at one of his two jobs.

NEW BOOK CALLS BONIOR ‘CLUELESS’ IN 08 CAMPAIGN

Game Change, a behind-the-scenes look at the 2008 presidential campaign, has already made the news several times over in recent days:
• For Sen. Harry Reid’s comments about then-presidential hopeful Barack Obama as electable because he’s “light-skinned” with “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one” — prompting a Reid apology this week.
• For its portrayal of John and Elizabeth Edwards that’s far at odds with his public image at the time (some advisers saw in him “a burgeoning megalomania”) and hers now (insiders supposedly saw her as an "abusive, intrusive, paranoid, condescending, crazywoman"). As to the John Edwards-Rielle Hunter affair, the book also claims the “dysfunctional” power couple even fought about the issue in front of staffers.
• For recounting a meeting between Bill Clinton and the late Sen. Ted Kennedy in which Clinton allegedly said of Obama: "A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee."
• For its contention that Sen. Hillary Clinton’s staff set up a secret “war room within a war room” to deal with potential allegations that Bill was philandering, and that the group had concluded he was in "a sustained romantic relationship" with someone other than Hillary.
Our search of the book online hasn’t found enormous news involving Michigan politicos, but a few tidbits we’ll pass along.
Former U.S. Rep. David Bonior is depicted as coming into the Edwards camp just at the point where, following her cancer flare-up, Elizabeth Edwards was shifting the power arrangement with John in the campaign: she was becoming more powerful, he, more deferential.

Former Congressman David Bonior, the campaign’s new manager, had no experience running a presidential operation and struck much of the staff as an extremely nice but very clueless guy. Elizabeth seemed to love having Bonior nominally in charge, because it meant that, in effect, she was in charge. On everything from hiring to advertising, her influence was singular.

Meanwhile, Gov. Jennifer Granholm — who the book somehow fails to note is a former thespian — is given high marks for her role as a stand-in for Sarah Palin to prep Joe Biden for their impending vice-presidential debate. Granholm devoured YouTube videos of Palin’s past Alaska debates.
“The result was perfect Palin: charming, folksy, disciplined — and mean,” write the authors. And she was particularly good at goading Biden so that “he turned scornful and chauvinistic.” (If only she could study up on the role of decisive leader for Michigan.)
We’ll also note that the book by journalists John Heilemann (New York magazine) and Mark Halperin (Time) has been described as dishy and gossipy as well as an important look at the machinations of the 2008 campaign. Although the book is said to be the result of hundreds of interviews, in our scanning of excerpts, we’re seeing, as others have noted, a paucity of named sources and specific attribution.

John Bennett ready to make waves (air waves, that is)

Detroit Police Officer John Bennett has been making waves ever since he took to the Internet in a big way to call attention to the problems he saw with former Chief Jerry Oliver. That exercise in free speech cost Bennett his job — at least until the courts ordered that he be reinstated. Along the way, Bennett changed the name of his blog to DetroitUncovered (from Firejerryo), became an outspoken critic of the Kwame Kilpatrick administration and made an unsuccessful run for City Council last year.

Still on the police force, and still using his blog to keep close tabs on Detroit’s newest police chief (Warren Evans) and other issues of import, Bennett will be taking to the airwaves this Saturday to launch a weekly one-hour program on radio station WCHB-1200 AM.

For those of you unfamiliar with his website, it’s a place where a lot of insider scuttlebutt gets slung around, and the feet of public officials regularly get put to the fire. One thing for sure, Bennett isn’t shy about expressing his opinions. It’s an attitude he intends to carry over onto his radio program, which will air from 1:30 to 2:30 p.m.

“My slogan is, ‘Give it to ’em straight with no chaser,’” Bennett says. “I haven’t pulled any punches in the past, and I don’t intend to start now.”

The format of the show will allow for listener calls, and Bennett, who will be working alongside radio vet Harold Sullivan, says he’s looking forward to a freewheeling exchange of views.

Sounds like fun.

BARROW SEEKS INVESTIGATION INTO HANDLING OF ELECTION

Tom Barrow, who lost to Dave Bing in the Nov. 3 Detroit mayoral election, has sent letters to a variety of public officials — ranging from Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox and Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy to the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice — seeking a criminal investigation into the way the contest was handled.

In his letter, Barrow alleges that there is probable cause to believe that “vote tampering, ballot box stuffing and electronic vote manipulation” occurred.

Told of Barrow’s complaint, Bing’s office said the mayor is focusing on the future, not on an election his administration deems to have been sufficiently scrutinized already.

“At a time when this administration is focused on moving forward, it is unfortunate that Mr. Barrow continues to challenge a vote that has been counted, recounted and certified twice,” Karen Dumas, Bing’s director of communications, wrote in an e-mail Monday. “This is not the time for pursuing political points for personal reinforcement. It's a New Year, and time to move on.”

Because Monday is a furlough day for city workers, no one from the office of Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey or the city’s Department of Elections was available.

In a phone interview, Barrow said that the issue “is bigger than me. This is about the integrity of the election process.”

The complaint, among other things, raises questions about absentee ballot boxes that had numbered security seals that didn’t match numbers recorded in poll books; Barrow alleges that the discrepancy indicates the boxes were tampered with.

Late last month the Wayne County Board of Canvassers ruled that, because of the problems identified by Barrow, no absentee ballots could be included in a recount. Bing, however, still won by a decisive margin.

How much credence should be paid to the allegations Barrow is now making?

That’s a question we’re still trying to answer. Look for a more in-depth story in Metro Times come Wednesday.

Magazine’s X-mas gift for JoAnn Watson

The Nation magazine delivered a present on Christmas Eve to Detroit City Council member JoAnn Watson: It named her one of its 14 MVPs of 2009 among “progressives, liberals and the American left.” Other valued players included Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), the California Nurses Association, LGBT activist Cleve Jones and Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement.

The Nation said the intention “is not to identify perfect players so much as to make note of activists and activist groups that may not get enough recognition but that are having a demonstrable effect — in Washington and around the country.”

And Watson was cited as:

a neighborhood activist who has battled home foreclosures and environmental racism, a determined defender of her hometown who has blocked privatization of public services, and an ardent internationalist allied with the Institute for Policy Studies’s Cities for Peace and Cities for Progress initiatives. Watson has led fights for greater transparency and accountability in government, has gone after predatory lenders and has promoted a multifaceted Detroit Marshall Plan to revitalize her economically battered city.

And the piece concludes:

Re-elected to a second full term in November, Watson promises to bang on doors in Washington and say, “You’ve bailed out the auto industry. You’ve bailed out Wall Street. How about helping out Detroit in its time of need?”

While The Nation praises her for her ability at “getting local, state and national officials focused on fundamental issues,” those closer to her have more than occasionally seen her contentious side. We’re as convinced as anyone that a federal-level urban policy is needed in the long-term to address the dire straits of cities like Detroit — and none more so than Detroit. But what’s her plan for dealing with our problems absent an immediate infusion of cash? Curiously, however, The Nation made no mention of her tireless efforts to shut down Detroit’s waste-to-energy incinerator, which have been particularly notable.

Still The Nation highlights the best that Watson brings to the city’s political landscape.

Meanwhile, there was, perhaps one other MVP of particular interest to Detroit. Rebecca Solnit was cited for A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. Solnit’s idea of disaster spans the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 to Hurricane Katrina, and her position is that they bring out not only the “helpless and bestial” in victims, but also their best communal instincts.

Those who struggle with the slower-moving calamities facing the Motor City might also take inspiration in these.

The full list of MVPs can be seen at thenation.com.

Confession confusion: More from the Provience case

The confession of Eric Woods was good enough for Wayne County prosecutors when they successfully tried him for murder in 2003, but now they want his statement withheld from another man’s retrial in a different killing.

Why? Because it would help the defense of Dwayne Provience, a man whose case Metro Times has been following this year.

Woods admitted to killing a man named Courtney Irving and also told Detroit Police that someone other than Provience had killed Rene Hunter nearly a decade ago, shooting him to death at a northwest Detroit intersection. (See “A Tale of Two Homicides,” Oct, 28, 2009)

Then-Assistant Wayne County Prosecutor Eric Restuccia used Woods’ confession at his trial to explain that the two killings were related. In the confession Woods named another man — not Provience — as Hunter’s shooter.

Woods was found guilty and is currently serving a life sentence. Restuccia is currently Michigan’s solicitor general.

Earlier this year, Provience’s new attorneys from the University of Michigan Law School’s Innocence Clinic learned of Woods, his confession and the prosecutors’ use of it at trial. Provience’s attorneys want to use Woods’s identification of another shooter to help clear Provience who has been free on bond since last month when Wayne County Circuit Judge Timothy Kenny overturned his 2001 conviction in part because evidence was withheld from defense attorneys before trial.

Kenny held a hearing Tuesday to decide the question of the confession’s admittance and other pre-trial issues. Assistant Prosecutor Robert Stevens argued that the confession should not be allowed in a Provience re-trial, which he says he intends to pursue.

“We’re going into a grey area of vouching for the truth of the statement Mr. Woods made,” Stevens said. “[Restuccia was] not vouching for its truth but he’s saying it’s admissible evidence the jury could consider.”

Kenny disagreed. “No prosecutor worth his salt in a murder case is going to get up and say, ‘The defendant confessed. You can disregard that,’” Kenny said.

(After the hearing, Stevens declined to explain to Metro Times how the prosecutor’s office could argue two different theories of the same murder.)

Kenny ruled that Provience’s attorneys could not use Restuccia’s opening and closing statements at Provience’s new trial, scheduled for April, but he did agree that prosecutors could be prevented from contesting the truth of Woods’ confession at Provience’s trial.

Meanwhile, the sole prosecution witness to testify at Provience’s first trial says he won’t testify against him again.

“I’ll take the Fifth,” says Larry Wiley who appeared in court yesterday but was not asked to testify.

Wiley, an admitted drug user, was in custody suspected of burglary when he told Detroit police he saw Provience kill Hunter. His testimony contradicted a half-dozen other eyewitnesses, but he testified at Provience’s trial. Since then, he has told attorneys he was not at the scene. Yesterday he said police threatened him if he didn’t testify against Provience.

If Wiley won’t testify at Provience’s new trial and is deemed an “unavailable witness,” his trial testimony, under normal circumstances, could be read from a transcript. But that assumes Provience’s trial attorney was able to effectively cross-examine him at trial.

David Moran, one of Provience’s attorneys and co-director of the Innocence Clinic, says that didn’t happen because evidence was withheld and not available to the defense.

“It’s no substitute to read the transcript because we don’t get to ask Larry about it,” Moran says. “The remedy is to exclude the trial testimony.”

Kenny asked both Stevens and Provience’s team to file written briefs about the issue and set a Jan. 27 date for a hearing.

Guilty pleas from Swift’s captors

Two Detroit men charged with kidnapping Walter Swift and stealing
his furniture and other items pleaded guilty today in Wayne County
Circuit Court.

Detroit residents Leonard Duplessis, 23, and Cortez McAdoo, 22, had
been scheduled for trial in the May incident, but in a deal with Wayne
County prosecutors pleaded guilty to extortion and armed robbery.
Duplessis also pleaded to a felony firearms charge. Kidnapping charges
were dismissed for both men. Duplessis was remanded to custody, and
McAdoo was to be freed on an electronic tether.

Both men are scheduled for sentencing Jan. 6; Duplessis faces 5-20
years in prison and McAdoo faces 4-20 years.

Their victim, Swift, was released from prison in May 2008 after
evidence that wasn’t introduced at trial exonerated him of a rape. He
had served 26 years in prison. Swift testified at the men’s
preliminary examinations that they had kidnapped him because he owed
Duplessis money for drugs. Swift was profiled in a recent Metro Times
cover story about the difficulties exonerated prisoners face once they
are released (see “Swift's Justice,” Nov. 18).

UPDATE: Danger, Barack Obama, danger in Afghanistan

(See update below.)

With Obama nearing a fateful announcement on plans to “finish the job” in Afghanistan, our recent, cautionary interview with historian Juan Cole remains atop the most-viewed list of MT stories. With good reason.

Since Curt Guyette and I conducted that interview, a number of articles have struck me as important complementary reading for that piece.

For instance, Cole made a point of the small number of al-Qaeda that the U.S. is chasing in that part of the world:

And how many al-Qaeda operatives do you think are in the tribal areas of Pakistan? Five hundred? A thousand? What I can't understand is the argument that we need 100,000 troops in neighboring Afghanistan because there is a small number of Arab radicals hiding out in the hills of Waziristan. What can they do from there exactly? I can't imagine that they have high-speed Internet. They're just hiding out. Obviously, the way to deal with them is to have the Pakistani government deal with them.

Shortly after we published that piece, The Washington Post reported estimates that the number of al-Qaeda members in Pakistan is 300, plus about 100 in Afghanistan.
Which leads to the analogy, as far as al-Qaeda in Afghanistan goes, of occupying a country twice the size of Italy to get a Mafia clan. That’s not to downplay the danger or lethality of al-Qaeda but to underscore Cole’s contention that a massive troop “footprint” can be translated as occupation, stoking the kind of opposition that provides greater shelter for al-Qaeda.

Meanwhile, over at Foreign Policy, a counterintutive analysis suggests that we shouldn’t be too anxious to entirely wipe out al-Qaeda, given the Hyrda-headed nature of the network:

Like it or not, keeping a battered al Qaeda intact (if weak) is the world's best hope of funneling Islamist fanatics into one social network -- where they stand the best chance of being spotted, tracked, and contained. The alternative, destroying the terrorist group, would risk fragmenting al Qaeda into thousands of cells, and these will be much harder to follow and impossible to eradicate. It's the counterterrorist's dilemma, and the only real choice is the least unsavory: Al Qaeda must live.

Among other pieces well worth their reading time at FP is this one (along the lines of some of Cole’s interview points) on ways in which the Afghan campaign exacerbates rather than reduces the threat of terrorism.

There’s also bin Laden expert Peter Bergen’s overview (post-Fort Hood) of the threat of “clean skins”: al-Qaeda operatives, followers and like-minded extremists without criminal records or past connections to terror.

Update: Juan Cole’s Salon post-mortem on Obama's Afghanistan speech Tuesday night follows up on the issues that he raised beforehand in our interview, particularly his view of why the surge worked in Iraq (not for the reasons the last administration trumpeted or the current one apparently also embraces) and why the strategy is unlikely to transfer to Afghanistan. For one thing, Cole points out that in the inter-ethnic civil war in Iraq, the United States backed the majority Shiites. In Afghanistan, the Obama administration (like the Bush administration before) is betting on the minority Tajiks. From the view of the Pashtuns, also a minority, but a plurality:

The only thing worse than Tajik dominance would be what the Tajiks brought along with them — Western Christian soldiers outfitted like astronauts. Ironically, the Tajik dominance of the old 1980s communist government of Afghanistan, and their alliance with Russian troops, were among the reasons that impelled the Pashtuns to mount a Muslim insurgency in the first place.

That's an insurgency, by the way, that the U.S. armed in a chain of events that entwines with the birth of al-Qaeda and leads to our current situation by way of 9/11.

Cole explores ideas similar to those in the Salon piece on his own Informed Comment blog, with "Top Ten things that Could Derail Obama's Afghanistan Plan."

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