NPS |Following the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Spanish American War in December of 1898, the United States took control of the former Spanish colonies of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.
Companies from the segregated Black infantry regiments reported to the Presidio of San Francisco on their way to the Philippines in early 1899. In February of that year Filipino nationalists (Insurectos)
led by Emilio Aguinaldo resisted the idea of American domination and
began attacking U.S. troops, including the 24th and 25th Infantry
regiments.
The 9th and 10th Cavalry were sent to the Philippines as
reinforcements, bringing all four Black regiments plus African American
national guardsmen into the war against the Insurectos.
Within the Black community in the United States there was
considerable opposition to intervention in the Philippines. Many Black
newspaper articles and leaders supported the idea of Filipino
independence and felt that it was wrong for the United States to
subjugate non-whites in the development of what was perceived to be the
beginnings of a colonial empire. Bishop Henry M. Turner characterized
the venture in the Philippines as "an unholy war of conquest." (21)
But many African Americans felt a good military showing by Black
troops in the Philippines would reflect favorably and enhance their
cause in the United States.
isreview | The following month, Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux published another story for The Intercept,
which revealed that under the Obama administration the number of people
on the National Counterterrorism Center’s no-fly list had increased
tenfold to 47,000. Leaked classified documents showed that the NCC
maintains a database of terrorism suspects worldwide—the Terrorist
Identities Datamart Environment—which contained a million names by 2013,
double the number four years earlier, and increasingly includes
biometric data. This database includes 20,800 persons within the United
States who are disproportionately concentrated in Dearborn, Michigan,
with its significant Arab American population.2
By any objective standard, these were major news stories that ought
to have attracted as much attention as the earlier revelations. Yet the
stories barely registered in the corporate media landscape. The “tech
community,” which had earlier expressed outrage at the NSA’s mass
digital surveillance, seemed to be indifferent when details emerged of
the targeted surveillance of Muslims. The explanation for this reaction
is not hard to find. While many object to the US government collecting
private data on “ordinary” people, Muslims tend to be seen as reasonable
targets of suspicion. A July 2014 poll for the Arab American Institute
found that 42 percent of Americans think it is justifiable for law
enforcement agencies to profile Arab Americans or American Muslims.3
In what follows, we argue that the debate on national security
surveillance that has emerged in the United States since the summer of
2013 is woefully inadequate, due to its failure to place questions of
race and empire at the center of its analysis. It is racist ideas that
form the basis for the ways national security surveillance is organized
and deployed, racist fears that are whipped up to legitimize this
surveillance to the American public, and the disproportionately targeted
racialized groups that have been most effective in making sense of it
and organizing opposition. This is as true today as it has been
historically: race and state surveillance are intertwined in the history
of US capitalism. Likewise, we argue that the history of national
security surveillance in the United States is inseparable from the
history of US colonialism and empire.
The argument is divided into two parts. The first identifies a number
of moments in the history of national security surveillance in North
America, tracing its imbrication with race, empire, and capital, from
the settler-colonial period through to the neoliberal era. Our focus
here is on how race as a sociopolitical category is produced and
reproduced historically in the United States through systems of
surveillance. We show how throughout the history of the United States
the systematic collection of information has been interwoven with
mechanisms of racial oppression. From Anglo settler-colonialism, the
establishment of the plantation system, the post–Civil War
reconstruction era, the US conquest of the Philippines, and the
emergence of the national security state in the post-World War II era,
to neoliberalism in the post-Civil Rights era, racialized surveillance
has enabled the consolidation of capital and empire.
It is, however, important to note that the production of the racial
“other” at these various moments is conjunctural and heterogenous. That
is, the racialization of Native Americans, for instance, during the
settler-colonial period took different forms from the racialization of
African Americans. Further, the dominant construction of Blackness under
slavery is different from the construction of Blackness in the
neoliberal era; these ideological shifts are the product of specific
historic conditions. In short, empire and capital, at various moments,
determine who will be targeted by state surveillance, in what ways, and
for how long.
thehill | The McDonald killing also reflects a larger injustice that afflicts
our society. This injustice manifests itself in a system of behaviors,
norms, laws and technologies ostensibly put in place to maintain public
order but is most often directed against people Victorian-era
authorities called the “dangerous classes” — minorities and the poor,
who are treated as a persistent threat to the established social order.
In
the U.S., this system of structural surveillance emerges from a history
of racism and white supremacy that links the use of deadly force by
police against young black men and women to our systems of criminal
justice, social programs and public health. Its reach, as well as its
near invisibility to those privileged enough to escape its gaze, makes
it especially difficult to address in its entirety, and we are often
left to deal with its effects in piecemeal, incident by sickening
incident.
This complex system of overlapping surveillance regimes did
not emerge overnight but through reactions to moments of crisis,
eventually becoming permanent aspects of government and society over
time. In 18th century New York, for example, the fear of armed
insurrection by enslaved people led to a series of ordinances strictly
regulating the movement of blacks and Indians within the city. One such
class of statutes required all unattended slaves to carry lighted
lanterns after dark so that they could be easily identified and
monitored by white authorities. Any person of color found in violation
of these lantern laws was sentenced to a public flogging of up to 40
lashes, the actual number left to the discretion of the slaveholder.
Fast-forward
to the late 20th century, and we continue to see the instantiation of
surveillance mechanisms in response to perceived public crises. These
laws and practices were enacted seemingly to maintain public order
generally, but disproportionately targeted minorities and the poor.
I’d missed the entire reason privacy isn’t just a concern for those
who logged into Ashley Madison or researched something more nefarious
than the difference between starches. I missed that it should matter to
me because there are people for whom it has to matter, by virtue of
their socioeconomic or racial status. And while I have the luxury, by
virtue of my own socioeconomic status and race, of ignoring reality and
letting this not be my problem, that’s not how wrongs are righted.
I finally saw surveillance not as something mildly offensive to my
own sense of civil liberties, but as a tool of institutional racism.
It suddenly became clear to me — and I’m so embarrassed it didn’t prior
— that the people most stripped of their privacy rights in this
surveillance age are the people who are already vulnerable.
But the powerful surveilling the powerless, and I’m specifically
talking about race here, is nothing new. It existed even in the earliest
days of slavery. Surveillance and power have long been closely linked
to institutional racism, from slave owners branding their slaves so they
couldn’t move freely and privately, to plantation owners building homes
tall enough to surveil the entire plantation. Slavery may have been
abolished, but now we see racism and oppression in a new power structure
in which the powerful hold the data on the less powerful.
slate |The FBI has a lead. A prominent
religious leader and community advocate is in contact with a suspected
sleeper agent of foreign radicals. The attorney general is briefed and
personally approves wiretaps of his home and offices. The man was born
in the United States, the son of a popular cleric. Even though he’s an
American citizen, he’s placed on a watchlist to be summarily detained in
the event of a national emergency. Of all similar suspects, the head of
FBI domestic intelligence thinks he’s “the most dangerous,” at least
“from the standpoint of … national security.”
Is this a lone wolf in league with foreign sponsors of terrorism? No: This was the life of Martin Luther King Jr. That FBI assessment was dated Aug. 30, 1963—two days after King told our country that he had a dream.
We now find ourselves in a new surveillance debate—and the lessons of
the King scandal should weigh heavy on our minds. A few months after
the first Edward Snowden revelation, the National Security Agency disclosed that it had itselfwiretapped
King in the late 1960s. Yet what happened to King is almost entirely
absent from our current conversation. In NSA reform debates in the House
of Representatives, King was mentioned only a handful of times, usually
in passing. And notwithstanding a few brave speeches by senators such
as Patrick Leahy and Rand Paul outside of the Senate, the available
Senate record suggests that in two years of actual hearings and floor
debates, no one ever spoke his name.
There is a myth in this country that in a world where everyone is
watched, everyone is watched equally. It’s as if an old and racist J.
Edgar Hoover has been replaced by the race-blind magic of computers,
mathematicians, and Big Data. The truth is more uncomfortable. Across
our history and to this day, people of color have been the
disproportionate victims of unjust surveillance; Hoover was no
aberration. And while racism has played its ugly part, the justification
for this monitoring was the same we hear today: national security.
ethos | The United States entered World War I in April, 1917, amid a German spy scare. There were persistent allegations that Blacks were opposed to the war, in spite of their declarations to the contrary. "ProGermanism among the negroes" was investigated by the Justice Department's Bureau of Investigation and the Military Intelligence Branch (MIB) of the War Department's General Staff.
Efforts were made to discover disloyal motives behind orgnnisatione such as the NAACP and the National Equal Rights League; in the contents of publications such as the Crisis, the Messenger and the Chicago Defender; and in the activities of Black spokesmen such as W E B Du Bois, and Monroe Trotter, Kelly Miller, A Philip Randolph, Chandler Owen, and Hubert Harrison. No firm evidence was found to support claims that Blacks were disloyal, but investigation of what MIB called "Negro Subversion" became a regular part of domestic intelligence gathering during the war. Reports filed about Blacks were often inaccurate and the resulting misinformation was self-perpetuating. Black draft evasion, which was common, but not always deliberate, and rumours about harsh conditions and high casualty rates endured by Black troops were the subject of numerous reports by the Bureau and MIB, enhancing the misleading impression that there was a well-co-ordinated enemy plan to foment racial discord. The behaviour of Black soldiers was monitored by MIB. Particular attention was given to camp race riots and to the political views of Black YMCA staff.
Joel E Spingarn, the white chairman of the NAACP, served as a military intelligence officer for 21 months in 1918. He attempted to persuade the General Staff to sponsor federal anti-lynching legislation and began to set up a subsection within MIB to identify those instances of racial discrimination which most damaged Black morale. Spingarn was ousted from MIB after his proposal that Du Bois be brought into military intelligence aroused bitter Black criticism. Had he remained in Washington, the subsequent attitude of federal government toward intervention in the field of race relations might have been different. In the final months of the war, MIB was re-organised and re-named the Military Intelligence Division (MID).
Efforts of Blacks to travel to Paris to raise the question of race during the peace conference were in most cases foiled by the State Department's refusal on spurious grounds to grant them passports. At the same time, the return from France of Black troops with greater political and racial awareness than before the war was anticipated with some concern by military intelligence officers. The menace of the German agent was swiftly replaced in the American mind by the spectre of Bolshevism. In 1919 radical Black protest and organisation began to be attributed to the influence of the new alien threat. Randolph, Owen and Marcus Garvey were among those leaders watched by the federal investigative agencies in attempts to discover evidence of Bolshevik influence among Blacks. Race riots in Washington, UDC, and Chicago in July served to convince many officials, notably J Edgar Hoover, head of the Bureau's Radical Division, that some link must exist between Black protest, racial violence and Bolshevism. MID work on "Negro Subversion" was being scaled down, but the Radical Division maintained its interest in this area in the light of further riots. The climax of the Red Scare was accompanied by statements from the Justice Department that Blacks were part of the radical tide which threatened to sweep America. Blacks did not, in fact, adopt radical politics in significant numbers. However, in the minds of those who ran the investigative agencies of federal government, Blacks were now firmly established as a potentially disloyal and revolutionary element in American society - ever susceptible to, and the likely target of, the advances of subversive propagandists.
fas |Prior to our declaration of war with Germany this essential general staff agency which is charged with gathering, collating, and disseminating the military information necessary as a basis for correct military decisions existed only in a rudimentary form. In April, 1917, it consisted of a section of the War College Division comprising a total personnel consisting of two officers and two clerks and supplied with only $11,000 by congressional appropriation for the performance of duty vital to the interests of the Army and the Nation. Every other army of importance was provided with a far-reaching military intelligence service directed by a well-equipped general staff agency recognized as a par with agencies charged with military plans, operations, and supplies. As a result of our neglect of this service, the valuable information gathered by the officers whom we had attached to European armies during the first year and a half of the war was never properly used. We were also without accurate data as to the powerful and insidious espionage , propaganda, and sabotage methods with which Germany at once attempted to thwart our military effort.
pigeonsandplanes | Throughout the 80's, 90's and 2000's, I wore many hats as a talent
scout, freelance journalist, publisher, promoter and publicist trying to
use my influence to promote rap music with substance. I was so
committed to using Hip Hop as a form of empowerment that I even created
one of the nation's first full time educational Hip Hop program
for middle and high school students. Everyday for five years, I taught
six periods of Hip Hop culture education to hundreds of students who
never imagined that Hip Hop could be offered as a regular class. It was
magic! Lives were changed, students were motivated to better themselves
and I became an award winning teacher in the process. California's
economic crisis put an end to the magic in 2011 when my program lost its
funding.
I returned to the entertainment industry as a freelance publicist with
the goal of promoting quality Hip Hop. How foolish I was! Between 2011
and 2012, I found myself turning down more potential clients then I was
bringing in. The idea of working with aspiring artists who sounded just
like Big Sean, Rick Ross, Nicki Minaj or 2 Chainz disgusted me. And
those few artists who did have something of substance to offer had
little to no money or lacked the drive to take their music to the next
level. Everyday my inbox would fill up with rappers requesting my
services to help promote their songs about ass, weed, guns, cars,
strippers, sex and money. As a freelancer striving to establish myself, I
should have been thankful for generating so much business and could
have watched my bank account grow, regardless of the musical quality.
But as a husband, father and all around socially conscious person, I
couldn't. As a man, I couldn't.
Behind every mainstream rapper glorifying money, sex and violence, there
is a cast of managers, publicists, lawyers, program directors, DJ's,
bloggers, journalists, producers and other industry executives working
hard to make that artist a household name. Behind every Chief Keef, Tyga
and Trinidad James, there are college educated men and women whose job
it is to promote music that contributes to the dumbing down of our
youth. Behind every music video full of half naked girls, there are
casting agents and directors who would never allow their own daughters
to portray themselves in such light. Behind every rapper who claims to
be a thug, there are countless professionals who send their kids to
private schools while promoting music which sends our kids to prison.
Behind every mainstream rapper on BET, MTV, Hot 97, Power 106 and any
other popular station in your city, there's a Clear Channel, Viacom,
Emmis Communications and Radio One made up of powerful decision makers
who would never in a million years listen to the kind of music they get
rich promoting. And behind every rapper with a criminal record, there's a
publicist spinning a story to make crime more marketable.
salon | More than three decades ago, as I was winding up a major investigation
of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and its leader Huey Newton, I received
a call from Abbie Hoffman, the antic anti-Vietnam War activist, then a
fugitive from criminal charges for selling cocaine to a nark. Abbie and I
had been friends and fellow street-fighting buddies on the Lower East
Side in numerous demonstrations of the antiwar Yippies. His purpose, he
said, was to talk me out of publishing that 1978 investigation in New
Times. It would hurt the left and the struggle for black justice, he
warned.
My story exposed Newton’s bizarre
leadership (for a time he carried a swagger stick à la Idi Amin). Far
worse was the extortion racket he presided over that shook down pimps,
drug dealers, after-hours clubs and even a theater owner. Non-compliance
left one club owner dead and undiscovered for days in the trunk of his
car, which was parked at the San Francisco airport. The theater owner,
Ed Bercovich, declined the tithe and refused to give jobs to Panther
thugs. The theater burned down — it was arson. Murders of rivals were
also carried out on orders from above for perceived disloyalty to the
Panthers; vicious beatings of lower-rank Panther males were regular
punishments, along with turning out Panther women as prostitutes in the
Panther-owned bar and restaurant the Lamp Post. The Panthers always
needed cash for themselves and their programs. Paranoia was rampant,
with internal schisms fanned by the FBI and local red squads of the
police but also anchored in the egos and fear of rivals.
Newton
had a way of being tough on the streets, the mean streets of Oakland he
grew up in, but he managed to conceal it from his respectable friends,
black and white. He cultivated liberal politicians such as U.S. Rep. Ron
Dellums and state Rep. Tom Bates; a host of celebrities, including
Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda and Dennis Hopper; and opinion leaders such as
Yale president Kingman Brewster, author Jessica Mitford and conductor
Leonard Bernstein, all of whom became supporters of the Panthers.
At
first, I was puzzled as to why Abbie would call me from the underground
after a long silence — he was a fugitive, after all. Suddenly, in a
flash, I knew: “Did Bert put you up to this?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he
admitted sheepishly. Bert Schneider, I already knew, had underwritten
Abbie’s fugitive existence, just as he had for Huey Newton. I turned
Abbie — and Bert — down: The Panther investigation would run.
independent | Melvin Van Peebles says he believes ''people of goodwill can go with
him". He also deliberately veered away from focusing on Seale or Newton:
"I wanted people to look at the forest, not the tree.
"You have to remember this is based on my novel. But I didn't just
make it all up." Yet isn't he on thin ice? If it's a novel, why should
his critics not assume that he had indeed made up vast swathes of the
story? He replies: "By calling it fiction I hoped I could sidestep
questions like 'Oh, and where in the FBI files did you establish this?
Where's your corroboration?' ''
Clearly he miscalculated media reaction on this point. But the film's
most remarkable claim is that in response to the militancy in America's
cities, FBI boss J Edgar Hoover ordered black ghettoes to be flooded
with cheap drugs to pacify their inhabitants. That decision, says the
film, led to a tenfold increase in addiction.
"The Panthers had a lot of community support," says Van Peebles Snr.
"It was their power base. Hoover, knowing he couldn't destroy the
Panthers, decided to destroy the community itself. He had the people
medicated."
This sounds an outlandishly paranoid alle-gation. Do you really
believe this, I asked Melvin Van Peebles? Is there no question at all in
your mind? Do you feel no need for corroborating evidence?
"No," he says simply. "It's like the 18 missing minutes in the Nixon
tapes. I'm not saying Hoover personally went round and sowed weeds in
the garden. I'm saying all you had to do was give the gardener a couple
of days off and the weeds would grow. You follow?''
Evidence for the charge is scant. Certainly the FBI was mobilized to
harass the Panthers, black FBI informants infiltrated their ranks and
Hoover urged his men to neutralize the Panthers. A Hoover memo dated 4
March, 1968, outlines one specific goal: "Prevent the rise of a
'Messiah' who could unify and electrify the militant black nationalist
movement."
"Right," says Mario Van Peebles, as if this proved all the film's
claims. "And who do we have 25 years after Martin Luther King and
Malcolm X? A bunch of rappers."
Yet this is poor proof that the FBI systematically narcotised entire
communities. The Van Peebles' case appears to rest on a 1974
conversation, reported to them, between Newton and Elaine Brown, who by
this time was leader of the Panthers. She complained to Newton that
drugs were rampant.
"There were white guys driving into Oakland in Rolls-Royces, and not
dealing with the old gangster drug dealers, but going straight to the
kids," said Mario. "What Elaine didn't know at the time was that this
was happening nationally. It's not a new concept. You're British, right?
Your people did the same thing in the Boxer rebellion. Gave the people
opium."
politicswestchesterreview | In her book, A Taste of Power (page 167 on) Brown admits she was
TRAINED and PAID and sent into the Party by Jay Richard Kennedy, the
informant in Dr. King’s inner circle for the CIA Security Research
Section (birth name: Richard Solomonick).
Jay Richard Kennedy was a former Bureau of Narcotics, OSS man who was
also the manager for Harry Belafonte, until Belafonte FIRED him in the
1950s.
JRK was a partner in the Mafia-owned Sands Hotel in Vegas, which is
where Elaine Brown met him while working as a hooker in ’63 (her own
admission, see her book).
JRK was the owner of a factory in Quebec that produced proximity
fuses for the US military during the VietNam war, and (like the UK’s Ian
Fleming) the author of numerous spy books from ‘the inside’ of the
agency, such as “Man Called X” and his bestselling his book / movie ‘The
Chairman’.
JRK was the one who postulated to SRS that Dr. King was a tool of Mao
and laid the groundwork for the premise that allowed his assassination.
His ‘confession’ can be found in the British documentary ‘The Men who killed Martin Luther King’.
More information can be found in David Garrow’s book ‘The FBI and Martin Luther King’.
WaPo | While the FBI leadership’s animus toward MLK fixated on his reported
sexual appetites, the CIA entertained and memorialized accounts that
described the crucial secret conflict within the civil rights movement
as one between Soviet-controlled agents and Communist China’s
sympathizers. Top CIA officials relied upon an informant who explained
in meeting after meeting how a battle for subversive control over King
was being waged between New York lawyer Stanley Levison and
activist/entertainer Harry Belafonte. In the CIA’s version of civil
rights history, Levison, a onetime Communist Party financial
functionary, was actively representing Moscow as he advised King,
whereas Belafonte supposedly favored Beijing.
The CIA’s source on King turned out to be novelist and television host
Jay Richard Kennedy, who had long-standing friendships with civil rights
leaders A. Philip Randolph and James Farmer, and who moderated a
nationwide August 1963 telecast featuring the leaders of the March on
Washington. But Kennedy (born Samuel Richard Solomonick) and Levison,
his longtime business partner,
had fallen out years earlier. Indeed, by the 1950s, Levison’s first
wife, psychotherapist Janet Alterman, was married to Kennedy, who by
then was Belafonte’s business manager. Kennedy and Belafonte then had a
falling out of their own, and Kennedy subsequently published a roman à
clef about Belafonte, “Favor the Runner.”
The Kennedy-Levison-Belafonte story may sound better than fiction but,
more importantly, it is a case study in the ways anonymous intelligence
sources may have multiple agendas when they tattle on, and smear, people
for whom they have preexisting antipathy. Kennedy was not an opposition
research contractor like Steele, but when — as in the Steele case, and
in the case of the FBI’s most important informant
close to King, accountant James A. Harrison — a source is compensated
for the information they provide, their incentive to spin a narrative
that the payer wants to hear is that much greater.
Counterpunch | Eric Holder, the nation’s first black Attorney General made his mark as Washington’s first black chief prosecutor by advancing mass pretext policing (mass frisks, stops, and arrests on minor or made-up and discretionary police grounds) in Black neighborhoods. The nation’s first black president Barack Obama severely constricted his very tepid and belated steps toward criminal justice reform by ruling out any concern for those arrested and sentenced for technically violent offenses. That’s a big problem since more than half the nation’s 1 million Black prisoners are behind bars on technically violent charges.
Locking Up Our Own is a compelling and indispensable volume for those who want to get the whole story on the rise of the “the New Jim Crow” – a story that must include serious attention to class and other fractures within Black America. But it is not without problems. Oddly enough given Forman’s desire to provide a somewhat sympathetic explanation for the Black “leadership” class’s participation in the “new Jim Crow,” he fails to note how persistent harsh racial residential segregation – what sociologists Doug Massey and Nancy Denton have rightly called “American Apartheid” – has fed Black support for aggressive policing and harsh sentencing. The Black middle and professional class lives in much greater immediate proximity than its white counterpart to the deeply impoverished and crime-prone Black “underclass”
Forman might have reflected more ambitiously and radically on the question of what happened to the struggle for Black equality and social justice more broadly in the long capitalist neoliberal era, marked at home and abroad by the triumph of the right over the left hand of the state. Many on the Black Left will find Forman too mild and forgiving in his discussion of the role played by Black bourgeois elites in the rise of racially disparate mass incarceration. They will do so with good reason.
A good counter-text here is Elaine Brown’s 2002 volume The Condemnation of Little B. In this forgotten classic and Black radical text, Brown – a former chairman of the Black Panther Party – tried to understand how the entire city of Atlanta, including its prominent Black citizens, came to unjustly condemn a poor 13-year-old Black boy, Michael Lewis, for the 1997 murder of a white man visiting a well-known drug haven in that city’s Black ghetto. Brown showed how Lewis’s conviction was “effectively predestined, attributable to the comfortable ‘New Age racism’ of white liberals and middle-class blacks who have abandoned the cause of civil rights and equal opportunity.”
theatlantic | “President Trump has directed this
Department of Justice to reduce crime in this country, and we will use
every lawful tool that we have to do that,” he said at a gathering of
law-enforcement officials on Wednesday. “We will continue to encourage
civil-asset forfeiture whenever appropriate in order to hit organized
crime in the wallet.”
The directive revives the Justice Department’s Equitable Sharing Program, a controversial process
through which state and local police agencies can seize assets, then
transfer those seizures to federal control. In doing so, local agencies
can skirt some state-level regulations limiting forfeitures. Under the
program, the federal government pools the funds derived from the assets
and sends 80 percent of them back to the state or local department
itself, sometimes evading state laws that say seized assets should go
into a state’s general fund.
Civil
forfeiture has existed in some form since the colonial era, although
most of the current laws date to the War on Drugs’ heyday in the 1980s.
Law-enforcement officials like Sessions defend modern civil forfeiture
as a way to limit the resources of drug cartels and organized-crime
groups. It’s also a lucrative tactic for law-enforcement agencies in an
era of tight budgets: A Justice Department inspector general’s report in
April found that federal forfeiture programs had taken in almost $28 billion over the past decade, and TheWashington Post reported that civil-forfeiture seizures nationwide in 2015 surpassed the collective losses from all burglaries that same year.
In
its report, the inspector general’s office also raised concerns about
how federal agencies take funds, after it found almost half of the Drug
Enforcement Agency’s seizures in a random sample weren’t tied to any
broader law-enforcement purpose. “When seizure and administrative
forfeitures do not ultimately advance an investigation or prosecution,
law enforcement creates the appearance, and risks the reality, that it
is more interested in seizing and forfeiting cash than advancing an
investigation or prosecution,” the report concluded.
wikipedia | Slim attended Tuskegee University in Tuskegee, Alabama (it has been stated that he attended Tuskegee University at the same time as black author Ralph Ellison[4]),
but having spent time in the "street culture", he soon began
bootlegging and was expelled as a result. After his expulsion, his
mother encouraged him to become a criminal lawyer so that he could make a
legitimate living while continuing to work with the street people he
was so fond of, but Maupin, seeing the pimps bringing women into his
mother's beauty salon, was far more attracted to the model of money and
control over women that pimping provided.[4]
According to his memoir, Pimp, Slim started pimping at 18 and
continued that pursuit until age 42. The book claimed that during his
career, he had over 400 women, both black and white, working for him. He
said he was known for his frosty temperament, and at 6'2" and 180 lbs,
he was indeed slim, and he had a reputation for staying calm in sticky
situations, thus earning the street name Iceberg Slim. When verbal
instruction and psychological manipulation
failed to keep his women in line, he beat them with wire hangers; in
his autobiography he fully concedes he was a ruthless, vicious man.[5]
Slim had been involved with several other popular pimps, one of them Albert "Baby" Bell,[6] a man born in 1899 who had been pimping for decades and had a Duesenberg and a bejeweled pet ocelot.[6] Another pimp, who had gotten Slim hooked on heroin, went by the name of "Satin"[6] and was a major drug figure in Eastern America.[5]
Slim was noted for being able to effectively conceal his emotions
throughout his pimping career, something he said he learned from Baby
Bell: "A pimp has gotta know his whores, but not let them know him; he's
gotta be god all the way."[5]
wikipedia | Robert Sylvester Kelly was born on January 8, 1967 at Chicago Lying-in Hospital in Hyde Park, Chicago.[18] Kelly is the third of four children.[8] Kelly's single mother, Joanne, was a singer. She raised her children Baptist. Kelly's father was absent throughout his son's life.[19] Kelly's family lived in the Ida B. Wells Homespublic housing project in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood.[20] Kelly's high school music teacher Lena McLin
described Kelly's childhood home: "It was bare. One table, two chairs.
There was no father there, I knew that, and they had very little".[21] Kelly began singing in the church choir at age eight.[8]
Kelly grew up in a house full of women, whom he said would act
differently when his mother and grandparents were not home. At a young
age Kelly was often sexually abused by a woman who was at least ten
years older than himself. "I was too afraid and too ashamed," Kelly
wrote in his autobiography about why he never told anyone. At age 11, he
was shot in the shoulder while riding his bike home; the bullet is
reportedly still lodged in his shoulder.[22]
Kelly was eight years old when he had his first girlfriend. They
would hold hands and eat make-believe meals inside their playhouse built
from cardboard, where they "vowed to be boyfriend and girlfriend
forever." Their last play date turned tragic when, after fighting with
some older children over a play area by a creek, Lulu was pushed into
the water. A fast-moving current swept her away while she screamed
Kelly's name. Shortly after, she was found dead downstream. Kelly calls
Lulu his very first musical inspiration.[22]
alternet | Historically, indentured servants had their food, health care,
housing, and clothing provided to them by their “employers.” Today’s new
serfs can hardly afford these basics of life, and when you add in
modern necessities like transportation, education and child-care, the
American labor landscape is looking more and more like old-fashioned
servitude.
Nonetheless, conservatives/corporatists in Congress and
state-houses across the nation are working hard to hold down minimum
wages. Missouri’s Republican legislature just made it illegal for St.
Louis to raise their minimum wage to $10/hour, throwing workers back
down to $7.70. More preemption laws like this are on the books or on their way.
At
the same time, these conservatives/corporatists are working to roll
back health care protections for Americans, roll back environmental
protections that keep us and our children from being poisoned, and even
roll back simple workplace, food and toy safety standards.
The only way these predators will be stopped is by massive political action leading to the rollback of Reaganism/neoliberalism.
And the conservatives/corporatists who largely own the Republican Party know it, which is why they’re purging voting lists, fighting to keep in place easily hacked voting machines, and throwing billions of dollars into think tanks, right-wing radio, TV, and online media.
If
they succeed, America will revert to a very old form of economy and
politics: the one described so well in Charles Dickens’ books when
Britain had "maximum wage laws" and “Poor Laws” to prevent a strong and politically active middle class from emerging.
Conservatives/corporatists know well that this type of neo-feudalism
is actually a very stable political and economic system, and one that’s
hard to challenge. China has put it into place in large part, and other
countries from Turkey to the Philippines to Brazil and Venezuela are
falling under the thrall of the merger of corporate and state power.
So many of our individual rights have been stripped from us, so much of America’s middle-class progress in the last century has been torn from us,
while conservatives wage a brutal and oppressive war on dissenters and
people of color under the rubrics of “security,” “tough on crime,” and
the "war on drugs.”
As a result, America has 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, more than any other nation on earth, all while opiate epidemics are ravaging our nation. And what to do about it?
CounterPunch | The big thing I learned was that poor people have zero access to justice.
Nor do the middle class.
After the June 21st debacle, a semi-retired lawyer friend
advised me to file a Motion for Reconsideration, a request to the judge
to take another look and perhaps realize that he made some mistakes. The
law gives you 10 days to file.
My Motion for Reconsideration was one of numerous motions I would have to draft and file myself while pro se.
It was incredibly expensive, wildly burdensome and so daunting I bet
99% of people without a lawyer would throw up their hands and give up.
I’m the 1%.
I’m a writer. I went to an Ivy League school; I was a history major
so I’m good at research. I used to work at a bank, where I worked on
legal documents so I’m familiar with legalese. So I researched what
works and doesn’t work in a Motion for Reconsideration. I crafted an
argument. I deployed the proper tone using the right words and phrases.
Most people, not having the necessary skills or educational
attainment, wouldn’t stand a prayer of writing a legal brief like this
motion. Mine may fail — but the judge might read it and take it
seriously because it’s written correctly.
I called the court clerk to ask how to file my motion. She was
incredibly curt and mean. I’m a New Yorker so I persisted, but I could
imagine other callers being put off and forgetting the whole thing.
Schedule a date for your hearing on the court’s website, the clerk
told me. Good luck! The site had an outdated interface, was loaded with
arcane bureaucratic jargon and a design that’s byzantine and hard to
navigate. If English is your second language, forget it.
Eventually I found the place to reserve a hearing date — where I learned about the $540 filing fee.
Payable only by credit card.
No debit cards.
No Amex.
Protracted litigation against a well-funded adversary like the
Times/Tronc could easily require dozens of $540 filing fees. The poor
need not apply. Most Americans don’t have that kind of money. And what
about people who scrape up the dough but don’t have plastic?
$10 would be too much. $540 is frigging obscene.
I paid the fee, printed out the receipt as required, stapled it to
the back of my multiple required copies of the motion and went to the
Stanley Mosk Courthouse to file it. As I waited in Room 102 to have my
motions stamped by a clerk, I studied the many working-class people
waiting in the same line.
Here too, there is no consideration for the people. The clerk’s office is open Monday
to Friday 8:30 to 4:30. Most people work during those hours. Gotta file
something? You have to take time off.
Parking? Expensive and far away.
I have a dream.
I dream of a court system dedicated to equal justice before the law —
where anyone can file a motion, where there are no filing fees, where
the courthouse is open on weekends, where you can file motions by
uploading them online and there’s free parking for citizens conducting
business in the people’s house.
LATimes | In USC’s lecture halls, labs and executive offices,
Dr. Carmen A. Puliafito was a towering figure. The dean of the Keck
School of Medicine was a renowned eye surgeon whose skill in the
operating room was matched by a gift for attracting money and talent to
the university.
There was another side to the Harvard-educated physician.
During
his tenure as dean, Puliafito kept company with a circle of criminals
and drug users who said he used methamphetamine and other drugs with
them, a Los Angeles Times investigation found.
Puliafito,
66, and these much younger acquaintances captured their exploits in
photos and videos. The Times reviewed dozens of the images.
Shot
in 2015 and 2016, they show Puliafito and the others partying in hotel
rooms, cars, apartments and the dean’s office at USC.
In
one video, a tuxedo-clad Puliafito displays an orange pill on his
tongue and says into the camera, “Thought I’d take an ecstasy before the
ball.” Then he swallows the pill.
In
another, Puliafito uses a butane torch to heat a large glass pipe
outfitted for methamphetamine use. He inhales and then unleashes a thick
plume of white smoke. Seated next to him on a sofa, a young woman
smokes heroin from a piece of heated foil.
As
dean, Puliafito oversaw hundreds of medical students, thousands of
professors and clinicians, and research grants totaling more than $200
million. He was a key fundraiser for USC, bringing in more than $1
billion in donations, by his estimation.
theatlantic | Epidemics are hard to cover. Navigating the gaps between the private,
personal, and societal and managing to be relatable while also true to
science is a tough part of health reporting, generally. Doing those
things in the middle of public panic—and its attendant
misinformation—requires deftness. And performing them while also minding
the social issues that accompany every epidemic means reporters have to
dig deep, both into multiple disciplines and into ethics. With multiple
competing narratives, politics, and the sheer scale of disease, it’s
often easy to forget the individuals who suffer.
That’s why I was struck by a recent article in the New York Times
by Catherine Saint Louis that chronicles approaches for caring for
newborns born to mothers who are addicted to opioids. The article is
remarkable in its command and explanation of the medical and policy
issues at play in the ongoing epidemic, but its success derives from
something more than that. Saint Louis expertly captures the human
stories at the intersection of the wonder of childbirth and the grip of
drug dependency in a Kentucky hospital, all while keeping the epidemic
in view.
One particular passage stands out:
Jay’la Cy’anne was born
with a head of raven hair and a dependence on buprenorphine. Ms. Clay
took the drug under the supervision of Dr. Barton to help reduce her
oxycodone cravings and keep her off illicit drugs.
“Dr. Barton saved my
life, and he saved my baby’s life,” Ms. Clay said. She also used cocaine
on occasion in the first trimester, she said, but quit with his
encouragement.
[...]
For months, Ms. Clay
had stayed sober, expecting that she’d be allowed to take her baby home.
Standing in the hospital corridor, her dark hair up in a loose
ponytail, she said, “I’m torn up in my heart.”
Generally, treatment
for drug-dependent babies is expensive and can go on for months.
Nationally, hospitalization costs rose to $1.5 billion in 2012, from
$732 million in 2009, according to researchers at Vanderbilt University.
In the space of a few paragraphs, the
story introduces a mother and child and the drug dependency with which
they both struggle, and also expands its scope outwards to note the
nature of the epidemic in which they are snared. It doesn’t ignore the
personal choices involved in drug abuse, but—as is typical for reporting
on other health problems—it considers those choices among a
constellation of etiologies. In a word, the article is humanizing, and
as any public health official will attest, humanization and the empathy
it allows are critical in combating any epidemic.
The
article is an exemplar in a field of public-health-oriented writing
about the opioid crisis—the most deadly and pervasive drug epidemic in
American history—that has shaped popular and policy attitudes about the
crisis. But the wisdom of that field has not been applied equally in
recent history. The story of Jamie Clay and Jay’la Cy’anne stood out to
me because it is so incongruous with the stories of “crack babies” and
their mothers that I’d grown up reading and watching.
nbcboston | "We started seeing it last year here
and there. But now, it's just raining needles everywhere we go," said
Morrison, a burly, tattooed construction worker whose Clean River
Project has six boats working parts of the 117-mile (188-kilometer)
river.
Among the oldest tracking
programs is in Santa Cruz, California, where the community group Take
Back Santa Cruz has reported finding more than 14,500 needles in the
county over the past 4 1/2 years. It says it has gotten reports of 12
people getting stuck, half of them children.
"It's
become pretty commonplace to find them. We call it a rite of passage
for a child to find their first needle," said Gabrielle Korte, a member
of the group's needle team. "It's very depressing. It's infuriating.
It's just gross."
Some experts say the problem will ease only when more users get treatment and more funding is directed to treatment programs.
Others
are counting on needle exchange programs, now present in more than 30
states, or the creation of safe spaces to shoot up — already introduced
in Canada and proposed by U.S. state and city officials from New York to
Seattle.
Studies have found that
needle exchange programs can reduce pollution, said Don Des Jarlais, a
researcher at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai hospital in
New York.
But Morrison and Korte complain poor
supervision at needle exchanges will simply put more syringes in the
hands of people who may not dispose of them properly.
After
complaints of discarded needles, Santa Cruz County took over its
exchange from a nonprofit in 2013 and implemented changes. It did away
with mobile exchanges and stopped allowing drug users to get needles
without turning in an equal number of used ones, said Jason Hoppin, a
spokesman for the Santa Cruz County.
Forbes | According to an insider account,
the Clinton team, put together the Russia Gate narrative within 24
hours of her defeat. The Clinton account explained that Russian hacking
and election meddling caused her unexpected loss. Her opponent, Donald
Trump, was a puppet
of Putin. Trump, they said, “encourages espionage against our people.”
The scurrilous Trump dossier, prepared by a London opposition research
firm, Orbis, and paid for by unidentified Democrat donors, formed a key
part of the Clinton narrative: Trump’s sexual and business escapades in
Russia had made him a hostage of the Kremlin, ready to do its bidding.
That was Hillary's way to say that Trump is really not President of the
United States—a siren call adopted by the Democratic party and media.
Hillary and the Orbis Dossier
The most under covered story of Russia Gate is the interconnection
between the Clinton campaign, an unregistered foreign agent of Russia
headquartered in DC (Fusion GPS), and the Christopher Steele Orbis dossier.
This connection has raised the question of whether Kremlin prepared the
dossier as part of a disinformation campaign to sow chaos in the US
political system. If ordered and paid for by Hillary Clinton associates,
Russia Gate is turned on its head as collusion between Clinton
operatives (not Trump’s) and Russian intelligence. Russia Gate becomes
Hillary Gate.
Neither the New York Times, Washington Post, nor CNN has covered this explosive story. Two op-eds have appeared in the Wall Street Journal (Holman Jenkins and David Satter).
The possible Russian-intelligence origins of the Steele dossier have
been raised only in conservative publications, such as in The Federalist and National Review.
The Fusion story has been known since Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) sent a heavily-footnoted letter
to the Justice Department on March 31, 2017 demanding for his Judiciary
Committee all relevant documents on Fusion GPS, the company that
managed the Steele dossier against then-candidate Donald Trump. Grassley
writes to justify his demand for documents that: “The issue is of particular concern to the Committee given that when Fusion GPS reportedly was acting as an unregistered agent of Russian interests, it appears to have been simultaneously overseeing the creation of the unsubstantiated dossier of allegations of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians.” (Emphasis added.)
Former FBI director, James Comey, refused to answer questions about
Fusion and the Steele dossier in his May 3 testimony before the Senate
Intelligence Committee. Comey responded
to Lindsey Graham’s questions about Fusion GPS’s involvement “in
preparing a dossier against Donald Trump that would be interfering in
our election by the Russians?” with “I don’t want to say.” Perhaps he
will be called on to answer in a forum where he cannot refuse to answer.
WND | Eberwein was due to appear next Tuesday before the Haitian Senate
Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission where he was widely expected to
testify that the Clinton Foundation misappropriated Haiti earthquake
donations from international donors.
He had served as director general of the Haitian government’s
economic development agency, Fonds d’assistance économique et social,
for three years.
According to Eberwein, a paltry 0.6 percent of donations granted by
international donors to the Clinton Foundation with the express purpose
of directly assisting Haitians actually ended up in the hands of Haitian
organizations. A further 9.6 percent ended up with the Haitian
government. The remaining 89.8 percent – or $5.4 billion – was funneled
to non-Haitian organizations.
“The Clinton Foundation, they are criminals, they are thieves, they
are liars, they are a disgrace,” Eberwein said at a protest outside the
Clinton Foundation headquarters in Manhattan last year.
According to the Haiti Libre newspaper, Eberwein was said to be in
“good spirits,” with plans for the future. His close friends and
business partners are shocked by the idea he may have committed suicide.
“It’s really shocking,” said friend Gilbert Bailly. “We grew up together; he was like family.”
The Haitian government issued an official notice thanking Eberwein for his service and mourning his untimely death.
miamiherald |Klaus Eberwein,
a former Haitian government official, was found dead Tuesday in a South
Dade motel room in what the Miami-Dade medical examiner’s office is
ruling a suicide.
“He shot himself in the head,” said
Veronica Lamar, Miami-Dade medical examiner records supervisor. She
listed his time of death at 12:19 p.m.
The address where Eberwein’s body was discovered according to police, 14501 S. Dixie Hwy., is a Quality Inn.
A supporter of former Haitian
President Michel Martelly, Eberwein served as director general of the
government’s economic development agency, Fonds d’assistance économique et social,
better known as FAES. He held the position from May 2012 until February
2015 when he was replaced. He was also a partner in a popular pizza
restaurant in Haiti, Muncheez, and has a pizza — the Klaus Special —
named after him.
“It’s really shocking,” said Muncheez’s owner Gilbert Bailly. “We grew up together; he was like family.”
Bailly said he last spoke to
Eberwein, 50, two weeks ago and he was in good spirits. They were
working on opening a Muncheez restaurant in Sunrise, he said.
But it appears that Eberwein had
fallen on hard times. An Uber spokesperson confirmed that he worked as a
driver for awhile in South Florida.
During and after his government
tenure, Eberwein faced allegations of fraud and corruption on how the
agency he headed administered funds. Among the issues was FAES’
oversight of shoddy construction of several schools built after Haiti’s
devastating Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake.
Eberwein was scheduled to appear
Tuesday before the Haitian Senate’s Ethics and Anti-Corruption
Commission, the head of the commission, Sen. Evalière Beauplan
confirmed. The commission is investigating the management of PetroCaribe
funds, the money Haiti receives from Venezuela’s discounted oil
program.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/haiti/article160983614.html#storylink=cpy
theconspiracyblog | How many people have died under very unusual circumstances ( ARKANCIDE )
that stood in the way of the Clinton Crime Family’s rise to wealth and
power? The deaths connected to the Clintons are so numerous and so
suspicious that there is even a term for it… ARKANCIDE (Don Adams / Died
January 7, 1997)
eat your omega-3 fish oil!
-
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Chemical compounds called cannabinoids are found in marijuana and also are
produc...
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