consortiumnews | But don’t think that this unlocking of the U.S. taxpayers’ wallets is
just about this one couple. There will be plenty of money to be made by
other neocon think-tankers all around Washington, including Frederick
Kagan, who works for the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, and
his wife, Kimberly, who runs her own think tank, the Institute for the
Study of War [ISW].
According to ISW’s annual reports, its original supporters were mostly
right-wing foundations, such as the Smith-Richardson Foundation and the
Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, but it was later backed by a host
of national security contractors, including major ones like General
Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and CACI, as well as lesser-known firms such
as DynCorp International, which provided training for Afghan police,
and Palantir, a technology company founded with the backing of the
CIA’s venture-capital arm, In-Q-Tel. Palantir supplied software to U.S.
military intelligence in Afghanistan.
Since its founding in 2007, ISW has focused mostly on wars in the
Middle East, especially Iraq and Afghanistan, including closely
cooperating with Gen. David Petraeus when he commanded U.S. forces in
those countries. However, more recently, ISW has begun reporting
extensively on the civil war in Ukraine. [See Consortiumnews.com’s
“Neocons Guided Petraeus on Afghan War.”]
In other words, the Family Kagan has almost a self-perpetuating,
circular business model – working the inside-corridors of government
power to stimulate wars while simultaneously influencing the public
debate through think-tank reports and op-ed columns in favor of more
military spending – and then collecting grants and other funding from
thankful military contractors.
To be fair, the Nuland-Kagan mom-and-pop shop is really only a
microcosm of how the Military-Industrial Complex has worked for
decades: think-tank analysts generate the reasons for military
spending, the government bureaucrats implement the necessary war
policies, and the military contractors make lots of money before
kicking back some to the think tanks — so the bloody but profitable
cycle can spin again.
The only thing that makes the Nuland-Kagan operation special perhaps is that the whole process is all in the family.
fp | The nuclear mess in Parks could hold clues to yet another mystery in
this Pennsylvania community, one that has bedeviled nuclear analysts for
decades. Beginning in the early 1960s, investigators from the Atomic
Energy Commission (AEC), the agency that regulated U.S. nuclear
facilities at the time, began to question how large amounts of highly
enriched, weapons-grade uranium had gone missing from NUMEC. Any nuclear
site had a certain amount of loss, from seepage into walls and floors,
for instance. In fact, between 1952 and 1968, lax standards at 20 of the
country’s commercial nuclear sites resulted in an apparent loss of 995
kilograms (2,194 pounds) of uranium-235. But investigators found that at
NUMEC, hundreds of pounds went missing, more than at any other plant.
NUMEC’s founder, Zalman Shapiro, an accomplished American
chemist, addressed the concern in 1978, telling Arizona Congressman
Morris Udall that the uranium simply escaped through the facility’s air
ducts, cement, and wastewater. Others, such as the late Glenn Seaborg,
the AEC’s chairman in the 1960s—who had previously helped discover
plutonium and made key contributions to the Manhattan Project—have
suggested that the sloppy accounting and government regulations of the
mid-20th century meant that keeping track of losses in America’s newborn
nuclear industry was well near impossible. Today, some people in Apollo
think that at least a portion of the uranium might be buried in Parks,
contaminating the earth and, ultimately, human beings.
But a number of nuclear experts and intelligence officials propose
another theory straight out of an espionage thriller: that the uranium
was diverted—stolen by spies working for the Mossad, Israel’s
intelligence agency. In the 1960s, to secure nuclear technology and
materials, Israel mounted covert operations around the world, including
at least one alleged open-ocean transfer of hundreds of pounds of
uranium. Some experts have also raised questions about Shapiro himself.
He had contacts deep within Israel’s defense and intelligence
establishments when he ran NUMEC; several of them even turned up at his
facility over time and concealed their professional identities while
there.
Fifty years after investigations began—they have involved, at
various times, the AEC and its successors, Congress, the FBI, the CIA,
and other government agencies—NUMEC remains one of the most confounding
puzzles of the nuclear era. “It is one of the most interesting and
important Cold War mysteries out there,” said Steven Aftergood, who
directs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American
Scientists. “Mainly as a story of clandestine nuclear proliferation,
intelligence, security bungling, and the limits of intelligence.” The
questions about Shapiro, meanwhile, linger: Is he a great American
innovator, a traitor, or both? (Shapiro, now 94, has never been charged
with a crime or convicted of one, and he has steadfastly proclaimed his
innocence.)
Answers could emerge, once and for all, during the upcoming
cleanup in Parks. Residents of this corner of Armstrong County,
Pennsylvania, could finally be told that the missing uranium has been
beneath and around them all along—that large amounts of dangerous and
volatile radioactive waste have been festering in the soil for more than
half a century. Or they could learn that the material was indeed at the
center of international intrigue. Either way, the small town of Apollo
may long for boring anonymity.
theatlantic | Here's something else Obama said in that interview last year: "I
have not yet heard ... a persuasive vision of how Israel survives as a
democracy and a Jewish state at peace with its neighbors in the absence
of a peace deal with the Palestinians and a two-state solution. Nobody
has presented me a credible scenario."
He went on, "The only thing that I’ve heard is,
'We’ll just keep on doing what we’re doing, and deal with problems as
they arise. And we'll build settlements where we can. And where there
are problems in the West Bank, we will deal with them forcefully. We’ll
cooperate or co-opt the Palestinian Authority.' And yet, at no point do
you ever see an actual resolution to the problem. ... And my assessment,
which is shared by a number of Israeli observers, I think, is there
comes a point where you can’t manage this anymore, and then you start
having to make very difficult choices."
Over the past couple of days I've had several conversations with
American Jewish leaders—those who are located in the broad middle,
between the J Street/Sheldon Adelson ends of the spectrum—and they are
uniformly, and deeply, anxious. The message was the same: Netanyahu's
next, even-more-right-wing-than-usual government, they fear, will only
take steps to further Israel's isolation, from America and from the
world, and the Obama administration, which feels such deep, emotional
anger toward Israel, will only make the situation worse, by
misunderstanding, and downplaying, Israel's anxieties. (Sad but true:
Some Israelis voted for Netanyahu because they're frightened of
Obama.)
Something unnatural is happening in
Portland, and Police Union President Daryl Turner isn't going to put up
with it. The proper order of things is upended. Black is white and white
is black, cats and dogs cohabit. Madness! A judge has disbelieved a cop.
Last week Circuit Judge Diana Stuart acquitted teenager Thai Gurule on juvenile charges of assaulting a police officer, resisting arrest, and attempted assault on a cop. She acquitted him even though the cops said he did it. Is Judge Stuart some sort of pro-criminal agitator? Apparently. In an extensive written order
she weighed the testimony of sworn police officers against irrelevant
trifles like actual videorecordings of their encounter with Gurule. Even
though the cops swore that Gurule threw punches at them, Judge Stuart
disbelieved them simply because she could not see any punches on the
cell phone videos. Is she some sort of video-fisticuffs expert? Worse
than that, she specifically stated that she didn't find some of their
testimony credible.
As if they weren't cops.
There's a final aspect of this case that warrants a mention. In the
video of this 16-year-old being stopped illegally, his older brother,
who knew he was doing nothing wrong, can be heard shouting at police
that the youngster played football for his high school, didn't drink,
and didn't do marijuana. He was pleading with them and increasingly
distraught as they punched the kid, threw him to the ground, and Tased
him. What he's doing off camera isn't evident in the videos, though it
is apparent that an increasingly hostile crowd was gathering. The end of
the Oregonian story notes,
"Gurule's brother went to trial in adult court in January. Judge Cheryl
Albrecht found him guilty of misdemeanor interfering with a police
officer and resisting arrest, but acquitted him of disorderly conduct.
Albrecht sentenced him to 64 hours of community service and two years of
probation." I don't know if the brother got a bogus conviction or if he
really did criminally interfere with police by doing something stupid
off camera.
Either way, he is a young black man who wouldn't have this criminal
conviction, two years probation, and 64 hours of community service but
for the fact that Portland police illegally stopped his brother,
needlessly escalated the encounter, and meted out what has now been
judged excessive force in the course of taking him into custody.
adn | Anchorage police served a search warrant on the
Alaska Cannabis Club's downtown clubhouse on Friday afternoon, taking
boxes of evidence from the residence as club owner Charlo Greene
watched.
Anchorage Police Department spokesperson Jennifer Castro
told reporters on scene later Friday afternoon that police had received
reports of illegal marijuana sales occurring at the clubhouse. No
charges had been filed Friday, Castro said.
Police arrived about 1 p.m., Greene said. Greene, whose legal name is Charlene Egbe, is a former television news reporter who achieved national notoriety in September when she quit on-air after announcing she was the owner of the club.
A copy of the search warrant provided by Greene
specified police were searching for evidence of "misconduct involving a
controlled substance."
According to Greene, there were nine
marijuana plants in one duplex and 14 in another. Five medical-marijuana
cardholders live at the residence, Greene said. She said 10 to 12
medical marijuana cardholders were in the residence when the search
warrant was served.
"I'm not surprised but I am disappointed," Greene said of the raid.
Two
marked police cars were outside the residence on Friday afternoon, with
a few more arriving as the search wore on. Greene said about seven
officers were boxing up marijuana plants, computers, papers and other
materials in the clubhouse. Greene said she was free to go but chose to
wait while police took evidence from the home.
An officer on scene confirmed no arrests were being made Friday afternoon.
At 3:10
p.m., police began to load evidence in paper bags and cardboard
boxes into a white van from the back door of the clubhouse. At
about 3:15 p.m., a red pickup and black Jeep were towed away from the
house.
Greene and boyfriend, Peter LoMonaco, watched as the vehicles were towed away.
Greene said the club would “open tomorrow morning at 11 a.m. and give free weed to all our members who come through.”
Greene said she would be hiring an attorney and was “gonna sue the s--- out of the city.”
economic-undertow | Many
of the places that are suffering unrest and war were components of- or
client states of the USSR during its heyday: Libya (client), Egypt (a
Soviet client before becoming an American client), Somalia (client),
Eritrea (client), Afghanistan (client) Yemen (client), Syria (long-term
client), Iraq (client); Armenia, Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine,
Dagestan, Nagorno-Karabakh (all components of USSR); also Vietnam,
Laos, Angola and North Korea (all Soviet clients but wars have ended in
these countries) … also Russia itself. Seen from a long-term
perspective, the end of the Soviet Union government turns out not to be
the bloodless event as was advertised, the rotting empire still has some
collapse left in it.
One of the duties of the Economic Undertow is to turn conventional
historic narratives on their heads, to where they begin make sense. What
Americans have been fed about the demise of the Soviet Union is a
self-serving, political/ideological fairy tale: that the United States
under the direction of Ronald Reagan’s brilliant conservative leadership
outspent the USSR in an arms race that eventually — along with
collapsing oil prices caused by new oil on the markets from Prudhoe Bay
and the North Sea — bankrupted the Communist government. Once the
economic and ideological fault lines were revealed, the various
client/satellite states that made up the Soviet empire peaceably went
their own way without interference from Moscow. All of this ‘revealing’
and ‘peaceable-ness’ took place over a remarkably short period of time
in the early 1990s: here today, gone the next.
The more realistic narrative has Soviet intelligence agencies —
perhaps collaborating with those of the West along with Western
interests (banks) — gaining control over Russian assets, shifting them
to well-connected insiders, with the decrepit- and ossified Communist
government powerless to do anything about it. This process began before-
or during the Brezhnev period with matters well underway by the time of
Gorbachev … Perestroika being a (feeble) attempt on the part of the
Communist establishment to regain both credibility and some measure of
control. What happened in Russia was not reform and the end of communism
was an accident: what actually took place was the greatest crime of the
modern era, the theft of an empire by the country’s intelligence
services and criminal associates.
This outcome was a natural consequence of the Soviet Union as a
regimented national security state with outsized spy agencies … as well
as the slow commercial opening with the West beginning during the
Khrushchev era. Within the immense ganglia of the Soviet intelligence-
and internal security apparatus there was a kind of singularity or
dawning self-awareness … the managers grasped in an instant they had
access to the levers of control outside the reach of the Party, the
Politburo and the Red Army. The rise of the agencies’ power was a
consequence of Stalin’s paranoia; the Stalinist Russia was built on a
foundation of intrusive spying and control/liquidation of potential
internal enemies. Stalin held the agencies in check by way of periodic purges,
no group of operatives could become too comfortable or entrenched, they
had to constantly look over their own shoulders. Once ‘Uncle Joe’ was
gone there were no further checks on spy agency power, they could act
with impunity and did: what occurred was a silent coup d’etat with the
KGB state first emerging publicly under Yuri Andropov.
Once the looting and undermining was well-established in the center it
spread out and took hold among the clients with consequences that can be
seen clearly today.
At the same time, contact with the West, as tentative as it was,
informed the Russian intelligence elite what was possible … that the
Western standards for wealth and success were both qualitatively- and
qualitatively superior to what was available under egalitarian
communism. In 1975, to be wealthy and successful as a Swiss or Londoner
far exceeded what was possible in Leningrad or Kiev.
Under this scenario, ‘Nemtsov the reformer’ was either a co-conspirator — or, more likely a tool of intelligence
services and/or Western business interests; an operative within the
looting scheme along with Gaidar, Chubais and others. Instead of being
the heir to Stalin’s strongman legacy, Putin recedes to become the
technocratic figurehead who serves to distract public attention as the
Russian Mario Monti or Antonis Samaras … meanwhile, the stealing takes
place in the background.
hirhome | This paper advances an ``information goods'' theory that explains
prestige processes as an emergent product of psychological adaptations
that evolved to improve the quality of information acquired via
cultural transmission. Natural selection favored social learners who
could evaluate potential models and copy the most successful among
them. In order to improve the fidelity and comprehensiveness of such
ranked-biased copying, social learners further evolved dispositions to
sycophantically ingratiate themselves with their chosen models, so as
to gain close proximity to, and prolonged interaction with, these
models. Once common, these dispositions created, at the group level,
distributions of deference that new entrants may adaptively exploit to
decide who to begin copying. This generated a preference for models who
seem generally ``popular.'' Building on social exchange theories, we
argue that a wider range of phenomena associated with prestige
processes can more plausibly be explained by this simple theory than by
others, and we test its predictions with data from throughout the
social sciences. In addition, we distinguish carefully between
dominance (force or force threat) and prestige (freely conferred
deference).
archive | The distinction between fast and slow thinking has been explored by
many psychologists over the last twenty-five years. For reasons that I
explain more fully in the next chapter, I describe mental life by the
metaphor of two agents, called System 1 and System 2, which respectively produce
fast and slow thinking. I speak of the features of intuitive and
deliberate thought as if they were traits and dispositions of two
characters in your mind. In the picture that emerges from recent
research, the intuitive System 1 is more influential than your
experience tells you, and it is the secret author of many of the
choices and judgments you make. Most of this book is about the workings
of System 1 and the mutual influences between it and System 2.
The book is divided into five parts. Part 1 presents the basic elements
of a two-systems approach to judgment and choice. It elaborates the
distinction between the automatic operations of System 1 and the
controlled operations of System 2, and shows how associative memory,
the core of System 1, continually constructs a coherent interpretation
of what is going on in our world at any instant. I attempt to give a
sense of the complexity and richness of the automatic and often
unconscious processes that underlie intuitive thinking, and of how
these automatic processes explain the heuristics of judgment. A goal is
to introduce a language for thinking and talking about the mind.
Part 2 updates the study of judgment heuristics and explores a major
puzzle: Why is it so difficult for us to think statistically? We easily
think associatively, we think metaphorically, we think causally, but
statistics requires thinking about many things at once, which is
something that System 1 is not designed to do.
The difficulties of statistical thinking contribute to the main theme
of Part 3, which describes a puzzling limitation of our mind: our
excessive confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent
inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the
world we live in. We are prone to overestimate how much we understand
about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events. Overconfidence is fed by the illusory certainty of hindsight. My views
on this topic have been influenced by Nassim Taleb, the author of The
Black Swan. I hope for watercooler conversations that intelligently
explore the lessons that can be learned from the past while resisting
the lure of hindsight and the illusion of certainty.
The focus of part 4 is a conversation with the discipline of economics
on the nature of decision making and on the assumption that economic
agents are rational. This section of the book provides a current view, informed by the two-system model, of the key concepts of prospect
theory, the model of choice that Amos and I published in 1979.
Subsequent chapters address several ways human choices deviate from the
rules of rationality. I deal with the unfortunate tendency to treat
problems in isolation, and with framing effects, where decisions are
shaped by inconsequential features of choice problems. These
observations, which are readily explained by the features of System 1,
present a deep challenge to the rationality assumption favored in
standard economics.
Part 5 describes recent research that has introduced a distinction
between two selves, the experiencing self and the remembering self,
which do not have the same interests. For example, we can expose people
to two painful experiences. One of these experiences is strictly worse
than the other, because it is longer. But the automatic formation of
memories—a feature of System 1—has its rules, which we can exploit so
that the worse episode leaves a better memory. When people later choose which
episode to repeat, they are, naturally, guided by their remembering
self and expose themselves (their experiencing self) to unnecessary
pain.
The distinction between two selves is applied to the measurement of
wellbeing, where we find again that what makes the experiencing self
happy is not quite the same as what satisfies the remembering self. How
two selves within a single body can pursue happiness raises some
difficult questions, both for individuals and for societies that view
the well-being of the population as a policy objective.
A concluding chapter explores, in reverse order, the implications of
three distinctions drawn in the book: between the experiencing and the
remembering selves, between the conception of agents in classical economics and in behavioral economics (which borrows from psychology),
and between the automatic System 1 and the effortful System 2. I return
to the virtues of educating gossip and to what organizations might do
to improve the quality of judgments and decisions that are made on
their behalf.
hirhome | In this essay I will explore the important connection between
conformism as an adaptive psychological strategy, and the emergence of
the phenomenon of ethnicity. My argument will be that it makes sense
that nature made us conformists. And once humans acquired this adaptive
strategy, I will argue further, the development of ethnic organization
was inevitable. Understanding the adaptive origins of conformism, as we
shall see, is perhaps the most useful way to shed light on what
ethnicity is—at least when examined from the functional point of view,
which is to say from the point of view of the adaptive problems that
ethnicity solves. I shall begin with a few words about our final
destination.
Ethnicity is a phenomenon that rightly occupies much attention in lay
and scholarly circles alike, because it is relevant to almost
everything that humans do. What is it? From the descriptive point of
view, ethnicity is normative culture. That is to say, an ethnie is a collection of human
beings who more or less agree on how a human life should be lived:
which foods should be avoided, which eaten, and how the latter should
be prepared; what sorts of behaviors are funny, shameful, offensive
(and which aren't); by what specific ritual displays should politeness
be expressed in a million different contexts; what forms of dress and
cosmetic enhancement are appropriate for members of either sex; etc.
Ethnicity is a collection of 'oughts' and 'ought nots' that get passed
down more or less as a package along with the associated social label
inherited from one's parents; "I am an X." In some academic circles,
the question "Which ethnie has figured out the right way to live?" will
immediately be met with the following retort:
"Why, the premise is absurd! Why should there be one best way to live a
human life?" Perhaps. But this cosmopolitan multiculturalist complaint
belongs to a clear minority. To the same question, most human beings
all around the world have a ready answer, and it is always the same;
"My ethnie lives life the way a human should." Consequently, members of
ethnie A can easily amuse, offend, or shock members of ethnie B merely
in the act of conforming to the 'oughts' and 'ought nots' that As feel
obligated to pass down from one generation to the next.
Such haughty or offended reactions are usually labeled 'ethnocentrism',
or, depending on their intensity and negativity, 'prejudice' and
'racism'. Many academics consider ethnocentrism a "bad" thing in any of
its forms. But is it? Yes, it is a bad thing, very much so. The values
of science require that we root out from our observational methods any
source of consistent, distorting bias; and believing that cultural
difference implies error makes it well-nigh impossible for the social
scientist to make much progress in the study of cultural variation.
Even more important, by my lights at least, is that so long as we are
not cosmopolitan and therefore tolerant and compassionate with respect
to the ways of our neighbors, we are still moral failures.
Norm-conformism is an adaptive strategy that maximizes the number of
potential interactants in the conformist's local population. It makes sense to lament and oppose specific outcomes of particular conformist processes, such as some silent majorities, and ethnic prejudice. But to
treat "conformism" and its consequences as a generalized evil in the
abstract would spill a narrowly applicable moral evaluation into domains where not only does morality not apply, but where even a non-moral
interpretation of the negative judgment "bad" will also not fit, given
that norm-conformism does a lot of useful work helping humans navigate
their social world. As always, it is best to put our moral goals in charge of
conduct directed towards our fellow human beings. If we turn them
instead into axiomatic priors of a scientific analysis, we saddle our
attempt to understand human perception and behavior with
epistemological baggage that makes it harder to understand why people
do the things they do. Such ignorance can lead us to hurt people when
we meant to help, and it follows directly that this is ethically undesirable. Therefore, if
we have a compassion-based obligation to, first, do no harm, then we
have a moral imperative to be honest about what causes human behavior,
even if we would prefer to have been designed differently. Wishful
thinking will not heal a troubled world, but an improved understanding
of it just may.
hirhome | If ethnic actors represent ethnic groups as essentialized “natural”
groups despite the fact that ethnic essences do not exist, we must
understand why. This article presents a hypothesis and evidence that
humans process ethnic groups (and a few other related social
categories) as if they were “species” because their surface
similarities to species make them inputs to the “living kinds” mental
module that initially evolved to process species level categories. The
main similarities responsible are (1) category-based endogamy and (2)
descent-based membership. Evolution encouraged this because processing
ethnic groups as species—at least in the ancestral environment—solved
adaptive problems having to do with interactional discriminations and
behavioral prediction. Coethnics (like conspecifics) share many
strongly intercorrelated “properties” that are not obvious on first
inspection. Since interaction with out-group members is costly because
of coordination failure due to different norms between ethnic groups,
thinking of ethnic groups as species adaptively promotes interactional
discriminations towards the in-group (including endogamy). It also
promotes inductive generalizations, which allow acquisition of reliable
knowledge for behavioral prediction without too much costly interaction
with out-group members. The relevant cognitive-science literature is
reviewed, and cognitive field-experiment and ethnographic evidence from
Mongolia is advanced to support the hypothesis.
The evidence from Mongolia supports the hypothesis that humans process
ethnies as natural living kinds (theoretical considerations suggest
that they do so at the “species” level). My Torguud subjects have a
blood-based model for assigning individuals to ethnies. Beyond this,
they consider such assignment to carry implications for ethnic
category-based behavior even without any exposure to other members of
their ethnic category, and they seem to believe that the ineffable
“something” responsible for this is carried somehow “inside.” All of
these parallel essentialist thinking in natural living kinds,
suggesting that my subjects’ thinking about ethnies is not only
primordialist but essentialist and that there is no difference between
an ethnic group and a species from the point of view of the schemas
that are primed to process them. Processing endogamous norm groups as
species, I have argued, was adaptive in the ancestral environment
because (1) it allowed us to learn a lot about out-groups in a very
inexpensive way, in particular by making inductive inferences about
nonobvious properties, and (2) it made possible processes of
discrimination that prevented us from incurring the costs of
coordination failure. The reason these benefits have been obtained
specifically by processing these groups as species results from the
fact that ethnies exhibit the most diagnostic features of species:
group-based endogamy and descent-based membership. This made it easy
for a blind evolutionary process to exapt a preexisting architecture by
simply failing to discourage the priming by ethnies of the living-kinds
module. This is not, I think, how we think of social categories in
general but only how we think of those categories which, as in ethnies,
exhibit the strongly diagnostic features of biological species, such as
feudal classes and castes.
alternet | In his desire to placate white folks and appear reasonable,
Jonathan Capehart lets Wilson off the hook. The implication of
Capehart’s argument is that Michael Brown is an acceptable, justifiable
casualty in this decades-long police war on a small Midwestern
community. But if you believe that All Black lives matter, that is an
unconscionable conclusion, one that “offends my sense of right and
wrong.” As “respectable” Blacks are wont to do, the Capeharts of the
world need to believe that if Black people would just “act right” and
“do right,” we would be all right. But in a system of white supremacy, there isn’t that much act right in the world.
Jonathan,
surely you know a suit and tie won’t protect you. So we’re going to
keep on marching, as you said. And we will keep holding aloft the banner
of Michael Brown. We will do so, because Black folks have already
tested out your theory of respectability. We’ve been trying to save our
lives by dressing right, talking right and never, ever fucking up since
about 1877. That shit has not worked.
In an ideal world of crime
and punishment, the officer would have had the legal leeway and good
sense to pick these boys up, take them back down to the convenience
store, make them apologize and work out an arrangement to work off the
cigarillos they stole. That is one example of restorative justice and of
the world we are fighting for. We are trying to get free, and that
means we bring everybody with us, whether your suit is tailored or your
pants sag. When the revolution comes, we will leave no one behind.
NYTimes |
The neoliberal reaction that set in from the late ‘70s, escalating
under Reagan and his successors, hit the poorest and most oppressed
sectors of society even more than the large majority, who have suffered
relative stagnation or decline while wealth accumulates in very few
hands. Reagan’s drug war, deeply racist in conception and execution,
initiated a new Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander’s apt term for the revived
criminalization of black life, evident in the shocking incarceration
rates and the devastating impact on black society.
Reality is of course more complex than any simple recapitulation, but
this is, unfortunately, a reasonably accurate first approximation to
one of the two founding crimes of American society, alongside of the
expulsion or extermination of the indigenous nations and destruction of
their complex and rich civilizations.
‘Intentional ignorance’ regarding inconvenient truths about the
suffering of African- Americans can also be used to frame the genocide
of Native Americans.
G.Y.: While Jefferson may have understood the moral turpitude upon
which slavery was based, in his “Notes on the State of Virginia,” he
says that black people are dull in imagination, inferior in reasoning
to whites, and that the male orangutans even prefer black women over
their own. These myths, along with the black codes following the civil
war, functioned to continue to oppress and police black people. What
would you say are the contemporary myths and codes that are enacted to
continue to oppress and police black people today?
N.C.: Unfortunately, Jefferson was far from alone. No need to review
the shocking racism in otherwise enlightened circles until all too
recently. On “contemporary myths and codes,” I would rather defer to
the many eloquent voices of those who observe and often experience
these bitter residues of a disgraceful past.
Perhaps the most appalling contemporary myth is that none of this
happened. The title of Baptist’s book is all too apt, and the aftermath
is much too little known and understood.
There is also a common variant of what has sometimes been called
“intentional ignorance” of what it is inconvenient to know: “Yes, bad
things happened in the past, but let us put all of that behind us and
march on to a glorious future, all sharing equally in the rights and
opportunities of citizenry.” The appalling statistics of today’s
circumstances of African-American life can be confronted by other
bitter residues of a shameful past, laments about black cultural
inferiority, or worse, forgetting how our wealth and privilege was
created in no small part by the centuries of torture and degradation of
which we are the beneficiaries and they remain the victims. As for the
very partial and hopelessly inadequate compensation that decency would
require — that lies somewhere between the memory hole and anathema.
Jefferson, to his credit, at least recognized that the slavery in which
he participated was “the most unremitting despotism on the one part,
and degrading submissions on the other.” And the Jefferson Memorial in
Washington displays his words that “Indeed I tremble for my country
when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep
forever.” Words that should stand in our consciousness alongside of
John Quincy Adams’s reflections on the parallel founding crime over
centuries, the fate of “that hapless race of native Americans, which we
are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty…among the
heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring
[it] to judgment.”
What matters is our judgment, too long and too deeply suppressed, and
the just reaction to it that is as yet barely contemplated.
alternet |The following is the latest in a new series of articles on AlterNet called Fear in America that launched this March. Read the introduction to the series.
When
black people wake up and begin the day, we have a wide range of issues
we have to think about before leaving our homes. Will a police officer
kill us today? Or, will some George Zimmerman vigilante see us as a
threat in our own neighborhoods and kill us? We brace ourselves for
those white colleagues who are pissed Barack Obama won both elections
and take out their racist rage on us. When we drive our cars, we have to
wonder if we’ll be pulled over because our cars look too expensive for a
black person to be driving. If we’re poor and sick, we wonder if we'll
be able to be treated for our illness. We have a lot on our minds, and
sometimes it’s overwhelming.
Here are a few examples of things we have to be afraid of that white people don’t (or not nearly as much).
NYTimes | Scrawled on Starbucks
cups, the words “Race Together” were intended to stimulate
conversations about race relations in America, beginning just days
before the company’s annual shareholders meeting on Wednesday. But the
coffee company’s campaign has instead unleashed widespread vitriol and
derision.
The company effort,
which began this week, lit up social media, drawing criticism and
skepticism. The attacks grew so hostile that Corey duBrowa, the senior
vice president for global communications at Starbucks,
temporarily deleted his Twitter account on Monday. “Last night I felt
personally attacked in a cascade of negativity,” Mr. duBrowa wrote in a post on Medium on Tuesday.
The fury and confusion boiled down to a simple question: What was Starbucks thinking?
Reactions have ranged from video parodies of customer interactions with
baristas to some hostile online attacks aimed at corporate executives.
Many have pointed out that the company’s leadership is predominantly
white, while many of its baristas are members of minorities.
Others pleaded for a more traditional relationship with the businesses they patronize.
Gwen
Ifill, the co-anchor of “PBS NewsHour,” wrote in a tweet on Tuesday:
“Honest to God, if you start to engage me in a race conversation before
I’ve had my morning coffee, it will not end well.”
At
the Wednesday gathering in Seattle, Howard D. Schultz, the chief
executive of Starbucks, addressed the nascent public relations campaign
accompanied by the stagecraft of African-American guest speakers like
the Academy Award winner Common and ending with Jennifer Hudson’s
rousing rendition of “Hallelujah” at the close of the presentation.
“Race
is an unorthodox and even uncomfortable topic for an annual meeting,”
he acknowledged. “Where others see costs, risks, excuses and
hopelessness, we see and create pathways of opportunity — that is the
role and responsibility of a for-profit, public company.” Fist tap Arnach (for instigating me to read Thinking Fast and Slow)
kcur | There have been two Department of Justice Reports, two police officers shot, and several high-level resignations since our last conversation about the whirlwind of events in Ferguson, Missouri. A reporter, a professor and a reverend give us their perspectives on the latest news.
Guests:
Reverend Willis Johnson, pastor, Well Springs Church
Clarence Lang, professor, department of African and African-American Studies, The University of Kansas
guardian |For
an influential group of advanced thinkers, violence is a type of
backwardness. In the most modern parts of the world, these thinkers tell
us, war has practically disappeared. The world’s great powers are
neither internally divided nor inclined to go to war with one another,
and with the spread of democracy, the increase of wealth and the
diffusion of enlightened values these states preside over an era of
improvement the like of which has never been known. For those who lived
through it, the last century may have seemed peculiarly violent, but
that, it is argued, is mere subjective experience and not much more than
anecdote. Scientifically assessed, the number of those killed in
violent conflicts was steadily dropping. The numbers are still falling,
and there is reason to think they will fall further. A shift is under
way, not strictly inevitable but enormously powerful. After millennia of
slaughter, humankind is entering the Long Peace.
This has proved to be a popular message. The Harvard psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: a history of violence and humanity
(2011) has not only been an international bestseller – more than
a thousand pages long and containing a formidable array of graphs and
statistics, the book has established something akin to a contemporary
orthodoxy. It is now not uncommon to find it stated, as though it were a
matter of fact, that human beings are becoming less violent and more
altruistic. Ranging freely from human pre-history to the present day,
Pinker presents his case with voluminous erudition. Part of his argument
consists in showing that the past was more violent than we tend to
imagine. Tribal peoples that have been praised by anthropologists for
their peaceful ways, such as the Kalahari !Kung and the Arctic Inuit, in
fact have rates of death by violence not unlike those of contemporary
Detroit; while the risk of violent death in Europe is a fraction of
what it was five centuries ago. Not only have violent deaths declined in
number. Barbaric practices such as human sacrifice and execution by
torture have been abolished, while cruelty towards women, children and
animals is, Pinker claims, in steady decline. This “civilising process” –
a term Pinker borrows from the sociologist Norbert Elias – has come
about largely as a result of the increasing power of the state, which in
the most advanced countries has secured a near-monopoly of force. Other
causes of the decline in violence include the invention of printing,
the empowerment of women, enhanced powers of reasoning and expanding
capacities for empathy in modern populations, and the growing influence
of Enlightenment ideals.
HuffPo | This complete penetration of policing into everyday life establishes a
world of unceasing terror and violence. When everyone is a criminal by
default, police are handed an extraordinary amount of discretionary
power. "Discretion" may sound like an innocuous or even positive policy,
but its effect is to make every single person's freedom dependent on
the mercy of individual officers. There are no more laws, there are only
police. The "rule of law," by which people are supposed to be treated
equally according to a consistent set of principles, becomes the "rule
of personal whim."
And this is precisely what occurs in Ferguson. As others have noted,
the Ferguson courts appear to work as an orchestrated racket to extract
money from the poor. The thousands upon thousands of warrants that are
issued, according to the DOJ, are "not to protect public safety but
rather to facilitate fine collection." Residents are routinely charged
with minor administrative infractions. Most of the arrest warrants stem
from traffic violations, but nearly every conceivable human behavior is
criminalized. An offense can be found anywhere, including citations for
"Manner of Walking in Roadway," "High Grass and Weeds," and 14 kinds of
parking violation. The dystopian absurdity reaches its apotheosis in the
deliciously Orwellian transgression "failure to obey." (Obey what?
Simply to obey.) In fact, even if one does obey to the letter, solutions
can be found. After Henry Davis was brutally beaten by four Ferguson officers, he found himself charged with "destruction of official property" for bleeding on their uniforms.
None
of this is even to mention the blinding levels of racism, which remain
the central fact of police interactions in Ferguson and nationwide. The
overwhelming force of this violent and exploitative policing system is
directed at the African American population. In 2013, 92 percent of Ferguson's arrest warrants were issued against African Americans, and black Fergusonians were 68 percent less likely
than others to have their court cases dismissed. The racism is so
blatant and comprehensive that the DOJ concluded that "Ferguson law
enforcement practices are directly shaped and perpetuated by racial
bias." Considering the qualified and colorless language typically
deployed in government documents, this is an astonishingly forceful
statement.
Ferguson's racism has been central to the media
coverage of the release of the DOJ report. But in a certain way, by
focusing entirely on disparate racial impacts without examining the
sheer scale of the brutal state juggernaut, one misses crucial facts.
MSNBC listed as the DOJ's number one
"most shocking" finding the fact that "at least one municipal employee
thought electing a black president was laughable." But the existence of
racist views in the department is not the most shocking fact, not by a
country mile. Rather, endemic racism in policing comes standard.
However, that racism occurs in the wider context of an ever-enlarging
interlocking system of administrative bureaucracy and police violence.
The
other pitfall in analyzing the Ferguson report is to see it as being
about Ferguson. There are 19,492 municipal governments in America, and
the chances that Ferguson happens to be the worst are extremely slim. In
fact, there is strong evidence that in the world of better funded, more militarized, more technologically advanced
police departments, Ferguson is simply a high-profile case study. While
the Ferguson nightmare may dwarf the problems in cities like Boston,
American policing is so out-of-control that Ferguson-style practices can
occur on at least some level in almost every department.
It's
hard to believe, but the Ferguson police department's massive deliberate
racism only represents one of its problems. The DOJ report shows not
just a racist criminal justice system, but one in which the very act of
being alive has been made a crime, and in which nearly every resident is
wanted by the law at every moment of every day.
spectator | Just for once, let us try this argument with an open mind, employing
arithmetic and geography and going easy on the adjectives. Two great
land powers face each other. One of these powers, Russia, has given up
control over 700,000 square miles of valuable territory. The other, the
European Union, has gained control over 400,000 of those square miles.
Which of these powers is expanding?
There remain 300,000 neutral square miles between the two, mostly in
Ukraine. From Moscow’s point of view, this is already a grievous,
irretrievable loss. As Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the canniest of the
old Cold Warriors, wrote back in 1997, ‘Ukraine… is a geopolitical pivot
because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform
Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.’
This diminished Russia feels the spread of the EU and its armed wing,
Nato, like a blow on an unhealed bruise. In February 2007, for
instance, Vladimir Putin asked sulkily, ‘Against whom is this expansion
intended?’
I have never heard a clear answer to that question. The USSR, which
Nato was founded to fight, expired in August 1991. So what is Nato’s
purpose now? Why does it even still exist?
There is no obvious need for an adversarial system in post-Soviet
Europe. Even if Russia wanted to reconquer its lost empire, as some
believe (a belief for which there is no serious evidence), it is too
weak and too poor to do this. So why not invite Russia to join the great
western alliances? Alas, it is obvious to everyone, but never stated,
that Russia cannot ever join either Nato or the EU, for if it did so it
would unbalance them both by its sheer size. There are many possible
ways of dealing with this. One would be an adult recognition of the
limits of human power, combined with an understanding of Russia’s
repeated experience of invasions and its lack of defensible borders.
guardian | In the lexicon of human migration there are still hierarchical words,
created with the purpose of putting white people above everyone else.
One of those remnants is the word “expat”.
What is an expat? And who is an expat? According to Wikipedia, “an
expatriate (often shortened to expat) is a person temporarily or
permanently residing in a country other than that of the person’s
upbringing. The word comes from the Latin terms ex (‘out of’) and patria
(‘country, fatherland’)”.
Defined that way, you should expect that any person going to work
outside of his or her country for a period of time would be an expat,
regardless of his skin colour or country. But that is not the case in
reality; expat is a term reserved exclusively for western white people
going to work abroad.
Africans are immigrants. Arabs are immigrants. Asians are immigrants.
However, Europeans are expats because they can’t be at the same level
as other ethnicities. They are superior. Immigrants is a term set aside
for ‘inferior races’.
Don’t take my word for it. The Wall Street Journal, the leading financial information magazine in the world, has a blog dedicated to the life of expats and recently they featured a story ‘Who is an expat, anyway?’.
Here are the main conclusions: “Some arrivals are described as expats;
others as immigrants; and some simply as migrants. It depends on social
class, country of origin and economic status. It’s strange to hear some
people in Hong Kong described as expats, but not others. Anyone with
roots in a western country is considered an expat … Filipino domestic
helpers are just guests, even if they’ve been here for decades.
Mandarin-speaking mainland Chinese are rarely regarded as expats … It’s a
double standard woven into official policy.”
eutimes | The Ministry of Defense (MoD) is reporting today that the Federation is now in a “state of war” thus bringing to full activation President Putin’s “Dead Hand” nuclear order issued 29 July 2014 to The Strategic Missile Forces (SMF).
According to this report, the full activation of the much feared
“Dead Hand” nuclear option was authorized under President Putin’s
previous order due to the discovery that the nuclear forces of the
United Kingdom (UK) were preparing a first strike against military and
civilian targets located in the Federation.
Both the FSB and Kaspersky Lab experts, the MoD reports, were able to
swiftly reverse engineer the computer code(s) involved in this massive
NSA spying operation which then enabled them to electronically obtain
the launching codes and coordinates of all the UK’s nuclear weapons
showing their plan to launch a first strike against the Federation
during the week of 15 March.
“For the past week, something strange has been going on
in the European internet. For five days, web traffic from Texas to
certain addresses in the UK has been routed through Ukrainian and
Russian telecoms, taking a detour thousands of miles out of the way.
Network traffic often takes a circuitous route as a result of network
congestion or interconnection difficulties, but neither one would be
enough to account for these routes. Instead, this was the result of a
bad route announced by Ukraine’s Vega telecom, inserting itself in
between.
It’s particularly disconcerting because of the sensitive nature of
many of the sites involved. Among the dozens of sites involved was the
UK’s Atomic Weapons Establishment, which is tasked with managing and
delivering the UK’s nuclear warheads, as well as the UK’s official mail
service, the Royal Mail. US defense contractor Lockheed Martin was also
running a VPN connection that was caught up in the redirection.”
RT | The lack of civil rights, the lack of equality, the ‘ghettoization’, the
institutionalization of racism are fundamental and making what is
called ‘America in the 21st century'.
RT:What impact could this
shooting have on police reforms that were supposed to take place
in Ferguson?
Eric Draitser: It’s going to have a significant
impact on everything that is happening in Ferguson. I think first
and foremost we should begin with the impact that it’s going to
have on the on-going protest movement, on the ongoing calls for
justice, and it is not simply reform of the Ferguson Police
Department, but calling attention to the institutionalized racism
that exists both within that institution as well as within the
larger institutions in Missouri and in the US. Of course this
will delegitimize those protests, it will delegitimize that
movement or at least that is the attempt that is going to be
made. We have a very clear precedent here in New York City in the
aftermath of the non-indictment of the killers of Eric Garner.
When we had a massive protest movement developing in New York,
you had a very similar incident in which two police officers were
attacked and that incident was then used to attack the
protesters, that is to say to attack them in the media, attack
them in public relations, and we can expect a very similar
outcome here. It’s very unfortunate because of all of the
information that has come out about the racism, about the
brutality and the other impacts that it was having in Ferguson
itself.
RT:The recent wave of resignations in the
wake of the Michael Brown shooting was supposed to ease tensions.
Does it look like they've had the reverse effect?
ED: They were certainly meant to present the
illusion of changes, cosmetic changes, but again, I don’t think
that anything was really addressing the criminal nature of the
police department there. And certainly it is not easing tensions.
We should come back to the facts in this case. We have
corroborated accounts, that is to say corroborated by multiple
eye-witnesses that the shots that were fired - which the
mainstream media is attempting to allege came from the protesters
- actually came from some distance behind them.
The question then becomes exactly who is benefitting from this,
and who might have perpetrated such an attack, naturally an
investigation is what is really called for. But the larger
question is: does anybody really expect justice and fairness from
the Ferguson Police Department as if they would be the once
investigating this incident. What might need to be called for a
some kind of a special investigation possibly even a special
prosecutor, special investigator, something along those lines,
because the reality is, the situation in Ferguson is a volatile
one and it … really addresses many of the most fundamental
questions in the US regarding racism, social justice,
institutionalization of the brutality, militarization of police.
All of these issues that many of us have been talking for quite a
long time; all of them come to the fore in the recent
developments.
wsws | The US media and political establishment have seized upon the
wounding of two officers in Ferguson, Missouri on Wednesday night to
reiterate their support for the police amid widespread hostility to the
wave of police killings in America.
US President Barack Obama, making an appearance Thursday on the
late-night television program Jimmy Kimmel Live, declared that police
“have a terrifically tough job,” and added that “there was no excuse for
criminal acts.” He added, “They’re criminals, they need to be
arrested.”
These claims come despite the fact that, by their own admission,
police have no information as to who fired the shots that wounded the
officers, or whether the police were even the target. The shots were
reportedly fired from up to 150 yards away.
By contrast, the Obama administration’s own report on the Ferguson
Police Department revealed a “pattern” of criminal activity by police
officers and officials. Obama was not referring to any cops as
“criminals” or calling for their arrest. Instead, the Obama
administration decided not to bring charges against Darren Wilson, who
shot Michael Brown last August.
Prior to the shootings on Wednesday, the police had been on the
defensive, following the release of footage showing the horrific killing
of Charley Leundeu Keunang in Los Angeles on March 1; 19-year-old Tony
Robinson in Madison, Wisconsin on March 6; Anthony Hill in Atlanta,
Georgia on March 9 and many others.
The Justice Department’s report on the Ferguson Police Department,
released last week, documented numerous crimes, including beating and
arresting people and imprisoning the poor in order to compel them to pay
fines.
Shortly before the shooting, Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson
announced his resignation, while the Missouri Supreme Court said it
would place a state judge in charge of the city’s court system. These
moves followed the announcement earlier in the week that Ferguson City
Manager John Shaw would resign.
Ferguson Mayor James Knowles used the killings as an opportunity to
take aim at the Justice Department report. He told NPR Thursday that
“there continues to be hostile language coming out of the Justice
Department—or rather, from Eric Holder, specifically.”
On Thursday, Rudy Giuliani, the former Republican mayor of New York
City, denounced Obama for not going far enough to directly ally himself
with the police. Giuliani declared that it is “the obligation of the
president … to explain to the American people and the world that our
police are the best in the world; they are the most trained; they are
the most restrained.”
capitalnewyork | Computers operating on the New York Police Department’s computer
network at its 1 Police Plaza headquarters have been used to alter
Wikipedia pages containing details of alleged police brutality, a review
by Capital has revealed.
“The matter is under internal review,”
an NYPD spokeswoman, Det. Cheryl Crispin, wrote in an email to Capital
after examples of the changes were presented to the NYPD.
The
edits and changes were linked to the NYPD through a series of Internet
Protocol addresses, or IP addresses, which can be publicly tracked by
various websites. (Here, for example, is one website that shows a number of IP addresses registered to the NYPD.) IP addresses can locate where a computer is when it connects to the Internet.
Computer
users identified by Capital as working on the NYPD headquarters'
network have edited and attempted to delete Wikipedia entries for
several well-known victims of police altercations, including entries for
Eric Garner, Sean Bell, and Amadou Diallo. Capital identified 85 NYPD
addresses that have edited Wikipedia, although it is unclear how many
users were involved, as computers on the NYPD network can operate on the
department’s range of IP addresses.
NYPD IP addresses have also been used to edit entries on
stop-and-frisk, NYPD scandals, and prominent figures in the city’s
political and police leadership.
There are more than 15,000 IP
addresses registered to the NYPD, which employs 50,000 people, including
uniformed officers and civilians. Notable Wikipedia activity was linked
to about a dozen of those NYPD IP addresses. Fist tap Ed.
There are thousands of small towns and cities all across the US that
budget for substantial revenues from fines and traffic enforcement in
lieu of higher taxes. If the citizens don't like it, they can elect a
new city council next year. Issues of racial profiling and police practice are also at issue everywhere. These, too, are subject to review by votes.
Why is Ferguson any different than any of these 10,000 other Valkanvanian hamlets?
St. Louis County has a total population of just over a million people
and ninety municipal governments. The city of Toronto has
over two million people and one municipal government. The City of New
York has eight million people and makes do with one municipal
government. It follows that each resident of St. Louis County has to
support roughly ten to twenty times as many police chiefs, mayors, and
possibly even city councillors as a resident of Toronto.
Since many residents of St. Louis County do not want to pay for this
much government, the cities have grown dependent on fines as "revenue".
Since fines apply to residents of other towns, a municipality that
sustains itself through fines thus derives a percentage of its revenue
from outside its boundaries. These municipalities thus find themselves
in a variant of the "prisoner's dilemma"; the first municipal government
to eliminate fine revenue will have to raise taxes, while its
residents will continue to provide fine "revenue" for the surrounding
municipalities. Even worse, some of these municipalities cannot sustain
their operations from their tax base alone, which means that not
everyone can cooperate.
White flight spawned the "system" of racketeering hamlets that operates in
St. Louis County; continuing racism accounts for the failure to undertake any sensible
amalgamation. Once developed, the system of racketeering hamlets remains in place
because of a prisoner's dilemma paradox that no hanlet can escape
on its own.
NYTimes | Earlier,
police SWAT units surrounded a house a few blocks from the scene of the
shooting, and officers climbed onto the roof and broke through a vent
to gain access. The police took in three people from the house for
questioning and released them hours later.
The
three, Iresha Turner, who lives at the home, and her friends Martez
Little and Lamont Underwood, said they had attended the protest but had
nothing to do with the shootings. Ms. Turner and Mr. Underwood said they
fled from the protest to Ms. Turner’s house when the shots were fired,
and Mr. Little said he came to Mr. Turner’s home later and was also
detained.
Ms.
Turner said her 6-year-old son had been traumatized by the search and
the implication that his mother might have something to do with the
crime.
“I have to live here,” said Ms. Turner, who identified herself as a single mother. “I have no help. I’m a good woman.”
Mr.
Underwood speculated that someone might have seen him and Ms. Turner
speeding away from the protest scene and reported it to the police.
cnn | The shots rang out shortly after midnight, at the end of a protest against the maligned Ferguson Police Department.That
department has been under fire ever since one of its officers, Darren
Wilson, shot and killed black teenager Michael Brown last August, and
more recently since the release of a scathing Justice Department report
documenting a pattern of racial discrimination.
While the demonstrators' focus was the Ferguson department, neither of the wounded officers is from that St. Louis suburb.
reason | The Department of Justice threatens defendants
with dozens of federal charges that could put them behind bars for
decades unless they accept plea deals and avoid a trial, a punishment
for trying to defend themselves. Department of Justice prosecutors,
working with other agencies like the IRS, seize assets
from Americans and resist giving it back even when there's little
evidence such Americans have done anything wrong. The DOJ engages in a
lot of the same misbehavior found in the Ferguson system of justice—it's
just not motivated by race.
Even though the Department of Justice may attack Ferguson's
revenue-generating, they are quick to defend the role of their own
"Equitable Sharing Program," which encourages law enforcement agencies
to seize property and assets by allowing the agencies to keep 80 percent
of what they take in the program.
A White House report
crafted in the wake of the shooting of Michael Brown and the police's
militarized response to protests defended the program, along with
others, as "valuable and have provided state and local law enforcement
with needed assistance as they carry out their critical missions in
helping to keep the American people safe." Attorney General nominee
Loretta Lynch defended asset forfeiture as a useful tool for law enforcement at a Senate hearing.
Ferguson's police department participates in this federal program. According to research by The Washington Post,
the city has spent more than $100,000 on equipment and weapons paid for
with assets seized by police in Ferguson (this also means the federal
government has also received money from law enforcement activities in
the community as well). The DOJ's press office has not returned calls to
find out whether Ferguson would be booted from the program due to its
behavior. Ferguson officials have said they will attempt to settle
with the Department of Justice, not fight, so probably not. The DOJ has
only cut off access to the Equitable Sharing Program to a handful of
law enforcement agencies. One of them, Maricopa County in Arizona, is
infamous for resistance to attempts by the DOJ to reform the way it
deals with immigrants and Latino citizens. It's easy to look at the
program and see the DOJ using access to its funds as a carrot/stick to
influence the behavior of local law enforcement agencies. This is not
inherently a bad thing, but all of this knowledge about how the DOJ
operates should cause anybody to look askance at the agency's
credibility when it comes to evaluating the accessibility of fiscal
propriety of any justice system in the country.
For that matter, the DOJ, just like Ferguson, brags about the
millions—billions—of dollars it brings in from settlements and
enforcement activities in its annual reports. They put out press
releases and hold press conferences. The difference may be that its
targets are often rich corporations (but not always, as their actions
against a small Long Island vending business
shows). The DOJ and state-level prosecutors are looking for big
paydays, too, to help bolster the budgets of the governments they serve.
My story in Reason's April issue, titled "The Settlement Shakedown," helps explain how this all works out (It's available online now to digital subscribers).
None of this is to dismiss what is clearly racist animus by the
people in power in Ferguson. But if every victim described in the DOJ
report on Ferguson had been white and the racist comments and e-mails
hadn't happened, these incidents would still have been huge violations
of the rights of the citizens. Many would argue that these incidents
wouldn't have happened at all absent the racial component. I cannot
possibly say they're wrong. Every single government in the country is
driven to bring in revenue to perpetuate itself, and their targets will
most likely be those who will have the hardest times protecting or
defending themselves. This often means poor minorities and immigrants,
but don't confuse the symptoms with the cause. Racism just one sorting
tool for governments to decide who they're going to plunder.
guardian | “It has been an honor and a privilege to serve this great city and to
serve with all of you,” said Jackson. “I will continue to assist the
city in anyway I can in my capacity as private citizen.”
City officials said Jackson would receive a severance payment and
health insurance for a year. Lt. Col. Al Eickhoff is to become acting
police chief while city authorities carry out a “a nationwide search”
for a permanent replacement.
The resignation of Jackson has long been anticipated.He was heavily
criticised for his handling of the furore over a white police officer’s
fatal shooting of a black 18-year-old in Ferguson last year.
Residents were appalled that Jackson’s officers left the body of
Michael Brown lying for more than four hours in the residential
side-street where he had been shot dead by Darren Wilson on 9 August.
Successive nights of protests followed Brown’s death.
Jackson eventually apologise to Brown’s family in a video message.
“It was just too long, and I am truly sorry,” he said of the time
Brown’s body was left in the street. The chief was also criticised for
announcing at the same time as he unveiled Wilson’s long-awaited name
that Brown had been caught robbing a convenience store in the minutes
before he was killed.
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