dirty double-00 promised so much and delivered so little...,

HuffPo |  A government psychologist who helped craft policies central to the CIA’s torture program is now advising an FBI-led interrogation project, according to a series of emails revealed in a new independent report.

The High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group is the Obama administration’s response to the now-defunct CIA effort. Its members are dispatched to question terror suspects. Dr. Susan Brandon leads the HIG’s research committee, which studies and recommends the most effective methods of noncoercive interrogation. 

But as a Bush White House official, the new report says, Brandon helped that administration base the legality of the CIA’s interrogation techniques -- now widely denounced as torture -- on the assessments of psychologists present during the interrogations.

“Susan Brandon ... played a central role in the development of the 2005 [Psychological Ethics and National Security] policy,” states the report, which examined the complicity of psychologists in the CIA’s torture program. The language that Brandon helped write, the report says, has served to protect former torturers and their superiors from prosecution.

The report, titled "All The President’s Psychologists," was released last week on the heels of a separate inquiry examining the potential complicity of the American Psychological Association (APA) in the torture program. The latest investigation came from a group of university-affiliated psychologists, other medical professionals and human rights investigators.

Emails from the mid-2000s, cited in the report, tie Brandon to CIA contract psychologists Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, masterminds of the torture program. She had personal contact with them at a conference she arranged in 2003 and, according to emails, appears to have been in regular contact with their CIA supervisor. The extent of Brandon’s knowledge about Mitchell and Jessen’s activities at the time is unknown, though she is included on an email that discusses them as “doing special things to special people in special places.”

"What we see is associations. And the associations with the apparent supervisor of Mitchell and Jessen at each step of the process over a period of three years,” said Nathaniel Raymond, one of the report's co-authors and a program director with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. “The issue here is not about what she thinks about torture; the issue is about what she did in the past to knowingly or unknowingly create a legal heat shield for the president using the ethics of the APA. That’s the issue. This is not a question of torture. It’s a question of alleged corruption."

clintonism is all we have to go on when anticipating a politican whose only core value is seeking high-office

theatlantic |  Hillary Clinton has already staked out multiple stances that contrast starkly with Bill Clinton's policies. This week, in Las Vegas, she laid out a set of immigration policies including "full and equal citizenship" for undocumented immigrants, protecting the parents of young "Dreamer" undocumented immigrants from deportation, and softening deportation policies. Bill Clinton, on the other hand, signed several restrictive immigration measures during his tenure, speeding deportations, increasing penalties, and making it harder for the undocumented to gain legal status. The measures were passed by the Republican Congress at the time.

Hillary Clinton recently expressed hope that the Supreme Court would make same-sex marriage a constitutional right; her announcement video even featured a gay couple talking about their upcoming wedding. Bill Clinton, in 1996, signed the Defense of Marriage Act to deny federal marriage protections to same sex couples—a law that the Supreme Court ruled largely unconstitutional in 2013.

As the campaign continues, progressives can be expected to push Hillary Clinton to take more stances that contravene Bill Clinton's record. Trade and financial regulation are two notable areas of liberal angst: Many critics blame Bill Clinton's repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act for the 2008 financial crisis, and the North American Free Trade Agreement, which he championed, is frequently cited in the current debate over trade authority as an example of a bad free-trade deal. Welfare reform is another Bill Clinton compromise that many modern-day progressives reject. The Hillary Clinton of 2016 has yet to take a position on these issues, though she issued a statement expressing concern about the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. Obama strongly supports the deal, and Hillary Clinton previously advocated it as secretary of state.

NYTimes |  There are many ways for journalists to gain access to an inaccessible presidential candidate. Hang on the rope line and shout. Fire off questions via e-mail to media reps. Stake out. Ambush!

Now comes what we’ll call the “air question.” In a post this afternoon, New York Times reporter Amy Chozick notes that Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton has answered seven questions since launching her campaign on April 12. Or roughly three-tenths of a question per day.

Given that rate, Chozick and the New York Times have decided to disclose the questions they would have posed to Clinton if only they’d had the opportunity. Coming off of Clinton’s remarks Tuesday about immigration reform, the Times launches the first in a series:

“President Obama said his executive action on immigration went as far as the law will allow. You say you would go beyond what he did. How could you stretch the law further than the president of your own party and his Justice Department says it can go?”

The Erik Wemple Blog pledges another post on this series if the Times air-questions Clinton on her sparse Q-and-A availability, which would be a glorious meta-media moment.

america: not only malfunction and malinvestment - but outright criminal malfeasance...,

charleshughsmith |  Despite the PR about how corporate profits benefit widows and orphans, this vast wealth is concentrated in the top 1% and the top 5%.

I am honored to share a remarkable data base of Corporate Fines and Settlements from the early 1990s to the present compiled by Jon Morse. Here is Jon's description of his project to assemble a comprehensive list of all corporate fines and settlements that can be verified by media reports:

"This spreadsheet is all the corporate fines/settlements I’ve been able to find sourced articles about, mostly in the period from the 1990’s up to today (with a few 80’s and 70’s). This is by far the most comprehensive list of such things online. At least that I could find, because the lack of any decent list is what made me start compiling this list in the first place."What struck me was the sheer number of corporate violations of laws and regulations--thousands upon thousands, the vast majority of which occurred since corporate profits began their incredible ascent in the early 2000s--and the list of those paying hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and settlements, which reads like a who's who of Corporate America and Top 100 Global Corporations.

 

I encourage you to open one of the three alphabetical tabs at the bottom of the spreadsheet on Google Docs and scroll down to find your favorite super-profitable corporation. 

Many have a long list of fines and settlements, and many of the fines are in excess of $100 million. Many are for blatant cartel price-fixing, not disclosing the dangers of the company's heavily promoted medications, destroying documents to thwart an investigation of wrong-doing, etc.

In other words, these were not wrist-slaps for minor oversights of complex regulations-- these are blatant violations of core laws of the land.

america: when investment and policy coalesce around a screen-writer's philosophical pretensions...,

mises |  Mr. Max Ehrendfreund, writing in the Washington Post’s Wonkblog, believes that he has discovered something new: that the world is producing too much and doesn’t know what to do with it. His solution, of course, is to confiscate the overproduced products, such as oil and cotton, from its rightful owners and give it to the people who need it. This phony problem and its statist solution goes back at least as far at the 1930’s socialist calls for “production for use” vs. the hated capitalist concept of “production for profit“.

Mr. Ehrenfreund commiserates that a “surplus…challenges some basic principles of conventional economics…”. Ah, now we see why Mr. Ehrenfreund has a problem; he understands only “conventional economics”. Austrians have no such problem understanding why many commodities are currently in surplus. Our understanding of Austrian business cycle theory tells us that years of interest rate suppression by monetary authorities worldwide has disrupted the time structure of production; i.e., that artificially low interest rates have led entrepreneurs and their business partners to believe that sufficient resources exist for the profitable completion of longer term projects, such as increasing investment in oil and cotton production. Austrians do not contend that there cannot be a surplus of some goods. Of course, there can! But we know that a surplus of some goods means that there is a scarcity of others. Resources were “malinvested” in some projects instead of those more urgently desired by the public.

Here’s a rather humorous example.  A good friend was teaching in West Germany during the age of Tito, when he and his wife decided to vacation along Yugoslavia’s beautiful Adriatic coast. While there they tried in vain to find swimming accessories, like fins and masks, but shop after shop sold only one product. That one product? Panama hats! True story. So here is a good example of zero demand for Panama hats and a scarcity of swimming accessories in one of the most beautiful seaside vacation spots in the world. But these surpluses and scarcities are not always so obviously related. A surplus of oil and cotton may mean that there is a scarcity of millions of other goods that could otherwise have been produced.

The socialist dogma, to which Mr. Ehrenfeund seems to be enamored, blinds him to the concept that a successful economy does not need centralized control. In fact a successful economy needs no guidance at all, except the rational decisions of the owners of the means of production to put their resources to the most desired use. How do they know what that “most desired use” is? The price system tells them! A dynamic economy is controlled by millions upon millions of people making billions upon billions of decisions that are in constant flux. Manipulating the price of any factor of production, such as cotton prices, will cause disruptions. But our governments have done much worse than manipulate the price of a few major factors o f production; they have manipulated the price of money itself, the medium of exchange that is the lubricating and knowledge transmission device for ALL economic decisions.

So, Mr. Ehrendreund, brush up on your Mises, Rothbard, Hayek, Habeler, and Garrison. Your confusion will disappear to be replaced, no doubt, by exasperation that you ever could have harbored such silly notions as those you espouse in your article.

america: when industry and infrastructure coalesce around a window-dresser's design aesthetic...,

Guardian |  Behold the shopping mall – the built epitome, according to its critics, of the mindless, car-bound consumerism of white-bread suburban America. Yet Southdale Center, the first fully enclosed, climate-controlled collection of shops from which all the 1,100 or so similarly designed malls now standing across the United States descend, came from the mind of an anti-car, pro-pedestrian European Jewish socialist.

Victor Gruen, a refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria, arrived in America in 1938 with high architectural aims. He soon launched a career creating New York City storefronts for urban businesses, like Ciro’s on Fifth Avenue and Steckler’s on Broadway, 14 years into which he received a commission to design something else entirely: a shopping centre 10 miles outside Minneapolis.

This job offered Gruen a blank canvas on which to realise his long-imagined utopian vision of an indoor city centre that would import the urbanity of his native Vienna into his fast-growing adopted homeland. Southdale itself went up as he had imagined it – but nothing else went according to plan. By the 1970s, Gruen had returned to Austria to live out his days having all-too-clearly realised what a suburban monster he’d created.

Though few built environments now seem as prosaic as that of the shopping mall, it looked downright radical when Gruen first came up with it. He first publicly submitted such a design in 1943, to Architectural Forum magazine’s competition “Architecture 194X”, which called upon modern architects to imagine the city of the post-war future. Alas Gruen’s entry, with its full enclosure and lack of a central square, struck even those forward-thinking editors as a bit much, and they sent him back to the drawing board.

The real postwar America proved far more accommodating to Gruen’s vision than the imagined one. The 1952 commission that brought Southdale into the world came from the Dayton family, a name synonymous with department stores in 1950s Minneapolis. They wanted a shopping centre to complement the new Dayton’s location that was planned for the suburb of Edina, a growing town of 15,000 people located — in line with the concerns of cold war America — just outside the blast radius of a nuclear bomb dropped on the city.

scientific american's predictions from just 10 years ago are all wrong...,

gizmodo |  Recently, we did an experiment: We took an outdated issue of a respected popular science magazine, Scientific American, and researched exactly what happened to the highly-touted breakthroughs of the era that would supposedly change everything. What we discovered is just how terrible we are at predicting the long arc of scientific discovery.

The daily churn of science news tends toward optimism. You know what I’m talking about: New cure! New breakthrough smashing Moore’s law! New revolutionary technology! I write about science, and I am always uncomfortable trying to predict how a new piece of research will change the future. 

That’s because science can be wrong. It can go down dead ends. And even when it doesn’t, almost everything is more complicated and takes longer than we initially think. But just how wrong and how long? 

We can’t very well time travel to the future for those answers, but we can look backward. I recently dig up the 2005 December issue of Scientific American and went entry by entry through the Scientific American 50, a list of the most important trends in science that year. I chose 2005 because 10 years seemed recent enough for continuity between scientific questions then and now but also long enough ago for actual progress. More importantly, I chose Scientific American because the magazine 

publishes sober assessments of science, often by scientists themselves. (Read: It can be a little boring, but it’s generally accurate.) But I also trusted it not to pick obviously frivolous and clickbaity things.

Number one on the list was a stem cell breakthrough that turned out to be one of the biggest cases of scientific fraud ever. (To be fair, it fooled everyone.) But the list held other unfulfilled promises, too: companies now defunct, an FBI raid, and many, many technologies simply still on the verge of finally making it a decade later. By my count, only two of its 16 medical discoveries of 2005 have resulted in a drug or hospital procedures so far. The rosy future is not yet here.

Science is a not a linear march forward, as headlines seem to imply. Science is a long slow slog, and often a twisty one at that. That’s obvious in retrospect, when we can see the dead ends and the roadblocks. It’s less obvious looking ahead, as we’re being bombarded with promising new drugs and wondermaterial breakthroughs. So let’s take a look together.

english spoken here...?

kunstler |  Of course, the Freddie Gray riots in Baltimore last week prompted the usual cries for “an honest conversation about race,” and countless appeals to fix the “broken” public school system. So, in the spirit of those pleas, I will advance a very plain and straightforward idea: above all, teach young black kids how to speak English correctly.

Nothing is more important than acculturating ghetto kids out of their pidgin patois and into real English with all of its tenses, verb forms, and cases. It’s more important initially than learning arithmetic, history, and science. I would argue that it is hardly possible to learn these other things without first being grounded in real grammatical English.

When these kids grow up, their manner of speech will identify them and their prospects for success at least as much as the color of their skin — and probably more, in my opinion. Their ability to speak English correctly will be the salient feature in how others assess the content of their character

I’m sure by now that the racial justice hand-wringers are squirming over this proposal. All dialects are equally okay in this rainbow society, they might argue. No they’re not. Have you noticed that TV news, business, show biz, education, and politics increasingly employ people whose parents came from India and other parts of Asia. Do they speak in a patois lacking in complex verb forms? Apparently not. Are they succeeding in American life, such as it is? Apparently so.

Notice that the speech issue — how people talk — is never part of the “honest conversation about race” that we are supposed to have. Has anybody noticed that in his public speeches Martin Luther King spoke regular English correctly, if with a Southern inflection? Has anybody noticed how important that was in his role as “a communicator?” Why is this crucial question of language absent from the public conversation about “the intractable problems of race in America?” Is it because both blacks and whites are too fearful, too cowardly, to face this particular problem of how English is spoken?

Perhaps this raises the specter of IQ. I’d like to know how any IQ test can be meaningful when the person taking it can’t speak the language that the test is given in. I’m sure that any ghetto kid drilled in English for two years would show substantial improvement in such a generalized test. But, of course, first the American people of all skin tones would have to admit that this is important.

We don’t want to. We’d rather wring our hands over “structural racism” and other canards.

james baldwin's report from occupied territories 1966

thenation |  This is why those pious calls to “respect the law,” always to be heard from prominent citizens each time the ghetto explodes, are so obscene. The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer. To respect the law, in the context in which the American Negro finds himself, is simply to surrender his self-respect.

* * *

On April 17, some school children overturned a fruit stand in Harlem. This would have been a mere childish prank if the children had been white—had been, that is, the children of that portion of the citizenry for whom the police work and who have the power to control the police. But these children were black, and the police chased them and beat them and took out their guns; and Frank Stafford lost his eye in exactly the same way The Harlem Six lost their liberty—by trying to protect the younger children. Daniel Hamm, for example, tells us that “…we heard children scream. We turned around and walked back to see what happened. I saw this policeman with his gun out and with his billy in his hand I like put myself in the way to keep him from shooting the kids. Because first of all he was shaking like a leaf and jumping all over the place. And I thought he might shoot one of them.”

He was arrested, along with Wallace Baker, carried to the police station, beaten—“six and twelve at a time would beat us. They got so tired beating us they just came in and started spitting on us—they even bring phlegm up and spit on me.” This went on all day in the evening. Wallace Baker and Daniel Hamm were taken to Harlem Hospital for X rays and then carried back to the police station, where the beating continued all night. They were eventually released, with the fruit-stand charges pending, in spite of the testimony of the fruit-stand owner. This fruit-stand owner had already told the police that neither Wallace Baker nor Daniel Hamm had ever been at his store and that they certainly had had nothing to do with the fruit-stand incident. But this had no effect on the conduct of the police. The boys had already attracted the attention of the police, long before the fruit-stand riot, and in a perfectly innocent way. They are pigeon fanciers and they keep—kept—pigeons on the roof. But the police are afraid of everything in Harlem and they are especially afraid of the roofs, which they consider to be guerrilla outposts. This means that the citizens of Harlem who, as we have seen, can come to grief at any hour in the streets, and who are not safe at their windows, are forbidden the very air. They are safe only in their houses—or were, until the city passed the No Knock, Stop and Frisk laws, which permit a policeman to enter one’s home without knocking and to stop anyone on the streets, at will, at any hour, and search him. Harlem believes, and I certainly agree, that these laws are directed against Negroes. They are certainly not directed against anybody else. One day, “two carloads of detectives come and went up on the roof. They pulled their guns on the kids and searched them and made them all come down and they were going to take them down to the precinct.” But the boys put up a verbal fight and refused to go and attracted quite a crowd. “To get these boys to the precinct we would have to shoot them,” a policeman said, and “the police seemed like they was embarrassed. Because I don’t think they expected the kids to have as much sense as they had in speaking up for themselves.” They refused to go to the precinct, “and they didn’t,’’ and their exhibition of the spirit of ’76 marked them as dangerous. Occupied territory is occupied territory, even though it be found in that New World which the Europeans conquered, and it is axiomatic, in occupied territory, that any act of resistance, even though it be executed by a child, be answered at once, and with the full weight of the occupying forces. Furthermore, since the police, not at all surprisingly, are abysmally incompetent—for neither, in fact, do they have any respect for the law, which is not surprising, either—Harlem and all of New York City is full of unsolved crimes. A crime, as we know, is solved when someone is arrested and convicted. It is not indispensable, but it is useful, to have a confession. If one is carried back and forth from the precinct to the hospital long enough, one is likely to confess to anything.

overseers struggling with their loss of privilege..,

NYTimes |  Early this year, Megan E. Green, a St. Louis alderwoman, met with officials of a local police union to discuss a proposal for a civilian oversight board that would look into accusations of police misconduct. After Ms. Green refused to soften her support for the proposal, the union backed an aggressive mailing campaign against her.

But Ms. Green won her primary with over 70 percent of the vote, and the Board of Aldermen approved the oversight board by a large margin. “All that stuff backfired,” Ms. Green said. “The more they attacked me for it, the more people seemed to rally around me.”

During the urban crime epidemic of the 1970s and ’80s and the sharp decline in crime that began in the 1990s, the unions representing police officers in many cities enjoyed a nearly unassailable political position. Their opposition could cripple political candidates and kill police-reform proposals in gestation.

But amid a rash of high-profile encounters involving allegations of police overreach in New York, Baltimore, Cleveland, Ferguson, Mo., and North Charleston, S.C., the political context in which the police unions have enjoyed a privileged position is rapidly changing. And the unions are struggling to adapt.

“There was a time in this country when elected officials — legislators, chief executives — were willing to contextualize what police do,” said Eugene O’Donnell, a former New York City police officer and prosecutor who now teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “And that time is mostly gone.”

Granny Goodness' Top Contributors

opensecrets | Senator Hillary Clinton

Campaign Finance Cycle:

Citigroup Inc	$782,327	$774,327	$8,000
Goldman Sachs	$711,490	$701,490	$10,000
DLA Piper	$628,030	$601,030	$27,000
JPMorgan Chase & Co	$620,919	$617,919	$3,000
EMILY's List	$605,174	$601,254	$3,920
Morgan Stanley	$543,065	$538,065	$5,000
Time Warner	$411,296	$386,296	$25,000
Skadden, Arps et al	$406,640	$402,140	$4,500
Lehman Brothers	$362,853	$359,853	$3,000
Cablevision Systems	$336,288	$306,900	$29,388
University of California	$329,673	$329,673	$0
Kirkland & Ellis	$311,441	$294,441	$17,000
Squire Patton Boggs	$310,596	$305,158	$5,438
21st Century Fox	$302,400	$302,400	$0
National Amusements Inc	$297,534	$294,534	$3,000
Ernst & Young	$297,142	$277,142	$20,000
Merrill Lynch	$292,303	$286,303	$6,000
Credit Suisse Group	$290,600	$280,600	$10,000
Corning Inc	$274,700	$256,700	$18,000
Greenberg Traurig LLP	$273,550	$265,450	$8,100

This table lists the top donors to this candidate in 1999-2014. The organizations themselves did not donate, rather the money came from the organizations' PACs, their individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals' immediate families. Organization totals include subsidiaries and affiliates.

Why (and How) We Use Donors' Employer/Occupation Information

METHODOLOGY

NOTE: All the numbers on this page are for 1999-2014 and based on Federal Election Commission data available electronically on Monday, March 09, 2015. ("Help! The numbers don't add up...")

Feel free to distribute or cite this material, but please credit the Center for Responsive Politics. For permission to reprint for commercial uses, such as textbooks, contact the Center.

old stinky-fingered arkansas possum to blame for divorce rates among america's poor

WaPo |  The first question people ask me when they learn that my husband lost his job, our house went underwater and we went from middle class to barely working poor during the 2008 economic crash is: How did you stay together?

It always struck me as a strange question. But it’s actually a reasonable one. Overall, America’s divorce rate has fallen. But like many things, the poor have not reaped the benefits of this trend. The number of married, college-educated couples splitting by their seventh anniversary has dropped from more than 20 percent in the early 1980s to just 11 percent today. But among the poor, those numbers are stagnant. According to the New York Times, 17 percent of lower-income couples (pairs making no more than twice the federal poverty line of just over $30,000) get divorced, about the same rate as it was in the 1980s.

Why this discrepancy?

To start, money is a major source of tension for all couples (they fight more about it than about anything else, including sex and child care). And less money can equal more problems. Raevan Zayas stays at home with her 1-year-old baby in California while her husband struggles at a low-paying job. 

“I can’t afford child care to go to work. We can barely afford groceries. Our kid needs new shoes and clothes, and I can’t remember the last time Isaac and I did something nice together,” she said. “Our relationship is so strained. How are you supposed to work through the problems in your relationship when you’re worried about how you’re going to buy milk for your kid?”

University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers said he’s also found that working-class families have more stringent views about men as providers. The economy has shifted so that those without college degrees have more trouble finding such work, which contributes not only to financial hardship but also to relationship stress. As Johns Hopkins sociologist Andrew Cherbin explains: “I’ve looked at the marriage gap between men with high- and low-earning occupations, and it varies directly with the amount of economic inequality in the country. The more unequal the earning opportunities, the greater the marriage gaps between the classes.”

clintons can't tell you what they're peddling, but the ex hon.bro.preznit just got the good negroe franchise...,

NYTimes |  In the aftermath of racially charged unrest in places like Baltimore, Ferguson, Mo., and New York, Mr. Obama came to the Bronx on Monday for the announcement of a new nonprofit organization that is being spun off from his White House initiative called My Brother’s Keeper. Staked by more than $80 million in commitments from corporations and other donors, the new group, My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, will in effect provide the nucleus for Mr. Obama’s post-presidency, which will begin in January 2017.

“This will remain a mission for me and for Michelle not just for the rest of my presidency but for the rest of my life,” Mr. Obama said. “And the reason is simple,” he added. Referring to some of the youths he had just met, he said: “We see ourselves in these young men. I grew up without a dad. I grew up lost sometimes and adrift, not having a sense of a clear path. The only difference between me and a lot of other young men in this neighborhood and all across the country is that I grew up in an environment that was a little more forgiving.”

Organizers said the new alliance already had financial pledges from companies like American Express, Deloitte, Discovery Communications and News Corporation. The money will be used to help companies address obstacles facing young black and Hispanic men, provide grants to programs for disadvantaged youths, and help communities aid their populations.

Joe Echevarria, a former chief executive of Deloitte, the accounting and consulting firm, will lead the alliance, and among those on its leadership team or advisory group are executives at PepsiCo, News Corporation, Sprint, BET and Prudential Group Insurance; former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell; Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey; former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.; the music star John Legend; the retired athletes Alonzo Mourning, Jerome Bettis and Shaquille O’Neal; and the mayors of Indianapolis, Sacramento and Philadelphia.

The alliance, while nominally independent of the White House, may face some of the same questions confronting former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton as she begins another presidential campaign. Some of those donating to the alliance may have interests in government action, and skeptics may wonder whether they are trying to curry favor with the president by contributing.

“The Obama administration will have no role in deciding how donations are screened and what criteria they’ll set at the alliance for donor policies, because it’s an entirely separate entity,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Air Force One en route to New York. But he added, “I’m confident that the members of the board are well aware of the president’s commitment to transparency.”

the despicable overseer brand is a clinton legacy...,

NYTimes |  “In a democratic society, people have a say in how they are policed, and people are saying that they are not satisfied with how things are going,” said Sean Whent, the police chief in Oakland, Calif. The city has a troubled history of police abuse and misconduct, but some policy changes and a new approach to training have led to sharp declines in the use of force, Chief Whent added.

Like the 21-foot rule, many current police practices were adopted when officers faced violent street gangs. Crime rates soared, as did the number of officers killed. Today, crime is at historic lows and most cities are safer than they have been in generations, for residents and officers alike. This should be a moment of high confidence in the police, said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement policy group. Instead, he said, policing is in crisis.

“People aren’t buying our brand. If it was a product, we’d take it out of the marketplace and re-engineer it,” Mr. Wexler said. “We’ve lost the confidence of the American people.”

Mr. Wexler’s group will meet with hundreds of police leaders in Washington this week to call for a new era of training, one that replaces truisms such as the 21-foot rule with lessons on defusing tense situations and avoiding violent confrontations. While the Justice Department and chiefs of some major police departments are supportive, the effort has not been widely embraced, at least so far. Some police unions and others have expressed skepticism, saying officers are being unfairly criticized.

“All this chatter just increases the idea that these encounters are avoidable and law enforcement is at fault,” said Jeff Roorda of the St. Louis Police Officers’ Association, who said officers already thought about ways to avoid confrontations.

The typical police cadet receives about 58 hours of training on how to use a gun and 49 hours on defensive tactics, according to a recent survey by Mr. Wexler’s group. By comparison, cadets spend just eight hours learning to calm situations before force is needed, a technique called de-escalation.

“Everything now is: You get there, you see a guy with a knife, you resolve it,” said Mr. Wexler, a former senior Boston police official. In many situations, he said, officers who find themselves 21 feet from a suspect can simply take a step backward to buy themselves time and safety.

overseers not about to de-escalate a dayyum-thing anywhere...,

LRC |  I was made aware of the “Interim Report of the President’s Task Force on 21^st Century Policing” via an email in response to my post regarding recent incidents in Baltimore. The emailer suggested a false flag operation in Baltimore.

The president established this commission several months ago, in response to similar incidents that occurred in Ferguson, Missouri.  What is found in the report are dozens of recommendations and action items to involve the US Department of Justice further into local law enforcement, further consultations and studies, significant federal funding, etc. In other words, using events such as those in Baltimore as an opportunity for significant expansion of federal power and encroachment at the local level; and, if a false flag, even fomenting those events.

I am not in any position to make a statement regarding the false flag part of the discussion; however I found the report worthy of some interest.  It is this that I explore here.

What is the motive force behind this report?

Trust between law enforcement agencies and the people they protect and serve is essential in a democracy. It is key to the stability of our communities, the integrity of our criminal justice system, and the safe and effective delivery of policing services.

True, true and true.

In light of the recent events that have exposed rifts in the relationships between local police and the communities they protect and serve, on December 18, 2014, President Barack Obama signed an Executive Order establishing the Task Force on 21st Century Policing.

But to the observant, “recent events” were not necessary to bring this lack of trust to light.

In establishing the task force, the President spoke of the distrust that exists between too many police departments and too many communities—the sense that in a country where our basic principle is equality under the law, too many individuals, particularly young people of color, do not feel as if they are being treated fairly.

The report offers six “Pillars” and a recommendation for implementation of the entire program.  I will briefly introduce these.  Each “pillar” is followed by several recommendations and action items – none of which will solve the underlying problems; instead all will only expand the bureaucracy behind the problems – opportunities for hundreds of millions of dollars for consulting contracts, billions of dollars in funds transferred from the federal government to local agencies, and the pretense that something is being done.

In other words, fertile ground for a false flag event.  Or, maybe, just making lemonade out of lemons.

There is little to no mention of recommendations and action items that will most quickly and efficiently improve the situation, for example:

• Eliminate all laws regarding victimless crimes;
• Ensure everyone is equal under the law – having a badge confers no special privilege;
• Eliminate minimum wage laws;
• Eliminate federal and state programs that subsidize behavior destructive toward personal responsibility and the family as the fundamental building block of a civilized society.

Of course, each of these would reduce government power, so they won’t be found in the report (with one tepid exception).

deutorestemes in texas

Stonekettle Station | Jade Helm.

Martial Law.

FEMA Death Camps.

Oh, it’s coming, Folks. It’s a comin’.

This is it. This is the big one. Obama is about to make his move. Martial law, you betcha, FEMA death camps and secret tunnels under Wal-Mart. Oh they warned us, they did, the powdered wig wearing Patriots of the Tea Party, they warned us. Grab the wimen’ folk, load yer guns, hoist the Confederate Battle Flag! To the bunkers! To the bunkers!

"Just because you're paranoid," said Ted Cruz, "doesn't mean they're not out to get you."

Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

Right.

And just because you have the word "Senator" in front of your name doesn't mean you're sane, rational, qualified to run the country, or have an IQ higher than that of a sea cucumber.

Seriously, somebody help me out here: what the fuck happened to Texas?

What the fuck happened to Texas?

There’s just no polite, no non-profane way to ask. What. The. Fuck. Happened to Texas?

H/T Prometheus 6

race, class, neglect...,

NYTimes |  Lagging wages — actually declining in real terms for half of working men — and work instability have been followed by sharp declines in marriage, rising births out of wedlock, and more.

As Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution writes: “Blacks have faced, and will continue to face, unique challenges. But when we look for the reasons why less skilled blacks are failing to marry and join the middle class, it is largely for the same reasons that marriage and a middle-class lifestyle is eluding a growing number of whites as well.”

So it is, as I said, disheartening still to see commentators suggesting that the poor are causing their own poverty, and could easily escape if only they acted like members of the upper middle class.

And it’s also disheartening to see commentators still purveying another debunked myth, that we’ve spent vast sums fighting poverty to no avail (because of values, you see.)

In reality, federal spending on means-tested programs other than Medicaid has fluctuated between 1 and 2 percent of G.D.P. for decades, going up in recessions and down in recoveries. That’s not a lot of money — it’s far less than other advanced countries spend — and not all of it goes to families below the poverty line.

Despite this, measures that correct well-known flaws in the statistics show that we have made some real progress against poverty. And we would make a lot more progress if we were even a fraction as generous toward the needy as we imagine ourselves to be.

The point is that there is no excuse for fatalism as we contemplate the evils of poverty in America. 

Shrugging your shoulders as you attribute it all to values is an act of malign neglect. The poor don’t need lectures on morality, they need more resources — which we can afford to provide — and better economic opportunities, which we can also afford to provide through everything from training and subsidies to higher minimum wages. Baltimore, and America, don’t have to be as unjust as they are.

what's killing poor white women?

americanprospect |  Everything about Crystal’s life was ordinary, except for her death. She is one of a demographic—white women who don’t graduate from high school—whose life expectancy has declined dramatically over the past 18 years. These women can now expect to die five years earlier than the generation before them. It is an unheard-of drop for a wealthy country in the age of modern medicine. Throughout history, technological and scientific innovation have put death off longer and longer, but the benefits of those advances have not been shared equally, especially across the race and class divides that characterize 21st--century America. Lack of access to education, medical care, good wages, and healthy food isn’t just leaving the worst-off Americans behind. It’s killing them.

 

The journal Health Affairs reported the five-year drop last August. The article’s lead author, Jay Olshansky, who studies human longevity at the University of Illinois at Chicago, with a team of researchers looked at death rates for different groups from 1990 to 2008. White men without high-school diplomas had lost three years of life expectancy, but it was the decline for women like Crystal that made the study news. Previous studies had shown that the least-educated whites began dying younger in the 2000s, but only by about a year. Olshansky and his colleagues did something the other studies hadn’t: They isolated high-school dropouts and measured their outcomes instead of lumping them in with high-school graduates who did not go to college.

The last time researchers found a change of this magnitude, Russian men had lost seven years after the fall of the Soviet Union, when they began drinking more and taking on other risky behaviors. Although women generally outlive men in the U.S., such a large decline in the average age of death, from almost 79 to a little more than 73, suggests that an increasing number of women are dying in their twenties, thirties, and forties. “We actually don’t know the exact reasons why it’s happened,” Olshansky says. “I wish we did.”

Most Americans, including high-school dropouts of other races, are gaining life expectancy, just at different speeds. Absent a war, genocide, pandemic, or massive governmental collapse, drops in life expectancy are rare. “If you look at the history of longevity in the United States, there have been no dramatic negative or positive shocks,” Olshansky says. “With the exception of the 1918 influenza pandemic, everything has been relatively steady, slow changes. This is a five-year drop in an 18-year time period. That’s dramatic.”

sistah sold-yah is 360 degrees of EE-ville personified....,

theatlantic |  In the late 1980s and early 1990s, when crime rates hit their peak, the issue enjoyed a salience in American politics that is hard to comprehend today. And for Democrats, the consequences of appearing soft were devastating. In 1988, the George H.W. Bush campaign’s most effective (and notorious) ad slammed Michael Dukakis for furloughing murderers in Massachusetts. (A separate ad, by a pro-Bush PAC, made African American furloughed murderer Willie Horton a household name).

The most important moment in that year’s debates came when Dukakis, after being asked how he would react if his wife was raped and murdered, gave a bloodless, and politically catastrophic, answer. In January 1994, 37 percent of Americans said crime was the most important issue facing the country. And that fall, Mario Cuomo lost the governorship of New York State to a little-known Republican, George Pataki, who had made Cuomo’s opposition to the death penalty central to his campaign.

In 1992, Bill Clinton faced a far tougher electorate than Hillary will this time around. African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians, who constituted almost 25 percent of the voters in 2012, and Millennials, who also lean disproportionately left on cultural issues, were either in school or in diapers. There’s a reason Clinton reminded voters that year that his nickname was “Bubba.” It’s because in 1992, far more than today, a Democrat who didn’t appeal to Bubbas couldn’t win. And in 1992, being “tough on crime” was critical to getting most Bubbas to give a Democrat a second look.

Was electing Bill Clinton worth it? It’s the kind of question that separates reformist, “pragmatic” progressives from their more revolutionary, anti-establishment brethren. It can’t be answered empirically. It depends on your worldview.

imitating what worked for others without all the parts and against all competitive odds...,

wikipedia |  Leon Mercer Jordan (May 6, 1905, Kansas City, Missouri - July 15, 1970, Kansas City, Missouri) was an American police officer, politician and civil rights leader who was assassinated on July 15, 1970.^[1][2] He was "one of the most influential African Americans in Kansas City's history"^[3] and, at the time of his death, the "state’s most powerful black politician".^[1]

Jordan attended Lincoln High School in Kansas City, served in the U.S. Army,^[3] and graduated from Wilberforce University in Wilberforce, Ohio in 1932.^[4] He married fellow Wilberforce student Orchid Irene Ramsey^[5][6] on August 10, 1932.^[4] After graduation, he worked as a school teacher.^[2]

Jordan joined the Kansas City Police Department in 1938, became a detective, and in 1952, became the first African-American police lieutenant in that department's history. He took a leave of absence in 1947, and spent eight years training the police forces of Liberia.^[6] A pilot, he flew his own plane around the country.^[3] In 1948, he helped coordinate the rescue of the French High Commissioner of West Africa and 16 other French officials after their plane made a forced landing. He was awarded the Chevalier of the Star of Africa by Liberian President William Tubman in 1948.^[4]

In 1951, Jordan became a life member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.^[4] He returned to Kansas City in February, 1952, and was promoted to police lieutenant. However, he discovered that he had little power, so he resigned and went back to Liberia for three years.^[3] He returned to Kansas City for good in the mid-1950s, and purchased the Green Duck Tavern.^[3]

In 1958, Jordan became a Democratic Party committeeman for the 14th Ward of Kansas City.^[3] In 1962, Jordan co-founded Freedom, Inc.^[7] along with Bruce R. Watkins.^[4] The organization advocated political awareness among African-Americans in Kansas City, organized a massive voter registration drive, and developed African-American political candidates. In 1963, Jordan and Watkins helped pass an accommodations ordinance, desegregating all public facilities in the city.^[6]

In 1964, Freedom, Inc. put forward eight candidates for office, and seven of them won.^[8] Among them was Jordan, who was elected to the first of three terms in the Missouri House of Representatives. He was campaigning for a fourth term at the time he was murdered. Shortly before his death, he described himself as a "radical", adding "I'm not a conformist but there are bounds of reason."^[2]

At about 1:00 a.m. on July 15, 1970, he was killed just outside his Green Duck Tavern by three shotgun blasts. Eyewitnesses reported that the three killers were African-American. The shotgun had been stolen, and was abandoned immediately. When it was recovered, it was traced to a burglary five years earlier in Independence, Missouri.^[9]

Three men were arrested for the murder, at least one of whom affiliated with a criminal group called the "Black Mafia". One was acquitted, and charges were dropped against the other two.^[10]

In 2010, reporters with the Kansas City Star began investigating the assassination while preparing for coverage of the 40th anniversary of Jordan's death. This led to discovery of the missing murder weapon and some old fingerprint cards, and that motivated the Kansas City Police Department to re-open the official investigation of the department's oldest cold case. Civil rights leader Alvin Sykes pressed the department for a complete investigation.^[11] In trying to determine who was responsible for the assassination, the newspaper reported that Jordan and his Freedom, Inc. political movement had been opposed to the "North End" faction in Kansas City politics, a group under the influence of La Cosa Nostra, and which had previously controlled black voting blocs. In 1965, Jordan had punched Frank Mazzuca, a fellow state legislator who was alleged to have supported mob interests in Jefferson City, Missouri, and death threats against Jordan were reported in the aftermath.^[9]

The newspaper reported that police informants associated with the Black Mafia had described the killing as a favor to North End mob interests, and that it was organized by "Shotgun Joe" Centimano, owner of a local liquor store. The informants said that Centimano had supplied the murder weapon and recruited the killers. The newspaper reported that one informant said the assassination had elements of both a "contract killing" and a "revenge killing", and that another said it was "all about politics".^[10] News coverage said that a 900-page police report finished in 2011 had concluded that mob boss Nick Civella had given his "blessing" to Jordan's assassination.^[12] No one was indicted because all of the main players were dead by then.

 

building fortunes, dynasties, cultures through politics like a BOSS!

wikipedia |  Thomas Joseph Pendergast (July 22, 1873 – January 26, 1945) was a political boss who controlled Kansas City and Jackson County, Missouri from approximately 1925 to 1939. "Boss Tom" Pendergast gave workers jobs and helped elect politicians, becoming wealthy in the process. He was eventually convicted of income tax evasion and served 15 months in a Federal prison.

Pendergast was a patron of the early political career of Harry S. Truman, a fact that caused some controversy after Truman became Vice President and then President.

In the 1890s young Tom Pendergast worked in his older brother James Pendergast's, West Bottoms tavern. The West Bottoms were at that time an immigrant section of town located at the 'bottom' of the bluffs overlooking the Missouri River, above which spread the more prosperous sections of Kansas City. James Pendergast, an alderman in Kansas City's city council, tutored him in the diversities of the city's political ways and systems and in the strategic advantages of controlling blocs of voters. Jim retired in 1910 and died the next year, naming Tom his successor. Following his brother's death, Pendergast served in the city council until stepping down in 1916 to focus on consolidating the factions of the Jackson County Democratic Party. After a new city charter passed in 1925, placed the city under the auspices of a city manager picked by a smaller council, Pendergast easily gained control of the government.^{[citation needed]}

Pendergast married Caroline Snyder in January 1911 and raised three children, two girls and a boy, at their home on 5650 Ward Parkway.

Pendergast ruled from a simple, two-story yellow brick building at 1908 Main Street. Messages marked with his red scrawl were used to secure all manner of favors. He was unquestionably corrupt and there were regularly shootouts and beatings on election days during his watch. Some apologists have tended to be kind to his legacy since they allege that the permissive go-go days gave rise to the golden era of Kansas City jazz (now commemorated at the American Jazz Museum at 18th and Vine) as well as a golden era of Kansas City building. In addition he spotted the talent of Harry S. Truman (dubbed derisively at the time as "the Senator from Pendergast"). Pendergast tried to portray a "common touch" and made attention grabbing displays of helping pay medical bills, provide "jobs", and hosted famous Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners for the poor. Often due to fraud and intimidation Kansas City voter turnout tended to be close to 100 percent in the Pendergast days.^[1]

Despite Prohibition, Pendergast's machine and a bribed police force allowed alcohol and gambling. Additionally many elections were fixed to keep political friends in power. In return, Pendergast's companies like Ready-Mixed Concrete were awarded government contracts. Under a $40 million bond program the city constructed many civic buildings during the Depression. Among these projects were the Jackson County courthouse in downtown Kansas City, and the concrete "paving" of Brush Creek near the Country Club Plaza. (A local urban legend, that bodies of Pendergast opponents were buried under the Brush Creek concrete, was finally put to rest when the concrete was torn up for a renewal project in the 1980s.) He also had a hand in other projects like the Power and Light Building, Fidelity Bank and Trust Building, Municipal Auditorium, and the construction of inner-city high schools.

Pendergast was able to place many of his associates in positions of authority throughout Jackson County. Pendergast handpicked Harry S. Truman, the 1934 candidate for U.S. Senate, and Guy Brasfield Park as governor in 1932 when the previous candidate, Francis Wilson, died two weeks before the election.

Pendergast also extended his rule into neighboring cities such as Omaha, Nebraska and Wichita, Kansas where members of his family had set up branches of the Ready-Mixed Concrete company. The Pendergast stamp was to be found in the packing plant industries, local politics, bogus construction contracts and the jazz scene in those cities. Many of Truman's old war buddies had veterans' clubs in Omaha.