Dictatorship of Celebrity: Glorification and Promotion of Criminal Behavior

pigeonsandplanes |  Throughout the 80's, 90's and 2000's, I wore many hats as a talent scout, freelance journalist, publisher, promoter and publicist trying to use my influence to promote rap music with substance. I was so committed to using Hip Hop as a form of empowerment that I even created one of the nation's first full time educational Hip Hop program for middle and high school students. Everyday for five years, I taught six periods of Hip Hop culture education to hundreds of students who never imagined that Hip Hop could be offered as a regular class. It was magic! Lives were changed, students were motivated to better themselves and I became an award winning teacher in the process. California's economic crisis put an end to the magic in 2011 when my program lost its funding.

I returned to the entertainment industry as a freelance publicist with the goal of promoting quality Hip Hop. How foolish I was! Between 2011 and 2012, I found myself turning down more potential clients then I was bringing in. The idea of working with aspiring artists who sounded just like Big Sean, Rick Ross, Nicki Minaj or 2 Chainz disgusted me. And those few artists who did have something of substance to offer had little to no money or lacked the drive to take their music to the next level. Everyday my inbox would fill up with rappers requesting my services to help promote their songs about ass, weed, guns, cars, strippers, sex and money. As a freelancer striving to establish myself, I should have been thankful for generating so much business and could have watched my bank account grow, regardless of the musical quality. But as a husband, father and all around socially conscious person, I couldn't. As a man, I couldn't.

Behind every mainstream rapper glorifying money, sex and violence, there is a cast of managers, publicists, lawyers, program directors, DJ's, bloggers, journalists, producers and other industry executives working hard to make that artist a household name. Behind every Chief Keef, Tyga and Trinidad James, there are college educated men and women whose job it is to promote music that contributes to the dumbing down of our youth. Behind every music video full of half naked girls, there are casting agents and directors who would never allow their own daughters to portray themselves in such light. Behind every rapper who claims to be a thug, there are countless professionals who send their kids to private schools while promoting music which sends our kids to prison. Behind every mainstream rapper on BET, MTV, Hot 97, Power 106 and any other popular station in your city, there's a Clear Channel, Viacom, Emmis Communications and Radio One made up of powerful decision makers who would never in a million years listen to the kind of music they get rich promoting. And behind every rapper with a criminal record, there's a publicist spinning a story to make crime more marketable.

Dictatorship of Celebrity: Manager, Coach, Director, Psychiatrist, Cheerleader, Manipulator [and] Guide

salon |  More than three decades ago, as I was winding up a major investigation of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and its leader Huey Newton, I received a call from Abbie Hoffman, the antic anti-Vietnam War activist, then a fugitive from criminal charges for selling cocaine to a nark. Abbie and I had been friends and fellow street-fighting buddies on the Lower East Side in numerous demonstrations of the antiwar Yippies. His purpose, he said, was to talk me out of publishing that 1978 investigation in New Times. It would hurt the left and the struggle for black justice, he warned.

 

My story exposed Newton’s bizarre leadership (for a time he carried a swagger stick à la Idi Amin). Far worse was the extortion racket he presided over that shook down pimps, drug dealers, after-hours clubs and even a theater owner. Non-compliance left one club owner dead and undiscovered for days in the trunk of his car, which was parked at the San Francisco airport. The theater owner, Ed Bercovich, declined the tithe and refused to give jobs to Panther thugs. The theater burned down — it was arson. Murders of rivals were also carried out on orders from above for perceived disloyalty to the Panthers; vicious beatings of lower-rank Panther males were regular punishments, along with turning out Panther women as prostitutes in the Panther-owned bar and restaurant the Lamp Post. The Panthers always needed cash for themselves and their programs. Paranoia was rampant, with internal schisms fanned by the FBI and local red squads of the police but also anchored in the egos and fear of rivals.

Newton had a way of being tough on the streets, the mean streets of Oakland he grew up in, but he managed to conceal it from his respectable friends, black and white. He cultivated liberal politicians such as U.S. Rep. Ron Dellums and state Rep. Tom Bates; a host of celebrities, including Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda and Dennis Hopper; and opinion leaders such as Yale president Kingman Brewster, author Jessica Mitford and conductor Leonard Bernstein, all of whom became supporters of the Panthers.

At first, I was puzzled as to why Abbie would call me from the underground after a long silence — he was a fugitive, after all. Suddenly, in a flash, I knew: “Did Bert put you up to this?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he admitted sheepishly. Bert Schneider, I already knew, had underwritten Abbie’s fugitive existence, just as he had for Huey Newton. I turned Abbie — and Bert — down: The Panther investigation would run.

Was the Ghetto Deliberately Narcotized to Destroy the Black Panthers?

independent |  Melvin Van Peebles says he believes ''people of goodwill can go with him". He also deliberately veered away from focusing on Seale or Newton: "I wanted people to look at the forest, not the tree.

"You have to remember this is based on my novel. But I didn't just make it all up." Yet isn't he on thin ice? If it's a novel, why should his critics not assume that he had indeed made up vast swathes of the story? He replies: "By calling it fiction I hoped I could sidestep questions like 'Oh, and where in the FBI files did you establish this? Where's your corroboration?' ''

Clearly he miscalculated media reaction on this point. But the film's most remarkable claim is that in response to the militancy in America's cities, FBI boss J Edgar Hoover ordered black ghettoes to be flooded with cheap drugs to pacify their inhabitants. That decision, says the film, led to a tenfold increase in addiction.

"The Panthers had a lot of community support," says Van Peebles Snr. "It was their power base. Hoover, knowing he couldn't destroy the Panthers, decided to destroy the community itself. He had the people medicated."

This sounds an outlandishly paranoid alle-gation. Do you really believe this, I asked Melvin Van Peebles? Is there no question at all in your mind? Do you feel no need for corroborating evidence?

"No," he says simply. "It's like the 18 missing minutes in the Nixon tapes. I'm not saying Hoover personally went round and sowed weeds in the garden. I'm saying all you had to do was give the gardener a couple of days off and the weeds would grow. You follow?''

Evidence for the charge is scant. Certainly the FBI was mobilized to harass the Panthers, black FBI informants infiltrated their ranks and Hoover urged his men to neutralize the Panthers. A Hoover memo dated 4 March, 1968, outlines one specific goal: "Prevent the rise of a 'Messiah' who could unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement."

"Right," says Mario Van Peebles, as if this proved all the film's claims. "And who do we have 25 years after Martin Luther King and Malcolm X? A bunch of rappers."

Yet this is poor proof that the FBI systematically narcotised entire communities. The Van Peebles' case appears to rest on a 1974 conversation, reported to them, between Newton and Elaine Brown, who by this time was leader of the Panthers. She complained to Newton that drugs were rampant.

"There were white guys driving into Oakland in Rolls-Royces, and not dealing with the old gangster drug dealers, but going straight to the kids," said Mario. "What Elaine didn't know at the time was that this was happening nationally. It's not a new concept. You're British, right? Your people did the same thing in the Boxer rebellion. Gave the people opium."

Jay Richard Kennedy and The Dictatorship of Celebrity

politicswestchesterreview |  In her book, A Taste of Power (page 167 on) Brown admits she was TRAINED and PAID and sent into the Party by Jay Richard Kennedy, the informant in Dr. King’s inner circle for the CIA Security Research Section (birth name: Richard Solomonick).

Jay Richard Kennedy was a former Bureau of Narcotics, OSS man who was also the manager for Harry Belafonte, until Belafonte FIRED him in the 1950s. 

JRK was a partner in the Mafia-owned Sands Hotel in Vegas, which is where Elaine Brown met him while working as a hooker in ’63 (her own admission, see her book).

JRK was the owner of a factory in Quebec that produced proximity fuses for the US military during the VietNam war, and (like the UK’s Ian Fleming) the author of numerous spy books from ‘the inside’ of the agency, such as “Man Called X” and his bestselling his book / movie ‘The Chairman’.

JRK was the one who postulated to SRS that Dr. King was a tool of Mao and laid the groundwork for the premise that allowed his assassination.

His ‘confession’ can be found in the British documentary ‘The Men who killed Martin Luther King’.

More information can be found in David Garrow’s book ‘The FBI and Martin Luther King’.

WaPo |  While the FBI leadership’s animus toward MLK fixated on his reported sexual appetites, the CIA entertained and memorialized accounts that described the crucial secret conflict within the civil rights movement as one between Soviet-controlled agents and Communist China’s sympathizers. Top CIA officials relied upon an informant who explained in meeting after meeting how a battle for subversive control over King was being waged between New York lawyer Stanley Levison and activist/entertainer Harry Belafonte. In the CIA’s version of civil rights history, Levison, a onetime Communist Party financial functionary, was actively representing Moscow as he advised King, whereas Belafonte supposedly favored Beijing.

The CIA’s source on King turned out to be novelist and television host Jay Richard Kennedy, who had long-standing friendships with civil rights leaders A. Philip Randolph and James Farmer, and who moderated a nationwide August 1963 telecast featuring the leaders of the March on Washington. But Kennedy (born Samuel Richard Solomonick) and Levison, his longtime business partner, had fallen out years earlier. Indeed, by the 1950s, Levison’s first wife, psychotherapist Janet Alterman, was married to Kennedy, who by then was Belafonte’s business manager. Kennedy and Belafonte then had a falling out of their own, and Kennedy subsequently published a roman à clef about Belafonte, “Favor the Runner.”

The Kennedy-Levison-Belafonte story may sound better than fiction but, more importantly, it is a case study in the ways anonymous intelligence sources may have multiple agendas when they tattle on, and smear, people for whom they have preexisting antipathy. Kennedy was not an opposition research contractor like Steele, but when — as in the Steele case, and in the case of the FBI’s most important informant close to King, accountant James A. Harrison — a source is compensated for the information they provide, their incentive to spin a narrative that the payer wants to hear is that much greater.

Predations From Within The American Negroe Socio-Economic Class Structure

Counterpunch |  Eric Holder, the nation’s first black Attorney General made his mark as Washington’s first black chief prosecutor by advancing mass pretext policing (mass frisks, stops, and arrests on minor or made-up and discretionary police grounds) in Black neighborhoods. The nation’s first black president Barack Obama severely constricted his very tepid and belated steps toward criminal justice reform by ruling out any concern for those arrested and sentenced for technically violent offenses. That’s a big problem since more than half the nation’s 1 million Black prisoners are behind bars on technically violent charges.

Locking Up Our Own is a compelling and indispensable volume for those who want to get the whole story on the rise of the “the New Jim Crow” – a story that must include serious attention to class and other fractures within Black America. But it is not without problems. Oddly enough given Forman’s desire to provide a somewhat sympathetic explanation for the Black “leadership” class’s participation in the “new Jim Crow,” he fails to note how persistent harsh racial residential segregation – what sociologists Doug Massey and Nancy Denton have rightly called “American Apartheid” – has fed Black support for aggressive policing and harsh sentencing. The Black middle and professional class lives in much greater immediate proximity than its white counterpart to the deeply impoverished and crime-prone Black “underclass”

Forman might have reflected more ambitiously and radically on the question of what happened to the struggle for Black equality and social justice more broadly in the long capitalist neoliberal era, marked at home and abroad by the triumph of the right over the left hand of the state. Many on the Black Left will find Forman too mild and forgiving in his discussion of the role played by Black bourgeois elites in the rise of racially disparate mass incarceration. They will do so with good reason.

A good counter-text here is Elaine Brown’s 2002 volume The Condemnation of Little B. In this forgotten classic and Black radical text, Brown – a former chairman of the Black Panther Party – tried to understand how the entire city of Atlanta, including its prominent Black citizens, came to unjustly condemn a poor 13-year-old Black boy, Michael Lewis, for the 1997 murder of a white man visiting a well-known drug haven in that city’s Black ghetto. Brown showed how Lewis’s conviction was “effectively predestined, attributable to the comfortable ‘New Age racism’ of white liberals and middle-class blacks who have abandoned the cause of civil rights and equal opportunity.”

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III Coming to Take Your Isht!

theatlantic |  “President Trump has directed this Department of Justice to reduce crime in this country, and we will use every lawful tool that we have to do that,” he said at a gathering of law-enforcement officials on Wednesday. “We will continue to encourage civil-asset forfeiture whenever appropriate in order to hit organized crime in the wallet.”

The directive revives the Justice Department’s Equitable Sharing Program, a controversial process through which state and local police agencies can seize assets, then transfer those seizures to federal control. In doing so, local agencies can skirt some state-level regulations limiting forfeitures. Under the program, the federal government pools the funds derived from the assets and sends 80 percent of them back to the state or local department itself, sometimes evading state laws that say seized assets should go into a state’s general fund.

Civil forfeiture has existed in some form since the colonial era, although most of the current laws date to the War on Drugs’ heyday in the 1980s. Law-enforcement officials like Sessions defend modern civil forfeiture as a way to limit the resources of drug cartels and organized-crime groups. It’s also a lucrative tactic for law-enforcement agencies in an era of tight budgets: A Justice Department inspector general’s report in April found that federal forfeiture programs had taken in almost $28 billion over the past decade, and The Washington Post reported that civil-forfeiture seizures nationwide in 2015 surpassed the collective losses from all burglaries that same year.

In its report, the inspector general’s office also raised concerns about how federal agencies take funds, after it found almost half of the Drug Enforcement Agency’s seizures in a random sample weren’t tied to any broader law-enforcement purpose. “When seizure and administrative forfeitures do not ultimately advance an investigation or prosecution, law enforcement creates the appearance, and risks the reality, that it is more interested in seizing and forfeiting cash than advancing an investigation or prosecution,” the report concluded.

What Is To Be Done About Predators? Don't Heroes Kill Monsters?

wikipedia |  Slim attended Tuskegee University in Tuskegee, Alabama (it has been stated that he attended Tuskegee University at the same time as black author Ralph Ellison^[4]), but having spent time in the "street culture", he soon began bootlegging and was expelled as a result. After his expulsion, his mother encouraged him to become a criminal lawyer so that he could make a legitimate living while continuing to work with the street people he was so fond of, but Maupin, seeing the pimps bringing women into his mother's beauty salon, was far more attracted to the model of money and control over women that pimping provided.^[4]

According to his memoir, Pimp, Slim started pimping at 18 and continued that pursuit until age 42. The book claimed that during his career, he had over 400 women, both black and white, working for him. He said he was known for his frosty temperament, and at 6'2" and 180 lbs, he was indeed slim, and he had a reputation for staying calm in sticky situations, thus earning the street name Iceberg Slim. When verbal instruction and psychological manipulation failed to keep his women in line, he beat them with wire hangers; in his autobiography he fully concedes he was a ruthless, vicious man.^[5]

Slim had been involved with several other popular pimps, one of them Albert "Baby" Bell,^[6] a man born in 1899 who had been pimping for decades and had a Duesenberg and a bejeweled pet ocelot.^[6] Another pimp, who had gotten Slim hooked on heroin, went by the name of "Satin"^[6] and was a major drug figure in Eastern America.^[5]

Slim was noted for being able to effectively conceal his emotions throughout his pimping career, something he said he learned from Baby Bell: "A pimp has gotta know his whores, but not let them know him; he's gotta be god all the way."^[5]

wikipedia |  Robert Sylvester Kelly was born on January 8, 1967 at Chicago Lying-in Hospital in Hyde Park, Chicago.^[18] Kelly is the third of four children.^[8] Kelly's single mother, Joanne, was a singer. She raised her children Baptist. Kelly's father was absent throughout his son's life.^[19] Kelly's family lived in the Ida B. Wells Homes public housing project in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood.^[20] Kelly's high school music teacher Lena McLin described Kelly's childhood home: "It was bare. One table, two chairs. There was no father there, I knew that, and they had very little".^[21] Kelly began singing in the church choir at age eight.^[8]

Kelly grew up in a house full of women, whom he said would act differently when his mother and grandparents were not home. At a young age Kelly was often sexually abused by a woman who was at least ten years older than himself. "I was too afraid and too ashamed," Kelly wrote in his autobiography about why he never told anyone. At age 11, he was shot in the shoulder while riding his bike home; the bullet is reportedly still lodged in his shoulder.^[22]

Kelly was eight years old when he had his first girlfriend. They would hold hands and eat make-believe meals inside their playhouse built from cardboard, where they "vowed to be boyfriend and girlfriend forever." Their last play date turned tragic when, after fighting with some older children over a play area by a creek, Lulu was pushed into the water. A fast-moving current swept her away while she screamed Kelly's name. Shortly after, she was found dead downstream. Kelly calls Lulu his very first musical inspiration.^[22]

Desires of 99% Now Politically/Legally Equal to Statistical Random Noise

alternet |  Historically, indentured servants had their food, health care, housing, and clothing provided to them by their “employers.” Today’s new serfs can hardly afford these basics of life, and when you add in modern necessities like transportation, education and child-care, the American labor landscape is looking more and more like old-fashioned servitude.

Nonetheless, conservatives/corporatists in Congress and state-houses across the nation are working hard to hold down minimum wages. Missouri’s Republican legislature just made it illegal for St. Louis to raise their minimum wage to $10/hour, throwing workers back down to $7.70. More preemption laws like this are on the books or on their way.

At the same time, these conservatives/corporatists are working to roll back health care protections for Americans, roll back environmental protections that keep us and our children from being poisoned, and even roll back simple workplace, food and toy safety standards.

The only way these predators will be stopped is by massive political action leading to the rollback of Reaganism/neoliberalism.

And the conservatives/corporatists who largely own the Republican Party know it, which is why they’re purging voting lists, fighting to keep in place easily hacked voting machines, and throwing billions of dollars into think tanks, right-wing radio, TV, and online media.

If they succeed, America will revert to a very old form of economy and politics: the one described so well in Charles Dickens’ books when Britain had "maximum wage laws" and “Poor Laws” to prevent a strong and politically active middle class from emerging.

Conservatives/corporatists know well that this type of neo-feudalism is actually a very stable political and economic system, and one that’s hard to challenge. China has put it into place in large part, and other countries from Turkey to the Philippines to Brazil and Venezuela are falling under the thrall of the merger of corporate and state power.

So many of our individual rights have been stripped from us, so much of America’s middle-class progress in the last century has been torn from us, while conservatives wage a brutal and oppressive war on dissenters and people of color under the rubrics of “security,” “tough on crime,” and the "war on drugs.”

As a result, America has 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, more than any other nation on earth, all while opiate epidemics are ravaging our nation. And what to do about it?

Justice Court Is Off-Limits to the 99%

CounterPunch |  The big thing I learned was that poor people have zero access to justice.

Nor do the middle class.

After the June 21^st debacle, a semi-retired lawyer friend advised me to file a Motion for Reconsideration, a request to the judge to take another look and perhaps realize that he made some mistakes. The law gives you 10 days to file.

My Motion for Reconsideration was one of numerous motions I would have to draft and file myself while pro se. It was incredibly expensive, wildly burdensome and so daunting I bet 99% of people without a lawyer would throw up their hands and give up.

I’m the 1%.

I’m a writer. I went to an Ivy League school; I was a history major so I’m good at research. I used to work at a bank, where I worked on legal documents so I’m familiar with legalese. So I researched what works and doesn’t work in a Motion for Reconsideration. I crafted an argument. I deployed the proper tone using the right words and phrases.

Most people, not having the necessary skills or educational attainment, wouldn’t stand a prayer of writing a legal brief like this motion. Mine may fail — but the judge might read it and take it seriously because it’s written correctly.

I called the court clerk to ask how to file my motion. She was incredibly curt and mean. I’m a New Yorker so I persisted, but I could imagine other callers being put off and forgetting the whole thing.

Schedule a date for your hearing on the court’s website, the clerk told me. Good luck! The site had an outdated interface, was loaded with arcane bureaucratic jargon and a design that’s byzantine and hard to navigate. If English is your second language, forget it.

Eventually I found the place to reserve a hearing date — where I learned about the $540 filing fee.

Payable only by credit card.

No debit cards.

No Amex.

Protracted litigation against a well-funded adversary like the Times/Tronc could easily require dozens of $540 filing fees. The poor need not apply. Most Americans don’t have that kind of money. And what about people who scrape up the dough but don’t have plastic?

$10 would be too much. $540 is frigging obscene.

I paid the fee, printed out the receipt as required, stapled it to the back of my multiple required copies of the motion and went to the Stanley Mosk Courthouse to file it. As I waited in Room 102 to have my motions stamped by a clerk, I studied the many working-class people waiting in the same line.

Here too, there is no consideration for the people. The clerk’s office is open Monday to Friday 8:30 to 4:30. Most people work during those hours. Gotta file something? You have to take time off. 

Parking? Expensive and far away.

I have a dream.

I dream of a court system dedicated to equal justice before the law — where anyone can file a motion, where there are no filing fees, where the courthouse is open on weekends, where you can file motions by uploading them online and there’s free parking for citizens conducting business in the people’s house.

But Tronc wouldn’t like that system.

Feeling Torches and Pitchforks for Dr. Carmen Puliafito and R.Kelly About Now...,

LATimes |  In USC’s lecture halls, labs and executive offices, Dr. Carmen A. Puliafito was a towering figure. The dean of the Keck School of Medicine was a renowned eye surgeon whose skill in the operating room was matched by a gift for attracting money and talent to the university.

There was another side to the Harvard-educated physician.

During his tenure as dean, Puliafito kept company with a circle of criminals and drug users who said he used methamphetamine and other drugs with them, a Los Angeles Times investigation found.

Puliafito, 66, and these much younger acquaintances captured their exploits in photos and videos. The Times reviewed dozens of the images.

Shot in 2015 and 2016, they show Puliafito and the others partying in hotel rooms, cars, apartments and the dean’s office at USC.

In one video, a tuxedo-clad Puliafito displays an orange pill on his tongue and says into the camera, “Thought I’d take an ecstasy before the ball.” Then he swallows the pill.

In another, Puliafito uses a butane torch to heat a large glass pipe outfitted for methamphetamine use. He inhales and then unleashes a thick plume of white smoke. Seated next to him on a sofa, a young woman smokes heroin from a piece of heated foil.

As dean, Puliafito oversaw hundreds of medical students, thousands of professors and clinicians, and research grants totaling more than $200 million. He was a key fundraiser for USC, bringing in more than $1 billion in donations, by his estimation.

What Happened To The 80's Crack Babies?

theatlantic |  Epidemics are hard to cover. Navigating the gaps between the private, personal, and societal and managing to be relatable while also true to science is a tough part of health reporting, generally. Doing those things in the middle of public panic—and its attendant misinformation—requires deftness. And performing them while also minding the social issues that accompany every epidemic means reporters have to dig deep, both into multiple disciplines and into ethics. With multiple competing narratives, politics, and the sheer scale of disease, it’s often easy to forget the individuals who suffer.

That’s why I was struck by a recent article in the New York Times by Catherine Saint Louis that chronicles approaches for caring for newborns born to mothers who are addicted to opioids. The article is remarkable in its command and explanation of the medical and policy issues at play in the ongoing epidemic, but its success derives from something more than that. Saint Louis expertly captures the human stories at the intersection of the wonder of childbirth and the grip of drug dependency in a Kentucky hospital, all while keeping the epidemic in view.

One particular passage stands out:

Jay’la Cy’anne was born with a head of raven hair and a dependence on buprenorphine. Ms. Clay took the drug under the supervision of Dr. Barton to help reduce her oxycodone cravings and keep her off illicit drugs.

“Dr. Barton saved my life, and he saved my baby’s life,” Ms. Clay said. She also used cocaine on occasion in the first trimester, she said, but quit with his encouragement.

[...]

For months, Ms. Clay had stayed sober, expecting that she’d be allowed to take her baby home. Standing in the hospital corridor, her dark hair up in a loose ponytail, she said, “I’m torn up in my heart.”

Generally, treatment for drug-dependent babies is expensive and can go on for months. Nationally, hospitalization costs rose to $1.5 billion in 2012, from $732 million in 2009, according to researchers at Vanderbilt University.

In the space of a few paragraphs, the story introduces a mother and child and the drug dependency with which they both struggle, and also expands its scope outwards to note the nature of the epidemic in which they are snared. It doesn’t ignore the personal choices involved in drug abuse, but—as is typical for reporting on other health problems—it considers those choices among a constellation of etiologies. In a word, the article is humanizing, and as any public health official will attest, humanization and the empathy it allows are critical in combating any epidemic.

The article is an exemplar in a field of public-health-oriented writing about the opioid crisis—the most deadly and pervasive drug epidemic in American history—that has shaped popular and policy attitudes about the crisis. But the wisdom of that field has not been applied equally in recent history. The story of Jamie Clay and Jay’la Cy’anne stood out to me because it is so incongruous with the stories of “crack babies” and their mothers that I’d grown up reading and watching.

What Exactly Is The Plan Again For Dealing With This Opioid Epidemic?

nbcboston |  "We started seeing it last year here and there. But now, it's just raining needles everywhere we go," said Morrison, a burly, tattooed construction worker whose Clean River Project has six boats working parts of the 117-mile (188-kilometer) river.

Among the oldest tracking programs is in Santa Cruz, California, where the community group Take Back Santa Cruz has reported finding more than 14,500 needles in the county over the past 4 1/2 years. It says it has gotten reports of 12 people getting stuck, half of them children.

"It's become pretty commonplace to find them. We call it a rite of passage for a child to find their first needle," said Gabrielle Korte, a member of the group's needle team. "It's very depressing. It's infuriating. It's just gross."

Some experts say the problem will ease only when more users get treatment and more funding is directed to treatment programs.

Others are counting on needle exchange programs, now present in more than 30 states, or the creation of safe spaces to shoot up — already introduced in Canada and proposed by U.S. state and city officials from New York to Seattle.

Studies have found that needle exchange programs can reduce pollution, said Don Des Jarlais, a researcher at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai hospital in New York.

But Morrison and Korte complain poor supervision at needle exchanges will simply put more syringes in the hands of people who may not dispose of them properly.

After complaints of discarded needles, Santa Cruz County took over its exchange from a nonprofit in 2013 and implemented changes. It did away with mobile exchanges and stopped allowing drug users to get needles without turning in an equal number of used ones, said Jason Hoppin, a spokesman for the Santa Cruz County.

RussiaGate Is Really HillaryGate

Forbes |  According to an insider account, the Clinton team, put together the Russia Gate narrative within 24 hours of her defeat. The Clinton account explained that Russian hacking and election meddling caused her unexpected loss. Her opponent, Donald Trump, was a puppet of Putin. Trump, they said, “encourages espionage against our people.” The scurrilous Trump dossier, prepared by a London opposition research firm, Orbis, and paid for by unidentified Democrat donors, formed a key part of the Clinton narrative: Trump’s sexual and business escapades in Russia had made him a hostage of the Kremlin, ready to do its bidding. That was Hillary's way to say that Trump is really not President of the United States—a siren call adopted by the Democratic party and media.

Hillary and the Orbis Dossier

The most under covered story of Russia Gate is the interconnection between the Clinton campaign, an unregistered foreign agent of Russia headquartered in DC (Fusion GPS), and the Christopher Steele Orbis dossier. This connection has raised the question of whether Kremlin prepared the dossier as part of a disinformation campaign to sow chaos in the US political system. If ordered and paid for by Hillary Clinton associates, Russia Gate is turned on its head as collusion between Clinton operatives (not Trump’s) and Russian intelligence. Russia Gate becomes Hillary Gate.

Neither the New York Times, Washington Post, nor CNN has covered this explosive story. Two op-eds have appeared in the Wall Street Journal  (Holman Jenkins and David Satter). The possible Russian-intelligence origins of the Steele dossier have been raised only in conservative publications, such as in The Federalist and National Review.

The Fusion story has been known since Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) sent a heavily-footnoted letter to the Justice Department on March 31, 2017 demanding for his Judiciary Committee all relevant documents on Fusion GPS, the company that managed the Steele dossier against then-candidate Donald Trump. Grassley writes to justify his demand for documents that: “The issue is of particular concern to the Committee given that when Fusion GPS reportedly was acting as an unregistered agent of Russian interests, it appears to have been simultaneously overseeing the creation of the unsubstantiated dossier of allegations of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians.” (Emphasis added.)

Former FBI director, James Comey, refused to answer questions about Fusion and the Steele dossier in his May 3 testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Comey responded to Lindsey Graham’s questions about Fusion GPS’s involvement “in preparing a dossier against Donald Trump that would be interfering in our election by the Russians?” with “I don’t want to say.” Perhaps he will be called on to answer in a forum where he cannot refuse to answer.

Clinton Foundation: Criminals, Thieves, Liars, A Disgrace

WND  |  Eberwein was due to appear next Tuesday before the Haitian Senate Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission where he was widely expected to testify that the Clinton Foundation misappropriated Haiti earthquake donations from international donors.

He had served as director general of the Haitian government’s economic development agency, Fonds d’assistance économique et social, for three years.

According to Eberwein, a paltry 0.6 percent of donations granted by international donors to the Clinton Foundation with the express purpose of directly assisting Haitians actually ended up in the hands of Haitian organizations. A further 9.6 percent ended up with the Haitian government. The remaining 89.8 percent – or $5.4 billion – was funneled to non-Haitian organizations.

“The Clinton Foundation, they are criminals, they are thieves, they are liars, they are a disgrace,” Eberwein said at a protest outside the Clinton Foundation headquarters in Manhattan last year.

According to the Haiti Libre newspaper, Eberwein was said to be in “good spirits,” with plans for the future. His close friends and business partners are shocked by the idea he may have committed suicide.

“It’s really shocking,” said friend Gilbert Bailly. “We grew up together; he was like family.”

The Haitian government issued an official notice thanking Eberwein for his service and mourning his untimely death.

Witness to Clinton Foundation Corruption in Haiti Arkancided in Miami?

miamiherald | Klaus Eberwein, a former Haitian government official, was found dead Tuesday in a South Dade motel room in what the Miami-Dade medical examiner’s office is ruling a suicide. 

“He shot himself in the head,” said Veronica Lamar, Miami-Dade medical examiner records supervisor. She listed his time of death at 12:19 p.m.

The address where Eberwein’s body was discovered according to police, 14501 S. Dixie Hwy., is a Quality Inn.

A supporter of former Haitian President Michel Martelly, Eberwein served as director general of the government’s economic development agency, Fonds d’assistance économique et social, better known as FAES. He held the position from May 2012 until February 2015 when he was replaced. He was also a partner in a popular pizza restaurant in Haiti, Muncheez, and has a pizza — the Klaus Special — named after him.

“It’s really shocking,” said Muncheez’s owner Gilbert Bailly. “We grew up together; he was like family.”

Bailly said he last spoke to Eberwein, 50, two weeks ago and he was in good spirits. They were working on opening a Muncheez restaurant in Sunrise, he said.

But it appears that Eberwein had fallen on hard times. An Uber spokesperson confirmed that he worked as a driver for awhile in South Florida.

During and after his government tenure, Eberwein faced allegations of fraud and corruption on how the agency he headed administered funds. Among the issues was FAES’ oversight of shoddy construction of several schools built after Haiti’s devastating Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake.

Eberwein was scheduled to appear Tuesday before the Haitian Senate’s Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission, the head of the commission, Sen. Evalière Beauplan confirmed. The commission is investigating the management of PetroCaribe funds, the money Haiti receives from Venezuela’s discounted oil program.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/haiti/article160983614.html#storylink=cpy

Arkancide: The Clinton Body Count

theconspiracyblog |  How many people have died under very unusual circumstances ( ARKANCIDE ) that stood in the way of the Clinton Crime Family’s rise to wealth and power? The deaths connected to the Clintons are so numerous and so suspicious that there is even a term for it… ARKANCIDE (Don Adams / Died January 7, 1997)

What If The Apollo Missions Hadn't Been ICBM Demonstrations?

Can It Be That It Was All So Simple Then....,

Ponzai Musk Tells Governors How Afraid He Is Of AI

recode |  Elon Musk doesn’t scare easily — he wants to send people to Mars and believes that all cars will be driving themselves in the next ten years. He’s excited about it!

But there is something that really scares Musk: Artificial Intelligence, and the idea of software and machines taking over their human creators. 

He’s been warning people about AI for years, and today called it the “biggest risk we face as a civilization” when he spoke at the National Governors Association Summer Meeting in Rhode Island.

Musk then called on the government to proactively regulate artificial intelligence before things advance too far. 

“Until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don’t know how to react because it seems so ethereal,” he said. “AI is a rare case where I think we need to be proactive in regulation instead of reactive. Because I think by the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it’s too late.”

“Normally the way regulations are set up is a while bunch of bad things happen, there’s a public outcry, and after many years a regulatory agency is set up to regulate that industry,” he continued. “It takes forever. That, in the past, has been bad but not something which represented a fundamental risk to the existence of civilization. AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.”

AI Used to Create Even Faker Obama

ieee |  Artificial intelligence software could generate highly realistic fake videos of former president Barack Obama using existing audio and video clips of him, a new study [PDF] finds.

Such work could one day help generate digital models of a person for virtual reality or augmented reality applications, researchers say.

Computer scientists at the University of Washington previously revealed they could generate digital doppelgängers of anyone by analyzing images of them collected from the Internet, from celebrities such as Tom Hanks and Arnold Schwarzenegger to public figures such as George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Such work suggested it could one day be relatively easy to create such models of anybody, when there are untold numbers of digital photos of everyone on the Internet.

The researchers chose Obama for their latest work because there were hours of high-definition video of him available online in the public domain. The research team had a neural net analyze millions of frames of video to determine how elements of Obama's face moved as he talked, such as his lips and teeth and wrinkles around his mouth and chin.

In an artificial neural network, components known as artificial neurons are fed data, and work together to solve a problem such as identifying faces or recognizing speech. The neural net can then alter the pattern of connections among those neurons to change the way they interact, and the network tries solving the problem again. Over time, the neural net learns which patterns are best at computing solutions, an AI strategy that mimics the human brain.

In the new study, the neural net learned what mouth shapes were linked to various sounds. The researchers took audio clips and dubbed them over the original sound files of a video. They next took mouth shapes that matched the new audio clips and grafted and blended them onto the video. Essentially, the researchers synthesized videos where Obama lip-synched words he said up to decades beforehand.

The researchers note that similar previous research involved filming people saying sentences over and over again to map what mouth shapes were linked to various sounds, which is expensive, tedious and time-consuming. In contrast, this new work can learn from millions of hours of video that already exist on the Internet or elsewhere.

The Robots are Just Us

BostonGlobe  |  Even AI giants like Google can’t escape the impact of bias. In 2015, the company’s facial recognition software tagged dark skinned people as gorillas. Executives at FaceApp, a photo editing program, recently apologized for building an algorithm that whitened the users’ skin in their pictures. The company had dubbed it the “hotness” filter. 

In these cases, the error grew from data sets that didn’t have enough dark-skinned people, which limited the machine’s ability to learn variation within darker skin tones. Typically, a programmer instructs a machine with a series of commands, and the computer follows along. But if the programmer tests the design on his peer group, coworkers, and family, he’s limited what the machine can learn and imbues it with whichever biases shape his own life. 

Photo apps are one thing, but when their foundational algorithms creep into other areas of human interaction, the impacts can be as profound as they are lasting.

The faces of one in two adult Americans have been processed through facial recognition software. Law enforcement agencies across the country are using this gathered data with little oversight. Commercial facial-recognition algorithms have generally done a better job of telling white men apart than they do with women and people of other races, and law enforcement agencies offer few details indicating that their systems work substantially better. Our justice system has not decided if these sweeping programs constitute a search, which would restrict them under the Fourth Amendment. Law enforcement may end up making life-altering decisions based on biased investigatory tools with minimal safeguards.

Meanwhile, judges in almost every state are using algorithms to assist in decisions about bail, probation, sentencing, and parole. Massachusetts was sued several years ago because an algorithm it uses to predict recidivism among sex offenders didn’t consider a convict’s gender. Since women are less likely to reoffend, an algorithm that did not consider gender likely overestimated recidivism by female sex offenders. The intent of the scores was to replace human bias and increase efficiency in an overburdened judicial system. But, as mathematician Julia Angwin reported in ProPublica, these algorithms are using biased questionnaires to come to their determinations and yielding flawed results.

A ProPublica study of the recidivism algorithm used in Fort Lauderdale found that 23.5 percent of white men were labeled as being at an elevated risk for getting into trouble again, but didn’t re-offend. Meanwhile, 44.9 percent of black men were labeled higher risk for future offenses, but didn’t re-offend, showing how these scores are inaccurate and favor white men. 

While the questionnaires don’t ask specifically about skin color, data scientists say they “back into race” by asking questions like: When was your first encounter with police? 

The assumption is that someone who comes in contact with police as a young teenager is more prone to criminal activity than someone who doesn’t. But this hypothesis doesn’t take into consideration that policing practices vary and therefore so does the police’s interaction with youth. If someone lives in an area where the police routinely stop and frisk people, he will be statistically more likely to have had an early encounter with the police. Stop-and-frisk is more common in urban areas where African-Americans are more likely to live than whites.This measure doesn’t calculate guilt or criminal tendencies, but becomes a penalty when AI calculates risk. In this example, the AI is not just computing for the individual’s behavior, it is also considering the police’s behavior.

“I’ve talked to prosecutors who say, ‘Well, it’s actually really handy to have these risk scores because you don’t have to take responsibility if someone gets out on bail and they shoot someone. It’s the machine, right?’” says Joi Ito, director of the Media Lab at MIT.

Money Laundering Makes the Drug Wars Go Round

gfintegrity |  My name is Jack Blum. I am a Washington attorney specializing in money laundering compliance and issues of offshore tax evasion. I am appearing on behalf the Tax Justice Network-USA and Global Financial Integrity. Both organizations endorse the bill sponsored by Senator Levin, S. 569, the Incorporation Transparency and Law Enforcement Assistance Act.

The single most important tool in the toolkit of people trying to hide money from law enforcement and tax collection is the anonymous shell corporation. These shell corporations have no physical place of business, use nominee officers and directors, and as a rule do no business in the place of incorporation. Their sole purpose is hiding where money is, who controls it, and where it is moving, from law enforcement and tax collectors. These shell companies should not be allowed remain anonymous.

States that offer corporations to individuals without insisting on information on beneficial ownership are undermining the efforts of law enforcement to prevent crime, recover stolen assets and collect tax. They are also putting the United States out of compliance with international standards for customer identification. From our perspective gathering basic information about ownership for government use is essential to protect national security and to limit financial crime and tax evasion.

Anti-money laundering compliance is dependent on 'know your customer .' Without that knowledge financial institutions cannot evaluate the legitimacy of a transaction. Knowing that one shell corporation is owned by another shell corporation is not helpful. Having the details of the "owner's" directors who are usually professional directors who work for a corporate service company in another jurisdiction is useless. Financial institutions need to know who is behind a company to judge whether the transactions they monitor are suspicious. They need to know whether the beneficial owner is on the OFAC list, the other sanctions lists is a politically exposed person.

The proposed legislation would end the all too frequent use of loopholes in State incorporation laws to hide money.  Fist tap Bro. Makheru

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III's Ass-Clownery Knows No Limits

WaPo |  Not everyone in the public health community is convinced the new DARE is any better than the old DARE. A peer-reviewed study published last year found that the specific versions of the keepin’ it REAL curriculum used by DARE haven’t been tested for efficacy.

“The systematic review revealed major shortfalls in the evidence basis for the KiR D.A.R.E. programme,” that study’s authors conclude. "Without empirical evidence, we cannot conclusively confirm or deny the effectiveness of the programme. However, we can conclude that the evidence basis for the D.A.R.E. version of KiR is weak, and that there is substantial reason to believe that KiR D.A.R.E. may not be suited for nationwide implementation."

There’s no doubt, however, that DARE is currently making an effort to adopt more of an evidence-based approach than in prior years, when the program’s practices were largely driven by the belief that they were "pure as the driven snow." This brings us back to the central irony of Jeff Sessions’s remarks on Tuesday, when he yearned for a return to the DARE of “the 1980s and the 1990s.”

Decades of research are unequivocal: The DARE of yesteryear didn’t work, and it may have actually made the drug problem worse. Instead of embracing DARE’s new evidence-based practices, Sessions offered up a return to the bad old days of drug policy, when decisions were driven by gut feeling and political expediency.

We already know how that story ended: billions of dollars spent, millions of people imprisoned and stronger, cheaper drugs. DARE is already trying to turn the page on the harsh and ineffective drug policies of the past. At the moment, it appears the Justice Department is trying to revive them.

You Know It's True...,

theantimedia |  Already, the Department of Defense has created the Sentient World Simulation, a real-time “synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information, such as major events, opinion polls, demographic statistics, economic reports, and shifts in trends,” according to a working paper on the system.

In recent years, other scientists have conducted research and even experimentation in attempts to show actual evidence of the Simulation. Heads turned last year when theoretical physicist S. James Gate announced he had found strange computer code in his String Theory research. Bound inside the equations we use to describe our universe, he says, is peculiar self-dual linear binary error-correcting block code.

A team of German physicists has also set out to show that the numerical constraints we see in our universe are consistent with the kinds of limitations we would see in a simulated universe. These physicists have invoked a non-perturbative approach known as lattice quantum chromodynamics to try to discover whether there is an underlying grid to the space/time continuum.

So far their efforts have recreated a minuscule region of the known universe, a sliver of a corner that is but a few femtometers across. But this corner simulates the hypothetical lattice of the universal grid, and their search for a corresponding physical restraint turned up a theoretical upper limit on high-energy particles known as the Greisen–Zatsepin–Kuzmin, or GZK cut off. In other words, there are aspects of our universe that look and behave as a simulation might.

With news that there are two anonymous tech billionaires working on a secret project to break us out of the Matrix, it’s hard to know whether we should laugh or scream in horror. Simulation talk is great epistemological fun and metaphysical amusement of the highest order, but it may speak to an underlying anxiety regarding the merging of our reality with machines, or an underlying existential loneliness. It’s even been posited as a solution to the Fermi Paradox. Why haven’t we met aliens? Well, because we live inside a world they built.

What Do You Expect When Your Drug Czar For The Drug War Is A General?

The drug-connected crime problem isn't all about the junkies - it's about the dealers. Especially the violent crime problem. The key to dealing with drug crime is drying up the profits of the illegal market. Reliance on incarceration has only made the power of organized criminal gangs stronger. It hasn't broken a single gang. A lawless marketplace staffed entirely by criminals who protect their inventory and personal safety with arsenals of weaponry and enforce and regulate business disputes with gunfire is a pretty unique business model. A global business that ranks third in revenues after arms and oil and hides its profits with sophisticated money laundering techniques that allow the top players access into corridors of political power while providing unparalleled liquidity advantages in business competition is a pretty unique business model.

Nixon's early 1970s globalization of the War on Drugs was ostensibly aimed at enlisting all UN members in a united effort to shut down drug supplies at their source. What resulted instead was much closer to a U.S. imperial protection racket for drug kingpins, with the US holding the power to confer a status of impunity on politically favored players overseas. In return, those who benefited were able to target internal law enforcement efforts at culling their business competition, which typically worked to produce results sufficient to bolster their anti-drug credibility.

In Dark Alliance the late investigative journalist Gary Webb documented connections that led through multiple Latin American countries- El Salvador, Honduras, Panama, Mexico- to drug rings operating in several regions in the US. He wasn't alone in his investigations, either.

The big picture that results when that research is reviewed is that the political and military leaders of a great many Central American and Caribbean nations during the Cold War era were provided with protected status in the transshipment of cocaine in return for maintaining pro-US policies in their countries.

General Bueso Rosa in Honduras; Hugo Banzer in Bolivia; the Salinas brothers in Mexico, and other Mexican governments before and since; Sandoval Alarcon in Guatemala; Trujillo and Noriega in Panama; the Somoza regime in Nicaragua, in the 1970s; Uribe in Colombia, Cedras/Emmanuel Constant FRAPH junta in Haiti; the JLP in Jamaica - this US policy is blatantly in effect right now in Afghanistan, the top source nation for opium and heroin in the world. It has been in effect from the outset of US intervention in Central Asia. It has become standard U.S. necropolitical operating procedure.

But back to Dark Alliance, Danilo Blandon, the Contra-connected supplier who furnished most of Rick Ross's cocaine, offered him an unprecedented deal soon after establishing that he could move large retail quantities on the street: consignment, no money down, at a kilo price that worked out to less than $20/gram.

Ross was able to move 200 kilos a month. That's over 2 tons a year, at a time when the DEA was estimating the annual US supply at 70 tons. Blandon was a true drug kingpin. Up until the Blandon-Ross connection was dismantled, with the help of Danilo Blandon, who received immunity from prosecution and earned around $200,000 as a paid FBI informant for providing testimony to take down a huge LA cocaine ring that he.was instrumental in enabling to boom to an unprecedented level.

Danilo Blandon's supplier was Norwin Meneses, who had been identified as an even bigger kingpin by US Federal law enforcement since the 1970s. Meneses was the brother of the Somoza-era chief of police, and at least one other general in Somoza's Guardia Nacionale, which eventually became the largest Contra faction, the FDN, under military commander Enrique Bermudez. Meneses also benefited from some sort of arrangement with US authorities, remaining free of prosecution, residing in the US and traveling back and forth between there and Central America without interference.

Blandon was not Meneses' only wholesaler and Meneses was not the only person involved with Contra resupply who had a long history as a major drug supplier and transporter into the USA. The Contra effort made use of a network of long-time Cold War era US intelligence/covert operations agents including a nucleus of Cuban exiles drawn from the ranks of Bay of Pigs battle veterans.

Some 8% of the 1500 Bay of Pigs veterans, about 120 of them, had been identified as kingpins as early on as the late 1960s. Mostly heroin, at that point- supplying the NYC market out of Union City, NJ. They later showed up everywhere from Southeast Asia to the Argentine Dirty War, and eventually as field operators in the Contra effort.

Speaking of the neofascist junta-era Argentine military, they became the first overseas liason to the formation of the Contras in the Reagan era, offering them a safe haven and working to train and equip the Somocista Guardia Nacionale in exile in 1981.

In the previous year, the Argentines had provided the principal base of support for the military coup in Bolivia that put the Cocaine Junta into power, in July 1980. DEA agent Michael Levine, the top field agent in the Southern Cone of Latin America at the time, contends that this was done in collaboration with the local CIA faction down there, who were bitterly opposed to Jimmy Carter's "human rights" foreign policy, which had brought pressure to bear on right-wing President Col. Hugo Banzer Suarez to relinquish his martial law "autogolpe" rule and hold elections. The Cocaine Coup successfully derailed the ascension of a civilian government to power.

Banzer had long-standing connections to the US, having been trained at the School of the Americas, Ft. Hood's armored cavalry school, and as a US diplomatic liason in DC. He was also affiliated with the Falange Socialista Boliviana, and the Latin American Anti-Communist League affiliated with WACL; with the international right-wing assassination program known as Operation Condor, along with his ideological allies in Pinochet's Chile and the Argentina junta. Banzer's family relations and associates were also busted repeatedly in the US and Canada for smuggling cocaine; one case involved his son-in-law and another his chauffeur, iirc. And one of Banzer's cousins was Luis Arce Gomez, one of the chief plotters of the Cocaine Coup.

Race Obsessed Youtube Dips**t Ignorant of Oregon's Legalization Status

theantimedia |  Oregon’s state legislature just reduced penalties for drug possession in a bill also intended to reduce racial profiling by law enforcement agencies.

H.B. 2355 passed both the House and Senate last week and reduces possession of illegal drugs to misdemeanors rather than felonies as long as the person in possession does not have prior drug convictions. According to a press release issued on July 7 by Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum, the bill provides for “the reduction of penalties for lower level drug offenders. The bill also reduces the maximum penalty for Class A misdemeanors by one day to avoid mandatory deportation for misdemeanants.”

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According to the text of the bill, drugs like LSD, MDMA, cocaine, meth, oxycodone, and heroin are essentially decriminalized in small amounts. Each drug listed is accompanied by the following text, indicating possession is only a felony if:

“(a) The person possesses a usable quantity of the controlled substance and: (A) At the time of the possession, the person has a prior felony conviction; (B) At the time of the possession, the person has two or more prior convictions for unlawful possession of a usable quantity of a controlled substance.”

The “misdemeanor” title applies for varying amounts of different drugs. For example, the maximum allowable amount of acid is up to “40 units,” while individuals may have up to five MDMA pills or less than one gram before their “offense” crosses the line into a felony. Less than two grams of cocaine constitutes a misdemeanor.

As Rep. Mitch Greenlick, a Democrat representing Portland, told Portland-based health outlet the Lund Report:

“We’ve got to treat people, not put them in prison. It would be like putting them in the state penitentiary for having diabetes… This is a chronic brain disorder and it needs to be treated this way.”

“When you put people in prison and given them a felony conviction, you make it very hard for them to succeed,” he added.

Did the Bush-Obama Wars Cost Clinton the White House?

mondoweiss |  Clinton lost the battleground states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan in last year’s presidential election because they had some of the highest casualty rates during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and voters there saw Clinton as the pro-war candidate.

By contrast, her pro-war positions did not hurt her in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and California, the study says; because those states were relatively unscathed by the Middle East wars.

The study is titled “Battlefield Casualties and Ballot Box Defeat: Did the Bush-Obama Wars Cost Clinton the White House?” Authors Francis Shen, associate professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, and Dougas Kriner, a political science professor at Boston University, strike a populist note:

With so much post-election analysis, it is surprising that no one has pointed to the possibility that inequalities in wartime sacrifice might have tipped the election. Put simply:

perhaps the small slice of America that is fighting and dying for the nation’s security is tired of its political leaders ignoring this disproportionate burden.

Their study argues that there is a direct relationship between those states that gained Republican votes from Romney’s defeat in 2012 to Trump’s win in 2016 and those states that have higher casualty rates in Middle East wars.

At Reason.com, Ed Krayewski summarizes the findings:

A new study attributes Donald Trump’s victory last year to communities hit hardest by military casualties and angry about being ignored. These voters, the authors suggest, saw Trump as an “opportunity to express that anger at both political parties.”

Krayewski summarizes the data behind the conclusion:

The study… found a “significant and meaningful relationship between a community’s rate of military sacrifice and its support for Trump.” The statistical model it used suggested that if Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin had suffered “even a modestly lower casualty rate,” all three could have flipped to Hillary Clinton, making her the president. The study controlled for party identification, comparing Trump’s performance in the communities selected to Mitt Romney’s performance in 2012. It also controlled for other relevant factors, including median family income, college education, race, the percentage of a community that is rural, and even how many veterans there were.

“Even after including all of these demographic control variables, the relationship between a county’s casualty rate and Trump’s electoral performance remains positive and statistically significant,” the paper noted. “Trump significantly outperformed Romney in counties that shouldered a disproportionate share of the war burden in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

And here are the authors themselves on the moral hazard at work here. The people who decide are not suffering as much.