Joe Biden is the Hillary Clinton of 2020

With now 20 candidates for the Democrat 2020 presidential nomination, the obsession of Democrats ought to be determining which candidate can beat Donald Trump.  All else should pale in comparison  and Democrats should avoid repeating past mistakes.  They need a candidate that can generate excitement and not just among their fraction of the party base that border on cultist for that 

candidate.  Rightly or wrongly, Trump generated excitement among the white supremacists, Christian extremists, and those who wanted to blow up the system.  Excitement is what gets voters to the polls.  A winning candidate also needs to be free from as much baggage as possible that drag the candidate down or turn off critical elements of the voter base.  A lengthy piece in Vox makes the case that if Joe Biden is the 2020 nominee, Democrats will be making the same mistake they made in 2016 by nominating Hillary Clinton.  This go round, there are more candidates to choose from and Democrats need to think long and hard about the most important question: who can beat Trump. A candidate's perfection on every policy issue matters matters far less since, if the candidate cannot win, their policy issues are meaningless. Here are article highlights which too me, are on point:

To a certain kind of Democratic Party establishmentarian, Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 because she was not “likable” enough — a sentiment that may or may not be thinly veiled code for saying that she’s a woman. Their solution in 2020 is good old Joe Biden.

Biden, on the likability frame, is the opposite of Clinton — a back-slapping pol man who enjoys shooting the breeze with reporters. But the reality is Clinton was plenty likable at key moments in her career. Most notably, one of the main reasons the Democratic Party rallied around her so hard in 2014-’15 is that when she was secretary of state, her approval ratings were far higher than Barack Obama’s, and she was an in-demand midterms surrogate even in states where he was toxic.

Biden, meanwhile, was not especially popular as vice president during Obama’s first six years in office and only saw his numbers rise as he appeared to step out of the electoral arena — swapping places with Clinton as the kind of generic Famous Democrat Who Isn’t Running.

What brought Clinton down was public exposure not to her personality — which was sparkling enough to make her the most admired woman in America for 17 years straight before losing the claim to Michelle Obama in 2018 — but extended public scrutiny of every detail of a decades-long career in public life. This, in turn, is the exact same problem Biden will inevitably face as a presidential candidate. Americans like outsiders and fresh faces, not veteran insiders who bear the scars of every political controversy of the past two generations.

Mainstream Democrats like other mainstream Democrats. But what it means to be a mainstream Democrat has changed significantly since Biden entered the Senate 46 years ago. As Democrats gear up to take on Trump, the party’s best shot is to do anything possible to avoid repeating the 2016 experience of defending decades’ worth of twists and turns on various issues from the Iraq War to LGBTQ rights to banking deregulation.

In 2008, Democrats responded to the evident unpopularity and failure of the 2003 war in Iraq in the sensible way — by nominating someone who'd spoken out against the war when he had a chance. . . . yet Democrats chose to saddle themselves with a nominee who’d been a prominent advocate for it.

[A] well-known Iraq War supporter who, unlike Trump, was actually in the Senate at the time was very poorly positioned to argue against him. And by 2020, there’s simply no reason to do that again. Most of the party’s bench consists of people like Sens. Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar and Cory Booker, who are young enough not to have participated in the war debate in Congress.

[W]hat’s Biden’s excuse? He was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time — the guy with privileged access to top officials in the American government and around the world. The guy who, though he surely couldn’t have stopped Bush’s folly, certainly could have warned about it.

Foreign policy experience theoretically should be a big Biden advantage over his rivals. But in reality, on one of the only foreign policy controversies voters actually paid attention to or remember, Biden got it wrong in a big way.

[S]ince the founding generation passed away, voters have tended not to want to put veteran politicians in the White House. With only a handful of exceptions, the voters choose to elevate an “outsider” who’s going to “fix the mess in Washington” (or drain the swamp) rather than an inside player who’s mastered the system.

Candidates don’t get credit with voters for mastering Washington. Instead, they end up on defense, defending political decisions that don’t look great in hindsight.

Another major problem for Clinton that emerged over the course of the campaign related to her paid speeches for major banks during the brief window between her service as secretary of state and running for president.

Biden is in no better a position. He spent his whole career in the Senate representing Delaware, a major center of the consumer credit side of the banking industry. He was so close to the local banking giant that he was jokingly referred to as “the senator from MBNA” (which has since been bought by Bank of America).

This made him, among other things, a champion of mostly GOP-supported legislation in 2005 whose aim was to make it more difficult for hard-pressed families to discharge their credit card debt in bankruptcy. . . . Clinton was unusually tight with Wall Street for a Democrat because she represented New York in the Senate, and bankers were her dairy farmers and cheesemakers.

But “I just happen to represent a state whose local business interests are unusually evil” is a terrible public-facing argument (which, of course, is why Clinton didn’t make it). The reality is that very little about Biden’s career is extraordinary. But this, again, is precisely why the voters tend not to choose congressional veterans — people hate business as usual in Washington and want to elect leaders who’ll change the game, not play by the rules.

Biden looks bad in hindsight on a lot of issues.  Marriage equality is in some respects the best example. If you trace the long arc of the Democratic Party’s slow, steady embrace of LGBTQ equality as a cause, then Biden is clearly right there on the journey with everyone else. At a critical moment, he actually led the stampede, as the first Obama administration official to openly embrace marriage equality during the great Obama flip-flop of 2012.

But back in 1996, as a senator, he voted for the viciously discriminatory Defense of Marriage Act. This was, at the time, a totally unremarkable vote — virtually everyone in Congress voted for it.

Biden has, in recent years, been a champion of criminal justice reform just like most Democrats. But in earlier years, when most Democrats were “tough on crime” drug warriors, Biden was a “tough on crime” drug warrior who as a senior member of the Judiciary Committee authored a number of harsh anti-drug laws.

It would be a mistake to see him as some kind of carceral maniac, warmonger, or anti-gay bigot — he was a normal Democrat who had normal Democratic Party positions on a variety of issues over time. But while that extreme normality appeals to party regulars, just as Hillary Clinton appealed to them, the sheer duration of normality means you end up flip-flopping or getting behind the curve in a way that a younger politician wouldn't. And then there are some unique home-state issues.

Had Biden not opted to run, he’d have gone down in history as a senator who was very well-liked by his colleagues and the press, and who served as the popular vice president for one of the most influential presidents of all time. . . . But as a candidate, he’s much too big a fish to be ignored by his rivals, and they’ll have to tear him down.

Some of that will be policy-based, but some of it will probably be personal. Biden has followed Clinton’s footsteps in doing paid speaking gigs while also harboring presidential ambitions — an error that proved costly for her and will likely prove costly for him if it ends up under the microscope. , , , especially because Biden himself can’t seem to decide what he thinks about his handling of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings — alternately apologizing for having mishandled things and griping that it’s unfair for Anita Hill to blame him.

Add it all up and you get a negative portrait of Joe Biden — the buckraker who failed to protect a sexual harassment victim and spent the aughts boosting the Iraq War and bank deregulation after fueling mass incarceration and anti-gay discrimination in the 1980s and ’90s.

Times change, and the 2020 presidential campaign will be waged in this moment. And Democrats deserve a nominee who can either plausibly claim to have been prescient on the big changes that have swept progressive politics or is new enough to elective office to simply be of the current moment.

Trump's Alarming Ignorance About Foreign Aid

With threats to close the U.S./Mexican border - something that will cause possible severe economic damage to the USA and cause severe adverse impacts on U.S. border cities - and his cutting off of all foreign aid to Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, Donald Trump has shown his near total ignorance on the issue of foreign aid which more often than not is driven not by U.S. generosity  but instead by the benefits the USA derives. No doubt his ignorance embracing, knuckle dragging base loves that Trump is "punishing" "those people" and is too ignorant to grasp that Trump's actions will only make matters worse and harm U.S. interests.  A piece by former Republican Michael Gerson looks at the stupidity and self-inflicted harm that Trump's petulant ignorance will bring to American interests.  Here are excerpts:

There are times when President Trump manages to be so wrong — so empirically groundless, so logically fallacious, so stridently uninformed — that it seems like a form of parody. But more often than not, this reflects an authentic and alarming ignorance. The mask of a barroom political crank turns out to be the face of the president of the United States.

Such appears to be the case in Trump’s recent threat to cut off hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign assistance to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — countries known as the Northern Triangle of Central America — as punishment for their failure to stem migrant flows to the United States.

To make this action a rational one, Trump must imagine that foreign aid is nothing more than cash loaded onto cargo planes and dropped on the presidential compounds of corrupt rulers as reward for subservience to U.S. interests. So he wants to cancel the deliveries until they do what we wish.

The reality of foreign assistance is very different. It is seldom given directly to foreign governments. The work is often contracted to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that work in partnership with locals. And it is generally designed to improve conditions within foreign countries that can give rise to global threats.

This role is obvious, say, in fighting infectious diseases. It is better to deal with an Ebola outbreak as close as possible to the source, rather than waiting for the threat to arrive in Georgia or Kansas. But this is equally true when it comes to a flow of refugees.

Consider an example in Guatemala. More than a decade ago, a remarkable institution called International Justice Mission (IJM) — an NGO dedicated to the fight against modern forms of slavery — began working with local authorities to improve the prosecution of child sexual assault. This partnership improved the capacities of police, prosecutors and courts, while making the whole system less traumatizing for survivors. As a result of the initiative — supported by a grant from the State Department — successful prosecutions in Guatemala have increased by 300 percent, imposing real consequences on predators.

Imagine you had a child and lived in a country where children were raped with impunity. Wouldn’t a dangerous trek north to the United States make more sense? But this program and others like it are threatened by [Trump’s] the president’s aid cutoff. In the real world of U.S. interests, we need more of these efforts to reduce the supply side of illegal migration. And the supply side of sexual trafficking. And of criminal gangs. And of the drug trade. And of illegal arms dealing. And of radicalism and terrorism.

One of the main drivers of illegal migration has been the collapse of criminal-justice systems in Central America. And it reflects a global problem. . . . . Roughly a third of people in the world live in relatively just and stable criminal-justice systems. Another third live under the protection of private security forces — a system that turns security into a luxury good. (In Guatemala, for example, there are seven times more people involved in providing private security than public security.) And a third of people live without the effective protection of the law, experiencing what Haugen calls “everyday violence” from corrupt and exploitative officials.

If U.S. policy does not address the functional collapse of criminal-justice systems in places such as the Northern Triangle, it is not seriously addressing the problem of illegal migration. Yet the IJM program in Guatemala and similar efforts are the kind of spending now being threatened by the president’s announcement. This means that U.S. policy has become self-destructive to U.S. interests.

[T]he lack of justice leading to everyday violence has become a global problem, with consequences that spill up on many shores, including our own. It is a matter deserving policy creativity rather than Trump’s public threats.

It would make far more sense to double assistance for these programs — designed to support local reformers, not to impose American solutions — than to end them. But an absence of vision is one cost of ignorance.

Racial Justice and Legal Pot Collide in Congress

For decades now, America's marijuana laws have been used by the old white Republican establishment to disproportionately criminalize blacks and, perhaps most importantly, take away their voting rights should they receive felony convictions.  Virginia has a truly ugly history of this practice with Norfolk being among the worse cities for utilizing the practice.  The push for decriminalizing marijuana and criminal justice reform go hand in hand in part and pressure is growing at both the state and federal level for reform that will cease the needless - albeit in my view, deliberate - criminalization of so many which has also made securing a good job almost impossible.  A number of states have legalized recreational use of marijuana and a whole new industry is growing, yet a road block remains at the federal level where Republican intransigence to reform has been the norm as exhibited by Jeff Sessions' (a many with a long racist resume) move to more forcefully prosecute marijuana offenders.  Now, as the momentum for legalization grows and as even some conservatives see marijuana as a new crop that can bring economic prosperity, a collision course has developed in Congress.  A lengthy piece in Politico looks at the phenomenon.  Here are article excerpts:

Congressman James Comer stood in front of a local hemp harvest stacked shin-deep for hundreds of feet in every direction, . . . .Little yellow butterflies flitted across the surface of the crop that filled the once-vacant warehouse with the comforting smell of damp grass clippings.

It was the middle of October, and aromatic plants represented the first harvest for Vertical, a California company that has already become a serious contender in the rapidly expanding legal cannabis industry. Comer, who just won reelection to Congress with 69 percent of the vote, has promoted hemp, the non-psychoactive sister plant to marijuana, as a jobs-creating crop to replace the state’s vanished tobacco industry. Hemp grown for CBD, a medicinal oil used for complaints from arthritis to epilepsy, fetches as much as $8,000 per acre, compared with less than $600 for the same amount of corn. This processing facility, Comer said, will create 125 jobs when Vertical has it fully operational, a not insignificant boost in a town of 2,600 people.

Vertical’s future, as well as the state’s infant hemp industry as a whole, rests in large part with the passage of the vast farm bill that Congress is expected to finish in the lame-duck session. Thanks to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the bill includes an amendment that would permanently remove hemp from the list of federally banned drugs like heroin and cocaine, freeing hemp from the crippling legal stigma that has made it economically unviable for the past four decades. But that amendment also includes a little-noticed ban on people convicted of drug felonies from participating in the soon-to-be-federally-legal hemp industry.

[T]he exception has angered a broad and bipartisan coalition of lawmakers, hemp industry insiders and religious groups who see it as a continuing punishment of minorities who were targeted disproportionately during the war on drugs and now are being denied the chance to profit economically from a product that promises to make millions of dollars for mostly white investors on Wall Street.

Legalization has made steady progress at the state level since California first approved medical marijuana in 1996. As of election night, 33 states now allow medical marijuana, and 10 states plus the District of Columbia allow fully recreational use. But at the federal level, a sizable headwind remains.

[L]awmakers like McConnell, who have discovered the economic benefits of relaxing prohibitions on products such as hemp, have nevertheless quietly found ways, like the farm bill felon ban, to satisfy the demands of their anti-legalization constituents, to the chagrin of pro-cannabis lawmakers and activists. After POLITICO Magazine reported on the drug-crime felon ban in August, three senators—Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.)—wrote to Senate leadership demanding the removal of the ban, citing its “disparate impact on minorities,” among other concerns.

“I think there’s a growing recognition of the hypocrisy and unfairness of our nation’s drug laws, when hundreds of thousands of Americans are behind bars for something that is now legal in nine states and something that two of the last three Presidents have admitted to doing,” Booker told POLITICO Magazine. “If we truly want to be a just and fair nation, marijuana legalization must be accompanied by record expungement and a focus on restorative justice.”

The fairness problems inherent in the felon ban are evident even in a predominantly white community like Cadiz. Vertical’s CEO is himself a felon. Todd Kaplan pleaded guilty in 2010 to tax evasion, but because his crime was not drug-related, he won’t be barred from participating in the hemp business. But for many men in rural Kentucky, where illegal marijuana was a staple crop, the lifetime ban included in the proposed farm bill means they’re shut out of a growing industry in which they have have actual job skills.

When I asked Comer about the felon ban at the ribbon-cutting for Vertical's hemp-processing plant in Cadiz, he said it was not something he endorsed. “I would not have added the language preventing anyone with a prior minor drug-felony conviction from being able to produce hemp. I support the basis for criminal justice reform as it pertains to the sheer quantity of senseless petty drug sentences.”

Comer, who approves of the House's plan to force work requirements on recipients of the food stamps program known as SNAP, said he understands a primary reason able-bodied adults aren't participating in the workforce is because of their criminal records. “I’m sure the language was added to appease certain senators,” Comer told me. “But it really goes against the direction our country is headed with respect to criminal justice reform related to minor drug offenses.” But when I asked whether he will vote for the farm bill in spite of the felon ban he professes to dislike, Comer didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

This once-radical notion that felons ought to gain priority for entry into a newly legal industry—instead of being shut out—has quietly gained bipartisan support on Capitol Hill, albeit not among Republican leadership.

In the House, this mounting opposition to the continuing punishment of felons first cropped up in September, when the Judiciary Committee passed its first pro-marijuana bill. It would expand access to scientific study of the cannabis plant, a notion agreed upon by marijuana’s supporters and detractors alike. However, Democrats almost killed the bill because it included language that barred felons (and even people convicted of misdemeanors) from receiving licenses to produce the marijuana. Felon bans are commonplace in legal marijuana programs. Every state has some version of it, but most of them have a five- or 10-year limit. But the felon bans in both the Senate’s farm bill and the House’s marijuana research bill are lifetime bans, and the House bill includes misdemeanors, too.

In the Senate, the movement to protect the legal marijuana trade has taken the form of the proposed bipartisan Gardner-Warren STATES Act, which would maintain the status quo of federal non-interference in state-legal programs that was upended when then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions repealed the Cole Memo, an Obama-era document that outlined a hands-off approach to state-legal programs. Booker’s Marijuana Justice Act would adopt California-style principles and apply them federally, going far beyond the STATES Act, removing marijuana from Schedule I (defined as having no medical value and a high risk of abuse) and eliminating criminal penalties for marijuana. But unlike other pro-marijuana bills, it would also deny federal law-enforcement grants to states that don’t legalize marijuana; direct federal courts to expunge marijuana convictions; and establish a grant-making fund through the Department of Housing and Urban Development for communities most affected by the war on drugs.

Booker’s bill has become popular among Senate Democrats. Ron Wyden, Kirsten Gillibrand, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Merkley and Elizabeth Warren have signed on as co-sponsors—a list that looks a lot like a lineup of presumed candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.

“For too long, the federal government has propped up failed and outdated drug policies that destroy lives,” Wyden told POLITICO Magazine. “The war on drugs is deeply rooted in racism. . . . . People across America understand and want change. Now, Congress must act.”

Recent polling shows that Americans agree with Wyden—to a point. There is a widespread acceptance of legalizing marijuana. Gallup has been tracking this number since 1969, when only 12 percent of Americans believed in legalizing it; in October, Gallup put the number at 66 percent, the highest ever number recorded. Pew says it is 62 percent, also its highest number ever. But there is far less acceptance of the idea that the war on drugs has had an adverse impact on poorer, minority communities, . . .

While voters might doubt who has suffered because of laws against marijuana, there should be little doubt about who is benefiting from its legalization. In 2017, the North American marijuana industry was valued at $9.2 billion, and it is expected to reach $47.3 billion by 2027, according to Arcview Market Research and BDS Analytics. The excitement around marijuana investment is so high that even John Boehner, who as speaker of the House blocked the District of Columbia from implementing its legal marijuana program, has recently joined the board of Acreage Holdings, one of the largest vertically integrated cannabis operators in America.

Now that Democrats have won control of the House, a co-founder of the Cannabis Caucus, Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), is poised to implement his blueprint for how the House under Democratic leadership would legalize marijuana at the federal level. Racial justice is front-and-center in that plan. The memo he sent to Democratic leadership reads in part, “committees should start marking up bills in their jurisdiction that would responsibly narrow the marijuana policy gap—the gap between federal and state marijuana laws—before the end of the year. These policy issues … should include: Restorative justice measures that address the racial injustices that resulted from the unequal application of federal marijuana laws.” 

 I find it disgusting that no matter the policy issue, racism and harming minorities remains a bedrock of the Republican Party. 

America's Misplaced War on Marijuana

As noted in other posts, a majority of Americans believe that the nation's marijuana laws need to be changed.  As they exist currently, Virginia's marijuana laws produce thousands of citizens each year permanently marked by a criminal record - even for possessing small amounts of the substance.  All of this despite the fact that no research exists that has demonstrated that marijuana use has any where near the health issues of tobacco - which can still be legally purchased - which costs the nation billions of dollars in otherwise avoidable health care costs and lives ended prematurely.  Talk about having your priorities backwards.  A column in the Washington Post looks at these misplaced priorities.  Here are highlights:

In January [1964], the surgeon general announced that scientists had found conclusive evidence linking smoking to cancer and thus launched our highly successful 50-year public- health fight against tobacco. In August, the North Vietnamese fired on a U.S. naval ship in the Gulf of Tonkin, which led to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the public phase of the Vietnam War. Alongside an accelerating deployment of conventional troops would come their widespread use of marijuana and heroin.

By 1971, cigarette ads had been banned from radio and television, the surgeon general had called for regulation of tobacco, and cigarette smoking had begun its long decline. T he impact of drug use among troops and returning veterans provoked President Richard M. Nixon to declare a war on drugs.  This was followed, of course, by the 1973 passage of the Rockefeller Drug Laws in New York. These set the model for criminalization and increasing penalties for the country as a whole, especially regarding drugs.

In the contrast between what has happened since 1964 with tobacco, on the one hand, and marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other banned substances, on the other, we have an instructive lesson in the comparative effects of choosing a public-health or a criminalization paradigm for dealing with addictive substances.

The approach to tobacco has worked. Between 1964 and 2014, smoking rates declined by half; . . . . The progress against smoking has been steady and impressive. It’s an altogether different tale with banned substances. While levels of illegal drug use have risen and fallen since 1971, current levels are equivalent to those we had in the mid-1970s. 

There is an even starker contrast in how perceptions of the risks of smoking and of illegal drugs have changed. In 1975, 51.3 percent of 12th-graders thought that smoking one or more packs of cigarettes a day posed great risk; by 1991 that number was 69.4 percent, by 2014 it was 78 percent. With illegal drugs, arrows move the opposite direction or stay essentially flat.

In other words, for all the money spent and lives ruined through violence and criminalization, we have made zero headway against illegal drugs.

So what did we do about smoking? Tobacco control has focused on prevention and cessation.

Beginning in 1964, public- health campaigns worked toward the “denormalization” of smoking, in the words of the 2014 Report of the Surgeon General

What we have done with marijuana and the other illegal drugs is, of course, invest heavily in criminal justice.

According to a 2011 Justice Department report, addressing illegal drugs cost the nation $193 billion in 2007.  . . . . this criminalization means a massive overload on the judicial system.

Rather than using the FBI to bust up fancy tunnel networks, we should legalize marijuana and decriminalize other drugs, and then tax and sue drug producers to generate revenue to support public health campaigns against their products, agencies to regulate them and treatment for those who suffer from addiction. Legalizing and decriminalizing drugs doesn’t mean giving up on the fight against them, and we have the lesson about what works right in front of our eyes.

Add to the ass backward approach taken on marijuana the unequal arrest rates for young black males and what we have is a disaster.  Conservatives are anti-drug yet whine and bitch about blacks not working when the failed war on drugs has made many nearly unemployable.  The cynic in me at times wonders if this hasn't worked more to hold back blacks than the foul Jim Crow laws.  The drug laws need to change now.

Why So Many Black Women Are Dying of AIDS

In a recent VEER Magazine piece I criticized Virginia's idiotic marijuana laws that serve little purpose other than to make otherwise law abiding citizens into criminals, often sending them to prison and destroying their ability to ever secure quality jobs upon their released.  No segment of the population is hit harder by these laws than young black males who lack legal counsel and get convicted whereas whites with legal counsel either secure reduced sentences or have their sentences dropped after good behavior.  I've seen it happen sitting in court with clients with code violations, so those who deny this reality are living in a fantasy world or lying to themselves. The havoc wreaked on the black community is immense, not that most Republicans give a damn since many are racists themselves or pander to racists in the party base.  As an article in the New York Times indicates, there is another sinister and deadly outcome from such failed criminal justices policies: rampant HIV/AIDS among black women.  The article looks at the failure of criminal justice in this nation and the bigotry that is fueling the HIV/AIDS epidemic.  Unfortunately, the article fails to look at the homophobia of black churches that only worsens the problem by pushing black males to be "on the down low."  Here are article highlights:

[I]t is critical that we do not overlook the significant evidence showing that the end result of these practices — the mass incarceration of nonwhite men — may also be fueling an urgent public health crisis among some of the most disadvantaged members of our society.

Although African-Americans represent about 12 percent of the United States’ population, they account for roughly half of all new infections and deaths from H.I.V./AIDS. The H.I.V. infection rate among black women is 20 times higher than for white women . . . . “If H.I.V./AIDS were the leading cause of death of white women between the ages of 25 and 34, there would be an outraged outcry in this country.”

Because most gay men do not have female sexual partners and there are relatively low rates of infection among nonblack women, and because rates of injection drug use or unprotected sex among black women are no higher than for other groups, the rapid increase in H.I.V./AIDS cases among black women has been hard to account for. But several public health studies now suggest that because people tend to select sex partners from within their own communities, higher rates of H.I.V. among men who have been in prison may raise the risk of infection in their community.

A study conducted by two professors of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, determined that from 1970 to 2000, a period in which the incarceration rates for black men skyrocketed to roughly six times the rate for non-Hispanic white men, the H.I.V./AIDS infection rate for black women rose to 19 times the rate for non-Hispanic white women. Using various sources of data to investigate the connection between these developments, they concluded that “higher incarceration rates among black males explain the lion’s share of the black-white disparity in AIDS infection rates among both men and women.” 

[I]ncarceration is a risk factor for H.I.V. infection for the following reasons: There is a higher prevalence of H.I.V. among prison populations; there are higher than average rates of sexual assault and coercive sex among men in prison; inmates have little access to condoms; injectable drugs and tattooing are risk factors that also occur in prisons; and when people are released from prison they typically have inadequate access to health care and treatment because of unemployment and poverty.

These facts suggest that an important contributor to the H.I.V. crisis among black women may be hyper-incarceration.  . . . . Outside of prison, African-Americans have the same (or lower) rates of risky sex or drug use as other Americans. Explanations like these reinforce homophobic and racist “blame the victim” attitudes. They have also impeded disease reduction by wrongly identifying vectors of transmission.

There is an urgent need for new policy approaches. We should demand rigorous enforcement of the standards mandated by the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act in order to significantly reduce sexual assaults and coercive sexual practices inside our prisons. We also need to insist that condoms be distributed inside all prisons, and that incarcerated individuals have access to H.I.V. testing and treatment before and after their release. Finally, we must continue to work to eliminate racial profiling in our criminal justice system, and significantly reduce incarceration rates by revising laws and punishment practices that unnecessarily send so many nonviolent lawbreakers to prison.

For those with their heads in the sand, HIV/AIDS in the black community is a huge problem in the  Hampton Roads area.  Pretending that the problem does not exist or ignoring the factor that Virginia's failed criminal justice system is playing in exacerbating the problem is idiocy and/or out right bigotry.. 

6 Baltimore Police Officers Charged in Freddie Gray Death

As repeated news stories from around the country demonstrate, America has a real problem with police brutality.  Even worse, young black males seem to be disproportionately killed in circumstances that raise serious questions as to the validity of claims that they acted out of fear for their lives.  A discussion is badly needed to face the reality that while there are many good police officers - the vast majority - there are bad apples who have no business wearing a badge and carrying a gun.  There should be no room for prejudice and bigotry, yet it continues to exist (yes, and there is lots of homophobia too as I found out personally back in 2003 when Wayne Besen and I were stopped and some Norfolk cops who seemingly got their laughs but tormenting some "faggots" - internal affairs work diligently to protect the officers after I filed a complaint).  After riots and unrest, six officers have now been arrested in Baltimore over the death of Freddie Gray.  Whether they will be convicted, will be another story. Here are highlights from the New York Times:

Baltimore’s chief prosecutor charged six police officers on Friday with a range of crimes including murder and manslaughter in the arrest and fatal injury of Freddie Gray, a striking and surprisingly swift turn in a case that has drawn national attention to police conduct.

The state’s attorney for Baltimore City, Marilyn J. Mosby, filed the charges almost as soon as she received a medical examiner’s report that ruled Mr. Gray’s death a homicide, and a day after the police concluded their initial investigation and handed over their findings. Officials had cautioned that it could take considerable time for her office to complete its own investigation and decide whether to prosecute.

The most serious charges were brought against Officer Caesar R. Goodson Jr., who was driving the van that carried Mr. Gray to a police station after his April 12 arrest. Along with involuntary manslaughter, Officer Goodson, 45, was charged with “second-degree depraved heart murder,” which means indifference to human life.

All six officers were arrested and appeared before a judicial officer. Bail was set at $350,000 for four of the officers and $250,000 for the other two, according to court records. By late Friday, court records showed the officers had been released from jail.

The death of Mr. Gray, 25, a week after he suffered a spinal cord injury brought to a boil long-simmering tensions between the police and poor neighborhoods in this majority-black city, culminating in rioting and looting on Monday. More peaceful demonstrations continued through the week after a curfew was put in place. And the swift action by the prosecutor seemed to some to mark a turning point after months of debate and demonstrations around the country over police violence.

The Baltimore chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police called the speed of the prosecutor politically motivated. “The actions taken today by the state’s attorney are an egregious rush to judgment,” said Michael E. Davey, the union’s lawyer. “We believe that these officers will be vindicated, as they have done nothing wrong.”

Ms. Mosby faulted the police conduct at every turn. The officers who arrested him “failed to establish probable cause for Mr. Gray’s arrest, as no crime had been committed,” she said, describing the arrest as illegal. Officers accused him of possession of a switchblade, but Ms. Mosby said, “The knife was not a switchblade and is lawful under Maryland law.”

Mr. Gray’s condition deteriorated, she said, as officers repeatedly ignored his pleas for medical attention and ignored obvious signs that he was in distress. At one point, she said, when officers tried to check on him, Mr. Gray was unresponsive, yet no action was taken. He died of his injuries a week later.

A. Dwight Pettit, a lawyer who handles police brutality cases in Baltimore — and worked to help elect Ms. Mosby — said her emphasis on the officers’ lack of probable cause in arresting Mr. Gray was significant. Rarely, he said, are police officers prosecuted for making false arrests — and too often, they do not worry about lacking probable cause.

He called the charges of false imprisonment “something new for police activity, which offends the constitutional rights of citizens.”