America: A Country in Free Fall

Back in December, 2019, many Americans had a false sense of security and stability even through the Trump/Pence regime and the Republican Party were hard at work to create a new Gilded Age with more and more of the nation's wealth concentrating in the 1% - or even 0.1% - of the population,  Unemployment was at a 50 year low yet real wages for the middle class when adjusted for inflation had risen little since 1970. Adding to the mix was Trump's never ending signaling to white supremacists and extreme right Christians (the two groups sadly overlap to a very large degree) the false message that they were being persecuted and needed to "take back America."  Those truly being persecuted were those hated by these angry whites and modern day Pharisees. And sadly, police across the nation continued to kill unarmed blacks even as ridiculous marijuana laws were disproportionately used to criminalize young black males (Virginia belatedly decriminalized possession for personal use just this year).   One could say that America was like the Titanic at 11:30 pm on April 14, 1912 - ten minutes before the iceberg strike - and now the Covid-19 has proved itself to be America's iceberg that is laying bare all of the problems that have simmered for years and which are exploding under the economic stress and racial injustice highlighted again by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.  A column in the New York Times looks at America as its underlying problems explode to the surface.   Frighteningly, we have an occupant of the White House and a U.S. Senate majority that will only make matters worse.  Here are column highlights:

The last two and a half months in America have felt like the opening montage in a dystopian film about a nation come undone. First the pandemic hit and hospitals in New York City were overwhelmed. The national economy froze and unemployment soared; one in four American workers has applied for unemployment benefits since March. Lines of cars stretched for miles at food banks. Heavily armed lockdown protesters demonstrated across the country; in Michigan, they forced the Capitol to close and legislators to cancel their session. Nationwide, at least 100,000 people died of a disease almost no one had heard of last year.

Then, this week, a Minneapolis police officer was filmed kneeling on the neck of a black man named George Floyd. As the life went out of him, Floyd pleaded that he couldn’t breathe, echoing the last words of Eric Garner, whose 2014 death at the hands of New York policemen helped catalyze the Black Lives Matter movement. Floyd’s death came only days after three Georgia men were arrested on charges of pursuing and killing a young black man, Ahmaud Arbery, whom they saw out running. A prosecutor had initially declined to charge the men on the grounds that their actions were legal under the state’s self-defense laws.

In Minneapolis protesters poured into the streets, where they met a far harsher police response than anything faced by the country’s gun-toting anti-lockdown activists. On Wednesday night, peaceful demonstrations turned into riots, and on Thursday Minnesota’s governor called in the National Guard.

For a moment, it seemed as if the blithe brutality of Floyd’s death might check the worst impulses of the president and his Blue Lives Matter supporters. The authorities were forced to act: All four of the policemen involved were fired, police chiefs across the country condemned them and William Barr’s Justice Department promised a federal investigation that would be a “top priority.”

But on Thursday night, after a county prosecutor said his office was still determining if the four policemen had committed a crime, the uprising in Minneapolis was reignited, and furious people burned a police precinct. (One of the officers was arrested and charged with third-degree murder on Friday.) On Twitter, an addled Trump threatened military violence against those he called “THUGS,” . . . . [Trump] The president later tried to tamp down outrage by saying he was just warning of danger — the Trump campaign has hoped, after all, to peel off some black voters from the Democrats — but his meaning was obvious enough. This is the same president who on Thursday tweeted out a video of a supporter saying, “The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.”

The Trump presidency has been marked by shocking spasms of right-wing violence: the white nationalist riot in Charlottesville, Va., the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, the mass shooting targeting Latinos in El Paso. But even as the country has simmered and seethed, there hasn’t been widespread disorder. Now, though, we might be at the start of a long, hot summer of civil unrest.

So many things make America combustible right now: mass unemployment, a pandemic that’s laid bare murderous health and economic inequalities, teenagers with little to do, police violence, right-wingers itching for a second civil war and a president eager to pour gasoline on every fire. “I think we’re indeed in a moment where things are going to get a lot more tense before they get more peaceful,” said the University of Michigan historian Heather Ann Thompson, . . . .

These demonstrations were sparked by specific instances of police violence, but they also take place in a context of widespread health and economic devastation that’s been disproportionately borne by people of color, especially those who are poor. “Sociologists have studied collective behavior, urban unrest for decades, and I think it’s safe to say that the consensus view is that it’s never just about a precipitating incident that resulted in the unrest,” Darnell Hunt, dean of social sciences at U.C.L.A., told me. “It’s always a collection of factors that make the situation ripe for collective behavior, unrest and mobilization.”

[F]rustration is likely to build, because the economic ruin from the pandemic is just beginning. In some states, moratoriums on evictions have ended or will soon. The expanded unemployment benefits passed by Congress as part of the CARES Act run out at the end of July. State budgets have been ravaged, and Republicans in Washington have so far refused to come to states’ aid, meaning we’ll likely soon see painful cutbacks in public jobs and services.

But if America feels like a tinderbox at the moment, it’s not just because of pressure coming from the dispossessed. On Wednesday, the journalists Robert Evans and Jason Wilson published a fascinating and disturbing look at the “boogaloo” movement — “an extremely online update of the militia movement” — on the investigative website Bellingcat. “The ‘boogaloo Bois’ expect, even hope, that the warmer weather will bring armed confrontations with law enforcement, and will build momentum towards a new civil war in the United States,” Evans and Wilson write. They add, “In a divided, destabilized post-coronavirus landscape, they could well contribute to widespread violence in the streets of American cities.” . . . . People associated with the subculture had a significant presence at the lockdown protests, but some, motivated by hatred of the police and a love of bedlam, took part in the Minneapolis demonstrations as well.

Most American presidents, faced with such domestic instability, would seek de-escalation. This is one reason civil unrest, for all the damage it can cause to communities where it breaks out, has often led to reform. Change has come, said Thompson, when activists have “created a situation where the people in power actually had to act in order to bring back some meaningful public peace.”

Now, however, we have a president who doesn’t much care about warding off chaos. “In every other time when protest has reached a fever pitch because injustices very much needed to be remedied, the country ultimately tried to find a new equilibrium, tried to address it enough to reach some sort of peace,” said Thompson. “We now have a leadership that’s been crystal clear that it’s perfectly OK if we descend into utter civil war.”

Some of the tropes are familiar, but we haven’t seen this movie before. No one knows how dark things could get, only that, in the Trump era, scenes that seem nightmarish one day come to look almost normal the next.

Be very afraid.

Hillary Clinton Slams Jeb Bush on Racial Issues

The annual convention of the National Urban League provided Hillary Clinton with a venue to call out Jeb "Jebbie" Bush on the inherent racism of the economic policies he favors which, as noted before, are just a warmed over version of the GOP's voodoo economics which have not worked at all over the last 35 years.  At least not for black and average Americans.  Instead, the policies have benefited the 1% and pushed America toward a new Gilded Age where the few have fabulous wealth and the rest of us struggle to hang on to what we have with increasing difficulty.  The New York Times looks at the salvos that Hillary rightly delivered at Jebbie (she should have also attacked the GOP's anti-union agenda in my view).  Here are highlights:

Jeb Bush and his aides had envisioned a big, inclusive, high-minded speech about race on Friday in his home state of Florida, a chance to bring his message of colorblind opportunity to a prestigious group of African-American leaders.

In a rare gesture of bipartisanship, Mr. Bush even planned to warmly quote President Obama, usually the object of his derision.

Then Hillary Rodham Clinton stomped all over those plans.

In a biting surprise attack, delivered as Mr. Bush, the former Florida governor, waited backstage here at the annual convention of the National Urban League, Mrs. Clinton portrayed him as a hypocrite who had set back the cause of black Americans.

It was an unexpected moment of political theater that seemed to presage what could be a bitter general-election rivalry between two of the biggest names in American politics.

Mrs. Clinton, a Democratic candidate for president, latched onto Mr. Bush’s campaign slogan and the name of his “super PAC” —Right to Rise, his shorthand for a conservative agenda of self-reliance and hope — and turned it into a verbal spear.

“People can’t rise if they can’t afford health care,” Mrs. Clinton said to applause from conventiongoers, a dig at Mr. Bush’s opposition to the Affordable Care Act.

“They can’t rise if the minimum wage is too low to live on,” she said, a jab at his opposition to raising the federal minimum wage.

“They can’t rise if their governor makes it harder for them to get a college education,” she said, a critique of Mr. Bush’s decision as governor to eliminate affirmative action in college admissions.

Mr. Bush appeared unprepared to respond, thanking Mrs. Clinton for joining him at the event but otherwise leaving her criticism unanswered in his own speech. 

[H]e did not directly address the rash of police shootings of unarmed black men that dominated discussions at the Urban League conference this week. Instead, he called more obliquely for rebuilding trust in “America’s vital institutions.”

Clinton took a more direct approach, ticking off the names of African-Americans who have died after interactions with law enforcement — including Eric Garner, Walter L. Scott and Freddie Gray — to knowing nods in the audience.

“These names are emblazoned on our hearts,” she said. “We’ve seen their faces; we’ve heard their grieving families.”  She spoke explicitly about racial discrimination, saying it still played a major role in determining “who gets ahead in America and who gets left behind.”

She added: “We can’t go on like this. We are better than this. Things must change.”

Toward the end of her speech, Mrs. Clinton turned to those who, in her telling, do not live up to their own words on the subject of racial injustice, singling out Mr. Bush, not by name but by implication, over and over.

Cherie LaCour-Duckworth, a Clinton supporter, said she had paid little attention to what Mr. Bush said. Mrs. Clinton, she said, “set the stage for him.”

Ben Carson, a Republican who was the sole black candidate to speak here, took a tough-love approach that seemed to inspire little enthusiasm from the crowd. Mr. Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, never mentioned the high-profile deaths of unarmed black men and women in police custody and held himself up as a model of how ambition and education could rescue poor African-Americans from poverty.  He called on black parents to talk to their sons “about how they conduct themselves.”

Herman Wallace, an attendee from Kansas City, Mo., was unmoved. “Carson,” he said, “talked about himself.”

Morgan Freeman - F*ck the Media on Baltimore Coverage

One of the biggest problems blocking any correction of politics and social conditions in America is the decline of American journalism and television news coverage.  Serious news coverage is become harder and harder to find while "reality shows" and inane entertainment news proliferates.  Then there are outlets like Fox News where facts and coverage are twisted - and often ignored - to further a particular political agenda.  Compounding the problem, of course, is the laziness of far too many Americans who fail to educate themselves on issues and then go and vote when they don't know their ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to really knowing what the issues are.  The proverbial soccer moms from my old neighborhood underscore the problem: they worried about PTA infighting, children's sports, and every other thing that had no effect on the state of the nation or world, but were complete idiots on important matters.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the sad state of our media today.  Here are highlights:

I’m seated across from Morgan Freeman, the Oscar-winning acting legend, discussing his latest film Five Flights Up. One of the through lines of the movie, a sweet little rom-com also starring Diane Keaton, is a young Muslim man whose truck has been stopped by the NYPD on a bridge. A televised standoff ensues, with media figures and the public wildly speculating about the cause of the stop. Most, as is their wont, immediately jump to the “he has a bomb” conclusion.

“Isn’t that always happening?” says Freeman of the media’s penchant for unsubstantiated, biased conjecture during live news events. “Look at MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN. Go between those three. There’s a take, there’s a take, and there’s a take. It’s just commentary. CNN wants to be pure news, but the others are just commentary. They’re just commenting on things.”

Which brings us to the TV news media’s coverage of the Baltimore protests in the wake of the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old African-American who was arrested on April 19 for possession of a switchblade. He was later found dead while in police custody, having sustained injuries to his spinal cord and larynx.

Citywide protests ensued, and while some were peaceful, the media focused all of its coverage on the rioting in near-pornographic fashion, leading journalist and African-American scholar Ta-Nehisi Coates to comment, “Cameras actually distort the story. The story already happened. The story began with policy and apexed with Freddie Gray’s death. The story is simple. Gray died in state custody. Unlikely anyone will be punished. (Which explains the riots.) 

[T]echnology lets us see behind the scenes a little bit better,” he continues. “Police have a standard reaction to shooting somebody. I fear for my life and I fear for my safety. Now, at least you can see, ‘Hey, his hands were up in the air! What part of your safety were you afraid of? The guy was running away, what part of your safety was in danger?’ There was one situation I saw where a cop told a guy to get out of the car, said, ‘Show me your driver’s license,’ and the guy reached back into the car and the cop shot him!”

“Anyway, off the media,” he says, waving his hands in the air and chuckling. “F-ck the media.”

We have real problems in this country and lazy and biased media coverage is not helping correct the situation. 

How Many Americans Are Killed by the Police Each Year?

The killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and other recent shootings of unarmed individuals by police may have the much needed benefit of forcing a rethinking of the deference too often given to police office.  Yes, there are many good and honest police officers, but from my own experience there are a number of "bad apples" who sadly are protected by police departments rather than expelled.  From my dealings with police internal affairs departments, most are more worried about protecting police officers rather than determining the truth and disciplining police officers who damage the image of the police in general and who too often seem only too ready to trample on the rights of citizens.  A piece in FiveThirtyEight looks at the question of how many Americans are killed by police each year.  What is disturbing is the fact that this question cannot be easily answered.  The impression, however, is the answer is too many.  Here are highlights:

Earlier this month, a police officer shot and killed an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri. The shooting and the response have reignited concerns about racial profiling, police brutality and police militarization. The incident has also drawn attention to a remarkable lack of knowledge about a seemingly basic fact: how often people are killed by the police.

Some reporting has put forward one of the only figures available: the approximately 400 “justifiable police homicides” each year since 2008, according to the FBI’s annual Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR). That data point has appeared with heavy caveats in a string of media reports, including in USA Today, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Washington Post.

But these estimates can be wrong. Efforts to keep track of “justifiable police homicides” are beset by systemic problems. “Nobody that knows anything about the SHR puts credence in the numbers that they call ‘justifiable homicides,’” when used as a proxy for police killings, said David Klinger, an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri who specializes in policing and the use of deadly force. And there’s no governmental effort at all to record the number of unjustifiable homicides by police. If Brown’s homicide is found to be unjustifiable, it won’t show up in these statistics.

The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program, which compiles the SHR, relies on voluntary involvement of state and local police agencies — a fact that may raise some questions about the integrity of the data.

But the bigger issue is that the basic UCR reports don’t include any information on victims or offenders. That data is provided to the FBI via a separate form, also called the Supplementary Homicide Report (SHR). The circumstances of each death are supposed to be recorded here, with classifications like “gangland killings” (code 46), “lovers triangles” (code 40), and “felon killed by police” (code 81).

The “400 justifiable police killings” figure comes from these SHR forms. This is a problem, for four main reasons:

1. Fewer local police agencies report SHR data than report standard UCR data.
2. “Felon killed by police” refers narrowly to justifiable police homicides, and “unjustifiable homicide by police” is not a classification. This means it’s difficult to combine unjustifiable police homicides — which could be listed as crimes elsewhere in the database — with “justifiable” police homicides.
3. If the legality of a police homicide is in question, it may not be reported to the FBI SHR until the investigation is resolved. If the investigation concludes in a new reporting year, the old SHR data may not be updated, regardless of whether the killing was found to be justifiable or not. Criminology professor Geoff Alpert of the University of South Carolina, an expert on police violence, said he has “never seen a department go back and audit their numbers and fix them.”
4. Killings in federal jurisdictions, such as federal prisons or military bases, are not included in the database.

Account for all that, and you would have the true number of police homicides each year.   It’s more than 400.

Obviously, with the militarization of police forces, the chances that more Americans will be unjustifiably killed by police officers increases significantly.