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carolinehayter

Defunding Or Reallocating Police Resources: Most Mayors Do Not Support : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-police-resources-survey-finds

police Politics US Culture policy BLM

shared by carolinehayter on 28 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The vast majority of mayors in American cities do not support sweeping changes to the funding of their police departments, and most say last year's racial justice protests were a force for good in their cities, according to a new survey of more than 100 mayors from across the U.S.
  • Eighty percent of the mayors who responded to the Menino Survey of Mayors say they believe their police budgets last year were "about right." Most mayors said they did not support reallocating many, or some of their police department's resources and responsibilities.
  • The findings come in the early days of the Biden administration, as the president seeks to make good on campaign promises to rein in police abuse and dismantle systemic racism. The country's divisions over race, criminal justice and policing are some of the most significant domestic challenges facing Biden's administration.
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  • The mayors were surveyed over the summer, as the country reckoned visibly, and painfully, with racism and police violence across all sectors of American life.
  • making Black Lives Matter a national rallying cry.
  • Mayors say they believe that the protests that swept the country during the summer of 2020 did more good than harm in their communities, but there were divisions along party lines. Republican mayors were 31 percentage points more likely to see protests as having done harm to their communities, according to the report.
  • "There was a small but sort of reasonably sized minority of mayors that really wanted to think about those bigger transformational changes, but for the most part, mayors proposed reforms that existed within existing structures," said Katherine Levine Einstein, a Boston University assistant professor of political science who is one of the report's authors.
  • Mayors also say they recognize the disparities in how Black people are treated by police with their white counterparts. Sixty-eight percent said they agree that the police treat white people better than Black people. But there is a sharp partisan gap, with 73% of Republican mayors saying that police treat white and Black people equally, compared to just 14% of Democratic mayors.
  • 44% of mayors say they believe that Black residents in their city distrust the police
  • The survey also found that most mayors surveyed opposed drastically reshaping the budgets of their local police departments, amid calls in some parts of the country to slash funding for police departments or to disband them entirely, redirecting funding to social programs. A large, bipartisan majority of mayors said that in their city, their police department's share of the budget was "about right." Just 12% said that the budget for their police department was too large.
  • Inglewood, Calif., Mayor James Butts said he believed that the slogan defund the police was "too simplistic" to solve what is ultimately a "multi-layered long-standing cultural and leadership issue."
  • The mayors that responded to the survey are overwhelmingly Democrats. Just 20% are Republicans.
  • "They thought more about, OK, we have this police force, how can we maybe make it a little more diverse? How can we maybe change our training practices at the margins? So they thought more about what I would say are some of these more modest reforms rather than big, structural overhauls about what policing might look like in a community."
  • Butts said that the root problem that needs to be addressed to improve police-community relationships is department culture, discipline and leadership.
  • "They can't be schemes that say 'Look, we're doing this, so we've changed.' You have to look inside at your culture, how you police, how you think, look at your complaints that you receive and use those as a barometer or guide as to what you need to do to change behavior or thinking in the department."
Javier E

Tyre Nichols's Death Raises Questions About Race and Policing - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...as-reform-violence-11675089879

justice right racism stereotypes black culture

shared by Javier E on 01 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • it mistakes justice for right. Justice is only ever retrospective. It is the redress of a wrong. It can never right a wrong. Even if, as we hope, it can help deter future crime, it doesn’t even purport to address the causes and conditions that lead to criminal acts. For that we have to examine individual, social and institutional characteristics—and, if we can, correct them.
  • There is still much room for uncertainty but I think the answer here is clearly yes.
  • The right question to ask is: Would the Memphis officers have behaved as they did if the man they were pursuing had been white?
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  • t we can frame the question differently: Is it less probable that a confrontation between these officers and a suspect would have resulted in his violent death if he had been, let’s say, a middle-aged white man rather than a 29-year-old black man?
  • Five black cops kill a black man and the left immediately insists it is racism at work. But you don’t have to believe that the black officers were somehow acting as unwitting agents of white supremacism, or subscribe to the canon of critical race theory, to ponder how the race of suspects affects how they are treated by police.
  • The problem, as well documented in studies of police shootings, is that young black men are disproportionately more likely to be involved in serious crime—and in encounters with police—than are other demographics. This inevitably results in a greater suspicion in the minds of police officers (and the rest of us) that a young black man may pose a greater risk.
  • This is rational and not primal bigotry. But at what point does this rational, inference-making blur into a set of unworthy assumptions about the behavior of all young black men, even—perhaps especially—among other black men?
  • Fixing the deep social problems that result in higher crime rates, and sometimes tragic encounters with police, among blacks is a continuing task for policy makers. But fixing in our own minds—of blacks and whites alike—lingering stereotypes of particular demographics is an urgent task for all of us.
Javier E

Democrats Need the Best of Biden - The Bulwark - 0 views

thebulwark.com/mocrats-need-the-best-of-biden

biden Democratic party 2020

shared by Javier E on 17 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • What must Biden do? In terms of substance, not too much—instead, he needs to do a much better job of spelling out what he already stands for. In truth, based on what he has already said, Biden would be the most progressive Democratic presidential nominee in recent history.
  • Take healthcare. Trump has labored to abolish Obamacare, including its protection for those with pre-existing conditions. By comparison, Biden offers a huge step forward, preserving private health insurance while offering public access to Medicare for all who want it. In the real world, such progress was unthinkable until today.
  • As a corollary, Biden offers what Vox calls the most detailed proposal to combat the opioid crisis: $125 billion over 10 years to scale up treatment and recovery programs—with the pharmaceutical industry to cover the costs through higher taxes. This plan has the benefit of being both fair and appealing to both Democrats and populist Trump voters
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  • Biden calls for a $15 minimum wage, increased Social Security benefits for the poorest Americans, and strengthening the power of unions to organize and bargain. He advocates a substantial program to tackle infrastructure, and a sweeping gun control plan.
  • He proposes to assist low-income schools by tripling the amount of federal assistance to fund universal pre-K and raise teachers’ salaries. A frequent critic, German Lopez of Vox, describes his proposal for criminal justice reform as “one of the most comprehensive among presidential campaigns, taking on various parts of the criminal justice system at once.” And he is committed to fighting voter suppression and expanding the right to vote.
  • When it comes to the environment, even the progressive Sunrise Movement (which supports Sanders) calls Biden’s plan to combat climate change “comprehensive.” Focused on achieving clean energy and eliminating harmful emissions, it would cost $1.7 trillion over a decade—which, while far less the cost of the Green New Deal, represents a giant leap forward.
  • His immigration plan is smart and balanced. While avoiding the extremes of decriminalizing the border or abolishing ICE, it protects Dreamers, provides a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, welcomes increased immigration, and reverses our shameful and sadistic maltreatment of asylum seekers and their children.
  • How does Biden propose to raise revenue? By tax increases of $3.4 trillion over a decade, virtually all derived from raising rates for corporations and wealthy—including treating capital gains as ordinary income.
  • The relevant question is not how all this compares to Sanders’s unachievable wish list, but to the reality of America under Donald Trump. Anyone who dismisses the difference is not a progressive, but a myopic and politically-infantile purist.
  • Still, at its heart this election is about one man: Trump. That’s why it’s imperative that Biden daily remind voters, in style and substance, that he is Trump’s antithesis: decent, dignified, compassionate, and competent; a man they can trust.
  • To a great extent, Biden is less a leader than a vehicle. Which means that his campaign will need to present Biden at his best—the warm and engaging guy who looks like a “can-do” president.
  • As a child, Biden struggled to conquer a congenital stutter he fights against still, which may explain some of his verbal tics in debate. To control stuttering requires immense concentration and willpower: that Biden became a politician is a triumph—and something of a wonder
  • that’s the Biden his campaign needs voters to internalize: a leader with the resilience to conquer adversity and come out stronger and more compassionate than before. Which is a pretty fair metaphor for the America which, millions hope, will follow Donald Trump.
  • A Morning Consult poll in February showed that 30 percent of independent voters were less likely to support Biden because of controversy regarding his son. Republican senators are primed to use their subpoena power to “investigate” Hunter and thereby deep-dye the damage to his father, undercutting his appeal as an ordinary guy who exemplifies middle-class values.
Javier E

How Donald Trump Could Build an Autocracy in the U.S. - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...513872

autocracy trump politics

shared by Javier E on 09 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Everything imagined above—and everything described below—is possible only if many people other than Donald Trump agree to permit it. It can all be stopped, if individual citizens and public officials make the right choices. The story told here, like that told by Charles Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, is a story not of things that will be, but of things that may be. Other paths remain open. It is up to Americans to decide which one the country will follow.
  • What is spreading today is repressive kleptocracy, led by rulers motivated by greed rather than by the deranged idealism of Hitler or Stalin or Mao. Such rulers rely less on terror and more on rule-twisting, the manipulation of information, and the co-optation of elites.
  • the American system is also perforated by vulnerabilities no less dangerous for being so familiar. Supreme among those vulnerabilities is reliance on the personal qualities of the man or woman who wields the awesome powers of the presidency.
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  • The president of the United States, on the other hand, is restrained first and foremost by his own ethics and public spirit. What happens if somebody comes to the high office lacking those qualities?
  • Donald Trump, however, represents something much more radical. A president who plausibly owes his office at least in part to a clandestine intervention by a hostile foreign intelligence service? Who uses the bully pulpit to target individual critics? Who creates blind trusts that are not blind, invites his children to commingle private and public business, and somehow gets the unhappy members of his own political party either to endorse his choices or shrug them off? If this were happening in Honduras, we’d know what to call it. It’s happening here instead, and so we are baffled.
  • As politics has become polarized, Congress has increasingly become a check only on presidents of the opposite party. Recent presidents enjoying a same-party majority in Congress—Barack Obama in 2009 and 2010, George W. Bush from 2003 through 2006—usually got their way.
  • Trump has scant interest in congressional Republicans’ ideas, does not share their ideology, and cares little for their fate. He can—and would—break faith with them in an instant to further his own interests. Yet here they are, on the verge of achieving everything they have hoped to achieve for years, if not decades. They owe this chance solely to Trump’s ability to deliver a crucial margin of votes in a handful of states—Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—which has provided a party that cannot win the national popular vote a fleeting opportunity to act as a decisive national majority.
  • What excites Trump is his approval rating, his wealth, his power. The day could come when those ends would be better served by jettisoning the institutional Republican Party in favor of an ad hoc populist coalition, joining nationalism to generous social spending—a mix that’s worked well for authoritarians in places like Poland.
  • A scandal involving the president could likewise wreck everything that Republican congressional leaders have waited years to accomplish. However deftly they manage everything else, they cannot prevent such a scandal. But there is one thing they can do: their utmost not to find out about it.
  • Ryan has learned his prudence the hard way. Following the airing of Trump’s past comments, caught on tape, about his forceful sexual advances on women, Ryan said he’d no longer campaign for Trump. Ryan’s net favorability rating among Republicans dropped by 28 points in less than 10 days. Once unassailable in the party, he suddenly found himself disliked by 45 percent of Republicans.
  • Ambition will counteract ambition only until ambition discovers that conformity serves its goals better. At that time, Congress, the body expected to check presidential power, may become the president’s most potent enabler.
  • Discipline within the congressional ranks will be strictly enforced not only by the party leadership and party donors, but also by the overwhelming influence of Fox News.
  • Fox learned its lesson: Trump sells; critical coverage does not. Since the election, the network has awarded Kelly’s former 9 p.m. time slot to Tucker Carlson, who is positioning himself as a Trump enthusiast in the Hannity mold.
  • Gingrich said: The president “has, frankly, the power of the pardon. It is a totally open power, and he could simply say, ‘Look, I want them to be my advisers. I pardon them if anybody finds them to have behaved against the rules. Period.’ And technically, under the Constitution, he has that level of authority.”
  • In 2009, in the run-up to the Tea Party insurgency, South Carolina’s Bob Inglis crossed Fox, criticizing Glenn Beck and telling people at a town-hall meeting that they should turn his show off. He was drowned out by booing, and the following year, he lost his primary with only 29 percent of the vote, a crushing repudiation for an incumbent untouched by any scandal.
  • Fox is reinforced by a carrier fleet of supplementary institutions: super pacs, think tanks, and conservative web and social-media presences, which now include such former pariahs as Breitbart and Alex Jones. So long as the carrier fleet coheres—and unless public opinion turns sharply against the president—oversight of Trump by the Republican congressional majority will very likely be cautious, conditional, and limited.
  • His immediate priority seems likely to be to use the presidency to enrich himself. But as he does so, he will need to protect himself from legal risk. Being Trump, he will also inevitably wish to inflict payback on his critics. Construction of an apparatus of impunity and revenge will begin haphazardly and opportunistically. But it will accelerate. It will have to.
  • By filling the media space with bizarre inventions and brazen denials, purveyors of fake news hope to mobilize potential supporters with righteous wrath—and to demoralize potential opponents by nurturing the idea that everybody lies and nothing matters
  • The United States may be a nation of laws, but the proper functioning of the law depends upon the competence and integrity of those charged with executing it. A president determined to thwart the law in order to protect himself and those in his circle has many means to do so.
  • The powers of appointment and removal are another. The president appoints and can remove the commissioner of the IRS. He appoints and can remove the inspectors general who oversee the internal workings of the Cabinet departments and major agencies. He appoints and can remove the 93 U.S. attorneys, who have the power to initiate and to end federal prosecutions. He appoints and can remove the attorney general, the deputy attorney general, and the head of the criminal division at the Department of Justice.
  • Republicans in Congress have long advocated reforms to expedite the firing of underperforming civil servants. In the abstract, there’s much to recommend this idea. If reform is dramatic and happens in the next two years, however, the balance of power between the political and the professional elements of the federal government will shift, decisively, at precisely the moment when the political elements are most aggressive. The intelligence agencies in particular would likely find themselves exposed to retribution from a president enraged at them for reporting on Russia’s aid to his election campaign.
  • The McDonnells had been convicted on a combined 20 counts.
  • The Supreme Court objected, however, that the lower courts had interpreted federal anticorruption law too broadly. The relevant statute applied only to “official acts.” The Court defined such acts very strictly, and held that “setting up a meeting, talking to another official, or organizing an event—without more—does not fit that definition of an ‘official act.’ ”
  • Trump is poised to mingle business and government with an audacity and on a scale more reminiscent of a leader in a post-Soviet republic than anything ever before seen in the United States.
  • Trump will try hard during his presidency to create an atmosphere of personal munificence, in which graft does not matter, because rules and institutions do not matter. He will want to associate economic benefit with personal favor. He will create personal constituencies, and implicate other people in his corruption.
  • You would never know from Trump’s words that the average number of felonious killings of police during the Obama administration’s tenure was almost one-third lower than it was in the early 1990s, a decline that tracked with the general fall in violent crime that has so blessed American society. There had been a rise in killings of police in 2014 and 2015 from the all-time low in 2013—but only back to the 2012 level. Not every year will be the best on record.
  • A mistaken belief that crime is spiraling out of control—that terrorists roam at large in America and that police are regularly gunned down—represents a considerable political asset for Donald Trump. Seventy-eight percent of Trump voters believed that crime had worsened during the Obama years.
  • From the point of view of the typical Republican member of Congress, Fox remains all-powerful: the single most important source of visibility and affirmation with the voters whom a Republican politician cares about
  • Civil unrest will not be a problem for the Trump presidency. It will be a resource. Trump will likely want not to repress it, but to publicize it—and the conservative entertainment-outrage complex will eagerly assist him
  • Immigration protesters marching with Mexican flags; Black Lives Matter demonstrators bearing antipolice slogans—these are the images of the opposition that Trump will wish his supporters to see. The more offensively the protesters behave, the more pleased Trump will be.
  • If there is harsh law enforcement by the Trump administration, it will benefit the president not to the extent that it quashes unrest, but to the extent that it enflames more of it, ratifying the apocalyptic vision that haunted his speech at the convention.
  • In the early days of the Trump transition, Nic Dawes, a journalist who has worked in South Africa, delivered an ominous warning to the American media about what to expect. “Get used to being stigmatized as ‘opposition,’ ” he wrote. “The basic idea is simple: to delegitimize accountability journalism by framing it as partisan.”
  • Mostly, however, modern strongmen seek merely to discredit journalism as an institution, by denying that such a thing as independent judgment can exist. All reporting serves an agenda. There is no truth, only competing attempts to grab power.
  • In true police states, surveillance and repression sustain the power of the authorities. But that’s not how power is gained and sustained in backsliding democracies. Polarization, not persecution, enables the modern illiberal regime.
  • A would-be kleptocrat is actually better served by spreading cynicism than by deceiving followers with false beliefs: Believers can be disillusioned; people who expect to hear only lies can hardly complain when a lie is exposed.
  • The inculcation of cynicism breaks down the distinction between those forms of media that try their imperfect best to report the truth, and those that purvey falsehoods for reasons of profit or ideology. The New York Times becomes the equivalent of Russia’s RT; The Washington Post of Breitbart; NPR of Infowars.
  • Trump had not a smidgen of evidence beyond his own bruised feelings and internet flotsam from flagrantly unreliable sources. Yet once the president-elect lent his prestige to the crazy claim, it became fact for many people. A survey by YouGov found that by December 1, 43 percent of Republicans accepted the claim that millions of people had voted illegally in 2016.
  • A clear untruth had suddenly become a contested possibility. When CNN’s Jeff Zeleny correctly reported on November 28 that Trump’s tweet was baseless, Fox’s Sean Hannity accused Zeleny of media bias—and then proceeded to urge the incoming Trump administration to take a new tack with the White House press corps, and to punish reporters like Zeleny.
  • the whipping-up of potentially violent Twitter mobs against media critics is already a standard method of Trump’s governance.
  • I’ve talked with well-funded Trump supporters who speak of recruiting a troll army explicitly modeled on those used by Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Russia’s Putin to take control of the social-media space, intimidating some critics and overwhelming others through a blizzard of doubt-casting and misinformation.
  • he and his team are serving notice that a new era in government-media relations is coming, an era in which all criticism is by definition oppositional—and all critics are to be treated as enemies.
  • “Lying is the message,” she wrote. “It’s not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power over truth itself.”
  • lurid mass movements of the 20th century—communist, fascist, and other—have bequeathed to our imaginations an outdated image of what 21st-century authoritarianism might look like.
  • In a society where few people walk to work, why mobilize young men in matching shirts to command the streets? If you’re seeking to domineer and bully, you want your storm troopers to go online, where the more important traffic is. Demagogues need no longer stand erect for hours orating into a radio microphone. Tweet lies from a smartphone instead.
  • “Populist-fueled democratic backsliding is difficult to counter,” wrote the political scientists Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Erica Frantz late last year. “Because it is subtle and incremental, there is no single moment that triggers widespread resistance or creates a focal point around which an opposition can coalesce … Piecemeal democratic erosion, therefore, typically provokes only fragmented resistance.”
  • If people retreat into private life, if critics grow quieter, if cynicism becomes endemic, the corruption will slowly become more brazen, the intimidation of opponents stronger. Laws intended to ensure accountability or prevent graft or protect civil liberties will be weakened.
  • If the president uses his office to grab billions for himself and his family, his supporters will feel empowered to take millions. If he successfully exerts power to punish enemies, his successors will emulate his methods.
  • If citizens learn that success in business or in public service depends on the favor of the president and his ruling clique, then it’s not only American politics that will change. The economy will be corrupted too, and with it the larger cultur
  • A culture that has accepted that graft is the norm, that rules don’t matter as much as relationships with those in power, and that people can be punished for speech and acts that remain theoretically legal—such a culture is not easily reoriented back to constitutionalism, freedom, and public integrity.
  • The oft-debated question “Is Donald Trump a fascist?” is not easy to answer. There are certainly fascistic elements to him: the subdivision of society into categories of friend and foe; the boastful virility and the delight in violence; the vision of life as a struggle for dominance that only some can win, and that others must lose.
  • He is so pathetically needy, so shamelessly self-interested, so fitful and distracted. Fascism fetishizes hardihood, sacrifice, and struggle—concepts not often associated with Trump.
  • Perhaps the better question about Trump is not “What is he?” but “What will he do to us?”
  • By all early indications, the Trump presidency will corrode public integrity and the rule of law—and also do untold damage to American global leadership, the Western alliance, and democratic norms around the world
  • The damage has already begun, and it will not be soon or easily undone. Yet exactly how much damage is allowed to be done is an open question—the most important near-term question in American politics. It is also an intensely personal one, for its answer will be determined by the answer to another question: What will you do?
julia rhodes

Turkey's ailing sultan - Le Monde diplomatique - English edition - 0 views

mondediplo.com/06turkey

economics US policy history culture politics crisis monde turkey sultan syria erdogan

shared by julia rhodes on 15 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • “Increasingly, democratisation and authoritarianism are going hand in hand, and not just in Turkey.”
  • Erdogan’s ambition to institute an enhanced presidency with himself as a new “sultan” now looks unlikely to succeed after his imperious response to the protests over the development of Gezi Park
  • For the first time, Erdogan, who had confidently steered Turkey through choppy waters, seemed at a loss
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  • His other recent attempts at social control (restrictions on the sale of alcohol or moves to end abortion, which he has described as murder) infuriated secular Turks, but were aimed at winning votes from Muslim conservatives in this still divided society.
  • Secular intellectuals regard Gezi as a turning point: in the first major political protests since the 1970s, an apolitical younger generation has become politicised — not by big ideas like democracy or nationalism, but for their rights. They were joined by activists for Kurdish, Alevi and gay rights — a coming together of separate causes that is new to Turkey.
  • As it built its own coalitions at home, it set out internationally to demonstrate that Islam was compatible with democracy. The policy worked. The AKP was re-elected on 22 July 2007, and won a triumphant third term in the 12 June 2011 elections
  • The AKP, though not democratic, became a democratising force, giving a new sense of belonging and empowerment to a majority of Turks, previously excluded by the old secular elites
  • His worsening authoritarianism escaped the world’s attention, although in Turkey, there were worries about unaccountability and crony capitalism, the penetration of Fethullah Gulen’s Islamist movement into the police and judiciary, the silencing of the media, and the arrest of many journalists and other critics of the government
  • It is clear the justice system is not free of politics and has failed to investigate evidence of wider involvement in criminal activity and human rights abuses, particularly in the southeast. Yet with the verdicts, Turkey’s demilitarisation has been underlined.
  • Much of the AKP success story was based on the economy, which it opened up, building on structural adjustment reforms by the former economy minister Kemal Derviş (2001-02).
  • . On Cyprus, there is a sense that the AKP government has done what it can, backing the UN peace plan proposed by Kofi Annan for a federal solution.
  • he AKP government’s biggest achievement so far — and greatest remaining challenge — is its attempt at a solution to the Kurdish question.
  • “We used to see self-determination as the only solution... Now our Kurds want to look west. Both for economic benefits and because of the regional conjunction, Kurds here see their future in a democratising Turkey that recognises their rights.” Those rights mean an end to ethnic discrimination, full recognition of Kurdish identity with the right to teach Kurdish at school and a decentralisation that will lead to a form of autonomy. For this, constitutional reform is needed.
  • Further diplomatic incidents led to Turkey’s suspension of military, though not economic, ties with Israel that October. This made Erdogan the darling of the Arab world and played well with the Turkish public. Washington under Obama was not dissatisfied. Then came the Mavi Mamari affair, when a Turkish flotilla carrying humanitarian aid to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza was attacked in international waters on 31 May 2010 and nine Turkish activists killed. This year, after a very public row, the Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu apologised.
  • There were miscalculations on Syria. After Turkey’s close alliance with President Bashar al-Assad was swiftly reversed at the start of the uprising, Turkey facilitated the rebels, set up refugee camps along the shared border and allowed the opposition Syrian National Council to set up its headquarters in Istanbul. Ordinary Turks welcomed Syria’s refugees but there was no enthusiasm for military involvement, with the risks of unrest among the country’s own Alevi minority (3) and concern at the porous borders that allow infiltration of Al-Qaida-linked jihadists into Turkey.
Javier E

Andrew Sullivan: The Limits of My Conservatism - 0 views

nymag.com/...limits-of-my-conservatism.html

conservatism reactionary gender leftist indoctrination immigration

shared by Javier E on 17 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • I had a very pleasant dinner with Michael Anton, the brilliant, bespoke Straussian who went to work for Trump’s National Security Council for a while
  • Anton is something of an intellectual pariah — a Washington Post columnist wrote last year that “there is little reason to ever listen” to him — but he’s a pariah in part because he’s a reactionary with a first-class mind
  • He reminds me why I’m a conservative, why the distinction between a reactionary and a conservative is an important one in this particular moment, and how the left unwittingly is becoming reactionism’s most potent enabler
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  • one core divide on the right: between those who see the social, cultural, and demographic changes of the last few decades as requiring an assault and reversal, and those who seek to reform its excesses, manage its unintended consequences, but otherwise live with it. Anton is a reactionary; I’m a conservative
  • there is a place where conservatives and reactionaries find common cause — and that is when the change occurring is drastic, ideological, imposed by an elite, and without any limiting principle.
  • On immigration, for example, has the demographic transformation of the U.S. been too swift, too revolutionary, and too indifferent to human nature and history?
  • Or is it simply a new, if challenging, turn in a long, American story of waves of immigrants creating a country that’s an ever-changing kaleidoscope?
  • If you answer “yes” to the first, you’re a reactionary. If “yes” to the second, you’re a liberal. If you say yes to both, you’re a conservative.
  • If you say it’s outrageous and racist even to consider these questions, you’re a card-carrying member of the left.
  • In a new essay, Anton explains his view of the world: “What happens when transformative efforts bump up against permanent and natural limits? Nature tends to bump back
  • But what are “permanent and natural limits” to transformation? Here are a couple: humanity’s deep-seated tribalism and the natural differences between men and women
  • — but you will never eradicate these deeper realities.
  • The left is correct that Americans are racist and sexist; but so are all humans
  • I’d say that by any reasonable standards in history or the contemporary world, America is a miracle of multiracial and multicultural harmony. There’s more to do and accomplish, but the standard should be what’s doable within the framework of human nature, not perfection
  • More to the point, the attempt to eradicate rather than ameliorate these things requires extraordinary intervention in people’s lives, empowers government way beyond its optimal boundaries, and generates intense backlash.
  • if you decide to change the ethnic composition of an entire country in just a few decades, you will get a backlash from the previous majority ethnicity; and if you insist that there are no differences between men and women, you are going to generate male and female resistance.
  • That kind of left-radicalism will generate an equal and opposite kind of right-reactionism. And that’s especially true if you define the resisters as bigots and deplorables, and refuse to ever see that they might have a smidgen of a point.
  • This is not to say that some of the resisters are not bigots, just that no human society has been without bigotry, and that many others who are resistant to drastic change are just uncomfortable, or nostalgic, or afraid, or lost
  • I’m a multicultural conservative. But when assaulted by the slur of “white supremacist” because I don’t buy Marcuse, my reactionism perks up. The smugness, self-righteousness, and dogmatism of the current left is a Miracle-Gro of reactionism.
  • Subject young white boys to critical race and gender theory, tell them that women can have penises, that genetics are irrelevant in understanding human behavior, that borders are racist, or that men are inherently toxic, and you will get a bunch of Jordan Peterson fans by their 20s. Actually, scratch that future tense — they’re here and growing in number.
  • Many leftists somehow believe that sustained indoctrination will work in abolishing human nature, and when it doesn’t, because it can’t, they demonize those who have failed the various tests of PC purity as inherently wicked.
  • n the end, the alienated and despised see no reason not to gravitate to ever-more extreme positions. They support people and ideas simply because they piss off their indoctrinators. And, in the end, they reelect Trump.
  • None of this is necessary. You can be in favor of women’s equality without buying into the toxicity of men; you can support legal immigration if the government gets serious about stopping illegal immigration; you can be inclusive of trans people without abolishing the bimodality of human sex and gender; you can support criminal-justice reform without believing — as the New York Times now apparently does — that America is an inherently racist invention,
  • Leftists have to decide at some point: Do they want to push more conservatives into Michael Anton’s reactionary camp or more reactionaries into the conservative one? And begin to ponder their own role in bringing this extreme reactionism into the mainstream.
mimiterranova

Final Trump-Biden presidential debate: Top 5 moments | Fox News - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...den-final-debate-top-5-moments

debate fox news Politics

shared by mimiterranova on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • allegations that Biden was involved in the foreign business dealings of his son, Hunter. (The Democrat and his campaign have denied this).
  • Allegations have surfaced in recent days that Biden was involved with his son Hunter's foreign business dealings, though the Democrat and his campaign has denied this
  • Trump attacked Biden for the Obama-Biden administration's "catch-and-release" policy, in which illegal immigrants were allowed to walk free ahead of their court dates after being arrested for being in the country illegally. Conservatives have said that allows those immigrants to miss their court dates and disappear into the country. Biden meanwhile attacked Trump on the current administration's family separation policy, which before it ended in 2018 was highly controversial. 
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • "Who built the cages, Joe?" Trump said. 
  • "You have 525 kids not knowing where in God's name they're going to be and lost their parents," Biden replied, bringing up the family separation policy again.
  • After Welker asked Biden about whether increasing the minimum wage to $15 per hour might hurt small businesses, Biden appeared not to understand the question and advocated for small-business bailouts. 
  • This exchange may be considered Biden's biggest blunder of the evening, as he appeared to initially completely miss the point of Welker's question. The moment also played into Trump's larger economic message, which his allies have been practically begging him to highlight in the late stages of the campaign. 
  • The comments from Biden were in response to claims from Trump that he is "the least racist person in this room.""I got criminal justice reform done and prison reform, and opportunity zones," the president said, elaborating on his race record. "I took care of black colleges and universities."
  • "Anybody responsible for that many deaths should not remain president of the United States of America," Biden said of Trump's handling of the pandemic that's killed over 200,000 Americans. "We can’t lock ourselves in a basement like he does. ... He has this thing about living in a basement," Trump said, echoing his previous exhortations to Americans to not be afraid of the virus. 
  • mimiterranova on 02 Nov 20
     
    from a different point of view
manhefnawi

Russia Tries to Catch 'Criminals' by Abusing Interpol - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...561539

Russia Putin Crime Legal Systems

shared by manhefnawi on 31 May 18 - No Cached
  • “Urgent: Just was arrested by Spanish police in Madrid on a Russian Interpol arrest warrant. Going to the police station right now.”
  • Bill Browder, the hedge-fund manager and Putin fan turned human-rights activist and anti-Putin crusader, was in Spain to give evidence in anti-corruption proceedings implicating the Russian government
  • It can effectively be a “crime” in member states like Russia, Iran, or Venezuela, to engage in anti-government activism or even run-of-the-mill journalism—activities that, in other member countries including most Western democracies, are protected by law.
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  • Interpol’s constitution tries to guard against this by forbidding “any intervention or activities of a political, military, religious or racial character.”
  • Among other things, the act sanctions wealthy associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and is by many accounts uniquely enraging to the Russian government.)
  • A Spanish court ultimately rejected Russia’s extradition request, but not until after Silaev had spent eight days in prison and six months fighting a legal battle in Spain.
  • But ultimately the international justice system is only as good as the countries writing and enforcing the laws—and some notions of “justice” are not fit for export overseas.
Javier E

How a Liberal Lawyer in Georgia Took an Extreme Right Turn - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-Jr-georgia-capitol-riot.html

culture politics US trump history crisis individual corruption racism

shared by Javier E on 18 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • last year, as the progressive movement in Georgia was on the cusp of historic electoral triumph, Mr. Calhoun, a small-town lawyer whose family had long roots in the state, suddenly abandoned the Democrats. And not only that, he pledged to kill them.
  • “I have tons of ammo,” Mr. Calhoun wrote on Twitter three months before storming the U.S. Capitol with a pro-Trump mob. “Gonna use it too — at the range and on racist democrat communists. So make my day.”
  • Some Black residents of Americus, Mr. Calhoun’s hometown, were not shocked that a person so worldly could end up doing something like this. “The Jekyll and Hyde effect,” said the Rev. Mathis Kearse Wright Jr., the head of the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter.
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  • Black residents in Sumter make up a reliable Democratic base, while whites are often divided, as one local put it, between liberal “come heres,” like Habitat employees, and conservative, locally raised, “been heres.”
  • Before it fell away, Mr. Calhoun’s white progressivism had a homegrown flavor, steeped in Georgia’s history, countercultural currents and higher education system. He preached criminal justice reform and broadcast his support for Hillary Clinton.
  • Then came his abrupt turn, and a headlong descent into some of the darkest places in Georgia history. He peppered his social media posts with racial slurs, referring to Vice President Kamala Harris as a “fake negro.” He saluted the Confederacy, and he seemed to thirst for civil war.
  • He was not an unlettered man: In his years at school, Mr. Calhoun had written a master’s thesis on the historiography of Napoleon’s peninsular war and had attended a law seminar in Belgium. His profile — a well-educated, white-collar white man — matched that of some of the other Georgians who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6
  • The crowd that came from Georgia included a 53-year-old investment portfolio manager and a 65-year-old accountant. It included Cleveland Grover Meredith Jr., 51, a successful business owner who graduated from an elite Atlanta prep school, who was arrested in Washington the day after the riot with guns, hundreds of rounds of ammunition and a phone with his text messages about “putting a bullet” into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s head.
  • he began a law career in Americus, an old Confederate cotton town and the seat of Sumter County, about 140 miles south of Atlanta. Sumter has for decades played an important role in liberal Georgia’s sense of possibility. A multiracial Christian commune, Koinonia Farm, was founded there in the 1940s. Jimmy Carter lives in the tiny town of Plains, and the nonprofit Habitat for Humanity, founded by a Koinonia family, is headquartered in Americus
  • while Mr. Calhoun’s politics had changed drastically, Mr. Lankford said, his personality had not.“He’s the same old banty rooster, just on the other side of the fence,” Mr. Lankford said.
  • Rev. Wright suggested that the racism deep at the root of Georgia’s history was still very much alive, even if white people, including some of those who saw themselves as progressive, did not want to admit it. “What President Trump did was allow it to bud and to grow,” he said. “A lot of people who had been suppressing it no longer felt that they had to suppress it.”
  • “I was a Democrat for 30 years,” he wrote in a recent social media post. The new gun control proposals changed that, he said. “I was called a white supremacist and a racist for defending the 2A,” he continued, using a shorthand for the Second Amendment. Given all that he had done as a lawyer for “justice,” he said, “that hurt my feelings a little. That’s when I became a Trump supporter.”
  • His conversion was total. By the fall of 2020 he was posting about a looming “domestic communist problem” and the “rioting BLM-Antifa crime wave.” Of Joe Biden, he wrote: “Hang the bastard.”
  • Old friends were baffled, and some grew nervous. “I’ll be slinging enough hot lead to stack you commies up like cordwood,” Mr. Calhoun wrote on Twitter in October. Then, a few days later: “Standing by, and when Trump makes the call, millions of heavily armed, pissed off patriots are coming to Washington.”
  • After the election, Mr. Calhoun held a small gun rights rally in town, and the violent posts continued, with talk of civil war, mounting heads on pikes and showing the Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar “what the bottom of the river looks like.” In December, a reporter for The Globe and Mail, a Canadian newspaper, found Mr. Calhoun buying a Confederate flag outside a Trump rally. “This is about independence and freedom,” Mr. Calhoun told the reporter, describing Trumpism and Southern secession as similarly justified fights against tyranny.
  • On Jan. 6, Mr. Calhoun’s posts showed he had made his way inside the U.S. Capitol with the mob. “The first of us who got upstairs kicked in Nancy Pelosi’s office door,” he wrote in one post. “Crazy Nancy probably would have been torn into little pieces, but she was nowhere to be seen.”
  • A week later, federal agents arrested him at his sister’s house in Macon, Ga., where he had stockpiled two AR-15-style assault rifles, two shotguns, a handgun, brass knuckles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, according to the testimony of an F.B.I. agent.
  • After the 2016 election, an old friend, Bob Fortin, remembers Mr. Calhoun excoriating him for voting for Mr. Trump. “He cussed me out in his kitchen,” said Mr. Fortin, who said he later regretted his vote. “He made me feel like a complete ass.”
  • At Mr. Calhoun’s Jan. 21 court hearing in Macon, Charles H. Weigle, the federal magistrate judge, ruled that there was probable cause to believe that Mr. Calhoun had committed crimes when he stormed the Capitol.
  • A man who had committed such “extreme violence,” the judge said — who believed that it was his patriotic duty to take up arms and fight in a new civil war — constituted a danger to the community.The judge sent Mr. Calhoun back to jail.
Javier E

Far Right Pushes a Through-the-Looking-Glass Narrative on Jan. 6 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...jan-6-trump.html

narrative Jan-6 trump politics far right

shared by Javier E on 23 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • More than half, or 58 percent, of self-described conservatives say that Jan. 6 was an act of “legitimate political discourse” rather than a “violent insurrection,” according to a poll three months ago by The Economist/YouGov.
  • Ms. Kelly recounted a meeting she and a fellow supporter of Jan. 6 defendants, Cynthia Hughes, had last September with Mr. Trump at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J. She said she told the former president that the defendants felt abandoned by him: “They’re saying to me: ‘We were there for him. Why isn’t he here for us?’” Ms. Hughes informed Mr. Trump that the federal judges he appointed were “among the worst” when it came to the treatment of the riot defendants.
  • Surprised, Mr. Trump replied, “Well, I got recommendations from the Federalist Society.” Ms. Kelly said he then asked, “What do you want me to do?” She replied that he could donate to Ms. Hughes’s organization, the Patriot Freedom Project, which offers financial support to the defendants. Mr. Trump’s Save America PAC subsequently gave $10,000 to the group.
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  • Insha Rahman, the vice president for advocacy and partnerships at the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit focused on criminal justice reform, agrees, up to a point. Mr. McBride and the others are raising “unfortunately a fact of life for over two million Americans who are behind bars,” said Ms. Rahman, who has visited the D.C. jail several times and concurs that its conditions are inhumane, though no worse, she said, than detention facilities in Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston.
  • Still, she said, the privileges afforded the Jan. 6 pretrial detainees in their particular wing — individual cells, a library, contact visits, the ability to participate in podcasts — “are not at all typical.
  • “But I don’t want to call that special treatment,” Ms. Rahman said. “That’s the floor for what every incarcerated person in America should have a right to expect.”
Javier E

Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz: Young Silicon Valley billionaires pioneer new approach ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...4-b9b7-b8632ae73d25_story.html

philanthropy effectiveness role model Facebook

shared by Javier E on 29 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Tuna and Moskovitz were in their mid-20s in 2010 when they became the youngest couple ever to sign on to the Giving Pledge, the campaign started by Bill Gates and Warren E. Buffett to encourage the world’s billionaires to commit to giving away most of their wealth.
  • They had little experience with philanthropy, but they believed that the bulk of the money Moskovitz had made — estimated to be $8.1 billion by Forbes — should be returned to society in their lifetimes.
  • they have narrowed their interests to four major “buckets”: U.S. policy, global catastrophic risks, international aid and science. They plan to announce their first major gifts in early 2015 and eventually hope to scale up to give away hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
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  • As Tuna and Moskovitz, now 29 and 30, respectively, began to compare one possibility with another and then another, they have become pioneers in an emerging philosophy of philanthropy known as “effective altruism” — which applies evidence and reason over things like emotion and intuition to determine where one can do the most good.
  • Today, Tuna and Moskovitz have a reputation for being among Silicon Valley’s most low-key billionaires. Friends and colleagues mention that they prefer to spend their free time doing yoga, meditating and taking walks. They fly coach, share a used car and bike or take public transportation to work.
  • Early in her research, Tuna came across Peter Singer’s “The Life You Can Save” — a book she cites as the catalyst for their approach. An Australian philosopher, Singer makes the moral case for giving, arguing that many people in the developed world can do so at little cost to themselves.
  • Each topic is assigned to one of four researchers who work full-time — which include Tuna, Karnovsky and two other young whizzes from the country’s top colleges. They conduct “shallow” investigations of the ideas that involve making a few phone calls with experts and reading a few smart papers or journal articles on the subject.
  • A former hedge fund analyst, Karnovsky was frustrated that he could not compare the impact of different charities when he tried to give away $5,000 of his own one year. So he and a colleague, Elie Hassenfeld, quit their jobs and founded an independent, nonprofit charity evaluator that they dubbed GiveWell.
  • Tuna and Karnovsky approached the challenge like reporter-scientists, partnering to collect data on the universe of possible causes, evaluate them and share their findings online for anyone interested to see. As part of a joint venture between Good Ventures and GiveWell that they called the Open Philanthropy Project, they talked to foundation heads, technical experts, historians, biologists, former government officials, political campaign managers and many others.
  • “One thing I learned early on is that a well-placed donation can transform someone’s life, but a poorly placed donation can have no impact or even do harm,” Tuna said. “But it’s not at all obvious from charities’ marketing which are the best buys.”
  • The centerpiece of the team’s investigation is a giant spreadsheet, the origins of which can be traced to a Google Doc list Tuna began in 2011. She added causes as she thought of them: Malaria, microfinance, marijuana policy. The arts. Nuclear security, climate change and on and on until there were hundreds of entries.
  • “Cari and I are stewards of this capital,” Moskovitz wrote in a Quora chat in 2013 shortly before they married. In response to a question about what it feels like to be a billionaire, he said: “It’s pooled up around us right now, but it belongs to the world. We intend not to have much left when we die.”
  • They consider three questions when deciding whether a cause has promise. First, importance — how many people’s lives would be affected and by how much? Second, could it be solved, in the short-term and long-term? And third, how crowded is the space? If a lot of smart people are already thinking about the issue, the marginal impact could be less than in other areas.
  • If a topic passes this initial test, an in-depth investigation follows. That can take months and includes discussions with as many as 50 people in the field and an attempt to home in on what kind of specific project could make a difference.
  • One of the topics they zeroed in on was criminal justice reform. Tuna and her team were struck by two statistics: The United States incarcerates a larger percentage than almost any other country in the world at great fiscal cost and it has highest rate of criminal homicides in the developed world. Clearly something wasn’t working.
  • “The world is a big, complicated system,” Tuna said, “and I feel we need to be as smart as we can be in order to stand a chance of having an impact with the resources we have — which are significant in one sense but really small in comparison to the kinds of the problems we want to work on.”
brookegoodman

Putin, a criminal and incompetent president, is an enemy of his own people | Simon Tisd... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...enemy-of-his-own-people-russia

politics

shared by brookegoodman on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • News that Vladimir Putin, Russia’s latter-day tsar, is making plans to cling to power indefinitely comes as no surprise. All the same, it is deeply worrying for Putin’s prey – principally the Russian people and the western democracies.
  • Russia under Putin’s grim tutelage has grown notorious for cronyism and corruption on a vast scale, repression of domestic opponents and free speech, and military aggression and disruption abroad.
  • Putin’s supposedly transformative national spending projects worth an eye-watering $390bn have largely failed to materialise. His promises of economic modernisation and raised living standards must be set against a consecutive five-year fall in real wages and cuts to state pensions.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Putin also has options to be speaker of the Duma (parliament) or leader of its main party, United Russia, thereby exercising power behind the scenes in the manner of Jaroslaw Kaczyński, leader of Poland’s Law and Justice party.
  • The accompanying, enforced resignation of the entire government, including the prime minister, Dmitri Medvedev, is Putin’s attempt to reset his administration before Duma elections next year. Analysts say he feared Medvedev’s unpopularity – he has been accused of corruption – was beginning to rub off on him.
  • Although these changes are dressed up as desirable constitutional reforms, they clearly serve one common purpose: establishing Putinism in perpetuity. By showing he has no intention of retiring, Putin hopes to nip a possible succession battle in the bud.
  • Yet it appears Putin does not want to emulate out-and-out dictators in other countries by making himself president-for-life – the path chosen by China’s Xi Jinping. He values a veneer of democratic legitimacy.
  • The continuing drag on Russia’s development caused by western sanctions, imposed after the illegal annexation of Crimea, symbolises the broader, negative aspects of perpetual Putinism.
  • Putin is in cahoots with Turkey’s leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and his campaign against pro-western Kurds in north-east Syria. More recently, he has inserted Russian mercenaries into the war in Libya, backing rebels against the UN-recognised government in Tripoli.
  • And speaking of poison, who doubts that Putin and his henchmen were behind the unpunished attempt to assassinate Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury and last year’s murder of a Chechen separatist in Berlin?
  • The prospect of Putin prolonging and strengthening his nihilistic reign is a terrible one. Putin’s is the face of the enemy. Henceforth he must be recognised as such.
  • More people than ever before are reading and supporting our journalism, in more than 180 countries around the world. And this is only possible because we made a different choice: to keep our reporting open for all, regardless of where they live or what they can afford to pay.
  • None of this would have been attainable without our readers’ generosity – your financial support has meant we can keep investigating, disentangling and interrogating. It has protected our independence, which has never been so critical. We are so grateful.
tsainten

Fact check: Trump's policies for Black Americans - POLITICO - 0 views

www.politico.com/...lack-americans-policies-433744

HBCU Trump Policy US

shared by tsainten on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Trump won just 8 percent of Black voters in 2016 and has talked more about criminals than criminal justice in the closing days of the campaign. He did, however, sign the bipartisan First Step Act and has granted 28 pardons and 16 sentence commutations.
  • Former President Barack Obama tapped two Black attorneys general to serve in his administration, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, and he used his executive authority to create a task force on 21st century policing and granted clemency to more than 1,900 people, the highest figure since Harry Truman’s administration granted clemency to more than 2,000 people.
  • “Black voters are looking for a comprehensive agenda that will get at the structural barriers blocking Black mobility in this country,”
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • the First Step Act would release more than 3,100 federal prison inmates and said its retroactive sentencing reform had led to nearly 1,700 sentence reductions. The Sentencing Project said last year that Black Americans made up 91 percent of everyone receiving reductions.
  • Trump reinstituted the federal death penalty. Seven people have been executed this year under the policy — five were white, one was Native American and the other was Black. And there are 55 federal death-row prisoners. Twenty-five are African Americans, 22 are white, seven are Latino and one is Asian.
  • Under the Trump administration, the Black unemployment rate steadily improved, dropping to 5.4 percent at its bottom in August 2019, compared to 7.5 percent when Trump took office in January 2017. But that achievement is attributable to economic growth that was already revving when Trump took office, economists say.
  • Black workers did not see employment levels ever go “above the trend.”
  • The bill is a 10-year renewal of funding. During Obama’s eight years in office, mandatory HBCU funding ranged from almost $80 million to $85 million per year. The same has been true during Trump’s administration.
  • Even with record-low unemployment rates in 2019, Black Americans still had fewer jobs than their white counterparts — even for those with college or advanced degrees — according to research by EPI.
  • In April, when unemployment peaked at 14.7 percent — the highest level seen since the Great Depression — the unemployment rate for Black workers was even higher, at 16.7 percent. By September, the share of unemployed Black workers still struggling to find a job only dropped to 12.1 percent.
  • Many banks limited their initial application pool for the small business rescue Paycheck Protection Program to previous customers, a staff report by the House coronavirus subcommittee found. Democrats and non-profits argue that shut out many minority-owned businesses that lacked business banking relationships from the program, which offered forgivable loans to companies that kept their workers on the payroll.
  • when the labor market is tight, like it was in first three years of the Trump administration, discrimination tends to decline.
  • The amount of funding for HBCUs is “the same thing that we had under President Obama.”
  • creating “more than 8,000 opportunities zones, bringing jobs and opportunities to our inner-city families.”
  • Opportunity zones “are tax incentives to encourage those with capital gains to invest in low-income and undercapitalized communities,” according to the Tax Policy Center.
  • A feature of the president’s $1.5 trillion tax cuts, the program was intended to benefit Black, Hispanic and low-income communities. But there’s very little data about what’s actually happening in opportunity zones. There isn’t a full accounting of the number of opportunity zone projects, let alone basic information such as what those projects are, why they’re being pursued and who is benefiting from them.
  • the vast majority of opportunity zone capital appears to be going into real estate rather than operating businesses, meaning that the opportunity zones aren’t creating sustainable, long-term jobs.
  • he scrapped an Obama rule requiring localities to track patterns of segregation or lose federal funding.
  • The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development replaced the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Act with a much weaker rule in July, using a waiver to exempt the new regulation from public-comment requirements. Public comments allow people to weigh in on proposed rules before they’re finalized. But by bypassing that critical step, the agency essentially expedited a months-long process without any public input.
  • baseless fear of crime and decreased property value as attempted triggers to get at white anxiety about living with people of color — and African Americans in particular — and the idea of integration itself,”
  • new rule in September overhauling the Obama administration’s 2013 “disparate impact” rule. The new rule would have required plaintiffs to meet a higher threshold to prove unintentional discrimination — known as disparate impact — and given defendants more leeway to rebut the claims.
  • A federal court intervened this month -- the day before the rule was set to take effect last week -- issuing a preliminary nationwide injunction to bar HUD from implementing the new regulation until the merits of a lawsuit brought by civil rights advocates have been decided.
johnsonma23

Protests continue as Holder pushes new steps on police shootings | MSNBC - 0 views

www.msnbc.com/...hes-new-steps-police-shootings

police msnbc US culture

shared by johnsonma23 on 16 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Protests continue as Holder pushes new steps on police shootings
  • As protesters from Boston to south Florida sought Thursday to keep attention focused on the fight for police and criminal justice reform, the Obama administration continued to signal its openness to the movement’s concerns.
  • highlighted the need for better data on police shooting
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • threatened mass civil disobedience and demanded a meeting with state leaders.
  • activists behind the Black Lives Matter movement, who have mostly been out of the headlines since the start of the year, have no intention of easing up. And that those in charge are eager to show they’re listening.
  • “The troubling reality is that we lack the ability right now to comprehensively track the number of incidents of either uses of force directed at police officers or uses of force by police,
  • The news that neither of the police officers responsible for those deaths would be charged added fuel to the fire and set off nationwide protests in recent months
  • johnsonma23 on 16 Jan 15
     
    Protests supporting 'Black lives matter' 
redavistinnell

EU referendum: Leaving EU 'big gamble' for UK security - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...olitics-eu-referendum-35628051

referendum leaving security bbc news

shared by redavistinnell on 22 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • EU referendum: Leaving EU 'big gamble' for UK security
  • David Cameron will face MPs later as he presents his case for the UK remaining within the 28-member organisation.But Mayor of London Boris Johnson has again insisted that the country has a "great future" outside the EU.
  • The prime minister will outline details to MPs in a Commons statement, starting at 15.30 GMT, of last week's deal with EU leaders on reforms to the terms of the UK's membership, which paved the way for him to call a referendum on EU membership on 23 June.
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  • He rejected claims by former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith, one of six Cabinet ministers campaigning for the UK to leave the EU, that the UK's membership actually exposed it to greater security risks, pointing out that the EU had taken the lead in confronting Russia over its annexation of Crimea and Iran over its nuclear programme.
  • "It is through the EU that you exchange criminal records and passenger records and work together on counter-terrorism...We need the collective weight of the EU when you are dealing with Russian aggression or terrorism. You need to be part of these big partnerships."
  • It is less than 48 hours since the referendum date was announced, but already the campaigning is in full swing. The leave campaign has been given a major boost by Boris Johnson, who says the only way to change the EU is to vote to go.
  • In a 2,000-word column for the Daily Telegraph, Mr Johnson said staying inside the union would lead to "an erosion of democracy".
  • "There is only one way to get the change we need - and that is to vote to go; because all EU history shows that they only really listen to a population when it says no," he wrote.
  • Several other senior Tories - including Justice Secretary Michael Gove - have already said they will join the Out campaign.
  • Leaving his home in north London, Mr Johnson said his immediate focus was his remaining time in City Hall and there would be plenty of time to discuss the issue of Europe, and the UK's "great future" outside it, over the next four months.
  • The prime minister, who argues EU membership offers more power to the UK, will take his case to the Commons this afternoon.
  • However, his father, Stanley Johnson, told BBC Radio 5 live he disagreed with his son's argument.He denied Mr Johnson's decision had been a "career move", saying he had "completely thrown away" any chance of a post inside Mr Cameron's cabinet by aligning himself against the prime minister.
  • The prime minister announced the date of the in/out referendum outside Number 10 on Saturday, having returned from agreeing a deal in Brussels that he argued gave the UK a "special status" within the EU.
Javier E

Gun violence has sharply declined in California's Bay Area. What happened? | US news | ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...p-30-percent-why-investigation

violence california success

shared by Javier E on 05 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • Cities that once ranked among the nation’s deadliest, such as Oakland and Richmond, have seen enormous decreases over the past decade. These are not single-year drops in killings, but declines sustained over multiple years
  • California has the strongest gun laws in the country, and it’s enacted more than 30 new gun control laws since 2009 alone
  • Gun homicide rates for all races have fallen, but the drop was largest for black Bay Area residents: a 40% decrease.
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  • As officials in cities such as Oakland have touted the progress in gun violence numbers, they have repeatedly faced the same question: is the drop in gun violence just a result of gentrification?
  • An academic study of gun violence in Oakland neighborhoods found that the city’s focused deterrence strategy, known as “Ceasefire”, significantly reduced shootings, even when accounting for the level of gentrification in different areas.
  • the fact that big drops in gun violence are coming at the same time as intense gentrification and displacement has raised troubling questions for some local activists about who will get to benefit from living in a safer Oakland – and whose interests the decreases in shootings may ultimately serve.
  • As we make the city safer, are we opening up the floodgates more for gentrification? That’s what it feels like,” Clarke said. “Are we cleaning up the city for other people to move in?”
  • The Bay Area’s drop in gun violence does not reflect a drop in overall “crime”. The rate of property crimes such as theft and burglary have decreased only 16% across the region as gun violence has fallen by nearly a third. San Francisco has seen its property crime rate increase even as the number of people killed in gun homicides has dropped.
  • Criminal justice reforms have reduced the number of residents spending their lives behind bars. Since 2006, California’s state prison population has fallen by 25
  • There’s early evidence that local violence prevention strategies – including a refocused, more community-driven “Ceasefire” policing strategy, and intensive support programs that do not involve law enforcement at all – were a “key change” contributing to these huge decreases.
  • At the same time, Thomas said: “few of the laws enacted in the last 10 years would have been expected to entirely explain the significant reductions in the Bay Area.”
  • Nor have policies to shield undocumented immigrants led to violence, as Donald Trump and some of his Republican allies often warn. San Francisco saw a 49% drop in its gun homicide rate as it held to its pro-immigrant law enforcement policies
  • At the heart of the different strategies Bay Area cities are using are the same basic elements: data, dollars, and community leadership, including leadership from formerly incarcerated residents.
  • “The common context among each of these cities – Richmond, Oakland, and San Francisco – is that they have adopted community-driven, non-law enforcement approaches, and they’ve been robustly funded,
  • Longtime community outreach workers and violence interrupters, many of whom are formerly incarcerated, are crucial to making these public health strategies effective, experts across the region said
  • Finally, better analysis of who’s behind the violence has helped law enforcement, social services and community groups intervene more effectively. In Oakland, for example, a 2017 study of every homicide that occurred over 18 months showed that only 0.16% of Oakland’s population, about 700 high-risk men, were responsible for the majority of the homicides
  • “Gun violence is pretty much a form of disease. Once it starts affecting one person, it starts spreading,” said the former fellow, who asked that his name not be published
  • The fellowship helped him develop and realize a new vision for his life. He ended up graduating from the historically black college he had visited on one of the trips--a place, he said, where “I didn’t have to watch over my shoulder.” “To have somebody who believes in you, and knows you’ve got the potential to go for it, stuff like that makes you want to keep going right,” he said
Javier E

'We can't go back to normal': how will coronavirus change the world? | World news | The... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ge-from-the-coronavirus-crisis

history culture politics

shared by Javier E on 17 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Every day brings news of developments that, as recently as February, would have felt impossible – the work of years, not mere days.
  • disasters and emergencies do not just throw light on the world as it is. They also rip open the fabric of normality. Through the hole that opens up, we glimpse possibilities of other worlds
  • he pessimistic view is that a crisis makes bad things worse.
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  • “In a rational world, we would be ramping up production of basic essential supplies – test kits, masks, respirators – not only for our own use, but for poorer countries, too. Because it’s all one battle. But it’s not necessarily a rational world. So there could be a lot of demonisation and calls for isolation. Which will mean more deaths and more suffering worldwide.”
  • prior to 9/11, the US government had been in the process of developing serious regulations designed to give web users real choice about how their personal information was and wasn’t used. “In the course of a few days,” Zuboff says, “the concern shifted from ‘How do we regulate these companies that are violating privacy norms and rights’ to ‘How do we nurture and protect these companies so they can collect data for us?’”
  • “People have a hard time remembering privacy rights when they’re trying to deal with something like a pandemic,” says Vasuki Shastry, a Chatham House fellow who studies the interplay of technology and democracy. “Once a system gets scaled up, it can be very difficult to scale it back down. And then maybe it takes on other uses.”
  • The US Department of Justice has, since the outbreak began, filed a request with Congress for a new rule that would allow judges to suspend courtroom proceedings in emergencies, creating the possibility of people being jailed without ever being able to formally object.
  • In a 2008 report on the legal aspects of pandemic response, prompted by the increase in pandemic flu outbreaks, a team of historians and medical ethicists assembled by the American Civil Liberties Union bemoaned a common tendency – resurgent, in their view, since 9/11 – for government to address public health problems using mindsets more appropriate to tracking down criminals.
  • here’s another school of thought that looks at crisis and sees glimmers of possibility
  • “Ideas that used to be seen as leftwing seem more reasonable to more people. There’s room for change that there wasn’t beforehand. It’s an opening.”
  • Covid-19 has revealed the political status quo to be broken. Long before anyone had heard of the new coronavirus, people died of diseases we knew how to prevent and treat. People lived precarious lives in societies awash with wealth. Experts told us about catastrophic threats on the horizon, including pandemics, and we did next to nothing to prepare for them
  • At the same time, the drastic measures governments have taken in recent weeks testify to just how much power the state does have – the extent of what government can accomplish (and quickly!) when it realises it must act boldly or risk being seen as fundamentally illegitimate. As Pankaj Mishra recently wrote: “It has taken a disaster for the state to assume its original responsibility to protect citizens.”
  • For years, in mainstream politics the conventional line – on everything from healthcare to basic living expenses such as housing – has been that even if the world has its problems, expansive government intervention is not a feasible solution
  • Instead, we have been told that what works best are “marketplace” solutions, which give large roles to corporations motivated not by outdated notions like “the public good” but by a desire to make a profit
  • From this perspective, the task today is not to fight the virus in order to return to business as usual, because business as usual was already a disaster. The goal, instead, is to fight the virus – and in doing so transform business as usual into something more humane and secure.
  • disasters opened up human reserves of improvisation, solidarity and resolve, pockets of purpose and joy, even in the midst of loss and pain
  • In her 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine, the Canadian writer Naomi Klein laid out a dark account of crisis politics. In Klein’s view, there is always Disaster 1 – the earthquake, the storm, the military conflict, the economic slump – and Disaster 2 – the bad things that people with power subsequently get up to, such as ramming through extreme economic reforms or gobbling up post-crisis opportunities for self-enrichment, while the rest of us are too dazed to notice
  • Both address crisis not in terms of what inevitably – or “naturally” – happens as they unfold, but in terms of choices that people make along the way. And both were well-timed to contribute to the political conversations taking shape in the rubble of the financial crash
  • We may not quite all be “in it together” – as always, the poor are hit worse – but there is more truth to the idea than there ever was in the wake of 2008.
  • In this, the optimists believe, there is hope that we might begin to see the world differently.
  • Maybe we can view our problems as shared, and society as more than just a mass of individuals competing against each other for wealth and standing. Maybe, in short, we can understand that the logic of the market should not dominate as many spheres of human existence as we currently allow it to.
  • in the years since publishing The Shock Doctrine, Klein has made climate change her central focus, framing it as the paradigmatic emergency that must be wrenched from the clutches of fossil-fuel profiteers and their enablers in government.
  • the two problems have suggestive similarities. Both will require unusual levels of global cooperation. Both demand changes in behaviour today in the name of reducing suffering tomorrow. Both problems were long predicted with great certainty by scientists, and have been neglected by governments unable to see beyond the next fiscal quarter’s growth statistics
  • both will require governments to take drastic action and banish the logic of the marketplace from certain realms of human activity, while simultaneously embracing public investment.
  • “What is possible politically is fundamentally different when lots of people get into emergency mode – when they fundamentally accept that there’s danger, and that if we want to be safe we need to do everything we can. And it’s been interesting to see that theory validated by the response to the coronavirus
  • Now the challenge is to keep emergency mode activated about climate, where the dangers are orders of magnitude greater. We can’t think we’re going to go ‘back to normal’, because things weren’t normal.”
  • Most people do not feel they or their loved ones could die from the climate crisis this month, and so emergency mode is harder to activate and sustain
  • Alongside these hopeful signs, a far less heartening story is unfolding, which fits Klein’s “shock doctrine” framework. Disaster 1: Covid-19. Disaster 2: the dismantling of even the meagre existing rules designed to protect the environment
  • advocacy groups funded by the plastics industry have launched a public relations blitz on behalf of single-use plastic bags, spreading the unproven claim that the virus is less likely to stick to plastic than to the cloth fabric of reusable bags.
  • On 26 March, following lobbying from the energy industry, the US Environmental Protection Agency announced that, in recognition of the pandemic’s effects on the workforce, it will not punish violations of pollution regulations so long as companies can link those violations to the pandemic. China’s environmental ministry has started waiving inspections that assess the environmental impact of industrial facilitie
  • “It’s good that we’re entering emergency mode about the pandemic,” she said. “But unless we also do it for climate … ” She didn’t finish the sentence.
  • We need to learn to be scared together, to agree on what we’re terrified about.” Only then, she said, would governments be forced to act.
  • The historian Philip Mirowski, author of Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, warns against complacency. “The left thought it was so obvious to everyone that the crisis revealed the utter bankruptcy of a certain way of looking at the economy,” he told me. “And it wasn’t obvious to everyone, and the left lost.”
  • How do we prevent the world from going back to a version of the way it was before Covid-19, with the virus vanquished but all of the old ongoing disasters still unfolding?
  • “The political outcome of the epidemic,” said Mike Davis, “will, like all political outcomes, be decided by struggle, by battles over interpretation, by pointing out what causes problems and what solves them. And we need to get that analysis out in the world any way we can.”
  • the past few weeks have exposed the fact that the biggest things can always change, at any minute. This simple truth, both destabilising and liberating, is easy to forget. We’re not watching a movie: we’re writing one, together, until the end
rerobinson03

Opinion | We've Spent Over a Decade Researching Guns in America. This Is What We Learne... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...gun-reform-us.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Gun violence did not go away during 2020. Gun homicides jumped 25 percent from the year before, apparently fueled in part by a rise in intimate-partner violence. Some people have approached the possibility of becoming a victim of violence, including anti-Asian hate crime, with what could be characterized as an act of anticipatory trauma: purchasing a firearm. This isn’t unprecedented. Americans have long turned to firearms as both a last (if not first) resort for addressing uncertainty, precarity and insecurity in a country that largely lacks a collective social safety net.
  • This trauma has a broad toll, unevenly borne. More than 240,000 students (including a disproportionate number of Black students) have experienced gun violence at school since the 1999 Columbine shooting, while socioeconomically underserved communities of color disproportionately bear the brunt of gun violence. Black boys and young men ages 15 to 34 are more than 20 times more likely to die of gun homicide than their white counterparts.
  • Many people recognized that the lull in mass public shootings during 2020 brought on by the pandemic response would eventually end. The violence that we have seen in the past two weeks in the Atlanta area and Boulder points us to a different kind of gun debate — one that recognizes the cyclical nature of gun trauma while also recognizing that many gun policies are also counterproductive. Policies that purport to end the trauma of gun violence by increasing the punitive surveillance of individuals with mental illness, increasing police presence and surveillance of students at schools or bringing more people into contact with the criminal justice system may ultimately create more, if different, trauma.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Approaching guns from the perspective of trauma will require some imagination — and some courage. In the days and weeks to come, we will be tempted to double down on our usual agendas and party lines. We should embrace evidence-based policies to reduce gun violence. But we can’t stop there. Addressing gun violence in the spaces where we live our lives — our grocery stores, our workplaces, our schools, our streets and our homes — requires addressing the damage gun trauma inflicts on our souls, retooling our familiar agendas, letting go of partisanship and remembering that we share a basic vulnerability as humans that can unite us or, if we choose, divide us further.
Javier E

Opinion | Democrats Repent for Bill Clinton - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...democrats-bill-clinton.html

clinton presidency legacy failure history politics

shared by Javier E on 15 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • I view the crime bill as disastrous. It flooded the streets with police officers and contributed to the rise of mass incarceration, which disproportionately impacts Black men and their families. It helped to drain Black communities of fathers, uncles, husbands, partners and sons.
  • A 2015 New York Times Upshot analysis of 2010 census data found that there were 1.5 million “missing” Black men between the ages of 25 and 54, comparing the totals of Black men and women who were not incarcerated. According to the report: “Using census data, we estimated that about 625,000 prime-age Black men were imprisoned, compared with 45,000 Black women. This gap — of 580,000 — accounts for more than one-third of the overall gap.”
  • It continued: “It is the result of sharply different incarceration rates for Black men and any other group. The rate for prime-age Black men is 8.2 percent, compared with 1.6 percent for nonblack men, 0.5 percent for Black women and 0.2 percent for nonblack women.”
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • But in the last decade, the party and Clinton himself have been forced to admit the failures of the bill and to work to rectify it. As Clinton told the N.A.A.C.P. in 2015, “I signed a bill that made the problem worse, and I want to admit it.”
  • Part of the goal of the bill was to blunt Republican criticisms that Democrats were soft on crime, so the bill gave permission for Democrats across the country to engage in a sort of criminal justice policy and punishment arms race with Republicans, each group attempting to be more draconian than the other.
  • Then there was the welfare reform bill, which Clinton promised would “end welfare as we know it.” One of its central provisions was block-grant assistance to the states.
  • As Clinton said when the bill was passed:“Today the Congress will vote on legislation that gives us a chance to live up to that promise, to transform a broken system that traps too many people in a cycle of dependence to one that emphasizes work and independence, to give people on welfare a chance to draw a paycheck, not a welfare check.”
  • On the day Clinton signed the bill, Marian Wright Edelman, the founder of the Children’s Defense Fund and Hillary Clinton’s longtime mentor, released a statement that read, “President Clinton’s signature on this pernicious bill makes a mockery of his pledge not to hurt children.”
  • As the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out in 2020, the block grant to states “has been set at $16.5 billion each year since 1996; as a result, its real value has fallen by almost 40 percent due to inflation.”
  • Furthermore, only a fraction of the money goes to income assistance, and state-set benefit levels are low and “do not enable families to meet their basic needs,” the report outlines. It continues:
  • “The wide variation in benefit levels across states exacerbates national racial disparities because many of the states with the lowest benefits have larger Black populations. Fifty-five percent of Black children live in states with benefits below 20 percent of the poverty line, compared to 40 percent of white children.”
kaylynfreeman

Kushner resurfaces with op-ed on the Middle East - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

US Politics trump

shared by kaylynfreeman on 16 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Washington (CNN)Top Trump adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner resurfaced on Sunday by penning a Wall Street Journal op-ed about the Middle East, his first public remarks since the end of the Trump administration and offering a potential indication into how he will seek to cement his own legacy and accomplishments.
  • Kushner, one of the most omnipresent officials in the Trump administration who was tasked with far-reaching responsibilities from Middle East peace to criminal justice reform, has maintained a low profile since leaving the White House, moving from Washington to Miami with wife Ivanka Trump on January 20.
  • "Right now, he's just checked out of politics,"
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