In 1959 I turned 24. I was single, sighted and working at a drapery
factory full time and doing free lance photography evenings and
weekends.
When Fulgencio Batista was ousted as Cuba's dictator, I cheered. I'd
been following the struggles of Fidel Castro and his rag tag Freedom
Fighters. I clearly remember the photographs of Fulgencio Batista's
palatial surroundings, with his closets filled to overflowing with
top-of-the-line clothing.
These photos were in contrast to the ones of little ragged children,
barefoot in the dusty back roads, playing in the open sewers and
living in shanty towns. And at the same time we saw the gay lights
and fancy casinos and five star hotels with the Americans dressed in
their finery, laughing and contented to look away from the squalor.
And how well I recall the aristocratic Cubans fleeing, like Rats
deserting a sinking ship, crowding into Miami where they were
sheltered by a government that proclaimed to promote democracy around
the world. This ghetto of vermin has been an embarrassment to Freedom
Lovers in America for far too many years. They have given nothing but
contempt to hard working Americans.
It should be a national disgrace when we recall the efforts of the
Empire's government to sabotage, assassinate, and starve out Cubans.
But what can we expect, these people who would bring hardship to
little children in an effort to take control of their government,
these are the same people who think nothing of dropping drones around
the globe, scattering the broken bodies and limbs of little children,
women and elderly, and calling it "collateral Damage".
Carl Jarvis
On 7/26/15, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@freelists.org> wrote:
> http://themilitant.com/2015/7927/792702.html
> The Militant (logo)
>
> Vol. 79/No. 27 August 3, 2015
>
> (lead article)
> Cuba opens DC embassy,
> presses call to lift embargo
>
> BY OMARI MUSA
> AND MARY-ALICE WATERS
> WASHINGTON — Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla raised the
> flag in front of the newly opened Cuban Embassy here July 20 to strains
> of Cuba's national anthem and cheers from the more than 500 people
> gathered to celebrate the formal re-establishment of diplomatic
> relations between the U.S. and Cuban governments. Washington severed
> diplomatic relations with the island on Jan. 3, 1961, as Cuba's workers
> and peasants advanced their socialist revolution and the U.S. rulers
> prepared a mercenary invasion force they erroneously hoped would be able
> to crush it.
> Guests joining the celebration came from all over the U.S., from
> California to Massachusetts, Illinois and Florida. Many had been
> fighting for decades against the U.S. policy of trying to overthrow the
> Cuban Revolution through military action, economic warfare,
> assassination attempts, the financing of armed counterrevolutionary
> groups, countless subversive programs and increasingly futile efforts to
> isolate the island politically and diplomatically.
>
> The mood in the crowd was festive as several hundred waited more than an
> hour in the blazing heat and humidity of a Washington summer day for the
> activities to begin. During conversations many noted that it was the
> steadfastness and courage of the Cuban people and their revolutionary
> leadership that made this victory possible.
>
> Among the participants in the day's formal ceremonies and the reception
> that followed were members of the U.S. Congress, business people,
> students from Washington universities, Cuban-Americans who have worked
> for the normalization of relations and U.S. residents long active in
> defense of the Cuban Revolution. Representatives came from numerous
> African, Latin American and European embassies as well.
>
> Roberta Jacobson, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere
> affairs, represented the U.S. government at the flag-raising and
> ceremony addressed by Cuba's foreign minister. Jacobson led the U.S.
> negotiating team during the bilateral talks begun after the joint
> announcements Dec. 17 by U.S. President Barack Obama and Cuban President
> Raúl Castro of the agreement to upgrade the existing Interests Sections
> of the two governments to full-fledged embassies. The completion of this
> process is understood as a first step toward normalization of relations.
>
> Rodríguez was received later in the day by Secretary of State John
> Kerry, following which they held a joint press conference where both
> spoke of the "profound differences" that continue to exist between the
> two governments and the "long and complex" process of addressing them
> that remains ahead. These issues include the lifting of the multifaceted
> measures of U.S. economic warfare Cubans call the blockade, as well as
> the return to Cuba of the U.S.-held naval base at Guantánamo and, in
> Rodríguez's words, discussing the "deep differences between Cuba and the
> United States with regard to our views about the exercise of human
> rights by all citizens the world over."
>
> At the same time, Rodríguez said, "we strongly believe that we can both
> cooperate and coexist in a civilized way, based on respect for these
> differences."
>
> Among those participating in the day's activities was a delegation of
> some 30 Cubans, including current and former members of the National
> Assembly, former diplomats long involved in U.S.-Cuba relations, and
> leaders from a broad cross section of Cuban society — science, industry,
> medicine, sports, women, farmers, artists, writers and musicians, youth
> and more.
>
> Ramón Sánchez-Parodi, who headed the Cuban Interests Section in
> Washington for 12 years following its opening in 1977, was among those
> present. In remarks published in the Cuban press he commented with
> satisfaction that he had been confident this day would come. "Decades
> have passed," he said, "but it was worth it because the United States
> has recognized the resistance of the Cuban people and now we enter a new
> stage in bilateral relations."
>
> World-renowned artist Alexis Leiva Machado, better known as Kcho, voiced
> the sentiments of many when he noted that the re-establishment of
> diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States was also Fidel's
> achievement. Without the revolution, "Cuba could not have done what we
> have done," he said, calling attention to the fact that Cuba was
> recently singled out by the World Health Organization as "the first
> country in the world to have eliminated the transmission of HIV and
> syphilis from mother to child.
>
> "The enemy has recognized it made a mistake," he said. "That's a victory
> of more than 50 years of the revolution which is the people."
>
>
> Related articles:
> 'Blockade must be lifted, Guantánamo returned':
> Speech by Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez on
> reopening of Cuban Embassy in US after 54 years
>
>
> Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home
>
>
>
>
Monday, July 27, 2015
Sunday, July 26, 2015
Re: today the ADA is 25: so, how's the education thing going?
When I joined the NFB back in 1969, I truly believed that if enough
> blind people got together, we could change public attitudes. When I
> began working in the Orientation and Training Center, I believed that
> if I were diligent and persuasive I could change people's attitudes
> about blindness. Today, after 50 years as a blind man, 46 years in
> blind organizations, 40 years in the field of work for the blind, the
> greatest change in attitudes has been between my own two ears. Oh
> sure, things have improved slightly for blind and disabled people.
> But after 25 years of ADA working to "educate" the public, statistics
> show an actual decrease in employment among the disabled population.
> I'll say that again. With all it's efforts to change public attitudes
> toward disabled people, ADA has not been effective in changing
> employers attitudes toward hiring disabled workers.
> Our training program at the Department of Services for the Blind is a
> residential program. When I was director, we worked with students
> from 8:00 A.M. until 4:00 P.M., five days per week with many evening
> events and weekend outings. Students entered the program and lived in
> the Dorm for 6 to 9 months. We had a staff of 8, including myself,
> and 4 dorm coordinators. That came to 12 folks working with the
> students. Add to that 1 secretary and we had 13 total employees and a
> student body of 17. 6 to 9 months and at the end of this concentrated
> training I very often turned to my staff and said about a graduating
> student, "I wish they were just now coming into the program". We
> presented a trophy, a statue, upon graduation. Each student entered
> the program when an opening occurred, and left, or graduated, when
> staff and their VRC felt they had gained all they could from the
> training. So we held a celebratory luncheons in the honor of each new
> graduate and presented the little statue. On it was engraved their
> name and the dates of their stay in the program. Below were the
> words; Skills Attitudes Motivation.
> We called it the SAM Award, or the Sammy. Some members of my staff
> felt I should not present the Sammy to any student who had not
> attained a certain level of competency in all of the skills areas we
> taught. They felt that those students who really did achieve high
> levels, would feel the award was meaningless. I came to believe
> differently. I put together a short sermon in which I challenged the
> graduating student to put their Sammy in a prominent spot in their
> home and look at it every day. "When you think of the words on your
> Sammy, Skills, Attitudes, and Motivation, you need to remind yourself
> that you did not graduate from this program, you graduated into the
> rest of your life. Finally, remember this, if you are not constantly
> developing your Skills, improving your Attitudes and Motivating
> yourself, it's a pretty good sign that you're dead".
> And so Sam represented a beginning. But I never convinced some of my
> staff, and I watched as many of our graduates went forth into the
> world and applied for Care-Givers and all of the free services
> available. If one of the program's goals was to reduce costs to the
> taxpayers and promote self reliance, we were a standout failure. We
> tweaked the program, adding new elements, changing our approach,
> involving successful former students, on and on, without any
> significant difference. And yet, years later I meet former students,
> never having worked, living in subsidized housing, needing care
> givers, and stuck on SSI, students who completed the OTC program, and
> they grab me and thank me for all I did for them. I think I have an
> idea of what went through Barak Obama's mind when he was told he'd
> been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
> And yet, some students did grow during their stay in the program. And
> they, and a few others, did and do continue to grow. But our Sighted
> Culture is against them. Against all of us disabled folks.
> The Establishment will say, "We open our arms to these poor disabled
> folks, and do what we can for them". They are totally unable to see
> their prejudice toward the, "Less Fortunate".
> While I did manage to pull myself away from my original belief that I
> was the Super Savior of the Blind, I was never successful in changing
> some of my staff's, "Rescuer Complex".
> Society tends to dismiss the impact of subtle under currents. But the
> ones being discriminated against are very well tuned into them. I go
> crazy when I'm in a conversation with someone who feels they must
> announce, "I haven't a prejudiced bone in my body". I used to say, "I
> envy you. I fight my prejudices every single day".
> I finally gave up on that approach. I feel sometimes like the fellow
> pushing the boulder up the steep hill, only to have it slip past him
> and roll back to the bottom. Perhaps the majority likes things the
> way they are. They have their little Ruling Class to tell them when
> to jump, and how high, and they have those folks, like the Colored and
> the Disabled, to pick on, and to "help". Maybe that's all we can hope
> for. I mean, hope for from our sighted all white society. Most days
> I figure I just let them do their thing and I do mine.
> Carl Jarvis
On 7/25/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>> And everyone is talking about this stuf and writing about it as if this
>> is
>> new! My God, do these young reporters actually know why the Black
>> Panthers
>> formed and what they were talking about? If only we had them today. They
>> began in California where it was legal to openly carry guns and that's
>> what
>> they did. They patrolled black neighborhoods with guns in order to defend
>> residents from police brutality. They are not the radicals who threw
>> bombs
>> and tried to destroy buildings. That was mostly young white radicals who
>> were deluded into thinking that they could stop the war by bombing the
>> pentagon. The Black Panthers wanted only to defend their people within
>> their
>> communities. Well, I started reading a very long academic history of the
>> group, and now I've been sidetracked by 2 other books. But the leadership
>> was killed by cops and the FBI. Fred Hampton was murdered in his bed
>> while
>> he slept. And today, Black Lives matter does peaceful noisey protests
>> and
>> they're being spied upon by our security state and arrested for
>> demonstrating. And, in the same way the blind organizations keep saying
>> that
>> they will educate the sighted world someday, black people say that they
>> will
>> overcome the system of institutional racism some day.
>>
>> Miriam
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
>> [mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
>> Sent: Saturday, July 25, 2015 3:30 PM
>> To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
>> Subject: [blind-democracy] Macho Cop not fit to wear the uniform
>>
>> No doubt about it. Sandra Bland was victimized by a cop not fit to wear
>> the
>> uniform.
>> I have done something I've avoided doing 99% of the time. I listened to
>> the
>> recording, several times, of Sandra Bland being cornered in a cat and
>> mouse
>> game where she was the prey.
>> As I say, I avoid these reports as much as I can because I become so
>> outrageously angry. And there's nothing I can do after the fact.
>> Furthermore, all I need to do is to wander around my own area and talk to
>> White folks about discrimination, to get the message that prejudice still
>> rules.
>> "I'm not prejudiced," an elderly White client told us. "But I don't know
>> why them Coloreds have to push in where they're not wanted."
>> Thank goodness he's not prejudiced.
>> "They say they're as good as the rest of us," a waitress in our favorite
>> eatery told us. "So why are so many of them selling and using drugs and
>> getting into fights and getting themselves arrested?"
>> She went on to exclaim that we don't have that sort of violence and drug
>> crime in Sequim. Ah yes, Sequim. A retirement town of about 9,000
>> almost
>> all White residents. Mostly older. Cathy and I serve a great number of
>> these people, in their apartments and homes. Sequim does not have any
>> area
>> one might consider to be slums. No Colored Ghetto. No hookers walking
>> up
>> and down in front of the Penny Arcades.
>> No Arcades. No pimps jockeying with one another for the choice street
>> corners for their Ladies. No drugs...oops! Wait a second. A couple of
>> years back some 32 "users" were rounded up and booked in Jefferson County
>> court. They were "captured" in the small, almost all White community of
>> Quilcene, about 25 miles East of Sequim. . Little Quilcene, closest
>> town
>> to my home, boasts a population of 2,500. I swear they're counting the
>> local cows and horses. But 32 arrests out of some 2,500 people, cows and
>> horses? That's a huge percentage to ignore when bragging about our
>> "clean"
>> county.
>> A client of ours told us that he never went to the doctor. "I keep a
>> positive frame of mind and that keeps me healthy", he bragged. He died
>> at
>> 73 of a diabetic coma. Is America killing itself by denying our
>> prejudices?
>> We sure can't have them removed until we admit that we have them.
>>
>> Carl Jarvis
>>
>> On 7/25/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>>>
>>> Taibbi writes: "The Texas Department of Safety ruled that Brian
>>> Encina, the officer who arrested Bland, pulled her from her car, and
>>> threatened her with a Taser, had merely violated the state's 'courtesy
>>> policy.'"
>>>
>>> Sandra Bland died at the Waller County Jail in Hempstead, Texas, on
>>> July 17.
>>> (photo: Jay Janner/AP)
>>>
>>>
>>> ALSO SEE: Jail Where Sandra Bland Died Has History of State Rules
>>> Violations Sandra Bland Was Murdered By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
>>> 25 July 15
>>>
>>> Suicide or not, police are responsible for Sandra Bland's death
>>>
>>> So news broke yesterday that authorities in Waller County, Texas, have
>>> "full faith" that Sandra Bland committed suicide. They said there was
>>> "no evidence of a struggle" on the body of the 28-year-old
>>> African-American woman who was ludicrously jailed last week after an
>>> alleged lane change violation.
>>> In related news, the Texas Department of Safety ruled that Brian
>>> Encina, the officer who arrested Bland, pulled her from her car, and
>>> threatened her with a Taser, had merely violated the state's "courtesy
>>> policy." The state said there was "no evidence" yet of criminal
>>> behavior on Encina's part.
>>> So barring something unexpected, we know now how this is going to play
>>> out in the media.
>>> Many news outlets are going to engage in an indirect version of the
>>> usual blame-the-victim game by emphasizing the autopsy finding of
>>> suicide, questioning Bland's mental health history, and by
>>> highlighting the reports of marijuana found in her system.
>>> Beyond that, we can expect a slew of chin-scratching "legal analyses"
>>> concluding that while there may have been some minor impropriety on
>>> officer Encina's part, the law governing police-motorist encounters is
>>> too "complicated" to make this anything more than a tragic accident.
>>> Media scandals are like criminal trials. They're about assigning blame.
>>> Because Bland may have technically taken her own life, the blame is
>>> now mostly going to fall on a woman with a history of depression and
>>> drugs, instead of on a criminal justice system that morally, if not
>>> legally, surely murdered Sandra Bland.
>>> Backing up: It's been interesting following conservative news outlets
>>> after the Bland case. They've been conspicuously quiet this week,
>>> holstering the usual gloating backlash of the "He'd be alive today, if
>>> he'd just obeyed the law" variety.
>>> After the Garner, Brown and Freddie Gray cases, of course,
>>> law-and-order commentators flocked to the blogosphere to explain the
>>> secret to preventing police brutality.
>>> It was simple, they explained. There's no police corruption problem.
>>> The real issue is that there are too many people who don't know how to
>>> behave during a car stop. Don't want to get murdered by police? Be
>>> polite!
>>> A writer named John Hawkins took on the subject for TownHall.com in a
>>> piece last year carrying the not at all joking headline "How to not
>>> get shot by police." After revealing that his only real experience in
>>> this area involved speeding tickets, Hawkins lectured readers that
>>> "the first key to not getting shot" is to not think of the police as a
>>> threat:
>>> "They're really not going to randomly beat you, arrest you or shoot
>>> you for no reason whatsoever. It's like a bee. Don't start swatting at
>>> it and chances are, it's not going to sting you.
>>> "In fact, when a cop pulls you over, you should have your license and
>>> registration ready, you put your hands on the steering wheel so he can
>>> see them when he arrives, and you say 'yes, sir' and 'no, sir.'"
>>> It's hard to wrap one's head around the absurdity of someone like
>>> Hawkins imagining to himself that black America has not already tried
>>> using the word "sir" as a strategy to avoid beatings and killings. But
>>> over and over again, we heard stuff like this from the Fox/Real Clear
>>> crowd, which as time passed flailed around with increasing desperation
>>> in search of a non-racial explanation for all of these violent
>>> episodes.
>>> After Eric Garner was killed, for instance, a New York Post columnist
>>> named Bob McManus argued that we should only blame - the word "only"
>>> was actually used - the "man who tragically decided to resist."
>>> Michigan's even dumber Ann Coulter wannabe, Debbie Schlussel,
>>> countered that Garner would still be alive if his parents had raised
>>> him better, and if he wasn't a "morbidly obese asthmatic."
>>> After Ferguson, it was the same thing. Editorials insisted that the
>>> solution to the brutality problem lay in "less criminality within the
>>> black community." The officer who shot Michael Brown, Darren Wilson -
>>> the same guy who called Brown a "demon" - insisted that Brown would
>>> still be alive "if he'd just followed orders."
>>> But nobody yet has dared to say Sandra Bland would still be alive
>>> today, if only she'd used her blinker. That's a bridge too far even
>>> for TownHall.com types.
>>> Suddenly even hardcore law-and-order enthusiasts are realizing the
>>> criminal code is so broad and littered with so many tiny technical
>>> prohibitions that a determined enough police officer can stop and/or
>>> arrest pretty much anybody at any time.
>>> Bland was on her way to a new job at Prairie A&M university when she
>>> was pulled over for failing to signal when changing lanes, something
>>> roughly 100 percent of American drivers do on a regular basis.
>>> Irritated at being stopped, she was curt with Encina when he wrote her
>>> up. He didn't like her attitude and decided to flex his muscles a
>>> little, asking her to put out her cigarette.
>>> She balked, and that's when things went sideways. Encina demanded that
>>> she get out of the car, reached for his Taser, said, "I'll light you
>>> up," and eventually threw her in jail.
>>> Many editorialists following this narrative case suddenly noticed, as
>>> if for the first time, how much mischief can arise from the fact that
>>> a person may be arrested at any time for "failing to obey a lawful
>>> order," which in the heat of the moment can mean just about anything.
>>> But this same kind of logic has underpinned modern community policing
>>> in big cities all over America for decades now. Under Broken Windows
>>> and other "zero tolerance"-type enforcement strategies, police move
>>> into (typically
>>> nonwhite) neighborhoods in big numbers, tell people to move off
>>> corners, and then circle back and arrest them for "loitering" or
>>> "failing to obey a lawful order" if they don't.
>>> Some cities have tried to put a fig leaf of legal justification on
>>> such practices by creating "drug-free" or "anti-loitering" zones,
>>> which give police automatic justification for arrest even if a person
>>> is guilty of nothing more than standing on the street. Failing to
>>> produce ID - even in the halls of your own building, in some cases -
>>> or being seen in or around a "known drug location" can similarly be
>>> grounds for search or detention.
>>> A related phenomenon is the policy governing "consent searches."
>>> Police stop people on the highways, in airports, on buses, really
>>> anywhere at all, and ask for their consent to search their property or
>>> their persons. Sometimes they do the asking with a drug-sniffing dog
>>> standing beside them.
>>> Studies have consistently shown that black and Hispanic people are
>>> pulled over at a far higher rate than white people, usually more than
>>> double, even though white people are statistically more likely to have
>>> illegal drugs on them.
>>> Add to this the whole galaxy of stop-and-frisk type behaviors, also
>>> known as "Terry stops," in which any police officer with an
>>> "articulable suspicion"
>>> that a crime of violence might be committed can pat down and question
>>> any person.
>>> The end of New York's infamous program notwithstanding, there are
>>> millions of such stops every year. In Chicago, for instance, recent
>>> data showed a rate of about a million stops per year, with roughly 72
>>> percent involving black people - and this in a city that's only 32
>>> percent
>> black.
>>> You add all this up, and we're talking about millions upon millions of
>>> stops, searches and misdemeanor arrests and summonses that clearly
>>> target black people at a far higher rate than the rest of the
>>> population.
>>> And if you're continually handcuffing people, sitting on them, putting
>>> knees in their backs and dragging them to jail in cases when you could
>>> have just handed over a summons, a certain percentage of these
>>> encounters are going to end in fights, struggles, medical accidents
>>> and other disasters. Like the Bland case.
>>> We'd call it murder if a kidnapping victim died of fright during the
>>> job.
>>> Of
>>> course it's not legally the same thing, but a woman dying of
>>> depression during an illegal detention should be the same kind of
>>> crime. It's especially true given our long and sordid history of
>>> overpolicing misdemeanors.
>>> In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander described how white America
>>> re-seized control after slavery by instituting a series of repressive
>>> "vagrancy laws," under which nonwhite Americans could be arrested for
>>> such absurdities as "mischief" and "insulting gestures."
>>> In an eerie precursor to the modern loitering laws, many states even
>>> had stringent rules against "idleness." There were even states where
>>> any black male over 18 could be thrown in jail for not carrying around
>>> written proof that he had a job.
>>> What exactly is the difference between being arrested for "idleness"
>>> and being arrested for "loitering in a designated drug-free zone"?
>>> What's the difference between an arrest for "mischief" and an arrest
>>> for "disorderly conduct" or "refusing to obey a lawful order"? If it's
>>> anything more than a semantic distinction, it's not much more of one.
>>> Law-and-order types like to lecture black America about how it can
>>> avoid getting killed by "respecting authority" and treating arresting
>>> cops like dangerous dogs or bees.
>>> But while playing things cool might prevent killings in some
>>> instances, it won't stop police from stopping people without reason,
>>> putting their hands on suspects or jailing people like Bland for
>>> infractions that at most would earn a white guy in a suit a desk
>>> ticket. That's not just happening in a few well-publicized cases a
>>> year, but routinely, in hundreds of thousands or even millions of
>>> incidents we never hear of.
>>> That's why the issue isn't how Sandra Bland died, but why she was
>>> stopped and detained in the first place. It's profiling, sure, but
>>> it's even worse than that. It's a systematic campaign to harass
>>> people, using misdemeanors and violations as battering ram - a
>>> campaign that's been going on forever, and against which there's
>>> little defense. When the law can be stretched to mean almost anything,
>> obeying it is no magic bullet.
>>> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
>>> valid.
>>>
>>> Sandra Bland died at the Waller County Jail in Hempstead, Texas, on
>>> July 17.
>>> (photo: Jay Janner/AP)
>>> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/sandra-bland-was-murdered-20
>>> 150724
>>> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/sandra-bland-was-murdered-20
>>> 150724 ALSO SEE: Jail Where Sandra Bland Died Has History of State
>>> Rules Violations Sandra Bland Was Murdered By Matt Taibbi, Rolling
>>> Stone
>>> 25 July 15
>>> Suicide or not, police are responsible for Sandra Bland's death o
>>> news broke yesterday that authorities in Waller County, Texas, have
>>> "full faith" that Sandra Bland committed suicide. They said there was
>>> "no evidence of a struggle" on the body of the 28-year-old
>>> African-American woman who was ludicrously jailed last week after an
>>> alleged lane change violation.
>>> In related news, the Texas Department of Safety ruled that Brian
>>> Encina, the officer who arrested Bland, pulled her from her car, and
>>> threatened her with a Taser, had merely violated the state's "courtesy
>>> policy." The state said there was "no evidence" yet of criminal
>>> behavior on Encina's part.
>>> So barring something unexpected, we know now how this is going to play
>>> out in the media.
>>> Many news outlets are going to engage in an indirect version of the
>>> usual blame-the-victim game by emphasizing the autopsy finding of
>>> suicide, questioning Bland's mental health history, and by
>>> highlighting the reports of marijuana found in her system.
>>> Beyond that, we can expect a slew of chin-scratching "legal analyses"
>>> concluding that while there may have been some minor impropriety on
>>> officer Encina's part, the law governing police-motorist encounters is
>>> too "complicated" to make this anything more than a tragic accident.
>>> Media scandals are like criminal trials. They're about assigning blame.
>>> Because Bland may have technically taken her own life, the blame is
>>> now mostly going to fall on a woman with a history of depression and
>>> drugs, instead of on a criminal justice system that morally, if not
>>> legally, surely murdered Sandra Bland.
>>> Backing up: It's been interesting following conservative news outlets
>>> after the Bland case. They've been conspicuously quiet this week,
>>> holstering the usual gloating backlash of the "He'd be alive today, if
>>> he'd just obeyed the law" variety.
>>> After the Garner, Brown and Freddie Gray cases, of course,
>>> law-and-order commentators flocked to the blogosphere to explain the
>>> secret to preventing police brutality.
>>> It was simple, they explained. There's no police corruption problem.
>>> The real issue is that there are too many people who don't know how to
>>> behave during a car stop. Don't want to get murdered by police? Be
>>> polite!
>>> A writer named John Hawkins took on the subject for TownHall.com in a
>>> piece last year carrying the not at all joking headline "How to not
>>> get shot by police." After revealing that his only real experience in
>>> this area involved speeding tickets, Hawkins lectured readers that
>>> "the first key to not getting shot" is to not think of the police as a
>>> threat:
>>> "They're really not going to randomly beat you, arrest you or shoot
>>> you for no reason whatsoever. It's like a bee. Don't start swatting at
>>> it and chances are, it's not going to sting you.
>>> "In fact, when a cop pulls you over, you should have your license and
>>> registration ready, you put your hands on the steering wheel so he can
>>> see them when he arrives, and you say 'yes, sir' and 'no, sir.'"
>>> It's hard to wrap one's head around the absurdity of someone like
>>> Hawkins imagining to himself that black America has not already tried
>>> using the word "sir" as a strategy to avoid beatings and killings. But
>>> over and over again, we heard stuff like this from the Fox/Real Clear
>>> crowd, which as time passed flailed around with increasing desperation
>>> in search of a non-racial explanation for all of these violent
>>> episodes.
>>> After Eric Garner was killed, for instance, a New York Post columnist
>>> named Bob McManus argued that we should only blame - the word "only"
>>> was actually used - the "man who tragically decided to resist."
>>> Michigan's even dumber Ann Coulter wannabe, Debbie Schlussel,
>>> countered that Garner would still be alive if his parents had raised
>>> him better, and if he wasn't a "morbidly obese asthmatic."
>>> After Ferguson, it was the same thing. Editorials insisted that the
>>> solution to the brutality problem lay in "less criminality within the
>>> black community." The officer who shot Michael Brown, Darren Wilson -
>>> the same guy who called Brown a "demon" - insisted that Brown would
>>> still be alive "if he'd just followed orders."
>>> But nobody yet has dared to say Sandra Bland would still be alive
>>> today, if only she'd used her blinker. That's a bridge too far even
>>> for TownHall.com types.
>>> Suddenly even hardcore law-and-order enthusiasts are realizing the
>>> criminal code is so broad and littered with so many tiny technical
>>> prohibitions that a determined enough police officer can stop and/or
>>> arrest pretty much anybody at any time.
>>> Bland was on her way to a new job at Prairie A&M university when she
>>> was pulled over for failing to signal when changing lanes, something
>>> roughly 100 percent of American drivers do on a regular basis.
>>> Irritated at being stopped, she was curt with Encina when he wrote her
>>> up. He didn't like her attitude and decided to flex his muscles a
>>> little, asking her to put out her cigarette.
>>> She balked, and that's when things went sideways. Encina demanded that
>>> she get out of the car, reached for his Taser, said, "I'll light you
>>> up," and eventually threw her in jail.
>>> Many editorialists following this narrative case suddenly noticed, as
>>> if for the first time, how much mischief can arise from the fact that
>>> a person may be arrested at any time for "failing to obey a lawful
>>> order," which in the heat of the moment can mean just about anything.
>>> But this same kind of logic has underpinned modern community policing
>>> in big cities all over America for decades now. Under Broken Windows
>>> and other "zero tolerance"-type enforcement strategies, police move
>>> into (typically
>>> nonwhite) neighborhoods in big numbers, tell people to move off
>>> corners, and then circle back and arrest them for "loitering" or
>>> "failing to obey a lawful order" if they don't.
>>> Some cities have tried to put a fig leaf of legal justification on
>>> such practices by creating "drug-free" or "anti-loitering" zones,
>>> which give police automatic justification for arrest even if a person
>>> is guilty of nothing more than standing on the street. Failing to
>>> produce ID - even in the halls of your own building, in some cases -
>>> or being seen in or around a "known drug location" can similarly be
>>> grounds for search or detention.
>>> A related phenomenon is the policy governing "consent searches."
>>> Police stop people on the highways, in airports, on buses, really
>>> anywhere at all, and ask for their consent to search their property or
>>> their persons. Sometimes they do the asking with a drug-sniffing dog
>>> standing beside them.
>>> Studies have consistently shown that black and Hispanic people are
>>> pulled over at a far higher rate than white people, usually more than
>>> double, even though white people are statistically more likely to have
>>> illegal drugs on them.
>>> Add to this the whole galaxy of stop-and-frisk type behaviors, also
>>> known as "Terry stops," in which any police officer with an
>>> "articulable suspicion"
>>> that a crime of violence might be committed can pat down and question
>>> any person.
>>> The end of New York's infamous program notwithstanding, there are
>>> millions of such stops every year. In Chicago, for instance, recent
>>> data showed a rate of about a million stops per year, with roughly 72
>>> percent involving black people - and this in a city that's only 32
>>> percent
>> black.
>>> You add all this up, and we're talking about millions upon millions of
>>> stops, searches and misdemeanor arrests and summonses that clearly
>>> target black people at a far higher rate than the rest of the
>>> population.
>>> And if you're continually handcuffing people, sitting on them, putting
>>> knees in their backs and dragging them to jail in cases when you could
>>> have just handed over a summons, a certain percentage of these
>>> encounters are going to end in fights, struggles, medical accidents
>>> and other disasters. Like the Bland case.
>>> We'd call it murder if a kidnapping victim died of fright during the
>>> job.
>>> Of
>>> course it's not legally the same thing, but a woman dying of
>>> depression during an illegal detention should be the same kind of
>>> crime. It's especially true given our long and sordid history of
>>> overpolicing misdemeanors.
>>> In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander described how white America
>>> re-seized control after slavery by instituting a series of repressive
>>> "vagrancy laws," under which nonwhite Americans could be arrested for
>>> such absurdities as "mischief" and "insulting gestures."
>>> In an eerie precursor to the modern loitering laws, many states even
>>> had stringent rules against "idleness." There were even states where
>>> any black male over 18 could be thrown in jail for not carrying around
>>> written proof that he had a job.
>>> What exactly is the difference between being arrested for "idleness"
>>> and being arrested for "loitering in a designated drug-free zone"?
>>> What's the difference between an arrest for "mischief" and an arrest
>>> for "disorderly conduct" or "refusing to obey a lawful order"? If it's
>>> anything more than a semantic distinction, it's not much more of one.
>>> Law-and-order types like to lecture black America about how it can
>>> avoid getting killed by "respecting authority" and treating arresting
>>> cops like dangerous dogs or bees.
>>> But while playing things cool might prevent killings in some
>>> instances, it won't stop police from stopping people without reason,
>>> putting their hands on suspects or jailing people like Bland for
>>> infractions that at most would earn a white guy in a suit a desk
>>> ticket. That's not just happening in a few well-publicized cases a
>>> year, but routinely, in hundreds of thousands or even millions of
>>> incidents we never hear of.
>>> That's why the issue isn't how Sandra Bland died, but why she was
>>> stopped and detained in the first place. It's profiling, sure, but
>>> it's even worse than that. It's a systematic campaign to harass
>>> people, using misdemeanors and violations as battering ram - a
>>> campaign that's been going on forever, and against which there's
>>> little defense. When the law can be stretched to mean almost anything,
>> obeying it is no magic bullet.
>>> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
>>> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>
> blind people got together, we could change public attitudes. When I
> began working in the Orientation and Training Center, I believed that
> if I were diligent and persuasive I could change people's attitudes
> about blindness. Today, after 50 years as a blind man, 46 years in
> blind organizations, 40 years in the field of work for the blind, the
> greatest change in attitudes has been between my own two ears. Oh
> sure, things have improved slightly for blind and disabled people.
> But after 25 years of ADA working to "educate" the public, statistics
> show an actual decrease in employment among the disabled population.
> I'll say that again. With all it's efforts to change public attitudes
> toward disabled people, ADA has not been effective in changing
> employers attitudes toward hiring disabled workers.
> Our training program at the Department of Services for the Blind is a
> residential program. When I was director, we worked with students
> from 8:00 A.M. until 4:00 P.M., five days per week with many evening
> events and weekend outings. Students entered the program and lived in
> the Dorm for 6 to 9 months. We had a staff of 8, including myself,
> and 4 dorm coordinators. That came to 12 folks working with the
> students. Add to that 1 secretary and we had 13 total employees and a
> student body of 17. 6 to 9 months and at the end of this concentrated
> training I very often turned to my staff and said about a graduating
> student, "I wish they were just now coming into the program". We
> presented a trophy, a statue, upon graduation. Each student entered
> the program when an opening occurred, and left, or graduated, when
> staff and their VRC felt they had gained all they could from the
> training. So we held a celebratory luncheons in the honor of each new
> graduate and presented the little statue. On it was engraved their
> name and the dates of their stay in the program. Below were the
> words; Skills Attitudes Motivation.
> We called it the SAM Award, or the Sammy. Some members of my staff
> felt I should not present the Sammy to any student who had not
> attained a certain level of competency in all of the skills areas we
> taught. They felt that those students who really did achieve high
> levels, would feel the award was meaningless. I came to believe
> differently. I put together a short sermon in which I challenged the
> graduating student to put their Sammy in a prominent spot in their
> home and look at it every day. "When you think of the words on your
> Sammy, Skills, Attitudes, and Motivation, you need to remind yourself
> that you did not graduate from this program, you graduated into the
> rest of your life. Finally, remember this, if you are not constantly
> developing your Skills, improving your Attitudes and Motivating
> yourself, it's a pretty good sign that you're dead".
> And so Sam represented a beginning. But I never convinced some of my
> staff, and I watched as many of our graduates went forth into the
> world and applied for Care-Givers and all of the free services
> available. If one of the program's goals was to reduce costs to the
> taxpayers and promote self reliance, we were a standout failure. We
> tweaked the program, adding new elements, changing our approach,
> involving successful former students, on and on, without any
> significant difference. And yet, years later I meet former students,
> never having worked, living in subsidized housing, needing care
> givers, and stuck on SSI, students who completed the OTC program, and
> they grab me and thank me for all I did for them. I think I have an
> idea of what went through Barak Obama's mind when he was told he'd
> been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
> And yet, some students did grow during their stay in the program. And
> they, and a few others, did and do continue to grow. But our Sighted
> Culture is against them. Against all of us disabled folks.
> The Establishment will say, "We open our arms to these poor disabled
> folks, and do what we can for them". They are totally unable to see
> their prejudice toward the, "Less Fortunate".
> While I did manage to pull myself away from my original belief that I
> was the Super Savior of the Blind, I was never successful in changing
> some of my staff's, "Rescuer Complex".
> Society tends to dismiss the impact of subtle under currents. But the
> ones being discriminated against are very well tuned into them. I go
> crazy when I'm in a conversation with someone who feels they must
> announce, "I haven't a prejudiced bone in my body". I used to say, "I
> envy you. I fight my prejudices every single day".
> I finally gave up on that approach. I feel sometimes like the fellow
> pushing the boulder up the steep hill, only to have it slip past him
> and roll back to the bottom. Perhaps the majority likes things the
> way they are. They have their little Ruling Class to tell them when
> to jump, and how high, and they have those folks, like the Colored and
> the Disabled, to pick on, and to "help". Maybe that's all we can hope
> for. I mean, hope for from our sighted all white society. Most days
> I figure I just let them do their thing and I do mine.
> Carl Jarvis
On 7/25/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>> And everyone is talking about this stuf and writing about it as if this
>> is
>> new! My God, do these young reporters actually know why the Black
>> Panthers
>> formed and what they were talking about? If only we had them today. They
>> began in California where it was legal to openly carry guns and that's
>> what
>> they did. They patrolled black neighborhoods with guns in order to defend
>> residents from police brutality. They are not the radicals who threw
>> bombs
>> and tried to destroy buildings. That was mostly young white radicals who
>> were deluded into thinking that they could stop the war by bombing the
>> pentagon. The Black Panthers wanted only to defend their people within
>> their
>> communities. Well, I started reading a very long academic history of the
>> group, and now I've been sidetracked by 2 other books. But the leadership
>> was killed by cops and the FBI. Fred Hampton was murdered in his bed
>> while
>> he slept. And today, Black Lives matter does peaceful noisey protests
>> and
>> they're being spied upon by our security state and arrested for
>> demonstrating. And, in the same way the blind organizations keep saying
>> that
>> they will educate the sighted world someday, black people say that they
>> will
>> overcome the system of institutional racism some day.
>>
>> Miriam
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
>> [mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
>> Sent: Saturday, July 25, 2015 3:30 PM
>> To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
>> Subject: [blind-democracy] Macho Cop not fit to wear the uniform
>>
>> No doubt about it. Sandra Bland was victimized by a cop not fit to wear
>> the
>> uniform.
>> I have done something I've avoided doing 99% of the time. I listened to
>> the
>> recording, several times, of Sandra Bland being cornered in a cat and
>> mouse
>> game where she was the prey.
>> As I say, I avoid these reports as much as I can because I become so
>> outrageously angry. And there's nothing I can do after the fact.
>> Furthermore, all I need to do is to wander around my own area and talk to
>> White folks about discrimination, to get the message that prejudice still
>> rules.
>> "I'm not prejudiced," an elderly White client told us. "But I don't know
>> why them Coloreds have to push in where they're not wanted."
>> Thank goodness he's not prejudiced.
>> "They say they're as good as the rest of us," a waitress in our favorite
>> eatery told us. "So why are so many of them selling and using drugs and
>> getting into fights and getting themselves arrested?"
>> She went on to exclaim that we don't have that sort of violence and drug
>> crime in Sequim. Ah yes, Sequim. A retirement town of about 9,000
>> almost
>> all White residents. Mostly older. Cathy and I serve a great number of
>> these people, in their apartments and homes. Sequim does not have any
>> area
>> one might consider to be slums. No Colored Ghetto. No hookers walking
>> up
>> and down in front of the Penny Arcades.
>> No Arcades. No pimps jockeying with one another for the choice street
>> corners for their Ladies. No drugs...oops! Wait a second. A couple of
>> years back some 32 "users" were rounded up and booked in Jefferson County
>> court. They were "captured" in the small, almost all White community of
>> Quilcene, about 25 miles East of Sequim. . Little Quilcene, closest
>> town
>> to my home, boasts a population of 2,500. I swear they're counting the
>> local cows and horses. But 32 arrests out of some 2,500 people, cows and
>> horses? That's a huge percentage to ignore when bragging about our
>> "clean"
>> county.
>> A client of ours told us that he never went to the doctor. "I keep a
>> positive frame of mind and that keeps me healthy", he bragged. He died
>> at
>> 73 of a diabetic coma. Is America killing itself by denying our
>> prejudices?
>> We sure can't have them removed until we admit that we have them.
>>
>> Carl Jarvis
>>
>> On 7/25/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>>>
>>> Taibbi writes: "The Texas Department of Safety ruled that Brian
>>> Encina, the officer who arrested Bland, pulled her from her car, and
>>> threatened her with a Taser, had merely violated the state's 'courtesy
>>> policy.'"
>>>
>>> Sandra Bland died at the Waller County Jail in Hempstead, Texas, on
>>> July 17.
>>> (photo: Jay Janner/AP)
>>>
>>>
>>> ALSO SEE: Jail Where Sandra Bland Died Has History of State Rules
>>> Violations Sandra Bland Was Murdered By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
>>> 25 July 15
>>>
>>> Suicide or not, police are responsible for Sandra Bland's death
>>>
>>> So news broke yesterday that authorities in Waller County, Texas, have
>>> "full faith" that Sandra Bland committed suicide. They said there was
>>> "no evidence of a struggle" on the body of the 28-year-old
>>> African-American woman who was ludicrously jailed last week after an
>>> alleged lane change violation.
>>> In related news, the Texas Department of Safety ruled that Brian
>>> Encina, the officer who arrested Bland, pulled her from her car, and
>>> threatened her with a Taser, had merely violated the state's "courtesy
>>> policy." The state said there was "no evidence" yet of criminal
>>> behavior on Encina's part.
>>> So barring something unexpected, we know now how this is going to play
>>> out in the media.
>>> Many news outlets are going to engage in an indirect version of the
>>> usual blame-the-victim game by emphasizing the autopsy finding of
>>> suicide, questioning Bland's mental health history, and by
>>> highlighting the reports of marijuana found in her system.
>>> Beyond that, we can expect a slew of chin-scratching "legal analyses"
>>> concluding that while there may have been some minor impropriety on
>>> officer Encina's part, the law governing police-motorist encounters is
>>> too "complicated" to make this anything more than a tragic accident.
>>> Media scandals are like criminal trials. They're about assigning blame.
>>> Because Bland may have technically taken her own life, the blame is
>>> now mostly going to fall on a woman with a history of depression and
>>> drugs, instead of on a criminal justice system that morally, if not
>>> legally, surely murdered Sandra Bland.
>>> Backing up: It's been interesting following conservative news outlets
>>> after the Bland case. They've been conspicuously quiet this week,
>>> holstering the usual gloating backlash of the "He'd be alive today, if
>>> he'd just obeyed the law" variety.
>>> After the Garner, Brown and Freddie Gray cases, of course,
>>> law-and-order commentators flocked to the blogosphere to explain the
>>> secret to preventing police brutality.
>>> It was simple, they explained. There's no police corruption problem.
>>> The real issue is that there are too many people who don't know how to
>>> behave during a car stop. Don't want to get murdered by police? Be
>>> polite!
>>> A writer named John Hawkins took on the subject for TownHall.com in a
>>> piece last year carrying the not at all joking headline "How to not
>>> get shot by police." After revealing that his only real experience in
>>> this area involved speeding tickets, Hawkins lectured readers that
>>> "the first key to not getting shot" is to not think of the police as a
>>> threat:
>>> "They're really not going to randomly beat you, arrest you or shoot
>>> you for no reason whatsoever. It's like a bee. Don't start swatting at
>>> it and chances are, it's not going to sting you.
>>> "In fact, when a cop pulls you over, you should have your license and
>>> registration ready, you put your hands on the steering wheel so he can
>>> see them when he arrives, and you say 'yes, sir' and 'no, sir.'"
>>> It's hard to wrap one's head around the absurdity of someone like
>>> Hawkins imagining to himself that black America has not already tried
>>> using the word "sir" as a strategy to avoid beatings and killings. But
>>> over and over again, we heard stuff like this from the Fox/Real Clear
>>> crowd, which as time passed flailed around with increasing desperation
>>> in search of a non-racial explanation for all of these violent
>>> episodes.
>>> After Eric Garner was killed, for instance, a New York Post columnist
>>> named Bob McManus argued that we should only blame - the word "only"
>>> was actually used - the "man who tragically decided to resist."
>>> Michigan's even dumber Ann Coulter wannabe, Debbie Schlussel,
>>> countered that Garner would still be alive if his parents had raised
>>> him better, and if he wasn't a "morbidly obese asthmatic."
>>> After Ferguson, it was the same thing. Editorials insisted that the
>>> solution to the brutality problem lay in "less criminality within the
>>> black community." The officer who shot Michael Brown, Darren Wilson -
>>> the same guy who called Brown a "demon" - insisted that Brown would
>>> still be alive "if he'd just followed orders."
>>> But nobody yet has dared to say Sandra Bland would still be alive
>>> today, if only she'd used her blinker. That's a bridge too far even
>>> for TownHall.com types.
>>> Suddenly even hardcore law-and-order enthusiasts are realizing the
>>> criminal code is so broad and littered with so many tiny technical
>>> prohibitions that a determined enough police officer can stop and/or
>>> arrest pretty much anybody at any time.
>>> Bland was on her way to a new job at Prairie A&M university when she
>>> was pulled over for failing to signal when changing lanes, something
>>> roughly 100 percent of American drivers do on a regular basis.
>>> Irritated at being stopped, she was curt with Encina when he wrote her
>>> up. He didn't like her attitude and decided to flex his muscles a
>>> little, asking her to put out her cigarette.
>>> She balked, and that's when things went sideways. Encina demanded that
>>> she get out of the car, reached for his Taser, said, "I'll light you
>>> up," and eventually threw her in jail.
>>> Many editorialists following this narrative case suddenly noticed, as
>>> if for the first time, how much mischief can arise from the fact that
>>> a person may be arrested at any time for "failing to obey a lawful
>>> order," which in the heat of the moment can mean just about anything.
>>> But this same kind of logic has underpinned modern community policing
>>> in big cities all over America for decades now. Under Broken Windows
>>> and other "zero tolerance"-type enforcement strategies, police move
>>> into (typically
>>> nonwhite) neighborhoods in big numbers, tell people to move off
>>> corners, and then circle back and arrest them for "loitering" or
>>> "failing to obey a lawful order" if they don't.
>>> Some cities have tried to put a fig leaf of legal justification on
>>> such practices by creating "drug-free" or "anti-loitering" zones,
>>> which give police automatic justification for arrest even if a person
>>> is guilty of nothing more than standing on the street. Failing to
>>> produce ID - even in the halls of your own building, in some cases -
>>> or being seen in or around a "known drug location" can similarly be
>>> grounds for search or detention.
>>> A related phenomenon is the policy governing "consent searches."
>>> Police stop people on the highways, in airports, on buses, really
>>> anywhere at all, and ask for their consent to search their property or
>>> their persons. Sometimes they do the asking with a drug-sniffing dog
>>> standing beside them.
>>> Studies have consistently shown that black and Hispanic people are
>>> pulled over at a far higher rate than white people, usually more than
>>> double, even though white people are statistically more likely to have
>>> illegal drugs on them.
>>> Add to this the whole galaxy of stop-and-frisk type behaviors, also
>>> known as "Terry stops," in which any police officer with an
>>> "articulable suspicion"
>>> that a crime of violence might be committed can pat down and question
>>> any person.
>>> The end of New York's infamous program notwithstanding, there are
>>> millions of such stops every year. In Chicago, for instance, recent
>>> data showed a rate of about a million stops per year, with roughly 72
>>> percent involving black people - and this in a city that's only 32
>>> percent
>> black.
>>> You add all this up, and we're talking about millions upon millions of
>>> stops, searches and misdemeanor arrests and summonses that clearly
>>> target black people at a far higher rate than the rest of the
>>> population.
>>> And if you're continually handcuffing people, sitting on them, putting
>>> knees in their backs and dragging them to jail in cases when you could
>>> have just handed over a summons, a certain percentage of these
>>> encounters are going to end in fights, struggles, medical accidents
>>> and other disasters. Like the Bland case.
>>> We'd call it murder if a kidnapping victim died of fright during the
>>> job.
>>> Of
>>> course it's not legally the same thing, but a woman dying of
>>> depression during an illegal detention should be the same kind of
>>> crime. It's especially true given our long and sordid history of
>>> overpolicing misdemeanors.
>>> In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander described how white America
>>> re-seized control after slavery by instituting a series of repressive
>>> "vagrancy laws," under which nonwhite Americans could be arrested for
>>> such absurdities as "mischief" and "insulting gestures."
>>> In an eerie precursor to the modern loitering laws, many states even
>>> had stringent rules against "idleness." There were even states where
>>> any black male over 18 could be thrown in jail for not carrying around
>>> written proof that he had a job.
>>> What exactly is the difference between being arrested for "idleness"
>>> and being arrested for "loitering in a designated drug-free zone"?
>>> What's the difference between an arrest for "mischief" and an arrest
>>> for "disorderly conduct" or "refusing to obey a lawful order"? If it's
>>> anything more than a semantic distinction, it's not much more of one.
>>> Law-and-order types like to lecture black America about how it can
>>> avoid getting killed by "respecting authority" and treating arresting
>>> cops like dangerous dogs or bees.
>>> But while playing things cool might prevent killings in some
>>> instances, it won't stop police from stopping people without reason,
>>> putting their hands on suspects or jailing people like Bland for
>>> infractions that at most would earn a white guy in a suit a desk
>>> ticket. That's not just happening in a few well-publicized cases a
>>> year, but routinely, in hundreds of thousands or even millions of
>>> incidents we never hear of.
>>> That's why the issue isn't how Sandra Bland died, but why she was
>>> stopped and detained in the first place. It's profiling, sure, but
>>> it's even worse than that. It's a systematic campaign to harass
>>> people, using misdemeanors and violations as battering ram - a
>>> campaign that's been going on forever, and against which there's
>>> little defense. When the law can be stretched to mean almost anything,
>> obeying it is no magic bullet.
>>> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
>>> valid.
>>>
>>> Sandra Bland died at the Waller County Jail in Hempstead, Texas, on
>>> July 17.
>>> (photo: Jay Janner/AP)
>>> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/sandra-bland-was-murdered-20
>>> 150724
>>> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/sandra-bland-was-murdered-20
>>> 150724 ALSO SEE: Jail Where Sandra Bland Died Has History of State
>>> Rules Violations Sandra Bland Was Murdered By Matt Taibbi, Rolling
>>> Stone
>>> 25 July 15
>>> Suicide or not, police are responsible for Sandra Bland's death o
>>> news broke yesterday that authorities in Waller County, Texas, have
>>> "full faith" that Sandra Bland committed suicide. They said there was
>>> "no evidence of a struggle" on the body of the 28-year-old
>>> African-American woman who was ludicrously jailed last week after an
>>> alleged lane change violation.
>>> In related news, the Texas Department of Safety ruled that Brian
>>> Encina, the officer who arrested Bland, pulled her from her car, and
>>> threatened her with a Taser, had merely violated the state's "courtesy
>>> policy." The state said there was "no evidence" yet of criminal
>>> behavior on Encina's part.
>>> So barring something unexpected, we know now how this is going to play
>>> out in the media.
>>> Many news outlets are going to engage in an indirect version of the
>>> usual blame-the-victim game by emphasizing the autopsy finding of
>>> suicide, questioning Bland's mental health history, and by
>>> highlighting the reports of marijuana found in her system.
>>> Beyond that, we can expect a slew of chin-scratching "legal analyses"
>>> concluding that while there may have been some minor impropriety on
>>> officer Encina's part, the law governing police-motorist encounters is
>>> too "complicated" to make this anything more than a tragic accident.
>>> Media scandals are like criminal trials. They're about assigning blame.
>>> Because Bland may have technically taken her own life, the blame is
>>> now mostly going to fall on a woman with a history of depression and
>>> drugs, instead of on a criminal justice system that morally, if not
>>> legally, surely murdered Sandra Bland.
>>> Backing up: It's been interesting following conservative news outlets
>>> after the Bland case. They've been conspicuously quiet this week,
>>> holstering the usual gloating backlash of the "He'd be alive today, if
>>> he'd just obeyed the law" variety.
>>> After the Garner, Brown and Freddie Gray cases, of course,
>>> law-and-order commentators flocked to the blogosphere to explain the
>>> secret to preventing police brutality.
>>> It was simple, they explained. There's no police corruption problem.
>>> The real issue is that there are too many people who don't know how to
>>> behave during a car stop. Don't want to get murdered by police? Be
>>> polite!
>>> A writer named John Hawkins took on the subject for TownHall.com in a
>>> piece last year carrying the not at all joking headline "How to not
>>> get shot by police." After revealing that his only real experience in
>>> this area involved speeding tickets, Hawkins lectured readers that
>>> "the first key to not getting shot" is to not think of the police as a
>>> threat:
>>> "They're really not going to randomly beat you, arrest you or shoot
>>> you for no reason whatsoever. It's like a bee. Don't start swatting at
>>> it and chances are, it's not going to sting you.
>>> "In fact, when a cop pulls you over, you should have your license and
>>> registration ready, you put your hands on the steering wheel so he can
>>> see them when he arrives, and you say 'yes, sir' and 'no, sir.'"
>>> It's hard to wrap one's head around the absurdity of someone like
>>> Hawkins imagining to himself that black America has not already tried
>>> using the word "sir" as a strategy to avoid beatings and killings. But
>>> over and over again, we heard stuff like this from the Fox/Real Clear
>>> crowd, which as time passed flailed around with increasing desperation
>>> in search of a non-racial explanation for all of these violent
>>> episodes.
>>> After Eric Garner was killed, for instance, a New York Post columnist
>>> named Bob McManus argued that we should only blame - the word "only"
>>> was actually used - the "man who tragically decided to resist."
>>> Michigan's even dumber Ann Coulter wannabe, Debbie Schlussel,
>>> countered that Garner would still be alive if his parents had raised
>>> him better, and if he wasn't a "morbidly obese asthmatic."
>>> After Ferguson, it was the same thing. Editorials insisted that the
>>> solution to the brutality problem lay in "less criminality within the
>>> black community." The officer who shot Michael Brown, Darren Wilson -
>>> the same guy who called Brown a "demon" - insisted that Brown would
>>> still be alive "if he'd just followed orders."
>>> But nobody yet has dared to say Sandra Bland would still be alive
>>> today, if only she'd used her blinker. That's a bridge too far even
>>> for TownHall.com types.
>>> Suddenly even hardcore law-and-order enthusiasts are realizing the
>>> criminal code is so broad and littered with so many tiny technical
>>> prohibitions that a determined enough police officer can stop and/or
>>> arrest pretty much anybody at any time.
>>> Bland was on her way to a new job at Prairie A&M university when she
>>> was pulled over for failing to signal when changing lanes, something
>>> roughly 100 percent of American drivers do on a regular basis.
>>> Irritated at being stopped, she was curt with Encina when he wrote her
>>> up. He didn't like her attitude and decided to flex his muscles a
>>> little, asking her to put out her cigarette.
>>> She balked, and that's when things went sideways. Encina demanded that
>>> she get out of the car, reached for his Taser, said, "I'll light you
>>> up," and eventually threw her in jail.
>>> Many editorialists following this narrative case suddenly noticed, as
>>> if for the first time, how much mischief can arise from the fact that
>>> a person may be arrested at any time for "failing to obey a lawful
>>> order," which in the heat of the moment can mean just about anything.
>>> But this same kind of logic has underpinned modern community policing
>>> in big cities all over America for decades now. Under Broken Windows
>>> and other "zero tolerance"-type enforcement strategies, police move
>>> into (typically
>>> nonwhite) neighborhoods in big numbers, tell people to move off
>>> corners, and then circle back and arrest them for "loitering" or
>>> "failing to obey a lawful order" if they don't.
>>> Some cities have tried to put a fig leaf of legal justification on
>>> such practices by creating "drug-free" or "anti-loitering" zones,
>>> which give police automatic justification for arrest even if a person
>>> is guilty of nothing more than standing on the street. Failing to
>>> produce ID - even in the halls of your own building, in some cases -
>>> or being seen in or around a "known drug location" can similarly be
>>> grounds for search or detention.
>>> A related phenomenon is the policy governing "consent searches."
>>> Police stop people on the highways, in airports, on buses, really
>>> anywhere at all, and ask for their consent to search their property or
>>> their persons. Sometimes they do the asking with a drug-sniffing dog
>>> standing beside them.
>>> Studies have consistently shown that black and Hispanic people are
>>> pulled over at a far higher rate than white people, usually more than
>>> double, even though white people are statistically more likely to have
>>> illegal drugs on them.
>>> Add to this the whole galaxy of stop-and-frisk type behaviors, also
>>> known as "Terry stops," in which any police officer with an
>>> "articulable suspicion"
>>> that a crime of violence might be committed can pat down and question
>>> any person.
>>> The end of New York's infamous program notwithstanding, there are
>>> millions of such stops every year. In Chicago, for instance, recent
>>> data showed a rate of about a million stops per year, with roughly 72
>>> percent involving black people - and this in a city that's only 32
>>> percent
>> black.
>>> You add all this up, and we're talking about millions upon millions of
>>> stops, searches and misdemeanor arrests and summonses that clearly
>>> target black people at a far higher rate than the rest of the
>>> population.
>>> And if you're continually handcuffing people, sitting on them, putting
>>> knees in their backs and dragging them to jail in cases when you could
>>> have just handed over a summons, a certain percentage of these
>>> encounters are going to end in fights, struggles, medical accidents
>>> and other disasters. Like the Bland case.
>>> We'd call it murder if a kidnapping victim died of fright during the
>>> job.
>>> Of
>>> course it's not legally the same thing, but a woman dying of
>>> depression during an illegal detention should be the same kind of
>>> crime. It's especially true given our long and sordid history of
>>> overpolicing misdemeanors.
>>> In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander described how white America
>>> re-seized control after slavery by instituting a series of repressive
>>> "vagrancy laws," under which nonwhite Americans could be arrested for
>>> such absurdities as "mischief" and "insulting gestures."
>>> In an eerie precursor to the modern loitering laws, many states even
>>> had stringent rules against "idleness." There were even states where
>>> any black male over 18 could be thrown in jail for not carrying around
>>> written proof that he had a job.
>>> What exactly is the difference between being arrested for "idleness"
>>> and being arrested for "loitering in a designated drug-free zone"?
>>> What's the difference between an arrest for "mischief" and an arrest
>>> for "disorderly conduct" or "refusing to obey a lawful order"? If it's
>>> anything more than a semantic distinction, it's not much more of one.
>>> Law-and-order types like to lecture black America about how it can
>>> avoid getting killed by "respecting authority" and treating arresting
>>> cops like dangerous dogs or bees.
>>> But while playing things cool might prevent killings in some
>>> instances, it won't stop police from stopping people without reason,
>>> putting their hands on suspects or jailing people like Bland for
>>> infractions that at most would earn a white guy in a suit a desk
>>> ticket. That's not just happening in a few well-publicized cases a
>>> year, but routinely, in hundreds of thousands or even millions of
>>> incidents we never hear of.
>>> That's why the issue isn't how Sandra Bland died, but why she was
>>> stopped and detained in the first place. It's profiling, sure, but
>>> it's even worse than that. It's a systematic campaign to harass
>>> people, using misdemeanors and violations as battering ram - a
>>> campaign that's been going on forever, and against which there's
>>> little defense. When the law can be stretched to mean almost anything,
>> obeying it is no magic bullet.
>>> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
>>> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>
Saturday, July 25, 2015
Macho Cop not fit to wear the uniform
No doubt about it. Sandra Bland was victimized by a cop not fit to
wear the uniform.
I have done something I've avoided doing 99% of the time. I listened
to the recording, several times, of Sandra Bland being cornered in a
cat and mouse game where she was the prey.
As I say, I avoid these reports as much as I can because I become so
outrageously angry. And there's nothing I can do after the fact.
Furthermore, all I need to do is to wander around my own area and talk
to White folks about discrimination, to get the message that prejudice
still rules.
"I'm not prejudiced," an elderly White client told us. "But I don't
know why them Coloreds have to push in where they're not wanted."
Thank goodness he's not prejudiced.
"They say they're as good as the rest of us," a waitress in our
favorite eatery told us. "So why are so many of them selling and
using drugs and getting into fights and getting themselves arrested?"
She went on to exclaim that we don't have that sort of violence and
drug crime in Sequim. Ah yes, Sequim. A retirement town of about
9,000 almost all White residents. Mostly older. Cathy and I serve a
great number of these people, in their apartments and homes. Sequim
does not have any area one might consider to be slums. No Colored
Ghetto. No hookers walking up and down in front of the Penny Arcades.
No Arcades. No pimps jockeying with one another for the choice street
corners for their Ladies. No drugs...oops! Wait a second. A couple
of years back some 32 "users" were rounded up and booked in Jefferson
County court. They were "captured" in the small, almost all White
community of Quilcene, about 25 miles East of Sequim. . Little
Quilcene, closest town to my home, boasts a population of 2,500. I
swear they're counting the local cows and horses. But 32 arrests out
of some 2,500 people, cows and horses? That's a huge percentage to
ignore when bragging about our "clean" county.
A client of ours told us that he never went to the doctor. "I keep a
positive frame of mind and that keeps me healthy", he bragged. He
died at 73 of a diabetic coma. Is America killing itself by denying
our prejudices? We sure can't have them removed until we admit that
we have them.
Carl Jarvis
On 7/25/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>
> Taibbi writes: "The Texas Department of Safety ruled that Brian Encina, the
> officer who arrested Bland, pulled her from her car, and threatened her
> with
> a Taser, had merely violated the state's 'courtesy policy.'"
>
> Sandra Bland died at the Waller County Jail in Hempstead, Texas, on July
> 17.
> (photo: Jay Janner/AP)
>
>
> ALSO SEE: Jail Where Sandra Bland Died Has History of State Rules
> Violations
> Sandra Bland Was Murdered
> By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
> 25 July 15
>
> Suicide or not, police are responsible for Sandra Bland's death
>
> So news broke yesterday that authorities in Waller County, Texas, have
> "full
> faith" that Sandra Bland committed suicide. They said there was "no
> evidence
> of a struggle" on the body of the 28-year-old African-American woman who
> was
> ludicrously jailed last week after an alleged lane change violation.
> In related news, the Texas Department of Safety ruled that Brian Encina,
> the
> officer who arrested Bland, pulled her from her car, and threatened her
> with
> a Taser, had merely violated the state's "courtesy policy." The state said
> there was "no evidence" yet of criminal behavior on Encina's part.
> So barring something unexpected, we know now how this is going to play out
> in the media.
> Many news outlets are going to engage in an indirect version of the usual
> blame-the-victim game by emphasizing the autopsy finding of suicide,
> questioning Bland's mental health history, and by highlighting the reports
> of marijuana found in her system.
> Beyond that, we can expect a slew of chin-scratching "legal analyses"
> concluding that while there may have been some minor impropriety on officer
> Encina's part, the law governing police-motorist encounters is too
> "complicated" to make this anything more than a tragic accident.
> Media scandals are like criminal trials. They're about assigning blame.
> Because Bland may have technically taken her own life, the blame is now
> mostly going to fall on a woman with a history of depression and drugs,
> instead of on a criminal justice system that morally, if not legally,
> surely
> murdered Sandra Bland.
> Backing up: It's been interesting following conservative news outlets after
> the Bland case. They've been conspicuously quiet this week, holstering the
> usual gloating backlash of the "He'd be alive today, if he'd just obeyed
> the
> law" variety.
> After the Garner, Brown and Freddie Gray cases, of course, law-and-order
> commentators flocked to the blogosphere to explain the secret to preventing
> police brutality.
> It was simple, they explained. There's no police corruption problem. The
> real issue is that there are too many people who don't know how to behave
> during a car stop. Don't want to get murdered by police? Be polite!
> A writer named John Hawkins took on the subject for TownHall.com in a piece
> last year carrying the not at all joking headline "How to not get shot by
> police." After revealing that his only real experience in this area
> involved
> speeding tickets, Hawkins lectured readers that "the first key to not
> getting shot" is to not think of the police as a threat:
> "They're really not going to randomly beat you, arrest you or shoot you for
> no reason whatsoever. It's like a bee. Don't start swatting at it and
> chances are, it's not going to sting you.
> "In fact, when a cop pulls you over, you should have your license and
> registration ready, you put your hands on the steering wheel so he can see
> them when he arrives, and you say 'yes, sir' and 'no, sir.'"
> It's hard to wrap one's head around the absurdity of someone like Hawkins
> imagining to himself that black America has not already tried using the
> word
> "sir" as a strategy to avoid beatings and killings. But over and over
> again,
> we heard stuff like this from the Fox/Real Clear crowd, which as time
> passed
> flailed around with increasing desperation in search of a non-racial
> explanation for all of these violent episodes.
> After Eric Garner was killed, for instance, a New York Post columnist named
> Bob McManus argued that we should only blame - the word "only" was actually
> used - the "man who tragically decided to resist." Michigan's even dumber
> Ann Coulter wannabe, Debbie Schlussel, countered that Garner would still be
> alive if his parents had raised him better, and if he wasn't a "morbidly
> obese asthmatic."
> After Ferguson, it was the same thing. Editorials insisted that the
> solution
> to the brutality problem lay in "less criminality within the black
> community." The officer who shot Michael Brown, Darren Wilson - the same
> guy
> who called Brown a "demon" - insisted that Brown would still be alive "if
> he'd just followed orders."
> But nobody yet has dared to say Sandra Bland would still be alive today, if
> only she'd used her blinker. That's a bridge too far even for TownHall.com
> types.
> Suddenly even hardcore law-and-order enthusiasts are realizing the criminal
> code is so broad and littered with so many tiny technical prohibitions that
> a determined enough police officer can stop and/or arrest pretty much
> anybody at any time.
> Bland was on her way to a new job at Prairie A&M university when she was
> pulled over for failing to signal when changing lanes, something roughly
> 100
> percent of American drivers do on a regular basis. Irritated at being
> stopped, she was curt with Encina when he wrote her up. He didn't like her
> attitude and decided to flex his muscles a little, asking her to put out
> her
> cigarette.
> She balked, and that's when things went sideways. Encina demanded that she
> get out of the car, reached for his Taser, said, "I'll light you up," and
> eventually threw her in jail.
> Many editorialists following this narrative case suddenly noticed, as if
> for
> the first time, how much mischief can arise from the fact that a person may
> be arrested at any time for "failing to obey a lawful order," which in the
> heat of the moment can mean just about anything.
> But this same kind of logic has underpinned modern community policing in
> big
> cities all over America for decades now. Under Broken Windows and other
> "zero tolerance"-type enforcement strategies, police move into (typically
> nonwhite) neighborhoods in big numbers, tell people to move off corners,
> and
> then circle back and arrest them for "loitering" or "failing to obey a
> lawful order" if they don't.
> Some cities have tried to put a fig leaf of legal justification on such
> practices by creating "drug-free" or "anti-loitering" zones, which give
> police automatic justification for arrest even if a person is guilty of
> nothing more than standing on the street. Failing to produce ID - even in
> the halls of your own building, in some cases - or being seen in or around
> a
> "known drug location" can similarly be grounds for search or detention.
> A related phenomenon is the policy governing "consent searches." Police
> stop
> people on the highways, in airports, on buses, really anywhere at all, and
> ask for their consent to search their property or their persons. Sometimes
> they do the asking with a drug-sniffing dog standing beside them.
> Studies have consistently shown that black and Hispanic people are pulled
> over at a far higher rate than white people, usually more than double, even
> though white people are statistically more likely to have illegal drugs on
> them.
> Add to this the whole galaxy of stop-and-frisk type behaviors, also known
> as
> "Terry stops," in which any police officer with an "articulable suspicion"
> that a crime of violence might be committed can pat down and question any
> person.
> The end of New York's infamous program notwithstanding, there are millions
> of such stops every year. In Chicago, for instance, recent data showed a
> rate of about a million stops per year, with roughly 72 percent involving
> black people - and this in a city that's only 32 percent black.
> You add all this up, and we're talking about millions upon millions of
> stops, searches and misdemeanor arrests and summonses that clearly target
> black people at a far higher rate than the rest of the population.
> And if you're continually handcuffing people, sitting on them, putting
> knees
> in their backs and dragging them to jail in cases when you could have just
> handed over a summons, a certain percentage of these encounters are going
> to
> end in fights, struggles, medical accidents and other disasters. Like the
> Bland case.
> We'd call it murder if a kidnapping victim died of fright during the job.
> Of
> course it's not legally the same thing, but a woman dying of depression
> during an illegal detention should be the same kind of crime. It's
> especially true given our long and sordid history of overpolicing
> misdemeanors.
> In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander described how white America
> re-seized control after slavery by instituting a series of repressive
> "vagrancy laws," under which nonwhite Americans could be arrested for such
> absurdities as "mischief" and "insulting gestures."
> In an eerie precursor to the modern loitering laws, many states even had
> stringent rules against "idleness." There were even states where any black
> male over 18 could be thrown in jail for not carrying around written proof
> that he had a job.
> What exactly is the difference between being arrested for "idleness" and
> being arrested for "loitering in a designated drug-free zone"? What's the
> difference between an arrest for "mischief" and an arrest for "disorderly
> conduct" or "refusing to obey a lawful order"? If it's anything more than a
> semantic distinction, it's not much more of one.
> Law-and-order types like to lecture black America about how it can avoid
> getting killed by "respecting authority" and treating arresting cops like
> dangerous dogs or bees.
> But while playing things cool might prevent killings in some instances, it
> won't stop police from stopping people without reason, putting their hands
> on suspects or jailing people like Bland for infractions that at most would
> earn a white guy in a suit a desk ticket. That's not just happening in a
> few
> well-publicized cases a year, but routinely, in hundreds of thousands or
> even millions of incidents we never hear of.
> That's why the issue isn't how Sandra Bland died, but why she was stopped
> and detained in the first place. It's profiling, sure, but it's even worse
> than that. It's a systematic campaign to harass people, using misdemeanors
> and violations as battering ram - a campaign that's been going on forever,
> and against which there's little defense. When the law can be stretched to
> mean almost anything, obeying it is no magic bullet.
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
> valid.
>
> Sandra Bland died at the Waller County Jail in Hempstead, Texas, on July
> 17.
> (photo: Jay Janner/AP)
> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/sandra-bland-was-murdered-20150724
> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/sandra-bland-was-murdered-20150724
> ALSO SEE: Jail Where Sandra Bland Died Has History of State Rules
> Violations
> Sandra Bland Was Murdered
> By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
> 25 July 15
> Suicide or not, police are responsible for Sandra Bland's death
> o news broke yesterday that authorities in Waller County, Texas, have
> "full
> faith" that Sandra Bland committed suicide. They said there was "no
> evidence
> of a struggle" on the body of the 28-year-old African-American woman who
> was
> ludicrously jailed last week after an alleged lane change violation.
> In related news, the Texas Department of Safety ruled that Brian Encina,
> the
> officer who arrested Bland, pulled her from her car, and threatened her
> with
> a Taser, had merely violated the state's "courtesy policy." The state said
> there was "no evidence" yet of criminal behavior on Encina's part.
> So barring something unexpected, we know now how this is going to play out
> in the media.
> Many news outlets are going to engage in an indirect version of the usual
> blame-the-victim game by emphasizing the autopsy finding of suicide,
> questioning Bland's mental health history, and by highlighting the reports
> of marijuana found in her system.
> Beyond that, we can expect a slew of chin-scratching "legal analyses"
> concluding that while there may have been some minor impropriety on officer
> Encina's part, the law governing police-motorist encounters is too
> "complicated" to make this anything more than a tragic accident.
> Media scandals are like criminal trials. They're about assigning blame.
> Because Bland may have technically taken her own life, the blame is now
> mostly going to fall on a woman with a history of depression and drugs,
> instead of on a criminal justice system that morally, if not legally,
> surely
> murdered Sandra Bland.
> Backing up: It's been interesting following conservative news outlets after
> the Bland case. They've been conspicuously quiet this week, holstering the
> usual gloating backlash of the "He'd be alive today, if he'd just obeyed
> the
> law" variety.
> After the Garner, Brown and Freddie Gray cases, of course, law-and-order
> commentators flocked to the blogosphere to explain the secret to preventing
> police brutality.
> It was simple, they explained. There's no police corruption problem. The
> real issue is that there are too many people who don't know how to behave
> during a car stop. Don't want to get murdered by police? Be polite!
> A writer named John Hawkins took on the subject for TownHall.com in a piece
> last year carrying the not at all joking headline "How to not get shot by
> police." After revealing that his only real experience in this area
> involved
> speeding tickets, Hawkins lectured readers that "the first key to not
> getting shot" is to not think of the police as a threat:
> "They're really not going to randomly beat you, arrest you or shoot you for
> no reason whatsoever. It's like a bee. Don't start swatting at it and
> chances are, it's not going to sting you.
> "In fact, when a cop pulls you over, you should have your license and
> registration ready, you put your hands on the steering wheel so he can see
> them when he arrives, and you say 'yes, sir' and 'no, sir.'"
> It's hard to wrap one's head around the absurdity of someone like Hawkins
> imagining to himself that black America has not already tried using the
> word
> "sir" as a strategy to avoid beatings and killings. But over and over
> again,
> we heard stuff like this from the Fox/Real Clear crowd, which as time
> passed
> flailed around with increasing desperation in search of a non-racial
> explanation for all of these violent episodes.
> After Eric Garner was killed, for instance, a New York Post columnist named
> Bob McManus argued that we should only blame - the word "only" was actually
> used - the "man who tragically decided to resist." Michigan's even dumber
> Ann Coulter wannabe, Debbie Schlussel, countered that Garner would still be
> alive if his parents had raised him better, and if he wasn't a "morbidly
> obese asthmatic."
> After Ferguson, it was the same thing. Editorials insisted that the
> solution
> to the brutality problem lay in "less criminality within the black
> community." The officer who shot Michael Brown, Darren Wilson - the same
> guy
> who called Brown a "demon" - insisted that Brown would still be alive "if
> he'd just followed orders."
> But nobody yet has dared to say Sandra Bland would still be alive today, if
> only she'd used her blinker. That's a bridge too far even for TownHall.com
> types.
> Suddenly even hardcore law-and-order enthusiasts are realizing the criminal
> code is so broad and littered with so many tiny technical prohibitions that
> a determined enough police officer can stop and/or arrest pretty much
> anybody at any time.
> Bland was on her way to a new job at Prairie A&M university when she was
> pulled over for failing to signal when changing lanes, something roughly
> 100
> percent of American drivers do on a regular basis. Irritated at being
> stopped, she was curt with Encina when he wrote her up. He didn't like her
> attitude and decided to flex his muscles a little, asking her to put out
> her
> cigarette.
> She balked, and that's when things went sideways. Encina demanded that she
> get out of the car, reached for his Taser, said, "I'll light you up," and
> eventually threw her in jail.
> Many editorialists following this narrative case suddenly noticed, as if
> for
> the first time, how much mischief can arise from the fact that a person may
> be arrested at any time for "failing to obey a lawful order," which in the
> heat of the moment can mean just about anything.
> But this same kind of logic has underpinned modern community policing in
> big
> cities all over America for decades now. Under Broken Windows and other
> "zero tolerance"-type enforcement strategies, police move into (typically
> nonwhite) neighborhoods in big numbers, tell people to move off corners,
> and
> then circle back and arrest them for "loitering" or "failing to obey a
> lawful order" if they don't.
> Some cities have tried to put a fig leaf of legal justification on such
> practices by creating "drug-free" or "anti-loitering" zones, which give
> police automatic justification for arrest even if a person is guilty of
> nothing more than standing on the street. Failing to produce ID - even in
> the halls of your own building, in some cases - or being seen in or around
> a
> "known drug location" can similarly be grounds for search or detention.
> A related phenomenon is the policy governing "consent searches." Police
> stop
> people on the highways, in airports, on buses, really anywhere at all, and
> ask for their consent to search their property or their persons. Sometimes
> they do the asking with a drug-sniffing dog standing beside them.
> Studies have consistently shown that black and Hispanic people are pulled
> over at a far higher rate than white people, usually more than double, even
> though white people are statistically more likely to have illegal drugs on
> them.
> Add to this the whole galaxy of stop-and-frisk type behaviors, also known
> as
> "Terry stops," in which any police officer with an "articulable suspicion"
> that a crime of violence might be committed can pat down and question any
> person.
> The end of New York's infamous program notwithstanding, there are millions
> of such stops every year. In Chicago, for instance, recent data showed a
> rate of about a million stops per year, with roughly 72 percent involving
> black people - and this in a city that's only 32 percent black.
> You add all this up, and we're talking about millions upon millions of
> stops, searches and misdemeanor arrests and summonses that clearly target
> black people at a far higher rate than the rest of the population.
> And if you're continually handcuffing people, sitting on them, putting
> knees
> in their backs and dragging them to jail in cases when you could have just
> handed over a summons, a certain percentage of these encounters are going
> to
> end in fights, struggles, medical accidents and other disasters. Like the
> Bland case.
> We'd call it murder if a kidnapping victim died of fright during the job.
> Of
> course it's not legally the same thing, but a woman dying of depression
> during an illegal detention should be the same kind of crime. It's
> especially true given our long and sordid history of overpolicing
> misdemeanors.
> In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander described how white America
> re-seized control after slavery by instituting a series of repressive
> "vagrancy laws," under which nonwhite Americans could be arrested for such
> absurdities as "mischief" and "insulting gestures."
> In an eerie precursor to the modern loitering laws, many states even had
> stringent rules against "idleness." There were even states where any black
> male over 18 could be thrown in jail for not carrying around written proof
> that he had a job.
> What exactly is the difference between being arrested for "idleness" and
> being arrested for "loitering in a designated drug-free zone"? What's the
> difference between an arrest for "mischief" and an arrest for "disorderly
> conduct" or "refusing to obey a lawful order"? If it's anything more than a
> semantic distinction, it's not much more of one.
> Law-and-order types like to lecture black America about how it can avoid
> getting killed by "respecting authority" and treating arresting cops like
> dangerous dogs or bees.
> But while playing things cool might prevent killings in some instances, it
> won't stop police from stopping people without reason, putting their hands
> on suspects or jailing people like Bland for infractions that at most would
> earn a white guy in a suit a desk ticket. That's not just happening in a
> few
> well-publicized cases a year, but routinely, in hundreds of thousands or
> even millions of incidents we never hear of.
> That's why the issue isn't how Sandra Bland died, but why she was stopped
> and detained in the first place. It's profiling, sure, but it's even worse
> than that. It's a systematic campaign to harass people, using misdemeanors
> and violations as battering ram - a campaign that's been going on forever,
> and against which there's little defense. When the law can be stretched to
> mean almost anything, obeying it is no magic bullet.
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
>
>
>
wear the uniform.
I have done something I've avoided doing 99% of the time. I listened
to the recording, several times, of Sandra Bland being cornered in a
cat and mouse game where she was the prey.
As I say, I avoid these reports as much as I can because I become so
outrageously angry. And there's nothing I can do after the fact.
Furthermore, all I need to do is to wander around my own area and talk
to White folks about discrimination, to get the message that prejudice
still rules.
"I'm not prejudiced," an elderly White client told us. "But I don't
know why them Coloreds have to push in where they're not wanted."
Thank goodness he's not prejudiced.
"They say they're as good as the rest of us," a waitress in our
favorite eatery told us. "So why are so many of them selling and
using drugs and getting into fights and getting themselves arrested?"
She went on to exclaim that we don't have that sort of violence and
drug crime in Sequim. Ah yes, Sequim. A retirement town of about
9,000 almost all White residents. Mostly older. Cathy and I serve a
great number of these people, in their apartments and homes. Sequim
does not have any area one might consider to be slums. No Colored
Ghetto. No hookers walking up and down in front of the Penny Arcades.
No Arcades. No pimps jockeying with one another for the choice street
corners for their Ladies. No drugs...oops! Wait a second. A couple
of years back some 32 "users" were rounded up and booked in Jefferson
County court. They were "captured" in the small, almost all White
community of Quilcene, about 25 miles East of Sequim. . Little
Quilcene, closest town to my home, boasts a population of 2,500. I
swear they're counting the local cows and horses. But 32 arrests out
of some 2,500 people, cows and horses? That's a huge percentage to
ignore when bragging about our "clean" county.
A client of ours told us that he never went to the doctor. "I keep a
positive frame of mind and that keeps me healthy", he bragged. He
died at 73 of a diabetic coma. Is America killing itself by denying
our prejudices? We sure can't have them removed until we admit that
we have them.
Carl Jarvis
On 7/25/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>
> Taibbi writes: "The Texas Department of Safety ruled that Brian Encina, the
> officer who arrested Bland, pulled her from her car, and threatened her
> with
> a Taser, had merely violated the state's 'courtesy policy.'"
>
> Sandra Bland died at the Waller County Jail in Hempstead, Texas, on July
> 17.
> (photo: Jay Janner/AP)
>
>
> ALSO SEE: Jail Where Sandra Bland Died Has History of State Rules
> Violations
> Sandra Bland Was Murdered
> By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
> 25 July 15
>
> Suicide or not, police are responsible for Sandra Bland's death
>
> So news broke yesterday that authorities in Waller County, Texas, have
> "full
> faith" that Sandra Bland committed suicide. They said there was "no
> evidence
> of a struggle" on the body of the 28-year-old African-American woman who
> was
> ludicrously jailed last week after an alleged lane change violation.
> In related news, the Texas Department of Safety ruled that Brian Encina,
> the
> officer who arrested Bland, pulled her from her car, and threatened her
> with
> a Taser, had merely violated the state's "courtesy policy." The state said
> there was "no evidence" yet of criminal behavior on Encina's part.
> So barring something unexpected, we know now how this is going to play out
> in the media.
> Many news outlets are going to engage in an indirect version of the usual
> blame-the-victim game by emphasizing the autopsy finding of suicide,
> questioning Bland's mental health history, and by highlighting the reports
> of marijuana found in her system.
> Beyond that, we can expect a slew of chin-scratching "legal analyses"
> concluding that while there may have been some minor impropriety on officer
> Encina's part, the law governing police-motorist encounters is too
> "complicated" to make this anything more than a tragic accident.
> Media scandals are like criminal trials. They're about assigning blame.
> Because Bland may have technically taken her own life, the blame is now
> mostly going to fall on a woman with a history of depression and drugs,
> instead of on a criminal justice system that morally, if not legally,
> surely
> murdered Sandra Bland.
> Backing up: It's been interesting following conservative news outlets after
> the Bland case. They've been conspicuously quiet this week, holstering the
> usual gloating backlash of the "He'd be alive today, if he'd just obeyed
> the
> law" variety.
> After the Garner, Brown and Freddie Gray cases, of course, law-and-order
> commentators flocked to the blogosphere to explain the secret to preventing
> police brutality.
> It was simple, they explained. There's no police corruption problem. The
> real issue is that there are too many people who don't know how to behave
> during a car stop. Don't want to get murdered by police? Be polite!
> A writer named John Hawkins took on the subject for TownHall.com in a piece
> last year carrying the not at all joking headline "How to not get shot by
> police." After revealing that his only real experience in this area
> involved
> speeding tickets, Hawkins lectured readers that "the first key to not
> getting shot" is to not think of the police as a threat:
> "They're really not going to randomly beat you, arrest you or shoot you for
> no reason whatsoever. It's like a bee. Don't start swatting at it and
> chances are, it's not going to sting you.
> "In fact, when a cop pulls you over, you should have your license and
> registration ready, you put your hands on the steering wheel so he can see
> them when he arrives, and you say 'yes, sir' and 'no, sir.'"
> It's hard to wrap one's head around the absurdity of someone like Hawkins
> imagining to himself that black America has not already tried using the
> word
> "sir" as a strategy to avoid beatings and killings. But over and over
> again,
> we heard stuff like this from the Fox/Real Clear crowd, which as time
> passed
> flailed around with increasing desperation in search of a non-racial
> explanation for all of these violent episodes.
> After Eric Garner was killed, for instance, a New York Post columnist named
> Bob McManus argued that we should only blame - the word "only" was actually
> used - the "man who tragically decided to resist." Michigan's even dumber
> Ann Coulter wannabe, Debbie Schlussel, countered that Garner would still be
> alive if his parents had raised him better, and if he wasn't a "morbidly
> obese asthmatic."
> After Ferguson, it was the same thing. Editorials insisted that the
> solution
> to the brutality problem lay in "less criminality within the black
> community." The officer who shot Michael Brown, Darren Wilson - the same
> guy
> who called Brown a "demon" - insisted that Brown would still be alive "if
> he'd just followed orders."
> But nobody yet has dared to say Sandra Bland would still be alive today, if
> only she'd used her blinker. That's a bridge too far even for TownHall.com
> types.
> Suddenly even hardcore law-and-order enthusiasts are realizing the criminal
> code is so broad and littered with so many tiny technical prohibitions that
> a determined enough police officer can stop and/or arrest pretty much
> anybody at any time.
> Bland was on her way to a new job at Prairie A&M university when she was
> pulled over for failing to signal when changing lanes, something roughly
> 100
> percent of American drivers do on a regular basis. Irritated at being
> stopped, she was curt with Encina when he wrote her up. He didn't like her
> attitude and decided to flex his muscles a little, asking her to put out
> her
> cigarette.
> She balked, and that's when things went sideways. Encina demanded that she
> get out of the car, reached for his Taser, said, "I'll light you up," and
> eventually threw her in jail.
> Many editorialists following this narrative case suddenly noticed, as if
> for
> the first time, how much mischief can arise from the fact that a person may
> be arrested at any time for "failing to obey a lawful order," which in the
> heat of the moment can mean just about anything.
> But this same kind of logic has underpinned modern community policing in
> big
> cities all over America for decades now. Under Broken Windows and other
> "zero tolerance"-type enforcement strategies, police move into (typically
> nonwhite) neighborhoods in big numbers, tell people to move off corners,
> and
> then circle back and arrest them for "loitering" or "failing to obey a
> lawful order" if they don't.
> Some cities have tried to put a fig leaf of legal justification on such
> practices by creating "drug-free" or "anti-loitering" zones, which give
> police automatic justification for arrest even if a person is guilty of
> nothing more than standing on the street. Failing to produce ID - even in
> the halls of your own building, in some cases - or being seen in or around
> a
> "known drug location" can similarly be grounds for search or detention.
> A related phenomenon is the policy governing "consent searches." Police
> stop
> people on the highways, in airports, on buses, really anywhere at all, and
> ask for their consent to search their property or their persons. Sometimes
> they do the asking with a drug-sniffing dog standing beside them.
> Studies have consistently shown that black and Hispanic people are pulled
> over at a far higher rate than white people, usually more than double, even
> though white people are statistically more likely to have illegal drugs on
> them.
> Add to this the whole galaxy of stop-and-frisk type behaviors, also known
> as
> "Terry stops," in which any police officer with an "articulable suspicion"
> that a crime of violence might be committed can pat down and question any
> person.
> The end of New York's infamous program notwithstanding, there are millions
> of such stops every year. In Chicago, for instance, recent data showed a
> rate of about a million stops per year, with roughly 72 percent involving
> black people - and this in a city that's only 32 percent black.
> You add all this up, and we're talking about millions upon millions of
> stops, searches and misdemeanor arrests and summonses that clearly target
> black people at a far higher rate than the rest of the population.
> And if you're continually handcuffing people, sitting on them, putting
> knees
> in their backs and dragging them to jail in cases when you could have just
> handed over a summons, a certain percentage of these encounters are going
> to
> end in fights, struggles, medical accidents and other disasters. Like the
> Bland case.
> We'd call it murder if a kidnapping victim died of fright during the job.
> Of
> course it's not legally the same thing, but a woman dying of depression
> during an illegal detention should be the same kind of crime. It's
> especially true given our long and sordid history of overpolicing
> misdemeanors.
> In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander described how white America
> re-seized control after slavery by instituting a series of repressive
> "vagrancy laws," under which nonwhite Americans could be arrested for such
> absurdities as "mischief" and "insulting gestures."
> In an eerie precursor to the modern loitering laws, many states even had
> stringent rules against "idleness." There were even states where any black
> male over 18 could be thrown in jail for not carrying around written proof
> that he had a job.
> What exactly is the difference between being arrested for "idleness" and
> being arrested for "loitering in a designated drug-free zone"? What's the
> difference between an arrest for "mischief" and an arrest for "disorderly
> conduct" or "refusing to obey a lawful order"? If it's anything more than a
> semantic distinction, it's not much more of one.
> Law-and-order types like to lecture black America about how it can avoid
> getting killed by "respecting authority" and treating arresting cops like
> dangerous dogs or bees.
> But while playing things cool might prevent killings in some instances, it
> won't stop police from stopping people without reason, putting their hands
> on suspects or jailing people like Bland for infractions that at most would
> earn a white guy in a suit a desk ticket. That's not just happening in a
> few
> well-publicized cases a year, but routinely, in hundreds of thousands or
> even millions of incidents we never hear of.
> That's why the issue isn't how Sandra Bland died, but why she was stopped
> and detained in the first place. It's profiling, sure, but it's even worse
> than that. It's a systematic campaign to harass people, using misdemeanors
> and violations as battering ram - a campaign that's been going on forever,
> and against which there's little defense. When the law can be stretched to
> mean almost anything, obeying it is no magic bullet.
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
> valid.
>
> Sandra Bland died at the Waller County Jail in Hempstead, Texas, on July
> 17.
> (photo: Jay Janner/AP)
> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/sandra-bland-was-murdered-20150724
> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/sandra-bland-was-murdered-20150724
> ALSO SEE: Jail Where Sandra Bland Died Has History of State Rules
> Violations
> Sandra Bland Was Murdered
> By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
> 25 July 15
> Suicide or not, police are responsible for Sandra Bland's death
> o news broke yesterday that authorities in Waller County, Texas, have
> "full
> faith" that Sandra Bland committed suicide. They said there was "no
> evidence
> of a struggle" on the body of the 28-year-old African-American woman who
> was
> ludicrously jailed last week after an alleged lane change violation.
> In related news, the Texas Department of Safety ruled that Brian Encina,
> the
> officer who arrested Bland, pulled her from her car, and threatened her
> with
> a Taser, had merely violated the state's "courtesy policy." The state said
> there was "no evidence" yet of criminal behavior on Encina's part.
> So barring something unexpected, we know now how this is going to play out
> in the media.
> Many news outlets are going to engage in an indirect version of the usual
> blame-the-victim game by emphasizing the autopsy finding of suicide,
> questioning Bland's mental health history, and by highlighting the reports
> of marijuana found in her system.
> Beyond that, we can expect a slew of chin-scratching "legal analyses"
> concluding that while there may have been some minor impropriety on officer
> Encina's part, the law governing police-motorist encounters is too
> "complicated" to make this anything more than a tragic accident.
> Media scandals are like criminal trials. They're about assigning blame.
> Because Bland may have technically taken her own life, the blame is now
> mostly going to fall on a woman with a history of depression and drugs,
> instead of on a criminal justice system that morally, if not legally,
> surely
> murdered Sandra Bland.
> Backing up: It's been interesting following conservative news outlets after
> the Bland case. They've been conspicuously quiet this week, holstering the
> usual gloating backlash of the "He'd be alive today, if he'd just obeyed
> the
> law" variety.
> After the Garner, Brown and Freddie Gray cases, of course, law-and-order
> commentators flocked to the blogosphere to explain the secret to preventing
> police brutality.
> It was simple, they explained. There's no police corruption problem. The
> real issue is that there are too many people who don't know how to behave
> during a car stop. Don't want to get murdered by police? Be polite!
> A writer named John Hawkins took on the subject for TownHall.com in a piece
> last year carrying the not at all joking headline "How to not get shot by
> police." After revealing that his only real experience in this area
> involved
> speeding tickets, Hawkins lectured readers that "the first key to not
> getting shot" is to not think of the police as a threat:
> "They're really not going to randomly beat you, arrest you or shoot you for
> no reason whatsoever. It's like a bee. Don't start swatting at it and
> chances are, it's not going to sting you.
> "In fact, when a cop pulls you over, you should have your license and
> registration ready, you put your hands on the steering wheel so he can see
> them when he arrives, and you say 'yes, sir' and 'no, sir.'"
> It's hard to wrap one's head around the absurdity of someone like Hawkins
> imagining to himself that black America has not already tried using the
> word
> "sir" as a strategy to avoid beatings and killings. But over and over
> again,
> we heard stuff like this from the Fox/Real Clear crowd, which as time
> passed
> flailed around with increasing desperation in search of a non-racial
> explanation for all of these violent episodes.
> After Eric Garner was killed, for instance, a New York Post columnist named
> Bob McManus argued that we should only blame - the word "only" was actually
> used - the "man who tragically decided to resist." Michigan's even dumber
> Ann Coulter wannabe, Debbie Schlussel, countered that Garner would still be
> alive if his parents had raised him better, and if he wasn't a "morbidly
> obese asthmatic."
> After Ferguson, it was the same thing. Editorials insisted that the
> solution
> to the brutality problem lay in "less criminality within the black
> community." The officer who shot Michael Brown, Darren Wilson - the same
> guy
> who called Brown a "demon" - insisted that Brown would still be alive "if
> he'd just followed orders."
> But nobody yet has dared to say Sandra Bland would still be alive today, if
> only she'd used her blinker. That's a bridge too far even for TownHall.com
> types.
> Suddenly even hardcore law-and-order enthusiasts are realizing the criminal
> code is so broad and littered with so many tiny technical prohibitions that
> a determined enough police officer can stop and/or arrest pretty much
> anybody at any time.
> Bland was on her way to a new job at Prairie A&M university when she was
> pulled over for failing to signal when changing lanes, something roughly
> 100
> percent of American drivers do on a regular basis. Irritated at being
> stopped, she was curt with Encina when he wrote her up. He didn't like her
> attitude and decided to flex his muscles a little, asking her to put out
> her
> cigarette.
> She balked, and that's when things went sideways. Encina demanded that she
> get out of the car, reached for his Taser, said, "I'll light you up," and
> eventually threw her in jail.
> Many editorialists following this narrative case suddenly noticed, as if
> for
> the first time, how much mischief can arise from the fact that a person may
> be arrested at any time for "failing to obey a lawful order," which in the
> heat of the moment can mean just about anything.
> But this same kind of logic has underpinned modern community policing in
> big
> cities all over America for decades now. Under Broken Windows and other
> "zero tolerance"-type enforcement strategies, police move into (typically
> nonwhite) neighborhoods in big numbers, tell people to move off corners,
> and
> then circle back and arrest them for "loitering" or "failing to obey a
> lawful order" if they don't.
> Some cities have tried to put a fig leaf of legal justification on such
> practices by creating "drug-free" or "anti-loitering" zones, which give
> police automatic justification for arrest even if a person is guilty of
> nothing more than standing on the street. Failing to produce ID - even in
> the halls of your own building, in some cases - or being seen in or around
> a
> "known drug location" can similarly be grounds for search or detention.
> A related phenomenon is the policy governing "consent searches." Police
> stop
> people on the highways, in airports, on buses, really anywhere at all, and
> ask for their consent to search their property or their persons. Sometimes
> they do the asking with a drug-sniffing dog standing beside them.
> Studies have consistently shown that black and Hispanic people are pulled
> over at a far higher rate than white people, usually more than double, even
> though white people are statistically more likely to have illegal drugs on
> them.
> Add to this the whole galaxy of stop-and-frisk type behaviors, also known
> as
> "Terry stops," in which any police officer with an "articulable suspicion"
> that a crime of violence might be committed can pat down and question any
> person.
> The end of New York's infamous program notwithstanding, there are millions
> of such stops every year. In Chicago, for instance, recent data showed a
> rate of about a million stops per year, with roughly 72 percent involving
> black people - and this in a city that's only 32 percent black.
> You add all this up, and we're talking about millions upon millions of
> stops, searches and misdemeanor arrests and summonses that clearly target
> black people at a far higher rate than the rest of the population.
> And if you're continually handcuffing people, sitting on them, putting
> knees
> in their backs and dragging them to jail in cases when you could have just
> handed over a summons, a certain percentage of these encounters are going
> to
> end in fights, struggles, medical accidents and other disasters. Like the
> Bland case.
> We'd call it murder if a kidnapping victim died of fright during the job.
> Of
> course it's not legally the same thing, but a woman dying of depression
> during an illegal detention should be the same kind of crime. It's
> especially true given our long and sordid history of overpolicing
> misdemeanors.
> In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander described how white America
> re-seized control after slavery by instituting a series of repressive
> "vagrancy laws," under which nonwhite Americans could be arrested for such
> absurdities as "mischief" and "insulting gestures."
> In an eerie precursor to the modern loitering laws, many states even had
> stringent rules against "idleness." There were even states where any black
> male over 18 could be thrown in jail for not carrying around written proof
> that he had a job.
> What exactly is the difference between being arrested for "idleness" and
> being arrested for "loitering in a designated drug-free zone"? What's the
> difference between an arrest for "mischief" and an arrest for "disorderly
> conduct" or "refusing to obey a lawful order"? If it's anything more than a
> semantic distinction, it's not much more of one.
> Law-and-order types like to lecture black America about how it can avoid
> getting killed by "respecting authority" and treating arresting cops like
> dangerous dogs or bees.
> But while playing things cool might prevent killings in some instances, it
> won't stop police from stopping people without reason, putting their hands
> on suspects or jailing people like Bland for infractions that at most would
> earn a white guy in a suit a desk ticket. That's not just happening in a
> few
> well-publicized cases a year, but routinely, in hundreds of thousands or
> even millions of incidents we never hear of.
> That's why the issue isn't how Sandra Bland died, but why she was stopped
> and detained in the first place. It's profiling, sure, but it's even worse
> than that. It's a systematic campaign to harass people, using misdemeanors
> and violations as battering ram - a campaign that's been going on forever,
> and against which there's little defense. When the law can be stretched to
> mean almost anything, obeying it is no magic bullet.
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
>
>
>
[blind-democracy] SWP candidates campaign,for $15/hour, unionization
Where are those Wobblies when we need them?
Oh yeah, they were clubbed into the ground.
What the world needs now is not love sweet love, although that's not
such a bad thing, but what the world needs now is a Workers
International Party. Making changes in the wage minimum wage in
America will help our local workers...for a time, but until we gather
labor leaders from around the globe and set some international goals
and standards, we will remain under the greedy boot of the Corporate
Capitalists.
Carl Jarvis
On 7/25/15, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@freelists.org> wrote:
> http://themilitant.com/2015/7927/792701.html
> The Militant (logo)
>
> Vol. 79/No. 27 August 3, 2015
>
> (front page)
> SWP candidates campaign
> for $15/hour, unionization
> Call for labor party based on the unions
>
>
> Militant/Naomi Craine
> Osborne Hart, right, SWP candidate for mayor of Philadelphia, talks to
> retired leather worker James Roletter July 18. Roletter said removal of
> Confederate battle flag was long overdue.
>
> BY JOHN STUDER
> PHILADELPHIA — "The Socialist Workers Party candidates, John Staggs for
> City Council at-large and myself for mayor, are both workers at
> Walmart," Osborne Hart told Robert Taylor, a truck driver and Teamsters
> union member, as Taylor signed a nominating petition on his doorstep in
> the Port Richmond neighborhood here July 18.
> As of July 21 more than 1,200 people have signed to put the socialist
> candidates on the ballot. Campaign supporters go door to door in
> working-class neighborhoods and join labor rallies, protests against
> police brutality and other actions, discussing political developments
> from Iran and Greece to fights against boss attacks and the example of
> the Cuban Revolution. The SWP is going to sign up 1,000 over the
> required 1,325 signatures and file on July 31.
>
> "I never shop at Walmart. I'm union and they fight against having a
> union," Taylor said.
>
> "We don't ask people not to shop there," Hart said. "We say, 'Support
> our fight for higher wages, regular hours and a union.' The percentage
> of workers in this country who are union members is the lowest it's
> been. Workers fighting for $15 an hour and a union at Walmart,
> McDonald's and elsewhere are leading the fight to change that.
>
> "We need our own political party, a labor party based on the unions, a
> party that can bring workers together, build solidarity and confront the
> crisis we face," Hart said. "Such a party can bring together workers'
> battles on the job, fight to defend jobs, safety conditions and
> political and social rights. It can point the road to working people
> taking political power."
>
> "Workers face attacks all over the world — look at what's happening in
> Greece today," he said. "There's a world crisis of capitalism and we
> need to respond as a class."
>
> Protest against police abuse
> Earlier that day Hart and campaign supporters joined a protest demanding
> freedom for 22-year-old Tyree Carroll, who is imprisoned on frame-up
> drug charges after being brutally beaten by some 26 Philadelphia cops
> April 3.
> His grandmother Nancy Carroll and other relatives said Tyree was stopped
> for riding his bicycle the wrong way on a one-way street and then
> attacked. A neighbor caught the beating on video.
>
> After beating him, the cops took Carroll to the hospital, claiming he
> was hurt, "intentionally striking his own head against the protective
> shield located in the police vehicle."
>
> Ten family members and other marchers signed to put the SWP campaign on
> the ballot.
>
> The night before, Hart, Staggs and Carmen Guerrero, a leader of efforts
> to defend the human and political rights of immigrant workers in the
> Philadelphia suburb of Norristown, spoke at the weekly Militant Labor
> Forum.
>
> Staggs pointed to battles brewing as the United Steelworkers and United
> Auto Workers enter talks with the bosses over contracts that expire in
> September. ArcelorMittal has two steel mills in the Philadelphia area.
>
> "With the downturn in capitalist production and trade worldwide and the
> cooling off of expansion and production in China, steel bosses face
> shrinking markets and fierce competition," he said. "U.S. Steel has laid
> off thousands of workers and told 9,000 more they may be next. These
> bosses want the workers to take more concessions to try and protect
> their profits."
>
> "I'm proud to support the campaign," Guerrero said. "As workers we need
> to make our own power. It is time to fight for real change, and to do
> that we need a revolution in our consciousness.
>
> "I am proud that I am one of those invited to come to Washington, D.C.,
> and join the celebration at the reopening of the Cuban Embassy there
> after decades," she said. "This is a big victory and the Cuban
> Revolution is an example for all of us."
>
> Independence for Puerto Rico
> Sunday morning, Pastor José Díaz invited Hart to the Christ and St.
> Ambrose Episcopal Church in Philadelphia's Puerto Rican community. Hart
> and other SWP members had worked with Díaz to build the May 30
> demonstration demanding freedom for Puerto Rican independence fighter
> Oscar López, who has been imprisoned in the U.S. for more than 34 years.
> "The worldwide crisis of capitalism is responsible for what is happening
> to workers here, in Greece and in your home of Puerto Rico," Hart said.
> "U.S. bondholders bought up Puerto Rico's bonds, seeking to make a
> killing. Now, when the colonial government says the spiraling debt is
> unpayable, they try to make workers on the island bear the burden. We
> oppose this assault on the working class and support the fight for
> independence for Puerto Rico.
>
> "We join you in campaigning for freedom for Oscar López," he said.
> "Oscar, as many of you know, is a supporter of the Cuban Revolution. We
> join with him in pointing to the Cuban people's unbroken record of
> solidarity with workers and farmers throughout the world — from Puerto
> Rico to Angola and elsewhere."
>
> Forty members of the congregation signed petitions when church members
> passed them up and down the rows.
>
> Tuesday morning campaign supporters Chris Hoeppner and Mitchel Rosenberg
> went with Staggs to the Port Richmond neighborhood.
>
> "Chris and I went two blocks in a little over two hours, knocking on
> doors, and got 58 signatures," Rosenberg, an oil refinery worker, said.
> "I talked to a woman named Debbie who is unemployed. She signed and got
> her daughter to sign.
>
> "She said she really liked what the campaign had to say about the
> Confederate battle flag coming down, about how it brings workers
> together," he said. "She took my phone number to get a subscription to
> the Militant when she gets her check."
>
>
> Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home
>
>
>
>
Oh yeah, they were clubbed into the ground.
What the world needs now is not love sweet love, although that's not
such a bad thing, but what the world needs now is a Workers
International Party. Making changes in the wage minimum wage in
America will help our local workers...for a time, but until we gather
labor leaders from around the globe and set some international goals
and standards, we will remain under the greedy boot of the Corporate
Capitalists.
Carl Jarvis
On 7/25/15, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@freelists.org> wrote:
> http://themilitant.com/2015/7927/792701.html
> The Militant (logo)
>
> Vol. 79/No. 27 August 3, 2015
>
> (front page)
> SWP candidates campaign
> for $15/hour, unionization
> Call for labor party based on the unions
>
>
> Militant/Naomi Craine
> Osborne Hart, right, SWP candidate for mayor of Philadelphia, talks to
> retired leather worker James Roletter July 18. Roletter said removal of
> Confederate battle flag was long overdue.
>
> BY JOHN STUDER
> PHILADELPHIA — "The Socialist Workers Party candidates, John Staggs for
> City Council at-large and myself for mayor, are both workers at
> Walmart," Osborne Hart told Robert Taylor, a truck driver and Teamsters
> union member, as Taylor signed a nominating petition on his doorstep in
> the Port Richmond neighborhood here July 18.
> As of July 21 more than 1,200 people have signed to put the socialist
> candidates on the ballot. Campaign supporters go door to door in
> working-class neighborhoods and join labor rallies, protests against
> police brutality and other actions, discussing political developments
> from Iran and Greece to fights against boss attacks and the example of
> the Cuban Revolution. The SWP is going to sign up 1,000 over the
> required 1,325 signatures and file on July 31.
>
> "I never shop at Walmart. I'm union and they fight against having a
> union," Taylor said.
>
> "We don't ask people not to shop there," Hart said. "We say, 'Support
> our fight for higher wages, regular hours and a union.' The percentage
> of workers in this country who are union members is the lowest it's
> been. Workers fighting for $15 an hour and a union at Walmart,
> McDonald's and elsewhere are leading the fight to change that.
>
> "We need our own political party, a labor party based on the unions, a
> party that can bring workers together, build solidarity and confront the
> crisis we face," Hart said. "Such a party can bring together workers'
> battles on the job, fight to defend jobs, safety conditions and
> political and social rights. It can point the road to working people
> taking political power."
>
> "Workers face attacks all over the world — look at what's happening in
> Greece today," he said. "There's a world crisis of capitalism and we
> need to respond as a class."
>
> Protest against police abuse
> Earlier that day Hart and campaign supporters joined a protest demanding
> freedom for 22-year-old Tyree Carroll, who is imprisoned on frame-up
> drug charges after being brutally beaten by some 26 Philadelphia cops
> April 3.
> His grandmother Nancy Carroll and other relatives said Tyree was stopped
> for riding his bicycle the wrong way on a one-way street and then
> attacked. A neighbor caught the beating on video.
>
> After beating him, the cops took Carroll to the hospital, claiming he
> was hurt, "intentionally striking his own head against the protective
> shield located in the police vehicle."
>
> Ten family members and other marchers signed to put the SWP campaign on
> the ballot.
>
> The night before, Hart, Staggs and Carmen Guerrero, a leader of efforts
> to defend the human and political rights of immigrant workers in the
> Philadelphia suburb of Norristown, spoke at the weekly Militant Labor
> Forum.
>
> Staggs pointed to battles brewing as the United Steelworkers and United
> Auto Workers enter talks with the bosses over contracts that expire in
> September. ArcelorMittal has two steel mills in the Philadelphia area.
>
> "With the downturn in capitalist production and trade worldwide and the
> cooling off of expansion and production in China, steel bosses face
> shrinking markets and fierce competition," he said. "U.S. Steel has laid
> off thousands of workers and told 9,000 more they may be next. These
> bosses want the workers to take more concessions to try and protect
> their profits."
>
> "I'm proud to support the campaign," Guerrero said. "As workers we need
> to make our own power. It is time to fight for real change, and to do
> that we need a revolution in our consciousness.
>
> "I am proud that I am one of those invited to come to Washington, D.C.,
> and join the celebration at the reopening of the Cuban Embassy there
> after decades," she said. "This is a big victory and the Cuban
> Revolution is an example for all of us."
>
> Independence for Puerto Rico
> Sunday morning, Pastor José Díaz invited Hart to the Christ and St.
> Ambrose Episcopal Church in Philadelphia's Puerto Rican community. Hart
> and other SWP members had worked with Díaz to build the May 30
> demonstration demanding freedom for Puerto Rican independence fighter
> Oscar López, who has been imprisoned in the U.S. for more than 34 years.
> "The worldwide crisis of capitalism is responsible for what is happening
> to workers here, in Greece and in your home of Puerto Rico," Hart said.
> "U.S. bondholders bought up Puerto Rico's bonds, seeking to make a
> killing. Now, when the colonial government says the spiraling debt is
> unpayable, they try to make workers on the island bear the burden. We
> oppose this assault on the working class and support the fight for
> independence for Puerto Rico.
>
> "We join you in campaigning for freedom for Oscar López," he said.
> "Oscar, as many of you know, is a supporter of the Cuban Revolution. We
> join with him in pointing to the Cuban people's unbroken record of
> solidarity with workers and farmers throughout the world — from Puerto
> Rico to Angola and elsewhere."
>
> Forty members of the congregation signed petitions when church members
> passed them up and down the rows.
>
> Tuesday morning campaign supporters Chris Hoeppner and Mitchel Rosenberg
> went with Staggs to the Port Richmond neighborhood.
>
> "Chris and I went two blocks in a little over two hours, knocking on
> doors, and got 58 signatures," Rosenberg, an oil refinery worker, said.
> "I talked to a woman named Debbie who is unemployed. She signed and got
> her daughter to sign.
>
> "She said she really liked what the campaign had to say about the
> Confederate battle flag coming down, about how it brings workers
> together," he said. "She took my phone number to get a subscription to
> the Militant when she gets her check."
>
>
> Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home
>
>
>
>
Re: [blind-democracy] Re: Why Doesn't Bernie Sanders Run on a Truly Socialist Platform?
Miriam,
FDR had it right. Jobs create prosperity. When the private sector is
busy tucking its profits in off-shore banks or buying up its own stock
and failing in its role as a partner in the well being of our nation,
then the nation needs to step in. It makes plain and simple sense
that a nation that wants to survive will make certain that its
citizens, all those possible, will be participating in the benefits
that nation claims to offer.
FDR set in motion several Works Projects. My own dad spent time
working for the WPA. It was felt that there was value in putting
money in the pockets of unemployed workers as well as using that labor
to improve the nations infrastructure. The Arboretum in Seattle still
stands as a tribute to those hard times in the 1930's.
It will take leadership by the president if such a transition is made.
Private corporations are not in the business of creating jobs. The
work they so proudly claim to create is always an answer to their
desire to grab off more profits. Profits they do not intend to share.
A large pool of unemployed is the price we working folks pay for the
privilege of living in the Corporate Empire.
And to soothe our Souls, we buy the pipe dream that we just might rise
to become the next Donald Trump. If I had a gun I'd shoot myself
first.
So we are fed smoke and mirrors and succumb to Greed. And most of the
unemployed will end up sleeping in their burned out cars, if they are
so lucky. The corporate capitalists do not care for the nation. If
they did, they would eagerly plow their profits back into creating a
stronger base. Full employment, free education. Free, fully staffed
child care centers. Full participation in local and national
government.
But all of those ideas are alien to the Empire's goal of world dominance.
So, that is a not so short answer to the Plank of Government as
Employer of Last Resort. Government as Employer of Last Resort is a
good beginning, as long as it is followed by the other pieces I've
mentioned.
Could Bernie Sanders pull it off? I think FDR had some advantages
over Bernie Sanders, but Sanders seems as clever as Roosevelt, and he
has the time to build the structure he will need to pressure
corporations to bend enough. If the corporations feel threatened
enough, as they were in the 30's, fearing an attack on their power
position, they will give up just enough to ensure they remain on top.
Back in those troubled times, corporations understood that their well
being depended upon drastic measures. Even though they trashed
Roosevelt, they bent, gave up some ground. FDR literally saved
Capitalism. And in return they bashed Eleanor long past her death.
The Bastards! Of course if Bernie Sanders were elected and if he
could create some wiggle room, and if congress went along with being
the employer of last resort, it would only be a temporary fix. As
soon as jobs were created and money began to
flow back into the nations shops and banks, Self Serving Corporate
Leaders would begin plotting ways of creaming off the "good times".
But as a member of a Working Class that is temporarily short of power,
I would go for such a Plank just because it would get folks back to
work and out of the old cars and into warm houses and apartments and
dressing their children in warm clothes and shoes and safer streets
and new schools and free education. For a while we would bask in the
Sun, happy and busy. But would we understand that the war still
raged?
Go Sea Hawks!
Carl Jarvis
On 7/25/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> Carl,
>
> You're writing in response to the title of the article. However, the
> article
> presents a very specific plank that the writer suggests should be a part of
> Bernie's platform. I'd be interested to know your response to what the
> writer is suggesting.
>
> Miriam
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
> [mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
> Sent: Saturday, July 25, 2015 12:56 AM
> To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
> Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Why Doesn't Bernie Sanders Run on a Truly
> Socialist Platform?
>
> Remember, Bernie is running for the Democratic Nomination, not the
> Socialist. All his Platform needs to do is to be just Left of Clinton's.
> Why alienate some voters when he doesn't need to? Obama ran just to the
> Left of Center...sort of, and gained votes from people who might not have
> given him the nod if they thought he was too radical. And some of us voted
> for him hoping that he would move Left once in the office. It worked...for
> Obama. And of course what we got was pretty much what we saw.
> But Bernie is not trying to build a strong Workers or Socialists Party at
> this point in time. To seriously have a chance, he must win the nomination
> of the existing Democratic Party. And I believe Bernie Sanders is truly in
> this race to win. He is using solid, tried and true tactics. My hope at
> this time is that if Sanders wins we will at least get a president who
> stands on his Platform. It will not bring us a new dawning. It will
> probably do little to curtail our mad behavior in the Middle East. But it
> will put a focus on the needs of the American People. It will create jobs
> and repair our roads, bridges, schools and boost our sagging cost of living
> wage.
> But Bernie Sanders Platform is still grounded in the Laws of the Empire.
> Our slums and ghettos will not go away. Violence and murder will not end.
> Prisons will continue being mostly Black and Brown.
> And even though they will whine and pout like the Ruling Class of FDR's
> day,
> the Billionaires will continue to be the Privileged Ones.
> And they will go about the business of mounting efforts to take back what
> few gains Sanders makes.
> The only true reform is the replacement of the Corporate Capitalist System
> with one that is more broadly based in the Masses. Bernie Sanders does not
> propose to go that far.
>
> Carl Jarvis
>
>
> On 7/24/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>>
>> Myerson writes: "Yet, despite his inescapable affiliation with the
>> s-word - long considered a politically fatal liability - and his
>> reported contempt for the masses' sensibilities, Sanders continues to
>> draw enormous crowds, outpace Hillary Clinton in attracting small
>> donations and generate great enthusiasm, even among groups
>> conventional wisdom doggedly insists will refuse to embrace his
> candidacy."
>>
>> The proposals at the core of Bernie Sanders' platform are standard
>> fare for progressive Democrats. (photo: Derek Davis/Portland Press
>> Herald/Getty)
>>
>>
>> Why Doesn't Bernie Sanders Run on a Truly Socialist Platform?
>> By Jesse A. Myerson, Rolling Stone
>> 24 July 15
>>
>> Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist, but his platform is
>> hardly radical
>>
>> Bernie Sanders is nominally a socialist, or at least he sorta-kinda
>> calls himself one. "Do they think I'm afraid of the word?" he mused in
>> a recent interview with The Nation. "I'm not afraid of the word." When
>> The Washington Post gave him the opportunity to disavow the epithet
>> during his 2006 Senate run, Sanders stood firm: "I wouldn't deny it,"
>> he said. "Not for one second.
>> I'm a democratic socialist."
>> His affiliation has not escaped notice of Hillary Clinton's defenders.
> Sen.
>> Claire McCaskill recently grumbled, "I think that the media is giving
>> Bernie a pass right now. I very rarely read in any coverage of Bernie
>> that he's a socialist."
>> In apparent violation of this supposed cover-up, The Daily Beast's Ana
>> Marie Cox has labeled Sanders an "extremist" "caricature" who amounts
>> to "the Left's Trump." The Week's Damon Linker was also tempted by the
>> Sanders-Trump comparison, calling them "unelectable radicals," and
>> noting that Sanders "shows little interest in tailoring his message to
>> woo the masses."
>> Yet, despite his inescapable affiliation with the s-word – long
>> considered a politically fatal liability – and his reported contempt
>> for the masses'
>> sensibilities, Sanders continues to draw enormous crowds, outpace
>> Hillary Clinton in attracting small donations and generate great
>> enthusiasm, even among groups conventional wisdom doggedly insists
>> will refuse to embrace his candidacy. That these throngs – energized
>> by Sanders' egalitarian economic advocacy, support for worker
>> empowerment and hostility to what he calls "the billionaire class" –
>> are not noticeably put off by the description of these qualities as
>> socialist, as opposed to merely "progressive," raises the
>> question: Why doesn't Sanders avail himself of this political latitude
>> and run on a more socialistic policy program?
>> For now, the proposals at the core of his platform – for the most part
>> very good – are standard fare for progressive Democrats. Of the "12
>> Steps Forward" in his "Agenda for America," none diverge from the
>> policies advocated by Sanders' fellow members of the Congressional
>> Progressive Caucus. In fact, with the exception of "Creating Worker
>> Co-ops," "Trade Policies that Benefit American Workers" and "Health
>> Care as a Right for All," none of the items would seem out of place in
>> a stump speech or State of the Union address by President Obama.
>> For now, this sort of platform constitutes the leftmost bounds of
>> mainstream policy discourse, but there is plenty of room to stretch
>> leftward through advocacy of "non-reformist reforms" – those that, in
>> the words of French philosopher André Gorz, "advance toward a radical
>> transformation of society," producing a "modification of the relations
>> of power" and thus "serv[ing] to weaken capitalism and to shake its
>> joints."
>> On the other hand, an increase in the minimum wage – to use one
>> example from Sanders' platform – yields a host of advantages for
>> working people, and plainly excites the opposition of the capitalist
>> class, but it neither socializes ownership claims on capital, nor
>> fundamentally changes the power relations between workers and owners,
>> nor incites a process that yields equality as reliably as capitalism
>> yields inequality. Raising the minimum wage is a defense against
>> capitalists' perpetual imperative to intensify exploitation of labor
>> by lowering wages, not an offense against the structures by which
>> capitalists are able to do this.
>> Running on a platform with a non-reformist reform at its core would
>> serve Sanders' pro-equality political project, even if he should lose
>> to Clinton and her mountains of corporate cash. Once one of these
>> off-the-agenda items is named, articulated and argued for – once
>> people are familiarized with a program's contours, rationale and
>> merits – it is much easier to mobilize support for an idea. The Nader
>> campaigns left behind them nothing so much as contempt for third party
>> "spoilers," the Kucinich campaigns not even that.
>> People for Bernie (whose open letter encouraging Sanders to run I
>> signed) may hope for an ongoing political organization, such as
>> emerged from the insurgent candidacy of Sanders' fellow Vermonter, former
> Gov. Howard Dean.
>> But it is fair to ask more. The more attention and enthusiasm his
>> candidacy garners, the more favorable the terrain will be for Sanders
>> to pry open the boundaries of policy consideration. This would provide
>> a boost to the effort to agitate for a departure from capitalism,
>> after what he calls his "revolution" concludes.
>> Of the array of non-reformist reforms Sanders could adopt as key
>> planks, the one that probably makes the most sense is a job guarantee,
>> whose historical advocates have ranged from Thomas Paine to Martin
>> Luther King. Under this program, the federal government would act as
>> the "employer of last resort"; it could hire the unemployed for its
>> own national projects, funnel money to states and municipalities or
>> let communities design their own projects and apply for funding.
>> Guaranteeing public sector employment to anyone who wants to sign up
>> would accomplish a lot of the goals Sanders trumpets. It would reduce
>> inequality by eliminating unemployment and its resultant poverty. It
>> would magnify worker power by providing an exit from the job market,
>> thereby setting minimum standards for all sorts for private sector
>> employment. It would eliminate employment discrimination, long a
>> central pillar of structural racism, erasing the chief cause of
>> recidivism. It would allow communities that currently rely on prisons
>> to close them without toppling the local economy, thereby enabling the
>> type of mass decarceration Sanders would do well to advocate
>> forcefully, the better to make up for his recent blunder at Netroots
>> Nation. It would promote ecological sustainability by making full
>> employment independent of the resource extraction sector, by paying
>> for low-emissions employment like elder- and childcare and by
>> providing resources for pollution-reducing infrastructure renovation.
>> It would guarantee dignified pay and conditions for so-called
>> "unskilled" labor typically performed by women: domestic work,
>> childcare and nursing. It would end reliance on increasingly expensive
>> higher education as a prerequisite for employment. It would
>> practically establish a public option for health care, since those
>> availing themselves of the program would receive normal benefits for a
>> federal employee.
>> All these virtues, and the program would be fiscally sound on its own.
>> It would grow the deficit permanently – an outcome Sanders has
>> repeatedly, to his disgrace, maintained is undesirable – but never so
>> far that inflation, the sole danger of too big a deficit, ensues: When
>> the business cycle is down, the program would grow to bring us up to
>> capacity, and when a boom threatens to inflate the economy, the program
> would automatically shrink.
>> As
>> long as the job guarantee wages are not competitive with the private
>> sector, they should serve to anchor the general price level.
>> Nor is this some bizarre, far-fetched idea that would hike Sanders'
>> already uncomfortably high degree of Seeming Kooky: even without
>> inclusion on the agenda of any mainstream political actors, a job
>> guarantee already polls at
>> 47 percent.
>> Ironically, no one touts the merits of guaranteed public employment
>> more vigorously than modern monetary theorists like Stephanie Kelton,
>> the chief economist for the Democratic staff on the Sanders-chaired
>> Senate Budget Committee. I took his hiring Kelton as a signal that
>> Sanders was preparing to run for president on a job guarantee. So far,
>> he has given no such indication, but there remain many excruciating
>> months until the primaries; Sanders has plenty of time to earn more
>> fully the label he says he's not afraid of.
>> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
>> valid.
>>
>> The proposals at the core of Bernie Sanders' platform are standard
>> fare for progressive Democrats. (photo: Derek Davis/Portland Press
>> Herald/Getty)
>> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-doesnt-bernie-sanders-ru
>> n-on-a
>> -truly-socialist-platform-20150722 -
>> ixzz3gp85DSF1http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-doesnt-bern
>> ie-san
>> ders-run-on-a-truly-socialist-platform-20150722 - ixzz3gp85DSF1 Why
>> Doesn't Bernie Sanders Run on a Truly Socialist Platform?
>> By Jesse A. Myerson, Rolling Stone
>> 24 July 15
>> Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist, but his platform is
>> hardly radical ernie Sanders is nominally a socialist, or at least he
>> sorta-kinda calls himself one. "Do they think I'm afraid of the word?"
>> he mused in a recent interview with The Nation. "I'm not afraid of the
>> word." When The Washington Post gave him the opportunity to disavow
>> the epithet during his 2006 Senate run, Sanders stood firm: "I
>> wouldn't deny it," he said. "Not for one second.
>> I'm a democratic socialist."
>> His affiliation has not escaped notice of Hillary Clinton's defenders.
> Sen.
>> Claire McCaskill recently grumbled, "I think that the media is giving
>> Bernie a pass right now. I very rarely read in any coverage of Bernie
>> that he's a socialist."
>> In apparent violation of this supposed cover-up, The Daily Beast's Ana
>> Marie Cox has labeled Sanders an "extremist" "caricature" who amounts
>> to "the Left's Trump." The Week's Damon Linker was also tempted by the
>> Sanders-Trump comparison, calling them "unelectable radicals," and
>> noting that Sanders "shows little interest in tailoring his message to
>> woo the masses."
>> Yet, despite his inescapable affiliation with the s-word – long
>> considered a politically fatal liability – and his reported contempt
>> for the masses'
>> sensibilities, Sanders continues to draw enormous crowds, outpace
>> Hillary Clinton in attracting small donations and generate great
>> enthusiasm, even among groups conventional wisdom doggedly insists
>> will refuse to embrace his candidacy. That these throngs – energized
>> by Sanders' egalitarian economic advocacy, support for worker
>> empowerment and hostility to what he calls "the billionaire class" –
>> are not noticeably put off by the description of these qualities as
>> socialist, as opposed to merely "progressive," raises the
>> question: Why doesn't Sanders avail himself of this political latitude
>> and run on a more socialistic policy program?
>> For now, the proposals at the core of his platform – for the most part
>> very good – are standard fare for progressive Democrats. Of the "12
>> Steps Forward" in his "Agenda for America," none diverge from the
>> policies advocated by Sanders' fellow members of the Congressional
>> Progressive Caucus. In fact, with the exception of "Creating Worker
>> Co-ops," "Trade Policies that Benefit American Workers" and "Health
>> Care as a Right for All," none of the items would seem out of place in
>> a stump speech or State of the Union address by President Obama.
>> For now, this sort of platform constitutes the leftmost bounds of
>> mainstream policy discourse, but there is plenty of room to stretch
>> leftward through advocacy of "non-reformist reforms" – those that, in
>> the words of French philosopher André Gorz, "advance toward a radical
>> transformation of society," producing a "modification of the relations
>> of power" and thus "serv[ing] to weaken capitalism and to shake its
>> joints."
>> On the other hand, an increase in the minimum wage – to use one
>> example from Sanders' platform – yields a host of advantages for
>> working people, and plainly excites the opposition of the capitalist
>> class, but it neither socializes ownership claims on capital, nor
>> fundamentally changes the power relations between workers and owners,
>> nor incites a process that yields equality as reliably as capitalism
>> yields inequality. Raising the minimum wage is a defense against
>> capitalists' perpetual imperative to intensify exploitation of labor
>> by lowering wages, not an offense against the structures by which
>> capitalists are able to do this.
>> Running on a platform with a non-reformist reform at its core would
>> serve Sanders' pro-equality political project, even if he should lose
>> to Clinton and her mountains of corporate cash. Once one of these
>> off-the-agenda items is named, articulated and argued for – once
>> people are familiarized with a program's contours, rationale and
>> merits – it is much easier to mobilize support for an idea. The Nader
>> campaigns left behind them nothing so much as contempt for third party
>> "spoilers," the Kucinich campaigns not even that.
>> People for Bernie (whose open letter encouraging Sanders to run I
>> signed) may hope for an ongoing political organization, such as
>> emerged from the insurgent candidacy of Sanders' fellow Vermonter, former
> Gov. Howard Dean.
>> But it is fair to ask more. The more attention and enthusiasm his
>> candidacy garners, the more favorable the terrain will be for Sanders
>> to pry open the boundaries of policy consideration. This would provide
>> a boost to the effort to agitate for a departure from capitalism,
>> after what he calls his "revolution" concludes.
>> Of the array of non-reformist reforms Sanders could adopt as key
>> planks, the one that probably makes the most sense is a job guarantee,
>> whose historical advocates have ranged from Thomas Paine to Martin
>> Luther King. Under this program, the federal government would act as
>> the "employer of last resort"; it could hire the unemployed for its
>> own national projects, funnel money to states and municipalities or
>> let communities design their own projects and apply for funding.
>> Guaranteeing public sector employment to anyone who wants to sign up
>> would accomplish a lot of the goals Sanders trumpets. It would reduce
>> inequality by eliminating unemployment and its resultant poverty. It
>> would magnify worker power by providing an exit from the job market,
>> thereby setting minimum standards for all sorts for private sector
>> employment. It would eliminate employment discrimination, long a
>> central pillar of structural racism, erasing the chief cause of
>> recidivism. It would allow communities that currently rely on prisons
>> to close them without toppling the local economy, thereby enabling the
>> type of mass decarceration Sanders would do well to advocate
>> forcefully, the better to make up for his recent blunder at Netroots
>> Nation. It would promote ecological sustainability by making full
>> employment independent of the resource extraction sector, by paying
>> for low-emissions employment like elder- and childcare and by
>> providing resources for pollution-reducing infrastructure renovation.
>> It would guarantee dignified pay and conditions for so-called
>> "unskilled" labor typically performed by women: domestic work,
>> childcare and nursing. It would end reliance on increasingly expensive
>> higher education as a prerequisite for employment. It would
>> practically establish a public option for health care, since those
>> availing themselves of the program would receive normal benefits for a
>> federal employee.
>> All these virtues, and the program would be fiscally sound on its own.
>> It would grow the deficit permanently – an outcome Sanders has
>> repeatedly, to his disgrace, maintained is undesirable – but never so
>> far that inflation, the sole danger of too big a deficit, ensues: When
>> the business cycle is down, the program would grow to bring us up to
>> capacity, and when a boom threatens to inflate the economy, the program
> would automatically shrink.
>> As
>> long as the job guarantee wages are not competitive with the private
>> sector, they should serve to anchor the general price level.
>> Nor is this some bizarre, far-fetched idea that would hike Sanders'
>> already uncomfortably high degree of Seeming Kooky: even without
>> inclusion on the agenda of any mainstream political actors, a job
>> guarantee already polls at
>> 47 percent.
>> Ironically, no one touts the merits of guaranteed public employment
>> more vigorously than modern monetary theorists like Stephanie Kelton,
>> the chief economist for the Democratic staff on the Sanders-chaired
>> Senate Budget Committee. I took his hiring Kelton as a signal that
>> Sanders was preparing to run for president on a job guarantee. So far,
>> he has given no such indication, but there remain many excruciating
>> months until the primaries; Sanders has plenty of time to earn more
>> fully the label he says he's not afraid of.
>> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
>> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
FDR had it right. Jobs create prosperity. When the private sector is
busy tucking its profits in off-shore banks or buying up its own stock
and failing in its role as a partner in the well being of our nation,
then the nation needs to step in. It makes plain and simple sense
that a nation that wants to survive will make certain that its
citizens, all those possible, will be participating in the benefits
that nation claims to offer.
FDR set in motion several Works Projects. My own dad spent time
working for the WPA. It was felt that there was value in putting
money in the pockets of unemployed workers as well as using that labor
to improve the nations infrastructure. The Arboretum in Seattle still
stands as a tribute to those hard times in the 1930's.
It will take leadership by the president if such a transition is made.
Private corporations are not in the business of creating jobs. The
work they so proudly claim to create is always an answer to their
desire to grab off more profits. Profits they do not intend to share.
A large pool of unemployed is the price we working folks pay for the
privilege of living in the Corporate Empire.
And to soothe our Souls, we buy the pipe dream that we just might rise
to become the next Donald Trump. If I had a gun I'd shoot myself
first.
So we are fed smoke and mirrors and succumb to Greed. And most of the
unemployed will end up sleeping in their burned out cars, if they are
so lucky. The corporate capitalists do not care for the nation. If
they did, they would eagerly plow their profits back into creating a
stronger base. Full employment, free education. Free, fully staffed
child care centers. Full participation in local and national
government.
But all of those ideas are alien to the Empire's goal of world dominance.
So, that is a not so short answer to the Plank of Government as
Employer of Last Resort. Government as Employer of Last Resort is a
good beginning, as long as it is followed by the other pieces I've
mentioned.
Could Bernie Sanders pull it off? I think FDR had some advantages
over Bernie Sanders, but Sanders seems as clever as Roosevelt, and he
has the time to build the structure he will need to pressure
corporations to bend enough. If the corporations feel threatened
enough, as they were in the 30's, fearing an attack on their power
position, they will give up just enough to ensure they remain on top.
Back in those troubled times, corporations understood that their well
being depended upon drastic measures. Even though they trashed
Roosevelt, they bent, gave up some ground. FDR literally saved
Capitalism. And in return they bashed Eleanor long past her death.
The Bastards! Of course if Bernie Sanders were elected and if he
could create some wiggle room, and if congress went along with being
the employer of last resort, it would only be a temporary fix. As
soon as jobs were created and money began to
flow back into the nations shops and banks, Self Serving Corporate
Leaders would begin plotting ways of creaming off the "good times".
But as a member of a Working Class that is temporarily short of power,
I would go for such a Plank just because it would get folks back to
work and out of the old cars and into warm houses and apartments and
dressing their children in warm clothes and shoes and safer streets
and new schools and free education. For a while we would bask in the
Sun, happy and busy. But would we understand that the war still
raged?
Go Sea Hawks!
Carl Jarvis
On 7/25/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> Carl,
>
> You're writing in response to the title of the article. However, the
> article
> presents a very specific plank that the writer suggests should be a part of
> Bernie's platform. I'd be interested to know your response to what the
> writer is suggesting.
>
> Miriam
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org
> [mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
> Sent: Saturday, July 25, 2015 12:56 AM
> To: blind-democracy@freelists.org
> Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Why Doesn't Bernie Sanders Run on a Truly
> Socialist Platform?
>
> Remember, Bernie is running for the Democratic Nomination, not the
> Socialist. All his Platform needs to do is to be just Left of Clinton's.
> Why alienate some voters when he doesn't need to? Obama ran just to the
> Left of Center...sort of, and gained votes from people who might not have
> given him the nod if they thought he was too radical. And some of us voted
> for him hoping that he would move Left once in the office. It worked...for
> Obama. And of course what we got was pretty much what we saw.
> But Bernie is not trying to build a strong Workers or Socialists Party at
> this point in time. To seriously have a chance, he must win the nomination
> of the existing Democratic Party. And I believe Bernie Sanders is truly in
> this race to win. He is using solid, tried and true tactics. My hope at
> this time is that if Sanders wins we will at least get a president who
> stands on his Platform. It will not bring us a new dawning. It will
> probably do little to curtail our mad behavior in the Middle East. But it
> will put a focus on the needs of the American People. It will create jobs
> and repair our roads, bridges, schools and boost our sagging cost of living
> wage.
> But Bernie Sanders Platform is still grounded in the Laws of the Empire.
> Our slums and ghettos will not go away. Violence and murder will not end.
> Prisons will continue being mostly Black and Brown.
> And even though they will whine and pout like the Ruling Class of FDR's
> day,
> the Billionaires will continue to be the Privileged Ones.
> And they will go about the business of mounting efforts to take back what
> few gains Sanders makes.
> The only true reform is the replacement of the Corporate Capitalist System
> with one that is more broadly based in the Masses. Bernie Sanders does not
> propose to go that far.
>
> Carl Jarvis
>
>
> On 7/24/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>>
>> Myerson writes: "Yet, despite his inescapable affiliation with the
>> s-word - long considered a politically fatal liability - and his
>> reported contempt for the masses' sensibilities, Sanders continues to
>> draw enormous crowds, outpace Hillary Clinton in attracting small
>> donations and generate great enthusiasm, even among groups
>> conventional wisdom doggedly insists will refuse to embrace his
> candidacy."
>>
>> The proposals at the core of Bernie Sanders' platform are standard
>> fare for progressive Democrats. (photo: Derek Davis/Portland Press
>> Herald/Getty)
>>
>>
>> Why Doesn't Bernie Sanders Run on a Truly Socialist Platform?
>> By Jesse A. Myerson, Rolling Stone
>> 24 July 15
>>
>> Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist, but his platform is
>> hardly radical
>>
>> Bernie Sanders is nominally a socialist, or at least he sorta-kinda
>> calls himself one. "Do they think I'm afraid of the word?" he mused in
>> a recent interview with The Nation. "I'm not afraid of the word." When
>> The Washington Post gave him the opportunity to disavow the epithet
>> during his 2006 Senate run, Sanders stood firm: "I wouldn't deny it,"
>> he said. "Not for one second.
>> I'm a democratic socialist."
>> His affiliation has not escaped notice of Hillary Clinton's defenders.
> Sen.
>> Claire McCaskill recently grumbled, "I think that the media is giving
>> Bernie a pass right now. I very rarely read in any coverage of Bernie
>> that he's a socialist."
>> In apparent violation of this supposed cover-up, The Daily Beast's Ana
>> Marie Cox has labeled Sanders an "extremist" "caricature" who amounts
>> to "the Left's Trump." The Week's Damon Linker was also tempted by the
>> Sanders-Trump comparison, calling them "unelectable radicals," and
>> noting that Sanders "shows little interest in tailoring his message to
>> woo the masses."
>> Yet, despite his inescapable affiliation with the s-word – long
>> considered a politically fatal liability – and his reported contempt
>> for the masses'
>> sensibilities, Sanders continues to draw enormous crowds, outpace
>> Hillary Clinton in attracting small donations and generate great
>> enthusiasm, even among groups conventional wisdom doggedly insists
>> will refuse to embrace his candidacy. That these throngs – energized
>> by Sanders' egalitarian economic advocacy, support for worker
>> empowerment and hostility to what he calls "the billionaire class" –
>> are not noticeably put off by the description of these qualities as
>> socialist, as opposed to merely "progressive," raises the
>> question: Why doesn't Sanders avail himself of this political latitude
>> and run on a more socialistic policy program?
>> For now, the proposals at the core of his platform – for the most part
>> very good – are standard fare for progressive Democrats. Of the "12
>> Steps Forward" in his "Agenda for America," none diverge from the
>> policies advocated by Sanders' fellow members of the Congressional
>> Progressive Caucus. In fact, with the exception of "Creating Worker
>> Co-ops," "Trade Policies that Benefit American Workers" and "Health
>> Care as a Right for All," none of the items would seem out of place in
>> a stump speech or State of the Union address by President Obama.
>> For now, this sort of platform constitutes the leftmost bounds of
>> mainstream policy discourse, but there is plenty of room to stretch
>> leftward through advocacy of "non-reformist reforms" – those that, in
>> the words of French philosopher André Gorz, "advance toward a radical
>> transformation of society," producing a "modification of the relations
>> of power" and thus "serv[ing] to weaken capitalism and to shake its
>> joints."
>> On the other hand, an increase in the minimum wage – to use one
>> example from Sanders' platform – yields a host of advantages for
>> working people, and plainly excites the opposition of the capitalist
>> class, but it neither socializes ownership claims on capital, nor
>> fundamentally changes the power relations between workers and owners,
>> nor incites a process that yields equality as reliably as capitalism
>> yields inequality. Raising the minimum wage is a defense against
>> capitalists' perpetual imperative to intensify exploitation of labor
>> by lowering wages, not an offense against the structures by which
>> capitalists are able to do this.
>> Running on a platform with a non-reformist reform at its core would
>> serve Sanders' pro-equality political project, even if he should lose
>> to Clinton and her mountains of corporate cash. Once one of these
>> off-the-agenda items is named, articulated and argued for – once
>> people are familiarized with a program's contours, rationale and
>> merits – it is much easier to mobilize support for an idea. The Nader
>> campaigns left behind them nothing so much as contempt for third party
>> "spoilers," the Kucinich campaigns not even that.
>> People for Bernie (whose open letter encouraging Sanders to run I
>> signed) may hope for an ongoing political organization, such as
>> emerged from the insurgent candidacy of Sanders' fellow Vermonter, former
> Gov. Howard Dean.
>> But it is fair to ask more. The more attention and enthusiasm his
>> candidacy garners, the more favorable the terrain will be for Sanders
>> to pry open the boundaries of policy consideration. This would provide
>> a boost to the effort to agitate for a departure from capitalism,
>> after what he calls his "revolution" concludes.
>> Of the array of non-reformist reforms Sanders could adopt as key
>> planks, the one that probably makes the most sense is a job guarantee,
>> whose historical advocates have ranged from Thomas Paine to Martin
>> Luther King. Under this program, the federal government would act as
>> the "employer of last resort"; it could hire the unemployed for its
>> own national projects, funnel money to states and municipalities or
>> let communities design their own projects and apply for funding.
>> Guaranteeing public sector employment to anyone who wants to sign up
>> would accomplish a lot of the goals Sanders trumpets. It would reduce
>> inequality by eliminating unemployment and its resultant poverty. It
>> would magnify worker power by providing an exit from the job market,
>> thereby setting minimum standards for all sorts for private sector
>> employment. It would eliminate employment discrimination, long a
>> central pillar of structural racism, erasing the chief cause of
>> recidivism. It would allow communities that currently rely on prisons
>> to close them without toppling the local economy, thereby enabling the
>> type of mass decarceration Sanders would do well to advocate
>> forcefully, the better to make up for his recent blunder at Netroots
>> Nation. It would promote ecological sustainability by making full
>> employment independent of the resource extraction sector, by paying
>> for low-emissions employment like elder- and childcare and by
>> providing resources for pollution-reducing infrastructure renovation.
>> It would guarantee dignified pay and conditions for so-called
>> "unskilled" labor typically performed by women: domestic work,
>> childcare and nursing. It would end reliance on increasingly expensive
>> higher education as a prerequisite for employment. It would
>> practically establish a public option for health care, since those
>> availing themselves of the program would receive normal benefits for a
>> federal employee.
>> All these virtues, and the program would be fiscally sound on its own.
>> It would grow the deficit permanently – an outcome Sanders has
>> repeatedly, to his disgrace, maintained is undesirable – but never so
>> far that inflation, the sole danger of too big a deficit, ensues: When
>> the business cycle is down, the program would grow to bring us up to
>> capacity, and when a boom threatens to inflate the economy, the program
> would automatically shrink.
>> As
>> long as the job guarantee wages are not competitive with the private
>> sector, they should serve to anchor the general price level.
>> Nor is this some bizarre, far-fetched idea that would hike Sanders'
>> already uncomfortably high degree of Seeming Kooky: even without
>> inclusion on the agenda of any mainstream political actors, a job
>> guarantee already polls at
>> 47 percent.
>> Ironically, no one touts the merits of guaranteed public employment
>> more vigorously than modern monetary theorists like Stephanie Kelton,
>> the chief economist for the Democratic staff on the Sanders-chaired
>> Senate Budget Committee. I took his hiring Kelton as a signal that
>> Sanders was preparing to run for president on a job guarantee. So far,
>> he has given no such indication, but there remain many excruciating
>> months until the primaries; Sanders has plenty of time to earn more
>> fully the label he says he's not afraid of.
>> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
>> valid.
>>
>> The proposals at the core of Bernie Sanders' platform are standard
>> fare for progressive Democrats. (photo: Derek Davis/Portland Press
>> Herald/Getty)
>> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-doesnt-bernie-sanders-ru
>> n-on-a
>> -truly-socialist-platform-20150722 -
>> ixzz3gp85DSF1http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-doesnt-bern
>> ie-san
>> ders-run-on-a-truly-socialist-platform-20150722 - ixzz3gp85DSF1 Why
>> Doesn't Bernie Sanders Run on a Truly Socialist Platform?
>> By Jesse A. Myerson, Rolling Stone
>> 24 July 15
>> Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist, but his platform is
>> hardly radical ernie Sanders is nominally a socialist, or at least he
>> sorta-kinda calls himself one. "Do they think I'm afraid of the word?"
>> he mused in a recent interview with The Nation. "I'm not afraid of the
>> word." When The Washington Post gave him the opportunity to disavow
>> the epithet during his 2006 Senate run, Sanders stood firm: "I
>> wouldn't deny it," he said. "Not for one second.
>> I'm a democratic socialist."
>> His affiliation has not escaped notice of Hillary Clinton's defenders.
> Sen.
>> Claire McCaskill recently grumbled, "I think that the media is giving
>> Bernie a pass right now. I very rarely read in any coverage of Bernie
>> that he's a socialist."
>> In apparent violation of this supposed cover-up, The Daily Beast's Ana
>> Marie Cox has labeled Sanders an "extremist" "caricature" who amounts
>> to "the Left's Trump." The Week's Damon Linker was also tempted by the
>> Sanders-Trump comparison, calling them "unelectable radicals," and
>> noting that Sanders "shows little interest in tailoring his message to
>> woo the masses."
>> Yet, despite his inescapable affiliation with the s-word – long
>> considered a politically fatal liability – and his reported contempt
>> for the masses'
>> sensibilities, Sanders continues to draw enormous crowds, outpace
>> Hillary Clinton in attracting small donations and generate great
>> enthusiasm, even among groups conventional wisdom doggedly insists
>> will refuse to embrace his candidacy. That these throngs – energized
>> by Sanders' egalitarian economic advocacy, support for worker
>> empowerment and hostility to what he calls "the billionaire class" –
>> are not noticeably put off by the description of these qualities as
>> socialist, as opposed to merely "progressive," raises the
>> question: Why doesn't Sanders avail himself of this political latitude
>> and run on a more socialistic policy program?
>> For now, the proposals at the core of his platform – for the most part
>> very good – are standard fare for progressive Democrats. Of the "12
>> Steps Forward" in his "Agenda for America," none diverge from the
>> policies advocated by Sanders' fellow members of the Congressional
>> Progressive Caucus. In fact, with the exception of "Creating Worker
>> Co-ops," "Trade Policies that Benefit American Workers" and "Health
>> Care as a Right for All," none of the items would seem out of place in
>> a stump speech or State of the Union address by President Obama.
>> For now, this sort of platform constitutes the leftmost bounds of
>> mainstream policy discourse, but there is plenty of room to stretch
>> leftward through advocacy of "non-reformist reforms" – those that, in
>> the words of French philosopher André Gorz, "advance toward a radical
>> transformation of society," producing a "modification of the relations
>> of power" and thus "serv[ing] to weaken capitalism and to shake its
>> joints."
>> On the other hand, an increase in the minimum wage – to use one
>> example from Sanders' platform – yields a host of advantages for
>> working people, and plainly excites the opposition of the capitalist
>> class, but it neither socializes ownership claims on capital, nor
>> fundamentally changes the power relations between workers and owners,
>> nor incites a process that yields equality as reliably as capitalism
>> yields inequality. Raising the minimum wage is a defense against
>> capitalists' perpetual imperative to intensify exploitation of labor
>> by lowering wages, not an offense against the structures by which
>> capitalists are able to do this.
>> Running on a platform with a non-reformist reform at its core would
>> serve Sanders' pro-equality political project, even if he should lose
>> to Clinton and her mountains of corporate cash. Once one of these
>> off-the-agenda items is named, articulated and argued for – once
>> people are familiarized with a program's contours, rationale and
>> merits – it is much easier to mobilize support for an idea. The Nader
>> campaigns left behind them nothing so much as contempt for third party
>> "spoilers," the Kucinich campaigns not even that.
>> People for Bernie (whose open letter encouraging Sanders to run I
>> signed) may hope for an ongoing political organization, such as
>> emerged from the insurgent candidacy of Sanders' fellow Vermonter, former
> Gov. Howard Dean.
>> But it is fair to ask more. The more attention and enthusiasm his
>> candidacy garners, the more favorable the terrain will be for Sanders
>> to pry open the boundaries of policy consideration. This would provide
>> a boost to the effort to agitate for a departure from capitalism,
>> after what he calls his "revolution" concludes.
>> Of the array of non-reformist reforms Sanders could adopt as key
>> planks, the one that probably makes the most sense is a job guarantee,
>> whose historical advocates have ranged from Thomas Paine to Martin
>> Luther King. Under this program, the federal government would act as
>> the "employer of last resort"; it could hire the unemployed for its
>> own national projects, funnel money to states and municipalities or
>> let communities design their own projects and apply for funding.
>> Guaranteeing public sector employment to anyone who wants to sign up
>> would accomplish a lot of the goals Sanders trumpets. It would reduce
>> inequality by eliminating unemployment and its resultant poverty. It
>> would magnify worker power by providing an exit from the job market,
>> thereby setting minimum standards for all sorts for private sector
>> employment. It would eliminate employment discrimination, long a
>> central pillar of structural racism, erasing the chief cause of
>> recidivism. It would allow communities that currently rely on prisons
>> to close them without toppling the local economy, thereby enabling the
>> type of mass decarceration Sanders would do well to advocate
>> forcefully, the better to make up for his recent blunder at Netroots
>> Nation. It would promote ecological sustainability by making full
>> employment independent of the resource extraction sector, by paying
>> for low-emissions employment like elder- and childcare and by
>> providing resources for pollution-reducing infrastructure renovation.
>> It would guarantee dignified pay and conditions for so-called
>> "unskilled" labor typically performed by women: domestic work,
>> childcare and nursing. It would end reliance on increasingly expensive
>> higher education as a prerequisite for employment. It would
>> practically establish a public option for health care, since those
>> availing themselves of the program would receive normal benefits for a
>> federal employee.
>> All these virtues, and the program would be fiscally sound on its own.
>> It would grow the deficit permanently – an outcome Sanders has
>> repeatedly, to his disgrace, maintained is undesirable – but never so
>> far that inflation, the sole danger of too big a deficit, ensues: When
>> the business cycle is down, the program would grow to bring us up to
>> capacity, and when a boom threatens to inflate the economy, the program
> would automatically shrink.
>> As
>> long as the job guarantee wages are not competitive with the private
>> sector, they should serve to anchor the general price level.
>> Nor is this some bizarre, far-fetched idea that would hike Sanders'
>> already uncomfortably high degree of Seeming Kooky: even without
>> inclusion on the agenda of any mainstream political actors, a job
>> guarantee already polls at
>> 47 percent.
>> Ironically, no one touts the merits of guaranteed public employment
>> more vigorously than modern monetary theorists like Stephanie Kelton,
>> the chief economist for the Democratic staff on the Sanders-chaired
>> Senate Budget Committee. I took his hiring Kelton as a signal that
>> Sanders was preparing to run for president on a job guarantee. So far,
>> he has given no such indication, but there remain many excruciating
>> months until the primaries; Sanders has plenty of time to earn more
>> fully the label he says he's not afraid of.
>> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
>> http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
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