Crime Is Rampant In Cities With Republican Mayors

How does the most failed and hated president in U.S. history, who can't get beyond his mostly ignorant and brain-washed base, run for reelection? Short answer: fear and loathing plus racism, chaos and gaslighting... and domestic terrorism. Listen to this NPR report from Steve Innskeep with lifelong Republican and former Homeland Security Department assistant secretary of counterterrorism and threat preventionl Elizabeth Neumann who asserts, credibly, that the Trump regime is "creating the conditions for domestic extremism to flourish in the United States... and paving the way for even more violence." She told Innskeep that "It's his style. His style is chaos itself. And when you have chaos at the top of the federal government, that creates chaos throughout every other level of government. That means we cannot perform our security functions well. The first and primary job of a president, the first and primary job of the federal government, is to protect us."



AP reporters Steve Peoples and Zeke Miller wrote that "After struggling for much of the year to settle on a clear and concise reelection message, President Donald Trump appears to have found his 2020 rallying cry. Four years ago, it was 'Build the Wall,' a simple yet coded mantra to white America that nonwhite outsiders threatened their way of life. This week, Trump has re-centered his campaign on another three-word phrase that carries a similar racial dynamic: 'Law and Order.' For much of the summer, the Republican president flirted with the bumper-sticker slogan championed by Richard Nixon and George Wallace in 1968. But Trump sharply increased his focus on law and order after a white police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shot Jacob Blake, a Black man, multiple times last week as Blake’s three children watched, sparking protest-related violence.

And, of course, he's blaming Democrats-- particularly Democratic mayors and, by extension, Biden-- for the breakdown of his somewhat warped version or law and order. But let's put aside the kind of crime his regime is steeped in and just take his own idea of crime into account. Cities have crime-- everywhere in the world. That's hardly news. Tulsa and Oklahoma City both have violent crime rates that are very high-- 1040.83 violent crimes per million residents in Tulsa and 787.34 violent crimes per million residents in OK City, higher than violent crime rates in New York (538.90 violent crimes per million residents) and San Francisco (715.0 violent crimes per million residents). Tulsa mayor G.T. Byrum and OK City mayor David Holt are Trumpist Republicans. New York and San Francisco both have Democratic mayors. Tulsa also has an extraordinarily high property crime rate. So do Miami, Omaha and Fresno, which also have Republican mayors. Their property crime rates are significantly higher than Chicago's, Dallas', or Los Angeles', all of which have Democratic mayors.

No one in their right mind blames the high crime rates in Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Miami, Omaha and Fresno on their Republican mayors. But Trump blames crime in even "safer" cities on Democrats. That's who Trump is and how he tries manipulating voters. If the election is decided on his own record-- as a kind of referendum-- he will lose and lose big. There are very few states were his job approval numbers are higher than his disapproval numbers. And nationally, he is drowning in a toilet of disapproval. A recent poll for Politico by Morning Consult asked registered voters if they approve of disapprove. 24% said they strongly approve, 17% said they somewhat approve, 10% said they somewhat disapprove and 46% said they strongly disapprove. More important in terms of the election, among independent voters 12% said they strongly approve, 21% said they somewhat approve, 17% said they somewhat disapprove and 45% said they strongly disapprove.

Yesterday, Utah Senator Mitt Romney (R) said that Trump's "comments and tweets over the past few days, including a retweet of a 2019 video clearly intended to further inflame racial tensions, are simply jaw-dropping." And not jaw-dropping in a good way.

And, according to the NY Times with Biden vigorously, pressing his argument that Trump is failing the country with his handling of the coronavirus, and his irresponsible plans to rush into dangerous school reopening, Trump needs voters to focus on his cockamamie, manipulative version of crime in the streets rather than an actual pandemic that is impacting peoples' lives (and deaths).

Reporting for Reuters after a new Ipsos poll came out yesterday, Chris Kahn, wrote that it isn't working for Trump. "Trump’s attempt to make civil unrest a central theme of his re-election campaign," he reported, "has yet to boost his political standing, as most Americans do not see crime as a major problem confronting the nation and a majority remain sympathetic to anti-racism protests."

[T]he poll showed the majority-- 78%-- remain “very” or “somewhat” concerned about the coronavirus. Nearly 60% said Trump is at least partly responsible for the protracted school and business closures due to the virus, as well as for the high number of coronavirus cases in the United States. More than 6 million Americans have been infected with the virus, more people than in any other country.

By contrast, most Americans do not see crime as a major priority and do not think it is increasing in their communities, the poll showed.

Only about 8% of American adults listed crime as a top priority for the country, compared with 30% who said it was the economy or jobs, and 16% who said it was the healthcare system.

"Fargo" Revisited by Nancy Ohanian

And 62% of registered voters, including 62% of Democrats and 65% of Republicans, said crime was not increasing in their communities.

According to the poll, 53% of American adults said they remain sympathetic to people out protesting against racial inequality, nearly unchanged from 52% in a similar poll that ran in late July.

While support for the protesters has declined overall since the immediate aftermath of the police killing in May of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which sparked a national conversation on race, the poll showed more than half of suburban Americans and more than half of undecided registered voters are still sympathetic to them.

Trump and his Republican allies tried to re-focus the country’s attention on crime in America during their convention last week, as new confrontations erupted following the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a crucial battleground that will help decide November’s election.

Trump also has attempted to stoke fears, especially among suburban white voters, about crime-ridden cities and falsely asserted that Biden would “defund the police.” Biden has rejected that position.

“No one will be safe in Biden’s America,” Trump said last week at the Republican national convention.

Biden has pushed back, accusing Trump of stirring up racist fears in the U.S. in hopes of reviving his campaign.

“The simple truth is Donald Trump failed to protect America. So now he’s trying to scare America,” Biden said in Pittsburgh this week.

It's All About The Racism... And Fear

A new poll for ABC News by Ipsos, isn't indicating that the conventions changed anyone's mind about Trump or Biden. Ipsos concluded that among all all Americans who watched at least some of the GOP convention-- about half of the voters-- responses to the RNC are more negative than the DNC. "Slightly more than one in three Americans (37%) approve of what the Republicans said and did at their convention, compared to 59% who disapprove. After the DNC, 53% approved of the Democrats’ message... Biden’s and Trump’s standings, along with their running mates, remains unchanged from after the DNC. Currently, 31% of Americans feel favorable toward Donald Trump, unchanged from last week (32%) and similar to his standing before both conventions (35%). The same is true for Joe Biden: 46% feel favorable, virtually the same as last week (45%). However, more Americans feel positive toward Biden than negative, an improvement from earlier in August. Just over a third of Americans (35%) approve of how Trump is handling the response to the coronavirus, unchanged from the end of July (34%)."

So what's a Republican operative class gonna do? Fear's worked for them in the past... and it's a natch for Trump. And racism... another Trump forte. NBC News had a cute report up late last week about how Twitter is trying to stop a Trump campaign spam operation that pushes messages from fake accounts about Black people abandoning the Democratic Party.

The fake accounts were purported to be run by Black people whose viral tweets received tens of thousands of shares in the past month. One of the accounts, @WentDemToRep, logged over 11,000 retweets on a single tweet that claimed that the user was a lifelong Democrat who was pushed to vote Republican by the Black Lives Matter movement. The tweet was posted shortly after the account was created Tuesday.

The WentDemToRep account quickly tagged two other accounts in a reply, @PeterGammo and @KRon619, which were suspended at the same time Tuesday. The Twitter spokesperson said all three accounts were suspended for spam and, "specifically, artificially manipulative behavior."

Disinformation experts and national security agencies are gearing up for the election, anticipating that social media platforms will continue to be central to foreign and domestic efforts to mislead voters.

The fake accounts, which used the images of Black men for their profile pictures, had five separate posts with at least 10,000 retweets. Recent attempts to co-opt the identities of African Americans to simulate support for President Donald Trump in the run-up to the election have had success online, researchers say.

The profile picture from WentDemToRep was stolen from the Instagram page of Nelis Joustra, a model who worked to get the fake account deleted.

...Brandi Collins-Dexter, a fellow at Color Of Change, an online racial justice nonprofit, said trolls' simulating the identities of African Americans is a coordinated practice that has been a common trope over the last decade for those trying to delegitimize social justice causes.

"The point is to provide ammunition against Black people for policymakers so they can point to things that are being said, allegedly from a Black person's account, to reinforce the idea that Black Lives Matter is a terrorist threat and put them on equal footing as white nationalists in terms of content moderation," Collins-Dexter said.

There is a decades-long history of non-Black actors posing as African Americans on social media. In 2016, Russia's Internet Research Agency "troll farm" targeted Black voters to depress turnout for Hillary Clinton, according to American intelligence agencies and bipartisan House and Senate reports.

Collins-Dexter also noted a coordinated campaign from the extremist website 4chan in April to pose as African Americans on Twitter who had just received COVID-19 stimulus checks. The fake accounts would thank the president for the checks, then brag about using them on alcohol, in "an effort to perpetuate the 'Welfare Queen' myth," Collins-Dexter said.

With Trump encouraging his KKK-like supporters to bring chaos and violence into the streets, in the hope of causing enough fear and backlash to reelect him, Biden barely understands how to push back at all. He seems torn and uncomfortable and might prefer taking a more rote "law and order" stance himself.

Frank Rich is a pretty perceptive observer of contemporary politics and he's come to the conclusion that Trump and his Republicans have decided their best shot at reelection is to just play the racist card-- heavy... and to the exclusion of anything else. Rich wrote that "During a week of police violence and vigilante murder in Wisconsin, in a year of preventable deaths and growing poverty, the Republican convention emphasized loyalty to Donald Trump, casting aside matters of policy and campaign law in favor of grievance. Was the convention just another concession to his outsize ego, part of the strategy to energize the party’s base in the run-up to November, or an attempt to win over undecided voters?" Like many Americans, Rich is worried that Trump could win and worried that if he loses "he would stop at nothing to take an already teetering country down with him."

The RNC was so boring Wednesday night that Tucker Carlson cut away early on, ditching the nattering Tennessee congresswoman Marsha Blackburn so he could launch into his now notorious defense of Kyle Rittenhouse’s killing spree in Kenosha: “How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?” At that instant, Carlson, implicitly speaking for Trump, the Republican Party, and its media enforcer, Fox News, crystalized what message mattered most about this convention and what message will matter most in Trump’s campaign over the crucial two months to come. As Trump would define it in a rare moment of focus during his endless drone of an acceptance speech, a vote for Joe Biden is a vote to “give free rein to violent anarchists and agitators and criminals who threaten our citizens.” The corollary, stated directly by Carlson and repeatedly embraced by Trump, is that arms-bearing white Americans can’t be faulted for wanting to take the law into their own hands.

For “anarchists and agitators and criminals,” read “Black people.” This racially tinged “law and order” message is nothing new either for Trump or a GOP that has been pursuing a “Southern strategy” since Richard Nixon codified it half a century ago. As many have noted, Trump is at a logical disadvantage in using it since, unlike Nixon, he is the incumbent president and the disorder he keeps decrying is happening on his watch. But what grabbed my attention on the convention’s sleepy third night was how Trump, on the ropes in summer polling, is nonetheless determined to take that message to a new and even more dangerous level by fomenting racial violence if need be. He will not only continue to boost arms-bearing white vigilantes as he has from Charlottesville to Portland, but, when all else fails, unabashedly pin white criminality on Black Lives Matter protesters.

Literally so. While the unrest in Kenosha was referenced repeatedly on Wednesday night, no one mentioned that the violence was all committed by white men: Rittenhouse, and Rusten Sheskey, the police officer who shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back while his three young sons looked on. Then along came Pence to raise the ante in his closing address. While trying to pound in the fear that Biden will coddle and encourage violent thugs, he brought up the ominous example of an officer who had been “shot and killed during the riots in Oakland, California.” The implication, of course, was that the officer had been killed by black rioters in that “Democratic-run city” when in fact the victim was murdered by a member of the far-right extremist movement known as “boogaloo” boys.

Next to this incendiary strategy, the other manifest sins of the week, though appalling, seem less consequential as we approach the crucial post–Labor Day campaign. They did keep those of us in the press busy. The news media were unstinting in calling out every lie and alternative fact in every speech as well as every violation of the Hatch Act. Full notice was paid to every shameless rhetorical feint and stunt contrived to create an alternative reality in which the coronavirus and mask-wearing are in the past tense, the decimated economy is about to skyrocket, and Trump is a champion of both immigration (even from what he calls “shithole countries”) and health care covering preexisting conditions. But aside from the 42 percent or so who consistently approve of Trump no matter what he or those around him do, most other Americans will see for themselves whether COVID-19 has evaporated or their economic security has improved this fall. Those are realities that Trump, for all his subterfuge, cannot alter. But racial animus is a less tangible and more enduring factor in America’s political fortunes, and it has been a toxic wild card in every modern election.

...Biden had it exactly right when he characterized this plan on Thursday by calling out Trump for “pouring gasoline on the fire” and “rooting for more violence, not less.” That was true from day one of the convention, when the gun-toting St. Louis couple, the McCloskeys, were given a prominent spot in the festivities. The rifle that Mark McCloskey pointed toward Black Lives Matter protesters in St. Louis, an AR-15, was the same that Kyle Rittenhouse fired at protesters in Kenosha the following night.

But it’s not enough for Biden to identify the strategy that is being unleashed to derail him, and it shouldn’t have taken him most of the week to get to the point. He’s in a fight for his and the country’s life. A Democratic campaign that was pitched most of all on targeting Trump’s criminally negligent response to the pandemic must now pivot to combat the most lethal of all American viruses, racism, in its most weaponized strain.

The Age Of Trump: Lawlessness And Disorder

American Fascism's Betsy Ross

Has there ever been a president less about either law or order than Trump? I though Nixon was so bad that I went to live overseas for nearly 7 years after he won the first time. And on Nixon's worst day, he was never as bad as Trump on his best day... not that I recall any Trump best days. You?

Ben Mathis-Lilley, writing for Slate yesterday, probably doesn't. He noted just before Trump went on that "One major theme of the Republican National Convention has been 'rioting' and alleged lawlessness in 'Democrat-run' cities across the Untied States. Anxious Democrats and media observers have wondered if this traditionally potent GOP 'law and order' message will be able to boost Donald Trump’s presidential election chances against Joe Biden, who he currently trails by eight-plus points in the FiveThirtyEight polling average. This discourse can be, in a limited sense, connected to events in reality. In recent days there has been notable protest-related violence and property damage in Kenosha, Wisconsin and Portland, Oregon. These cities do have Democratic mayors. If Biden were to do literally nothing to respond to the Republican Party’s rhetoric, maybe he would lose votes. In the larger sense, however, what the hell are we talking about here?"

Mathis-Lilley wrote about the ugly Trumpist-era "context in which a police officer in Kenosha was videotaped shooting an unarmed Black man seven times in the back while, according to a family attorney, his three children watched from inside their car. This is the context in which property damage occurred during a protest against Kenosha law enforcement officers, whose sheriff said in 2018 that he wished he could put four black shoplifters in jail for the rest of their lives so they wouldn’t reproduce. This is the context in which a white 17-year-old Trump supporter from Illinois drove to Kenosha on Tuesday and shot two protesters to death with an assault rifle after the police appeared to give encouragement to the 'militia' group he was with. This is the context in which that armed white supremacists have appeared at civil rights protests in Portland and become involved in altercations. Some law and order would be pretty nice, wouldn’t it? What protesters are calling for, with public sentiment behind them, is for people to be able to live their lives in peace and safety. How much unrest is ongoing in the countries that have contained the coronavirus and reopened public spaces? How much political violence is there in the countries in which armed neo-Nazis aren’t ubiquitously present at political events? How much property damage would be taking place in a country whose national response to a widely acknowledged police brutality problem wasn’t 'nothing'?"

This morning, the Politico Playbook crew professed shock that the president used America’s monuments-- Fort McHenry, the Washington Monument and the White House-- for nakedly partisan political purposes. It’s clearly illegal... 'The South Lawn speech was the final demolition of the boundaries between governance and campaigning in a week full of such eroding'." Considering the criminal nature of the Trump regime for the last 3 plus years-- not to mention the existing threat to democracy we're living through today-- the South Lawn speech...? Really?

Jonathan Chait seems to have thought so. "The second night of the Republican convention was a festival of massive lawbreaking," he wrote. "In open violation of the Hatch Act, President Trump turned the White House into a convention stage. He even held an immigration ceremony on camera, and had his secretary of State deliver a speech in explicit violation of State Department regulations. The White House might as well have been surrounded by yellow police tape... [T]he blatant violation was met with resignation. 'Nobody outside of the Beltway really cares,' sneers Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. There is a controlling legal authority-- they just don’t care."

Does the Hatch Act matter? Everybody in government thought it did, at least a little, right until the Trump administration. Government officials used to take pains to avoid using their offices for campaign purposes. Two former officials wrote about the hassle they would go through to avoid a small breach. The purpose of this restriction is clear enough: Control of the federal government is not supposed to grant the in party advantages (or at least not excessive advantages) over the opposition. Joe Biden can’t hold campaign events in the East Wing, so why can Trump?

The Trump administration has effectively turned the law into a dead letter, in following its basic principle that any law that lacks an effective and immediate enforcement mechanism essentially does not exist. Trump has ignored the law for years, using his official events for campaigning, while previous presidents carefully avoided doing so, and even reimbursed the government for expenses incurred while traveling for campaign events. After the Office of Special Counsel recommended firing Kellyanne Conway for Hatch Act violations last year, nothing happened. “Some of Mr. Trump’s aides privately scoff at the Hatch Act and say they take pride in violating its regulations,” reported the New York Times last week.

Laws like the Hatch Act and prohibitions on using private emails for official purposes are in a category of laws that effectively bind one party but not the other. (Indeed, Trump’s administration is filled with private email users-- nobody cares.) Why is that?

One reason, particular to this administration, is that Trump violates so many norms so flagrantly that he shatters the scale. There’s only so much journalistic bandwidth. Covering Trump’s violations of laws and norms by the standard you would apply to a normal president would mean banner headlines every day and interrupting television programming with breaking news every night.

But another, more long-standing, reason is that the two parties operate in structurally different news environments. The Republican base largely follows partisan Republican news sources, like Fox News, which largely do not hold their officials accountable. Republicans don’t have to worry that their small legal violations will make their own voters raise questions, because their own voters either won’t hear about the story in the first place, or-- if it becomes too big to ignore-- will learn about it in the context of some kind of whatboutist defense emphasizing how the Democrats are worse.

Disdain for democracy starts here

Democrats, on the other hand, have to communicate to their base through mainstream news outlets that follow traditional norms of journalistic independence. Of course you can critique the media for its implicit liberal biases. Even conceding for the sake of argument that the mainstream media has a strong social liberal bias, though, it is evidently true that they take Democratic violations seriously. The Times might go easy on any number of liberal shibboleths, but it was extremely tough on Clinton email protocol.

The media asymmetry is compounded by a structural bias in political representation. The House, Senate, and Electoral College all have Republican biases to various degrees. Republicans have the luxury of winning through pure polarized base appeals that Democrats do not enjoy. (This is one reason why, if you want Republicans to moderate, reforming the Senate would be a good start.)

And then there’s the additional problem that arises when reporters treat these asymmetrical conditions as unalterable and unremarkable features of the political landscape. From that standpoint, it’s obvious that minor Republican legal violations will not matter, and minor Democratic violations will. “Of course, much of this is improper, and, according to most every straight-faced expert, it’s a violation of the Hatch Act…” concedes Politico’s Playbook. “But do you think a single person outside the Beltway gives a hoot about the president politicking from the White House or using the federal government to his political advantage? Do you think any persuadable voter even notices?”

As analysis and prediction, this is correct. But it also has a self-fulfilling quality. Reporters assume small Democratic scandals “matter” much more than small Republican scandals, because Democratic voters follow news coverage that treats those violations seriously and Republican voters don’t. This is how you get to a world where Al Gore’s fundraising calls are still raising questions about his ethics three years later, while Trump’s latest obliteration of a law will be forgotten within days.

Señor Trumpanzee: Your Law And Order President?

Fascist movements and fascist states are obsessed with "law and order," more order than law, until they pass their own laws. Now that the American Republican Party has passed the Rubicon into fascism, we can look back to the 1930s Nazi Party to find precedents for how William Barr runs the "Justice Department." Loyalty to the Führer and blind obedience was the cornerstone of Nazi law and order, Recht und Ordnung. The Nazi seizure of power had a lot to do with a desire of the German people for everything to function normally.

German-- and American-- compulsive respect for private property played a key role in the passive acceptance of fascism. Intolerance of "anti-social" behavior-- which included homosexuality, abortion, prostitution, begging.

Because of the nature of America's would-be Führer, fascism has a distinct overlay of both Kleptocracy (government by those who seek personal gain at the expense of the governed) and Kakistocracy (a system of government that is run by the worst, least qualified, and/or most unscrupulous citizens). Eventually Nazi Germany slid gently-- and not so gently-- into being an out and out police state.

Early this morning we published a post about the soon to be forgotten Geoffrey Berman mini-firestorm. CNN political analyst Julian Zelizer reported that the sloppy way the regime ousted Berman "immediately created concerns that this was a politically motivated ouster. Berman's office has investigated high-level associates of President Donald Trump, including the President's former attorney Michael Cohen and Trump confidante and personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, and Trump had reportedly considered firing him for some time. Barr's move came two days after former national security adviser John Bolton alleged in his new book that the President offered to interfere in a Southern District investigation of a Turkish bank. Trump told Turkish President Recep Erdogan that the problem (that is, the investigation) would be fixed when the prosecutors were 'replaced by his people,' Bolton wrote."

The news is one more piece of evidence that Trump is the anti-law-and-order President, despite his claims to the contrary. Trump touts law and order when it suits him, but attacks the courts and erodes our judicial system when it comes to his agenda and actions. He loves to tweet former President Richard Nixon's famous catchphrase-- law and order-- which Nixon used in the 1968 election against Hubert Humphrey to promise an end to the riots and protests that had shaken the nation. But the truth is, the Trump administration has repeatedly taken steps that undermine our nation's confidence that this White House adheres to the notion that nobody is above the law.

Barr has been the point man in this strategy. He brings a level of legal sophistication and political savvy that Trump lacks and has repeatedly placed the political interests of the President above the law. When the Mueller investigation wrapped up, the attorney general framed the findings of the report in a way that exonerated the President from wrongdoing. During the impeachment hearings and trial earlier this year, Trump reportedly leaned on Barr to limit the ability of legislators to obtain necessary information. And in Trump's post-impeachment attacks on inspectors general and US attorneys, Barr has proven willing to take the bold and controversial steps necessary to insulate his boss.

Under Barr, the Justice Department has supported an aggressive response to the Black Lives Matter protests. Millions of Americans have taken to the streets across the country to demand bold policing reforms that aim to stop the police brutality that led to the death of George Floyd. But Barr has denied that systemic racism is a problem in policing, and the Justice Department has stood firm, years after scrapping Obama-era police reforms.

The Justice Department also deployed armed forces against peaceful protesters at Lafayette Park. Rather than embracing the notion, which many conservatives would have once agreed to, that protecting individual human rights from unaccountable police officers is the way to ensure law and order on the streets, the Justice Department under Trump has instead pushed for a breathless acceleration of state policing power.

The restraints that have checked previous administrations have deteriorated, and we are now living in a moment when President Trump-- with Barr's assistance-- appears to believe that there are no law and order guardrails prohibiting what he can do.

Given the fact that Senate Republicans continue to back him, the President is not wrong in this assumption. Senate Republicans have played an essential role in allowing Trump to continue eroding our democratic institutions. As long as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is willing to stand firm in backing the administration, the odds of any sort of serious check on these kinds of actions diminish.

The wildcard remains the courts. This week, the Supreme Court defied the President by ruling that he could not immediately end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, delivering a major blow to his anti-immigration platform. This decision came soon after Trump appointee Justice Neil Gorsuch shocked conservatives by joining Chief Justice John Roberts and four liberals on the bench in a decision protecting gay and transgender persons from workplace discrimination.

Though the Supreme Court is now under a conservative majority, it is not an institution where members can be primaried out of their posts, and federal judges have the capacity to be true institutionalists, even in an era when many elected officials refuse to accept that role. Certainly, Chief Justice Roberts is following these events with a close eye. As the President bends law and order to fit his own agenda, the biggest question remains: How much are the federal courts willing to tolerate and at what point will they finally check the President in the dangerous campaign that he has undertaken?

Until the courts step in, the nation is in a dangerous place. The stories that have converged in the past few weeks have revealed quite clearly that law and order is under threat. The threat, however, isn't coming from the streets but from the highest office in the land.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

When, in the wake of the Kavanaugh hearings, Comrade Trump recently launched the current hit Republican diatribe featured in tonight's meme, my mind immediately went to two things: 1) The usual mangling of the English language by a profoundly uneducated "president," and 2) The horrific case of The Central Park Five from 1989 and his role in the ugliness surrounding it.

For those who don't remember, the Central Park Five case centered around the vicious beating, rape and attempted murder of a 28-year-old white female jogger in New York's Central Park. Four African-American teens and one Latino teen were arrested and charged. The case got nationwide headlines and things got even uglier than one could expect. Leading the charge was then real estate magnate Donald Trump who spent $85,000 dollars on full page ads that called for the reinstatement of the death penalty in New York City's four major daily newspapers. In his full page ad, Trump said, among other things:

Mayor Koch says that hate and rancor should be removed from our streets. I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer... Yes, Mayor Koch, I want to hate these muggers and murderers and I always will. How can our great society tolerate the continued brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits? Criminals must be told that their CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS!

Shortly after, in an interview with Larry King on CNN, Trump doubled down on his lust for hate and his total contempt for the American Constitution, saying:

The problem with our society is the victim has absolutely no rights and the criminal has unbelievable rights... maybe hate is what we need if we're gonna get something done.

The FBI did DNA tests of the 5 suspects and the victim and no matches were made. The DA told the media that the tests were "inconclusive." The Central Park Five were found guilty, twice. The five teens went to jail and served sentences varying from 6 to 13 years. Fortunately, if there is much of a fortunately in the case, Trump's call for the death penalty was not heeded. In 2002, the real rapist confessed. His DNA matched, he provided details of the crime that only he could possibly know, and the Central Park Five were set free. To this day, now President Trump insists that the Central Park Five are guilty. In his Republican mind, of course they are. They're, well... you know. He has also publicly insisted that the settlements the Central Park 5 have received are a "disgrace."

The irony of the juxtaposition of Comrade Trump's recent statement that has become a near mantra to republicans this week, and the words of his racist hate-mongering actions in 1989, is of course totally disregarded by Republicans; and the kind of blatant racism exhibited by Trump in 1989 is obviously a big part of Trump's current appeal to Republicans.

Trump Era: Breakdown Of Law And Order-- Pennsylvania Edition

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court looked at the unconstitutional gerrymander the Republicans in the state legislature perpetrated on the citizens of the state and threw it out. The Justices instructed the Republicans not to show up for prison but to redraw the maps in time for the November midterms. Prison terms would have been more appropriate... but the Court was lenient. One of the leaders of the crooked gang, Senate president Joe Scarnati, announced Wednesday that he doesn't plan to cooperate with what the Supreme Court ordered. This is how desperate Pennsylvania Republicans are to hold onto their illegitimate and illegal power:

"In light of the unconstitutionality of the Court’s Orders and the Court’s plain intent to usurp the General Assembly’s constitutionally delegated role of drafting Pennsylvania’s congressional districting plan, Sen. Scarnati will not be turning over any data identified in the Court’s Orders," his lawyers wrote in a letter to the court.

...In declaring the state’s congressional map an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander, the state high court ordered a new map redrawn in time for the primary election in May. It gave the General Assembly less than three weeks to approve a new map, then have it signed by Gov. Wolf. If that does not happen, the justices said in their order, they would adopt their own boundaries.

Days later, the court issued another order, announcing it had retained Stanford University professor Nathaniel Persily as an adviser and requesting the current municipal boundaries from the General Assembly. It also requested the parties submit maps and technical data used in expert testimony. Lawyers for the plaintiffs-- 18 Democratic voters from across the state--— submitted their maps and data Wednesday, as did a lawyer for Lt. Gov. Mike Stack. Other parties, including Wolf, said they did not have any data to provide.

Scarnati and Turzai have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block the state court ruling, arguing that the U.S. Constitution gives state legislatures the power to run elections. By saying it would intervene and draw its own map, the lawmakers wrote, the state high court takes that power from the legislature. The court has not officially agreed to consider the case, but U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. has requested a response from the plaintiffs by 4 p.m. Friday.

In the meantime, lawmakers have taken the initial steps toward drawing new lines.

Meanwhile, for those perplexed about the sudden retirement of powerful Philly Machine boss, Bob Brady-- he isn't running for reelection-- there is a back story for those outside of Philadelphia-- and it isn't the bullshit Pelosi spit out about Brady's outstanding service as "a forceful champion for working people in Pennsylvania and across the nation." True, he doesn't want to be beaten by Nina Ahmad but there's more to it than that.

The FBI last year filed charges against four people in an investigation into a payment Brady's campaign made to a primary opponent in 2012. Three people have pleaded guilty, including a political consultant to Brady.

Brady's campaign gave a city judge who challenged him in the 2012 primary $90,000 to quit the race, according to the plea memo unsealed after the judge's campaign aide pleaded guilty to breaking campaign finance laws. And Brady himself tried to "influence" a witness in the case, according to prosecutors, who said they filed the case under seal for fear he would "corrupt(ly)" pressure the aide not to cooperate.

At the end of last year, one of Brady's campaign workers agreed to take the fall for Brady. No one was buying it though.

A political consultant for U.S. Rep. Bob Brady pleaded guilty to lying about a $90,000 payoff made by the congressman’s campaign to get an opponent to quit a 2012 primary.

Donald Jones, 62, pleaded guilty on Friday to making false statements to the FBI in a campaign finance probe involving the boss of the Philadelphia Democratic Party.

“I accept full responsibility for my actions and consider my guilty plea a first step in making amends,” Jones said in a statement issued by his attorney Alan J. Tauber. “I apologize to the people of Philadelphia and to my family for bringing this dishonor upon them.”

The district is just 42% white but the establishment white Machine is not giving up without a fight; there's also a black establishment machine, which is likely to run Joanna McClinton. It looks to me that the white machine is going to put up Richie Lazar as the man they want to hold onto Brady's seat and keep Ahmad out of it. Earlier in the month The Inquirer was already speculating that "Many in Philadelphia’s political circles wonder whether Brady is scheming to install Lazer as his successor... One political operative said Lazer replacing Brady would be 'a status quo bait and switch.' Another said that if Lazer does run, it probably would be with Brady’s blessing." The fount of corruption in Philly politics, John “Johnny Doc” Dougherty, building trades leader, is behind Lazar, just as Brady always has.

"The True History of the Origins of Police"

Chicago police attacking a Memorial Day picnic of approximately 1000 unarmed strikers and family members at the Republic Steel plant — May 1937. 10 were shot dead, another 30 were wounded, and nearly the same number suffered serious head injuries from police beatings (source)

by Gaius Publius

I found the following article, posted at Alternet and written by Sam Mitrani, a history professor at the College of DuPage, absolutely fascinating. We've been discussing, in these pages and elsewhere, the behavior of "our" police forces and their frequent mistreatment of citizens, especially the poor, brown and less "deserving."

The underlying assumption is that the police exist to protect "us," an idea frequently promoted by the police themselves, whose slogan is usually some variant of this one:

(Notice the U.S. flag incorporated into this example, which adds a note of authoritarianism. The Nixon-era conversion of the U.S. flag from a national patriotic symbol to a dog-whistle call for obedience to authority will be treated later.)

"To protect and serve" — but whom? That's where the history lesson offered by Professor Mitrani comes in. Let's start with a time in the U.S. before we had organized city-run police forces. Mitrani:

The True History of the Origins of Police — Protecting and Serving the Masters of Society

The liberal way of viewing the problem rests on a misunderstanding of the origins of the police.

... Before the 19th century, there were no police forces that we would recognize as such anywhere in the world. In the northern United States, there was a system of elected constables and sheriffs, much more responsible to the population in a very direct way than the police are today. In the South, the closest thing to a police force was the slave patrols.

What happened to change this? Capitalism and its dependence on the low-paid physical labor of immigrants, and later of blacks moving north after the Civil War — up the Mississippi through St. Louis to Kansas City and Chicago, and up the eastern seaboard to Washington, New York and Boston, among other places.

Mitrani:

Then, as Northern cities grew and filled with mostly immigrant wage workers who were physically and socially separated from the ruling class, the wealthy elite who ran the various municipal governments hired hundreds and then thousands of armed men to impose order on the new working-class neighborhoods.

Class conflict roiled late-19th century American cities like Chicago, which experienced major strikes and riots in 1867, 1877, 1886 and 1894. In each of these upheavals, the police attacked strikers with extreme violence. In the aftermath of these movements, the police increasingly presented themselves as a thin blue line protecting civilization, by which they meant bourgeois civilization, from the disorder of the working class. ...

"A thin blue line protecting bourgeois civilization from the disorder of the working class." Sound familiar? As always, of course, the situation evolved, but never strayed from the main purpose (my paragraphing):

Of course, the ruling class did not get everything it wanted. It had to yield on many points to the immigrant workers it sought to control — this is why, for instance, municipal governments backed away from trying to stop Sunday drinking and why they hired so many immigrant police officers, especially the Irish. But despite these concessions, businessmen organized themselves to make sure the police were increasingly isolated from democratic control.

The police, meanwhile, increasingly set themselves off from the population by donning uniforms; establishing their own rules for hiring, promotion and firing; working to build a unique esprit de corps; and identifying themselves with order. And despite complaints about corruption and inefficiency, they gained more and more support from the ruling class, to the extent that in Chicago, for instance, businessmen donated money to buy the police rifles, artillery, Gatling guns and buildings and to establish a police pension out of their own pockets.

You're probably stuck on the Gatling guns in the last sentence, but the phrase that caught my eye was the one I bolded: "identifying themselves with order." There's your tie to police authoritarianism and the cop authoritarian personality, so much in evidence today among too many police officers (my emphasis):

I’m a cop. If you don’t want to get hurt, don’t challenge me.
By Sunil Dutta
August 19, 2014 

Sunil Dutta, Ph.D., is a 17-year-veteran police officer in Los Angeles.

... Even though it might sound harsh and impolitic, here is the bottom line: if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don’t argue with me, don’t call me names, don’t tell me that I can’t stop you, don’t say I’m a racist pig, don’t threaten that you’ll sue me and take away my badge. Don’t scream at me that you pay my salary, and don’t even think of aggressively walking towards me.

Because, he goes on to explain, "officers are rarely at fault. When they use force, they are defending their, or the public's, safety."

There's the sell again: "Defending the public's safety." According to Professor Mitani's walk through history, there's a straight line from the immigrant (meaning labor) and racial struggles of the 19th century, which municipal police forces were created to shut down, and today's police practices in poor, brown and black towns and neighborhoods. The primary goal is now what it always was — to keep the victims of a predatory economy back on their heels and resigned to their place and their labor.

"There was never a time when the big city police neutrally enforced 'the law'"

Mitrani again on a key point — what this implies about rule of law:

There was never a time when the big city police neutrally enforced “the law” — nor, for that matter, a time when the law itself was neutral. Throughout the 19th century in the North, the police mostly arrested people for the vaguely defined “crimes” of disorderly conduct and vagrancy, which meant that they could target anyone they saw as a threat to “order.” In the post-bellum South, they enforced white supremacy and largely arrested black people on trumped-up charges in order to feed them into convict labor systems.

The violence the police carried out and their moral separation from those they patrolled were not the consequences of the brutality of individual officers, but of policies carefully designed to mold the police into a force that could use violence to deal with the social problems that accompanied the development of a wage-labor economy. ...

Though some patrolmen tried to be kind and others were openly brutal, police violence in the 1880s was not a case of a few bad apples — and neither is it today.

In the interest of not quoting too much, I cut out a number of his examples in a number of places. Please do read the whole piece; he makes his case quite well.

"The police were created to use violence"

I'll close with what for me is his main point. This is hard to believe, and hard to grasp, but it's the only way to make sense of news that comes at us like a train. Chris Hayes could do "killer cop goes free" stories from now till the rest of his life, never run out, and in our hearts, every one of us knows it. There's an endless supply of "killer cops" and their stories, most hidden from view, never prosecuted unless there's an outcry, and rarely even then.

So why is there seemingly no way ever to curb the violence of the police? The answer's in front of us. Because:

The police were created to use violence to reconcile electoral democracy with industrial capitalism. Today, they are just one part of the “criminal justice” system that plays the same role. Their basic job is to enforce order among those with the most reason to resent the system — in our society today, disproportionately among poor black people.

Every word a true one. Remember your Dickens, then remember that you can't have a world owned and harvested by men like David Koch and Jamie Dimon without an enforcement mechanism. I know this is not your TV's Law and Order vision of the world, but it is the world, and your TV is wrong. Here's what it looks like when white people resist — same result:

A cop, protected by the "law," protecting and serving. You can't see whom he's protecting (Jamie Dimon couldn't make it to this U.C. Davis demonstration). But you can see what he's serving (pepper spray), and to whom. Thanks to Professor Mitrani for a great and instructive read.

GP

Cross-posted with permission from Digby's Hullabaloo.

Lawlessness And Disorder-- Big Coal

With update: Donny Blankenship indicted!

There have been myriad complaints that the Obama administration has been systematically letting the banksters off the hook-- fining the share-holders who really didn't have any criminal intent, while letting the criminally minded executives skate away without charges... with their inflated bonuses. And why is Cliven Bundy still running around free? Yesterday NPR and Mine Safety and Health News released the results of an investigation into another class of coddled criminals who thumb their nose at lawful society and get away with it: the mine operators.

While McConnell was shedding crocodile tears for the suffering the mine workers will have to endure because of Obama's Climate Change agreement with China, NPR was broadcasting how McConnell's donors may have been sending him his bribe money while refusing to pay millions of dollars in fines. Citations and the fines that go with egregious violations of safety rules are key components of the federal law designed to protect miners, reported NPR. "They are supposed to make violations expensive-- costing hundreds of thousands of dollars for the most serious offenses-- and create an incentive for mine owners to keep workers safe."

A joint investigation by NPR and Mine Safety and Health News found that thousands of mine operators fail to pay safety penalties, even as they continue to manage dangerous-- and sometimes deadly-- mining operations. Most unpaid penalties are between two and 10 years overdue; some go back two decades. And federal regulators seem unable or unwilling to make mine owners pay.

Our joint investigation looked at 20 years of federal mine data through the first quarter of 2014, including details about fines, payments, violations and injuries. We used raw Department of Labor data and delinquency records provided by the Mine Safety and Health Administration to calculate the number of injuries and injury rates, and violations and gravity of violations, at mines with delinquent penalties while they were delinquent.

Among the findings:

• 2,700 mining company owners failed to pay nearly $70 million in delinquent penalties.

• The top nine delinquents owe more than $1 million each.

• Mines that don't pay their penalties are more dangerous than mines that do, with injury rates 50 percent higher.

• Delinquent mines reported close to 4,000 injuries in the years they failed to pay, including accidents that killed 25 workers and left 58 others with permanent disabilities.

• Delinquent mines continued to violate the law, with more than 130,000 violations, while they failed to pay mine safety fines.

Most mine operators pay their penalties, our investigation found. Delinquents account for just 7 percent of the nation's coal, metals and mineral mining companies. But that small subset of the industry is more dangerous than the rest, federal data show.

The violations at delinquent mines included 40,000 that are labeled in government safety records as "Significant and Substantial," which means serious injury or illness were likely if inspectors hadn't intervened. More than 15,000 violations were the kind found in fatal accidents, major disasters or mining deaths, the records also show.

And when those safety records are compared with other government data on coal production, it shows that some of the top delinquents continued to mine coal and reap millions of dollars in revenue while their safety fines remained unpaid.

Why hasn't the Obama administration been tough on crime? I bet Bernie Sanders will be a lot stricter with the worst of the predatory criminal elements plaguing society:

UPDATE: Crooked Mine Boss, Murderer Finally Indicted!

This certainly took far too long. Let's hope they go after some banksters next! How sweet would it be for Blankenship and Blankenfein to share a cell at Club Fed?

Don Blankenship, the longtime chief executive of Massey Energy, was indicted today on charges that he violated federal mine safety laws at the company’s Upper Big Branch Mine prior to an April 2010 explosion that killed 29 miners.

U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin this afternoon informed representatives of the families of the Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster victims that a four-count indictment had been handed up by a federal grand jury charging Blankenship.

The indictment alleges that Blankenship conspired to cause routine, willful violations of mandatory federal mine safety and health standards at Upper Big Branch during a period from Jan. 1, 2008, to April 9, 2010, according to a notice Goodwin’s office sent to the families.

The notice also said that the indictment alleges Blankenship was part of a conspiracy to cover up mine safety violations and hinder federal enforcement efforts by providing advance warning of government inspections. The indictment also alleges that, after the explosion, Blankenship made false statements to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission about Massey’s safety practices prior to the explosion, the notice to families says.

The indictment comes after a more than four-year investigation by Goodwin that began following the mine disaster on April 5, 2010, but expanded to examine a troubled safety record that critics have long argued put coal production and profits ahead of worker protections.

...Blankenship invoked his Fifth Amendment rights and refused to answer questions from MSHA, the state Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training and an independent team appointed by then-Gov. Joe Manchin to probe the Upper Big Branch disaster.

"Police Pleasantly Surprised To Learn Man They Shot Was Armed" (The Onion)

Police Pleasantly Surprised To Learn Man They Shot Was Armed

NEWS IN BRIEF • Local • Crime • Police • Violence •
Issue 50•41 • Oct 14, 2014





LEXINGTON, KY—Following a pedestrian stop Monday night during which they fired their weapons on a suspicious individual, patrol officers for the Fayette County Police Department were pleasantly surprised to discover the man they shot was armed, sources confirmed. “Well, what do you know—he really was carrying a gun,” said officer Dustin Hayes, smiling upon finding a 9mm pistol on the body of the 23-year-old individual shortly after the policeman and his partner discharged their firearms a total of 19 times. “I honestly had no idea if he had a handgun, so it’s pretty great to find one right there tucked into his waistband. This makes the rest of our week a whole lot easier.” Officers said they were further relieved after discovering the man had a petty theft charge on his record, ensuring they were 100 percent off the hook.

by Ken

Is this like a stopped clock being right twice a day? Or perhaps just the law of averages at work?

(Do bear in mind that, notwithstanding the unmistakable ring of plausibility, this "story" comes from The Onion -- aka "America's Finest News Source.")

Er, just kidding, officers. Pretty much.

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Huh? You mean cops "don't pay attention to the First Amendment"? It's shocking, Rosemarie, but I'm afraid no, not so much

Plus: An Alexander Cockburn postscript

from the Inwod Community Group's Facebook page

"To lump all cops as killers is wrong."

-- former cop John Garvey, on the same Facebook page

"While police have always considered themselves above the common herd, and have always looked after themselves first and civilians second, it's very clear that police today are much worse in this regard than they were 10 years ago, and 10 years before that, and 10 years before that. Police are well aware that they have near full immunity: they can beat people, kill people, plant evidence on people and they will, in most cases, get away with it. Even if caught on tape, the worst punishment is likely to be paid suspension."

-- Ian Welsh, in a blogpost of "scattered thoughts
on cops, particularly cops in the US"

"What the hell is the thinking here and where does any cop have the right to do this? They don't pay attention to the First Amendment?”

-- Invwood resident Rosemarie Kliegman, on the Facebook page

by Ken

First, some context for the above Facebook quotes, for those who who haven't been following the story. (I don't know how much play it has gotten outside NYC -- or in the city, for that matter.) it concerns a mural painted on the wall of a building in Inwood, Manhattan's far-northern neighborhood by artist Alan Ket. As Carla Zanoni recalls in a follow-up piece today on the invaluable DNAinfo.com, "Inwood Artist Told His Controversial Work Needs NYPD Clearance" (links onsite).

Ket’s painting, that called police "murderers," was removed by a pair of plainclothes officers who arrived at the New Edition Cleaners at 4929 Broadway at 11 a.m. Tuesday armed with buckets of black paint, roller brushes and drop cloths.

They were carrying out orders issued by the 34th Precinct, according to police sources.

The mural, which showed the word "murderers" painted over tombstones and coffins with epitaph names that included the NYPD, the Environmental Protection Agency and global corporations including Halliburton and Monsanto, had been painted on the wall of the business with the permission of its owners.

[Note: DNAinfo.com has a slide show of photos.]

Before we continue, we ought perhaps to clarify the "permission" issues, from Carla Zanoni's own report (a follow-up to her report yesterday, "Cops Paint Over Inwood Mural That Depicts NYPD as 'Murderers'"), from which I gather that for at least five years Alan Ket had gotten year-by-year permission from the owners to paint some sort of mural. Now, Zanoni tells us:

The building’s landlord, who would only identify himself as Victor, said he is willing to work with Ket on replacing the mural, but would no longer allow him to spray paint just any image on the wall.

"They were nice paintings before, but the new painting was very offensive," he said. "I don't agree with it and neither do the police."

One is tempted to crack some sort of joke about everyone being a critic. After all, "Victor" presumably would have had the right to approve of what Ket painted on his wall, if he had chosen to do so, which it seems he didn't. But then there's that sentence: "I don't agree with it and neither do the police."

Where do the police come into having opinions about murals painted on private property? Opinions that they proceed to back up by unilaterally painting over the painting. And by the way, in the matter of "Victor" being "willing to work with Ket on replacing the mural,"

After the incident, Ket, who has had permission to paint murals on the wall for at least five years, said he asked the landlord if he could paint the word “censored” on the coat of glossy black paint that now covers his original art.

The landlord said no.

“It’s a little bit crazy,” Ket said.

"This wall is being censored by the NYPD," Ket said to Carla Zanoni. Of his conversation with "Victor," he said, "I told him I found it kind of strange he would feel he needed to get approval or permission or run anything by the police, but he said that he doesn’t want any problems with the police, that the police are a bit threatening."

Zanoni concludes her report today:

Inwood residents said they were appalled at the removal of the mural and said aesthetic or political preference should not weigh in on whether the mural remained or was removed.

"If they had to censor something, why didn't they just cross out the tomb stone with NYPD," wrote Inwood resident Rosemarie Kliegman on Facebook's Inwood Community Group.

"What the hell is the thinking here and where does any cop have the right to do this? They don't pay attention to the First Amendment?” she continued.

Despite the overwhelmingly negative response to the mural’s removal, not all Inwood residents opposed the NYPD's action.

“Let's just say that nobody would like a wall painted about them and their job, that is a bold lie,” wrote John Garvey on the site, identifying himself as a former cop.

"To lump all cops as killers is wrong."

This last sentence, you'll note is the quote I tacked to the top of this post. "To lump all cops as killers is wrong." Am I the only one who's kind of astonished at the way this ex-cop couches his indignation? "So the "bold lie," apparently is "to lump all cops as killers." Left open is the question of exactly what percentage of cops are killers. Yikes!

Carla Zanoni's original report must have been lodged in the back of my head when I read the new post from Ian Welsh from which I've taken the second quote at the top of this post. If "police are well aware that they have near full immunity," that "they can beat people, kill people, plant evidence on people and they will, in most cases, get away with it," then I don't imagine they would even give a second thought about painting over a mural. Which brings me to the final quote up top, in which Rosemarie Kliegman asks, as I would like to think any patriotic American would, "What the hell is the thinking here and where does any cop have the right to do this? [emphasis added]" And then she asks, "They don't pay attention to the First Amendment?"

You're probably laughing hysterically by now. Is Rosemarie on medication of some sort? Cops pay attention to the First Amendment? However, I would like to think, at least for this brief moment, that her response is exactly what we would hope any true-blue American's would be. Can it possibly be that cops aren't answerable to the most basic laws of the land?

I don't know how to break this to you, Rosemarie, but no, they don't pay attention to the First Amendment, or to any other fussy old rules they can get away with not paying attention to. As Ian Welsh writes, "The jokes about the crime of 'disrespect of cop' aren't jokes; it is very close to the most dangerous thing you can do around a cop, as any refusal to obey an order can be cause for a beating and a free-standing resisting arrest warrant (something which used to be impossible, but is now common)."

Ian is writing specifically here of the "thug" personality that's so common in Western security forces, which he distinguishes from the "ideologue" type once common, for example, in the old KGB, which brought both the advantages and the disadvantages" of "believers" -- the disadvantage he cites being: "They generally don't get off on violence and cruelty, though they do it when necessary."

Thugs, on the other hand, want a license to allow them to be brutal and cruel. They like power and they like to be able to tell other people what to do, to force them to obey and even to grovel. The jokes about the crime of "disrespect of cop" aren't jokes, it is very close to the most dangerous thing you can do around a cop, as any refusal to obey an order can be cause for a beating and a free-standing resisting arrest warrant (something which used to be impossible, but is now common.)

The problem with thugs is that they really aren't that discriminate. They like hurting people and forcing people to grovel and under the right circumstances they'd be just as happy to do it to their lords and masters as to dirty hippies. From the point of view of a real reformer, security forces, whether police or otherwise, are a huge problem. They're trained in violence, they like it and they want to keep doing it. If you fire them or lay them off in large numbers, they will turn their skill in violence against you. Mind, they are actually lousy at fighting anyone who can fight back, paramilitarized police are generally no threat to the real military, but they are excellent at terrorizing civilians.

In fairness, I would suggest that the constitutional protections against police misconduct defined by the Warren Court really did, in many ways, force police to do their jobs better -- and I do mean not just more correctly, but better. If you can't just beat a confession out of the first schlepp you pick up, you may actually be forced to solve the crime, and back up your arrest with legitimate evidence that can prove the case to a jury.

Of course the Rehnquist and Warren courts have been eroding those constitutional protections as fast as their Constitution-overwriting crayons will allow. And I suspect there's a lot of pent-up rage at the shilly-shalliers' refusal to just let cops be cops, not to mention the abusive reality that these days all the riffraff have cameras and you never know when you're going to wind up on YouTube. I suspect that a lot of this added rage is being released in all the extra-constitutional methodologies that have become part of modern police-state enforcement.

That enforcement isn't necessarily terribly efficient, however, and certainly doesn't come cheap, as we've found out when we get glimpses of the tab for the NYPD's repression of the Occupy movement, acting basically as the hired goons of the .01 Percent, except without the "hiring" part, since the elites got their dirty work done at taxpayer expense.

Ian notes:

One of the most notable things, to me, about the police, is that as they have become more and more "militarized" they have become more and more ineffective. It now takes 10 car loads to quell disturbances that 30 years ago a single car could have handled. I was recently treated to the spectacle of less than 50 Occupy Toronto protestors marching, surrounded on all three sides by police, a squad of horse-cops following and a bunch of paddy wagons in addition. Dealing with any sort of real crowds always involves bussing in cops from hundreds of miles around, and their reactions in crisis are slow, confused and yes, brutal.

What's more, "the police have also been corrupted,"

especially in the US, by seizure laws in general and the war on drugs in particular. The ability to seize cash and property without proving an underlying crime has turned the police into a crime syndicate themselves. I have friends who won't travel through entire US states because police systematically target out-of-state travelers in order to seize their money and property.

"All of this," he continues, "is before we get to the problem of prison guards."

Violent, brutal and numerous, they are politically powerful, their industry is the mainstay of entire towns, and they can't be laid off in large numbers for the same reason you can't get rid of police who are thugs, because they are trained in violence and cruelty and it can be reasonably expected that jobless ex-prison guards in large numbers will engage in violence.

"This problem is an ancient one," he says:

Teach men to be violent, and to enjoy cruelty, give them license and you become as much their prisoner as their master. For now the police are willing to do their master's bidding, and brutalize the citizenry, because they enjoy it and see citizens as lesser forms of life, who need to be taught their power. But they are a danger to everyone, their masters and anyone who would fix society alike, for there is no road to fixing many nations which does not include de-militarizing the police. And that removal of their power and license to abuse is something they are unlikely to tolerate.

I guess we can take comfort in the now-established reality that not all cops are killers.

I might just add that I hate this for the added reason that I would really and truly like to believe in the mission of the police as upholders of our common well-being. It's an unfortunate reality that not all citizens accept the responsibility of behaving in civilized fashion, and we necessarily have laws to protect our society, and it sure would be swell if that's what our men and women in blue were doing. Sometimes, of course, it is, and at those times we can believe in rubrics like New York's Finest. Too much of the time, though, it isn't. I can understand that many cops' feelings are hurt when they're called stuff like "pigs" and "fascist enforcers." Regrettably, when the cause is fascist-enforcer-type behavior, the name-calling truly isn't the problem.


AN ALEXANDER COCKBURN POSTSCRIPT

Drat the luck! I had finished the above post when I stumbled across Hendrik Hertzberg's new newyorker.com blogpost, "Alexander the Great (and the Grating)." The other day I grappled with my wildly conflicted feelings about the late Alexander Cockburn. I could easily have gotten a post out of it -- and may yet. Hertzberg has all sorts of inside knowledge of personalities and issues which I didn't and don't, and so I'm poorly equipped to evaluate his analysis of the "bad" Alex, much of it having to do with the legacy of his father. (By the way, I'd like to think HH already regrets putting into print the clever-sounding but screamingly idiotic notion of him as "John the Baptist to Christopher [Hitchens]'s Jesus," not to mention his preoccupation with their looks.)

I'm sure that some of what Hertzberg has to say about the bad side has validity, and the clear understanding that there were both good and bad sides comforts me in my helpless confusion at to what to make of the man and his legacy. More important, though, at least to me, is HH's description of the "good" Alex.

Within his ideological comfort zone, and when none of his tripwires had been tripped, Alexander Cockburn did a prodigious amount of valuable journalism. Among other services, he practically invented modern press criticism, now (unlike the press itself) a thriving industry. His crackling "Press Clips" column was the perfect vehicle for his talents, his insights, and his prejudices. It was the first thing thousands of readers, me included, turned to in the vital Voice of the seventies, and I don't remember it ever disappointing, even on those occasions, all too rare, when he took a swipe at me. After all, as Katrina vanden Heuvel, Alex's long-suffering editor at The Nation, said in her statement after his death, "It was an honor, in many ways, to join the growing list of people Alexander would attack with his pen."

Let me also pass along this parenthetical note from HH: "Among the many Cockburn tributes and anti-tributes, I’d especially recommend those of Michael Tomasky and Harold Meyerson. Jack Shafer’s is worth a read, too." I haven't read them yet, but don't let me stop you. (Okay, since writing this, I've read all three pieces. You do what you want.)

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