Month: December 2014

“Wall Streeters are Ready for Hillary … How many ways can they give?”

by Gaius Publius

This small piece at The Nation tells a very large tale — actually several. Let’s start with their infographic (click to make big):

And now from their comments:

Hillary Clinton is leaving nothing to chance, and neither is Goldman Sachs.
Since her first Senate campaign in 1999, the firm has been bankrolling
Clinton to the tune of millions. … Citigroup ranks No. 1 in lifetime donations to Clinton; Morgan Stanley is No. 6 and employs Clinton confidant Tom Nides.

Wall Streeters are ready for Hillary. …

So what are the tales this tells?

1. Clinton is openly called out as a Wall Street Candidate. This has been strongly implied elsewhere. Now it’s said in a big-name left-wing venue, in a way she may not be able to ignore. (I think she’s a Carbon Candidate as well, but more on that later.)
    
2. The Clinton Global Initiative foundation is also called out — as in effect a campaign slush fund, along with whatever else it is. This has also been strongly implied elsewhere — now it’s “out there,” said. (Next we need a call for CGI to make all of its contributions public.)
    
3. It sure look to me like The Nation has come out against her nomination (see also here). The rest of this issue hosts a variety of opinions (one example here), but still, they could have stayed mainly silent. More than anything, this infographic feature seems telling; the editors are concerned.

Remember: No real progressive save Sanders will enter the race until Hillary Clinton is out of it, or until she is painted accurately enough — put on the record enough — to be vulnerable. Thanks, pages of The Nation. No more corporate Democratic presidents, please; sixteen years is enough.

GP

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It’s not “Democratic Decline.” It’s a crisis of faith in the system.

by David Atkins

Charlie Cook has come out with what seems like the thousandth version of the “Declining Democrats need to give working-class voters something to believe in” story. That’s all well and good, of course: that the Democratic Party needs to embrace big ideas that restructure the economy in favor of the 99% is obvious and old hat by now at Hullabaloo and most other progressive venues.

But there’s something that sticks in the craw about the notion that the 2014 election represents a “decline” in the Democratic Party. Both the 2010 and 2014 elections were symptomatic of a newly sharpened trend in which Democratic voters turn out for Presidential elections but not midterms; 2014 combined this phenomenon with a very unfavorable Senate map and an economy that is still sour for nearly everyone but the top tier of incomes.

What we do know is that 2014 was an awful year for voter turnout generally. That’s not surprising considering that Americans trust their elite institutions less than they ever have, and that Congressional approval ratings are at or near all-time lows. People are discouraged and angry across the board; it just so happens that we came out of an electoral cycle in which more rabid conservatives turned out to the polls than staunch liberals did, with a particularly heavy impact on the Senate in conservative-leaning states.

There’s no guarantee, of course, but it seems quite likely that 2016 will see a reversal in which Democrats recapture the Senate and probably hold onto the White House, at which point the media will start sounding the death knell of the Republican Party, asking if the GOP will ever be relevant again. The press will try to point to some policy event that took place between November 2014 and November 2016 to account for the “shift”, as if it weren’t simply a turnout seesaw in an increasingly polarized and angry electorate, with the very few actual undecided (and mostly ignorant) voters simply bouncing back and forth trying to see if something different will work for a change.

It’s not that Democrats are in decline, so much as that trust in the entire system is in decline. Everyone can feel the economic uncertainty in their bones. Liberals and conservatives both feel like the country is sliding into a morass, even as the world is changing faster than they can process it.

I’m not saying this to let the Democratic Party off the hook for its failures. Introspection and a bolder economic progressivism is absolutely necessary to revitalize the Party and increase base turnout (to say nothing of actually solving the country’s problems.) But the constant negative focus on the Democratic Party is an distraction from the broader problem that turns the country’s deep, gnawing challenges into a horse-race narrative about public perception of the two political parties. It wasn’t more than two years ago that pundits were pounding nails into the GOP’s coffin. In two more years they’re probably be doing the same thing. It’s an easy way to avoid talking about the fundamental issues for which neither political party is actually providing any serious solutions.

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“There’s a history we have to overcome”
by Tom Sullivan

So, by now you know that the New York grand jury we wrote about on Tuesday returned its decision yesterday not to indict NYPD’s Officer Daniel Pantaleo for the July 17 chokehold death of Eric Garner. The 43 year-old black man died gasping “I can’t breathe” while in the custody of white officers outside a Staten Island convenience store after being accused of selling untaxed, loose cigarettes. The death was ruled a homicide by a New York medical examiner in August.

Oh, but the grand jury did indict the man who videoed the whole thing on his cellphone, so there’s that.

Protests broke out over the grand jury’s non-indictment, as expected, disrupting the Christmas tree lighting at Rockefeller Plaza. Police made about 30 arrests.

Arrests going down at 47th and 6th Avenue. Massive standoff between police and protesters. pic.twitter.com/b9Xcgqhuzo— ANIMALNewYork (@ANIMALNewYork) December 4, 2014

Reacting to the grand jury decision, the New York Times’ Charles Blow wrote that biases are pervasive and sometimes unnoticed, just beyond our awareness:

I would love to live in a world where that wasn’t the case. Even more, I would love my children to inherit a world where that wasn’t the case, where the margin for error for them was the same as the margin for error for everyone else’s children, where I could rest assured that police treatment would be unbiased. But I don’t. Reality doesn’t bend under the weight of wishes. Truth doesn’t grow dim because we squint.

We must acknowledge — with eyes and minds wide open — the world as it is if we want to change it.

But New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s statement went to the heart of the matter. De Blasio has had to have “the talk” with his own son about how to behave in encounters with police:

This is profoundly personal to me. I was at the White House the other day, and the president of the United States turned to me, and he met Dante a few months ago, and he said that Dante reminded him of what he looked like as a teenager. And he said I know you see this crisis through a very personal lens. And I said to him, I did.

Because Chirlane and I have had to talk to Dante for years about the dangers that he may face. A good young man, law-abiding young man who would never think to do anything wrong. And yet, because of a history that still hangs over us, the dangers he may face, we’ve had to literally train him—as families have all over this city for decades—in how to take special care in any encounter he has with the police officers who are there to protect him.

And that painful sense of contradiction that our young people see first, that our police are here to protect us, and we honor that, and at the same time, there’s a history we have to overcome, because for so many of our young people, there’s a fear. And for so many of our families, there’s a fear.

So I’ve had to worry over the years. Chirlane’s had to worry. Is Dante safe each night? There are so many families in this city who feel that each and every night. Is my child safe? And not just from some of the painful realities—crime and violence in some of our neighborhoods—but is safe from the very people they want to have faith in as their protectors.

Bloomberg reports that the U.S. Justice Department will conduct a civil rights probe into the episode.

“We are dealing with centuries of racism that has brought us to this day,” the mayor said. “That is how fundamental the task at hand is: to turn from that history and make a change that is profound and lasting.”

Eric Garner didn’t get a chance to hold his breath waiting for that.

“Just imagine if Officer Wilson in Ferguson had just taken a step back”

by digby

 Peter King needs to STFU. Now he’s saying that Eric Garner pretty much killed himself because he was overweight and had asthma and couldn’t take the chokehold. He should have thought ahead. Also too, it’s simply unbelievable that a man really couldn’t breathe when he said he couldn’t breathe — and then died on the spot:

Even though video captured Garner saying that he couldn’t breathe as officer Daniel Pantaleo placed him in a chokehold and wrestled him to the ground, King said that “police had no reason to know that he was in serious condition.”

“The fact is if you can’t breathe, you can’t talk,” King said. “If you’ve ever seen anyone resisting arrest, I’ve seen it, and it’s been white guys, and they’re always saying, ‘You’re breaking my arm, you’re choking me, you’re doing this,’ police hear this all the time.”

In August, the New York City medical examiner ruled Garner’s death a homicide caused by compression to his neck and chest, in addition to the way that he was positioned on the ground as he was arrested. The medical examiner also determined that Garner’s asthma, obesity and hypertensive cardiovascular disease contributed to his death.

Yeah, whenever someone claims cop is hurting them it’s really because they’re doing it to themselves. Whiners, all of ’em.

This is a common excuse the law and order types make for deaths at the hands of police. Taser deaths, for instance, are often attributed to underlying heart conditions or this bogus diagnosis of “excited delirium” that only afflicts people who die in police custody rather than the 50,000 volts of electricity that was inflicted upon them.

Lawrence O’Donnell featured a very smart discussion tonight which he started off by noting that police officers encounter these sorts of situations all the time and the difference between those that end tragically like Michael Brown and Eric Garner and those that don’t is “the better and cooler” judgment of the police. He was speaking with two police analysts Eugene O’Donnell and Jim Cavanaugh and Cavanaugh brought up the fact that the police used to engage in high speed chases no matter what the crime but realized over the years that the dangers outweighed the necessity to catch all but the most violent felons. He said:

We need to take that attitude to the street. If you would just imagine if Officer Wilson in Ferguson had just taken a step back after the confrontation with the vehicle and after Michael Brown ran away. Just after he called for back-up that was 90 seconds away. Where was Michael Brown going to go? He’s going to the hospital, he’s been shot.  He’s not going the Katmandu, on an airplane. You’re going to catch him. Just take a step back. In Mr Garner’s case, as well. When he put’s his hands like this it’s like “ok ok”, when they get on his back, take a step back. In the Cleveland case with the child, if you drive your car in like that if you have an escaped felon with a gun your dead, he’s going to shoot you as soon as you drive up. What kind of tactic is that?

So take a step back and be smart and we can police better than we’re doing.

O’Donnell went on to talk about police training that includes a responsibility to reasonably retreat in situations where there is nothing at stake in closing in someone. Clearly, unarmed citizens at the top of the list. The only thing at stake there is the officer’s pride or desire to punish them in the moment for failing to instantly comply.

I watch cops all the time in LA dealing with various altercations. One thing I know for sure. They are in no hurry. They take hours to deal with virtually any call, standing around shooting the shit with each other, taking their time no matter what. Unless someone is “defying” their order, in which case they simply refuse to take even an extra five minutes to try to defuse the situation. It’s not about time, it’s about authority. And that’s what we need to change.

I’ve been writing about this culture of instant compliance in my work about about tasers for nearly a decade. It’s a problem. It’s a particular problem with the kind of racial bias that pervades so much of white America and it’s a problem for the mentally ill and the disabled who often simply cannot comply either through lack of understanding or emotional agitation or sometimes because they are in the midst of a seizure or are deaf and literally cannot hear what the policeman is demanding that he do. There are dozens of examples of all of those situations.

As the police analyst Eugene O’Donnell pointed out, there are many cops who are skilled enough to handle these situations peacefully and there are many other professions that have strategies to deal with potentially violent altercations without escalating them. The militarization of the police and the kill or be killed combat zone attitude adopted by so many departments makes little use of any skills other than sheer force when what largely makes for effective policing in a free society are things like psychology, patience, common sense, empathy, confidence and maturity. If these skills were more highly valued it would be easy to see that stepping back from pulling your gun and shooting at Michael Brown or continuing to talk with Eric Garner to get him to calm down, maybe even issue a warning instead of an arrest for such a minor crime, could have prevented the deaths of both of them.

The police need to learn how to de-escalate these situations instead of turning them into tests of will. These are citizens not enemies.

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“I can’t breathe”

by digby

The killing of Eric Garner wasn’t the first time we’ve been able to hear someone begging for his life, unable to breathe, as police killed them on camera:

This is what he looked like at the hospital.  He lived for five more days.

It didn’t help that it was filmed. It didn’t even help that they were indicted:

A jury has acquitted two former Fullerton, California, police officers on trial in the beating death of Kelly Thomas, a mentally ill and homeless man.

The verdict was read in a Santa Ana courtroom Monday afternoon. Eight women and four men began deliberating the case on Thursday.

“I’m just horrified. They got away with murdering my son,” Cathy Thomas, the victim’s mother, told reporters after the verdict was read.

The victim’s father, Ron Thomas, said that everyone now needs to be afraid.

“This is carte blanche to police officers to do whatever they want,” he told reporters.

Why would any cop think otherwise?

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They “won one”

by digby

The http://t.co/FUEjIiEByg comment section on #EricGarner http://t.co/S9qr5XMdW4 pic.twitter.com/KqBXNFdkty— Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) December 3, 2014

These are New York’s finest lettin’ it all hang out.

I love how they believe it’s unusual for a cop not to be charged in a killing of an unarmed citizen. If only …

Update:

PETER KING HAS A CLASSY RESPONSE TO THE GARNER DECISION – After a grand jury declined to indict a New York police officer who choked an unarmed black man to death on camera, Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) took the occasion to remind black people of the NYPD’s greatness. “During this tense time in New York, it must be noted and remembered that no organization has done more to safeguard the lives of young African Americans in New York City than the NYPD,” King wrote on Facebook. “It is time for all New Yorkers – and indeed all Americans – to acknowledge this fact.”

Oh, and just so you don’t get the idea that New York isn’t serious about justice:

The Queens activist charged with assault for throwing fake blood on Police Commissioner Bill Bratton and his security detail last week has posted bail.

Diego Ibanez was released on November 26 after spending two nights in jail, according to his lawyer, Eliza Orlins. She added that she was unsure who put up the money; shortly after Ibanez’s arraignment, fellow activists took to Twitter to raise money for the $20,000 in cash or $30,000 bond he would need in order to get out. According to one tweet from OWS Bail Fund, which raises money for legal expenses for activists in New York, the group managed to raise “about half” of Ibanez’s bail money.

He’s facing possible decades in prison. For real.

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Tom Tomorrow cuts through the BS

by digby

Via DKos:

Yup.  And double yup.

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“Just the facts” don’t answer the main question

by digby

Doug McIntyre at the Daily Beast scolds people who question the Grand Jury decision not to indict Darren Wilson because he says that we won’t face the clear facts:

I wasn’t there when Brown had his fatal encounter with the now former Ferguson police officer. Chances are neither were you. I also wasn’t on the Sea of Tranquility when Neil Armstrong took “one giant leap for mankind,” but I believe mankind took a giant leap.

In other words, we’re all entitled to believe things about events for which we weren’t present. But the fact is that the testimony of multiple grand jury witnesses supports Wilson’s version of events, as does the forensic evidence. Still, there are many millions who have reached the same conclusion as Michael Brown’s mother; they don’t believe a word of it.
[…]
It’s healthy to be skeptical of official sources, but at some point we have to agree on something or else consensus and civil society as we know it will shatter like the plate glass in a Ferguson Missouri storefront.

Setting aside that there were plenty of witnesses who disputed Wilson’s account, that Wilson’s behavior after the event was highly questionable,that the Grand Jury process was bizarre and unusual, this whole line of discussion in a red herring. The reason people are upset about the non-indictment isn’t because they don’t believe Darren Wilson testified truthfully, it’s that his decision to shoot Michael Brown was based upon dubious justification. It’s perfectly fair to think that a trial is the proper place to sort out the question of whether a policeman should have killed an unarmed citizen under this set of facts.

You could believe that Brown was belligerent and that he reached for the gun and that he hit Wilson and still believe it’s wrong for a police officer to get out of his car and shoot an unarmed suspect who is several feet away from him. If there’s one part of Wilson’s story that it’s certainly reasonable to wonder about, it’s that he thought Brown was reaching for his waistband and charging him like a demonic, comic book super-villain. Some of us think that too many people are having this particular delusion and shooting too many unarmed kids and that the system is far too lenient about it.

Apparently this alleged “finding of fact” ends all the questions and means that we’re also supposed to agree it’s fine for police officers to shoot unarmed teenagers if they think they look like demons. Do we now have consensus on that? I hadn’t heard.

And, by the way, there’s a long history of the unarmed black “brute” allegedly forcing white people to kill them. There used to be a “consensus” among white people that this was ok. It’s not. It never was. And there should be plenty of skepticism when people use that defense.

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Rick Perry has signed 279 death warrants. 279!!! And he wants to be president.

by digby

I don’t know if you’ve heard but Rick Perry is about to kill his 279th person today. And this person is severely mentally ill. It remains to be seen if he will agree to commute the sentence, even temporarily, or if the Supremes will weigh in. But the mere fact that this is happening is enough to turn your stomach.

I wrote about this and the history of the Democratic Party’s cynical calculation on the question of the death penalty at Salon today. Here’s the opening:

Perhaps the ugliest moment in former President Bill Clinton’s career was his decision to race back to Arkansas in the middle of the 1992 campaign to oversee the execution of a mentally disabled man named Ricky Ray Rector. It was a perfect example of fighting the last war in which it had become conventional wisdom that Michael Dukakis had blown his chances at the presidency largely because of his position on the death penalty. His answer to moderator Bernard Shaw’s question of whether he would support the death penalty should his wife be raped and murdered was, “no, I don’t, Bernard, and I think you know that I’ve opposed the death penalty during all of my life. I don’t see any evidence that it’s a deterrent and I think there are better and more effective ways to deal with violent crime.” Journalist Roger Simon recounted the incident in 2007 and described the reaction among the reporters at the debate:

In the press room, the murmurs over Shaw’s question now turned to mutters over Dukakis’ answer. “He’s through.” “That’s all she wrote.” “Get the hook!”

The CW at the time was that the answer was seen as professorial and most importantly, lacking in the emotion we evidently require in a president. He should have rent his garments and howled in anger at the mere idea of such a terrible circumstance. But the lesson the Democrats took from that incident was that no candidate for president could be elected if he or she were against the death penalty as a matter of principle. (This was one of many opportunistic capitulations on alleged principles to come — welfare and gun control being just two examples.)

I also recount this notorious example of puerile sadism:

In the week before [Karla Faye Tucker’s] execution, Bush says, Bianca Jagger and a number of other protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Tucker. “Did you meet with any of them?” I ask.

Bush whips around and stares at me. “No, I didn’t meet with any of them,” he snaps, as though I’ve just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. “I didn’t meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with [Tucker], though. He asked her real difficult questions, like ‘What would you say to Governor Bush?’

“What was her answer?” I wonder.

“Please,” Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, “don’t kill me.”

I wonder if maybe Rick Perry will take to opportunity to be a “compassionate conservative” today. After all, his killing credentials are impeccable. He could use this as a “Sistah Soljah” moment.

But I doubt he’ll do it. These guys have never shown the least bit of concern for the morality of what they’re doing. Why start now?

Update: Thank God

11:47 a.m. Wednesday: The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay of execution. The stay is only issued “pending further order of the court,” which is expected to set a schedule for consideration of Panetti’s appeal.

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Bill Moyers on The Lives of the Very Very Rich

by Gaius Publius

Near the bottom of this piece is one of those videos I mentioned a bit ago, ones I’ve been saving to show. This is about the very very rich. Most people don’t have any idea what the very very rich — the “billionaire class” as Bernie Sanders calls them — actually live like. Consider this chart, starting from the bottom:

The bottom line shows what people think is the ideal wealth distribution. But since they know the distribution is out of whack, they take their best guess at how out of whack things are, shown in the middle line. No one has a clue, it seems, that the top line is what’s really going on. In other words (rounding slightly):

• Ideal: Top 20% owns 30% of all American wealth.
• Best guess: Top 20% owns 60% of all American wealth.
• In reality: Top 20% owns 85% of all American wealth.

Now look at the top 1% and you see vast differences in the various strata, the layers. For example, this is from 2011 data (again slightly rounded):

• Average income of Top 0.01% — $23,800,000
• Average income of the rest of the Top 0.1% —  $2,800,000
• Average income of the rest of the Top 1% — $1,020,000
• Average income of the rest of the Top 10% — $161,000

If you just looked at the top 1% as a whole, that huge gap between the 0.01% (the “1% of the 1%”) and everyone else really skews the averages. You have to look at the segments individually to see them properly.

To show that in another way, if there were only 100 total people in the Top 1%, the top one person in that group would take in almost $24 million per year. The next nine would average only $2.8 million. The remaining 90 people would average just $1 million each. That one person is a king.

The Wealth Disparity at the Top is Huge and Belongs to Just a Few

Keep that income gap of nearly 10-to-1 between the Top 0.01% and the rest of the One-Percent in mind. Now let’s look at the population size. If there are 150 million individual (non-corporate) IRS returns filed each year (very close; see Table 2; pdf), there are 1.5 million in the 1%, and 15,000 in the 0.01%. Of these, roughly 500 are already billionaires by wealth.

Five hundred billionaires, 15,000 people all averaging nearly $24,000,000 per year, and every group below them averages about a tenth or less in earnings. Look at that list above, and notice the bottom bullet. Everyone from the top 2% through the top 10% averages less than $200,000 per year — 1/120th of our lucky 15,000.

Why point this out? Because people have no idea what life for the 15,000 is actually like, much less life for someone in the David Koch class. When we think of the wealthy, we imagine McMansions blown big; we conjure pictures we’ve seen from wealthier neighborhoods, and we just … scale up a bit. We see monster Cadillac SUVs and say, “Ah, the very rich.” People who live like us, but with more stuff.

We know that this can’t be true, quite, but it can’t be off by too much, right? And then we go on with our lives.

One Reason We Don’t Have Revolutions

Our image of the very very rich — McMansions, only scaled up; nice cars, only pricier; like us, but with more toys — is very very wrong. It’s also one reason we haven’t had a class revolt since the New Deal era. Chris Rock talked about it in the context of Ferguson:

[Q] For all the current conversation about income inequality, class is still sort of the elephant in the room. 

[Rock] Oh, people don’t even know. If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets. If the average person could see the Virgin Airlines first-class lounge, they’d go, “What? What? This is food, and it’s free, and they … what? Massage? Are you kidding me?”

Except even he doesn’t scale up enough. These people never ride first class because they never fly commercial. He rides first class; they own airplanes. They don’t own homes, they own estates — so many of them in fact that not one is “home” in the normal sense. Now extend that — for most of these people, not one country is home either.

You and me, we live in a city. Chris Rock, he lives in a city and travels a lot. Real Money lives in the world, everywhere, all of it. And most are loyal to none of it.

Bill Moyers Shows How “Real Money” Lives — In Their “Private Snow Globe”

Now the film. It’s about the lives of the very very rich, the places they buy to rarely live in, and how they’re transforming cities like New York. Enjoy.

From the transcript, a tease (italics mine):

BILL MOYERS: A private city in the sky for the rich — the very, very rich. As Goldberger wrote: “if you seek a symbol of income inequality, look no farther than 57th Street.”

PAUL GOLDBERGER: They’re mostly the international super-rich. It’s a whole category of people. Most people are living there part time and have other residences either in this region, or elsewhere in the US or elsewhere in the world, or all of the above. And they’re people who can afford to spend l0, 15, 20, 30 million dollars on an apartment. …

BILL MOYERS: The penthouse apartment is under contract for a reported $90 million. The hedge fund tycoon behind the deal told The New York Times he thought “it would be fun” to own “the Mona Lisa of apartments,” although he has no intention of living there. …

PAUL GOLDBERGER: There’s a prominent real estate appraiser in New York who referred to these buildings as safe deposit boxes in the sky. Places where people put cash and they rarely visit themselves.

BILL MOYERS: So think of them as plush Swiss banks, with maid service, for people who, as one critic wrote, “see the city as their private snow globe.” When this building, 432 Park Avenue, is finished next year, it will surpass even One57, climbing 150 feet taller than the Empire State Building before its spire.

No pharaoh ever dreamed on so grand a scale. Each tower is a feat of technological, economic and political engineering. Promoted to the very rich as the very best.

Note the amazing images; the text can’t do them justice. Note also the hubris, the mark of the billionaire class.

These people control most aspects of public life. Whether you live poorly or well, you work so they can be richer. You’re fired when they want you fired. You’re killed — in their wars; by their poisons; by their unaffordable health care system; by your poverty; by their police — when they want you to die.

Like fish in water, you live with their greed every day. You watch their propaganda (we call it “entertainment”). You vote for their candidates. Their touch and reach is everywhere, yet they’re invisible to us. The key to their destruction is to expose their lives to view.

I’ve talked about “collapse” — social, political, climatological — most recently on Virtually Speaking. When collapses come, they usually come fast. The last time we came close was the Depression. If we’re poised on the cusp of another, god help us … no one will have fun then, not us, not them. But if things do break apart, it won’t be for lack of patience on our side, but hubris on theirs. They will have forced it themselves … unless they’re stopped.

GP

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