Author: Tom Sullivan

SCOTUS has your back


by Tom Sullivan

No, not your back, innocent victim of law enforcement gone wrong. They’ve got law enforcement’s back. You’re on your own. The dean of the School of Law at the University of California, Irvine, Erwin Chemerinsky, explains. There’s not only immunity for cities for the misconduct of their employees — for, say, wrongful death or prosecutorial misconduct — but immunity for officials themselves against personal lawsuits, and “qualified immunity” for officials unless “every reasonable official” would have known the conduct in question was unlawful. Such as shooting Michael Brown in the head, assuming that was excessive or not self defense.

The Supreme Court has used this doctrine in recent years to deny damages to an eighth-grade girl who was strip-searched by school officials on suspicion that she had prescription-strength ibuprofen. It has also used it to deny damages to a man who, under a material-witness warrant, was held in a maximum-security prison for 16 days and on supervised release for 14 months, even though the government had no intention of using him as a material witness or even probable cause to arrest him. In each instance, the court stressed that the government officer could not be held liable, even though the Constitution had clearly been violated.

Perhaps like me, you’ve noticed a spate of videos surfacing in which a prone suspect is beaten or repeatedly tased as police mechanically scream “Stop resisting!” Or repeatedly yell “Stop going for my gun!” at a suspect with his hands up (as in this video). Make of that what you will. The Supreme Court, it seems, will not.

But in the wake of the police shooting of Michael Brown in Missouri and an Ohio Walmart patron shopping for a pellet rifle (both men black), one has to wonder whether we as a country haven’t created the conditions for these types of tragedies. In the wake of 9/11, Vice-President Cheney advised America that our response might take us to “the dark side.” He would know.

And with the post-9/11 deployment of military gear and chemical weapons against civilian protesters across the country, are we as a culture encouraging — recommending — their use? The famous Stanford Prison and the Milgram experiments showed how, when ordinary people are placed in a position of authority in an environment that encourages wielding imperious power, authoritarian tendencies surface where they might have remained latent. Not to deny the personal culpability of those deserving the accountability Cheney, et. al. have avoided, but given the commonalities in these police shootings and other violent encounters, we might consider whether, America having gazed “long into an abyss” is seeing the abyss gaze back.

Not to mention how, as I hear, black men are calling into radio talk shows complaining they cannot even enjoy driving the cars they worked hard to earn because of being regularly stopped by police in which the first words police utter are “Where are the drugs?” Or producer Charles Belk on his way to the Emmys this week being detained in Beverly Hills for six hours as a suspect in a bank holdup because, “Hey, I was ‘tall,’ ‘bald,’ a ‘male’ and ‘black,’ so I fit the description.”
Charlie Pierce at Esquire:

And there still will be people who will claim not to “understand” why black people dread the approach of the police.
… because it’s not about race because it’s never about race.

America needs to stop staring into the abyss and spend some time staring into the mirror.

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Keeping them in their places

by Tom Sullivan

A report from the Guttmacher Institute shows how cutbacks to reproductive health services have particularly hurt poorer women. Even as the need has increased over the last decade-plus, the number of women actually receiving publicly funded assistance has fallen by 9 percent.

While public support for contraceptive services for poorer women dates back to 1970, that portion of the safety net has been failing, particularly in states that refuse to expand Medicaid as part of the Affordable Care Act, and with increasing attacks on women’s health services, writes Tara Culp-Ressler.

The issue has recently been getting worse. In the period between 2010 and 2012 alone — when attacks on publicly-funded clinics intensified — the number of poor adult women in need of contraceptive services increased by 12 percent. In Texas, where lawmakers’ crusade against abortion has undermined the entire family planning landscape over the past two years, this health care crisis is coming into sharp focus. Advocates are holding up the state as a negative example of what happens without Title X.

Michael Hiltzik points out the folly in attacking Title X reproductive health services.

In more recent years, however, congressional conservatives have had their knives out for Title X. The program was openly made a target of the right wing’s attack on Planned Parenthood, for example. The religion-based attack on ACA-mandated contraceptive services–the Hobby Lobby effect–is more of the same.
Let’s be blunt here: There is no more witless public-health position than one that targets women’s reproductive health. Preventing unwanted pregnancies pays off in multiples by reducing the burden on healthcare institutions and improving women’s work and career prospects and the health of their families.

Yet ultimately these policies are neither about economics nor religion. Which makes it even more annoying when religious business people argue that it is their rights being infringed by being required to pay for employee health care plans that include coverage for contraception.Employment is a form of contract in which employers agree to compensate employees for their labor with a package of cash and benefits. Once those services have been rendered, the employer has incurred an enforceable debt. The money passing through the employer’s account to purchase health insurance he had contracted to pay as compensation is no longer his, but the employee’s to spend as she/he chooses. But framing it that way treats employees as equal economic partners in the employer/employee relationship. And in the new neo-feudalism, “job creators” can’t have that.In the end, the attacks on women’s reproductive health services — as well as on labor — are not just about religion or economics, but about power. About reaffirming who’s in charge and who isn’t. As I observed at my home blog,

In every economic argument these days, notice the unstated assumption, how among both top Republicans and Democrats that the concerns of the employer, the entrepreneur — his needs, his convenience, his profitability, his confidence, his incentives — are always front and center, the primary topic of debate and of legislation. And the needs and concerns of workers without whom nothing gets done are a secondary, even tertiary concern. Because all Americans are equal, but some are more equal than others. Once you tune your ear to listen for it, you hear it everywhere.Welcome to Orwell’s Farm.

Confederate States of mind

by Tom Sullivan

Dave Neiwert linked the other day to this Doug Muder piece that traces the origins of some of our current rhetoric. He begins, “Tea Partiers say you don’t understand them because you don’t understand American history. That’s probably true, but not in the way they want you to think.” Muder contends that while the North won the Civil War, the planter aristocrats won Reconstruction, effectively nullifying the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, thereby preserving the social order and power structures God himself intended — to make and keep the planter aristocrats wealthy.
“[I]n the Confederate mind, no democratic process could legitimate such a change in the social order. It simply could not be allowed to stand, and it did not stand,” writes Muder. So, perhaps, it is with obstructionism in Congress today.

When in the majority, Confederates protect the established order through democracy. If they are not in the majority, but have power, they protect it through the authority of law. If the law is against them, but they have social standing, they create shams of law, which are kept in place through the power of social disapproval. If disapproval is not enough, they keep the wrong people from claiming their legal rights by the threat of ostracism and economic retribution. If that is not intimidating enough, there are physical threats, then beatings and fires, and, if that fails, murder.

What was old is new again. The South may be a place, writes Muder, “but the Confederacy is a worldview.” One not unique to the South. Gadsden flags appeared after Barack Obama was elected. Talk of tyranny was in the air and ammunition shelves emptied. There were implied threats of violence. Open carry advocates now strut through downtowns with AR-15s. (No threat implied, of course.) Echoes of the Reconstruction-era “rifle clubs,” perhaps.

One book Muder does not reference is Stephen Budiansky’s The Bloody Shirt, which covers the same period, the same cries of tyranny, and the rifle clubs mentioned above. In the Prologue, he writes,

A bald fact: Generations would hear how the South suffered “tyranny” under Reconstruction. Conveniently forgotten was the way that word was universally defined by white Southerners at the time: as a synonym for letting black men vote at all. A “remonstrance” issued by South Carolina’s Democratic Central Committee in 1868, personally signed by the leading native white political figures of the state, declared that there was no greater outrage, no greater despotism, than the provision for universal male suffrage just enacted in the state’s new constitution. There was but one possible consequence: “A superior race is put under the rule of an inferior race.” They offered a stark warning: “We do not mean to threaten resistance by arms. But the white people of our State will never quietly submit to negro rule. This is a duty we owe to the proud Caucasian race, whose sovereignty on earth God has ordained.”

That’s not an argument for slavery or for re-enslavement, but a demand for the continuation of superior privilege by people convinced they are entitled to wield power and fearful of sharing it. That is, it’s about power. Tribal power and racially tinged, but about power nonetheless.

The re-imposition of restrictive — and targeted — voting laws half a century after passage of the Civil Rights and the Voting Rights Acts seems eerily reminiscent of the post-Civil War resistance described above. It was then and is now a denial of the equality among men which the Founders considered (in theory, anyway) self-evident and the foundation of democracy.

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Tom Cruise in a jetpackby Tom SullivanIMDB describes Minority Report thusly:

In the year 2054 A.D. crime is virtually eliminated from Washington D.C. thanks to an elite law enforcing squad “Precrime”. They use three gifted humans (called “Pre-Cogs”) with special powers to see into the future and predict crimes beforehand.

Meanwhile, here in the past an elite research team at N.C. State University is at work on a top secret project, Future States Processing (announced a year ago yesterday):

RALEIGH — As the field of “big data” continues to grow in importance, N.C. State University has landed a big coup – a major lab for the study of data analysis, funded by the National Security Agency.

This is from the project’s Executive Summary [emphasis mine]:

Broadly, Future States Processing (FSP) is “a mechanism that conceives of the state of an entity (e.g., person, place, or thing) at some point in the future based on a current collection of information.” One challenge is to decompose the broad aim of FSP into a set of key research areas. The group has identified five areas: narrative processing (addressed in another research theme), which allows the identification of emerging topics and narratives from structured and unstructured data; state description, which includes entity, feature, and attribute identification; state modeling, which identifies relationships and dependencies and creates a formal representation; process and prediction models, which infers subsequent states given the current description and a context; and uncertainty quantification, which addresses the precision with which the predictions can be made. Predictions must be made within a context, and an unaddressed issue is context generation. As the group identifies example problems, the preference is to focus on people as entities and to predict behavior or motivation.

Some people are paid to lose sleep over those unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know. For that, there’s “big data.” And now that No Such Agency has a place to store it (Bluffdale, UT), N.C. State just needs to develop the right set of algorithms to predict people’s future behaviors.But there’s still the unaddressed problem of “context generation.”Describe your most paranoid fantasy and — with the right data “corpus” — No Such Agency will tell you who’s most likely working on turning that threat into a reality.So you can arrest or kill them.What could go worng?What could go worng?

Using up all kinds of cop equipment

by Tom Sullivan

For a good bit of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I commuted home on Fridays on I-26 in South Carolina and North Carolina. I could kind of gauge the wars’ progress by how many low-boys carrying Humvees, up-armored Humvees, and MRAPs (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected armored troop carriers) passed me on my commute as they headed from their Midwest factories to Joint Base Charleston to be airlifted to the war zones.

Plenty never made it home, I’m sure. But after this week’s events in Ferguson MO, I have to wonder where the rest wound up. Chase Madar explains how one MRAP ended up at Ohio State University in case a frat party got out of hand.

That MRAP came, like so much other equipment police departments are stocking up on — from tactical military vests, assault rifles, and grenade launchers to actual tanks and helicopters — as a freebie via a Pentagon-organized surplus military equipment program.  As it happens, police departments across the country are getting MRAPs like OSU’s, including the Dakota County Sheriff’s Office in Minnesota.  It’s received one of 18 such decommissioned military vehicles already being distributed around that state.  So has Warren County which, like a number of counties in New York state, some quite rural, is now deploying Afghan War-grade vehicles.  (Nationwide, rural counties have received a disproportionate percentage of the billions of dollars worth of surplus military equipment that has gone to the police in these years.)

So lots of that deficit-funded hardware deployed to fight ’em over there so we wouldn’t have to fight ’em over here has come home to fight — for lack of terrorists in places like Ferguson, MO — whatever “threats” are lying around. Congressman Hank Johnson, D-Ga has proposed legislation to restrict the militarization of neighborhood policing.

It was just typical “cop equipment hanging around the police officer station” that rural Massachusetts police couldn’t wait to use up against the notorious litterer, Arlo Guthrie. Now it’s state-of-the-art war-fighting machinery. If that’s meant to make Americans feel safer, it ain’t working.

Drones Over Your Homes



by Tom Sullivan

So in North Carolina’s capitol, one of Charlie Pierce’s Laboratories Of Democracy, Gov. Pat McCrory is rushing to fix items in the budget he signed just days ago. Like a “provision that would stop automatically paying for enrollment growth at public schools.” 

It’s just another of those items slipped anonymously into a must-pass budget bill. Among the hidden pearls is this ALEC-inspired gem found by Asheville-based activist Barry Summers. He wrote about it this week in the Asheville Citizen-Times:

H1099 was never heard by any Senate committee, but it has become State law nonetheless. It allows warrantless drone surveillance at all public events (including those on private property) or any place which is in “plain view” of a law enforcement officer. It has other loopholes and deficiencies which taken altogether, make a mockery of the “right-to-privacy” anywhere but inside your home with the shades drawn tight.
Not surprisingly, the ACLU-NC, which had partnered with conservatives to draft the earlier, tougher H312 (Protecting Privacy Act), has come out solidly against H1099.
It was conceived in the NC House Committee on Unmanned Aircraft Systems, chaired by an executive of a company that develops drone technology for the military (no conflict of interest there, right?). They solicited no testimony from anyone whose focus is the preservation of civil liberties. Instead, they invited drone manufacturers, law enforcement and others who clearly wanted the NCGA to open up the skies to drones with the fewest possible restrictions. Concerns about privacy were given little consideration.

These drones might be GoPro-equipped flyers like the one that just found its way to the bottom of the Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone. Or they might be the type that until recently the San Jose Police Department denied purchasing with a Homeland Security grant. Or they might be, as Summers discovered in a presentation to a state committee, whatever specially equipped drones are being flown out of the eastern North Carolina airstrip owned by the firm formerly known as Blackwater.

I wonder, Wayne LaPierre, can they see into your gun safe and count your AR-15s?
It’s a rare instance where the ACLU and the tea party are on the same page. The local tea party group represented by state Rep. Tim Moffitt, R-Buncombe, one of ALEC’s point men on drone legislation in NC, seems to have caught Moffitt claiming that the drone bill “is more than likely not going anywhere.” This, after the language he sponsored got slipped into the budget bill he voted for and Pat McCrory signed. People who might have been staunch supporters have discovered that Moffitt thinks they’re stupid or else he’s incompetent.
Moffitt is up for reelection in November. Good luck with that.