RSN: The Plutocrats Are Winning. Don't Let Them!, From Halliburton to Walmart, These Big Corporations Will Make Money off of Climate Change

Don’t Go Ebenezer Scrooge on Us Folks!

So far we’re looking at the worst December in our history. That’s bad. But we certainly have the capacity to change that, and that’s good. A lot of Readers have helped. How about you?

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Marc Ash 
Founder, Reader Supported News

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Bill Moyers | The Plutocrats Are Winning. Don't Let Them!

Bill Moyers, Reader Supported News
Moyers writes: "Did any voter in any district or state in the last Congressional election vote to give that billion dollar loophole to a handful of billionaires? To allow corporations to hide their political contributions? To add $1.4 trillion to the national debt? Of course not."
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ear Readers:

In the fall of 2001, in the aftermath of 9/11, as families grieved and the nation mourned, Washington swarmed with locusts of the human kind: wartime opportunists, lobbyists, lawyers, ex-members of Congress, bagmen for big donors: all of them determined to grab what they could for their corporate clients and rich donors while no one was looking.

Across the land, the faces of Americans of every stripe were stained with tears. Here in New York, we still were attending memorial services for our firemen and police. But in the nation's capital, within sight of a smoldering Pentagon that had been struck by one of the hijacked planes, the predator class was hard at work pursuing private plunder at public expense, gold-diggers in the ashes of tragedy exploiting our fear, sorrow, and loss.

What did they want? The usual: tax cuts for the wealthy and big breaks for corporations. They even made an effort to repeal the alternative minimum tax that for fifteen years had prevented companies from taking so many credits and deductions that they owed little if any taxes. And it wasn't only repeal the mercenaries sought; they wanted those corporations to get back all the minimum tax they had ever been assessed.

They sought a special tax break for mighty General Electric, although you would never have heard about it if you were watching GE's news divisions -- NBC News, CNBC, or MSNBC, all made sure to look the other way. They wanted to give coal producers more freedom to pollute, open the Alaskan wilderness to drilling, empower the president to keep trade favors for corporations a secret while enabling many of those same corporations to run roughshod over local communities trying the protect the environment and their citizens' health.

It was a disgusting bipartisan spectacle. With words reminding us of Harry Truman's description of the GOP as "guardians of privilege," the Republican majority leader of the House dared to declare that "it wouldn't be commensurate with the American spirit" to provide unemployment and other benefits to laid-off airline workers. As for post 9/11 Democrats, their national committee used the crisis to call for widening the soft-money loophole in our election laws.

America had just endured a sneak attack that killed thousands of our citizens, was about to go to war against terror, and would soon send an invading army to the Middle East. If ever there was a moment for shared sacrifice, for putting patriotism over profits, this was it. But that fall, operating deep within the shadows of Washington's Beltway, American business and political mercenaries wrapped themselves in red, white and blue and went about ripping off a country in crisis.

H.L. Mencken got it right: "Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it."

Fourteen years later, we can see more clearly the implications. After three decades of engineering a winner-take-all economy, and buying the political power to consummate their hold on the wealth created by the system they had rigged in their favor, they were taking the final and irrevocable step of separating themselves permanently from the common course of American life. They would occupy a gated stratosphere far above the madding crowd while their political hirelings below look after their earthly interests.

The $1.15 trillion spending bill passed by Congress last Friday and quickly signed by President Obama is just the latest triumph in the plutocratic management of politics that has accelerated since 9/11. As Michael Winship and I described here last Thursday, the bill is a bonanza for the donor class - that powerful combine of corporate executives and superrich individuals whose money drives our electoral process. Within minutes of its passage, congressional leaders of both parties and the president rushed to the television cameras to praise each other for a bipartisan bill that they claimed signaled the end of dysfunction; proof that Washington can work. Mainstream media (including public television and radio), especially the networks and cable channels owned and operated by the conglomerates, didn't stop to ask: "Yes, but work for whom?" Instead, the anchors acted as amplifiers for official spin -- repeating the mantra-of-the-hour that while this is not "a perfect bill," it does a lot of good things. "But for whom? At what price?" went unasked.

Now we're learning. Like the drip-drip-drip of a faucet, over the weekend other provisions in the more than 2000-page bill began to leak. Many of the bad ones we mentioned on Thursday are there -- those extended tax breaks for big business, more gratuities to the fossil fuel industry, the provision to forbid the Securities & Exchange Commission from requiring corporations to disclose their political spending, even to their own shareholders. That one's a slap in the face even to Anthony Kennedy, the justice who wrote the Supreme Court's majority opinion in Citizens United. He said: "With the advent of the Internet, prompt disclosure of expenditures can provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions."

Over our dead body, Congress declared last Friday, proclaiming instead: Secrecy today. Secrecy tomorrow. Secrecy forever. They are determined that we not know who owns them.

The horrors mount. As Eric Lipton and Liz Moyer reported for The New York Times on Sunday, in the last days before the bill's passage "lobbyists swooped in" to save, at least for now, a loophole worth more than $1 billion to Wall Street investors and the hotel, restaurant and gambling industries. Lobbyists even helped draft crucial language that the Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid furtively inserted into the bill. Lipton and Moyer wrote that, "The small changes, and the enormous windfall they generated, show the power of connected corporate lobbyists to alter a huge bill that is being put together with little time for lawmakers to consider. Throughout the legislation, there were thousands of other add-ons and hard to decipher tax changes."

No surprise to read that "some executives at companies with the most at stake are also big campaign donors." The Times reports that "the family of David Bonderman, a co-founder of TPG Capital, has donated $1.2 million since 2014 to the Senate Majority PAC, a campaign fund with close ties to Mr. Reid and other Senate Democrats." Senator Reid, lest we forget, is from Nevada. As he approaches retirement at the end of 2016, perhaps he's hedging his bets at taxpayer expense.

Consider just two other provisions: One, insisted upon by Republican Senator Thad Cochran, directs the Coast Guard to build a $640 million National Security Cutter in Cochran's home state of Mississippi, a ship that the Coast Guard says it does not need. The other: A demand by Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins for an extra $1 billion for a Navy destroyer that probably will be built at her state's Bath Iron Works - again, a vessel our military says is unnecessary.

So it goes: The selling off of the Republic, piece by piece. What was it Mark Twain said? "There is no distinctive native American criminal class except Congress."

Can we at least face the truth? The plutocrats and oligarchs are winning. The vast inequality they are creating is a death sentence for government by consent of the people at large. Did any voter in any district or state in the last Congressional election vote to give that billion dollar loophole to a handful of billionaires? To allow corporations to hide their political contributions? To add $1.4 trillion to the national debt? Of course not. It is now the game: Candidates ask citizens for their votes, then go to Washington to do the bidding of their donors. And since one expectation is that they will cut the taxes of those donors, we now have a permanent class that is afforded representation without taxation.

A plutocracy, says my old friend, the historian Bernard Weisberger, "has a natural instinct to perpetuate and enlarge its own powers and by doing so slams the door of opportunity to challengers and reduces elections to theatrical duels between politicians who are marionettes worked by invisible strings."

Where does it end?

By coincidence, this past weekend I watched the final episode of the British television series Secret State, a 2012 remake of an earlier version based on the popular novel A Very British Coup. This is white-knuckle political drama. Gabriel Byrne plays an accidental prime minister - thrust into office by the death of the incumbent, only to discover himself facing something he never imagined: a shadowy coalition of forces, some within his own government, working against him. With some of his own ministers secretly in the service of powerful corporations and bankers, his own party falling away from him, press lords daily maligning him, the opposition emboldened, and a public confused by misinformation, deceit, and vicious political rhetoric, the prime minister is told by Parliament to immediately invade Iran (on unproven, even false premises) or resign.

In the climactic scene, he defies the "Secret State" that is manipulating all this and confronts Parliament with this challenge:

"Let's forget party allegiance, forget vested interests, forget votes of confidence. Let each and every one of us think only of this: Is this war justified? Is it what the people of this country want? Is it going to achieve what we want it to achieve? And if not, then what next?

"Well, I tell you what I think we should do. We should represent the people of this country. Not the lobby companies that wine and dine us. Or the banks and the big businesses that tell us how the world goes 'round. Or the trade unions that try and call the shots. Not the civil servants nor the war-mongering generals or the security chiefs. Not the press magnates and multibillion dollar donors... [We must return] democracy to this House and the country it represents.

Do they? The movie doesn't tell us. We are left to imagine how the crisis -- the struggle for democracy -- will end.

As we are reminded by this season, there is more to life than politics. There are families, friends, music, worship, sports, the arts, reading, conversation, laughter, celebrations of love and fellowship and partridges in pear trees. But without healthy democratic politics serving a moral order, all these are imperiled by the ferocious appetites of private power and greed.

So enjoy the holidays, including Star Wars. Then come back after New Year's and find a place for yourself, at whatever level, wherever you are, in the struggle for democracy. This is the fight of our lives and how it ends is up to us.

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/34225-the-plutocrats-are-winning-dont-let-them

For 55 Officers in Fatal Shootings This Year, It Wasn't Their First Time
Keith L. Alexander, Amy Brittain, Wesley Lowery, and Sandhya Somashekhar, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "More than 50 police officers involved in fatal shootings this year had previously fired their guns in deadly on-duty shootings, according to a Washington Post investigation."
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ore than 50 police officers involved in fatal shootings this year had previously fired their guns in deadly on-duty shootings, according to a Washington Post investigation.

For a handful of officers, it was their third fatal shooting. For one officer, it was his fourth.

The findings concerned many law enforcement experts, who said that most officers never fire their weapons on the job. The analysis also exposed another gap in the federal government’s oversight of fatal police shootings nationwide: the absence of a system for tracking multiple shootings by individual officers.

The 55 officers were identified as part of a Post project tracking all fatal shootings by police in the line of duty in 2015. It is the first nationwide attempt to determine whether fatal police shootings are isolated events in an officer’s career or whether some officers repeatedly fire their weapons in deadly encounters.

The Post also found that an additional 45 officers had previously been involved in non-fatal shootings.

“It’s a national embarrassment. We don’t even know how many times cops pull their triggers,” said Geoffrey Alpert, a criminologist at the University of South Carolina.

In most cases, the person killed was armed and the shootings were found to be justified by authorities or were still under investigation. The shootings cut across departments of all sizes, involved officers on a variety of assignments and grew out of circumstances such as routine patrols, undercover police operations and standoffs with SWAT teams that spanned hours.

In Broward County, Fla., a sheriff’s deputy on a SWAT team was involved in three fatal shootings from 2009 to 2011. His fourth came in June when officers shot and killed a suspected bank robber.

In San Bernardino, Calif., five officers opened fire in February, killing a man who led police on a high-speed chase and then tried to ram their cars. For two of the officers, it was their third fatal shooting with the department; and for another, his second.

And in New Mexico, five state police officers who were involved in fatal shootings in 2015 also fired their weapons in earlier encounters in which police killed someone. One of those officers took part in two fatal shootings this year — six weeks apart. Both involved standoffs with armed individuals.

Many departments withheld officers’ names from the public or released only vague details, making it impossible to precisely determine how many officers have been involved in multiple shootings.

Policing experts said the phenomenon has not been deeply studied nationwide, and a deeper review of the cases could root out officers who resort too often to deadly force and help officials develop strategies for officers to defuse — or avoid — volatile situations.

The Post requested information on 743 deadly police shootings it tracked from January through September. Agencies provided information on officers in about half the cases, or 367 shootings.

Of those, 1 in 8 shootings involved at least one officer who had taken part in a previous deadly shooting. Many fatal shootings by police involve multiple officers. It is often unclear who fired the fatal shot or shots.

“If someone is involved in multiple shootings, it doesn’t mean that it was a bad shooting,” said Jonathan Smith, a former chief of the special litigation section in the Justice Department’s civil rights division who studied the issue in Miami. “But it does mean that you should be asking a lot of questions.”

One March morning in Bakersfield, Calif., Adrian Hernandez raped a woman and set her house on fire, police said. Hours later, after a manhunt, officers spotted his car and gave chase.

Hernandez exited the vehicle and pointed a weapon, later determined to be a BB gun, at police, Bakersfield authorities said. Five officers opened fire, killing him.

For three of those officers, it was their second deadly shooting.

A year earlier, one fired at an unarmed man who appeared to be reaching for a gun.

In 2013, another officer shot at a woman who pointed a pellet gun at police.

And in the same year, a third officer opened fire on two men. One was wanted for violating parole on an assault charge, the other was a police informant.

In that incident, police were following the wanted man’s car as the informant, 34-year-old Jorge Ramirez, a passenger in the car, was texting a contact in the department. The wanted man stopped in a hotel parking lot and fired at officers, police said, wounding one. Police fired back, killing the suspect and Ramirez.

Police shootings in Bakersfield, a department with fewer than 400 officers, show the broad range of situations that officers encounter that can quickly turn volatile. This year, police there have shot and killed six people.

Bakersfield police spokesman Gary Carruesco, who previously worked as an investigator in the department’s internal affairs unit, declined to comment on the shootings other than to say that each was found by police to be justified.

“That speaks volumes on the training we receive as officers,” Carruesco said. “I’m sure any department would love it if they never had a fatal shooting, the negative attention it draws to the department, and the emotional stress it probably brings to the officer.”

Jorge Ramirez Sr., who has filed a lawsuit on behalf of his son against the department, questions how a department the size of Bakersfield could have so many fatal shootings.

“This isn’t Los Angeles or New York. Something is wrong here,” Ramirez said.

Los Angeles police have had 20 deadly shootings this year; New York City police have had eight.

There are many and complex reasons an officer might be involved in multiple shootings, experts said. The officer’s assignment matters — for example, an officer on a gang or drug squad in a crime-heavy area might be more likely to end up in a gunfight than an officer who patrols a quiet suburb.

When the Justice Department investigated the Miami Police Department in 2011 after a spate of officer-involved shootings, the federal agency found that “a small number of officers were involved in a disproportionate number of shootings.”

Seven officers accounted for more than one-third of the department’s 33 total shootings, both fatal and non-fatal incidents, from 2008 to 2011. One officer shot and killed two people in the span of two weeks, the report said.

“This is a problem across the country,” said Smith, the former chief of the special litigation section of the Justice Department’s civil rights division. “It was not unique to Miami.”

In many cases, Miami officers returned to patrolling the streets long before any investigations had been completed, Smith said. The report raised questions about potential corrective actions that could have, or should have, been put into place.

Miami Police Chief Rodolfo Llanes said the department has made changes, including using a state agency to review police shootings. The department, which has 1,258 officers, has had two fatal shootings this year.

Tactical changes also may have led to fewer shootings, Llanes said. The department has reduced the number of “jump-out squads,” the undercover units known for breaking up drug deals and going after violent offenders, he said.

“When you discharge a firearm, you shouldn’t automatically feel like you did something wrong,” Llanes said. “But you did take someone’s life. It’s a matter of being accountable to the community. It’s serious. It’s a big deal. It’s not the normal course of business.”

Patrol officers account for the majority of the repeat shooters identified by The Post. They are often the first to respond to tense situations including domestic disputes and calls to help someone with mental illness.

Shortly before 11 p.m. one August evening, police in Kerrville, Tex., got a call from a woman pleading for help. She said her husband had become violent, and she and her children had fled their home. She warned that he had a gun.

Minutes later, Sgt. Jonathan Lamb, a patrol officer, and three colleagues pulled up. As the officers approached the house, police said, the man rushed out of his front door and began shooting. Lamb and the other officers returned fire.

Lamb’s first deadly shooting had occurred six years earlier.

In 2009, he and others killed a hit-and-run suspect who police said lunged at officers with a knife as they tried to arrest him.

“I feel I had no other choice in both circumstances,” Lamb, a 14-year veteran with the department, said in an interview with The Post.

Three other times in his career as a police officer, Lamb said, he pulled out his weapon — in the first two, he was responding to domestic violence calls and the suspect advanced toward him with a knife. In the third, a fugitive who was taller and nearly 100 pounds heavier than Lamb charged him in an attempt to evade arrest.

Each of those times, the suspect stopped advancing as the officer drew his firearm, and he was able to make an arrest without firing a shot.

“I think a lot of people, quite honestly, don’t know what they don’t know about use of force,” Lamb said. “In the aftermath of some of these high-profile shootings that have made headlines, the public sometimes has an unrealistic expectation of what law enforcement should be capable of. Use of force is never pretty.”

LaMaurice Gardner, a police psychologist who advises the National Tactical Officers Association, said officers often develop anxiety and depression and avoid situations that remind them of the shooting. For officers with multiple shootings, the effect can be cumulative.

“I’ve had officers literally say, ‘Is death chasing me?’ ” said Gardner, who also works as a reserve lieutenant for the Oakland County Sheriff’s Department in Pontiac, Mich. “They don’t want to risk getting labeled as a RoboCop or a killer. It borders on paranoia.”

After shootings, some officers have taken nearly a year to return to full duty, while others have returned much sooner, he said. In his 20 years of work, he said, about eight officers he treated who had been involved in shootings left their jobs because of post-traumatic stress disorder. He said that one officer who had been involved in 10 shootings recently retired because the mental burden was too much to bear.

Not all officers experience long-lasting effects after a shooting, however, experts said. Lamb said neither the fatal shooting this year nor the one in 2009 left him with anxiety or second thoughts.

“In both cases, I felt that I was protecting my own life and the lives of the other officers on the scene,” Lamb said, “although neither was the outcome that we would have preferred.”

Many of the officers involved in multiple fatal shootings were assigned to specialized police units, including SWAT and narcotics teams, The Post found. Of eight officers who opened fire in three or more fatal shootings, six were on specialized units.

In January, Sgt. Jesus Deanda with the Chandler police and two other officers were on assignment as part of a special fugitive task force in Arizona. Police said a burglary suspect led the officers on a car chase and began shooting. Deanda and the officers returned fire, killing the man.

It was Deanda’s third fatal shooting.

In 2013, he was among six officers on a U.S. Marshals task force who were trying to arrest a man wanted for assaulting a police officer and drug possession, according to police.

Police said the suspect, sitting in a pickup truck, reached for a gun. Deanda and the other officers opened fire, killing him.

A decade earlier, Deanda was involved in another fatal shooting. He and his then-partner Antonio Frias killed a suspected drug dealer they were chasing while working on an undercover narcotics unit.

Deanda yelled, “He’s got a gun!” Frias told The Post.

As the man climbed a fence, Frias pulled him to the ground. The two wrestled, and the man pointed the gun and fired at Frias.

The bullet creased the top of Frias’s skull. “It sounded like an M-80 firecracker go off at the head,” Frias told The Post.

Both officers returned fire.

Frias said that he retired in 2012 after being diagnosed with PTSD because of the shooting.

Deanda declined comment through a police spokesman, who said the shootings were all justified. He remains assigned to a special task force with the Chandler police, a department of 345 officers.

“Sgt. Deanda is a decorated professional police officer who continues to perform at the highest level and has continued on with his career in an exemplary manner,” said spokesman Joseph Favazzo.

One officer who has killed twice in the line of duty now faces criminal charges for the most recent fatal shooting. He is one of the few officers nationwide to be prosecuted for an on-duty shooting in 2015.

On the morning of April 22, Portsmouth, Va., police officer Stephen D. Rankin responded to a call for a shoplifting at a local Walmart. There he encountered 18-year-old William L. Chapman II in the parking lot. About a minute later, Rankin fatally shot the unarmed man in his face and chest, according to police records.

Multiple witnesses said that there was a physical struggle between Rankin and Chapman in the moments prior to the shooting, according to statements obtained by The Post.

In September, a grand jury indicted Rankin on a charge of first-degree murder. Rankin, 36, was fired from his job. The interim Portsmouth police chief declined an interview request.

Rankin’s defense attorney, Nicole Belote, said the facts did not support a charge of first-degree murder and that she would prepare to “zealously defend” Rankin at trial.

Attorney Jon Babineau, who represents Chapman’s family, said he was a “soft-spoken” man with learning disabilities. Walking through Walmart was part of his daily routine, Babineau said.

Four years earlier, Rankin fatally shot another unarmed man, 26-year-old Kirill Denyakin, an immigrant from Kazakhstan.

On the evening of April 23, 2011, Denyakin was drunk and pounding on the glass door of an apartment building, according to court records. A neighbor called 911 to report a burglary. Rankin said that when he arrived he told Denyakin to stop, according to a statement the officer gave investigators. Denyakin then turned around, dug into his waistband and ran toward the officer with a “steely-eyed look in his eyes,” Rankin stated.

Rankin said Denyakin reached into his waistband and ran toward him. Rankin shot him 11 times. “I believed he was charging at me with a weapon,” he told the jury in a civil trial.

The jury found Rankin not liable for Denyakin’s death.

Rankin spent three years on administrative duty while the case was investigated by the Justice Department, police spokeswoman Misty Holley said. No charges were filed, and Rankin returned to his patrol job in 2014. A year later, Rankin shot Chapman in the Walmart parking lot.

Rankin is scheduled for trial in February.

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/34224-for-55-officers-in-fatal-shootings-this-year-it-wasnt-their-first-time

As Military Handles Drone Strikes, Less Scrutiny by Congress
Ken Dilanian, Associated Press
Dilanian writes: "Putting the U.S. military in charge of drone strikes in Iraq and Syria has effectively reduced congressional scrutiny of those sensitive operations, leaving some activists, lawmakers and U.S. intelligence officials fearful of increased civilian casualties."
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The War on Christmas, or How to Build Mass Support for Right-Wing Ideology
Mary Anne Henderson and Brian Platt, CounterPunch
Excerpt: "The war on Christmas is more than a tinfoil hat conspiracy theory, it is a gateway into a conservative politics that exalts capitalism, racism, and nativism while attacking the Left."
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British Muslims Seek Answers to Why They Are Being Barred From US Travel to Disneyland
Justin Salhani, Think Progress
Salhani writes: "After months of saving for a family trip to Disneyland, a family of 11 British Muslims was told by UK border officials that they wouldn't be allowed to board a plane to the United States."
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15 Indigenous Rights Victories That You Didn't Hear About in 2015
John Ahni Schertow, Intercontinental Cry
Schertow writes: "Indigenous rights victories give us all pause to celebrate, to reflect and to rejuvenate our own quests for justice."
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From Halliburton to Walmart, These Big Corporations Will Make Money off of Climate Change
Jeremy Schulman, Grist
Schulman writes: "In a remarkable series of documents submitted to a London-based nonprofit called CDP, big-name corporations describe global warming as a chance to sell more weapons systems to the military, more air conditioners to sweltering civilians, and more medications to people afflicted by tropical diseases."
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