RSN: Wanna See What Happens When You Rely on the Fossil Fuel Sector and Slash Taxes? Check Out Louisiana, LAPD Shoots Unarmed, Sleeping Couple in 'Self-Defense'

Reader Supported News | 08 March 16 AM

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William Boardman | Romney Throws Hat Toward Ring, Warns of Abyss 
 
William Boardman, Reader Supported News 
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Drone Casualty Report Promised as US Airstrike Kills 150 Al Shabaab Members 
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Justice Dept. Appeals Ruling in Apple iPhone Case in Brooklyn 
Julia Edwards, Reuters 
Edwards writes: "The U.S. Justice Department on Monday sought to overturn a ruling which protects Apple from unlocking an iPhone in a New York drug case." 
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LAPD Shoots Unarmed, Sleeping Couple in 'Self-Defense' 
Julie M. Rodriguez, Care2 
Rodriguez writes: "A couple in their early 30s, Kisha Michael and Marquintan Sandlin, went out for a date in the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood. By the end of the night, both of them were dead - shot by police on the side of the road. Initially, the LAPD claimed that Michael threatened them with a gun, but as the story has developed, it's been revealed that both victims were asleep in their vehicle at the time of the shooting." 
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A police officer checks in on a fellow officer. (photo: Richard Burkhart/Savannah Morning News)

n February 21, a couple in their early 30s, Kisha Michael and Marquintan Sandlin, went out for a date in the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood. By the end of the night, both of them were dead — shot by police on the side of the road. Initially, the LAPD claimed that Michael threatened them with a gun, but as the story has developed, it’s been revealed that both victims were asleep in their vehicle at the time of the shooting.

That’s not the only detail that has the local community suspicious about what really happened that day. The LAPD hasn’t exactly been forthcoming with information on the incident. What we do know is that someone called to report a “suspicious vehicle,” and the police responded around 3 a.m. Apparently, the police arrived and found the couple unconscious in the car. After about 45 minutes spent attempting to “de-escalate” the situation by trying to rouse the occupants of the vehicle, police opened fire in response to an as-of-yet unnamed “threat” from Michael or Sandlin.

Despite the claims that Kisha Michael had a weapon, there have been no reports of a gun recovered at the scene. In an interview with the LA Times, Michael’s twin sister Trisha explained that her sister had never even owned a firearm, and that Sandlin was unarmed. Of course, it’s possible that the responding officersthought they saw something that might have looked like a gun in the dark, but if that’s the case, the department has declined to say. It’s also worth noting that mistaking harmless objects, like a pill bottle, for a gun has become a troublingly widespread defense in police shootings against unarmed suspects.

In the meantime, relatives of the victims are demanding answers. Some of them visited Inglewood Police headquarters this week, demanding to speak with the chief of police. They held signs reading “Murdered by Inglewood Police,” and shouted slogans including, “It could be your child next. You never know.” So far, the department has declined to respond while they collect all the details of the incident. It’s unclear whether there will be any investigation or action taken against the responding officers.

As if the senseless killing weren’t tragic enough on its own, it turns out that both Michael and Sandlin were single parents — she had three sons at home, while he had four daughters. That’s seven children orphaned for seemingly no reason.

This isn’t the first time the LAPD has been accused of abusing its power. In recent years, the department’s officers have come under fire for sexually assaulting a female suspect and then allowing her to fall from a moving vehicle, fatally shooting an autistic man for touching his waistband in a “suspicious” manner, firing more than 100 bullets at two elderly women delivering newspapers, punching a homeless woman on the bus, and racially profiling suspects, among other controversies. Unfortunately, this latest incident shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone given the department’s history, especially given the fact that both victims were black.

While the LAPD has been equipping officers with body cameras since last May, there’s no point in holding your breath for any incriminating footage. The department has already stated it’s not going to release any of the footage to the public, and it’s possible that the footage doesn’t even exist. LAPD officers are allowed to turn their cameras on and off at will, and they’re encouraged to review the recordings before filing reports on any controversial incidents. Unless the department is faced with incredible public pressure, the facts about what really happened that night may never be known.

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/35623-lapd-shoots-unarmed-sleeping-couple-in-self-defense

Florida Passes New Death Penalty Law After SCOTUS Ruling 
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Wanna See What Happens When You Rely on the Fossil Fuel Sector and Slash Taxes? Check Out Louisiana 
Ben Adler, Grist 
Adler writes: "The state of Louisiana has fallen on hard times, and its situation offers some hard lessons. First, don't let a right-wing ideologue cut your budget to the bone. Second, don't hang your whole economy on fossil fuel extraction." 
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Former governor Bobby Jindal drove Louisiana off a fiscal cliff. (photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

he state of Louisiana has fallen on hard times, and its situation offers some hard lessons. First, don’t let a right-wing ideologue cut your budget to the bone. Second, don’t hang your whole economy on fossil fuel extraction.

The Washington Post reports on the state’s budget crisis:

Already, the state of Louisiana had gutted university spending and depleted its rainy-day funds. It had cut 30,000 employees and furloughed others. It had slashed the number of child services staffers …

And then, the state’s new governor, John Bel Edwards (D), came on TV and said the worst was yet to come. …

Despite all the cuts of the previous years, the nation’s second-poorest state still needed nearly $3 billion — almost $650 per person — just to maintain its regular services over the next 16 months. …

A few universities will shut down and declare bankruptcy. Graduations will be canceled. Students will lose scholarships. Select hospitals will close. Patients will lose funding for treatment of disabilities. Some reports of child abuse will go uninvestigated.

For eight years, under former Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-La.), Louisiana slashed taxes and played tricks to fill budget holes. Jindal claimed that the tax cuts he pushed through would promote miraculous economic growth and make up for the lost revenue. That didn’t work, of course, just as it didn’t work on a national level under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. The Post writes:

Many of the state’s economic analysts say a structural budget deficit emerged and then grew under former governor Bobby Jindal, who, during his eight years in office, reduced the state’s revenue by offering tax breaks to the middle class and wealthy. He also created new subsidies aimed at luring and keeping businesses. Those policies, state data show, didn’t deliver the desired economic growth. This year, Louisiana has doled out $210 million more to corporations in the form of credits and subsidies than it has collected from them in taxes.

The current Republican presidential frontrunners are running on a similar program of massive tax cuts tilted towards the wealthy — which would likely lead to a similar budget crisis on a nationwide scale. (Jindal’s ill-fated presidential campaign had its own gigantic regressive tax cut proposal.)

When government budgets collapse, environmental protection takes a big hit. This is particularly worrying in Louisiana. The state is filled with severely climate-threatened low-lying regions such as the Bayou and New Orleans, and its coastline is disappearing under the rising sea, so it should be investing heavily in climate adaptation. The state’s poverty also intensifies its aching need for improved mass transit. Huge spending cuts at the federal or state level, never mind both, are putting the state’s populace at greater risk.

Louisiana’s budget problems also demonstrate that fossil fuel extraction may be less an economic boon than a massive liability. Louisiana, with its oil refineries and offshore rigs, has the third worst poverty rate in the nation — and that is sadly typical of fossil fuel–heavy states. West Virginia and Kentucky, for example, are among the top three states for coal production and among among the 10 poorest states overall. And these states ranked dismally on poverty metrics even when oil, gas, and coal were booming. Now that they’re not, things are even worse.

Politicians from all of these places, even Democrats, argue that fossil fuel production is a needed economic engine. But fossil fuel extraction is inherently temporary: one day, the well will run dry — if the market doesn’t dry up first. Commodity prices are inherently volatile, and when they fall, the first thing you see is a loss of revenue to that industry and a decline in tax revenues. What comes next in many places may be even worse: with lower prices making harder-to-reach deposits unprofitable to extract, the industry cuts back on production. Workers get laid off, and the hard times ripple throughout the economy.

For Louisiana, where the oil and gas is offshore and therefore more expensive to drill than the oil right under the Saudi desert, this is just what has happened. As the Post notes, “The price of oil and natural gas fell off a cliff, causing a retrenchment in an industry that provided the state with jobs and royalties.”

Louisiana is not the only state experiencing this. Declining oil prices have forced Alaska to cut $1 billion in spending from its budget over the last two years. Now it faces a $4 billion deficit. And low coal and natural gas prices have West Virginia facing a $466 million budget gap.

Whole countries are feeling the same pinch. Russia, which depends heavily on gas and oil exports, is looking at a national budget that will be shorn of over $38 billion in income.

Instead of just relying on a short-term, unreliable, and polluting industry, states such as Louisiana need to diversify into industries that draw on human capital — whether it’s computer programming or solar panel manufacturing — and can provide a more stable source of revenue. Microchip prices don’t fluctuate wildly. And the high-tech sector doesn’t just fall apart when demand slackens for current products; companies innovate new ones. Louisiana can’t innovate its way out of its current problem by inventing a new fossil fuel that just happens to be under its feet.

Perhaps, instead of cutting taxes and education spending, Jindal should have invested in a more educated workforce. But then his support for creationism might not have gone over as well.

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/35621-wanna-see-what-happens-when-you-rely-on-the-fossil-fuel-sector-and-slash-taxes-check-out-louisiana