Alton Sterling was a husband and a father of five children. He was shot at point-blank range by police outside of a convenience store in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on Tuesday.
Philando Castile was a son, nephew, and boyfriend. He was killed by police in his vehicle in Falcon Heights, Minnesota on Wednesday with his girlfriend in the passenger seat and 4-year-old daughter in the back seat.
With an ever-growing list of African Americans who have been killed by police, it is clear we have much more to do to advance justice and peace in our communities, accountability for police officers who use lethal force, and equality for our African American friends, family members and neighbors.
It is difficult to fathom how, time and time again, video evidence of police brutality does not result in justice for the families of the victims. It is even more difficult to comprehend and bear witness to the apparent disregard for African American lives.
A broken tail light. A toy gun at a park. Failing to signal a lane change.
These, along with so many others, are the mundane circumstances that spur police violence against African American men, women and children.
Law enforcement officials have a very difficult job, and the vast majority of them do not use their power to inflict harm on others. But when a police officer kills someone, there must be an impartial investigation so that he or she is held accountable.
It is unacceptable to have a justice system that barely ever prosecutes or convicts police officers who commit murder on the job. And it is unacceptable when a law enforcement official employs an excessive use of force that results in death.
The families of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile deserve justice.
Black lives matter.
Onwards,
Barbara Lee
FOCUS: Kathy Kelly | Don't Move (Don't F#%king Move)
Kathy Kelly, Common Dreams
Kelly writes: "Two major news stories here in the U.S., both chilling, point out how readily U.S. authorities will murder people based on race and the slightest possibility of a threat to those in places of power."
READ MORE
Kathy Kelly, Common Dreams
Kelly writes: "Two major news stories here in the U.S., both chilling, point out how readily U.S. authorities will murder people based on race and the slightest possibility of a threat to those in places of power."
READ MORE
wo major news stories here in the U.S., both chilling, point out how readily U.S. authorities will murder people based on race and the slightest possibility of a threat to those in places of power.
On July 5th Baton Rouge police killed Anton Sterling in a Louisiana parking lot. Sterling was a 37-year-old Black father of five selling CDs outside of a local storege. As captured on widely seen cellphone video, two officers tased him, held him with their hands and knees down on the ground and then shot him multiple times at close range. The officers pulled a gun out of Sterling’s pocket after they had killed him but witnesses say Sterling was not holding the gun and his hands were never near his pockets. The situation might have escalated further but clearly little concern was shown for the sanctity of a human life deemed a threat to officers. In the witness-recorded video one officer promises, "If you f---ing move, I swear to God!"
Police departments in the U.S. often arrest and all too often kill citizens on U.S. streets based on "racial profiling." Young men of certain demographics are targeted based on their "patterns of behavior" for confrontations in which officers' safety trumps any concern for the safety of suspects, and which easily ramp up to killing.
And so it is abroad. The week's other chilling news involved the long-promised release of U.S. government data on drone strikes and civilian deaths. The report covered four countries with which the U.S. is not at war. From 2009 through 2015 in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya the U.S. admits to its drone strikes having killed between 64 and 116 civilians, although these numbers are only a small fraction of even the most conservative estimates on such deaths made by credible independent reporters and researchers over the same period. With U.S. definitions of a "combatant" constantly in flux, many of the 2,372 to 2,581 "combatants" the government reports killed over the same period will have certainly been civilian casualties. Few eyes in the U.S. watch for cellphone video from these countries, and so the executing officers’ versions of events are often all that matters.
In June 2011 CIA Director John Brennan stated there hadn’t been "a single collateral death" caused by drone strikes over the previous eighteen months. Ample reportage showed this statistic was a flat lie. Marjorie Cohn notes that what little we know of President Obama’s 2013 policy guidelines (still classified) for decreasing civilian deaths is inconsistent even on the point of a known target having been present. Many strikes are targeted at areas of suspicious activity with no idea of who is present.
As Philip Giraldi notes, a March 2015 Physicians for Social Responsibility report claims that more (perhaps far more) than 1.3 million people were killed during the first ten years of the "Global War on Terror" in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Adding Syria, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen, he finds the current total might easily exceed 2 million with some estimates credibly going to 4 or beyond. He fears the data released July 1stwill end up normalizing the drone program, writing: "The past 15 years have institutionalized and validated the killing process. President Clinton or Trump will be able to do more of the same, as the procedures involved are 'completely legal' and likely soon to be authorized under an executive order."
The July 1st data minimizes civilian deaths by limiting itself to countries with which the U.S. is not at war. But the United States' drone arsenal is precisely designed to project violence into areas miles from any battlefield where arrest, not assassination would before have been considered both feasible and morally indispensable in dealing with suspects accused of a crime. U.S. figures do not count untold numbers of civilians learning to fear the sky, in formerly peaceful areas, for weapons that might be fired without warning. The drones take away the very idea of trials and evidence, of the rule of law, making the whole world a battlefield.
In the U.S. neighborhoods where people like Alton Sterling most risk summary execution, residents cannot be faulted for concluding that the U.S.' government and society don’t mind treating their homes as warzones; that lives of innocent people caught up in these brutal wars do not matter provided the safety and property of the people outside, and of the people sent in to quell disorder, are rigorously protected.
My friends and sometime hosts in Afghanistan, the Afghan Peace Volunteers, run a school for street kids, and a seamstress program to distribute thick blankets in the winter. They seek to apply Mohandas Gandhi’s discipline of letting a determination to keep the peace show them the difficult work needed to replace battlefields with community. Their resources are small and they live in a dangerous city at a perilous time. Their work does little, to say the least, to ensure their safety. They aim to put the safety of their most desperate neighbors first.
It makes no one safer to make our cities and the world a battlefield. The frenzied concern for our safety and comfort driving so much of our war on the Middle East has made our lives far more dangerous. Can we ask ourselves: which has ever brought a peaceful future nearer to people in Afghan or U.S. neighborhoods– weaponized military and surveillance systems or the efforts of concerned neighbors seeking justice? Gigantic multinational “defense” systems gobble up resources, while programs intended for social well-being are cut back. The U.S. withholds anything like the quantity of resources needed for the task of healing the battle scar the U.S. and NATO have inflicted on so much of the Muslim world. If our fear is endless, how will these wars ever end?
We have to face that when the U.S. acts as self-appointed “global policeman,” what it does to poor nations resembles what those two officers did to Alton Sterling. We must temper selfish and unreasonable fears for our own safety with the knowledge that others also want safe and stable lives. We must build community by lessening inequality. We must swear off making the world our battlefield and be appalled to hear the U.S. government seem to tell the world "I will kill you if you f---ing move."
Police Shootings Won't Stop Unless We Also Stop Shaking Down Black People
The dangers of turning police officers into revenue generators.
- Owen Freeman
In April, several days after North Charleston, South Carolina, police officer Michael Slager stopped Walter Scott for a busted taillight and then fatally shot him, the usual cable-news transmogrification of victim into superpredator ran into problems. The dash cam showed Scott being pulled over while traveling at a nerdy rate of speed, using his left turn signal to pull into a parking lot and having an amiable conversation with Slager until he realized he'd probably get popped for nonpayment of child support. At which point he bolted out of the car and hobbled off. Slager then shot him. Why didn't the cop just jog up and grab him? Calling what the obese 50-year-old Scott was doing "running" really stretches the bounds of literary license.
But maybe the question to ask is: Why did Scott run? The answer came when theNew York Times revealed Scott to be a man of modest means trapped in an exhausting hamster wheel: He would get a low-paying job, make some child support payments, fall behind on them, get fined, miss a payment, get jailed for a few weeks, lose that job due to absence, and then start over at a lower-paying job. From all apparent evidence, he was a decent schlub trying to make things work in a system engineered to make his life miserable and recast his best efforts as criminal behavior.
Recently, two more deaths of African Americans that have blown up in the media follow a pattern similar to Scott's. Sandra Bland in Texas and Samuel DuBosein Cincinnati were each stopped for minor traffic infractions (failing to use turn signal, missing front license plate), followed by immediate escalation by the officer into rage, and then an official story that is obviously contradicted by the video (that the officer tried to "de-escalate" the tension with Bland; that the officer was dragged by DuBose's car). In both cases, the perpetrator of a minor traffic offense died.
When incidents of police violence come to light, the usual defense is that we should not tarnish all the good cops just because of "a few bad apples." No one can argue with that. But what is usually implied in that phrase is that the "bad" officers' intentions are malevolent—that they are morally corrupt and racist. And that may be true, but they are also bad in the job-performance sense. These men are crummy cops, sometimes profoundly so. Slager had a record for gratuitously using his Taser. Timothy Leohmann, who leapt from his car and instantly killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice, had been deemed "weepy" and unable to "emotionally function" by a supervisor at his previous PD job, who added: "I do not believe time, nor training, will be able to change or correct these deficiencies." Ferguson's Darren Wilson was also fired from his previous job—actually, the entire police force of Jennings, Missouri, was disbanded for being awful.
When you ask why such "bad" cops are nevertheless armed and allowed to patrol the streets, one begins to see that lurking beneath this violence is a fiscal menace: police departments forced to assist city officials in raising revenue, in many cases funding their own salaries—redirecting the very concept of keeping the peace into underwriting the budget.
We saw a glimpse of this when the Justice Department released its report on Ferguson in March. In his statement, then-Attorney General Eric Holder referenced a lady in town whose life sounded Walter Scott-like. She had received two parking tickets totaling $151. Her efforts to pay those fines fell so behind that she eventually paid out more than $500. At one point, she was jailed for nonpayment and—eight years later—still owes $541 in accrued fees.
The judge largely responsible for the extraction of these fees from Ferguson's poor,Ronald J. Brockmeyer, owed $172,646 in back taxes, a sum orders of magnitude greater than any late fine coming before his bench. Even as he was jailing black ladies for parking tickets, Brockmeyer was allegedly erasing citations for white Ferguson residents who happened to be his friends. After the report's publication, he resigned so that Ferguson could "begin its healing process."
When you ask why such "bad" cops are armed and allowed to patrol the streets, one begins to see that lurking beneath this violence is a fiscal menace.
But consider: In 2010, this collaboration between the Ferguson police and the courts generated $1.4 million in income for the city. This year, they will more than double that amount—$3.1 million—providing nearly a quarter of the city's $13 million budget, almost all of it extracted from its poorest African American citizens.
Evidence also suggests that this new form of raising revenue—policiteering?—goes far beyond Ferguson. Remember the recent Oklahoma case involving Robert Bates, a 73-year-old millionaire insurance broker with scant law enforcement background who was allowed to go out on patrol—likely because he had donated lots of money and equipment to the local sheriff's office? He killed an unarmed black suspect when he grabbed his gun instead of his Taser. In the days that followed, we learned that other deputies had long resented this guy's freelance incompetence.
"Essentially, these small towns in urban areas have municipal infrastructure that can't be supported by the tax base, and so they ticket everything in sight to keep the town functioning," said William Maurer, a lawyer with the Institute for Justice who has been studying the sudden rise in "nontraffic-related fines."
Take the St. Louis suburb of Pagedale, where, among other Norman Rockwell-worthy features deemed illegal, "you can't have a hedge more than three feet high," Maurer says. "You can't have a basketball hoop or a wading pool in front of a house. You can't have a dish antenna on the front of your house. You can't walk on the roadway if there is a sidewalk, and if there is not a sidewalk, they must walk on the left side of the roadway. They must walk on the right of the crosswalk. They can't conduct a barbecue in the front yard and can't have an alcoholic beverage within 150 feet of a barbecue. Kids cannot play in the street. They also have restrictions against pants being worn below the waist in public. Cars must be within 500 feet of a lamp or a source of illumination during nighttime hours. Blinds must be neatly hung in respectable appearance, properly maintained, and in a state of good repair."
Where did this Kafkaesque laundry list come from? Maurer explains that in 2010, Missouri passed a law that capped the amount of city revenue that any agency could generate from traffic stops. The intent was to limit small-town speed traps, but the unintentional consequences are now clear: Pagedale saw a 495 percent increase in nontraffic-related arrests. "In Frontenac, the increase was 364 percent," Maurer says. "In Lakeshire, it was 209 percent."
It is probably no coincidence that when you examine the recent rash of police killings, you find that the offenses the victims were initially stopped for were preposterously minor.
This racket now has many variants. South Carolina hosts "Operation Rolling Thunder," an annual dragnet in which 21 different law enforcement agencies swarm stretches of I-85 and I-26 in the name of catching drug dealers. In 2013, this law enforcement Bonnaroo netted 1,300 traffic citations and 300 speeding tickets. But after everyone had paid up, the operation boasted exactly one felony conviction.
A different strategy in San Diego simply tacks on various fees to an existing fine. A 2012Union Tribune investigation revealed that while speeding is a simple $35 fine, other government agencies can tack on as many as 10 other surcharges, including: a state penalty assessment, $40; county penalty assessment, $36; court construction, $20; state surcharge, $8; DNA identification, $16; criminal conviction fee, $35; court operations, $40; emergency medical air transportation penalty, $4; and night court, $1. When it's all said and done, that $35 ticket comes to $235.
Another report released earlier this year connects the dots: African Americans and Latinos make up less than a third of San Diego's population but represent 64.5 percent of those searched during a traffic stop.
There is still no comprehensive study to determine just how many cities pay their bills by indenturing the poor, but it is probably no coincidence that when you examine the recent rash of police killings, you find that the offenses they were initially stopped for were preposterously minor. Bland's lane change signal, DuBose's missing plate. Walter Scott had that busted taillight—which, we all later learned, is not even a crime in South Carolina. Eric Garner was selling loose cigarettes. When Darren Wilson was called to look into a robbery, the reason he initially stopped Michael Brown was for walking in the street—in Ferguson, an illegal act according to Section 44-344 of the local code. Between 2011 and 2013, 95 percent of the perpetrators of this atrocity were African American, meaning that "walking while black" is not a punch line. It is a crime.
And not just a crime, but a crime that comes with fines that are strictly enforced. In 2014, Ferguson's bottom-line-driven police force issued 16,000 arrest warrants to three-fourths of the town's total population of 21,000. Stop and think about that for a moment: In Ferguson, 75 percent of all residents had active outstanding arrest warrants. Most of the entire city was a virtual plantation of indentured revenue producers.
Back in Pagedale, St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Jennifer Mann recently calculateda 500 percent increase in petty fines over the last five years. "Pagedale handed out 2,255 citations for these types of offenses last year," Mann wrote, "or nearly two per household."
"Once the system is primed for maximizing revenue—starting with fines and fine enforcement," Holder said apropos Ferguson, "the city relies on the police force to serve, essentially, as a collection agency for the municipal court rather than a law enforcement entity."
In Alabama, a circuit court judge, Hub Harrington, wrote a blistering opinion three years ago asserting that the Shelby County Jail had become a kind of "debtors' prison" and that the court system had devolved into a "judicially sanctioned extortion racket." This pattern leads to a cruel paradox: One arm of the state is paying a large sum to lock up a person who can't pay a small sum owed to a different arm of the state. The result? Bigger state deficits. As the director of the Brennan Center's Justice Program put it, "Having taxpayers foot a bill of $4,000 to incarcerate a man who owes the state $745 or a woman who owes a predatory lender $425 and removing them from the job force makes sense in no reasonable world."
When the poor come to understand that they are likely to be detained and fined for comically absurd crimes, it can't be a surprise to the police that their officers are viewed with increasing distrust. In this environment, running away from a cop is not an act of suspicion; it's common sense.
Cops like to talk about "good police." They say, "That guy is good police"—a top compliment, by which they mean cool under the pressure of the street and cunning at getting people to give up the details of a crime. Good police look bad when sharing the street with crummy police. But when budgetary whims replace peacekeeping as the central motivation of law enforcement, who is more likely to write up more tickets, the good cop or the crummy one? When the mission of the entire department shifts from "protect and serve" to "punish and profit," then just what constitutes good police?
Rosie MartineztoBernie Sanders is my HERO
Share if you agree. I think is more than 80%
We're #stillSanders #Bernieorbust #seeyouinPhilly
We're #stillSanders #Bernieorbust #seeyouinPhilly
THE ARK ENCOUNTER IS A MONUMENT TO MAN’S STUPIDITY
Posted by Thomas Clay
Jul 6, 2016
Australian evangelical Ken Ham has finally finished his Christian Monument to the stupidity of man he calls The Ark Encounter in the fertile ground of ignorance in the middle of the Bible Belt replete with dinosaurs. It was Mark Twain who presciently said, “When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Kentucky because everything there happens 25 years after it happens everywhere else.”
What Ham and company have created is an affront to all known scientific data known to mankind and he and his ilk are lying to deceive because the one thing that ignorance flourishes in is religion. Consider for a moment that not only are the 13,000 known species represented in the Ark but also all the dinosaurs which were until a few years ago, just something scientists made up to make evangelicals looks stupid. Bring in a few billion dollars in Jurassic Park sales and it’s going to be awful hard to sell children on the book of Genesis.
What Ham has done now is increased the population of the Ark with the thousands of species of dinosaurs that died out millions of years, err, I mean 4000 years ago like it says in the bible. So now there were 2 75 foot Apatosauruses on the ark weighing a combined 50 tons on a boat that was 500 feet long and 86 feet wide. They probably climbed in and went to sleep with the muggles on the ship because carnivores and herbivores have always gotten along.
WSMV in Nashville reported what the believers were trying to do with this standing abortion to all we know.
“Here at the ark, we’re trying to recreate what the ship might have looked like 4,400 years ago,” said Co-founder and CCO for Answers in Genesis Mark Looy. “We didn’t want to have a lot technology here-that might make you think you’re more in the modern era.”The $91 million timber-framed attraction is seven stories tall and a football field and a half in length. The music inside of the ark was specially made by a music producer in Nashville.Once it is ready for the public, the park will stay open for 40 days and 40 nights – the amount of time the Bible says the flood lasted.“For the Christians who come here, we want to equip them with answers to help defend that there really was a Noah’s Ark and a Noah’s flood,” said Looy. “For the non-Christians who come here, we want to lovingly present the gospel message to them.”
The Bible says also that the biblical flood covered the highest peak. In Genesis 15 it says, “The waters prevailed fifteen cubits upward, and the mountains were covered.” According to the United States’ Geological Survey, there is 332,500,000 cubic miles of water on Earth. The highest mountain is Mt. Everest at 29,029 feet above sea level. The surface area of the Earth is 196.9 million square miles. To increase the amount of water to cover the top of Everest would take approximately 600,000,000 cubic miles of water which is nearly twice the volume of water on our planet now.
At 23,000 feet, the Earth is so cold that it would freeze any water at that altitude and cause any creature to be what mountain climbers call ‘the death zone’ where altitude sickness kills with regularity in a matter of hours but to hear Ken Ham and Ray Comfort tell it, all the critters were all warm and comfy on the Ark for 40 days and 40 nights and the year after it took for the waters to recede. Of course Antione Lavoisier’s Law of Conservation of Mass and all we know about physics is out the window because magic and such. The increased volume of water would cause the Earth to rotate wildly and Ken Ham nor Ray Comfort are ever going to explain what happened to all of that water.
Obviously to anyone who is not intellectually challenged, there are a lot of other problems with the book of Genesis. For instance, there are about 400,000 known species of beetles on this planet. The sheer volume of 800,000 beetles would take up a third of the Ark by volume but that kind of fact-based logic does not perturb Ken because God can wave his magic wand and undo the laws of physics entirely. Ken had some trouble with that whole logic “thing” when he debated Bill Nye who had some particular observations that perplexed the biblical sages.
This debate was a windfall for the floundering Ark Encounter project. Religious-folk didn’t take kindly to their champeen being made to look like a perfectly designed imbecile by some uppity sciencetician that went to college! Donations poured in and Ken Ham got just the governor he needed to make his Monument to Human Stupidity in Matt Bevin. Bevin is a religious fanatic that hired his own private attorney to file a lawsuit against Kentuckiana Planned Parenthood because everyone knows that Jesus doesn’t like abortions.
Bevin procured an $11 million allotment to help build an exit way for the Ark Encounter so that these evangelicals could put more children in chains with their primitive religious dogma. Kentuckians hailed the expansion by and large because Charles Darwin is a godless commie. It also begs the question, if religious people want to practice their religion then why can’t they keep their hands out of the government’s pocket? Shouldn’t the good Lord provide the money to spread the good word? Apparently not.
The flat imbecility of creationists/flat Earthers who believe that 2 of everything of the 13,000 species of Earth-dwellers lived on a boat 500 feet long for 40 days and 40 nights without any food is entirely ludicrous. The 600 year-old man who built an Ark for God exists only in the fertile ground of the primitive mind. Selling lies to a compliant following is the charlatan’s profession but you won’t hear Ken Ham or Ray Comfort ever complain about their $73 million standing abortion in Williamstown Kentucky.
What is even better if you’re in the business of selling lies disguised as faith is that the Ark Encounter Ministries will not have to pay a nickel in taxes to the state of Kentucky, ever. Whoever said that America was the ‘land of opportunity’ was either a preacher or a snake-oil salesman which in this day and age, what’s the difference?
President of the Russian Federation, Vladimier Putin is right, the USA is not a functioning Democracy.
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