RSN: Republican Senators Just Voted to Sell Off Your National Forests, UAE's Secret $1M Gift to the NYPD

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Noam Chomsky: 'Oppression Is Not a Law of Nature'

Noam Chomsky, Commonweal Magazine
Chomsky writes: "In 1962, President Kennedy changed the mission of the Latin American military from 'hemispheric defense' to 'internal security.'"
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UAE's Secret $1M Gift to the NYPD
Murtaza Hussain and Eli Clifton, The Intercept
Excerpt: "The New York City Police Foundation received a $1 million donation from the government of the United Arab Emirates, according to 2012 tax records, the same amount the foundation transferred to the NYPD Intelligence Division's International Liaison Program that year, according to documents obtained by The Intercept."
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Walter Scott Shooting: Officer Laughs About Adrenaline Rush in Recording
Jon Swaine, Guardian UK
Swaine writes: "The police officer who killed Walter Scott in South Carolina laughed about the adrenaline rush he was feeling, in a conversation that offers a new insight into his mindset in the minutes after the shooting."
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Flaw in the Search for Humane Execution: There Is No Such Thing
Jason Silverstein, Guardian UK
Silverstein writes: "Oklahoma is but the governor's signature away from becoming the first state to approve the use of nitrogen gas in executions - another step in the doomed search for a humane execution."
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Israel Profits Off of 11-Year-Olds' Labor in Illegal Settlements
Al Jazeera and The Associated Press
Excerpt: "A leading international human rights group on Monday accused Israeli settlements in the West Bank of using Palestinian child labor in farming, calling it a violation of international law."
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In Some of the World's Poorest Countries, It's Easier to Get an Abortion Than in the United States
Tera Culp-Ressler, ThinkProgress
Culp-Ressler writes: "In order to argue that abortion bans are simply common sense, anti-abortion advocates often point out that even liberal European countries cut off access to the procedure before the United States does - making the point that the U.S. has particularly extreme laws that fall outside the status quo."
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Republicans just voted to sell off our national land. (photo: David McNew/Getty Images)

Republican Senators Just Voted to Sell Off Your National Forests

By Wes Siler, IndefinitelyWild

13 April 15

ur public lands — including National Forests, wildlife refuges and wilderness areas — are arguably our greatest treasure. Well, almost every Republican Senator just voted to sell them to the highest bidder. This is what you can do about it.

 

Why Public Land Is Important

 

I don't need to explain this, some of our nation's greatest thinkers and leaders have already done so:

 

"There can be no greater issue than that of conservation in this country." — Theodore Roosevelt

 

"Today, across our land, the National Park System represents America at its best. Each park contributes to a deeper understanding of the history of the United States and our way of life; of the natural processes which have given form to our land, and to the enrichment of the environment in which we live." — George B Hartzog, Jr.

 

"The fundamental idea...is that the country belongs to the people, that it is in process of making for the enrichment of the lives of all of us." — Franklin D. Roosevelt

 

"National parks and reserves are an integral aspect of intelligent use of natural resoures. It is the course of wisdom to set aside an ample portion of our natural resources as national parks and reserves, thus ensuring that future generations may know the majesty of the earth as we know it today." — John F. Kennedy

 

"Conservation is a great moral issue, for it involves the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and continuance of the nation." — Theodore Roosevelt

 

"As we peer into society's future, we – you and I, and our government – must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage." — Dwight D. Eisenhower

 

"Restoring nature to its natural state is a cause beyond party and beyond factions. It has become a common cause of all the people of this country. It is a cause of particular concern to young Americans, because they more than we will reap the grim consequences of our failure to act on programs which are needed now if we are to prevent disaster later." — Richard Nixon

 

"The preservation of parks, wilderness, and wildlife has also aided liberty by keeping alive the 19th century sense of adventure and awe with which our forefathers greeted the American West. Many laws protecting environmental quality have promoted liberty by securing property against the destrutctive trespass of pollution. In our own time, the nearly universal appreciation of these preserved landscapes, restored waters, and cleaner air through outdoor recreation is a modern expression of our freedom and leisure to enjoy the wonderful life that generations past have built for us." — Ronald Reagan

 

And one more, for good measure: "We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature." — Henry David Thoreau

SA 838

 

SA 838 is a budgetary amendment which backs support for and funding of state efforts to take over federal land. It was part of a larger debate over the 2016 fiscal year federal budget.

 

While yes, its language does note that it's impossible to sell National Parks, National Monuments and National Preserves (which enjoy extraordinary legal protection), it leaves the door open to sell National Forests, Wildlife Refuges and Wildernesses. That's some of you and I's most beautiful lands on which we're currently able to camp, hunt, hang out with our dogs and on which a large portion of wild animals rely for their habitat.

 

Introducing the amendment, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R, AK) stated, "When we have an opportunity to consider this amendment, a vote for it is really a vote in support of — as a priority of this Congress — comprehensive approaches to land policies to facilitate economic development, empower States and improve our conservation systems."

 

The back story is that there's ongoing, and potentially unconstitutional efforts taking place in Utah, Arizona, Wyoming, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, Alaska and Idaho to see those states take possession of public land from the federal government, then allow the exploitation of their resources by private industry.

 

AmericanProgress.org calls it "…a losing battle that amounts to little more than political grandstanding to rally their extreme conservative base and feed an antigovernment narrative. Such bills contradict the majority of public opinion in these states, as well as economic realities and constitutional precedent dating back to the mid-19th century."

 

The senate's budgetary amendment to support this privatization carries no legal weight — it's not a law — but does signify a troubling level of support for the privatization of public land. And make no mistake, this is about privatization and resource exploitation.

 

Efforts to "reclaim" public land are financially support by special interest groups like ALEC and Americans For Prosperity. ALEC is primarily funded by ExxonMobil while Americans For Prosperity was founded by David and Charles Koch. They're funding an argument that, on the surface, sounds sensible — States' Rights! — but underneath, simply appears to be a land grab by private interests intent on resource exploitation.

 

SA 838 passed 51-49. Democrats unanimously opposed it, while all but three Republicans voted for it. The holdouts were Corey Gardner of Colorado, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee.

 

If it's not a law (yet!), then why worry about it? "If you let a bad idea fester long enough, it sounds less and less like a bad idea," states Steve Kline, of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. The fear is that this success in the senate could encourage future efforts to pass similar language as actual legislation. Once our National Forests, Wildlife Refuges and Wildernesses are gone, they're gone for good.

 

And despite a clear demarcation along party lines in the vote, this isn't a partisan issue. It's a common sense one; we need to preserve the protected wildernesses that make this country so special.

 

Traditionally conservative organizations like Backcountry Hunters & Anglers are also voicing strong opposition. "Public lands are the fabric that binds America together," they state. "Nationally, an organized, concerted movement is underway to sell off and limit access to America's public lands and waters. These are not merely the actions of a lunatic fringe. Now is the time to double down and fight back against this ill-conceived idea."

 

What Can You Do About It?

 

Well, you could stop electing to public office greedy assholes who care more about pandering to big business than serving their constituents or the public interest. If that's asking too much, you could instead sign this petition from The Wilderness Society, it calls for elected officials to end their support for selling off public lands.

 

You could also write to your local senator in opposition to the amendment, especially if they were one of the Republicans who supported it.

Assholes.

 

 

RSN: Are Cell Phones Changing the Narrative on Police Shootings?

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Matt Taibbi. (photo: Rolling Stone)

Are Cell Phones Changing the Narrative on Police Shootings?

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

10 April 15

Thank God for the video in the Scott case, but cell phones aren't everywhere yet

lmost everyone's seen the video. The latest murder of an unarmed African-American man by police was captured in its entirety by a bystander named Feidin Santana, and the footage was so gruesome it basically precluded any controversy.

 

Former North Charleston police officer Michael Slager has already been fired and charged for the murder of Walter Scott. Still, one has to wonder: "Would this guy have gotten away with this without the video?"

 

Nonwhite America has watched police lie compulsively about incidents like this for as long as there have been police. You can open the law books and find cases like the Scott murder in almost any state of the union, in almost every year, going back decades and decades.

 

The only difference is that in the past, before everyone above the age of 2 had a cell phone, the insultingly lame explanations of the police ("The gun just went off"; "The suspect suddenly took a swing at me") were almost always swallowed whole, by juries and the media alike.

 

But even before cell phones became ubiquitous, the presumption that a police officer's testimony is sacrosanct started to die out. Public defenders in big cities long ago learned to deal with the frustration of police caught lying on the stand who were allowed to continue giving evidence in other cases.

 

Even judges, increasingly, aren't always buying the stories police officers give anymore, particularly when it comes to issues like probable cause. Earlier this year, a local defense attorney sent me a long list of cases, mostly here in New York, that involved judges ruling that police had fabricated testimony. It's clear even magistrates are losing patience.

 

Take People v. Andrews, for instance, in which a judge named Steven Knopf threw his figurative hands up in frustration over a police officer's changing descriptions of a "snowball" of cocaine he claimed to have seen a young black man throw into a Ford Focus. The story changed so many times that the judge had no choice but to toss the case.

 

"It is clear to this Court that [the] Police Officer's multiple descriptions. . .indicates he was unclear about what, if anything, he actually observed in this defendant's hand," the judge wrote. "In fact, it is this Court's belief that [the officer] did not see anything in the defendant's hand, in spite of his creative descriptive testimony."

 

The problem is that this kind of "testilying" is usually only caught when the officer's fabrications are so absurd and incompetent that judges literally have no choice but to suppress his or her evidence.

 

Judges don't like showing up cops in court. There are even cases on record when judges admit out loud to being reluctant to discredit the testimony of police, no matter how clumsy their testimony.

 

"I don't like to jeopardize their career and all the rest of it," a federal judge named John Sprizzo said a few years back, after ruling that two cops had "tailored" their testimony to justify an illegal search.

 

Minus video, a defendant on the wrong side of a police fabrication typically has to hope the arresting officer is so dumb and such a maladroit liar that he leaves a judge no choice but to override his natural inclination to buy the testimony of a sworn officer. Those are pretty long odds.

 

Getting back to the Scott case, the presence of a cell phone clearly changed the game. Going forward, maybe innovations like body cameras will help change the national narrative about these incidents (although it's significant that when there is no video, like in the Michael Brown case, white people still tend to reflexively believe the police).

 

The thornier problem will be what will happen with the thousands of other, smaller incidents that involve questionable car stops or searches, where cases are generated based on police seeing suspects making "furtive movements," or "leaning" in the direction of an officer's gun, or suspiciously "loitering," or smelling the "strong odor of marijuana," etc. (Not sure what body electronics they can install to check that last sort of probable cause issue).

 

And there isn't always video to save the day in other my-word-against-his cases. Look at the recent research on chokehold allegations in New York.

 

According to a study done by the new chair of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, New Yorkers made 1,048 allegations of chokeholds against police over a five-year period, between 2009 and 2014.

Of those, the CCRB substantiated the allegations – meaning they found a preponderance of evidence of police misconduct – in just 10 of those cases. As one attorney put it to me, "Historically, if there's no video, they just don't substantiate."

 

And when Phillip Eure, the newly-appointed Inspector General of the NYPD, looked at those 10 cases, he found something amazing. There was virtually no discipline for any of the officers involved, even in that tiny sliver of "substantiated" abuses. This is from the Daily News report on Eure's study:

 

In all 10 cases the NYPD ignored CCRB's suggested punishment. In nine of the cases, CCRB recommended the toughest sanction possible, departmental charges. In every case the cop got lesser punishment ranging from no punishment at all to the loss of five vacation days.

 

North Charleston resident Feidin Santana is rightly being praised for having the presence of mind (and the backbone) to take the cell phone video of Slager's murder of Scott, but as the Eure study and others show, there won't always be a Santana on hand, particularly for the less serious cases.

 

One other often-overlooked issue is the problem of the police who fail to help victims after the fact.

 

In the Scott case, the police appeared to have lied about administering CPR to him while he lay on the ground bleeding to death. As Vanity Fair put it:

 

While the police report on the incident indicates that officers performed C.P.R. on Scott, the video footage the Times reviewed and posted does not show any of the three officers who were eventually on the scene administering C.P.R. to Scott, who is face-down, hands cuffed behind his bloodied back.

 

This is one of the many consistent themes to a lot of these police-abuse stories. In so many incidents, even the nearby officers who didn't administer the deadly force originally are discovered later on to have not helped or made real efforts to save the victim.

 

We heard about that in the Akai Gurley shooting case in East New York, where the two officers involved reportedly texted their union reps before calling for help for Gurley.

 

And then of course there was the Eric Garner case, where a multitude of officers stood around with hands on hips while Garner said "I can't breathe" 11 times. (And though of course no one knows for sure, it's likely that many of those officers now have immunity after testifying before a grand jury).

 

What about criminal responsibility for refusing medical aid, or, worse, lying about refusing medical aid?

 

That's what's worrisome about this case. Slager will be painted as the bad apple and he'll have the book thrown at him. But the institutional response didn't come around until the video surfaced.

 

Which should make even doubters wonder how often the authorities lie and get away with it.