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How Inequality Is Killing the American Dream ... And What We Can Do About It |
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Thursday, 20 November 2014 14:15 |
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Stiglitz reports: "A country that prides itself on being the land of opportunity, but in which a child's prospects are more dependent on the income and education of his or her parents than in other advanced countries."
Joseph Stiglitz. (photo: unknown)
How Inequality Is Killing the American Dream ... And What We Can Do About It
By Joseph Stiglitz, AlterNet
20 November 14
The question is not whether we can afford to do more about our inequality; it is whether we can afford not to do more.
 rich country with millions of poor people. A country that prides itself on being the land of opportunity, but in which a child’s prospects are more dependent on the income and education of his or her parents than in other advanced countries. A country that believes in fair play, but in which the richest often pay a smaller percentage of their income in taxes than those less well off. A country in which children every day pledge allegiance to the flag, asserting that there is “justice for all,” but in which, increasingly, there is only justice for those who can afford it. These are the contradictions that the United States is gradually and painfully struggling to come to terms with as it begins to comprehend the enormity of the inequalities that mark its society—inequities that are greater than in any other advanced country.
Those who strive not to think about this issue suggest that this is just about the “politics of envy.” Those who discuss the issue are accused of fomenting class warfare. But as we have come to grasp the causes and consequences of these inequities we have come to understand that this is not about envy. The extreme to which inequality has grown in the United States and the manner in which these inequities arise undermine our economy. Too much of the wealth at the top of the ladder arises from exploitation—whether from the exercise of monopoly power, from taking advantage of deficiencies in corporate governance laws to divert large amounts of corporate revenues to pay CEOs’ outsized bonuses unrelated to true performance, or from a financial sector devoted to market manipulation, predatory and discriminatory lending, and abusive credit card practices. Too much of the poverty at the bottom of the income spectrum is due to economic discrimination and the failure to provide adequate education and health care to the nearly one out of five children growing up poor.
The growing debate about inequality in America today is, above all, about the nature of our society, our vision of who we are, and others’ vision of us. We used to think of ourselves as a middle-class society, where each generation was better off than the last. At the foundation of our democracy was the middle class—the modern-day version of the small, property-owning American farmer whom Thomas Jefferson saw as the backbone of the country. It was understood that the best way to grow was to build out from the middle—rather than trickle down from the top. This commonsense perspective has been verified by studies at the International Monetary Fund, which demonstrate that countries with greater equality perform better—higher growth, more stability. It was one of the main messages of my book The Price of Inequality. Because of our tolerance for inequality, even the quintessential American Dream has been shown to be a myth: America is less of a land of opportunity than even most countries of “old Europe.”
The articles in this special edition of the Washington Monthly describe the way that America’s inequality plays out at each stage of one’s life, with several articles focusing in particular on education. We now know that there are huge disparities even as children enter kindergarten. These grow larger over time, as the children of the rich, living in rich enclaves, get a better education than the one received by those attending schools in poorer areas. Economic segregation has become the order of the day, so much so that even those well-off and well-intentioned selective colleges that instituted programs of economic affirmative action—explicitly trying to increase the fraction of their student body from lower socioeconomic groups—have struggled to do so. The children of the poor can afford neither the advanced degrees that are increasingly required for employment nor the unpaid internships that provide the alternative route to “good” jobs.
Similar stories could be told about each of the dimensions of America’s outsized inequality. Take health care. America is unique among the advanced countries in not recognizing access to health care as a basic human right. And that means if you are a poor American, your prospects of getting adequate, let alone good, medical care are worse than in other advanced countries. Even after passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), almost two dozen states have rejected expanding vitally needed Medicaid, and more than forty million Americans still lacked health insurance at the beginning of 2014. The dismal statistics concerning America’s health care system are well known: while we spend more—far more—on health care (both per capita and as a percentage of gross domestic product) than other countries, health outcomes are worse. In Australia, for instance, spending on health care per capita is just over two-thirds that in the United States, yet health outcomes are better—including a life expectancy that is a remarkable three years longer.
Two of the reasons for our dismal health statistics are related to inequalities at the top and the bottom of our society—monopoly profits reaped by drug companies, medical device makers, health insurers, and highly concentrated provider networks drive prices, and inequality, up while the lack of access to timely care for the poor, including preventive medicine, makes the population sicker and more costly to treat. The ACA is helping on both accounts. The health insurance exchanges are designed to promote competition. And the whole act is designed to increase access. The numbers suggest it’s working. As for costs, the widespread predictions that Obamacare would cause massive health care inflation have proven false, as the rate of increase in health care prices has remained comparatively moderate over the last several years, showing once again that there is no necessary trade-off between fairness and efficiency. The first year of the ACA showed significant increases in coverage—far more significant in those states that implemented the Medicaid expansion than in those that refused to do so. But the ACA was a compromise, leaving out dental and long-term extended care insurance.
Inequities in health care, then, are still with us, beginning even before birth. The poor are more likely to be exposed to environmental hazards, and mothers have less access to good prenatal care. The result is infant mortality rates that are comparable to some developing countries alongside a higher incidence of low birth weight (systemically correlated with poor lifetime prospects) than in other advanced countries. Lack of access to comprehensive health care for the 20 percent of American children growing up in poverty, combined with lack of access to adequate nutrition, makes success in school even less likely. With the cheapest form of food often being unhealthy carbohydrates, the poor are more likely to face problems of childhood diabetes and obesity. The inequities continue throughout life—culminating in dramatically different statistics on life expectancy.
All well and good, you might say: it would be nice if we could give free health care to all, free college education to all, but these are dreams that have to be tamed by the harsh realities of what we can afford. Already the country has a large deficit. Proposals to create a more equal society would make the large deficit even larger—so the argument goes. America is especially constrained because it has assumed the costly mission of ensuring peace and security for the world.
This is nonsense, on several counts.
The real strength of the United States is derived from its “soft power,” not its military power. But growing inequality is sapping our standing in the world from within. Can an economic system that provides so little opportunity—where real median household income (half above, half below, after adjusting for inflation) is lower today than it was a quarter century ago—provide a role model that others seek to emulate, even if a few at the very top have done very well?
Moreover, what we can afford is as much a matter of priorities as anything else. Other countries, such as the nations of Scandinavia, have, for instance, managed to provide good health care to all, virtually free college education for all, and good public transportation, and have done just as well, or even better, on standard metrics of economic performance: incomes per head and growth are at least comparable. Even some countries that are far poorer than the United States (such as Mauritius, off the east cost of Africa) have managed to provide free college education and better access to health care. A nation must make choices, and these countries have made different ones: they may spend less on their military, they may spend less on prisons, they may tax more.
Besides, many of the distributional issues are related not to how much we spend but who we spend it on. If we include within our expenditures the “tax expenditures” buried in our tax system, we effectively spend a lot more on the housing of the rich than is generally recognized. Interest deductability on a mega-mansion could easily be worth $25,000 a year. And alone among advanced economies, the United States tends to invest more in schools with richer student bodies than in those with mostly poor students—an effect of U.S. school districts’ dependence on local tax bases for funding. Interestingly, according to some calculations, the entire deficit can be attributed to our inefficient and inequitable health care system: if we had a better health care system—of the kind that provided more equality at lower cost, such as those in so many European countries—we arguably wouldn’t even have a federal budget deficit today.
Or consider this: if we provided more opportunity to the poor, including better education and an economic system that ensured access to jobs with decent pay, then perhaps we would not spend so much on prisons—in some states spending on prisons has at times exceeded that on universities. The poor instead would be better able to seize new employment opportunities, in turn making our economy more productive. And if we had better public transportation systems that made it easier and more affordable for working-class people to commute to where jobs are available, then a higher percentage of our population would be working and paying taxes. If, like the Scandinavian countries, we provided better child care and had more active labor market policies that assisted workers in moving from one job to another, we would have a higher labor force participation rate—and the enhanced growth would yield more tax revenues. It pays to invest in people.
This brings me to the final point: we could impose a fair tax system, raising more revenue, improving equity, and boosting economic growth while reducing distortions in our economy and our society. (That was the central finding of my 2014 Roosevelt Institute white paper, “Reforming Taxation to Promote Growth and Equity.”) For instance, if we just imposed the same taxes on the returns to capital that we impose on those who work for a living, we could raise some $2 trillion over ten years. “Loopholes” does not adequately describe the flaws in our tax system; “gaps” might be better. Closing them might end the specter of the very rich almost proudly disclosing that they pay a tax rate on their disclosed income at half the rate of those with less income, and that they keep their money in tax havens like the Cayman Islands. No one can claim that the inhabitants of these small islands know how to manage money better than the wizards of Wall Street; but it seems as though that money grows better in the sunshine of these beach resorts!
One of the few advantages of there being so much money at the top of the income ladder, with close to a quarter of all income going to the top 1 percent, is that slight increases in taxes at the top can now raise large amounts of money. And because so much of the money at the top comes from exploitation (or as economists prefer to call it, “rent seeking”—that is, seizing a larger share of the national pie rather than increasing its size), higher taxes at the top do not seem to have much of an adverse effect on economic performance.
Then there’s our corporate tax rate. If we actually made corporations pay what they are supposed to pay and eliminated loopholes we would raise hundreds of billions of dollars. With the right redesign, we could even get more employment and investment in the United States. True, U.S. corporations face one of the higher official corporate tax rates among the advanced countries; but the reality is otherwise—as a share of corporate income actually paid, our federal corporate taxes are just 13 percent of reported worldwide income. By most accounts, the amount of taxes actually paid (as a percentage of profits) is no higher than the average of other advanced countries. Apple Inc., Google Inc., and General Electric Co. have become the poster children of American ingenuity—making products that are the envy of the rest of the world. But they are using too much of that ingenuity to figure out how to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. Yet they and other U.S. corporations make full use of ideas and innovations produced with the support of the U.S. government, starting with the Internet itself. At the same time they rely on the talent produced by the country’s first-rate universities, all of which receive extensive support from the federal government. They even turn to the U.S. government to demand better treatment from our trading partners.
Corporations argue that they would not engage in so much despicable tax avoidance if tax rates were lower. But there is a far better solution, and one that the individual U.S. states have discovered: have corporations pay taxes based on the economic activity they conduct in the United States, on the basis of a simple formula reflecting their sales, their production, and their research activities here, and tax corporations that invest in the United States at lower rates than those that don’t. In this way we could increase investment and employment here at home—a far cry from the current system, in which we in effect encourage even U.S. corporations to produce elsewhere. (Even if U.S. taxes are no higher than the average, there are some tax havens—like Ireland—that are engaged in a race to the bottom, trying to recruit companies to make their country their tax home.) Such a reform would end the corporate stampede toward “inversions,” changing a corporation’s tax home to avoid taxes. Where they claim their home office is would make little difference; only where they actually do business would.
Other sources of revenue would benefit our economy and our society. Two basic principles of taxation are that it is better to tax bad things than good; and it is better to tax factors in what economists call “inelastic supply”—meaning that the amounts produced and sold won’t change when taxes are imposed on them. Thus, if we taxed pollution in all of its forms—including carbon emissions—we could raise hundreds of billions of dollars every year, and have a better environment. Similarly, appropriately designed taxes on the financial sector would not only raise considerable amounts of money but also discourage banks from imposing costs on others—as when they polluted the global economy with toxic mortgages.
The $700 billion bank bailout pales in comparison to what the bankers’ fecklessness has cost our economy and our society—trillions of dollars in lost GDP, millions of Americans thrown out of their homes and jobs. Yet few in the financial world have been held accountable.
If we required the banks to pay but a fraction of the costs they have imposed on others, we would then have further funds to undo some of the damage that they caused by their discriminatory and predatory lending practices, which moved money from the bottom of the economic pyramid to the top. And by imposing even slight taxes on Wall Street’s speculative activities via a financial transactions tax, we would raise much-needed revenue, decrease speculation (thus increasing economic stability), and encourage more productive use of our scarce resources, including the most valuable one: talented young Americans.
Similarly, by taxing land, oil, and minerals more—and forcing those who extract resources from public land to pay the full values of these resources, which rightly belong to all the people, we could then spend those proceeds for public investments—for instance, in education, technology, and infrastructure—without resulting in less land, less oil, fewer minerals. (Even if they are taxed more, these resources won’t go on strike; they won’t leave the country!) The result: increased long-term investments in our economy would pay substantial future dividends in higher economic productivity and growth—and if the money was spent right, we could have more shared prosperity. The question is not whether we can afford to do more about our inequality; it is whether we can afford not to do more. The debate in America is not about eliminating inequality. It is simply about moderating it and restoring the American Dream.
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The Coming GOP Freakout Over Immigration |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=7326"><span class="small">Patricia Murphy, The Daily Beast</span></a>
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Thursday, 20 November 2014 14:03 |
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Murphy writes: "With an executive order this week that will affect 5 million undocumented immigrants, the president is daring the Republicans to fight back-and alienate Latino voters."
(photo: file)
ALSO SEE: Obama's Immigration Plan Could Shield Five Million
The Coming GOP Freakout Over Immigration
By Patricia Murphy, The Daily Beast
20 November 14
With an executive order this week that will affect 5 million undocumented immigrants, the president is daring the Republicans to fight back—and alienate Latino voters.
 hen President Obama announces his executive order giving legal status to as many as 5 million undocumented immigrants, he will do it over the objections of nearly every Republican in Congress. And that’s just fine with Democrats.
“We have waited long enough for House Republicans,” Harry Reid said Wednesday. “Since they won’t act, the president should, and he will.”
Likewise, Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, who often has to contort his answers from the podium to cover every base and offend no audience, was notably at ease as he discussed the president’s immigration plans during his press briefing later in the day. “The president often says only the tough issues reach his desk,” Earnest said with half a smile. “This might be the one exception.”
After a humiliating defeat on Election Day, when Latino voters stayed home in droves and Democrats lost every race they expected and many they didn’t, the president’s party now sees an early opportunity to turn the tide back against Republicans. By moving unilaterally, the thinking goes in Washington, Democrats will get credit from Latinos for securing legal status for millions, all while goading the GOP into a potentially fatal reaction on the issue that has danced on racial, class, and political divides for decades.
“I’d say ‘advantage Obama’ on the politics of this,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, a pro-reform group. “He’s going to recover lost ground in the Latino community for himself and for Democrats. This is a big, bold move that’s going to protect millions of people.”
While Democrats get the credit, Sharry predicted, the danger for Republicans comes if the opposition of the party’s most strident members, like Sens. Ted Cruz and Jeff Sessions, define the GOP as a whole. The danger of a potential Republican overreach or overreaction was clearly on the minds of people in both parties Wednesday.
“If the fight over the next six weeks, six months, two years is, ‘Republicans want to kill this thing in the crib, Democrats fight to defend it,’ think of the bright line that draws,” Sharry said. “One party is fighting for immigrants; the other party is fighting against them. That distinction, which was a big factor in 2012, will be turbo-charged in 2016.”
But as certain as Democrats are that the politics of another immigration fight will help them, conservatives are equally convinced of the rightness of their argument.
“It is a huge issue, and I don’t think you could overstate how important it is,” said Dan Holler, communications director for Heritage Action.
“What we said in 2013 was that if you were a politician and the American people saw you fighting with every tool you have to stop Obamacare, you’d be rewarded,” he said. “I think that played out. Similarly, if a politician used every tool available to stop executive amnesty and handing out 5 million work permits, those politicians are going to be rewarded. I think it’s a no-brainer.”
As news broke that the president would make his announcement from the White House before the end of the week, Democrats quietly hoped that the GOP would quickly find the self-destruct button. Even before the details of the president’s plans were made public, Republicans lambasted the president as “Emperor Obama” (House Speaker John Boehner), “abusing his power” (Sen. John Cornyn), using “diktats” and “the tactics of a monarch” (Cruz), and risking “anarchy” and riots in the streets (Sen. Tom Coburn).
While the language may have been heated, Republican leaders were quietly sorting through “a very narrow path of acceptable options,” as one GOP staffer described it. Included on the list were suing the president in federal court, passing legislation to reverse the executive order, which the president would veto, and the riskiest—passing appropriations bills to fund the entire government but stripping out money for the president to enact the executive order, a path that could lead swiftly to threats of a government shutdown.
The first test will come almost immediately, in the first week of December, as Congress debates a bill to fund the government past December 11, when the current spending bill lapses.
Conservatives have made clear they want Republican leaders to use the December deadline to confront the president on immigration.
“We expect [the new GOP majority] to use the power of the purse to defund amnesty, especially those—and there were many—who ran against it,” said Kevin Broughton, national spokesman for the Tea Party Patriots. “This is a constitutional republic, not a banana republic. Let’s see if the GOP can act like it.”
Holler said he also thought the defund strategy is the one conservatives will push for, even though incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has promised to keep the government operating at all costs and several senior Republican senators have indicated that a government shutdown strategy should be off the table.
“The incoming Republican majority in the Senate was built on opposition to executive amnesty,” said Holler. “It’s what a lot of these folks ran on—and ran successfully on. There’s going to be a tremendous amount of pressure to use the appropriations process to try to block the executive action, regardless of what one or two senators might say.”
While the announcement will force Republicans to deal with a split in their caucus on the issue, Democrats have their own longstanding internal battles over immigration that the president’s announcement won’t solve. The executive action Obama is expected to take likely will not include relief for farm workers, high-tech workers, or those with extenuating humanitarian circumstances, three categories Democrats had pushed hard for.
Even the guest list for a White House dinner with Hill leaders to unveil the details of his plans raised eyebrows in Obama’s own party. On the list: Democratic leaders, the incoming head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and the leading Hispanic, Asian, and black members of the Democratic caucus. Not on the list: many of the senior Democrats who worked for years to write the House’s immigration-reform legislation and learned of plans for the executive order from media reports.
“What a bunch of motherf**kers,” said a top Democratic aide of the White House’s outreach to Democrats. “They can’t even do the easy things right.”
One Democrat who should have no complaints is Harry Reid. On Friday the president will go to Del Sol High School in Reid’s hometown of Las Vegas, where Obama spoke first during the 2008 presidential campaign and returned in 2012 to promise Latinos in the audience that “the time is now” on immigration reform.
It turns out that the time wasn’t then. But two years and two elections later, it looks like the time has come for the president to deliver on his long-delayed promise to the Latino and immigrant communities, which make up 27.5 percent of the population in Nevada. Standing next to Obama will be Reid, who is up for reelection in 2016 and could face Brian Sandoval, Nevada’s popular GOP governor, who just pulled in 47 percent of the Latino vote in his reelection bid this month.
Frank Sharry says Friday’s event could make all the difference for Reid in 2016. “If Harry Reid on Friday stands next to the president and says, ‘The biggest victory in 25 years is thanks so me,’ that’s a pretty big calling card,” Sharry said.
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FOCUS | "Down Outright Murder": A Complete Guide to the Shooting of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=29592"><span class="small">Ryan Devereaux, The Intercept</span></a>
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Thursday, 20 November 2014 11:06 |
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Devereaux writes: "The nation is on edge, awaiting a grand jury decision in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown - an unarmed African American teen in Ferguson, Missouri - by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson more than three months ago."
A Ferguson protester chants 'Don't shoot!' at police in riot gear. (photo: Ben Kesling)
"Down Outright Murder": A Complete Guide to the Shooting of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson
By Ryan Devereaux, The Interept
20 November 14
 he nation is on edge, awaiting a grand jury decision in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown — an unarmed African American teen in Ferguson, Missouri — by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson more than three months ago. The decision is expected any day and there is widespread belief, based on weeks of leaks to the media and laws that historically favor police officers in lethal force cases, that Wilson will not be indicted. Missouri Governor Jay Nixon has preemptively declared a state of emergency in anticipation of protests.
Brown’s killing, the culmination of an incident that the St. Louis Post Dispatch would later report lasted no more than 90 seconds, devastated a family with high hopes for their college-bound son and sparked some of the most significant civil rights demonstrations in a generation — casting a harsh light on the disproportionate number of black men killed by police, on St. Louis County’s exploitative and racially discriminatory municipal court system, and on the militarization of law enforcement.
In the months since Brown was killed, numerous eyewitnesses have come forward to describe what they saw during the teen’s final moments, while controversial disclosures to the press have served to describe Wilson’s version of the events that day.
This is everything we know about the shooting.
It was just past noon on August 9 when Wilson and Brown’s paths first crossed in Ferguson’s Canfield Green apartment complex. Wilson had just finished responding to a call regarding a sick infant. Brown and his friend Dorian Johnson, 22, were walking in a two-lane residential street when Wilson approached in his sport utility patrol vehicle and told them to get on the sidewalk. The precise details of what happened next have been at the center of months of protest and outrage.
Most agree on the following: There was some sort of physical struggle between Brown and Wilson while Wilson was still in his vehicle; Brown ran from the confrontation; Wilson got out of the vehicle and fatally shot Brown at least six times from a distance; Brown was unarmed; and his bleeding body lay in the hot summer sun for four hours, much of that time uncovered, as the residents of Canfield looked upon his splayed-out corpse in horror.
The Ferguson Police Department turned the investigation into Brown’s killing over to the larger St. Louis County Police Department almost immediately. The morning after Brown was killed, St. Louis County police chief Jon Belmar held a press conference. With protesters shouting in the background, Blemar told reporters that Brown “physically assaulted” an unnamed officer while the officer was in his vehicle. The teen was going for the officer’s gun, the police chief said.
“It is our understanding, at this point in the investigation, that there was a struggle over the officer’s weapon. There was at least one shot fired within the car,” Belmar said. While acknowledging that Brown was unarmed, Belmar said “more than a few” shell casings were found at the scene of the shooting but did not say how many times the officer fired, nor how many times Brown was hit.
“It was more than just a couple, but I don’t think it was many more than that,” Belmar said of the shots fired. The shooting, he said, took place roughly 35 feet from the officer’s vehicle.
Under Missouri state law, police officers are granted authority to use deadly force “in effecting an arrest or in preventing an escape from custody” if “he reasonably believes” it is necessary “to effect the arrest and also reasonably believes that the person to be arrested has committed or attempted to commit a felony…or may otherwise endanger life or inflict serious physical injury unless arrested without delay.” As an officer with the Ferguson Police Department, Wilson was also required to follow department guidelines on the use of force.
In mid-October, The New York Times published an article previewing Wilson’s official version of events, as told to the grand jury during his four-hour testimony. The disclosures were, in essence, a repeat of claims Wilson’s employer and friends had been making for months: The police officer was going about his duties when he came across a teenager who attacked him through his window and tried to steal his gun. As the story went, during the ordeal Wilson thought he might be killed so, after the teen took off running, Wilson got out of his vehicle and shot him to death.
Citing unnamed “government officials briefed on the federal civil rights investigation into the” shooting, the Times reported that two shots, not one, as previously reported, were fired inside Wilson’s vehicle and that Brown’s blood was splashed across on the interior panel of the SUV, as well as Wilson’s gun and uniform. According to the paper, “Wilson told the authorities that Mr. Brown had punched and scratched him repeatedly, leaving swelling on his face and cuts on his neck.”
The fact that Wilson testified was telling. He was not legally required to do so, and in most grand jury cases defendants do not testify because their attorney cannot be present. This move, some suggested, was an indication that Wilson and his legal counsel felt the proceedings would work to his favor.
Wilson’s decision to testify wasn’t the only unorthodox thing about the grand jury proceedings. In addition, St. Louis County’s top prosecutor, Robert P. McCulloch, opted to have the grand jurors decide what charges, if any, to file against Wilson. Those charges could include murder or manslaughter. From the beginning, however, a first-degree murder charge has been considered unlikely, as it would require proving Wilson harbored a malicious intent to kill Brown. A second-degree murder charge, meanwhile, could be overcome if Wilson could successfully argue that he was in fear for his life or the lives of others at the time of the incident, and it was clear early on that Wilson would argue that he feared for his life. Wilson could face lesser charges, like voluntary or involuntary manslaughter, if the jurors find that he was negligent in the shooting.
In the secretive process of a grand jury, a prosecutor wields considerable power to influence the determination of the jurors on the question of whether or not to indict. Critics argued that by shifting this responsibility to the jurors in the Brown case, presenting them with all of the witnesses and evidence in the investigation and effectively asking the 12 citizens on the panel, including three African-Americans, to make up their own minds, McCulloch was making a half-hearted attempt to secure an indictment while simultaneously insulating himself from any criticism if Wilson walked. McCulloch also turned over the bulk of the work in the case to two veteran prosecutors from his office, further distancing himself from the day-to-day proceedings.
For weeks, protesters and supporters of the Brown family, as well as elected officials, rallied to have McCulloch removed from the case, arguing that he had a longstanding history, rooted in personal trauma, of protecting police officers in use-of-force cases. McCulloch’s father was a police officer killed in the line of duty, 50 years before Brown was gunned down, by a black man who stole his gun. Several of McCulloch’s family members, including his mother, brother, uncle, and cousin, have worked for the St. Louis Police Department. McCulloch himself had a long hoped to join the force, but after losing his leg to cancer in high school he decided to become a prosecutor. “I couldn’t become a policeman, so being county prosecutor is the next best thing,” he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
In 2001, McCulloch oversaw a particularly controversial fatal shooting case in which two unarmed black men, caught up in a small-time drug sting, were shot 21 times in broad daylight by undercover officers at a Jack In the Box drive-through. In presenting the case to the grand jury, McCulloch said the men pulled forward at the officers, prompting them to open fire. The jurors decided not to indict the officers–who both testified–based on the evidence McCulloch presented. “These guys were bums,” McCulloch said of the deceased. The case became a flashpoint of racial tension that has been seared in the minds of many members of St. Louis County’s African American communities ever since. A subsequent investigation by The St. Louis Post Dispatch found that only three of the 13 officers involved in the sting said the vehicle moved forward; the two officers who shot and a third officer whose testimony McCulloch later described as “completely wrong.”
Outside the secretive confines of the grand jury, the accounts of multiple eyewitnesses to the shooting, relayed through the media and typically contradictory to the official police account, played a major role in driving the anger over Brown’s killing. As far as evidence goes, eyewitness testimony is far from perfect. According to the Innocence Project, a non-profit that has secured the release of hundreds of wrongfully convicted people over the last two decades, “eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions nationwide, playing a role in 72% of convictions overturned through DNA testing.”
Fallibility aside, the relative consistency of basic facts in the eyewitness accounts to Brown’s killing — combined with a history of racially biased, violent policing in many of St. Louis County’s African-American neighborhoods — fueled weeks of outrage. A refusal on the part of local authorities to release key pieces of information to the public made matters worse.
On August 12, three days after Brown was killed, Johnson, the friend who was with him at the time of his death, gave a detailed description of the shooting to the press. Similar accounts soon followed.
Johnson said that when Wilson rolled up in his patrol vehicle, he told the two to “get the fuck onto the sidewalk” and that they responded by saying that they were nearing their destination. According to Johnson, Wilson, who had apparently continued past them, slammed on his brakes and reversed in their direction, pulling up so close that when he attempted to open his driver’s side door it slammed into Brown and remained closed. Johnson claimed that there was a “tug of war” struggle between Brown and Wilson, with Wilson grabbing at Brown’s neck—“[Brown]did not reach for a weapon at all,” Johnson said. Johnson said Wilson told Brown “I’ll shoot” and that a shot went off while Wilson was in the vehicle. Johnson thought Brown might have been hit by the first shot, as blood was beginning to soak through Brown’s shirt on his right side.
According to Johnson, he and Brown took off running after the first shot. Wilson stepped out of his vehicle. Johnson ducked behind a car and Brown continued on. Johnson said Wilson’s second shot struck Brown in the back and that the teen then turned around with his hands up and said, “I don’t have a gun, stop shooting!” Wilson fired several more shots, Johnson said, and Brown fell to the concrete curled into a fetal position. Johnson’s attorney later said his client recalled that Brown’s hands were not held high, that one was lower than the other because he seemed to be “favoring it.”
One day after Johnson’s first interview, Tiffany Mitchell, 27, came forward to describe what she saw that afternoon on Canfield Drive. In multiple interviews, with local news outlets, MSNBC, and CNN, Mitchell said that she too witnessed a physical struggle between Brown and Wilson through Wilson’s window and that a shot went off while Wilson was still inside the vehicle. That shot, she said, was fired while Brown’s hands were on the outside of the vehicle, in what she believed was the teen’s effort to push himself away from the officer. Mitchell claimed that after the first shot Brown managed to break away and took off running. Wilson got out of his vehicle, she said, and fired more shots. Mitchell said that at one point Brown jerked, as if he may have been shot, and that’s when he turned around and faced Wilson.
“After the shot, the kid just breaks away. The cop follows him, kept shooting, the kid’s body jerked as if he was hit. After his body jerked he turns around, puts his hands up, and the cop continues to walk up on him and continues to shoot until he goes all the way down,” Mitchell told a local TV news outlet.
Mitchell was in the Canfield complex to pick up her coworker, Piaget Crenshaw, 19, who also witnessed the shooting. Crenshaw told the Post-Dispatch that Brown’s hands were in the air when he attempted to flee from Wilson. From her apartment, Crenshaw shot cell phone video depicting the moments immediately following the shooting. Crenshaw shared her video with CNN. The video showed a dazed Wilson, wearing his blue Ferguson police uniform, pacing around Brown’s body. Crenshaw told CNN that she believed she saw Wilson attempting to pull Brown into his vehicle but failed and Brown got away. “It just seemed to have upset the officer,” Crenshaw said. She said Wilson then exited his vehicle and was “chasing after” Brown. She said multiple shots were fired and said she believed one might have grazed Brown.
“At the end [Brown] just turned around, after I’m guessing he felt the bullet graze his arm, he turned around then was shot multiple times,” Crenshaw said.
Darren Wilson was identified as the officer who killed Michael Brown on August 15, three days after Johnson came forward and nearly a full week after the shooting took place. The police had initially said he would be identified earlier, but changed course and decided to keep his name secret for several additional days, pointing to concerns for Wilson’s safety. That same day, the police also revealed the existence of surveillance camera footage that purported to show Brown and Johnson stealing a box of cigars from a local convenience store.
Since Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson acknowledged that Wilson’s initial decision to stop Brown and Johnson had nothing to do with the alleged strong-arm robbery, Brown’s parents and supporters argued that the release of the video–which the Department of Justice protested–was a blatant attempt at character assassination. Rep. William Lacy Clay of St. Louis said McCulloch’s office was attempting to influence the jury.
“Bob McCulloch tried to taint the jury pool by the stunt he pulled today,” the congressman told the Post-Dispatch. “I have no faith in him, but I do trust the FBI and the Justice Department.”
Two days later, on the evening of August 17, a private autopsy of Brown’s body was made public. The autopsy was performed by Michael M. Baden, the former chief medical examiner for the City of New York, at the request of the Brown family. The examination found that Brown was shot at least six times, including twice in the head and four times in the right arm. All but one of the shots appeared to have happened while Brown was facing Wilson, though one of the wounds to the teen’s arm could have occurred while Brown was facing away from Wilson, according to Shawn L. Parcells, who participated in the autopsy. With no gunpowder residue found on Brown’s body, the shots appeared to have been fired from a distance. Among the most significant wounds Baden examined was the bullet hole in the top of Brown’s head.
“This one here looks like his head was bent downward,” he told The New York Times. “It can be because he’s giving up, or because he’s charging forward at the officer.”
The day after the private autopsy results were revealed, a caller identifying herself as “Josie” phoned into The Dana Show, a conservative talk-radio program, and said she was a friend of Wilson’s. In a six-minute interview, Josie offered the officer’s version of the shooting, which largely foreshadowed the account Wilson ultimately gave to the grand jury.
“[Brown and Johnson] were walking in the middle of the street,” Josie began. “[Wilson] rolled his window down and said, ‘Come on guys. Get out of the street.’ They refused to and were yelling back, saying we’re almost where we’re going and there was some cussing involved.”
Josie said Wilson had pulled ahead of the young men when he received a call over the radio about a strong-arm robbery. According to Josie, Brown and Johnson fit the description broadcast over the radio. “He goes in reverse back to them, tries to get out of his car, they slam his door shut violently. I think he said Michael did,” Josie said.
“Then he opens his car again and tries to get out and as he stands up Michael just bum rushes him, and just shoves him back into his car, punches him in the face and then of course Darren grabs for his gun and Michael grabs the gun,” Josie added. “At one point he’s got the gun totally turned against his hip and then he shoves it away and the gun goes off.”
“Michael takes off with his friend,” she said. “They get to be about 35 feet away and Darren, of course protocol is to pursue. So he stands up and yells, ‘Freeze!’ Michael and his friend turn around and Michael starts taunting him. ‘Oh, what are you going to do about it? You’re not gonna shoot me.’”
“And then he said all of a sudden [Brown] just started to bum rush him,” Josie said. “He just started coming at him full speed so [Wilson] he just started shooting and he just kept coming. So [Wilson] really thinks [Brown] was on something because he just kept coming. It was unbelievable. And then so he finally ended up, the final shot was in the forehead and then he fell about 2, 3 feet in front of the officer.”
CNN quickly picked up on the interview and that afternoon reported that Josie’s account was consistent with the version of events Wilson provided to authorities, citing “direct guidance” the news outlet had received.
In late October, Brown’s official autopsy was leaked to the Post Dispatch. The 16-page report said that Brown had been shot nine times. Three of the shots entered Brown’s head — once in the top of the head, once in the right eye, and once in the “right central forehead” — two entered the chest, three entered the right arm, and one entered his right hand, “near his thumb and palm.”
“The official report notes an absence of stippling, powder burns around a wound that indicate a shot fired at relatively short range,” the paper reported.
According to the narrative report of the investigation prepared by the office of the medical examiner, Brown had become “belligerent” after Wilson ordered him out of the road. It said that he had pushed Wilson’s door shut, and that during a struggle Wilson’s weapon became un-holstered. “The weapon discharged during the struggle,” the report said. Brown ran, Wilson gave chase, and Brown turned around and ran towards him. Wilson fired “several times.”
“As this is preliminary information it was not known in which order or how many time [sic] the officer fired his weapon during the confrontation,” the report said.
“The deceased was cool to the touch,” the medicolegal investigator reported upon first encountering Brown’s body in the street. “Rigor mortis was slightly felt in his extremities.” The report added, “The deceased [sic] mother was on the scene.”
The emergence of the autopsy report deeply upset many supporters of the Brown family, with some suggesting that it was a thinly veiled attempt to publicly soften the blow of a non-indictment.
In the days and weeks that preceded the leaking of the autopsy report, more accounts of the shooting emerged. On the question of whether Brown charged “full speed” at Wilson — like some sort of drug-addled madman, as Josie claimed — witnesses repeatedly said that he did not. Some said he was at a stand still, some said he was walking calmly towards the officer, others said he was staggering, fatally wounded, in Wilson’s direction.
James McKnight told The New York Times that Brown’s hands were up as soon he turned around to face Wilson. “I saw him stumble toward the officer, but not rush at him,” McKnight said. “The officer was about six or seven feet away from him.”
Michael T. Brady, 32, told reporters that he began watching the altercation between Brown and Wilson shortly after it started. “It was something strange,” Brady said. “Something was not right. It was some kind of altercation. I can’t say whether he was punching the officer or whatever. But something was going on in that window, and it didn’t look right.
Brady told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that he did not hear the initial shot in the vehicle and that the “tussle” between Brown and Wilson lasted about ten seconds before Brown and his friend Johnson took off running. Brown, he said, was running down the middle of the street. Wilson stepped out of the car and “immediately” started shooting, Brady said, adding that Brown’s back was to the officer (because he was inside at the time, Brady said he could not hear anything Wilson may or may not have been yelling). Brady himself then ran outside with his phone.
“By the time I get outside he’s already turned around facing the officer,” Brady said of Brown. Brady said that Brown was “balled up” with his arms clutching his abdomen. Brown appeared to be going down, Brady said, “and the officer lets out about three or four shots at him.”
“He took like one or two steps going towards the officer,” Brady said. He flatly rejected claims that Brown was charging towards Wilson. “No,” Brady told CNN. “Not at all.”
In early September, the Post Dispatch revealed the existence of two more key witnesses in the Brown shooting; a pair of construction contractors who witnessed the killing from approximately 50 feet away. The men did not see how the altercation began, but looked up from their work when they heard a shot. One of the men detailed the ordeal in an interview with paper, saying that Brown had first approached them at approximately 11:00 a.m. and engaged his co-worker in a half-hour conversation in which Brown said he was “feeling some bad vibes.”
According to the contractor, Brown talked about having a picture of Jesus on his wall and said,“that the Lord Jesus Christ would help me through that as long as I didn’t get all angry at what I was doing.” A half-hour later, the contractor said, they heard the shot. The contractor said Brown was running and Wilson was following with his gun drawn about 10 to 15 behind the teen. He said the officer fired a shot while Brown’s back was turned.
The contractor said Brown stumbled and turned, then said, “OK, OK, OK, OK, OK.” Brown and Wilson were about 10 feet apart, he said. With his hands up, “[Brown]’s kind of walking back toward the cop,” he said. The contractor said Wilson was backing up while firing and that after the third shot Brown’s hands began to fall. The contractor told the paper that from his vantage point he could not tell whether the teen’s movement was “a stumble to the ground” or a “OK, I’m going to get you, you’re already shooting me.”
“I don’t know if he was going after him or if he was falling down to die,” the contractor said. “It wasn’t a bull rush.”
The Post-Dispatch report also quoted Canfield resident Phillip Walker, 40, who said Brown was walking towards Wilson with his hands up. “Not quickly,” he said. “He did not rush the officer.” As the paper noted at the time, “No witness has ever publicly claimed that Brown charged at Wilson.”
Four days after the Post-Dispatch story was published, CNN aired cellphone video of two contractors, presumably the same two who talked to the Post-Dispatch, reacting to the shooting. One of the men in the video, shown in a pink shirt, told CNN that he witnessed Brown “staggering.” The man said he heard one shot fired, then another 30 seconds later. He is seen in the video throwing his hands in the air, exclaiming, “He had his fucking hands up.” The contractor told CNN, “The cop didn’t say get on the ground. He just kept shooting.” He added that he saw Brown’s “brains come out of his head.” According to CNN, “[a]n attorney for the man who filmed the video says it was recorded 40 seconds after the shooting.” The second man in the video told the news network that he saw Brown running from a police vehicle, that he “put his hands up” and that “the officer was chasing him.”
In October, yet another witness spoke to the Post-Dispatch. The man, a Canfield resident who asked to remain anonymous but claimed to have watched the ordeal from start to finish, described testimony that he gave to the grand jury reviewing the Brown shooting. Unlike previous accounts, the man said that Wilson did not fire until Brown turned and faced him. Like Johnson’s lawyer said, the eyewitness said Brown did not raise his hands high. As the paper described it, “Brown never put his hands straight up, but held his elbows straight out from his torso, with palms turned up in a sort of gesture of disbelief.” The witness said that despite commands to stop, Brown staggered towards Wilson. He added that the final shot was fired with Brown and Wilson 20 to 25 feet apart, contradicting Josie’s claim that Wilson fired his last round with a charging Brown just feet away.
The witness also described an initial scuffle between Brown and Wilson through the window of the police vehicle, adding that he believed he saw Wilson’s hat fly off. He said he heard a shot and that Brown went running with Wilson following behind yelling “Stop!” (this contradicts the account of one of the two construction workers, who said Wilson was firing without issuing commands). According to the witness, Brown obeyed Wilson’s command to stop. The teen mumbled something the witness could not hear then took a step towards Wilson, the witness said.
“When he stepped foot on that street, the officer told him to stop again, and he fired three shots…When he (Brown) got hit, he staggered like, ‘Oh,’ and his body moved. Then he looked down…His hands were up like this (he gestures with arms out to the side and palms upward), and he was looking at the officer and was coming toward him trying to keep his feet and stand up. The officer took a few steps back and yelled, ‘Stop,’ again, and Michael was trying to stay on his feet…He was 20 to 25 feet from officer, and after he started staggering, he (Wilson) let off four more rounds. As he was firing those last rounds, Michael was on his way down. We were thinking, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, brother, stop, stop.’ He was already on his way down when he fired those last shots.
Echoing the feelings of many Canfield residents, the witness told the paper, “What transpired to us, in my eyesight, was murder. Down outright murder.”
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FOCUS | GOP Unveils Immigration Plan: "Make America Somewhere No One Wants to Live" |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160"><span class="small">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Thursday, 20 November 2014 09:58 |
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Borowitz writes: "Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell unveiled his party's long-awaited plan on immigration on Wednesday, telling reporters, 'We must make America somewhere no one wants to live.'"
A GOP immigration plan? (photo: Alex Wong/Getty)
GOP Unveils Immigration Plan: "Make America Somewhere No One Wants to Live"
By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
20 November 14
 The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report." 
 enate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell unveiled his party’s long-awaited plan on immigration on Wednesday, telling reporters, “We must make America somewhere no one wants to live.”
Appearing with House Speaker John Boehner, McConnell said that, in contrast to President Obama’s “Band-Aid fixes,” the Republican plan would address “the root cause of immigration, which is that the United States is, for the most part, habitable.”
“For years, immigrants have looked to America as a place where their standard of living was bound to improve,” McConnell said. “We’re going to change that.”
Boehner said that the Republicans’ plan would reduce or eliminate “immigration magnets,” such as the social safety net, public education, clean air, and drinkable water.
The Speaker added that the plan would also include the repeal of Obamacare, calling healthcare “catnip for immigrants.”
Attempting, perhaps, to tamp down excitement about the plan, McConnell warned that turning America into a dystopian hellhole that repels immigrants “won’t happen overnight.”
“Our crumbling infrastructure and soaring gun violence are a good start, but much work still needs to be done,” he said. “When Americans start leaving the country, we’ll know that we’re on the right track.”
In closing, the two congressional leaders expressed pride in the immigration plan, noting that Republicans had been working to make it possible for the past thirty years.
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or a two-term President whom his critics used to call “the speechifier,” Barack Obama has given surprisingly few memorable speeches, and none for quite a while. Sometimes his speechwriters over-egg it, and his language seems a bit stilted. On other occasions, he goes on for too long and his delivery is flat. Thursday night’s much-anticipated address on immigration, which he delivered from the East Room of the White House, was 
