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If You Want to See Inequality in the US at Its Worst, Visit an Impound Lot |
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Saturday, 30 August 2014 09:24 |
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Sheff writes: "For millions of Americans a towed car can lead to a crippling spiral of stress, debt, joblessness, illness and, in many cases, incarceration."
David Sheff. (photo: unknown)
If You Want to See Inequality in the US at Its Worst, Visit an Impound Lot
By David Sheff, TIME Magazine
30 August 14
For millions of Americans a towed car can lead to a crippling spiral of stress, debt, joblessness, illness and, in many cases, incarceration.
 n a recent San Francisco afternoon, I returned to where I’d parked my car, but it was gone. A “No Parking” sign indicated that parking was prohibited after 3:00 PM on weekends. It was 3:15. I called the telephone number on the sign and a clerk affirmed that my car had been towed to an impound lot.
I took a cab and entered a single-story brick building where a few dozen people were crowded together in a scene that evoked Kafka; weariness, frustration and anger were palpable. Some stood in line, some paced and some sat hunched on the floor. A family huddled in a corner, an infant asleep on the father’s shoulder. A woman on a pay phone wept as she begged whomever was on the line to find money so she could get her car back–she said she needed $875. “I’m gonna lose my job if I’m not there at 5.”
Clerks sat on stools behind Plexiglas. At a window, a man pleaded with an agent, “I have to pick up my kids in less than an hour. What am I supposed to do?” At the next window, another man railed loudly and furiously, yelling, “How the hell am I supposed to get my goddam money if I can’t get to goddam work?” The clerk said, “If you can’t get cash, you can pay by credit card or cashier’s check.” The man shouted, “And if I had a goddam limousine, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
A man waiting in line with me told me that he owned a landscaping business that depended on his truck, which had been towed three days earlier. “I can’t work,” he said. “The crew don’t work. Everything I need is in the truck.” It had been towed when he parked in a red zone in front of an auto-parts store. He’d been late to a job and ran into the store to buy a spark plug for a broken lawn mower. He didn’t have money enough that day to pay the $472 towing fee. After the first four hours, charges began accumulating—about $65.00 a day. (They didn’t include the $72 cost of the parking ticket.) He had borrowed $700, which he held near his chest in an envelope. He said it would take “I hope no more than a year” to repay the loan, for which he was being charged 50% of the loan amount. “I had no choice,” he said. He had already lost four days’ income and didn’t know how he was going to pay his bills, including rent, due that week.
When I reached the front of the line, I handed the clerk my credit card, on which she charged $472. I retrieved my car and drove home. I left behind the roomful of my fellow citizens, a disparate group bound together by the fact that they didn’t have the cash or credit required to free their impounded cars, a fact that threatened livelihoods, stressed families and broke budgets, forcing some people to choose between essentials and paying fees that would continue to accumulate and leave them without another essential, transportation, which in turn could lead to other calamities. If they didn’t find a way to pay the fees, they would ultimately lose their cars (the city auctions them), a loss that for some would be a devastating setback. For me, a towed car was an inconvenience. For them, it was a catastrophe.
Some cases of injustice in America are reported far and wide, such as the horrific shooting of Michael Brown, the unarmed man in Ferguson, Missouri, targeted by police in what many view as an egregious case of racial profiling. However, we don’t often hear about the countless quieter injustices suffered by tens of millions of Americans on a daily basis. They experience inequities of access to opportunities, quality medical and dental care, quality education, healthful food, affordable and safe housing, childcare, credit, psychological counseling, legal representation, insurance and more. For them, events that others weather unhappily but routinely—a towed car, for example—can lead to a crippling spiral of stress, debt, joblessness, illness and, in many cases, incarceration.
The final injustice comes when they die early, which many do—and not only by violence. More often, death comes slower, from under- or untreated physical and mental illness, poor nutrition and chronic stress as it impacts health. Several years ago, Senator Bernie Sanders presented a report to the Senate Subcommittee on Primary Health and Aging, in which he highlighted research that showed that the wealthiest Americans on average live at least 6.5 years longer than those in the lowest income group. In 2009, the mortality rate for African American infants was more than twice that of white infants. The poor in this country have higher rates of diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and depression, according to Dr. Steven Woolf, director of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University. According to the Health and Aging report, “The lower people’s income, the earlier they die and the sicker they live,” Woolf said. “Neighborhoods in Boston and Baltimore have a lower life expectancy than Ethiopia and Sudan. Azerbaijan has a higher life expectancy than areas of Chicago.”
When events like the Michael Brown shooting occur that inflame people and motivate them to take to the streets to protest, we are reminded that there is not justice for all in America. We must also acknowledge and condemn the daily injustices born of a system that slowly grinds down the people who can least afford it, and, in too many cases to count, leads to their early death. In the line at the San Francisco impound lot, I overheard the crying woman ahead of me telling the clerk, “I need my car to get home to my children.” The clerk responded, “I wish I could help you, ma’am, but if you don’t have the money, there’s nothing I can do.”
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US State Department Official: The Internet Belongs to Everyone |
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Saturday, 30 August 2014 09:20 |
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Novelli writes: "Why will so many government officials, CEOs, and Internet scholars devote one week of their time to attend the IGF? The answer is clear: they all care about the Internet's future, and the IGF is the premier international meeting to discuss that topic."
(photo: Getty Images)
US State Department Official: The Internet Belongs to Everyone
By Catherine Novelli, DIPNOTE: U.S. Department of State Official Blog
30 August 14
 ext week, I will travel to Istanbul, Turkey to lead the U.S. delegation to the 9th Annual Internet Governance Forum (IGF). This year, more than 3,000 participants from all continents representing different stakeholder groups -- governments, private sector, civil society, technical community and academia -- will attend the IGF.
Why will so many government officials, CEOs, and Internet scholars devote one week of their time to attend the IGF? The answer is clear: they all care about the Internet's future, and the IGF is the premier international meeting to discuss that topic.
Across the world, people's lives are improved by the Internet. Farmers in Kenya use mobile services, like DrumNet, to compare prices for their produce at a range of locations and are now earning 33-40 percent more for their crops. These services offer an essential tool to farmers -- access to information. Today, students everywhere are also benefiting through free online education services. One website, Coursera, offers hundreds of free courses, partners with top universities and colleges, and has more than nine million users -- 65 percent of which are outside the United States.
My message at the IGF is twofold: first, the Internet has proven to be a tremendous force for economic and social empowerment and, second, we have a shared responsibility to adopt policies and practices to ensure the Internet’s continued growth. We should not take the Internet’s growth for granted; instead, I will urge the international community to redouble its efforts to ensure the Internet’s continued expansion.
The Internet has become a platform for economic growth as fundamental as highways, power grids and universities. A 2012 report projects that by 2016, the Internet economy will reach $4.2 trillion in the G-20 economies alone. And, developing countries are experiencing faster rates of growth than developed countries. The Internet economy contributes 5 to 9 percent to total economic growth in developed markets; and, in developing markets, the Internet economy is growing at 15 to 25 percent per year. With Internet growth shifting to the developing world, developing and emerging market countries have enormous potential to benefit further from the Internet.
Given the Internet’s positive impact on economic growth, it is vital that all stakeholders adopt policies and practices to ensure improved access to and continued innovation on the Internet. We have a shared responsibility to promote everyone’s access to broadband. We have a shared responsibility to strengthen the free flow of information. And, we have the shared responsibility to prevent misuse of the Internet, whether that’s cyber-attacks or identity theft.
In Istanbul, I will reiterate these messages and call on the IGF community to address these shared challenges in a broad, creative, and collaborative manner. The IGF is the premier venue to discuss the Internet’s future. As such, the IGF community is uniquely situated to respond to these challenges and develop best practices for strengthening the Internet.
As the State Department’s Senior Coordinator for International Information Technology Diplomacy, I am excited about the opportunity to engage governments, industry, and civil society at this year’s IGF. The Internet has been remarkably successful but also faces certain challenges as we work to bring the next 3 billion people online. Our focus should be on solving real problems through the multi-stakeholder processes that underpins the Internet’s success. Let’s remember that the Internet belongs to everyone -- let’s keep it open. - See more at: http://blogs.state.gov/stories/2014/08/28/internet-belongs-everyone#sthash.8XSBgzhJ.dpuf
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Please, Somebody, Just Leak the Damn CIA Report |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Friday, 29 August 2014 14:43 |
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Pierce writes: "Please, somebody, goddammit, just leak the damn report. All of it, CIA concerns be damned."
ISIS has been carrying out executions throughout Iraq. (photo: Reuters)
Please, Somebody, Just Leak the Damn CIA Report
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
29 August 14
 ho could have predicted this?
Besides, you know, everybody.
"They knew exactly how it was done," a person with direct knowledge of what happened to the hostages said of the Islamic State militants. The person, who discussed the hostages' experience on the condition of anonymity, said the captives were held in Raqqah, a city in north-central Syria.
Please, somebody, goddammit, just leak the damn report. All of it, CIA concerns be damned. Because now not only do we have a moral right and a moral duty to know everything that was done in our name, but we also have a national interest in determining to what extent the behavior of our government differed from the behavior of ISIS, besides the fact that (as far as we know) none of our captives were beheaded. That's a pretty low bar for an evolved democracy, but there it is. I no longer care about phantom "national security" concerns. Fk the torturers and fk their enablers in Congress, and fk all redactors, and fk the pet lawyers and bureaucrats that made torture legal and acceptable. Let what's going to happen to them happen. Let justice be done though the heavens fall and John Yoo loses his job. They opened the door to this, with their memos and their barely stifled giggles. They grafted sadism onto the Constitution. They taught ISIS its techniques. James Foley, a fellow Warrior, god rest his brave soul, was tortured before he was murdered using techniques that barbarians learned from the oh-so-civilized heroes of our National Security state. This is what we teach the world now. Are you guys proud? Does your heart swell in the faculty lounges and in the cozy think-tanks? Does it swell with pride at the impact you've had on the world?
How do you like your blue-eyed boy now, Mr. Death?
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Cop Killings Erased From History: A Tale of Federal Negligence |
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Friday, 29 August 2014 14:36 |
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Hennelly writes: "Just how common is the shooting of African-American men, or, for that matter, civilians of any description, by the police last year, or the year before that, or, say, 2011, 2010?"
(photo: Getty Images)
Cop Killings Erased From History: A Tale of Federal Negligence
By Robert Hennelly, Salon
29 August 13
Serious problems that are measured can end up getting managed. Here's what happens when no one is keeping track
 his summer, two high-profile killings of unarmed African-American males by local police, one in New York City and the other in Ferguson, Missouri, have made the issue of police accountability a national one. Often, stories about people killed by the police get reported in the local press, but they rarely pop up on the national media radar.
Last month in New York City, 43 year old Eric Garner, a family man with six kids and two grand children, was killed after police applied a chokehold on him in an effort to take Garner into custody for allegedly selling individual untaxed cigarettes. Earlier this month 18 year old Michael Brown was shot several times in Ferguson, Missouri by a police officer under circumstances still under investigation.
Ten days later, just four miles from where Brown died, St. Louis police shot and killed 25 year-old Kajieme Powell, another African-American man that press reports indicate was emotionally disturbed, menaced police with a knife and asked the police to shoot him. Officials told reporters the police were responding to a call from a convenience store about the theft of some doughnuts and some drinks.
What are we to make of these three tragic anecdotes? Are they just isolated cases? Just how common is the shooting of African-American men, or for that matter civilians of any description, by the police last year, or the year before that, or say 2011, 2010? Legal experts will tell you nobody knows. Evidently the federal government, so busy collecting just about every other kind of data, does not require that local or state police report to the feds when they use deadly force on civilians.
The Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics does do an Arrest Related Death (ARD) survey which is a national tracking of civilians who die in custody or while they are in the process of being apprehended. For the nation’s 18,000 police departments participation in the survey is strictly voluntary. The latest ARD data set on line at the Bureau’s website is from 2009.
The ARD data includes all categories of deaths; shooting by the police, suicide while in custody, accidental, intoxication and natural causes. From 2003 through 2009 ARD registered 4,813 deaths. 61 percent (2,931) of those deaths were classified as homicides by law enforcement personnel. 11 percent (541) were suicides and five percent (244) were the result of natural causes. The rest were split between intoxication and accidental.
During that six year period 42 percent of the ARD deaths were white, 32 percent black and 20 percent hispanic. For context, consider that over that same time frame the FBI estimates police made 98 million arrests.
(According to the Bureau’s methodology analysis the states not reporting include Arkansas, Washington DC, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Wisconsin and Wyoming.)
Legal scholar Gloria J. Browne-Marshall, a professor at CUNY’s John Jay College says the lack of data greatly undermines the ability to keep law enforcement agencies accountable for their actions. “Police departments should be required to provide data on their use of deadly force to the State Attorney General and the F.B.I., annually,” says Browne-Marshall author of “Race, Law and American Society, 1607 to Present.” “If the Bureau of Criminal Justice Statistics maintained data on police use of deadly force then it would, in turn, be available to researchers, journalists, and concerned communities.”
“There just is no good data on how many civilians are killed by the police each year, much less the victims of excessive force,” says UCLA law professor Joanna Schwartz said in a phone interview. “And what is even defined as excessive force varies widely between the states and municipalities.” Schwartz notes that in some places placing someone in handcuffs or using police dogs for their apprehension would not be characterized as excessive force.
Schwartz says the accountability void for police misconduct extends to the cash settlements made on behalf of law enforcement to settle wrongful death, excessive force and civil rights violation claims. Schwartz says in 99.5 percent of the cases she has evaluated, local police enjoyed a qualified immunity, which shields them from personal liability for whatever actions they take while on the job. Almost universally that leaves the cost to settle these cases to local taxpayers and municipal insurance carriers.
On paper, Schwartz notes this qualified immunity for the police can be voided if their actions are malicious or criminal in nature. In a national survey Schwartz asked 70 of the nation’s largest police departments to supply the total payouts they made to settle police misconduct cases between 2006 and 2011 and for the instances when police officers had to contribute to a settlement. 44 of the 70 responded. All totaled these jurisdictions paid out $730 million to settle 9225 civil rights suits and officers were required to make some contribution in .41 percent of the cases. “Governments satisfied settlements even when officers were disciplined, or terminated by the department or criminally prosecuted for their conduct,” Schwartz wrote in her analysis of police indemnification and municipal payouts.
Schwartz’s study cites the case of 92 year-old Kathryn Johnson from Atlanta who was killed by police back in 2007 in what was later determined to be an illegal drug raid of her home. The officers involved in her shooting went back and planted marijuana in Johnston’s home and falsely alleged they had purchased cocaine at her home, all to cover their tracks.
Three officers were convicted on federal charges and sentenced to five to 10 years. They were on the hook to make $8,150 restitution which went to cover the costs of burying the 92 year-old. Nine other officers were terminated, disciplined, or resigned. The City of Atlanta paid $4.9 million to Johnson’s estate with no contribution coming from any any of the officers involved.
Schwartz says few police departments even bother to track which officers have been named as defendants much less do any root cause analysis about the circumstances around the individual incident that can run seven figures to settle. “Moreover, governments do not appear to be collecting enough information about lawsuits to make educated decisions about whether or how to reduce the police activities that prompt these suits,” Schwartz writes.
Schwartz believes that law enforcement agencies need to have the same kind of uniform standards for reporting problematic outcomes just as accredited U.S. hospitals are required to do. “In health care there is a standard agreement about what constitutes a sentinel event that requires reporting, It should be the same for law enforcement.” After all, what gets measured gets managed.
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f you don’t regard global warming as a serious problem, your company is growing. According to the 
