This Is the Culture of Impunity That Grows Within Too Much of Law Enforcement

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

13 November 20

This needs to change. If that makes "swing district" congresscritters uncomfortable, then that's the way it goes.

e begin in Kentucky, where the police department in Louisville is having a really bad year, and it's about to get even worse. From the Louisville Courier-Journal:

The Courier Journal last year requested all records regarding sexual abuse of minors by two officers in the Explorer Scout program for youths interested in law enforcement careers. Police officials and the Jefferson County Attorney’s Office said they couldn't comply, insisting all the records had been turned over to the FBI for its investigation. But that wasn't true, according to records The Courier Journal recently obtained in the appeal of its open records case. In fact, the department still had at least 738,000 records, which the city allowed to be deleted. "I have practiced open records law since the law was enacted 45 years ago, and I have never seen anything so brazen," said Jon Fleischaker, an attorney for The Courier Journal. "I think it an outrage."

The charges themselves are ghastly. In one way or another, they appear to involve all of the city's law enforcement apparatus and a healthy portion of city government. And it's clear that the police department and city hall had the same initial reaction that every institution, from Penn State to the Roman Catholic Church to the Boy Scouts, had. They looked for a way to bury the evidence.

Metro Council President David James said Wednesday that "it’s very disturbing to me that either the county attorney’s office or the police department was so dead-set on making sure those records never reached the public.” James, D-6th District, said he intended to talk to other council members "about holding people accountable who need to be held accountable." In a tweet, Councilman Anthony Piagentini, R-19th, said: "There aren’t the appropriate words to describe how indefensible this is. The administration oversaw the sexual exploitation of minors and then deleted evidence."

Almost 800,000 pieces of evidence? Somebody's going to jail behind this. And it's another example of the culture of impunity that grows within too much of law enforcement. Policing in this country needs to change, top to bottom, and if that makes "swing district" congresscritters uncomfortable, then that's the way it goes.

We move along to Utah, where the pandemic is spiking, as it is everywhere, and where we once again find our fellow citizens holding out against the jackboots of public health. From the St. George News:

“I think it’s really about the bigger picture, which comes down to, first of all, it’s Veterans Day,” Brendan Dalley, a participant in the march, told St. George News. “And I think that we need to show respect for our veterans for what they’ve done and that leads into this part of it, which is understanding our freedoms and having the choice to live freely.”... The march came after [Utah Governor Gary] Herbert’s public address Sunday, in which he issued a state of emergency that required masks in public statewide, prohibited social gatherings with people outside of household groups for the next two weeks, and postponed all nonplayoff school sporting events and other after-school activities.

This, however, seems a little nuts.

Businesses who fail to comply with the order could face penalties, including fines and the loss of their business license, according to Utah’s coronavirus website. But it is up to local authorities to decide whether to enforce the mandates in their areas. In Washington County, the Southwest Utah Public Health Department has the authority to enforce such measures, but spokesman David Heaton previously told St. George News they don’t have enough people to do it and don’t want to be viewed as law enforcement. However, Heaton said there have been people locally who contracted the coronavirus and went into public with the goal of spreading it, and the health department has collaborated with police to arrest those people and will continue to do so. “That’s a different story, and that’s a direct threat, and we’ve had that happen,” Heaton said previously. “When that’s happened, we have worked with law enforcement.”

Is this a thing now? People deliberately spreading the 'Rona because FREEDOM! or something? Apparently, the Department of Justice thought so, at least theoretically. Are a huge number of our fellow citizens absolutely unconscionable morons? Experts are divided.

We move on to Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis seems determined to cast the deciding "yes" vote in the survey mentioned above. In addition to hiring some third-rate sports blogger from Ohio to do "data analysis" on the pandemic in Florida, DeSantis is also taking some action against people who say mean things to him on the street, as the South Florida Sun-Sentinel explains.

DeSantis — flanked by police officers, Senate President-Designate Wilton Simpson and House Speaker-Designate Chris Sprowls — proposed that most crimes committed by protesters be elevated from misdemeanors to felonies. Obstructing traffic during an unpermitted protest would be a felony. The law would remove liability for drivers who strike protestors during a march. It would become a felony to participate in a protest where property is damaged, public monuments toppled or people harassed at “public accommodations” such as restaurants. Anyone who threw an object at law enforcement officers would be subject to a minimum six-month jail term. People arrested during protests would be denied bail before their initial court hearings. They would have to successfully argue they were no danger to the community before being released. Those who organized or funded “violent” protests would be treated like members of organized crime syndicates.

Almost none of this authoritarian swill is constitutional. (The no-bail provision belongs in North Korea.) And immunizing drivers who run down protestors in the street?

And that's not all. DeSantis also proposed adjusting the state's Stand Your Ground law, the one that allowed George Zimmerman to kill Trayvon Martin and get away with it, to a point where they might as well rename it Kyle's Law, after freedom fighter Kyle Rittenhouse, The Kenosha Kid. From the Miami Herald:

The proposal would expand the list of “forcible felonies” under Florida’s self-defense law to justify the use of force against people who engage in criminal mischief that results in the “interruption or impairment” of a business, and looting, which the draft defines as a burglary within 500 feet of a “violent or disorderly assembly.”...“It’s clear that the Trump beauty pageant is still going on with governors and senators, who all want to be the next Trump. And the governor is clearly a very good contestant,” said Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber, a former federal prosecutor and Democratic state legislator who was a critic of the Stand Your Ground law, when it first passed in 2005.

There's serious competition for the title of The Next Trump, and DeSantis is only one of the favorites. That's what worries me.

And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, where Blog Official Natural Gas Dowser Friedman of the Plains brings us the saga of yet another charter school outfit that's only in it for The Kids. From the Tulsa World:

In all, $125.2 million of the $458 million allocated to Epic Charter Schools, the operator of two public schools, for educating students the past six years was found to have ended up in the coffers of Epic Youth Services, a for-profit charter school management company that reportedly has made millionaires of school co-founders Ben Harris and David Chaney. The report raises questions that are now up to the Oklahoma attorney general to respond to about the legality of transferring hundreds of thousands of Oklahoma tax dollars to Epic’s California charter school, commingling funds for Epic’s two separate Oklahoma schools and chronically misreporting administrative costs.

The Oklahoma legislature, which never has been mistaken for the People's Liberation Army, is furiously demanding that the state's Department of Education be audited, and Governor Kevin Stitt has had no choice but to join the legislature in this demand.

State auditors found within the Education Department an accounting system preoccupied with school district compliance — with little to no verification of the information the districts report or accountability for falsehoods or other failings. Byrd’s report prompted the Oklahoma State Board of Education to demand back $11.2 million in taxpayer funding from the school after the audit found chronically excessive administrative overhead costs and inaccurate cost accounting.

The charter industry is a license to loot the public treasury unless strictly regulated. In fact, theoretically, if a kid with a brick in Florida behaved toward a liquor store the way that the charter sharpies behaved toward the Oklahoma taxpayers, Ron DeSantis would let you shoot him.

This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.

Poland: This Is About More Than Abortion Rights

By Tithi Bhattacharya, Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla and Tessy Schlosser, Jacobin

13 November 20

Poland's protests can be a rallying cry for a new feminist internationalism that demands and wins public services for care, social housing, universal health care, and wage justice.

n Polish director Marta Górnicka’s revolutionary production, “The Chorus of Women,” twenty-five women appear on stage, whispering, singing, and yelling in haunting tones, “be beautiful,” “be quiet” — “be a woman.” The trilogy sees the choir scream and gasp against chants of the Bacchae and the gospels, and in one play, utter the hoarse, final words — “I’m calling out to you.”

Gornicka’s chorus is echoed on the streets of Warsaw today. Tens of thousands of women are in open revolt against Poland’s new abortion ban. Their slogan of choice, “Wypierdala?” translates to “get the fuck out of here.” “[N]ow we are mad, not just unhappy,” wrote feminist philosopher Ewa Majewska, echoing the protesters, “I am terrified;” “I feel unimportant.” Their signs read: “women’s hell.”

The context of abortion debates is more varied than they seem at first glance. Until recently, women were penalized for bearing more than one child in China, while in Ecuador, they continue to be imprisoned for choosing to abort. In India, Armenia, or Hong Kong, the practice of sex-selective abortion — the abortion of female fetuses — has often pit women’s right to choose against the rights of future women, so to speak.

Despite these complexities, dominant narratives today risk marking what’s happening in Poland as being exclusively about abortion or Poland.

Authoritarian nationalists attempt to use women, and our bodies, as conduits for the production of national identity and honor. The protests aim “to destroy Poland and end the history of the Polish nation,” said Poland’s Jaros?aw Kaczy?ski, leader of the ruling Law and Justice Party.

In response, liberal feminism attempts to universalize the experience of abortion through the rubric of “choice.” Every woman must have the freedom to choose. This of course is true. But “freedom to choose” is woefully inadequate rhetoric. How many working-class women, for example, can afford, in its expansive sense, abortion even when its legal? Most abortions are shaped by wider social factors, whether by stigma of illegitimacy, financial constraints, or a fear of being held back in careers.

Both these approaches to reproductive issues are misplaced. They both fail to understand that love and gendered labor create and sustain human beings, but such labor goes both unrecognized and inadequately compensated.

Instead, we need to build a feminist internationalism. Internationalizing reproductive justice challenges our understanding not just of pregnancy and abortion, not just our right to have children and our right not to have them, but every other aspect of the reproduction of our social communities.

This is where the idea of a women’s strike, or Strajk Kobiet in Poland, becomes critical. Typically, a worker’s strike is a withdrawal of labor, and it illuminates in one fell swoop, who keeps the capitalist machinery running. Wage workers for the factory, drivers for public transport, janitors for universities. What of women’s unpaid work that sustains the world?

In 2016, women in Poland and Argentina organized mass demonstrations for abortion rights and against gender violence that inspired feminists around the globe to plan for an international women’s strike in 2017. Millions of women in over forty countries took part in the strike on March 8, and extensive networks of international solidarity and feminist politics were established.

By withdrawing from labor both paid and unpaid, the protests challenged what counts as labor. The home was at once made public. The personal was at once made political. Women taking to the streets in Poland against this latest attack on abortion rights brings us back full circle to the Polish streets again where the movement first began.

The history of abortion law in Poland is a testimony to states fighting to forge national identities over the bodies of women. In 1932, Poland became the first country in Europe to legalize abortion beyond medical cases, namely, when the pregnancy resulted from a criminal act. Toward the middle of the century, this law was expanded to include “difficult living conditions.” So liberal were the laws during this time that activists would help Swedes travel to Poland to access abortions.

This changed in the 1990s due to conflict between the Roman Catholic Church and crumbling state socialism. A severely restrictive “abortion compromise” permitted abortion in only three cases: rape, mortal risk to the woman, or fatal congenital diseases in the fetus. Last week’s ban on this third condition, pushed through Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal to avoid legislative debate, brings Poland’s women into the twenty-first century authoritarian playbook.

To confront these reactionary forces, a new feminist internationalism must move beyond the simple narrative of “choice.” Women’s right to choose must be supported, but that’s only half the job. We must simultaneously examine the responsibility that we collectively share to ensure that women have greater reproductive control overall, not just over abortions, but pregnancy, desire, and pleasure.

“The only way we stop the global reactionist wave is together, in streets everywhere, demanding what is ours: our bodies, our lives, our country, the world,” wrote Zofia Malisz of Lewica Razem, a left-wing political party in Poland. A feminist international must take a women’s strike across borders, through streets, political halls of power, workspaces, and homes.

In the manifesto, Feminism for the 99%, the authors note that capitalism’s key move was to “separate the making of people from the making of profit.” The first job was assigned to women, and then made to submit to the second. A feminist international must upturn this system.

We need a feminism that demands and wins public services for care, social housing, universal health care, and wage justice. We need an internationalism that rejects forced austerity on the global south, imperial aid interventions, and neocolonialism. This is where Górnicka’s “I’m calling out to you” meets Warsaw’s “Wypierdala?” today.