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Racism Is Profitable |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9643"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Thursday, 17 September 2020 08:14 |
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Reich writes: "It all boils down to this simple truth: Racism is profitable."
Robert Reich. (photo: Getty)
Racism Is Profitable
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
17 September 20
 ince the first colonizers arrived in the United States to this very moment, wealthy elites have used the tools of theft, exclusion, and exploitation to expand their wealth and power at the detriment of Black, Latinx, Indigenous people, and marginalized people of color.It all boils down to this simple truth: Racism is profitable.
The profitability of racism sparks a vicious cycle called the Oppression Economy:Elite institutions are motivated to keep suppressing the economic vitality of people of color. That economic oppression in turn hinders their political power, and that political oppression kneecaps their ability to change the system.
This cycle plays out in every aspect of our economy and is particularly apparent in mass incarceration.The criminalization of people of color is a multibillion-dollar industry: In 2017 alone, mass incarceration cost $182 billion; trapping mostly low-income Black and Latinx people in a cycle of economic and political disenfranchisement.
If we follow the money, we find that some of America’s largest banks, including Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and JPMorgan Chase, have all extended millions of dollars in credit lines to for-profit prison operators like GEO Group and CoreCivic.
The unregulated operations of prisons has increasingly mandated cheap service for maximum profit. For example, bail bonds companies, telecommunications, food, and commissary companies gouge both those incarcerated and their families.The exploitation doesn’t stop upon release from prison.
The suppression of economic vitality of people of color is just beginning. Because of discrimination, formerly incarcerated people face an unemployment rate of 27 percent — higher than the total U.S. unemployment rate during any historical period, including during this pandemic and the Great Depression.
Fines and fees associated with the criminal “justice” system have placed $50 billion in debt on the shoulders of approximately 10 million people who have been through the system. To make matters worse, many states bar people convicted of felonies from receiving any government assistance.That’s just incarceration.
Over the past four decades, the cost of policing in the U.S. has skyrocketed, almost tripling from $42.3 billion in 1977 to $114.5 billion in 2017. Of the 100 largest cities in America, the nine police forces that kill people at the highest rate per population all take up over 30 percent of their cities’ budgets — leaving paltry resources to invest in housing, education, or health care.
This deliberate economic oppression suppresses political power of people of color, weakening their constitutional right to change the rules of a system that regulates whether or not profit can be derived from racism.
In our current system, the wealthy elite use their purchased political power to manipulate the system for their own gain at the expense of people of color.
Let’s turn back to people who are incarcerated. In 48 states, those who are currently or formerly incarcerated face restrictions on their right to vote. Yet, inmates count as residents of where they are incarcerated, rather than their hometowns. That means people in prison have no representation, and are used as pawns to skew representational power towards the largely white, rural areas that house prisons.
This leaves incarcerated people’s hometowns under-represented. The restrictions on voting power don’t end upon release. 6.1 million people are prevented from casting a ballot due to a prior felony conviction, and 1 in 13 Black people have lost their right to vote due to felony disenfranchisement, compared to 1 in 56 non-Black people.
It’s a never-ending cycle that has been churning for centuries: the profitability of racism motivates elite institutions to continue economic oppression of people of color that in turn hinders their political power, and that political oppression kneecaps their ability to change the system in which racism is so profitable.
So how do we break the cycle?
Let’s start with supporting candidates and pressuring elected officials at every level of government who will support bold policies that dismantle the Oppression Economy and build a Liberation Economy — and remove those that don’t.
To end the Oppression Economy, our government must end the criminalization of people of color, end their political suppression, and curb runaway corporate power.
And, to build a Liberation Economy our government must guarantee that all people of color have access to basic economic rights like guaranteed income and employment, universal health care, guaranteed housing, a free college education and generational wealth.
This Liberation Economy is within our power to create. As Teddy Roosevelt said, “we are the government.” It does not belong to the corporations and the plutocrats that currently control them. It belongs to us, and it is within our power to take it back.
We can break this cycle, if we act together.
Let’s get to work.
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Occupying Palestine Is Rotting Israel From Inside. No Trump Deal Can Hide That |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=56246"><span class="small">Raja Shehadeh, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Thursday, 17 September 2020 08:14 |
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Shehadeh writes: "More than a quarter of a century after Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn, Israel has managed to turn its occupation of Palestinian territory from a burden into an asset."
Each year, some 700 Palestinian children are tried in Israeli military courts that boast a 99.7 percent conviction rate, according to rights groups. (photo: AFP)
Occupying Palestine Is Rotting Israel From Inside. No Trump Deal Can Hide That
By Raja Shehadeh, Guardian UK
17 September 20
Israel has twisted its laws and contorted its politics to protect the occupation. The UAE and Bahrain deals won’t create peace
 ore than a quarter of a century after Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn, Israel has managed to turn its occupation of Palestinian territory from a burden into an asset. What was for so long a liability – the flagrant violation of international law – has now become a valued commodity. Understanding this development is key to explaining why the Israelis are making peace with two distant Gulf states but not their closest neighbours, the Palestinians – without whom there can be no real peace.
Israel has learned in recent years how to manage the occupation in perpetuity with minimal cost. But from the very beginning of the occupation in June 1967, Israel has been unwilling to recognise the Palestinian nation or cede control of the Palestinian territory occupied in order to make peace.
The evidence to support this claim is easily found in Israel’s own archives. Two days after the occupation began, Israel passed military order number three, which referred to the fourth Geneva convention relative to the protection of civilian persons in time of war – mandating that military courts apply the provisions of the convention to their proceedings. Four months later, this portion of the order was deleted.
In September 1967, the legal counsel to the Israeli foreign ministry, Theodor Meron, was asked by the prime minister, Levi Eshkol, whether building new settlements in the occupied territories would violate the Geneva convention, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilians into the territory seized in war. He answered in the affirmative. But his advice was rejected and the government proceeded from that moment to establish illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Over the following months, Israel began a process that would continue for many years: amending laws governing Palestinian land – from the periods of Ottoman, British mandate and Jordanian control of the territory – to construct a false “legal” basis for the acquisition of land and other natural resources for the establishment of Jewish settlements.
I spent much of my working life, from 1979 until 1993, investigating and resisting Israel’s abuses of law in the occupied territories, and warning about the implications of building illegal settlements, all to no avail.
Yet it was not the legal transformations alone that enabled settlements to be built and to flourish. The militant Zionist thinker Vladimir Jabotinsky had written, in the 1920s, that “settlement[s] can … develop under the protection of a force that is not dependent on the local population behind an iron wall which they will be powerless to break down”. And so it was.
There was an added component to the transformation of the laws to enable the settlement project and that was sheer violence by settlers: vigilante actions that seemed to go against the law Israel had put down and bound itself to. In the early 80s Al-Haq, a West Bank-based human rights organisation that I was then directing, worked hard to document incidents of settler violence.
At the time we naively believed that if only Israelis knew what was taking place and the failure of law enforcement to stop it, they would take action to prevent it. We were unaware that it was all part of the Israeli struggle for the land. The agents of the orderly state can stay within the boundaries of their rewritten laws while the unruly settlers do the work of intimidation and violence to achieve the desired goal. It is all part of the same scheme.
Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, settler violence in the West Bank has become an almost daily occurrence. It is all out in the open and the government and the courts are on the same page in supporting the settlers and working to achieve the goal of greater Israel. The Knesset has passed the regularisation bill, which “legalises” settlements built on privately owned Palestinian land via de facto expropriation.
While Jewish settler violence against the Palestinians rages – preventing Palestinians from working their land or using it as their own, with no real attempt by the Israeli military or police to prevent this – Israel declares any and all Palestinian resistance to occupation to be terrorism.
When Palestinians began to organise non-violent resistance to the occupation, Israel redefined attacks by the army on these unarmed protesters to bring them under the category of “combat operations”. Recently, the villagers of Kafr Qaddum were staging weekly demonstrations against the blocking of a road, which prevented access to their village, because it was claimed that the road passes through a new part of the settlement of Kedumim. The army planted explosives on roads used by the villagers – but the soldiers who took this decision would be immune from prosecution for any injuries caused to the villagers.
With all these “victories” on Israel’s part, the country has now decided that it can manage the occupation rather than end it. The occupation even began to be seen as an asset. Israel has turned the occupied territories into a laboratory for testing weapons and systems of surveillance. Israelis now market their crowd control weapons and systems of homeland security to the US, based on testing in the occupied territories. Yet all this financial investment in the occupation – and all the twisting of domestic laws to protect the illegal settlement project, all the political contortions to cultivate authoritarian allies, from Trump to Orbán to Bolsonaro – is rotting Israel from the inside, turning it into an apartheid state that rules over millions of Palestinians without rights.
In Arundhati Roy’s novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, one of her characters, Musa, says that if Kashmiris have failed to gain independence from India, at least in struggling for it they have exposed the corruption of India’s system. Musa tells the book’s narrator, an Indian: “You’re not destroying us. It’s yourselves that you are destroying.” Palestinians today might say the same of our struggle with Israel.
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An Anonymous Anti-Masker, Deep in the Vermont Woods |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=35861"><span class="small">Bill McKibben, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Wednesday, 16 September 2020 13:00 |
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McKibben writes: "It takes lots of patient, careful labor to make a society of any kind work."
During the coronavirus pandemic, we have been assailed not only by microbes but also by a kind of rampaging ignorance. (photo: Megan Jelinger/Getty)
An Anonymous Anti-Masker, Deep in the Vermont Woods
By Bill McKibben, The New Yorker
16 September 20
ometimes, when I talk to people about my work on climate change, they’ll ask, “How do you keep from being depressed all the time?” I usually offer some variation of “I live in the woods, and so I go for a hike most days, and that helps.” Which is more or less true: I do live in the woods, and I do go for hikes, and it does often help. At the very least, it keeps me off the Internet for a time, which may be a reasonable approximation to mental hygiene in the twenty-first century.
Last week, I set off, with my dog, for a two-hour hike up a trail I’ve taken a hundred times before. It rises steeply through the woods until it connects to the Long Trail, a north-south hiking path that stretches the length of Vermont. I was meandering along, admiring the first hints of fall color on the maples, when my eye was caught by what looked like a handful of little yellow labels tacked to the smooth skin of a young beech tree. Upon closer inspection, I saw that they were tags of the sort you’d see at the bottom of a flyer posted outside a shop, except that, instead of offering dog-walking services or enrollment in a trial of a new medicine, they bore the words “Facemask Exemptions Facemask Science” and the URL for a video featuring a “doctor.”
I’m not going to tell you the “doctor” ’s name or link to his video, but it’s No. 708 (!) in a series that also includes anti-vax messages. It posits that face-mask laws are the result of letting people “with no educational requirements whatsoever—bureaucrats, legislators, governors, etc.” make the rules. In the past, the doctor says, “when there have been actual outbreaks of true infectious diseases,” you quarantined the diseased, “not the entire population.” This “attack on the world’s healthy population” shows how “docile” we have all become—even in Las Vegas, where he had just sojourned for a week, and where, he claimed, even though there was no mandate (there is), “thirty per cent of the people were still walking around with their masks on.” He expresses outrage that the “lowliest bag clerk in the grocery store” has “now been elevated to the rank of junior G-man. . . . Minimum wage and I get to join Youth for Hitler.” And so on, for twenty-nine minutes and forty-nine seconds. If only everyone would ignore the mask mandate, think “how much better our lives would be today,” he concludes, before urging viewers to catch his next video, about the “evils of contact tracing.”
Read The New Yorker’s complete news coverage and analysis of the coronavirus pandemic.
Material like this does real damage—the flyer sent me to watch the video on a service called BitChute, which the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League have described as a locus of racist, anti-Semitic content. (It’s where Alex Jones and InfoWars retreated to when YouTube had finally had enough.) Such videos also serve as a transmission mechanism for massive quantities of scientific disinformation. Millions of people have used the site to view “Plandemic,” a “documentary” that insists that Bill Gates helped create the coronavirus so that he could sell you the vaccine.
But I confess that I was disturbed less by the content of the video than by the fact that someone had taken the time to post ads for it along a lightly used trail through a federally designated wilderness in backwoods Vermont. Every few hundred yards, I found another little cluster of the tags tacked to another tree—they’d only been there a day or two, because the last rainfall hadn’t touched them. I did my best to collect all of them, but I bet I missed some; in any event, my hike was not the restful escape from the world’s cares that I’d been counting on. Instead, I was right back in the world. It reminded me of the plans that resurface from time to time to beam ads onto the surface of the moon, making them visible to half the residents of the Earth at any given moment. (If that ever happens, I’m moving underground.)
And it made me reflect anew on just how incredibly hard it is for anything useful to happen in our country right now. Between the President tweeting (sometimes a hundred times a day), Fox News shouting nightly, and Facebook serving as a right-wing echo chamber, it’s no wonder that we’ve become confused about basic facts. Do masks help? In the right-wing world, they didn’t, until the President said that they did. Are vaccines a useful addition to the modern world? The President used to have his doubts, but now he seems to be pinning his reëlection on one. Government agencies have become founts of misinformation—even the C.D.C. has apparently knuckled under, granting the White House the right to review information that it sends to health professionals.
This is not, of course, new. We’ve delayed action on the climate crisis for decades as a result of campaigns of organized lying. But in that case there was a profit motive: the goal was to keep the business model of the oil industry alive for a few more decades, even at the cost of breaking the planet. This other kind of freelance falsehood is more baffling. And it’s not entirely confined to the right. In Vermont, outbreaks of measles in past years tended to center on small, independent schools favored by people who would count themselves as environmentalists and progressives but don’t trust doctors about vaccines. (The Vermont chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics asked me to make a video a few years ago, trying to convince such people that—well, that science is good. I was happy to do it, but I did feel as if I’d been called to explain that gravity meant that if you leaned forward far enough you’d fall on your face.)
It takes lots of patient, careful labor to make a society of any kind work. I’ve written about Vermont’s success in containing the coronavirus, at least compared with other areas of the country. Part of that success is attributable to high levels of public trust, which have made mask-wearing almost ubiquitous, even without a government mandate—precisely the kind of social solidarity that the wilderness pamphleteer was attempting to undercut. We’ve let our governor and his bureaucrats do their jobs, and followed their advice, and it’s gone pretty well—at the moment, there’s no one in the state hospitalized for Covid-19.
That same kind of hard work seems to be paying off in our colleges, which have not become the coronavirus hot spots that we’ve seen elsewhere in the nation. Middlebury College, where I work, sits down the hill from the trail where I found the flyers. It has managed to welcome back more than two thousand students, from all fifty states, with only two testing positive for COVID-19 so far; both were immediately quarantined and have now recovered. Administrators have worked for months with public-health officials to establish tight protocols; they’ve had to send a few students home for disobeying the carefully worked-out rules, but for the most part the students have been champs, understanding that normal college life isn’t in the cards right now. Our local public schools have begun to open without incident, though with lots of masks. Expertise actually matters; coöperation in a joint task is still possible. We can do this—or, we could, if there weren’t constantly people insisting that somewhere there lurks a conspiracy, or the Gestapo, or George Soros.
I suspect that Vermont is sensible enough to work its way through the nonsense, but who knows? We are assailed in this world by microbes, by carbon-dioxide molecules, and by a kind of rampaging ignorance so aggressive that it won’t even cede the woods and the mountains to common sense. Perhaps it will lessen if the President is removed; perhaps that happy event would only increase its spread. In any event, it is clearly hardy enough that we need to be dealing with it directly. Along with our other tasks, we should all be working diligently toward a cure—or a mask—that will keep this kind of foolishness at bay and let us get on with life. Or, at least, with a hike.
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Breonna Taylor's Family Gets a Settlement - but Not Justice |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=56232"><span class="small">Sophia A. Nelson, The Daily Beast</span></a>
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Wednesday, 16 September 2020 12:47 |
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Excerpt: "It is, in some ways, a staggering settlement by the city of Louisville. But settlements still largely let officers who commit these acts walk away."
Protesters hold signs showing Breonna Taylor during a rally in her honor in Frankfort, Ky., on June 25. The city of Louisville will pay several million dollars to the mother of Breonna Taylor, city officials announced Tuesday. (photo: AP)
Breonna Taylor's Family Gets a Settlement - but Not Justice
By Sophia A. Nelson, The Daily Beast
16 September 20
 es, $12 million (minus the customary 30 to 40 percent in attorneys fees) is a lot of money. Breonna Taylor’s family members are now instant millionaires. But at what cost? Her life was taken in a hail of bullets at the hands of men sworn to protect and serve her as a citizen. Her boyfriend, suspected of some wrong-doing around drugs, was the target of their search. Her life is over. Ended tragically at the tender age of 26.
I want to be clear that I have no issue with a family bringing a wrongful death lawsuit in the case of a murdered loved one. That is their most sacred duty. Your family is supposed to love you, support you, and, in a horrific case like this, avenge you with every means necessary under law. Breonna’s family and her attorney, Ben Crump, made clear in their Tuesday press conference that they still want to seek justice for her murder. They want the policemen involved arrested. The Kentucky attorney general is investigating.
According to news reports, this settlement is the largest ever paid in the history of the city of Louisville and indeed one of the largest ever paid in the nation for police misconduct. Likewise, based on Crump’s press conference, the terms of the settlement include that both the city and police agree to major police reforms.
According to a statement from the mayor of Louisville, among the reforms that were agreed to with Taylor’s family: establishing a housing credit program to incentivize officers to live in certain low-income census tracts in the city; encouraging officers to volunteer two hours every two-week pay period in the communities they serve; including social workers in the Louisville Metro Police Department “so they can provide assistance on certain police runs where their presence can be helpful”; overhauling how search warrants are obtained; and requiring a commanding officer to review and approve all search warrants and affidavits supporting them before an officer seeks judicial approval of them.
My issue with this settlement is a very specific one. Settlements in high-profile cases like this, often lead to important evidence, testimony, and other facts getting lost. Or, put another way—getting buried. People who once were free to speak can no longer do so. Settlement means just that. You give up your legal rights to sue me in exchange for a payment. It does not equal an admission of guilt. It usually comes with a non-disclosure clause, and a “liquidated damages” clause which means that if the parties violate the terms of the settlement, they will pay back all or a portion of the settlement received. (It wasn’t clear whether there was such an agreement in this settlement.)
Settlements are at the core of what is wrong in America relative to racism and racially discriminatory conduct. I know. I used to practice law in a big firm. I have entered into settlement agreements with past employers or business partners where I was paid to keep quiet about the sexist or racist conduct I either experienced firsthand or witnessed in the workplace. Racial discrimination for Black women can range from the way we wear our hair to the attitude everyone says we have if we speak up, think for ourselves, or dare to expect equal pay and treatment at work. Or in business. We are all “angry” and “mean” so nobody can get along with us or work with us. It’s one of the most pernicious stereotypes out there.
In the case of Breonna Taylor, she was not given the presumption of innocence. She was not brought in for questioning. She was not given the courtesy of a knock on her door the night she was the victim of an erroneous knockless warrant. What happened to her would not have happened in my upscale, very white Virginia suburb. Not likely even to me as a Black woman. There are different varieties of justice in our nation for poor Blacks, urban Blacks, and even Black people who are simply driving in their cars.
According to the EEOC, corporations spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year settling discrimination suits. And after the dust settles, corporate America is not more diverse—it is still overwhelmingly white and male, with white women having made modest gains in board rooms, where they hold 19 percent of high corporate positions and are less than 5 percent of the Fortune 500 CEOS.
That’s the private sector. In the public sector, the cost of settlements is well into the hundreds of millions as well. In a recent Marketplace Morning Report this June titled “Understanding the Hidden Cost of Police Misconduct for Cities Nationwide,” it was estimated that cities pay millions in police misconduct settlements. National Urban League President Marc Morial, who was also mayor of New Orleans in the 1990s, was quoted in the article as saying, “Another ‘hidden cost’ of police misconduct is the money that cities have to pay victims in civil judgments.The public knows nothing about it. Many times it’s hidden behind confidentiality agreements, attorney-client privilege. It’s not discussed.” And a recent Wall Street Journal article reported: “The 10 cities with the largest police departments paid out $248.7 million in 2014 in settlements and court judgments in police-misconduct cases.” New York City paid a record $302 million in settlements in just the year 2017 alone.
Settlements are fine. But a better solution would be that the police who commit unlawful acts or racist acts be held accountable publicly. That the prosecutors and the victims’ families work toward justice, not on opposing sides. That the perpetrators of racially discriminatory behavior be held to account, as well as those who enabled their conduct to continue for years unchecked. And that the police unions and other organizations work with these families, and the elected officials, to come up with solutions and not more excuses. There have been too many deaths of Black men and women in the past five years in the United States at the hands of police. And there have been too many settlements letting the officers who committed these unspeakable acts off the hook with their jobs, and pensions, intact.
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