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RSN: Minneapolis Officers Who Killed George Floyd Had Histories of Shootings and Excessive Force |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=35143"><span class="small">Paul Gottinger, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Wednesday, 27 May 2020 11:54 |
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Gottinger writes: "Reports show that former officers Derek Chauvin and Tou Thao had histories of involvement in shootings, complaints, and a lawsuit for excessive force."
People hold up their fists after protesting near the spot where George Floyd was killed. (photo: Kerem Yucel/Getty)
Minneapolis Officers Who Killed George Floyd Had Histories of Shootings and Excessive Force
By Paul Gottinger, Reader Supported News
27 May 20
 housands of protesters took to the streets on the south side of Minneapolis Tuesday following the police killing of unarmed African American George Floyd, which was captured on video.
Protesters gathered at the location of Floyd’s killing and marched to the Minneapolis police department’s 3rd Precinct, where protesters believed the officers who killed Floyd worked. The protesters held signs that read “I can’t breathe” and “Justice for George.”
Outside the precinct building, Minneapolis police in riot gear shot tear gas, flash-bang grenades, and rubber bullets into crowds of protesters, hitting journalists as well. Some of the projectiles hit protesters in the head, causing serious injury.
Minneapolis City Council member Jeremiah Ellison called the police response “disgusting.” He tweeted:
The video of Floyd’s killing, captured by bystander Darnella Frazier, shows now former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on the neck of George Floyd for five minutes, as Floyd lies on the ground saying, “I cannot breathe” and “Don’t kill me.”
In the video, bystanders shout that Floyd appears to be unconscious, yet Officer Chauvin continues to strangle him with his knee. The video later shows Floyd being carried away completely lifeless. He died a short time later.
Minneapolis police released a statement claiming Floyd died due to a “medical incident,” which drew widespread outrage from the protesters.
“The police killed him, bro, right in front of everybody,” said Frazier, who filmed the incident. For “five, six minutes” after announcing he couldn’t breathe, Floyd was “sitting there dead.”
Also filmed in the video is former Minneapolis police officer Tou Thao. In the video, bystanders asked him if he was just going to allow Chauvin to kill George Floyd.
Minneapolis police have fired four officers involved in the killing, but they have yet to name the other two officers. The FBI has also begun an investigation into the killing.
Reports show that former officers Derek Chauvin and Tou Thao had histories of involvement in shootings, complaints, and a lawsuit for excessive force.
In 2006, Chauvin was involved in the shooting death of Wayne Reyes, according to Communities United Against Police Brutality. Reyes was fleeing officers when he was shot, according to reporting.
In 2008, Chauvin shot and wounded Ira Latrell Toles in the abdomen during a house call, and in 2011, he was placed on leave following his involvement in the shooting of a Native American man.
There have also been 12 complaints made against Chauvin according to the Minneapolis’ Office of Police Conduct complaint database and the Minneapolis Civilian Review Authority. None of the complaints appears to have resulted in discipline.
In 2006, a Minnesota correctional facility prisoner sued seven officers, including Chauvin, for violations of his federal constitutional rights. The case was dismissed.
Former officer Tou Thao was sued for excessive force in 2017. According to the lawsuit, Thao and another officer stopped Lamar Ferguson and an eight-month pregnant woman without cause and searched Ferguson. The two officers then threw Ferguson to the ground and began punching and kicking him The officers then brought Ferguson to jail in just his underwear and a tee-shirt.
The lawsuit was settled out of court for $25,000.
In 2015, the Minneapolis police killing of Jamar Clark sparked weeks of protests in Minneapolis, including the occupation of the Minneapolis 4th Precinct station for 18 days.
A recent study showed that Minneapolis police kill African Americans at thirteen times the rate of whites.
Paul Gottinger is a staff reporter at RSN whose work focuses on the Middle East and the arms industry. He can be reached on Twitter @paulgottinger or via
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Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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FOCUS: Leonardo DiCaprio's Big Middle Finger to the Confederacy |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=54481"><span class="small">Nick Schager, Yahoo! News</span></a>
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Wednesday, 27 May 2020 10:54 |
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Schager writes: "Grant, a History Channel miniseries airing over three nights beginning on Memorial Day, is an overt - and timely - reclamation project."
Leonardo DiCaprio. (photo: Angela Weiss/Getty Images)
Leonardo DiCaprio's Big Middle Finger to the Confederacy
By Nick Schager, Yahoo! News
27 May 20
 rant, a History Channel miniseries airing over three nights beginning on Memorial Day (May 25), is an overt—and timely—reclamation project. His reputation having faded over the past century because, as many here assert, the South’s “Lost Cause” rewriting of Civil War history invariably downplayed his accomplishments, Ulysses S. Grant is restored by this informative and entertaining TV documentary to the prototypical modern American hero. Based on Ron Chernow’s critically acclaimed 2017 biography of the same name, it’s a stirring tribute to an individual who embodied America’s finest ideals: hard work, determination, courage, resolve, and belief in democracy and equality for all, no matter the color of their skin.
Executive produced by Leonardo DiCaprio, and featuring participation from numerous historians, writers and servicemen, including Chernow, Ta-Nehisi Coates and David Petraeus, Grant is a non-fiction tale about the intertwined self-definition of a man and a nation. Born on April 27, 1822, Grant grew up the working-class son of an Ohio tanner and merchant, and found his first calling as an accomplished horseman. Disinterested in taking over the family business, and having garnered the nickname “Useless Grant” as a kid, he was sent—without being asked—to West Point, where a typo bestowed him with the middle initial “S” (rather than “H,” for Hiram), thereby resulting in the more patriotic “US Grant” moniker. The reconfiguration of Grant’s name would continue once he joined President Abraham Lincoln’s Civil War army, his initials eventually coming to stand for “Unconditional Surrender” Grant due to his habit of securing definitive victory over his adversaries.
The evolution of Grant’s handle goes hand-in-hand with the upwards trajectory of his life. Post-military school graduation, Grant entered the infantry, and soon fell in love with and married Julia Dent, the daughter of a family that owned slaves—a situation that caused some friction for Grant and his own abolitionist clan. Triumphs in the Mexican-American War proved that he was preternaturally cool under pressure, but in the years immediately following that conflict, Grant left the service and fell on hard times, to the point of taking various odd jobs just to make sure his family didn’t starve. Even at his most destitute, however, he hewed to his convictions, freeing his only slave, William Jones—given to him by his father-in-law.
The Civil War altered Grant’s fortunes forever, and after establishing the man’s backstory, this series roots itself in the commander’s rise up the ranks via a series of impressive and daring campaigns that confirmed his imposing mettle, intelligence, and strategic shrewdness. On the battlefields against a Confederate Army led by his fellow West Point graduate Robert E. Lee, Grant exhibited canny tactical acumen and equally formidable tenacity, taking immense gambits (such as at Vicksburg, hailed as his “masterpiece,” where he seized control of the Mississippi River) and often pursuing enemies into hostile territory in order to attain decisive wins. Grant began to develop into a legend in the thick of warfare, and it’s there that Grant spends the majority of its time, recounting in exhaustive detail the many clashes that marked his Civil War tenure, and the famously daring and clever maneuvers that allowed him to eventually secure victory for the Union.
Melding talking-head interviews and narrated excerpts from its subject’s memoirs with copious dramatic restagings of key events in his life, Grant’s formal approach takes some getting used to, especially at the outset. Fortunately, it settles into a rhythm, with its staged sequences providing momentum and weight to interviewees’ informative commentary about Grant’s exploits and mindset. From the catastrophic victory at Shiloh, to the heroic rescue at Chattanooga, to the bloody conflict in the Wilderness of Virginia, Grant’s recreations aren’t always as grand as one might like, resorting to soundbite-y dialogue and wannabe-mythic posing. Yet they’re sturdy and coherent complements to the show’s academic speakers, and they’re augmented considerably by excellent graphical maps and diagrams that lay out the specifics of Grant’s brilliant operations.
In the aftermath of his Civil War service (and his beloved President Lincoln’s assassination), Grant was elected America’s 18th commander-in-chief, and while in office, he became renowned for spearheading Reconstruction, creating the Justice Department, and using that arm of the government to battle and prosecute the Ku Klux Klan. Though slandered throughout his life as a drunk, a butcher and a corrupt would-be dictator (the last slur courtesy of an administration dogged by scandal), Grant makes the convincing case that he was, first and foremost, a noble patriot. A staunch defender of the Union, he was convinced of the necessity for emancipation for African-American slaves, and of the evil of the Confederacy, whose members he often referred to as “rebels” and “traitors” to the grand democratic experiment of the United States.
In this regard, Grant is an active attempt to rehabilitate the historical record, positing Confederate adversary Robert E. Lee as a symbol of the intolerant, aristocratic, treasonous old guard, and Grant as an emblem of a more open, just, unified modern America. Grant’s disgust for the Confederacy and the rancidness it stood for is on full display throughout this series, which pointedly contends that—good ol’ boy revisionism be damned—it was slavery, not simply the more euphemistic “states’ rights,” which drove the South to secede and take up arms against the Union. At the same time, Grant’s compassion and levelheadedness also remains front and center, epitomized by the lenient terms of surrender he ultimately offered to the defeated Lee, which helped him secure support throughout the South in the years following the end of the war.
Grant’s prolonged focus on the lieutenant general’s most famous wartime decisions means that the series is directly aimed at those with a fondness for in-depth military history. Nonetheless, the context it provides about Grant’s life, both as a young man and as an eight-year resident of the Oval Office, deepens its argument about the titanic nature of his achievements, and the greatness of his character—both of which make him, no matter the vantage point, one of the true, indispensable founders of the American republic.
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RSN: The Coast IS NOT Clear |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=63"><span class="small">Marc Ash, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Wednesday, 27 May 2020 08:31 |
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Ash writes: "It looks like a jail break out there. People who have been under house arrest for the better part of 3 months are charging back into the public domain with reckless abandon. Absent strong, responsible leadership, they hope for the best and ignore the worst."
Graves are prepared for victims of the Coronavirus outbreak in Cordoba, Argentina. (photo: Sebastian Salguero/Reuters)
The Coast IS NOT Clear
By Marc Ash, Reader Supported News
27 May 20
 t looks like a jail break out there. People who have been under house arrest for the better part of 3 months are charging back into the public domain with reckless abandon. Absent strong, responsible leadership, they hope for the best and ignore the worst.
The first death resulting from Covid-19 in the United States appears to have occurred on February 6, 2020, in Santa Clara County, California. In little more than 100 days, the death toll is over 100,000 as of this writing. That’s one hundred thousand Americans killed by this virus on American soil in less than four months. It is a staggering figure, historic in its proportions. It may be only the beginning.
The prognosis for the next year is not encouraging. Covid-19 has reached true pandemic proportions. It is affecting humanity worldwide. Aggressively and lethally. While the rate of infections is slowing a bit with the onset of warmer weather, that’s a pattern many health and disease experts foresaw. It is also eerily reminiscent of the path the Spanish Flu of 1918 took a little over a century ago.
It was the second wave of Spanish Flu infections that was most lethal. It was an H1N1 strain of the flu, not vastly different in its construct from what we regard as seasonal flu today. However, medical historians theorize that what had been a serious strain of the flu early in 1918 may have mutated into a far deadlier strain by the fall of that year, setting that stage for millions to die. The manner in which public officials handled the crisis is chillingly reminiscent of what we see playing out on evening news broadcasts now.
As Dave Roos writes on history.com, “James Harris, a historian at Ohio State University who studies both infectious disease and World War I … believes that the rapid spread of Spanish flu in the fall of 1918 was at least partially to blame on public health officials unwilling to impose quarantines during wartime. In Britain, for example, a government official named Arthur Newsholme knew full well that a strict civilian lockdown was the best way to fight the spread of the highly contagious disease. But he wouldn’t risk crippling the war effort by keeping munitions factory workers and other civilians home.”
By the time it was over, an estimated 20-50 million people were dead worldwide.
There is no world war underway today, no overriding national security imperative to justify the expenditure of more lives than the war itself. Instead workers are being sent back into the workplace to prop up the Western world’s for-profit system of capitalism.
However, on what is perhaps an even more immediate note, the WHO is warning that a second peak is occurring globally now. Indeed, some states in the U.S. that rejected lockdowns and protective precautions have seen spikes as a consequence.
In fairness, a desire to return to normalcy is not uniquely American. Pressure on governments to reopen business and social venues is common to many countries. If you are living paycheck to paycheck, and most people are, then you are under enormous pressure to get back to work. The risks often seem secondary.
Keeping humanity in the house is not a viable long-term strategy. Personal protective measures, testing, and contact tracing are the best hope for slowing the spread and mitigating the impact now and in the event of a second wave.
Of those measures, personal protective precautions are perhaps the most important and also the most reliant on the least qualified. The common man doesn’t maintain disease security well. We make mistakes, we let our guard down. We are human.
Viral Self Defense
Terms like PPE and social distancing are references to very important viral control tools. But they are hard for the average person to grasp. It might be better to think of wearing a good face mask, disinfecting high-risk surfaces, and staying at a safe distance from others as viral self-defense measures. You are literally defending yourself and your loved ones from a killer. A very prolific killer.
This will be a year of living dangerously. Be quite careful.
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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The Wealthy Bosses and Right-Wing Ideologues Behind the Rush to "Reopen" |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=50580"><span class="small">Chris Brooks, In These Times</span></a>
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Wednesday, 27 May 2020 08:31 |
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Brooks writes: "Conservative operatives are trying to reignite a Tea Party-like 'movement' to pressure states to reopen their economies."
A sign from a lockdown protest. (photo: InTheseTimes)
The Wealthy Bosses and Right-Wing Ideologues Behind the Rush to "Reopen"
By Chris Brooks, In These Times
27 May 20
he federal government squandered the time the states spent in lockdown. We still face a national shortage of COVID-19 test kits and PPE and there is no nationwide testing or contact tracing program. The United States has 4 percent of the world’s population, but about a third of the world's coronavirus cases.
But some folks were not wasting their time. True to form, the rich are doing everything they can to benefit financially from the crisis—and their work is paying off. The richest 400 Americans were already worth a collective $2.96 trillion last year.
Now many of the super-rich are poised to make even more during the pandemic—like the behemoth Amazon, which is propelling CEO Jeff Bezos even closer to becoming the world’s first trillionaire.
The goal of these powerful actors is twofold: to reopen the economy on their own terms and to capitalize on the economic crisis to push for a long-held wish list of cuts to taxes and government services. They will push for lower taxes and to gut services despite the glaring evidence, revealed by the pandemic, that we need more government, not less.
To do so they must get millions of workers to risk their health by returning to work. If workers aren't working, no profits are being generated. And which is more important to the captains of industry?
They are working hard to win the tug of war over reopening, hoping to overpower the dire warnings of the public health experts and the desires of the public, which polls consistently show are more worried about a surging virus than about a flagging Wall Street.
A Washington Post poll and a Pew survey both show that laid-off workers are more likely to support continued lockdowns than those still employed.
Their campaign has several parts:
—Congress’s economic relief packages focused more on bailing out big businesses than protecting workers. Any strings attached about companies' keeping workers employed were flimsy, and those strings will be snapped completely on the roughly $500 billion that the Treasury Department will oversee.
—The federal government abdicated its role in the pandemic, forcing states to buy their own ventilators, test kits, and personal protective equipment and develop their own contact tracing programs. That drove up local government expenses at the same time that statewide lockdowns have tanked tax revenues. Taking advantage of the resulting state budget deficits, the consortium of conservatives is pushing states to adopt its longstanding wish list, such as abandoning their pension obligations to public employees, laying off mass numbers of them, and making dramatic cuts to public services.
—Republican officials, right-wing media, and corporate front groups (especially Save Our Country Coalition, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the State Policy Network, and FreedomWorks) have been loudly banging the drums for the economy to reopen. The U.S. Department of Labor and several state governments are helping that process along by threatening to prosecute workers for unemployment benefits fraud if they refuse to return to work out of fear for their health.
—Both Trump and Republican congressional leaders are clear: there will be no further economic stimulus for states or the unemployed without a guarantee that businesses will be held harmless if their employees contract COVID-19 at work. The door is open for negligence on a grand scale.
The so-called recovery from the 2008 Great Recession saw Wall Street profits hit all-time highs while workers’ wages remained stagnant and union density hit an all-time low. “Recovery for me, poverty for thee” is again the corporate goal for the post-corona economy.
Tea Party 2.0
Conservative operatives are trying to reignite a Tea Party-like “movement” to pressure states to reopen their economies. A billionaire-backed network of corporate front groups with deep ties to conservative state lawmakers and the White House helped mobilize a motley crew to protest stay-at-home orders at state legislatures and amplified their actions in the media.
“It’s like strike-breaking,” said Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. “You can find people who will do it, but without the active role of the employer it would never happen.
“The same is true for the anti-lockdown protests. It’s only because there are all these corporate-funded front groups that are supported and amplified by Fox News and the right-wing echo chamber that they can create the fiction of a mass movement and exploit the crisis to force through unpopular policies they know would never happen otherwise.”
At the heart of the push to reopen are organizations like Tea Party Patriots and FreedomWorks and prominent right-wing activists like Stephen Moore, a conservative economist who has worked for the Heritage Foundation and Wall Street Journal and once told filmmaker Michael Moore (no relation) that “capitalism is a lot more important than democracy.”
Moore is an economic adviser to Trump and has been pushing the White House to follow the advice of business leaders and conservative economists rather than public health experts.
Moore is also a leader in the Save Our Country Coalition (SOCC), which is coordinating the effort for reopening, tax cuts, and legislation to erase employer liability. He is just one of the many White House connections to SOCC. Another is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), financed by large corporations and conservative billionaires. ALEC's membership includes both corporate lobbyists and almost a quarter of all state legislators.
ALEC’s primary mission is to draft model legislation that benefits corporations and can be introduced in cookie-cutter fashion in legislatures across the country.
According to documents obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy, ALEC hosted a call on April 22 on the need to reopen the economy with Vice President Mike Pence and 300 state legislators and corporate lobbyists—with promises of future calls with Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
Many Republican state legislators have encouraged the anti-lockdown protests in their home states.
Also joining the fray is the State Policy Network (SPN), a national web of corporate-funded think tanks that produce white papers and publicity for ALEC's model legislation.
With the pandemic, SPN affiliates are following a playbook they perfected earlier when denying climate change and the link between smoking and cancer: they promote skepticism about the coronavirus death rate and the models used by public health experts to predict the number yet to die.
These claims have been echoed by Trump, who has promoted the conspiracy theory that death rates are being inflated to stop his re-election.
Rigging a deficit
The pandemic response has fallen on the shoulders of state governments. Those hit hardest by the virus now face enormous budget shortfalls and the corporate-backed network is leveraging the moment to push austerity everywhere.
Michigan, for example, is estimated to be $1 billion to $3 billion in the red. The Mackinac Center, a corporate-financed SPN affiliate, has published an austerity wish list of items unrelated to the pandemic. It includes laying off a quarter of the state’s “non-essential” public employees and hiking state employees' health care premiums.
According to Politico, California faces a $54 billion budget deficit and is expected to make dramatic cuts if it doesn’t receive federal assistance, including $18 billion in cuts to schools and community colleges. Of course, schools need more funding to make social distancing a reality on campuses if they want to reopen.
The California Policy Center, another SPN affiliate, is advocating to transition the public employee pension system from a defined-benefit plan, which guarantees retirees a monthly payment, to a defined-contribution plan, where the employer is only on the hook for a certain amount into each employee’s retirement account each month. If the total runs out after the worker retires, too bad.
These policy proposals are reverberating throughout the SPN network, resulting in a growing chorus of conservative think tanks and politicians calling for states to abandon their commitments to their workers. “Just say no to a pension bailout” wrote the Beacon Center of Tennessee. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has gone so far as to call for states to declare bankruptcy so they can walk away from their pension obligations.
Economic relief for state and local governments is at the center of talks for the next relief bill in Congress, but McConnell has declared shielding private employers from liability for reopening a mandatory condition of any further federal stimulus.
The call for employer indemnification and tax cuts for the rich as a condition of further relief has been echoed by Trump.
The Godfather principle
Reopening the economy absent a national testing program is deeply unpopular. A majority of Americans believe our tax system is unfair and taxes should be substantially raised on corporations and the wealthy.
It's not incidental that Stephen Moore values capitalism more than democracy.
Employers and politicians force their policies onto the public by forcing us to choose between two bad options while maintaining the illusion that there is no alternative: Either work unsafely or be kicked off unemployment. States must either limit employers' liability or there will be no further stimulus.
To keep the corporate protection racket going, employers and politicians rely on the Godfather principle: making us an offer we can’t refuse.
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