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Sanders and Warren Are Challenging the Post-Cold War Foreign Policy Establishment |
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Wednesday, 12 December 2018 14:18 |
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vanden Heuvel writes: "Both Sanders and Warren embrace the growing Democratic opposition to wars without end and without purpose."
Sen. Bernie Sanders. (photo: Alex Brandon/AP)
Sanders and Warren Are Challenging the Post-Cold War Foreign Policy Establishment
By Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Washington Post
12 December 18
 fter mobilizing massive protests against the Iraq War before it began, and more recently spearheading campaigns to pressure Congress to end the war in Yemen and reassert its war-powers control, progressives have been relatively quiet in the foreign-policy debate. Now that is beginning to change, with progressives stepping up to issue an increasingly bold and broad call for fundamental reform in our global stance. Major speeches by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), both potential presidential contenders in 2020, issued a challenge not only to President Trump’s erratic and authoritarian course, but also to the foreign policy establishment in both parties and the ruinous bipartisan consensus of the past decades.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the foreign policy establishment envisioned the United States as the “indispensable nation,” policing an international order that would spread democracy, human rights and prosperity around the world. Instead, we suffered the Iraq War debacle, the global financial collapse, the wars without victory or end, the rise of an assertive mercantilist China and the reaction of an encircled Russia. Add to those the growing inequality and insecurity at home and the accelerating existential threat posed by catastrophic climate change.
After Trump’s improbable victory in 2016, that same establishment mobilized to defend the “liberal international order” and its institutions against his heresies, seeking less a reform than a restoration. Sanders and Warren, instead, have both issued direct indictments of Trump and that consensus: Sanders at Westminster College and at the School of Advanced International Studies , and Warren at American University and in the pages of the establishment journal Foreign Affairs. “While it is easy to blame President Trump for our problems,” Warren stated during her speech at American University, “the truth is that our challenges began long before him. And without serious reforms, they are just as likely to outlast him.”
Both Sanders and Warren embrace the growing Democratic opposition to wars without end and without purpose. Sanders has joined with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) in leading the effort to end our complicity with Saudi Arabia’s extirpation of Yemen. Both Warren and Sanders would end the 17-year war in Afghanistan; both would cut the military budget. And both oppose the trillion-dollar commitment to a new nuclear arms race.
Both senators further warn that authoritarianism is on the march — from Hungary’s Viktor Orban in the North to Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro in the South to Trump in the West. Sanders evokes a “global struggle” between the “movement for democracy, equalitarianism, economic, social, racial and environmental justice” and a “growing worldwide movement towards authoritarianism, oligarchy and kleptocracy.” Warren echoes that “democracy is running headlong into the ideologies of nationalism, authoritarianism and corruption.” Though the rhetoric sounds perilously like an invitation to neoconservative foreign-policy hawks to ramp up new cold or hot wars against what Sanders calls the “axis of authoritarianism,” Sanders and Warren argue, instead, that the new authoritarians are rising because of the failure of the global economic order. Trump and the gaggle of demagogues around the world are expressions of that failure, not the cause of it.
“We can start our defense of democracy by fixing what has gone wrong with our international economic policies,” Warren argues. “Defending the failed status quo of the last several decades is not good enough,” Sanders concurs . “In fact, we need to recognize that the challenges we face today are a product of that status quo.”
At home and globally, the pair argue that we need new policies geared to work for all, not simply the wealthy elite. Each has called for a fundamental change in corporate trade policies that, in Warren’s words, “delivered one punch in the gut after another to workers and the unions that fight for them.” They have also argued for a crackdown on corruption, monopolies, and on tax havens and global tax avoidance, ending, in Sanders’s words, “the absurdity of the rich and multinational corporations stashing over $21 trillion in offshore bank accounts.”
Sanders has joined with former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis to issue a more sweeping call for a new progressive international movement. It would work to unite progressives around the globe and to redefine global institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the International Labor Organization and the United Nations to further shared prosperity rather than enforce austerity, and to address the “massive global inequality that exists, not only in wealth but in political power.”
Both Sanders and Warren elevate catastrophic climate change as a national security priority. “The threat is real and it is existential,” Warren concludes. Oddly, neither treats the matter with the priority that reality would require. Warren calls for leveraging access to U.S. markets to insist on “meaningful environmental protections.” Sanders calls for “American leadership” to foster “strong international cooperation.”
There are differences between the two. Warren stakes out a more traditional view of Russia and China as power rivals posing a “threat” to Europe and to Asia. Sanders lumps Russia and China into the “authoritarian axis,” but says little about how to address them. Neither questions directly the wrongheaded National Defense Strategy that elevates Beijing and Moscow to the status of primary threats facing the United States. Neither details how to forge the essential balance between necessary cooperation — on global warming and nuclear disarmament — and potential confrontation — against the push for spheres of influence, or China’s economic mercantilism. Both admit that far more creative thinking is needed to define the world that we need to build.
As with domestic policy, when it comes to the United States’ foreign policy, defeating Trump in 2020 is not enough. The United States needs dramatic changes in its policies and the institutions that enforce them. It is time to think anew. Foreign policy is likely to be at the center of the political debate heading into 2020. Warren and Sanders have opened that debate.
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Universal Healthcare Could Save America Trillions: What's Holding Us Back? |
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Wednesday, 12 December 2018 14:18 |
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Gaffney writes: "A slew of studies are confirming that America can afford real universal healthcare, but some call it economically infeasible."
Recent reports have found that single-payer healthcare would reduce our nation’s spending by trillions of dollars over a decade. (photo: Erik mcGregory/Barcroft)
Universal Healthcare Could Save America Trillions: What's Holding Us Back?
By Adam Gaffney, Guardian UK
12 December 18
A slew of studies are confirming that America can afford real universal healthcare, but some call it economically infeasible
 f you can’t undercut a popular proposal as undesirable, make it sound impossible. That, in any event, has been the tack of opponents of single-payer healthcare, also called improved “Medicare-for-all”.
“[W]e got to get away from these falsehoods and start talking about the truth …” opined billionaire Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz on CNBC last June, while contending that single-payer healthcare was economically infeasible. “I think a lot of the analysis has shown it’s unaffordable,” claimed Seema Verma, head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, last summer, quoted by Kaiser Health News.
Yet casting Medicare-for-all as an economic impossibility is becoming a sisyphean pursuit: a slew of studies – including one released just the other week – are confirming that, yes, we can afford real universal healthcare in America. But if that’s the case, why haven’t we already achieved it? Well, the real stumbling block is not that single-payer advocates’ arithmetic is poor, it’s that American politics are dominated by the rich.
Still, the numbers matter. On 30 November, a team of economists with the Political Economy Research Institute (Peri) at the University of Amherst published a highly credible, nearly 200-page economic analysis of Senator Bernie Sanders’ single-payer bill. The Peri study received essentially none of the media coverage lathered on the last such analysis – a flawed piece of work published by the conservative Mercatus Center last summer. But here’s the funny thing: though these two analyses came from economists from opposite ends of the political spectrum, they shared a similar finding: single-payer would reduce our nation’s healthcare spending bill by trillions of dollars over a decade (around $2tn and $5tn, respectively).
The numbers are big, but they shouldn’t come as a surprise. Yes, single-payer imposes some new costs: when people don’t have to worry about ruinous medical bills or ravenous debt collectors, they tend to use more healthcare, increasing costs. But such rises in utilization are likely to be modest (even more modest than these analyses predict). There are only so many doctors and hospital beds, which limits theorized surges in utilization. Anyway, there are hundreds of billions in potential savings in moving to single-payer, such as slimming down on the massive administrative bloat of the privatized American healthcare system and bringing down our sky-high drug prices.
Going back decades, studies have found that, at worst, these costs and savings will balance out under a Canadian-style single-payer reform. “In Canada, each provincial plan provides for universal insurance coverage with no deductibles or copayments, controls on provider reimbursement, and administration by a single, public payer,” the United States General Accounting Office noted in an analysis of a single-payer bill way back in 1992. “We found that if these features were applied in the United States, the administrative savings could offset the added costs.”
In a review of the Peri study that I co-authored with Professors David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler at the City University of New York, we commended the robustness of the team’s much-needed and highly thorough analysis, while offering differing opinions on some of the specific assumptions. We also contended that it would be prudent to cautiously assume that overall healthcare spending would remain roughly stable (rather than fall) shortly after implementation.
But here’s the thing: a single-payer system allows cost growth to be directly controlled over time in a way that’s not possible with a privatized system. So even if a Medicare-for-all system only allows us to keep overall healthcare spending where it is today (as a proportion of the US economy), a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation using figures from the National Health Expenditures accounts shows that it would still save some $2tn over a decade.
To be clear, even as we reduce overall health spending by trillions, new taxes will be needed to replace most of the private spending – eg premiums, copays, and deductibles – that suddenly and permanently evaporate. To this end, the Peri analysis proposes a sensible mix of taxes, including payroll taxes paid by businesses, a sales tax on non-essentials, and a wealth tax on the richest among us. It would also treat capital gains like ordinary income. In exchange, we would have a healthcare system that covers everyone in the nation, without copays or deductibles, with comprehensive benefits, with no insurance networks or interruptions in coverage – and a permanent end to the soul-sucking hassle of medical bills.
There is another benefit of this system, albeit one that helps explain why we haven’t achieved it yet. A more progressive system of healthcare financing can, over time, reduce inequalities not only in health, but in wealth, helping to close our nation’s disastrous economic divide. It’s not surprising, then, that billionaires don’t much like it. Nor is it unexpected that the corporate behemoths that have the most to lose are already sharpening their swords, pouring cash into a new anti-single-payer lobbying group that, as the Intercept recently reported, is maneuvering to “influence Democratic party messaging and stymie the momentum toward achieving universal health care coverage”.
So as important as rigorous analyses and funding proposals are, we miss the forest from the trees if we see this mainly as a fight among policy wonks or dueling funding proposals. This is a struggle against the “economic royalists”, as Franklin D Roosevelt once termed them, of our day – and for the interests of ordinary working people. Good numbers do not a political movement make.
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RSN: John Kiriakou | Washington and Lee: What's in a Name? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=36478"><span class="small">John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Wednesday, 12 December 2018 13:11 |
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Kiriakou writes: "Virginia is still a southern state. And there are remnants of the shameful side of the South still around."
George Washington, Robert E. Lee. (photo: Wikimedia)
Washington and Lee: What's in a Name?
By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News
12 December 18
’m very fortunate to live in Arlington, Virginia. It is by far the most progressive place in the entire state. Barack Obama got 70 percent here in both 2008 and 2012, and Republicans don’t even bother to run for most offices. Arlington has the best parks in the state, the best schools, and it’s routinely ranked as one of the best places in America to live, walk, bike, or work. As blue as it has become, though, Virginia is still a southern state. And there are remnants of the shameful side of the South still around. Just by the Clarendon metro station, for example, in the center of Arlington’s restaurant and entertainment district, is a statue honoring the county’s war dead from World Wars I and II. But some names are separated from others and have a letter “C” after them. It’s meant to denote “Colored,” and it’s meant to be exclusionary.
Similarly, the local high school is named Washington & Lee after George Washington and Robert E. Lee. Washington actually owned much of the land that now constitutes Arlington, including the property where my house sits. Robert E. Lee, though, is the favorite son because he “defended the state,” “showed his love for Virginia,” and “stood up to the federal government,” as is taught in the state history classes here. I have to admit that it wasn’t until I was 18 years old and moved to the Washington area that I realized not everybody in America is taught that Robert E. Lee was a traitor. Indeed, I was taught that what he did was the very definition of treason — he “took up arms against his country in a time of war.” But he’s still very much a hero for many Virginians.
Still, Arlington has become progressive enough that enough people realize having the largest school in the county named after a pro-slavery traitor is the wrong message to send to the community. So a few months ago, the Arlington County School Board decided to rename the school. They appointed a board made up of a current high school student, a recent high school student, a resident of the neighborhood, a member of the school board, a member of the county council, and several members of the “community.”
The discussions turned nasty almost immediately. Many Arlingtonians were furious at the prospect of disrespecting the great general. They came up with all the usual reasons: The Confederacy is a part of our history; Lee fought for states’ rights, not slavery; why fix something that isn’t broken? The eventual consensus was to keep the name Washington but to drop the name Lee. A further consensus was that everybody seemed to like calling the place W&L, so a search was done to find another person worthy of the honor whose last name started with the letter L. That meant that the first few names thrown into the hopper, like Mary McLeod Bethune and Martin Luther King would not be considered.
The anti-change people — I don’t yet want to call them racists — saw a chance to take over the process. They came up with the idea to keep the name Washington & Lee, but to say that Lee was Robert E. Lee’s father, Lighthorse Harry Lee, who had once served with George Washington during the Revolution and was an army general. They were slapped down.
In the end, after contentious and angry debate, the committee decided to change the name to Washington & Loving, after Mildred and Richard Loving. The Lovings were residents of a small Virginia village called Central Point. Richard was white, Mildred was black, and they fell in love. Mildred became pregnant at 18 and, because interracial marriage was illegal in Virginia and 15 other states, she and Richard went to Washington DC to marry. When they returned to Central Point, an anonymous tipster called the police, and the Lovings were arrested on a felony charge of violating the miscegenation laws, specifically “cohabiting as man and wife against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth of Virginia.” Richard was released quickly, but Mildred was held for more than a week. They pleaded guilty to the crime and both were sentenced to one year in prison. They were released, but only after promising to not enter the state of Virginia again for 25 years. They returned to Washington.
The Lovings started a family, but they became homesick. Mildred wrote a letter to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy protesting that she was banned from her home state only because she was married to a white man. Kennedy’s office forwarded the letter to the American Civil Liberties Union, which decided to file a case. The ACLU appealed the Lovings’ conviction, but the judge who convicted them, Leon Bazile, wrote, “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay, and red and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with His arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that He separated the races shows that He did not intend for the races to mix.” The ACLU immediately appealed the decision. The case worked its way through the courts with the Lovings patiently waiting outside of Virginia. Finally, on June 12, 1967, the US Supreme Court ruled unanimously that miscegenation laws were unconstitutional. Interracial marriage was legal across the country.
The Lovings were simple people. They never sought the limelight. They only wanted to have the same rights that every other Virginian had. But they were willing to allow their lives to be dragged into the spotlight for the common good. They were selfless. They were quiet heroes who fought for something because they knew they were right and the government was wrong.
Richard Loving was killed by a drunk driver in 1975; the accident blinded Mildred in one eye. She rarely gave interviews after the court case, preferring to simply live in semi-anonymity. Still, these two humble people were accidental giants in the fight for civil and human rights, not just in Virginia, but across the country. At the very least, a simple high school could be named after them.
But there was surprising pushback — surprising because this is 2018, not 1962. When a decision was made by the Arlington School Board to make the Washington & Loving recommendation, two committee members resigned immediately. One member, a W&L parent, said, “I am departing with disgust about a morally bankrupt process that has been directed, not facilitated.” He said that the committee was “too racially fixated” and “a joke.” He said the very name Loving was “a totally ridiculous and inappropriate name … a joke, as far as I’m concerned.” Another committee member said, “The rationale for them [the Lovings] was they wanted to be happy and they were willing to break the law to do so. These were not people of high stature. They didn’t accomplish anything other than being in an interracial relationship.”
Two years ago I would have told you that that kind of ugly, racist anger was an anomaly, especially in progressive Arlington. But it’s not — at least not anymore. Why? Because Donald Trump has emboldened people to come out with the worst parts of themselves. After all these years, after all the progress of the past half-century, it’s OK to be racist again. And it’s OK to be public about it. It’s OK to carry tiki torches through the streets of one of the most progressive college towns in the state shouting “Jews will not replace us!” It’s OK to strip funding for schools in the poorest neighborhoods of our poorest cities. And it’s OK once again to pretend that a traitor, a man who took up arms against his country, a man who had (or more specifically whose wife had) slaves and who was cruel to them should be honored and venerated.
It’s one thing to oppose Donald Trump because you don’t like his policy toward Iran or Cuba, or to disagree with him on education or his refusal to recognize the problem of climate change. It’s an entirely different thing, however, to once again pit Americans against each other because of the color of their skin or because of one’s own feelings of racial superiority. Donald Trump has done that to us. We can’t forget it.
John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act - a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.
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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RSN: Police State Mindset Sees One-Year-Old and Mother as Threat |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Wednesday, 12 December 2018 11:41 |
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Boardman writes: "The stunningly abject failure of police to live up to their professed mission featured several police officers violently separating a one-year-old boy from his mother as she lay on the floor crying for help."
Jazmine Headley. (photo: WABC-TV/ABC7)
Police State Mindset Sees One-Year-Old and Mother as Threat
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
12 December 18
The mission of the New York City Police Department is to enhance the quality of life in New York City by working in partnership with the community to enforce the law, preserve peace, reduce fear, and maintain order. The Department is committed to accomplishing its mission of protecting the lives and property of all citizens of New York City by treating every citizen with compassion, courtesy, professionalism, and respect….
– Mission and Values of NYPD, issued April 5, 2016
 his mission was spectacularly NOT accomplished on Friday afternoon, December 7, at a Brooklyn office of the city’s HRA – Human Resources Administration (irony presumably unintended). The stunningly abject failure of police to live up to their professed mission featured several police officers violently separating a one-year-old boy from his mother as she lay on the floor crying for help. The end of the event was documented in a video posted on Facebook the same day by a witness who commented:
So I’m At 275 Bergen Street Handling My Business Or Whatever & There Wasn’t Any More Chairs For This Lady To Sit Down So She Sat In The Corner On The Floor. The Security Guard Came Over Said What Ever She Said To Her & She Made The Security Guard Feel Dumb So She Called The Cops On Her & This Was The Outcome SMH Mind You She Had Her Baby In Her Hands The Whole Time. I'm So Fucking Disgusted with The NYPD. EVRYBODY PLEASE SHARE!!! I’m a mother myself & I would’ve lost my fucking mind if this was me they would've had to kill me
Here’s what apparently happened, starting with the arrival of Jazmine Headley, 23, at the HRA office, carrying her one-year-old son. She was there to get a child care credit so that she could take a cleaning job. One account has her waiting four hours. She had no place to sit but the floor. None of the human resources workers offered her an extra chair. Instead, a security guard told this woman holding an infant that she had to stand. When Jazmine Headley refused to stand, the security guard or someone else called the cops.
That might not have been a bad thing, since New York has recently started training its police officers in de-escalation techniques that presumably help to “preserve peace, reduce fear, and maintain order.” How hard would it have been to sort out a situation where a mother and child are waiting patiently to get served? That really depends on the mindset of the enforcement officers. The security guards had already escalated a non-event into a confrontation. The NYPD officers, mostly (or all) women, turned it into a human rights violation, an unjustified assault on both the mother and the infant. When bystanders objected to the way the cops were acting, one of the cops threatened the bystanders with a taser. A police spokesman later refused to identify any of the cops involved or to say they had followed proper protocols.
This really should have been a no-brainer for every authority figure involved. A woman and her baby sitting in a corner pose what kind of threat to whom? Who is responsible for the way the hired security guards impose “order”? Where is the simple humanity of those who run a crowded “human resources” office? What possible rationale does anyone have for demanding that the woman stand with her child while she waits her turn? Why did the police not de-escalate the non-threating situation instead of turning it into a violent arrest of the mother and violent detention of the infant? No wonder the video went viral and sparked widespread outrage.
Official response by higher-ups was little better and came days later. Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted that the police assault was “a disturbing incident.” The NYPD issued a statement calling the assault “troubling.” The police statement apparently misrepresented the sequence of events, claiming HRA security “made unsuccessful attempts to remove this individual from the facility due to her disorderly conduct towards others and for obstructing the hallway.” The NYPD statement includes this inconsistent passage:
The woman was then informed by police numerous times to leave the location, and she refused. As NYPD officers were attempting to convince the woman to depart the facility, HRA peace officers brought the woman to the floor. NYPD officers then attempted to place her under arrest. She refused to comply with officers’ orders, and was then taken into custody.
She was “informed” to leave? Why? Did she not have every right to be there? What right did any of the authorities have to raise this barrier to her finding work when it was the job of at least some of them to help her? “HRA peace officers brought the woman to the floor.” What? She was standing, then tackled? With a child in her arms? Then she was arrested for what, littering? And why does the NYPD statement omit the child’s existence, as well as the assault on the child? After all, one of the charges against Headley was “acting in a manner injurious to a child.”
The bogus arrest of a young black woman on a Friday in Brooklyn didn’t generate much news coverage until the video went viral and public reaction pushed it into the news on December 9. The next day NY Police Commissioner James O’Neill tweeted:
As we investigate Friday’s arrest in Brooklyn, I’ll tell you the video is very disturbing to me — as PC, & as a dad. Also, #NYPD cops have a very tough job. We were called to a chaotic situation & we’re looking at all available video to determine why certain decisions were made.
The credible accounts available so far all suggest that if there was any chaos, then the private security guards created it, and the NYPD made it worse. Training in de-escalation – bringing a calming effect to an intense situation – began about four years ago, after an NY police officer killed Eric Garner with a stranglehold even though the underlying offense was selling single cigarettes on the street. Eric Garner, 43, was an unarmed black man and father of six when a gang of cops swarmed him. His last words were: “I can’t breathe.” Garner’s killer, Daniel Pantaleo, was not indicted by a grand jury in 2014, but he still faces an internal police disciplinary charge of using excessive force. Pantaleo’s hearing started December 7, the same day NY cops used Jazmine Headley to demonstrate that de-escalation techniques have not yet taken hold, although there was no stranglehold and Headley survived.
Pantaleo is defended by his police union, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association. Union head Patrick Lynch responded to protesters that this trial is a “kangaroo court.” He accused the Civilian Complaint Review prosecuting Pantaleo of rushing the 2014 case. Lynch was also quick to absolve the police of any blame in tearing Jazmine Headley’s baby from her arms. Lynch said: “These police officers were put in an impossible situation. They didn’t create the dispute at the HRA office.” Yes, that’s true as far as it goes. But it ignores the reality that the police made the impossible situation into a disaster. Kind of reminds one of Chicago mayor Richard Daley’s exquisite malapropism during the 1968 police riots: “The police are not here to create disorder, they’re here to preserve disorder.”
Fifty years after the Chicago police riots, police violence remains an American plague. Police executions of innocent, unarmed, usually non-white victims continue to go unpunished. The same day Jazmine Headley became news, The New York Times published a study of excessive police violence in Phoenix. The piece starts with a cop roughing up and arresting a blind man who “came too close” to him in a men’s room. City officials did not dispute the statistics showing Phoenix police were more violent than police in other cities of similar size. Instead, the officials blamed Phoenix citizens, based on no statistics or other evidence. When the Phoenix police chief hired a non-profit research firm to study the violence issue, the Phoenix police union called that “second-guessing police officers who have done nothing wrong.”
That’s a police state mentality, the presumption that the police have done nothing wrong, without evidence or analysis. Patrick Lynch of the NY police union expressed the same poisonous attitude: “The event would have unfolded much differently if those at the scene had simply complied with the officers’ lawful orders.” The idea that we should obey the police whatever they say is raw authoritarianism (in plain view in Poland these days at the climate change conference there, where protest is contained and coal is promoted). In a free country, police need to be as accountable as the rest of us. And in the case of Jazmine Headley, accountability seems to have begun.
On December 11, the Brooklyn district attorney dropped all charges against her, saying:
I was horrified by the violence depicted in the video and immediately opened an investigation into this case…. An HRA officer escalated the situation as Ms Headley was about to leave the premises, creating an awful scenario of a baby being torn from his mother. The consequences this young and desperate mother has already suffered as a result of this arrest far outweigh any conduct that may have led to it. She and her baby have been traumatized, she was jailed on an unrelated warrant and may face additional collateral consequences.
The same day, Headley was released from Rikers Island prison after five days there. Ordering her release, Judge Craig S. Walker called her arrest a “horrific scene that was broadcast all over the United States.” While the viral video and subsequent outcry influenced the judge, Headley had only limited awareness of the media storm until she was released.
Headley was jailed because of a New Jersey warrant relating to credit card fraud charges for which she had missed at least one court appearance. The NY judge released her on her own recognizance, meaning that she did not have to post bail but was expected to appear at a New Jersey hearing next week. Brooklyn Defender Services, which has represented Headley, assured the judge that she would appear as required. The agency has also filed a motion in New Jersey asking for the dismissal of the charges there.
This represents partial justice of a sort for Jazmine Headley, but it’s hardly restorative or compensatory. Meanwhile, the police union’s Patrick Lynch continues to whine for police supremacy: “The immediate rush to condemn these officers leaves their fellow cops wondering – when confronted with a similar impossible scenario, what do you want us to do? The answer cannot be ‘do nothing.’”
What do we want police to do? Have they not been trained in de-escalation? Are they not capable of making sensible, proportionate decisions? How willing are they to live up to their mission of “treating every citizen with compassion, courtesy, professionalism, and respect…”?
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
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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n Tuesday, right about at lunchtime, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer dropped down the street to the White House to have a chat with the president*. What followed 
