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FOCUS | Trump's Next Attack on Democracy: Mass Voter Suppression |
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Saturday, 01 July 2017 11:01 |
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Feingold writes: "The most important aspect of any democratic election is participation. A democracy gains its legitimacy through elections only so far as those elections represent the will of the people."
Russ Feingold. (photo: UWIRE)
Trump's Next Attack on Democracy: Mass Voter Suppression
By Russ Feingold, Guardian UK
01 July 17
The Trump administration’s ‘election integrity’ commission is declaring war on voters – our democratic legitimacy be damned
 he most important aspect of any democratic election is participation. A democracy gains its legitimacy through elections only so far as those elections represent the will of the people. Limit voter participation, and there is a direct correlation between the legitimacy of an election and the democratic system. President Trump and Vice-President Pence’s “election integrity” commission is unequivocally declaring war on voters – our democratic legitimacy be damned.
The commission recently sent a letter to all 50 states asking that they provide all the names and associated birthdays, last four digits of social security numbers, addresses, political parties, and voting histories since 2006 of people on their voter rolls. This letter is helping to lay the groundwork for nationalized voter suppression.
The commission is requesting the same information that Republican state governments have used to create hyper-partisan gerrymandering and enact restrictive voter ID laws. Such measures have been disturbingly successful at suppressing voting of minority and low-income citizens, groups that tend to vote with Democrats. This assault on voters might seem farfetched, except that we’ve seen this strategy too many times before to claim ignorance now.
After slavery ended, white elites invented felony disenfranchisement as a means to delegitimize black citizens and prevent them from gaining influence. We saw Jim Crow gut-punch our democracy in yet another attempt to disenfranchise minorities. We are witnessing history repeating itself.
Nationally, the Democratic party is gaining support as the country’s demographics become increasingly diverse. The majority of black, Native American, Hispanic and Asian voters vote as Democrats. The Republican party has known for several years now that its best tactic to cling to power is not to build a party worth supporting, but to deny participation in the political process to Democratic party voters.
Making matters worse, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Office, long heralded as the ultimate guarantor of civil rights, including voting rights, might unknowingly be supporting the commission’s efforts. The Civil Rights Office sent out a letter on Wednesday, the same day as the commission sent its letter, seeking information from states on how they maintain their voter rolls. The office charged with upholding the 1965 Voting Rights Act must resist playing a leading role in further dismantling this most fundamental democratic right.
I would expect these actions from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or any of the other authoritarian regimes we have sanctioned around the world – regimes that stay in power by suppressing their people and manipulating election results. We must not lie to ourselves when we see the warning signs here at home. This commission is a harbinger of a top-down, White House-endorsed assault on voters, specifically Democratic voters: the same voters who denied Trump the popular vote.
State leaders have a moral and constitutional obligation to our democracy and to their citizens to refuse to cooperate with this commission.
States should refuse to hand over any of the requested voter information, as California, Virginia, Rhode Island and Kentucky have refused to do at this writing. The Connecticut, Oklahoma and North Carolina secretaries of state, on the other hand, have agreed to send “publicly available” information to the commission. This is a mistake.
Our democracy cannot afford to turn over any information now and ask questions later. States turning over any information, including publicly available information, legitimize the commission and betray the trust and privacy of voters. Having publicly available information for in-state use is different from providing information for a national voter database that will be placed at the hands of nefarious actors. States must take a stand to protect their voters’ most fundamental democratic right.
Additionally, Democrats must refuse to participate in the commission. The secretaries of state for New Hampshire and Maine should step down from the commission immediately. Participation risks granting legitimacy where there can be none. Two lone Democrats on this commission will stand no chance of preventing the pre-cooked outcomes. Instead, they and their states are being used to cloak the commission in the guise of bipartisanship. If Democrats refuse to participate, the commission will be left with no clothes on.
The litany of research on voting in recent years has failed to come up with but a handful of voter fraud cases. On the other hand, voter suppression techniques, such as those employed by the Republican party, effectively disenfranchise scores of voters across the country. If the real goal of the administration is election integrity, the stated objective from day one should have been to maximize voter participation.
Rather than target minority voters with a modern gloss on McCarthyism, we should be prioritizing a 21st-century Voting Rights Act to protect voting rights and increase access to the ballot box.
Rather than voter ID laws that disenfranchise certain demographics, a new Voting Rights Act could set a national ID standard, granting maximum flexibility to voters. It could also ban felony disenfranchisement in national elections and require publication of new electoral changes to help educate voters.
The options are there to strengthen our democracy and truly protect “one person, one vote”. Instead, this commission appears intent on nationalizing the Republican party’s strategy of “one Anglo-Saxon, financially successful person, one vote”.
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FOCUS | Finally Everyone Agrees: Health Care Is a Human Right |
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Saturday, 01 July 2017 10:38 |
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Taibbi writes: "Many years ago, while researching a book chapter on health care reform, I visited a hospital in Bayonne, New Jersey that was having problems. Upon arrival, administrators told me a story that summed up everything that is terrible and stupid about American health care."
A health care rally. (photo: Health Care for All)
Finally Everyone Agrees: Health Care Is a Human Right
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
01 July 17
Let's hope we all remember the moral arguments about health care once the Trump administration ends
 any years ago, while researching a book chapter on health care reform, I visited a hospital in Bayonne, New Jersey that was having problems. Upon arrival, administrators told me a story that summed up everything that is terrible and stupid about American health care.
A patient of theirs suffering from a chronic illness took a bad turn and had to come in for a minor surgical procedure. The only problem was, the patient had been taking Coumadin, a common blood thinner, as part of his outpatient care.
So they brought him in to the hospital, weaned him off the Coumadin, did the surgery successfully, then sent him home. All was well until they billed the insurer. The answer came back: coverage denied, because the operation had not been conducted in "timely fashion."
Of course, had they operated in a more "timely fashion," the patient would have bled to death on the operating table. But such is the logic of the American health care system, a Frankenstein's monster of monopolistic insurance zones peppered with over a thousand different carriers, each with their own (often cruel) procedures and billing systems.
The hospitals I visited all told me they devoted enormous resources – as much as half of all administrative staff, in one case – to chasing claims. Patient care in American is in this way consistently reduced to a ludicrous and irrational negotiation of two competing professional disciplines: medicine, and extracting money from insurance companies.
Patients get trapped between hospitals that overcharge for simple procedures and insurers who deny coverage for serious ones. Administrative costs and profit are two of the bigger factors explaining why Americans spend about twice as much per person or more on health care compared with other industrialized countries, but get consistently worse results.
Ideas like a single-payer system, or ending the antitrust exemption for insurance companies, would be obvious fixes. But when they came up during the Obamacare debate, they were dismissed as politically unfeasible and/or too costly. Because the United States will not do what other countries do as a matter of course – declare health care to be a universal human right and work backward from that premise – we are continually stuck with patchwork political solutions that protect insurance and pharmaceutical company profits while leaving masses of people uninsured.
This is why it's so interesting to see so many of the opponents of universal health coverage attacking the idiotic Trumpcare bill on moral, rather than financial, grounds. Trumpcare is, like most Republican health care concepts, a depraved and transparent effort at slashing coverage and converting the benefits into tax breaks for rich people. This has resulted in howls of outrage from people who seem to have only just discovered that denying people health care might be bad for their health.
Take Paul Krugman's piece in the New York Times today, "Understanding Republican Cruelty":
"More than 40 percent of the Senate bill's tax cuts would go to people with annual incomes over $1 million — but even these lucky few would see their after-tax income rise only by a barely noticeable 2 percent.
"So it's vast suffering — including, according to the best estimates, around 200,000 preventable deaths — imposed on many of our fellow citizens in order to give a handful of wealthy people what amounts to some extra pocket change."
This is interesting, because only last year Krugman was telling us we should abandon efforts to seek universal health care and focus "on other issues." As he put it:
"If we could start from scratch, many, perhaps most, health economists would recommend single-payer, a Medicare-type program covering everyone. But single-payer wasn't a politically feasible goal in America."
Krugman then went on to explain that the "incumbent political players" – private insurers, among others – simply had too much power, so it was better to give them something and get some health care than to take something away from them and get nothing.
He also said that additional tax revenue would make a more universal program politically untenable; he said this even as he admitted that such a program would probably reduce costs overall, but countered that "it would be difficult to make that case to the broad public, especially given the chorus of misinformation you know would dominate the airwaves."
Krugman's concession to what he called "Realities" meant that it was OK to leave an expected 31 million people uninsured. This was the argument last January, when most pundits and Vegas bookmakers were sure we were looking at four more years of a Democratic White House.
Instead, the monster Trump is in power, and trying to further roll back coverage in a field he surely doesn't understand through legislation he apparently doesn't even like. Reports say he has "shown little interest in what's in the bill," but that he thought the House version was "mean, mean, mean."
That doesn't mean Trump or the Republican Party plans on doing anything substantive to fix their idiotic health care bill. In a scene straight out of Swift or Gogol, Republican Senators were apparently stunned to their cores to discover via the Congressional Budget Office that their steal-from-the-poor, give-to-the-rich mutant of a bill would push 23 million people off the health care rolls.
"It knocked the wind out of all their sails," a GOP aide told reporters.
While the Republicans scramble to figure out the next step, Democrats continue to hammer the theme that Republicans want to kill their voters. I'm not a big fan of this kind of rhetoric, but I'll take it if it means the party is having an epiphany about the moral aspects of the health care debate. Surely if pushing some people off health care is killing them, then leaving tens of millions more without care is no better.
Health care is an absolute human right. On a policy level we already recognized this decades ago, during the height of the Reagan era, when the Emergency Medical and Treatment Labor Act made it illegal for public and private hospitals alike to turn patients away in an emergency. There is simply no moral justification for denying aid to a sick or dying person. Any country that does so systematically is not a country at all.
Let's hope the awful Trump era awakens us to the broader issue. The sad thing is that doing the right thing is also the smart thing. As other countries have already discovered, universal coverage systems that put the right incentives back into health care greatly reduce costs and waste. Getting there isn't "unrealistic." It's necessary, morally and otherwise.
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Naomi Klein: The Worst Is Yet to Come With Trump, so We Must Be Ready for Shock Politics |
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Saturday, 01 July 2017 08:46 |
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Excerpt: "Now, I've spent a lot of time thinking about shock. Ten years ago, I published The Shock Doctrine, an investigation that spanned four decades, from Pinochet's U.S.-backed coup in 1970s Chile to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. I noticed a brutal and recurring tactic by right-wing governments."
Naomi Klein. (photo: Ed Kashi)
Naomi Klein: The Worst Is Yet to Come With Trump, so We Must Be Ready for Shock Politics
By Amy Goodman and Naomi Klein, Democracy Now!
01 July 17
 atch Part 2 of our conversation with best-selling author and Intercept senior correspondent Naomi Klein about her book, "No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need."
Watch Part 1: No Is Not Enough: Best-Selling Author Naomi Klein on Challenging Trump’s Shock Doctrine Politics
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report, as we wrap up today’s show with Part 2 of our conversation with best-selling author and journalist Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Her new book is called No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need. To accompany the book, The Intercept recently made this video.
NAOMI KLEIN: Shock.
MEGYN KELLY: Shocking.
STEPHEN COLBERT: I don’t think I could sit down right now.
ALISYN CAMEROTA: You mean—
WILLIE GEIST: Historic, astounding, shocking.
NAOMI KLEIN: It’s a word that’s come up a lot since November, for obvious reasons.
KELLYANNE CONWAY: He’s going to inject a shock to the system.
NAOMI KLEIN: Now, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about shock. Ten years ago, I published The Shock Doctrine, an investigation that spanned four decades, from Pinochet’s U.S.-backed coup in 1970s Chile to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. I noticed a brutal and recurring tactic by right-wing governments. After a shocking event—a war, a coup, a terrorist attack, market crash or natural disaster—exploit the public’s disorientation, suspend democracy, push through radical policies that enrich the 1 percent at the expense of the poor and middle class.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: This is a repeal and a replace of Obamacare.
GARY COHN: We’re going to cut taxes and simplify the tax code.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The United States will withdraw from the Paris climate accord.
NAOMI KLEIN: Now, some people have said that’s exactly what Trump has been trying to do. Is it true? Well, sort of. But in all likelihood, the worst is yet to come, and we better be ready. The administration is creating chaos, daily.
JUJU CHANG: Breaking news: Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn, has resigned tonight.
ANDERSON COOPER: All of a sudden, the White House is concerned about James Comey’s handling of Hillary Clinton’s email?
CBS NEWS ANCHOR: A Senate committee will question President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner about his meeting with officials from a Russian bank.
NAOMI KLEIN: Now, of course many of the scandals are the result of the president’s ignorance and blunders, not some nefarious strategy. But there’s also no doubt that some savvy people around Trump are using the daily shocks as cover to advance wildly pro-corporate policies that bear little resemblance to what Trump pledged on the campaign trail.
DONALD TRUMP: Save Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
MSNBC ANCHOR: The White House released its budget for 2018, and among the $4 trillion in cuts it proposes are billions upon billions of dollars slashed from both Medicaid and Social Security.
NAOMI KLEIN: And the worst part, this is likely just the warm-up. We need to focus on what this administration will do when it has a major external shock to exploit. Maybe it will be an economic crash like 2008, maybe a natural disaster like Sandy, or maybe it will be a horrific terrorist event like Manchester or Paris in 2015. Any one such crisis could redraw the political map overnight. And it could give Trump and his crew free rein to ram through their most extreme ideas.
But here is one thing I’ve learned over two decades of reporting from dozens of crises around the world: These tactics can be resisted. And, for your convenience, I’ve tried to boil it down to a five-step plan.
Step one: Know what’s coming. What would happen if a horror like the one in Manchester took place on U.S. soil? Based on Trump’s obvious fondness for authoritarianism, we can expect him to impose some sort of state of exception or emergency where the usual rules of democracy no longer apply. Protests and strikes that block roads and airports, like the ones that sprung up to resist the Muslim travel ban, would likely be declared a threat to national security. Protest organizers would be targeted under anti-terror legislation, with surveillance, arrests and imprisonment. With public signs of dissent suppressed, the truly toxic to-do list would quickly bubble up: bring in the feds to pacify the streets, muzzle investigative journalism—you know he’s itching to.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: You weren’t called. Sit down!
NAOMI KLEIN: The courts, who Trump would inevitably blame for the attacks, might well lose their courage. And the most lethal shock we need to prepare for: a push for a full-blown foreign war. And, no, it won’t matter if the target has no connection to the attacks used to justify it.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: What did Iraq have to do with what?
REPORTER: The attack on the World Trade Center.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Nothing.
NAOMI KLEIN: Preparing for all this is crucial. If we know what to expect, we won’t be that shocked. We’ll just be pissed.
And that’s important for step two: Get out of your home and defy the bans. When governments tell people to stay in their homes or show their patriotism by going shopping, they inevitably claim it’s for public safety, that protests and rallies could become targets for more attacks. What we know from other countries is that there is only one way to respond.
EURONEWS ANCHOR: Hundreds of Tunisians have been defying the curfew in the capital, Tunis.
NAOMI KLEIN: Disobey en masse. That’s what happened in Argentina in 2001. With the country in economic free fall, the president at the time declared a state of siege, giving himself the power to suspend the constitution.
FERNANDO DE LA RÚA: [translated] I declared a state of siege across the entire country.
NAOMI KLEIN: He told the public to stay in their houses. Here’s what they did instead.
PROTESTER: Argentina!
NAOMI KLEIN: The president resigned that night. And eventually new elections were held.
Three years later, in Madrid, a horrifying series of coordinated attacks on trains killed more than 200 people. The prime minister, José María Aznar, falsely pointed the finger at Basque separatists and also used the attacks to justify his decision to send troops to Iraq. His rhetoric was classic shock doctrine: division, war, fear—Daddy will protect you. This is how Spaniards responded.
PROTESTERS: [translated] Resignation! Resignation!
NAOMI KLEIN: They voted out Aznar a few days later. Many people said they did it because he reminded them of Franco, Spain’s former dictator.
Which brings us to step three: Know your history. Throughout U.S. history, national crises have been used to suspend constitutional protections and attack basic rights. After the Civil War, with the nation in crisis, the promise of 40 acres and a mule to freed slaves was promptly betrayed. In the midst of the pain and panic of the Great Depression, as many as 2 million people of Mexican descent were expelled from the United States. After the Pearl Harbor attacks, around 120,000 Japanese Americans were jailed in internment camps. If an attack on U.S. soil were perpetrated by people who were not white and Christian, we can be pretty damn sure that racists would have a field day. And the good folks of Manchester recently showed us how to respond to that.
PROTESTER: The people of Manchester don’t stand with your xenophobia and racism!
NAOMI KLEIN: Something else we know from history, step four: Always follow the money. While everyone is focused on security and civil liberties, Trump’s Cabinet of billionaires will try to quietly push through even more extreme measures to enrich themselves and their class, like dismantling Social Security or auctioning off major pieces of government for profit.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Today we’re proposing to take American air travel into the future.
NAOMI KLEIN: It’s in those moments when fear and chaos are sucking up all the oxygen when we most have to ask: Whose interests are being served by the chaos? What is being slipped through while we’re distracted? Who’s getting richer, and who’s getting even poorer?
WENDELL PIERCE: When the floodwaters were still rising in New Orleans, one of the first official acts that the governor did was to fire all the teachers. What’s happening is a raid of the money set aside for public education to be given to private companies. It wasn’t by happenstance. It was by design. You saw the political manipulations and taking advantage of the crisis.
NAOMI KLEIN: But if we learn from this history, we could actually make history, with step five: Advance a bold counterplan. At their best, all the previous steps can only slow down attempts to exploit crisis. If we actually want to defeat this tactic, opponents of the shock doctrine need to move quickly to put forward a credible alternate plan. It needs to get at the root of why these sorts of crises are hitting us with ever greater frequency. And that means we have to talk about militarism, climate change and deregulated markets. More than that, we need to advance and fight for different models, ones grounded in racial, economic and gender justice, ones that hold out the credible promise of a tangibly better and fairer life in the here and now and a safer planet for all of us in the long term. Defensive actions alone won’t cut it. There has to be a different vision, and it needs to be bold. Saying no to the shock doctrine is vitally important. But when the [bleep] hits the fan, no is not enough.
AMY GOODMAN: That video, produced by The Intercept. Their senior correspondent, Naomi Klein, author of the new book, released this week, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need. Yes, a shock. You’re a specialist in analyzing what happens next, Naomi.
NAOMI KLEIN: Right. And, you know, the reason why I wrote this book very quickly, for me—you know, it usually takes me five years to write a book; I did this in less than five months—is because I really wanted it to come out before any kind of major crisis hits the United States. I mean, lots of people out there see Trump himself as a crisis, and, you know, I would tend to agree, but what really has me scared is what this configuration of characters in the Trump administration—Pence, Bannon, Betsy DeVos, Steve Mnuchin, all these Goldman Sachs alum who are in the Cabinet—how they would respond to a large-scale crisis that they themselves are not creating. I mean, the chaos is chaos they’re generating themselves, either deliberately or out of incompetence and avarice, but what happens if there’s a 2008-like financial crisis? What happens, you know, heaven forbid, if there is a Manchester-like attack in the United States?
The actions of this administration make these types of shocks more likely, not less, right? They’re deregulating the banks, creating the conditions for another crash. They are antagonizing the world, particularly the Muslim world. You know, ISIS apparently called Trump’s Muslim travel ban a "blessed ban," because it was so good for recruitment. They are—you know, they are making climate disasters more likely with everything they’re doing to deregulate industry, deregulate for polluters. You know, there’s a lag time between that and when the climate shocks hit, but the truth is, we’ve already warmed the planet enough that no U.S. president can get through a year, let alone a term, without some sort of major climate-related disaster.
So, how does this group of—this Cabinet of disaster capitalists, is what I call them, Amy, because there is such a track record of taking advantage of crisis, whether we’re looking at the Goldman Sachs—former Goldman Sachs executives and the way they profited from the subprime mortgage crisis to increase their own personal wealth, whether it’s Mike Pence and the central role he played when New Orleans was still underwater to come up with a corporate wish list to push through. So, you know, as disastrous as Trump’s policies have been so far, there’s actually long, toxic to-do lists, things that people around Trump and Trump himself have been—have very openly said they would like to do, but they have actually not been able either to get through without a crisis or they haven’t even tried, right? Think about Trump’s threats to bring back torture. Think about his threats to bring the feds into Chicago. Think about his threats not just to have a Muslim travel ban from specific countries, but not to let Muslims into the country, period.
So I think we do need to prepare for this. And what I tried to do with this video is create a little toolkit of, you know, what I have seen work in other countries, because I have been reporting on shocks and large-scale disasters and how societies respond now for a couple of decades, and I’ve seen some amazing acts of resistance, you know?
AMY GOODMAN: And talk about those. We saw some images of them here.
NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah. So, one of the things I think we could really count on Trump to do, particularly if there is any kind of terrorism-related shock—and let’s be clear: There have been terrorism events, white supremacist terrorism, in the United States during the Trump era, but of course he doesn’t treat those as a crisis. So, an event that they decided was a large-scale crisis, we already know from the way Trump responded to the London Bridge attacks—he immediately said, "This is why we need to bring back my travel ban." After the Manchester attacks, he immediately said, "This is about immigrants flooding across our borders." In fact, the person responsible for those attacks was born in the U.K. It doesn’t matter. You know, we know this from 9/11, that the way—these crises are used as opportunities to push through policies that actually have very little to do with getting at root causes, and, in many cases, exacerbate—most notably, the invasion of Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11, but it was just that sheer opportunism.
So, you know, what I’ve seen is, I think, in all likelihood, they would declare a state of emergency, some sort of state of exception, where they’re able to ban protests, like the protests we saw, the very inspiring protests in the face of the Muslim travel ban. They would say, "No, you can’t block a road. You can’t block an airport. This is—you could be a target of terrorism yourself. Stay in your homes."
So, you know, I give a few examples, like Argentina in 2001, when, as the president was declaring a state of siege and telling people to stay in their homes, people described not being able to hear him because the sound from the streets was so loud, the roar of pots and pans, and neighbors flooding out of their homes and going to the Plaza de Mayo and refusing this state of siege, was—that they drowned him out. They literally couldn’t hear him. So other people left their houses. And, you know, in that moment, that’s the moment to resist. You know, that is the moment to just not accept it. And it’s really a question of strength in numbers, because if it is only the kind of hardcore activists that are out on the streets, it’s really easy to crush small protests. It’s harder to do it when it is hundreds of thousands of people. So I wanted to share some of these stories of societies that have just said, "We will not let you do it." Right?
I was in France, as were you, Amy, a week after the horrific terrorist attacks in 2015. We were there for the Paris climate summit. A week before, 200 people had been killed in Paris in coordinated attacks. The French government, under François Hollande, a Socialist government—Socialist in name only, but, you know, a left government—declared a state of emergency and banned political gatherings of more than five people. You know, if that can happen in France under a Socialist government, in a country with a very deep history of disruptive strikes, what do we expect Trump and Bannon and Pence to do at the earliest opportunity? So, I think it’s important to strategize.
It’s important to know the history in the United States. You know, in all these countries, the examples I give—Argentina, why did they flood out of their houses? You ask people. They said, "It reminded us of the beginning of the dictatorship in 1976. That’s how it started. They told us that we weren’t safe and that it was going to be a temporary state of emergency. And it ended up turning into a dictatorship." So they saw the early signs, and they said, "No, not again. Nunca más." Right? You know, we talked to Americans about this. They say, "Well, we don’t have that history." Really? What about the Japanese internment, you know? What about, as you’ve written, Amy, what about what happened to Mexican—Mexican Americans in the United States during the Great Depression and during that crisis and the mass deportations? There is this history in many communities, and those communities keep that history alive. You know, during Hurricane Katrina, so many African Americans talked about the history of how crises had been used to further oppress black people in this country. But these stories are offloaded into those communities, who hold them and keep that history alive. It isn’t nationally metabolized, right? And so we have to share these stories. And I do think there is a memory now of what happened after September 11th and the rights that were lost and the ways in which people’s grief was exploited by men in power who said, "Trust me." Don’t make that mistake again.
AMY GOODMAN: What about the connection to war? I mean, you have what happened in Manchester, the horror there. You have the continued deaths in Yemen, the U.S.-backed Saudi bombing. Now the U.S. has expanded both in Somalia and in the Philippines with U.S. forces.
NAOMI KLEIN: Mm-hmm, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: You have this horrific attack that took place in Kabul, where over 150 Afghans died. It hardly got any attention. But the rage that must be brewing at the grassroots when they don’t get any media attention from the West?
NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah, right, right. You know, people are being erased, you know, and this is a very, very old story. No, they’re already expanding the battlefields, escalating on multiple, multiple fronts. And, you know, this is the most dangerous, most lethal way that shocking events are exploited, people’s fear exploited.
And, you know, let’s remember that this administration will have various motivations for changing the subject away from their domestic scandals. And Trump has never gotten better media coverage than in the wake of the—his Syrian missile strike, you know, called "beautiful" by Brian Williams. And it’s—you know, suddenly, he was presidential—right?—ordering cruise missiles over delicious chocolate cake at Mar-a-Lago. So, you know, we have to be very, very vigilant about this.
And, you know, the U.S. has had a strong antiwar movement in the past, but that antiwar movement hasn’t been in the streets in the same way. And, you know, I think that this—these resistance movements are going to have to get ready for that kind of a shock, because once the wars begin, you know, it’s very hard to stop them.
Another example, I think, of shock resistance, we just saw in the U.K. during Jeremy Corbyn’s—during Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign, where Theresa May was exploiting the Manchester attacks, the London Bridge attacks, to say, "We are going to, you know, have to get rid of your online privacy. You know, we need backdoors into all of your communication apps. We may need to suspend human rights law." And Jeremy Corbyn was talking about root causes, the failure of the war-on-terror paradigm and how this is leading to an increase in these types of attacks. And, you know, I think that a lot of people decided that that made more sense after these many years, like not to double down and give up rights in these moments, but to try to understand why this is happening and to do something about it.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, Theresa May lost her Conservative majority in the Parliament. On Saudi Arabia, the first country President Trump went to, the first foreign country, was Saudi Arabia. He does the orb with the Saudi Arabians. He does the sword dances, or tries, with the Saudi Arabians.
NAOMI KLEIN: The sword stumble.
AMY GOODMAN: He seals these deals, well over $110 billion, leaves there extolling the Saudi leadership and attacks the European leaders, and then comes home, and, despite the almost begging of the European leaders on the issue of the climate accord, he not only attacks them, but then comes home to the United States and announces he’s withdrawing from the very accord they’re pleading with him to remain in. What about this primacy of Saudi Arabia right now, both its connection to war, with the U.S.-backed Saudi bombing of Yemen, which is leading to a horrific cholera epidemic, not to mention just the number of deaths, and climate change?
NAOMI KLEIN: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. You know, one of the things that really worries me is how motivated these petrostates are to have more instability, because that sends the price of oil up, and, you know, their profits flow even more. It’s something that the Saudis have in common with the Russians, have in common with Rex Tillerson, former CEO of Exxon. You know, the way I think we should see that foreign trip of Trump’s is basically as traveling weapons salesman, right? And he’s sending this message: You buy enough American weapons, you’re our friend. You know? Like this is the price. So he heaps praise on Saudi Arabia for, you know, having done that, having made that deal, and he goes to Europe, and he screams at them, you know, NATO members, for not pulling their weight, right? Which means not buying enough weapons. You know, I’m Canadian. I’m Canadian-American, dual citizen. But my government shamefully came home and announced a massive—sorry, a massive increase in weapons spending. So, you know, this is—this is Trump’s foreign policy, is traveling weapons salesman.
AMY GOODMAN: Best-selling author Naomi Klein, senior correspondent for The Intercept. Her new book is titled No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need. To see Part 1 of the interview, you can go to democracynow.org.
On Monday and Tuesday, two July 4th specials. We’ll bring you a major address by Senator Bernie Sanders at the People’s Summit in Chicago before about 4,000 people That’s Monday’s show, July 3rd. And on Tuesday, James Earl Jones reads Frederick Douglass’s historic speech, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" and we talk to chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe about the standoff at Standing Rock and where it stands today. Happy birthday to Isis Phillips!
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All the Police Have to Do Is Utter Those Five Magic Words: I Feared for My Life |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=42465"><span class="small">Janine Jackson, FAIR</span></a>
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Saturday, 01 July 2017 08:33 |
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Jackson writes: "If there is a word for being stunned and stunned again, and yet unable to become numb, it would go some way towards describing how people - especially black people - felt as we heard the verdict in the case of the murder of Philando Castile."
A police officer checks in on a fellow officer. (photo: Richard Burkhart/Savannah Morning News)
All the Police Have to Do Is Utter Those Five Magic Words: I Feared for My Life
By Janine Jackson, FAIR
01 July 17
CounterSpin interview with Ronnie Dunn on Philando Castile verdict
 anine Jackson interviewed Ronnie Dunn about the Philando Castile verdict for the June 23, 2017, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: If there is a word for being stunned and stunned again, and yet unable to become numb, it would go some way towards describing how people—especially black people—felt as we heard the verdict in the case of the murder of Philando Castile. That a jury determined no crime was committed when Police Officer Jeronimo Yanez pumped seven bullets at Castile and into the back seat of the car where his girlfriend and her four-year-old child were sitting. That this was the system working.
If these outcomes are to be more than a punch in the gut, we have to try and learn what they teach us about the limits of the law in achieving justice. The ultimate response to state violence against black people is building community power. But, with that, can the law—supposedly a living thing—be changed? What other points of intervention exist, and how do we measure progress?
Our next guest has been working on these issues for many years now. Ronnie Dunn is professor of urban studies at Cleveland State University in Ohio. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Ronnie Dunn.
Ronnie Dunn: Thank you for having me.
JJ: There’s always room, it seems, for more surprise, but verdicts like the one we’ve just seen in the case of Philando Castile don’t come from nowhere; they have something to do with the rules that jurors are given in such cases. Can you tell us about the Supreme Court rulings around “reasonableness,” and the role they play in delivering outcomes like this?
RD: Well, the Supreme Court ruled in Graham v. Connor that the standard used in such cases is the “reasonable officer standard,” and that being, would another officer, placed in the same set of circumstances and situation, respond accordingly with the use of deadly force? Then we have Tennessee v. Garner, which dealt with the “defense of life” standard. It shifted from the “fleeing felon” standard, wherein police could shoot at a felon as they fled, to that of defense of life, of either the officer or other citizens in the area.
JJ: It seems to say—and I know I’m putting it a bit crudely—but if an officer’s fear for their life can be used to justify a killing, and we have research showing that many police officers fear black people just because they’re black—well, heck, that sounds like a tight little circle of rationalized racism.
RD: Well, absolutely, I agree. Actually, all the police have to do is utter those five magic words—”I feared for my life”—and most likely they’re going to be acquitted. And as we’ve seen over these past several cases now—Philando Castile, Sylville Smith, Walter Scott, Terence Crutcher—the juries, once again, they’re inclined to take the officer at their word, in spite of video evidence that would contradict much of what the officers are stating.
And in the Philando Castile case, we see that since the officer was acquitted, they’ve now released a dashcam video, that in my view shows that the shooting was that much more egregious. And one’s left to question, why did they not release that video footage prior to the trial, versus after the ruling? So it’s very disturbing. Really, it makes one wonder whether or not the current criminal justice system, and our courts as currently constituted, actually have the capacity to deliver justice to people of color, particularly blacks, in these type of cases.
JJ: Is there anything that prevents state or local law enforcement from setting standards different than those that seem to have been established by the Supreme Court?
RD: No, they can establish stricter standards. Now, naturally, defense would try to challenge those, challenge the constitutionality of those, but they can. And actually, I’ve just been kind of brainstorming and thinking about these issues, and trying to think of some means that would provide a greater level of equity and justice.
And my mind keeps turning to the military, for example. I’m a veteran. And the military is held to the standards of the uniform code of military justice. So my thought is, in that the police are a paramilitary institution, that we might need to—and this is totally thinking out of the box—move to some type of judicial system or tribunal in regards to police-involved shootings, these controversial police-involved shootings. These cases are tried in a separate court, for example. Currently, many jurisdictions have drug courts, they have special dockets for veterans and other things of that nature. So I’m just trying to think of how we might be able to move to a system that can provide a greater degree of accountability and justice.
There are a couple of things that I think can be done to begin to potentially address this issue, and that is the implementation of more implicit-bias screening and training of police officers, to try to get at this irrational fear of black people that they seem to all universally have. So I would suggest that there needs to be an emphasis on implicit-bias training, both at the screening process and through continual in-service training of officers.
A colleague of mine at Cleveland State conducted research that showed that departments that have a policy that requires the reporting of every instance, every time an officer draws their weapon and aims it, that they have to file a report. That policy has been shown to have an impact on diminishing police-involved shootings.
So those are two strategies that I think have the potential to help to address these issues to some degree. But there’s much more research that needs to be done in this area. And other than that, the legislature will need to strengthen our laws to help to address that. And then, once again, it’s incumbent that we have to do something within the courts to try to offset this bias that is automatically given to law enforcement.
JJ: What’s clear is that something has to change. And I just want to ask you, finally, thoughts you have about the role of journalism here. I mean, I am tired of coverage that claims that the whole country is going through a “painful reckoning,” when the pain seems, in fact, very localized, and I don’t know what kind of reckoning it is that goes on for hundreds of years and doesn’t get reckoned. Or where things are framed in terms of “community/police relations,” when we’re really talking about ending police violence.
There are certainly things that media could do less of, I think. What would you like to see journalists do more of? Are there kinds of stories you think are missing, that might push this rock down the road?
RD: Well, I think it’s imperative that journalists continue to do the type of investigative journalism that we saw the Washington Post undertake, and the crowdsourcing of these police killings to develop these databases and fill in some of those gaps—that the federal government, in this instance, were not providing relevant data, so we would even know the magnitude of this problem. As we see with social media, it has brought this issue out of the dark and shone light on it nationally. Where these type of incidents and shootings have been taking place for God knows how long, it’s only with the advent of cellphone cameras and social media that it has now come to light, and been placed on the national and public agenda.
Media has a vital role to play in that, journalists [should] continue to shine light on that, and just keep it out there in the forefront, particularly in this current political environment that we’re in, with the changes in Washington, and the return to the war on drugs regime, and the aggressive policing that we saw over the past 30 to 40 years.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Ronnie Dunn, professor of urban studies at Ohio’s Cleveland State University. Ronnie Dunn, thank you so much for joining us today on CounterSpin.
RD: Thank you. My pleasure.
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