I am so frustrated by what has happened that I have found it difficult to take a step back and write a measured blog post about it, and instead have been engaging in debates/arguments on Facebook. I still haven't coalesced all my thoughts, so instead am just going to flag a point I made in response to someone on Facebook, which somewhat gets to the core of my thoughts on this troubling issue.
It is impossible, in my mind at least, to say "I am on one side on Mike Brown and the other side with Eric Garner", because in both cases the problem is the same: a District Attorney is so scared of pissing off the police union that he chooses not to pursue criminal charges against a police officer, even if he does go through the pantomime of pretending to do so. In both cases (we know in Ferguson, and we can assume in Staten Island), the prosecutor bent over backwards to avoid having the issue go to a full, public, trial, during which the testimony and evidence would be tested at length. By subverting and perverting the grand jury process Bob McCullough also further undermined African Americans' faith in the justice system. The son of a cop who was shot, he refused to recuse himself, but had neither the balls to take a decision not to press for an indictment nor leave the question of guilt or innocence to a jury in a trial. It's almost as if both DAs were scared of what the outcome might be, and intentional or not, the end result is that cops in America have become judge, jury, and executioner. That's not a democracy, that's a police state.
12/10/14 UPDATE:
The New York Times has a good piece expanding, in rather more measured terms, the point I was making above:
The deaths of Michael Brown and Kajieme Powell in St. Louis have bothered me. They have bothered me not so much for their details, though I hope for the families of both men that when all the evidence emerges and is weighed that they feel the conclusions arrived at have delivered justice, but because of what they say, when taken together. For that reason, as odd as it sounds, I want to set aside the arguments about whether Officer Darren Wilson and the two officers in the Powell case were justified in firing the bullets that killed these two men, though that is surely what the trial in the former case and the investigation in the latter will focus on. I want to look at the total number of bullets fired, and what it says. As I pointed out in my last blog post, police in Britain fired their weapons three times last year. In both the Brown and Powell cases, at least three times that number of bullets appear to have been fired in each incident. This is the aspect that worries me: multiple eye witnesses report that after some sort of scuffle at the police car, during which Wilson's gun was discharged, Brown set off running, and Wilson shot at him as he fled. Forget what happened next and think about that for a moment. If the eye witnesses are to be believed, and we now have so many that they are all part of a vast police-hating racially motivated conspiracy (and I am sure there are those who will want to believe that), Officer Wilson shot at Mike Brown as he ran away. When two police officers fired at least nine bullets into Kajieme Powell at close range, three of these were fired while he was on the ground. Both of these facts on their own should cause alarm, indeed outrage, among the public at large. In the sad circumstances of the deaths of these two men, however, it is a minor detail, though to me it speaks to the bigger problem. As is stated in the British police college's guidelines on the discharge of firearms, and very graphically illustrated in the video at the bottom of page 1 of this piece in The Atlantic, (humblebrag: my last blog post got a mention on page 2, and in this Al Jazeera piece) that police officers do not shoot to wound, they shoot to incapacitate, and that can only effectively be done with an unholstered weapon at a distance of 21 feet or more, aiming at the torso. "Incapacitate" is often expressed in the U.S. by police officers and gun enthusiasts as "neutralize the threat". I find that worrying like a euphemism for "shoot dead". Kajieme Powell was indeed close to the officers that shot him. They could not have missed. I believe they are trained to open fire with a "double tap". A 'double tap' at the range in question is going to incapacitate. A 'double tap' is going to neutralize the threat. A 'double tap' is probably going to kill. The 9 or 10 bullets fired into Kajieme Powell, including a number while he was on the ground, are going to ensure that. Threat neutralized indeed. I will confess I have little appreciation for the stresses police officers in the U.S., or the U.K. for that matter, work under. They do what is certainly a stressful and at times dangerous job. 32 of them died in the line of duty from gunshot wounds last year. An even greater number died in Road Traffic Accidents. What degree of risk the public can expect an officer to take while protecting the public is difficult to quantify. I worry that too many in the Police believe the answer is none.
It is ironic that at a time when Russia and its oligarchic politics is more at the forefront of American political consciousness than at any time previously, the U.S. is sliding, slowly but surely, into a place where its democracy is up for sale.
Bill Moyers warned about it in a prescient article last week, in the shadow of Republican 2016 hopefuls such as Chris Christie scraping and fawning in front of gambling billionaire Sheldon Adelson in Las Vegas.
And today, in a widely anticipated decision, following on from the truly awful Citizens United decision, the Supreme Court removed the aggregate donation cap in McCutcheon v FCC.
It is a sad indictment of American democracy when one of its two major parties, after having lost 5 out of 6 presidential elections on the trot, has decided that its strategy for winning is through restricting opportunities to vote and unlimited spending by plutocrats and billionaires.
The Washington Post has included some great infographics on what this all means in money terms (click through graphic for full story).
Dahlia Lithwick has a great take on things on Slate, in which she analyses Chief Justice John Roberts' majority opinion (plurality, technically, Clarence Thomas wants to get rid of all donation limits completely, in comparison to Stephen Breyers who wrote the dissent.
Lithwick writes:
And why does this collective speech matter? Why are we talking about corruption? Because, writes Breyer:“Where enough money calls the tune, the general public will not be heard. Insofar as corruption cuts the link between political thought and political action, a free marketplace of political ideas loses its point.” And yes, there is a silent “duh” in there.
She gets to the punch, however, in her analysis of where the real long term impact of this awful decision lies, which is to make Breyers' highly cynical view of money and corruption in politics a reality. The dangers of this are real, particularly in circumstances where across the developed world voting and political participation rates have declined as political ideologies have converged on a centre ground and voters' sense of impotence increases:
In which case McCutcheon is a self-fulfilling prophecy in exactly the way Breyer predicts: Money doesn’t just talk. It also eventually forces the public to understand that we don’t much matter. It silences. It already has.
In my blog post yesterday, I encouraged readers to read Ta-Nehisi Coates' essay, 'Other People's Pathologies, in The Atlantic. As I normally do, I tweeted a few times with a link to my blog post:
Without slavery there is no democracy; without slavery there is no American dream; without slavery there's no America http://t.co/s5ghnITEgG
— Chris Connolly (@Cripipper) April 1, 2014
The United States didn't save black people; black people saved the United States of America: Ta-Nehisi Coats nails it http://t.co/s5ghnITEgG
— Chris Connolly (@Cripipper) April 1, 2014
What's been fascinating to observe is the reaction to it, and by that I mean the relative lack of reaction or interest.
Normally when I tweet a blog post, no matter how banal, it registers about 5 or 6 click-throughs from Twitter to the blog post. Each of these tweets got somewhere between 0 and 1 person clicking to read it, at roughly the same times of the day as I would normally tweet the link.
Regular sources of traffic to the blog (from the UK), such as Lib Dem Blogs and Lib Dem Voice have been noticeably quiet in terms of traffic.
Have I failed to sell the blog post as well as others I have written, or is indifference to black history as bad as (or perhaps even worse than) I alluded to in the post itself? Writing the post has been almost as enlightening as reading the Coates essay.
Had the Union soundly and quickly defeated the Confederacy, it's very likely that slavery would have remained. Instead the war dragged on, and the Union was forced to employ blacks in its ranks. The end result—total emancipation—was more a matter of military necessity than moral progress...
The United States did not save black people; black people saved the United States of America. With that task complete, our "ally" proceeded to repay its debt to its black citizens by pretending they did not exist.
Ta-Nehisi Coates has written one of the most powerful essays on American history, and the black experience within it, that I have ever read. I hesitated about including the words "and the black experience within it" because, at its core, it runs against the spirit of the truths that Coates writes.
Senator Dick Burr: Dr. Martin, how many Canadians die on waiting lists each year, do you know?
Dr. Martin: I don't sir, but I do know that 45,000 die in America because they don't have insurance at all.
BOOM! She knocks it out of the park.
Watch this clip to see a superb Canadian doctor effortlessly bat away Republican senator Dick Burr's questions and red herrings about a single-payer health system.
In the past few days it has become very fashionable to rehabilitate Mitt Romney's foreign affairs credentials, and to assert that he was "right" about Russia in the presidential foreign policy debates, and President Obama was wrong.
Dave Weigel at Slate was one of the first out of the blocks.
There followed a piece in The New Republicby Isaac Chotiner, for which Julia Ioffe tweeted her support,
and then yesterday evening The Daily Beast published a piece by Stuart Stevens, making essentially the same argument.
It is, superficially at least, an attractive argument.
If you have been confused about what has been happening in Ukraine over the past week and went online or picked up a paper to try and find out, chances are you would come away not much the wiser.
Depending on what you read, Russian President Vladimir Putin is either a strategic genius, playing a long game of chess while the West plays marbles, or a short-sighted opportunist, constantly reacting to events but never able to control them.
Putin is either taking advantage of American weakness to throw Russian weight around, or is threatened by American and Western power pushing further against his borders.
Putin is either a hard-nosed realist, who will only respond to force and understands the importance of a balance-of-power, or an ideological Russian nationalist, prepared to risk Russia's material wellbeing and international standing in order to poke his perceived enemies in the eye.
In reading the multiple accounts and analyses of what is going on in Russia and Ukraine, I couldn't help but think of a comment by Henry Kissinger to TV presenter Dick Cavett, when discussing his former boss, Richard Nixon:
There are so many strands to his personality that almost everything you would say about Richard Nixon is true.
I had previously mentioned the case of Herbert Smulls, a man executed by the State of Missouri before the United States Supreme Court had even finished deciding on his petition for a stay of execution.
CBS and The Atlantic's Andrew Cohen (a must-follow for anyone interested in the U.S. criminal justice system) has written a follow-up piece on Smulls, and it appears that the behaviour of Missouri officials has not gone unnoticed by either the 8th Circuit or the Supreme Court.
The Washington Post today has an interesting profile of Judge Arenda Wright Allen who penned the historic judgment (covered in my last blogpost) overturning Virginia's ban on gay marriage, surely, with an eye in its place in the history books.
In the latest of a succession of federal court judgments that have overturned states' bans on same-sex marriage, a federal judge in Richmond, Virginia ruled that the state's constitutional ban on gay marriage is a violation of the United States Constitution. Her decision has been stayed, pending an appeal.
Leaving little room, it has to be said, for doubt as to on which side of the fence she stands herself, Judge Arenda Wright Allen opened her judgment with a quotation from Mildred Loving, one of the plaintiffs in the now famous U.S. Supreme Court case of Loving v. Virgina that saw the state's ban on interracial marriage declared unconstitutional.
We made a commitment to each other in our love and our lives, and now had the legal commitment, called marriage, to match. Isn't that what marriage is? … I have lived long enough now to see big changes. The older generations's fears and prejudices have given way, and today's young people realise that if someone loves someone they have a right to marry… I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people's religious beliefs over others… I support the freedom to marry for all. That's what Loving, and loving, are all about.
What has led to this growing stampede to have state bans overturned, as in Utah, Kentucky (where the issue was the state's refusal to recognise out-of-state same-sex marriages) and now Virginia's constitutional ban on gay marriage, is the U.S. Supreme Court decision of last summer that overturned the Defence of Marriage Act.
Although the Supreme Court declined to hear the merits of the arguments in the California case that directly challenged that state's gay marriage ban, in U.S. v Windsor, as some observers predicted at the time (including Justice Antonin Scalia, in his barnstorming dissent), the Court opened the path to state bans being declared unconstitutional.
Way back in the day when for a few months I first gave writing a blog a bash, I wrote a post about an elderly British gentleman and his experience of being arrested (using what would not pass for reasonable force in a British court) and his subsequent experience of the American criminal justice system.
His experience came to mind last month, in the much reported case of an elderly Chinese man who was again subjected to what would appear to be an unreasonable use of force by the NYPD during his arrest.
In both cases the men were arrested for the uniquely American crime of jaywalking. I asked on Facebook at the time why was jaywalking an issue for American police. A friend (hi Carm!) came back with the not unreasonable suggestion that:
Firstly, why was she back on trial? Fair enough, that's a question the answer to which anyone interested in the verdict should know. Second up:
Had I been eating cornflakes I would have choked on them. "Renewed questions about the effectiveness of Italy's justice system"? Here is a line that (if it wasn't) might as well have been lifted directly out of a release from Amanda Knox's well-funded PR machine.
Compare and contrast with its coverage of the execution of Troy Davis, a man put to death in Georgia despite the fact that most of the original prosecution witnesses had subsequently retracted their testimony, alleging they were put under pressure to testify by the police and the DA.
Costco pays its workers 40% more, on average, than Sam's Club, and offers a very generous health insurance plan.
Despite the prevailing weakness in the U.S. retail sector, Costco has
recorded impressive sales growth in the last few quarters. The firm's
comparable-store sales grew at an average pace of more than 5% for the
last three quarters. The biggest drivers fueling this new growth include
the company's rapidly swelling membership base and the robust growth of
the warehouse industry in the country. Costco's core value proposition,
strong private labels, and ancillary businesses have also been at the
helm of this progress.
This is why Obama is following up his call to "Give America a Raise" in last night's State of the Union address with a speech at at Costco in Maryland today.
His message is pretty clear: paying a decent wage is good for business as well as good for employees and the economy.
I couldn't help but wonder what on earth would prompt Mitt Romney to emerge, over a year after his defeat in the 2012 Presidential election, to slowjam the news on Fallon, a few days before Obama's State of the Union address.
I have just watched this Top Gear clip courtesy of Duncan Borrowman
*NB
As far as I can see, the whole piece at the petrol station was fabricated. Note that we never actually hear any threats, or see anyone acting in any sort of threatening manner. The pickup full of "red-necks" with a dog that arrived was actually a bunch of Mexicans.
The woman at the petrol station was actually trying to help them out - asking them if they were trying to get themselves beat up in this "hick town"? She turned angry with them because Jeremy Clarkson "tore up her parking lot" when he sped off. She was warning the film crew that the other two muppets had better not do the same.
And finally, the cameras go off - and we get some carefully recorded walkie-talkie messages and frantic cuts of them scrubbing their vehicles.
This is an excellent class in what video editing, music and carefully selected 'beeps' can achieve for dramatic effect.
I have travelled across the American South, and found it a wonderful experience, full of genuine, honest, and extraordinarily friendly people. Admittedly my boyfriend and I didn't walk hand-in-hand down the main street of Alabama hick towns, but then again there are large portions of South London where I wouldn't do the same.
Tennessee just happens to be one of my favourite places in the world, and I would recommend it to anyone as a holiday destination. And at the risk of sounding like I have an obsession with anti-Americanism (and I am not accusing Duncan Borrowman of being anti-American), we (and I include myself in this) laugh at 'hicks' (and I don't mean Bill); we laugh at their stupidity, their backward ways, the fact they married their first cousin.
But, having been across the South - from Virginia to Louisina and back - it struck me that what we are actually making fun of is poverty and lack of education. In the state of Mississippi, 30% of adults are functionally illiterate; in Alabama it is 1 in 4. Life expectancy in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and South Carolina is lower than in Mexico. The difference between the top and bottom ends of the scale in the U.S. is roughly comparable to the difference between the average life expectancy in Japan and in several countries in West Africa.
We will always laugh at rednecks; hell, they even laugh at themselves. We pulled up at a gas station in Blue Ridge, Georgia, where the wizened and toothless attendant was sat on the forecourt, believe it or not, smoking a cigarette. Upon hearing the English accent of one of my friends, he looked at us, completely deadpan, and asked:
"Why is it so hard to solve redneck crimes?
They got no dental records and the same DNA."
The South is deep red America (although this red state v blue state thing is a recent convention; for much of the past 50 years many Republicans went to great lengths to make sure Democrats were depicted as the 'red' (read pink) party. Southerners believe the most strongly in the things we commonly believe to be quintessentially American - faith and the flag, God and guns, suspicion of government (particularly the federal government) and dislike of gays. They believe in the American way, and are suspicious of foreigners.
Yet the saddest thing is that these are the same people who have been betrayed most by the American way, and left in poverty, ignorance, illiteracy and bad health. And as is so often the case, it is those who have been failed by the system who are the first to put their life on the line to defend it.
Jokes about rednecks will never stop being funny, but the reality of life in much of Alabama is rather more tragic.
As The Grauniad reports this morning, George Bush's Republican administration disembursed $12 billion in cash in Iraq in a period of less than 15-months. That's the kind of spending that even Victoria Beckham might be a little embarrassed over. What's more, the Coalition Provisional Authority appears to have learned its book-keeping practices from Colleen McLoughlin.
To quote the C.P.A. financial advisor who was asked what happened to $9 billion that was unaccounted for: "I have no idea. I can't tell you whether or not the money went to the right things or didn't - nor do I actually think it's important."
One of the many lessons of Vietnam that appears to have been forgotten is the enormous damage done to South Vietnamese society, and the war effort against the communists, when the country became awash in U.S. dollars accompanied by slack book-keeping and corruption. Huge amounts of money entered the black economy and ultimately ended up in the hands of the N.L.F., whereupon it was used to buy guns - often from South Vietnamese soldiers; and so the circle went round.
It begs the question how much money has Iran actually had to fork out to arm the insurgents, when bags of $2 million in cash were being doled out like sacks of rice?
There are a lot of very good reasons to question the value for the U.K. of having such a close relationship with the United States, but with all due respect to Nich Starling I am not sure that the matter of this video is one of them.
The U.S., particularly the military, have become very sensitive, if you pardon the turn of phrase, to the declassification of information in the wake of 9/11. In fact, so paranoid have the military and intelligence services become, that they have secretly reclassified 55,000 pages of documents that have been accessible in archives and in the public domain in other forms for years, in an effort to keep them from even the American people.
In Congress too, particularly in the Senate, there remains an streak that while not quite isolationist, certainly views with suspicion the supply of any arms or military technology to any foreign government - Britain included - partly because of concerns about information and/or technology leaking out; (this is one the resons why the fiction of Britain's 'independent nuclear deterrent is so proposterous: it is wholly dependent on American co-operation to make the thing work). This leak from within the MoD will not have helped to assuage such concerns.
Nich asserts that there is nothing on the tape that would pose a security risk: probably true, but then again we don't know whether that is wholly true because the upper left area of the video display has been edited to obscure what was originally underneath it. But what is important to remember is that unlike this country, which largely sees itself as a country in someone else's war, America sees itself as a country at war. Things weren't so different when Britain was at war. Go on ask your gran - "Dangerous talk costs lives!" "The walls have ears!"
Certainly the United States has dragged its feet over this whole affair, and IMHO there appears to be a legal case to answer given the catalogue of six failures to accord with the rules of engagement, and certainly the U.S. military must be embarrassed over this whole incident. But let's not get carried away about this, or forget that the British government was hardly falling over itself to secure prosecutions, convictions or even full sentences of soldiers who killed in Northern Ireland under questionable circumstances.
There are good reasons to have a critical reappraisal of "the special relationship", but this incident is small beer from the administration of Mr. "Yo Blair" Bush.
