What Black Lives Matter Wants Would Improve Life for Everyone

And it's no surprise.  The history of America is the history of protesters and dissenters demanding "radical" changes that turn out to be exactly what the nation needed.

Welcome to that club, Black Lives Matter.

Kevin Drum:

A few weeks ago, after the disruption at Netroots Nation, I wondered aloud what the Black Lives Matter movement actually wanted. What were their demands? What did they want from candidates for president? I found a list of items on their website, but they were vague enough and broad enough to keep me a little puzzled. What sort of concrete initiatives were they interested in?

I'm happy to see that they've now come up with exactly what everyone's been asking for. It's called Campaign Zero, and it even comes with its own nifty graphic:

Some of these are easy: police body cams, for example, have become widely supported on both right and left, and by both activists and police. Others are a little harder: independent investigations of police shootings and better representation of minorities on police forces aren't universally supported, but they do have fairly wide backing already. And some are more difficult: it will be tough to wean police forces off their up-armored humvees and challenging to end the vogue for broken-windows policing.

That said, these are all specific and achievable goals. They even have a fact sheet here that tracks some of the presidential candidates and where they stand on each issue. Ironically, Bernie Sanders has positions that at least partly address eight of the ten items—more than anyone else. Martin O'Malley has seven and Hillary Clinton has two so far.

This is good stuff. BLM won't get everything it wants—nobody ever does—but Campaign Zero should allow them to avoid the fate of Occupy Wall Street, which generated a ton of passion but never really offered any place to channel it. BLM has now done both, and has a good shot at making their issues important ones during the upcoming presidential campaign.

It's Economic Violence That's Killing Our Cities

There's not a rich person or corporation in this country that didn't get that way by cheating and stealing from the poor. That doing so also keeps the blahs down is just a bonus.

Zandar:

Charles Warren details in The Atlantic how Ferguson, Missouri spent years using its police as a taxation force, harassing the (mostly black) citizenry to raise money to run the local government despite Ferguson being the home of a $24 billion Fortune 500 corporation.

Take a walk along West Florissant Avenue, in Ferguson, Missouri. Head south of the burned-out Quik Trip and the famous McDonalds, south of the intersection with Chambers, south almost to the city limit, to the corner of Ferguson Avenue and West Florissant. There, last August, Emerson Electric announced third-quarter sales of $6.3 billion. Just over half a mile to the northeast, four days later, Officer Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown. The 12 shots fired by Officer Wilson were probably audible in the company lunchroom. 

Outwardly, at least, the City of Ferguson would appear to occupy an enviable position. It is home to a Fortune 500 firm. It has successfully revitalized a commercial corridor through its downtown. It hosts an office park filled with corporate tenants. Its coffers should be overflowing with tax dollars. 

Instead, the cash-starved municipality relies on its cops and its courts to extract millions in fines and fees from its poorest residents, issuing thousands of citations each year. Those tickets plug a financial hole created by the ways in which the city, the county, and the state have chosen to apportion the costs of public services. A century or more of public-policy choices protect the wallets of largely white business and property owners and pass the bills along to disproportionately black renters and local residents. It's easy to see the drama of a fatal police shooting, but harder to understand the complexities of municipal finances that created many thousands of hostile encounters, one of which turned fatal.

The familiar convention of the true-crime story turns out to be utterly inadequate for describing the social, economic, and legal subjection of black people in Ferguson, or anywhere in America. Understanding this requires looking beyond the 90-second drama to the 90 years of entrenched white supremacy and black disadvantage that preceded it.

The key to Ferguson's plight is nothing less than decades of a regressive "race to the bottom" taxation system designed exclusively to benefit white property owners and businesses at the expense of black tenants and renters.

Like most of the rest of St. Louis Country, mid-century Ferguson was defended by exclusionary zoning codes and whites-only collusion in the real estate market. In the 1960s Ferguson was known as a “sun-down” community: African Americans, mostly from neighboring Kinloch, came in to work in the houses of wealthy whites in Ferguson during the day, but were expected to be out of town by the time the sun set. To this day, the adjacent cities are joined by only two through streets, the Ferguson city line runs down a neutral zone lined on either side with mirror-image three-way intersections. If you have been to St. Louis, you likely landed in Kinloch. Over the last three decades, the vast majority of that city’s black residents have been displaced to accommodate the expansion of Lambert-St. Louis Airport. Over the same period of time, a small number of African American homeowners and a much larger number of African American renters have gradually replaced whites in Ferguson. Ferguson, which was almost entirely white in 1970, today has a black majority. 

In 1981, a federal judge in Missouri declared that the “severe” residential segregation of the St. Louis metropolitan area had produced a constitutionally impermissible degree of segregation in the region’s schools. The court tasked the East-West Gateway Government Council and the Missouri Housing Development Commission with developing a plan to desegregate the metropolitan area, but they simply ignored the ruling. At the turn of the 21st century, almost one-half of St. Louis County’s 90-odd municipalities had black populations under 5 percent.

And that brings us to Emerson Electric.

For tax purposes, Emerson’s Ferguson campus is appraised according to its “fair market value.” That means a $50 million dollar solar-powered data center is only worth what another firm would be willing to pay for it. “Our location in Ferguson affects the fair market value of the entire campus,” Polzin explained. By this reasoning, the condition of West Florissant Avenue explains the low valuation of the company’s headquarters. 

In fact, the opposite is true: The rock-bottom assessment value of the Ferguson campus helps ensure that West Florissant Avenue remains in its current condition, year after year. It severely limits the tax money Emerson contributes to the Ferguson-Florissant district’s struggling schools (Michael Brown graduated from nearby Normandy High School, a nearly 100 percent African American school that has been operating without state accreditation for the last two years), and to the government of St. Louis County more generally. On the 25 parcels Emerson owns all around St. Louis County, it pays the county $1.3m in property taxes. Ferguson itself receives far less. Even after a 2013 property tax increase (from $0.65 to the state-maximum $1 per $100 of assessed value), Ferguson received an estimated $68,000 in property taxes from the corporate headquarters that occupies 152 acres of its tax base—not even enough to pay the municipal judge and his clerk to hand out the fines and sign the arrest warrants. 

St. Louis County doesn’t just assess Emerson a low market value. It then divides that number in three—so its final property value, for tax purposes, ends up being one third of its already low appraised value. In some states, Ferguson would be able to offset this write-down by raising its own percentage tax rate. Voters would even be able to decide which services needed the most help and raise property taxes for specific reasons. But Missouri sets a limit for such levies: $1 per $100 of property. As Joseph Pulitzer wrote of St. Louis during the first Gilded Age, “millions and millions of property in this city escape all taxation."

A $24 billion company generates just $68,000 in taxes for the city in which it resides.  One percent of assessed value.  Put the $50 billion data center in a place like Ferguson and it becomes nearly worthless to tax.

America is broken.

Why Do White Cops Still Have Jobs?

Fire them all.  Do it now.

If it's happening in Missouri, it's happening everywhere.

During the summer of 2012, one Ferguson police officer detained a 32-year-old African American man who had just finished playing basketball at a park. The officer approached while the man was sitting in his car and resting. The car’s windows appeared to be more heavily tinted than Ferguson’s code allowed, so the officer did have legitimate grounds to question him. But, with no apparent justification, the officer proceeded to accuse the man of being a pedophile. He prohibited the man from using his cell phone and ordered him out of his car for a pat-down search, even though he had no reason to suspect that the man was armed. And when the man objected – citing his constitutional rights – the police officer drew his service weapon, pointed it at the man’s head, and arrested him on eight different counts. The arrest caused the man to lose his job.

Unfortunately, this event appears to have been anything but an isolated incident. Our investigation showed that members of Ferguson’s police force frequently escalate, rather than defuse, tensions with the residents they encounter. And such actions are sometimes accompanied by First Amendment violations – including arresting people for talking back to officers, recording their public activities, or engaging in other conduct that is constitutionally protected.

 Undercover Blue at Hullabaloo:

This is a department that might properly be prosecuted under RICO and likely won't be. And for the same reason Dick Cheney, the torture master, is still fly fishing instead of swatting flies in a jail cell; for the same reason banksters walk free after defrauding courts, plundering people's homes and throwing families into the street; for the same reason HSBC pays a fine for laundering drug money, and those too poor to pay parking fines face debtor's prison.

Justice, which was never equal in this country, has utterly broken down along class lines, rigged like the economy. The scales of justice aren't just out of balance. They've been thrown out. Medieval is right.

And if non-white cops start treating white citizens the way white cops have been treating black and hispanic citizens?

Good.  Couple-three centuries of that and we might be ready to start talking about justice.

Read also Steve M.

Putting Bull Connor in the Shade

Yes, worse than firehouses.  Yes, worse than bullwhips.  Yes, worse than lynchings.  The KKKops of Ferguson, MO.

The Rude Pundit:

Random Thoughts Reading Through the DOJ's Ferguson Police Report

1. You should read it. It's compelling, and it's like a look into Birmingham in the 1960s, except it's now. It makes you understand that the riots in Ferguson, Missouri, were not simply the result of the shooting death of Michael Brown. It was an explosion that the city had earned after years of abusing its black residents.

SNIP

Appalling. Disgusting. Now let's say an adult was there, a man with a gun, and he saw the dog biting the kid and he saw the cops stomping his head. At what point do the cops become bad enough that they need to be stopped? At what point are they the bad guys? At what point would you say that the man with the gun needs to do something? Or that the community needs to do something against the cops? At what point would you not blame them if they did? (By the way, there's a whole section on the overuse of force against students by cops in schools.)

5a. Or, if it's you the Ferguson cops are attacking, at what point are you standing your ground? At what point does your self-defense count? Never, of course. You always have to let the cops do whatever they want and hope that someone gets a written reprimand for breaking your skull.

6. The final sickening feeling the Rude Pundit has reading this is caused by the knowledge that this is just one town and that in towns big and small, all over the nation, the same things go on, the same racism, the same violence against citizens, the same. It's a shame that it will probably take a Michael Brown in each town to shine a light on even a small part of it.

6a. Not that the cop who shot Michael Brown will face any charges.

Law Enforcement is the Problem

Michael Denzel Smith at the Nation

We keep applying the language and framework of accountability, diversity and sensitivity to an issue of oppression. We are attempting to fly an airplane with the keys to a motorcycle. Our tools are woefully inadequate, and until we are ready to admit to ourselves that the police are an inherently oppressive force, and then use the language of anti-oppression and anti-racism in our analysis and solutions, it will not end today, as Eric Garner had hoped. The dead bodies of black folks will continue to line our streets and sidewalks, and they will be treated no better than the roadkill with whom they occupy those spaces.

Charlie Pierce:

This flaunting of both departmental rules and federal law on the part of local police departments is the clearest indication that they consider themselves beyond the law they are sworn to enforce. And why shouldn't they? The systems by which they are supposed to be held accountable are intolerably weak, where they are not broken altogether. Where are the stiff fines for the police chiefs who ignore the requirements of federal law? What good are departmental sanctions when officers get filmed blithely using techniques that those sanctions supposedly banned two decades ago? It has become plain that, in far too many cases and in far too many places, local police departments have made of themselves what Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1776 concerning the use of British troops to enforce the law in the colonies -- "independent of and superior to the civil power." Once there, these departments operate with impunity according to the informal dynamics of American law and American justice that were born when the country was. And, among other things, that means more Eric Garners and Michael Browns and Tamir Rices, the latter a 12-year old shot down by a cop in Cleveland who'd been hired anyway despite the fact that responsibilities of being a cop in a suburb were too much for him. Makes me wanna holler, too.

KY Protests Draw Hundreds in Solidarity With Ferguson

Hundreds in Lexington, and hundreds more in Louisville.  For Kentucky, that's a big turnout.

Karla Ward at the Herald:

There are 340 miles between Lexington and Ferguson, Mo., but a crowd of about 200 demonstrators marched downtown Tuesday night to show their solidarity with protesters there.

The peaceful but impassioned group chanted while walking down North Limestone past the federal and county courthouses, then turned onto Main Street and marched past the police station and back to the courthouse plaza.

There, speakers deplored the death of Michael Brown, who was shot and killed by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson on Aug. 9, and a St. Louis County grand jury's decision Monday night not to indict Wilson.

"The goal is to let people in Ferguson know that injustice is not just there in Ferguson," said Lamin Swann, who helped organize the event through Stop Mass Incarceration Network KY. "They're not alone. We're here to support them."

He said "systemic institutional injustice, discrimination" was a problem throughout the nation.

Most of the marchers were young adults, many of whom identified themselves with the University of Kentucky and Berea College.

It IS A Black Thing, But It's Also a Poor Thing

daChipster nails the real reason the rich don't want to share money with the poor: because then they'd also have to share the power.

But, it’s not a “black thing.”

In fact, with all due respect to the black community, most of what’s going on is not about them, per se.

It’s not black-white. Or brown-white. Or yellow-white. It’s not a race or color thing at all.

It’s a poor thing.

SNIP

Those who stand in opposition to Affirmative Action, public education, and other attempts to level the playing field bleat phrases like “Equality of Opportunity, not Equality of Outcome!” All the while, equality of opportunity is a sham.

The only people with equal opportunity are those who can pay for it.

The only people with equal justice are those who can pay for it.

The only people with equal police protection are those who can pay for it.

The only people with equal access to reproductive health are those who can pay for it.

The only people with equal political speech are those who can pay for it.

The only people with equal access to the ballot are those who can pay for it.

The only people with equal representation in Washington are those who can pay for it.

SNIP

It’s a poor thing.

Remember, chipster: no one on the Ferguson grand jury was rich by your measure. But three-quarters of those jurors were white.

KY Ferguson Solidarity Rallies in Lexington and Louisville This Evening

KY Ferguson Solidarity Rallies Today

Solidarity

In early March, 2011, I was moved to tears by a photograph of a protester in Cairo holding a sign that read: "Egypt Supports Wisconsin Workers.  One Big Union."

Mubarek was killing protesters in Cairo, while Scott Walker was killing public workers' unions, but those protesting oppression know each other.

From PZ Myers:

It seems that Palestinians are very familiar with injustice.

Are You Over Racism?

Just watch.

"Freedom Ain't Free, But It Sure Is White"

As always, the Rude One cuts to the chase:

Let us say, and why not, that starting last week, large groups of armed black men and women blockaded the roads to their neighborhood in Ferguson, Missouri. Let us say, and, indeed, why not, that those armed African-Americans said that they were sick and tired of being bullied by the government in the form of the police, with the killing of Michael Brown being the last straw, the one that broke the motherfuckin' camel's back.

And maybe they would declare that they were engaged in an act of civil disobedience against government overreach, that they had the right to walk the streets without being constantly subject to government interference in their daily lives. Perhaps the leaders of the protest would declare that God told them to stand up to the authorities. Perhaps they'd even say that they don't recognize the legitimacy of the police force. Perhaps they'd demand a restoration of government welfare programs that have been cut. Perhaps African-Americans from other cities would show up, armed, to join the Ferguson residents in defiance.

Then, let's say, and, remember, we're still in the realm of fantasy here, just having fun, you know, that a group of law enforcement officers, maybe cops, maybe state troopers, showed up with their armed vehicles and pointed their guns at the protesters. And then the protesters pointed all their guns back, declaring that they were willing to die, that they were making a stand and no one was going to get them to end it or take away their guns.

What would happen? Would law enforcement back down? Would they drive their BearCats back to the station? Would they lower their weapons and leave? Would senators stand with the Ferguson rebels? Would Fox "news" invite them on to praise their attack on a government gone mad?

Or would the cops just fucking waste them because they aren't white ranchers like Cliven Bundy, wanting free shit from the government? Hell, look what the cops are doing now and the Ferguson protesters have done nothing remotely as violent or threatening as the Bundy ranch assholes.

As for the Tea Party and the NRA, all those brave people who stand for "freedom" have pretty much scattered like fleas on an itchy dog and run when it comes time to oppose actual violence, not just playing cowboy. Freedom ain't free, but it sure is white.

These Are Your Cops, America

From a well-respected member of the profession and acknowledged expert now teaching the subject, asked to write in one of the nation's (formerly) premier newspapers:

if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don’t argue with me, don’t call me names, don’t tell me that I can’t stop you…  

"... just do what I tell you." Does that include orders like that cop favorite "suck my dick, bitch"?

Here's the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments bottom line:
 

Cops cannot under any circumstances whatsoever order you to do anything unless you are under arrest.

Period.  Nobody realizes this any more because cops have gotten away with being motherfucking stormtroopers for two hundred years.

No, I don't want anybody to be another "killed for resisting arrest" statistic because she followed my advice and refused to let another cop get away with this shit.

I want the democratically elected officials of this country to fire every motherfucking special-ops wannabe and hire cops who understand that citizens - even black, poor, obscenity-spouting, jay-walking citizens - are their employers, not the enemy.

Believe Zandar, who knows whereof he speaks:

Believe me when I say that 98% of cops believe the same as Dutta here does.  They are police officers, and you are not.  When they tell you to do something, you do it or else, regardless of what that may be.

So when these guys swing their weight around and go after black men and women and Latino men and women, they expect obedience, respect and fear.  If you are black or brown and the President of the United States, for that matter, and a cop like Dutta pulls you over, it's because he knows he has 100% of the power in the encounter.  It's because he knows he has the power to take your life if he sees fit.  You only continue to draw breath because he allows it.

So yes, black fathers and Latino fathers have "The Talk".  That you assume all cops are Officer Dutta, and you do 100% of what they say, or they will end you.

How difficult is it to cooperate for "that long"?  For a black man, "that long" is his entire lifespan.

Or that lifespan may end.

PZ Myers:

I’m not endorsing calling a policeman a racist pig, but if someone is angry and does, is it really appropriate cause to pull out your gun and shoot them? Officer Dutta seems to think it is. That’s what’s objectionable: that the police have acquired an attitude that justifies excessive force in response to physically weak actions — that calling them a rude name warrants whipping out every tool in their arsenal to kill, maim, or subdue miscreants. When someone is killed for jaywalking (or possibly shoplifting) by a policeman, I think it’s clear that a line has been crossed — that the attitude that the police have complete authority and discretion to use their weapons without being limited by reasonable concerns has led to police who treat crime in a community as an opportunity for a military-style assault.

Popehat gets the last word:

The outrageous thing is not that he says it. The outrageous thing is that we accept it.

Would we accept "if you don't want to get shot, just do what the EPA regulator tells you"? Would we yield to "if you don't want your kid tased, do what the Deputy Superintendent of Education tells you"? Would we accept "if you don't want to get tear gassed, just do what your Congressman tells you?" No. Our culture of individualism and liberty would not permit it. Yet somehow, through generations of law-and-order rhetoric and near-deification of law enforcement, we have convinced ourselves that cops are different, and that it is perfectly acceptable for them to be able to order us about, at their discretion, on pain of violence.

It's not acceptable. It is servile and grotesque.

Still the Klan with Badges

Still letting an unarmed black body rot in the street.

And still being defended with the self-righteous lies of the Plantation Crowd.

Steve M:

In America, right-wingers always get to position the Overton window, on every subject of debate. Right now, they're positioning it between Douthat/Jacoby and Medved. The "left" and "right" in this debate will be: do we get rid of the MRAPs and BearCats and keep the rest of our usual tactics? Or do we keep it all?

It would be lovely to think that Rand Paul, by joining liberals in condemning the racial inequities of our justice system, has helped move the discussion to the left. But as I told you on Thursday, even Paul stressed the military hardware rather than the racism in his Time op-ed. And now those of his conservative brethren who are willing to acknowledge any problems whatsoever in how we deal out criminal justice are going to limit themselves to talking about tanks. So, outside MSNBC, that's all we're going to talk about.

They don't need no military equipment, sah; why, back in the day billy clubs and hemp rope worked just fine, not to mention castrating knives and kerosene.

Zandar:

And now the National Guard will show up.  Will they bring actual tanks, I wonder?

All to protect a cop who executed an unarmed man.

America.  

It's the fucking Klan.  Always been the fucking Klan. Always will be the fucking Klan.

Juanita Jean:

True story:  the first time a met a Texas Ranger, the legendary Texas lawmen not the baseball team, I was wearing a gorgeous hand loomed sarape from interior Mexico.  It was one of my prize possessions because of its beauty and utility in Houston winters.  The Ranger, meeting me for the first time, said to me, “Don’t you know not to wear a poncho around a Texas Ranger?”  I asked why.  

 “Because that’s what we take target practice on. Har. Har. Har.”  My stomach turned.  It was a life-altering moment.

That’s not funny.  Not at all.  And the reason it’s not funny is that there is too much truth in it.

Twenty-five years later, I met the first black female Texas Ranger.  I asked her if I could hug her.  I didn’t tell her why but I think she saw it in my eyes.  She hugged me.

I am in pain over Ferguson.  We’ve fought this crap for my entire life and we still haven’t won.

I still have some fight left in me.  I do.

If you think you don't have any fight left in you, look at these pictures.

"All to protect a cop who executed an unarmed man." Don't let anybody forget that.