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.

How the Criminal Justice System Lynched Trayvon Martin

In a grotesque mangling of justice, Trayvon was found guilty of forcing that nice white man to kill him. It was a deliberate, premeditated, cold-blooded crime by the defense, aided and abetted by a prosecution who cared little more about Martin than did the cops who destroyed evidence and let Zimmerman walk

Patricia Williams in The Nation:

Much of it comes down to an all-too-familiar double standard. Sociologist Troy Duster recently summarized the difficulty confronted by prosecutor Bernie de la Rionda when he asked the jury to reverse the circumstances and imagine that an armed 28-year-old black man followed an unarmed 17-year-old white teenager, shot him dead and then pleaded self-defense: “The problem with this invitation to speculate,” he said, “is that it asks that we break frame with ‘common sense.’” For all the legal language of the courtroom, racialized narratives will emerge and form along the very same lines that Gordon Allport and Leo Postman identified in their research more than sixty years ago: in the “retelling,” a razor will leap “from the white man’s hand to… a colored man’s hand.”

And so, by the end of the trial, the 200-pound Zimmerman, despite martial arts training and a history of assaulting others, was transformed into a “soft,” retiring marshmallow of a weakling. The 158-pound Martin had been reimagined as an immense, athletically endowed, drug-addled “thug.”

Consider, by way of inverted contrast, the 2007 conviction of John White, a black man who shot an unarmed white teenager in New York in 2006. According to The New York Times, the victim, Daniel Cicciaro, “showed up at Mr. White’s house just after 11:00 p.m. to challenge his son Aaron, then 19, to a fight.” Waking up to “threats, profanities and racial epithets,” Mr. White “grabbed a loaded Beretta he kept in the garage of his house in Miller Place, a predominantly white hamlet on Long Island.” At the trial, which the Times described as “racially charged,” the prosecution successfully argued that the case “did not hinge on race but the rash actions of a quick-tempered man who kept an arsenal in his house in preparation for such a situation.” White, unlike Zimmerman, was convicted of manslaughter.

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It helped that the stage was set for this from the start. On February 26, 2012, when Zimmerman killed Martin, the Sanford Police Department quickly and all too casually concluded, after a halfhearted investigation, that they were “prohibited” from arresting him. Martin’s body was shoved in the morgue with little effort to identify it until his parents filed a missing-persons report; his wet clothing was tossed carelessly in a plastic bag to rot, possibly degrading key evidence. Zimmerman was lightly interrogated, then released without charge. No drug or alcohol testing was performed on him.

It would take more than a month of increasing public pressure for the case to be re-examined by a special prosecutor, and for the State of Florida to press for second-degree murder—arguably a curious bit of overcharging, since it imposes a burden as high (depraved or intentional disregard for human life) as the burden in a “stand your ground” defense  (a mere preponderance of the evidence) is low. Also surprising, the prosecution brought forth the charge of manslaughter (reckless disregard for human life) only at the end of the trial, almost as an afterthought.

Tasked with proving that Zimmerman was unreasonable to kill Martin, the prosecution was dismally scattered as a whole. Even the evidence it entered to illuminate the time sequence—a grainy tape of Martin shopping at a 7-Eleven—was freighted with unaddressed innuendo. No one looks innocent on a store’s security camera. Nor did it help that the store clerk was brought in to say he didn’t remember Martin—testimony of so little relevance, it seemed only posited to reassure us that he didn’t rob the place.

Worse, the prosecution repeatedly failed to object at terribly crucial moments, allowing the jury to hear irrelevant rumor, damaging insinuation and general spuriousness. Defense attorneys Mark O’Mara and Don West built their case around profiling Martin: grilling witnesses about other burglaries in the neighborhood, speculating about crime, even hypothesizing about a piece of broken window awning found five days after Martin was killed, in the bushes directly beneath the awning to which it belonged. Could it not be used as what’s called a “slim jim” for break-ins? Could it not have been part of a plot planned by Martin? Wasn’t Zimmerman’s fear about crime in the neighborhood a reasonable one? Wasn’t it true that a young man named Emmanuel Burgess had been prowling around the neighborhood only weeks before? Tall, skinny black guy? Serving five years for burglary now? Hadn’t there been a spree of burglaries? A rash of crime? The defense posited the entire annals of Sanford, Florida, crime into the record, drawing out the details of backpacks and bikes stolen by persons who just happened not to be Trayvon Martin.

And that's not the half of it.  Read the whole thinig.

No, Mr. President, This Does Not Give You a Pass to Approve the XL Pipeline ....

.... any more than your remarks about Trayvon Martin give you a pass to put racist, fascist  motherfucker Ray Kelly in charge of Homeland Security.


Erik Loomis:

The US Export-Import Bank has decided not to fund the Thai Binh Two coal-fired power plant in Vietnam. This is a marginally good sign that the Obama Administration’s rejection of coal that he set out in his climate change speech will have real life benefits. However, it’s also a decision that comes at almost no political cost except irritating the Vietnamese government. What happens with the Keystone XL Pipeline and especially the exporting of Powder River Basin coal to Asia will be far more telling.

"Injustice for All" Protest in Lexington

Just steps from the where thousands of black bodies were sold south from the nation's largest slave market, more than 100 protesters in Lexington yesterday demanded justice for Trayvon Martin.

Valerie Honeycutt-Spears at the Herald:

"Injustice for one, injustice for all."

That chant rose out of a diverse crowd of at least 100 people Saturday who rallied outside the federal courthouse in Lexington in response to the case involving Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman.

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Astarré Gudiño, community relations coordinator for the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Human Rights Commission, said after the noon rally that she thinks the gathering made a difference to the people who attended. (The commission did not coordinate or sponsor the rally.)

"A lot of people came down today with heavy hearts, and when they left I think they felt excited and more empowered," Gudiño said. "I think that happened because of people coming together and having an open conversation about a ... topic such as race. It think that's good for all people, not just African American people."

Gina DeArth, a coordinator for Lexington's event, said one reason for the rally was to support Trayvon Martin's family and "to let them know we are standing in solidarity with them."

"We also want to see the case move to the federal level," De Arth said. "There's been no justice at all. There's no resolution. It's just been an empty feeling."

However, DeArth said, "There's so much unity here today. It was so positive. I think we are going to be successful at moving forward."

Kentucky's stand your ground law doesn't get much publicity, but it's just as dangerous and likely to lead to horrific consequences as the one that gave a pathetic cop wannabe in Florida the right to gun down any unarmed kid he didn't like the look of.

Think you'd pass the George Zimmerman test of acceptability?  Are you sure?

Photos of rallies across the nation.

The Logic That Killed Trayvon Martin

And will kill many more until it's rejected.

In a column in the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates concludes:

What you must understand is that when the individual lives of those freighted by racism are deemed less than those who are not, all other inhumanities follow. That is the logic of Richard Cohen. It is the logic of Barack Obama's potential head of the DHS. This logic is not new, original or especially egregious. It is the logic of the country's largest city. It is the logic of the American state. It is the logic scribbled across the lion's share of our history. And it is the logic that killed Trayvon Martin.

Ed Kilgore:

All I’d add, which I often do, is that both in terms of the Zimmerman/Martin case and the gun issue generally, we ought to be asking Americans if they really want to be protected from crime by the police, or be forced to do it themselves or rely on the likes of George Zimmerman. If they think police resources are inadequate or their personnel are untrustworthy, let’s talk about fixing those problems, not throwing up our hands and engaging in an arms race with criminals we can never win.

Never forget: an important hallmark of a modern civilized society is a monopoly on the use of deadly force by public authorities under the supervision of laws, courts and elected officials. When we indulge in the barbarism of sanctioned private killing, we also inevitably encourage other forms of barbarism, like racism.

 Stand your ground isn't a law. It's the raw barbarism of a primitive society without laws or community values of any kind. It is Somalia.

It's Not Over, Because It's Never Over

First, understand this from Aura Bogado at The Nation:

That white anxiety serves to conceal the real public threat: that a black man is killed every twenty-eight hours by a cop or vigilante.

Next, use what you do best to change things.

Mychal Denzel Smith also at The Nation:

So what’s next? My fellow Nation contributor Salamishah Tillet told me a story about the legendary jazz singer Nina Simone. After the church bombing that killed the four little girls in Birmingham, Alabama, Simone went to her shed and tried to make herself a gun. Her husband walked in on her and asked what she was doing. She replied she was making a gun because she wanted to kill someone. He replied, “But you’re a musician.” Then she wrote “Mississippi Goddamn.”

What’s next is that each of us take whatever gift we have and use it in a way that honors and values black life. That is the legacy Trayvon Martin can leave to this world.

If all you can do is protest, do that:

The Rev. Al Sharpton announced on the Today show that his organization is planning a 100-city vigil for Trayvon Martin that will take place in front of federal buildings across the country on Saturday.

Black George Zimmerman Would Have Been Executed By Now

Any 28-year-old black man carrying a gun who disobeyed direct orders from the police to stand down and instead followed and then shot and killed a 17-year-old white man carrying nothing but candy and iced tea, that black man would have been arrested, beaten to within an inch of his life by police, tried and convicted in record time and executed a year ago.

And anyone who denies that truth in 21st-century America is a stone-cold racist and motherfucking liar.