Via the agitator

The War Against Crime: Explaining Police Misconduct

Tanya Eiserer has an interesting post in the Dallas Morning News crime blog. The post relates to a story she wrote about a Dallas police officer who pepper sprayed a man and a second officer who lied about it to internal affairs investigators. The two officers cooked up a story to explain the use of the pepper spray. A rookie officer who was also present failed to report the incident immediately because he feared retaliation. He eventually told investigators that he saw an officer pepper spray the man without provocation.
The officer who wielded the pepper spray explained why the rookie's account matched the victim's:

"Rookie officers interpret and see things differently than more mature veteran officers."

In other words, rookies in the Dallas Police Department haven't learned to lie to protect other officers. [more ...]
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Eiserer nonetheless makes an excellent point when she points to "the idea that police are at war." The war mentality -- the war against drugs, the war against crime -- creates the belief that anything officers do to harm the bad guys is justifiable. After all, it's war, and war isn't pretty. Wars are fought against enemies. Wars produce casualties. Defeating the enemy is the primary goal of a war, and if the enemy is harmed, or the enemy's property is destroyed or taken, that's an acceptable consequence of war.MORE

Throw in racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia and classism, mix together and we have a really toxic situation

In which the corporations try their best to derail healthcare reform

Healthcare update

Sarah Robinson has a rather sobering read...

Fascist America: Are we there yet?

What is fascism?
The word has been bandied about by so many people so wrongly for so long that, as Paxton points out, "Everybody is somebody else's fascist." Given that, I always like to start these conversations by revisiting Paxton's essential definition of the term:

Fascism is a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline.

Elsewhere he refines this as

a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Jonah Goldberg aside, that's a basic definition most legitimate scholars in the field can agree on, and the one I'll be referring to here.MORE

Liar cover changed for paperback edition

New Liar Cover I am still pissed. That hair is not nappy and the girl is lighter skinned than in the book, but...at least she is actually fucking black now? Fuck this shit to hell. I am tired of saying "at least".





Anyway, go buy the book please. Its supposed to be a good read, and we need to prove their fucked up perceptions wrong so that we can force them to actually get it right sometime in the future.

(no subject)

Taser Nation<

This one's especially interesting. A baseball fan is drunk and apparently belligerent (clearly the first time in history such a thing has happened. )The police are called to remove him. He argues with the cops for a little over 30 seconds and then it happens:

Since tasers were supposed to be a replacement for deadly force, I can only assume that in the past drunken baseball fans were shot dead for arguing with police. There must be quite a body count.MORE

(no subject)

The African Diaspora Dialogues

As the Obama Administration takes tentative steps towards addressing immigration, right-wing commentators and mainstream media alike have been jumping at the opportunity to sensationalize the divide between Blacks and immigrants. Taking a different approach, community organizers in Oakland, California have begun what they’re calling the African Diaspora dialogues—informal conversations between Black Americans and Black African immigrants about immigration, race and economic globalization. They’re hoping to use what they learn from these talks to build a Black Immigration Network that will advocate for immigration policies that are good for both communities.
Two of the organizers—Nunu Kidane, network coordinator with the Priority African Network, and Gerald Lenoir, coordinator of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration—sat down with me to talk about their work.MORE