By Mike Luckovich (Aug. 14, 2013)

Atlantic Mag, Aug. 13, 2013

by Andrew Cohen

If you don’t live in or near New York City, it’s easy not to care about the controversial "stop and frisk" policy its police have implemented there. If you are a tourist visiting Manhattan, for example, the chances that you will be stopped and frisked on a public street are more than remote. If you are someone who frequently travels to the city for business, you aren’t likely to go near a "high crime area" that often triggers these police stops. You enjoy the security the police say these practices bring — why would you look behind the curtain to understand how?

Oh, and it helps, measurably, if you are white. If you are white in New York City, or if you are a white person visiting the city for a day or a week or a year, your chances of being stopped and frisked are far lower than if you are a person of color. So this is one of those stories that means far more to the people affected by a government policy than it does to anyone else — a story that cries out for the type of racial and ethnic and regional empathy that, let’s face it, most people cannot or will not muster on behalf of strangers.

It’s also easy not to want to spend the time in the middle of August reading a 198-page judicial opinion written by a federal trial judge. But in this case, you should make the time. Everyone in America, white or black, urban or rural, Democrat or Republican, should take the time. Because U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin has just written a ruling about New York City’s stop-and-frisk policy that goes beyond the city, its policies, and its constitutional law to the essence of the debate about law and order, crime and punishment. It’s not just about the tension between liberty and security — it’s about simple government competence.

Do, in other words, what so many public officials did not do Monday before pronouncing the opinion right or wrong — read it for yourself, all of it, twice if you must, to understand both what Judge Scheindlin did and did not do:

http://legaltimes.typepad.com/files/frisk-op.pdf

Only then will you be able to understand the magnitude of the NYPD’s failure as well as the opportunity this turning point provides. Despite the hysteria offered by city officials, there is room in New York City, and in this ruling, for a better, smarter, fairer stop-and-frisk policy; the only obstacle to it now is the unremitting pride and stubbornness of the men defending what is essentially indefensible as a matter of law or fact.

So what exactly is Mayor Michael Bloomberg defending? A racially discriminatory police policy he and his tribunes tolerated with "deliberate indifference" to its unconstitutional applications? Overwhelming evidence of shoddy training and management practices within the police department? With their Chicken Little reaction to the ruling — murder and mayhem are on the way now that we aren’t stopping and frisking minorities! — city officials are purposefully avoiding the part of Judge Scheindlin’s ruling they really can do something about.

It seems to me that pages 11 and 12 of the judge’s ruling form the heart of the non-racial case against New York City’s stop-and-frisk practices. It turns out that they aren’t just intentional acts of racial discrimination or humiliating to the millions of people caught up in them. They also represent terribly inefficient police practices. Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly shouldn’t be angry that a judge has exposed these sad truths about police tactics — they should be terribly embarrassed. It’s the taxpayers who pay for all this who should be angry:

As early as 1999, a report from New York’s Attorney General placed the City on notice that stops and frisks were being conducted in a racially skewed manner. Nothing was done in response. In the years following this report, pressure was placed on supervisors to increase the number of stops. Evidence at trial revealed that officers have been pressured to make a certain number of stops and risk negative consequences if they fail to achieve the goal.

Without a system to ensure that stops are justified, such pressure is a predictable formula for producing unconstitutional stops. As one high ranking police official noted in 2010, this pressure, without a comparable emphasis on ensuring that the activities are legally justified, "could result in an officer taking enforcement action for the purpose of meeting a quota rather than because a violation of the law has occurred."

In addition, the evidence at trial revealed that the NYPD has an unwritten policy of targeting "the right people" for stops. In practice, the policy encourages the targeting of young black and Hispanic men based on their prevalence in local crime complaints. This is a form of racial profiling. While a person’s race may be important if it fits the description of a particular crime suspect, it is impermissible to subject all members of a racially defined group to heightened police enforcement because some members of that group are criminals The Equal Protection Clause does not permit race-based suspicion.

Much evidence was introduced regarding inadequate monitoring and supervision of unconstitutional stops. Supervisors routinely review the productivity of officers, but do not review the facts of a stop to determine whether it was legally warranted. Nor do supervisors ensure that an officer has made a proper record of a stop so that it can be reviewed for constitutionality. Deficiencies were also shown in the training of officers with respect to stop and frisk and in the disciplining of officers when they were found to have made a bad stop or frisk. Despite the mounting evidence that many bad stops were made, that officers failed to make adequate records of stops, and that discipline was spotty or non-existent, little has been done to improve the situation.

One example of poor training is particularly telling. Two officers testified to their understanding of the term "furtive movements." One explained that "furtive movement is a very broad concept," and could include a person "changing direction," "walking in a certain way," "[a]cting a little suspicious," "making a movement that is not regular," being "very fidgety," "going in and out of his pocket," "going in and out of a location," "looking back and forth constantly," "looking over their shoulder," "adjusting their hip or their belt," "moving in and out of a car too quickly," "[t]urning a part of their body away from you," "[g]rabbing at a certain pocket or something at their waist," "getting a little nervous, maybe shaking," and "stutter[ing]."

Another officer explained that "usually" a furtive movement is someone hanging out in front of [a] building, sitting on the benches or something like that" and then making a "quick movement," such as "bending down and quickly standing back up," "going inside the lobby. . . and then quickly coming back out," or "all of a sudden becom[ing] very nervous, very aware." If officers believe that the behavior described above constitutes furtive movement that justifies a stop, then it is no surprise that stops so rarely produce evidence of criminal activity.

The police say that all of this nonsense works. Let’s assume, for this moment alone, that it does. What the judge is really saying here is this discriminatory stop-and-frisk policy the city is trying so hard to defend is actually one giant bluff — an enormously arbitrary and capricious attempt to scare a relatively small number of people away from criminal conduct by inconveniencing a great many people (but of course not a great many people who have a great deal of political and economic power within the city). Whether it worked or not, such a policy would be legally valid if it humiliated blacks and whites evenly. But clearly it doesn’t.

Instead of lamenting Judge Scheindlin’s ruling or promising quickly to appeal it, Bloomberg and Kelly and company ought to be pledging to fix the widespread "inadequate monitoring and supervision" of police officers who are implementing the policy. Instead of arguing that the city will become Gotham if these policies are made more efficient and less discriminatory, they should accept the reasonable remedies the judge has suggested, pledging even to go beyond what she proposes to make these stops more accurate, more fair, and more justifiable.

The most storied and prominent police force in the nation has just been caught implementing a racially discriminatory policy by means of arbitrary tactics undertaken without adequate monitoring or supervision. That’s not just a constitutional scandal in one city– it’s a scandal that could take place whenever and wherever the police are willing to take shortcuts in the name of security. That’s why New York City’s trouble today is a national story — and why you should care about it even if you are white and live a thousand miles from the Empire State Building.

Dr. Beverly Wright is an environmental justice pioneer — one of the founders of the movement.  Recently U.S. EPA featured her in a five-minute video, “Growing up in Cancer Alley.”   To see it, click on the link below.
[wpvideo q9KbXYkh]

Alternet, Aug. 13, 2013

By Thom Hartmann

What does America do when she no longer needs her slaves or surplus workers?

The 1880’s reconstruction era was the first time in our history that America had seen a large surplus of non-white labor.

In the 1870’s many former slaves were integrated into the labor force, but white backlash in the 1880’s and 1890’s led to a permanent underclass through nearly a century of “separate but equal.”

For very different reasons, there was a similar surplus of white labor in the early 1930’s.

Regardless of race, capitalism runs in cycles: It’s called “the business cycle.” There are uptimes when there are jobs for everybody, the labor market is tight, and pay rises.

Then there are downtimes when the economy has a surplus of workers, falling wages, and a high level of unemployment.

We saw this cycle during the boom-and-bust of the roaring 20’s and the stock market crash and Great Depression of the 1930’s. After the crash, nearly a third of American workers couldn’t find a job, and the numbers were even worse in minority communities.

Our economy couldn’t put them to work, because capitalism failed.

So what do you do with all of those extra workers who can’t find a job?

In the 1920’s and 1930’s, that very question was the subject of a clear and open disagreement between Democrats and Republicans.

Herbert Hoover and the Republicans believed that when capitalism fails and you have high unemployment, you do nothing. You wait for the “free market” to magically fix things, and for capitalism to right the ship.

FDR and the Democrats believed that the Republican’s benign indifference was the completely wrong approach. Instead, FDR said that it’s the responsibility of government to put people back to work during times of high unemployment.

He enacted his New Deal. He put Americans back to work planting trees and forests, building schools, and improving the nation’s infrastructure. Twelve million Americans who’d been unemployed for years went back to work, and capitalism was rebooted in America.

For much of the 20th century, Hoover’s and FDR’s approaches represented the two sides of the debate about what to do with surplus workers.

Up until 1980, Republicans said you waited for the market to absorb the surplus of workers, while Democrats said you proactively used the powers of government to put Americans back to work.

But then Ronald Reagan came to Washington, and everything changed.

When Reagan stepped foot in the White House, he said the job of the government was not just to ignore a surplus of workers, but to figure out ways to make a buck off of them. Reagan lived by the notion that profit was king. If America’s businesspeople always and only did whatever made them the most money, that would magically cure all ills with supply-side fairy dust.

He fundamentally changed the way that we deal with surplus workers. Instead of ignoring them, or having the government put them to work, there was now a third option.

Make a profit off of them.

There are a variety of ways capitalists make a profit off of poor and unemployed people, from payday lenders, to “rent to own” furniture stores, to the most radical of them all: Turn them into prisoners.

That latter is the most radical, and has turned out to be the most profitable for America’s capitalists.

It’s almost elegant in its simplicity.

Turn unemployed Americans into criminals. Track them, punish them for any crime possible, take away their rights and throw them into for-profit prisons.

Once thrown inside a for-profit prison, an inmate needs food, housing, healthcare and other services. This means huge profits for capitalists. They’re raking in tens of thousands of dollars per prisoner per year – hundreds of percent more than Roosevelt paid to simply put them back to work.

And turning unemployed Americans into very profitable prisoners is a booming business.

From the beginning of America until 1980, the incarceration rate in America remained fairly steady. While Nixon declaring his war on drugs in 1971 did slightly increase incarceration in the United States, the increase was nothing drastic.

But then Reagan came to Washington, and his buddies realized they could make a buck off of unemployed Americans.

The nation’s incarceration rate took off like a rocket.

Thanks to Reagan elevating profit to a religion, between 1980 and 2009, the state and federal prison population in the U.S. increased by over 700 percent.

Since the for-profit prison industry started aggressively buying Congressmen 15 years ago, the number of people thrown into for-profit prisons has exploded.

And Americans sitting in jail make a very exploitable, very profitable, slave-like labor force.

According to the Prison Policy Initiative, the minimum wage for a prisoner who works in the UNICOR program, the federal government’s prison industries program, is 23 cents an hour. The maximum UNICOR wage is $1.15 an hour.

Across all state prisons, the average minimum wage for prisoners for non-industrial work is 93 cents per hour.

And some states, like Georgia and Texas, are completely upfront about their slave-labor camps. They pay absolutely nothing to prisoners.

Because the Reagan Revolution changed America’s value system, we stopped asking, “What’s the best way to deal with surplus workers?”

Instead, we started asking, “How can we make the most money off surplus workers?”

The logical answer was a return to slavery, and it has been embraced by capitalists with a vengeance.

And that is insane brutality.

N.Y. Times, Aug. 13, 2013

By David Firestone

Hillary Clinton seized upon exactly the right issues in her return to political life this week, issuing a firm defense of voting rights Monday in a speech to the American Bar Association. The danger is that she will see this as a box that’s been checked, an obligation addressed, and will then move on to other subjects in a policy parade.

That would be a mistake, because there is no graver issue at the moment than the ability of one political party to diminish the voting power of another, through outright abuse or through financial domination. Underlying all the gridlock holding back progress on the economy, on education, on the environment and so many other matters are abuses of the electoral system: The gerrymandering of districts to create safe seats for incumbents, which vastly magnifies the power of the right. The use of unlimited, undisclosed money to give an outsized voice to corporations and the rich of both parties. And the systematic reduction in ballot access for minorities, the poor, students, and the elderly, all designed to reduce Democratic turnout.

Ms. Clinton talked mostly about the latter issue, condemning the Supreme Court for overturning part of the Voting Rights Act and criticizing state governments (largely dominated by Republicans) that have imposed unnecessary voter ID laws and cut back on programs that made it easier for a wider variety of people to vote.

“Anyone who says racial discrimination is no longer a problem in American elections must not be paying attention,” she said, adding: “Our government cannot fully represent the people unless it has been fairly elected by them.”

She attacked what she called the “phantom epidemic of voter ID fraud,” and did so on the same day that the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit against what may be the harshest anti-voter law in the country, signed into law a few hours earlier by Gov. Pat McCrory of North Carolina.

But there is so much more to say, and so many other abuses. Kansas, for example, is refusing to register thousands of people who have not complied with a blatantly illegal proof-of-citizenship requirement that goes far beyond federal standards for registration. (The ACLU will probably have to file suit there, too, assuming the federal government does not.) Campaign finance issues deserve a speech just as impassioned as the one on voting rights, and it will be interesting to see if Ms. Clinton devotes more time to the subject than President Obama has.

Building a campaign around these kinds of issues particularly non-partisan redistricting and easy registration — has always been seen as too narrow and too wonky for a major candidate. But Ms. Clinton’s political future, not to mention the health of her party and her country, depend on someone taking them on and not letting go. And should Ms. Clinton succeed Mr. Obama, she will encounter precisely the same kind of blanket opposition in the House unless she starts trying to change it now.

She can start by using her popularity to urge greater turnout in next year’s midterm elections and in off-year state elections. The North Carolina law would never have passed if more people had paid attention and turned out in state elections. And once people begin fighting ballot restrictions and exercising their power at the state level, voting might just become a habit.

© 2013 The New York Times

N.Y. Times, Aug. 13, 2013

By Sheryl Gay Stolberg

Washington — John Lewis was the 23-year-old son of Alabama sharecroppers and already a veteran of the civil rights movement when he came to the capital 50 years ago this month to deliver a fiery call for justice on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Mr. Lewis’s urgent cry — “We want our freedom, and we want it now!” — was eclipsed on the steps that day by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech. But two years later, after Alabama State Police officers beat him and fractured his skull while he led a march in Selma, he was back in Washington to witness President Lyndon B. Johnson sign the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Today Mr. Lewis is a congressman from Georgia and the sole surviving speaker from the March on Washington in August 1963. His history makes him the closest thing to a moral voice in the divided Congress. At 73, he is still battling a half-century later.

With the Voting Rights Act in jeopardy now that the Supreme Court has invalidated one of its central provisions, Mr. Lewis, a Democrat, is fighting an uphill battle to reauthorize it. He is using his stature as a civil rights icon to prod colleagues like the Republican leader, Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, to get on board. He has also met with the mother of Trayvon Martin and compared his shooting to the 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till.

Slide Show | John Lewis 50 Years After the March on Washington The sole surviving speaker from the 1963 march, Mr. Lewis is taking on the Supreme Court’s decision on voting rights.
Mr. Lewis has an answer for those who say the election of a black president was a fulfillment of Dr. King’s dream: It was only “a down payment,” he said in an interview.

“There’s a lot of pain, a lot of hurt in America,” Mr. Lewis said in his office on Capitol Hill, which resembles a museum with wall-to-wall black-and-white photographs of the civil rights movement. Current events, he said, “remind us of our dark past.”

But Mr. Lewis, a longtime practitioner of civil disobedience (he has been arrested four times since joining Congress), is also encouraged. He said he found it gratifying to see peaceful throngs “protesting in a nonviolent fashion” after George Zimmerman was acquitted in Mr. Martin’s killing. Last week, he created a minor dust-up by telling Britain’s Guardian newspaper that Edward J. Snowden, the national security contractor who leaked classified documents, could argue that he was “appealing to a higher law,” but later condemned the leaks.

Now Mr. Lewis is introducing himself to a new generation by telling the story of his life as a Freedom Rider in “March,” a graphic novel that he wrote with a young aide, Andrew Aydin. The book, released this week, is modeled on a 1958 comic about Dr. King, which inspired early sit-ins.

Mr. Lewis remains a link to that past. At a National Urban League convention in Philadelphia last month, he was on fire as he told the crowd how his parents reacted when he asked about colored-only signs a lifetime ago in the Deep South.

“They would say, ‘That’s the way it is, don’t get in the way, don’t get in trouble,’ ” Mr. Lewis thundered in a preacher’s cadence. “But one day, I was inspired to get in the way, to get in trouble. And for more than 50 years, I’ve been getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble! And it’s time for all of us to get in trouble again!”

Last month, the congressman made a splash at Comic-Con in San Diego, where Lou Ferrigno, the original “Incredible Hulk,” was among the fans who lined up to see him. But it was serious business, a way for him to reach young people, Mr. Lewis said, and fulfill his duty to “bear witness.”

Each year, Mr. Lewis leads an emotional re-enactment in Selma of the “Bloody Sunday” march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where the brutal police response horrified the nation. Mr. Cantor participated this year, bringing his college-age son, and said he came away “very moved” — a sentiment that Mr. Lewis will play on during negotiations over a new bill.

“John is what I call a gentle spirit,” said Roy Barnes, a former Georgia governor, recalling a visit by Mr. Lewis in 2001 when he was wrestling with removing the Confederate emblem from the state flag.

“He said, ‘Right before I lost consciousness, I looked up and saw an Alabama state trooper beating me on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and all I could see was a Confederate flag on his helmet,’ ” Mr. Barnes recalled. “He said, ‘I want you to remember that.’ ”

At the Urban League conference, a pantheon of civil rights leaders, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton, mingled backstage, but all eyes were on Mr. Lewis. Convention workers asked for pictures. Benjamin Crump, the Martin family lawyer, clutched a copy of “March,” hoping for an autograph. Strangers asked for hugs.

It is often this way for Mr. Lewis. He seems sheepish about the attention, and his speeches hint at survivor’s guilt. “All I did was give a little blood on that bridge,” he often says. Pointing to old photos, he refers to himself as “young John Lewis,” as if he were seeing someone else.

It is a long way from dusty Troy, Ala., where Mr. Lewis, one of 10 children, picked cotton and preached the Gospel to his chickens. His life took a turn when, at 18, he wrote to Dr. King. Mr. Lewis was studying at a Baptist seminary in Nashville, but was thinking about trying to integrate his hometown college, Troy State, now Troy University. Dr. King sent bus fare for Mr. Lewis to meet him in nearby Montgomery.

His parents, he has written, were “deathly afraid” that his integration dream would bring the family harm. So he returned to Nashville, where he organized lunch counter sit-ins, got arrested and met a theologian, Jim Lawson, whose teachings about Gandhian nonviolence had a profound effect on him. In his quest to build what Dr. King called “the beloved community” — a world without poverty, racism or war — Mr. Lewis routinely votes against military spending.

“For most of us, nonviolence was a tool we used to achieve an end,” said another movement veteran, Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina. “John Lewis internalized that.”

In 1963, as the new chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Mr. Lewis helped organize the Washington march. His prepared remarks were so bold — he branded President John F. Kennedy’s civil rights efforts “too little, too late” — that older leaders persuaded him to tone them down.

He went on to settle in Atlanta, won a seat on the City Council, and in 1986 challenged Julian Bond, a state lawmaker and a close friend from their movement days, for Congress.

Mr. Bond, handsome and erudite, was the favorite, but Mr. Lewis, with a speaking style that some describe as an impediment, fought hard and brought up Mr. Bond’s refusal to take a drug test. Mr. Bond later became chairman of the N.A.A.C.P. It took years for them to repair the breach. “He did what it took to win,” Mr. Bond said, “as you would expect a hard-knuckled politician to do.”

On Capitol Hill, Mr. Lewis and Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, recently testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the voting bill. “It’s hard to look John Lewis in the eye and say, ‘We don’t need this,’ ” said Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the committee chairman.

On Aug. 24, at an anniversary march on Washington, Mr. Lewis will speak again at the Lincoln Memorial. He goes there every so often to reflect. A few weeks ago, he walked there alone from the Capitol, wearing a ball cap and workout clothes. It was peaceful. No one recognized him.

© 2013 New York Times