Month: September 2020

JUSTICE FOR BREONNA TAYLOR WAS ALWAYS IMPOSSIBLE

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I am sad. The sky weeps for me onto my window. I didn’t intend to be. I had no expectations that any cop would be charged in the murder of Breonna Taylor. And yet, my tenuous tie to Louisville, my birthplace, always evokes a special association for me. My ears perk up at the word, even though it ceased to be my home when at 4, we escaped segregation. Charging one cop with reckless endangerment of Breonna’s neighbor, the meager outcome from the Louisville grand jury, was something but it’s a mirage, a bone fed to the public that is meant to say that the Black AG, Daniel Cameron, is on the side of truth, justice and the American way. He said as much in his public statement. The problem with the American way is that it has always devalued Black lives, even the AG’s although that fact appears to elude him. There is no other way it could be in this land of the free[white] and the brave. 

After all, this AG is an elected public official who believes he’s overcome. He’s a darling of the Republican Party who spoke at their convention. He has sworn to defend the system and his spot on the convention stage suggests he’s pledged to Trump and his tyrannical rule. That single allegiance means he’s not thinking straight, because blind obedience is the absence of thought. Following a leader who acts like there is no law that isn’t subject to his whim leaves no place for justice in his agenda;   

Cameron’s interest is in maintaining the current system of injustice. Floating around is his mind is the need to continue to work closely with those cops to build future cases. No doubt during his tenure, he has had to make compromises with the police to win his cases. Bouncing around in his mind are horrific crimes perpetrated on innocent victims by criminals, more likely Black ones just by reigning statistics of who’s arrested and charged. Breonna is not among those innocent victims. Those visions sit alongside the embedded police culture and legal system that supports police abuse or what they see as simply the way to fight crime. Nestled within that frame is the belief that dark skinned people commit more crimes because it’s just their nature. The police routinely “prevent” or solve crime in the place where they’ve been programmed to believe it’s committed, Black neighborhoods. Their stereotypes are reinforced by what they see around them; the parade of Black “criminals” they arrest centers all crimes in Black hands. The spectrum runs the gamut from jaywalking to broken taillights to petty theft to gun possession to murder. Forgotten are the major crimes, like human and drug trafficking, embezzlement, financial scams, drug use, robbery, rape, assault, domestic violence, drug manufacturing, murder, child abuse, illegal arms sales and white nationalist violence, only a partial list of the crimes going on daily in white communities.

Just to be clear, grand juries do not sit to establish truth as the AG said; they decide which cases should proceed to trial after evidence is presented to establish if the law has been violated. It’s now abundantly clear that trials have very little to do with truth or justice and often not even with what’s illegal. Skin color and financial status figure more prominently in the trial process than guilt or innocence, a quirk in a system that depends on police collection of evidence, legal strategies and lastly, a jury of 12 who are all too often not peers of the defendant. A quirk, no; a deliberate configuration to disadvantage brown skinned people.

 It was inconceivable that any system could be worse than enslavement and the failure to acknowledge personhood. And yet, whites, in their infinite creativity to completely adapt to the hiccup of liberation from bondage, created a system that excluded Black persons from the court except as defendants to be found guilty of being Black. Blackness was established by laws against loitering or walking near railroad tracks or being insufficiently deferential. Across the South, this created a steady flow of prison labor which netted a steady income for sheriffs and profits for businesses. Simultaneously, acts that would be universally considered a crime around the world were essentially declared legal across the land; acts like indulging a murderous impulse to torture, castrate, burn, lynch, drag and shoot a fellow human being and white mobs looting and burning properties that belonged to dark skinned people. 

A further adaptation to pushback court sanctioned civil rights was established through the war on crime that created special laws to allow intrusions into the lives of Black Americans. The war on crime shifted law enforcement from solving crime to preventing it, micro-targeting Black neighborhoods as the beehive of lawlessness. White communities were somehow pure and law abiding. As resources poured into advanced weaponry, surveillance and riot police, solving crimes dropped from police priorities. The dismal national case closure rate of 20-40% for major crimes has spawned a whole entertainment industry of unsolved crimes. How is it that serial rapists and serial murderers are able to literally violate multiple victims, even a hundred in some cases? The police are clearly failing at the mandate to protect the public by removing criminals from society. Part of that failure is their willingness to railroad suspects into convictions using forced confessions, planted evidence and circumstantial evidence when the evidence suggests that they haven’t committed the crime. Their investigations of whites committing the crimes listed earlier, if started at all, tend to lumber along and grind to a halt due to lack of resources. White people who are the primary victims should be outraged, and yet, they remain deluded by racist tropes that their primary concerns lie with African Americans. Those with the financial resources have simply built walls and gates around their segregated residential enclosures, hired their own security and installed cameras to build a false reassurance against the Black hordes. But they can’t protect themselves against human and drug trafficking, embezzlement, financial scams, drug use, robbery, rape, assault, domestic violence, drug manufacturing, murder, child abuse, illegal arms sales and white nationalist violence outside their security network nor provide the resources and legal authority to hold the criminals accountable. Who’s fooling who?

The Kentucky AG unequivocally established that there is no safety for dark skinned people anywhere, not in their homes, like Botham Jean, shot dead without ever making an illegal move. Not in their beds, like Breonna. Not in their cars or a park like Tamir Rice; not on a street corner, like Earl Garner; not in police custody, like Freddie Gray; not standing with your hands in the air next to your truck, like Terence Crutcher; not sitting in a fast food drive through like Rayshard Brooks. Not saving victims of a mass shooting in an Alabama shopping mall. Those are acts of police violence from the force those people were paying taxes to protect them. But vigilante actions make other places unsafe, like praying in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina or running on a road, like Ahmaud Arbery. When the mass murderer at the South Carolina church was taken into custody as he waited to be arrested, weapon in hand, he was taken to a fast food restaurant on his way to jail. No body slams, no takedowns, no headlocks, no knees to the neck. And this is a man who shot seven people or maybe the cops thought they were less than people because they are Black. At the same time, the shooters of Ahmaud Arbery remained unarrested, uncharged for months, with the assistance of not one but two DAs who maintained that their actions were entirely legal and thus sanctioned by the state. Is this not two different systems? Black people are reduced to nonentities. We are scared all the time everywhere.

 There is a reason that some demonstrators may want to strike out violently, even as most of the violence surrounding demonstrations has come from white folks bent on violence, either from the left or the right which includes anarchists as well as white nationalists. It’s all about creating a race war. White people just can’t help co-opting what Black people do. African Americans are just tired of marching for so many years. We’re frustrated that we still have to march even as marching is clearly not enough. And we’re angry that our social contract with America has continuously been violated and there appears to be no hope that it ever will be. Those emotions have boiled over into property damage, which we know is more important to whites than our bodies. But frustration and hopelessness could lead to the kind of vigilante justice that has been such an effective tool for whites. In the wake of a persistent refusal to hold law enforcement officers accountable for murdering brown skinned people and an expanding white nationalists race war sanctioned by local police, people shouldn’t be surprised if a few African Americans move in that direction. Black people have stubbornly refused to sink to the level of whites but it’s looking like the game may soon be over. It’s not right; its desperation.  

Accountability, that’s what’s missing. Police can do whatever they damn well please, without penalty.

What? Hopelessness in the light of so many sympathetic statements from industries and corporations hungry for Black dollars but concrete changes in hiring practices aren’t even being planned for. Many say they’re “looking at it” but looking at it has generally meant waiting until the spotlight moves on to something else and quietly maintaining the status quo. Since all institutions are infected with racism, concrete changes in their processes and procedures must be accompanied by an unblinding of anti-Black implicit racial bias, an ongoing process, not a one time seminar and continuous monitoring to enforce accountability. The supremacy of whiteness is not gonna lay down and die; it must be constantly attacked wherever it raises its head. White people are the only people who can shed the ideas that their best minds throughout history produced. Nobody white in power is committing to that; the federal government refuses to even acknowledge that the country was founded on maintaining structural racism permanently.

This then is the system that Daniel Cameron, the Republican AG who was formerly an attorney to Mitchell McConnell, believes in, apparently without criticism. He can code switch through his statements to feign sympathy with the Black community, but he doesn’t have a message that people want to hear. He’s a victim of the misconception that his muckety muck white friends can protect him from his brown skin, but out on the road in the dark, white cops shoot first and ask questions later. In the grocery store, the clerk can’t tell he’s the attorney general which she suspects he’s shoplifting. But he probably sends underlings (or his partner, white or brown) to do those things.

Cameron is a victim of “what you see is all there is” or WYSIATI. WYSIATI is the practice of jumping to conclusions, common when people think intuitively. Humans tend to be overconfident in their own beliefs, but as WYSIATI implies, overconfidence is undeterred by the amount or quality of the evidence used to come to a conclusion. That sense of confidence hinges mostly on the quality of the story that we tell ourselves about what we see, even when we have seen very little. Just as importantly, people often fail to consider that some evidence that may be critical to our judgments is missing; thus what we see is all there is. It’s like beginning an investigation, already having a conclusion and looking only in places where information supports that conclusion while discounting other sources and everything else. Perhaps the most amazing part of this process is that it takes place automatically in the blink of an eye without our even being aware of it. Mental processing like WYSIATI and what is called the overconfidence bias guide a significant number of thoughts and actions throughout everyday life, most of the time without mistakes. But in some instances, it’s automatic nature is prone to errors that are not apparent to us. Implicit racial bias falls in that basket.

The AG in his public statement clearly wanted to support the police as he carefully laid out what he couldn’t charge the police with because they were doing what cops are supposed to do under Kentucky law. At the same time, evidence in news reports claim that the no knock warrant was obtained inappropriately on the word of an informant for a suspect that was already in custody at the time the raid was taking place. Testimony from Breonna’s boyfriend corroborated by a neighbor established that the police did not announce themselves and despite improper entry, the fact that the boyfriend was “standing his ground” as apparently only white men are allowed to do, when he fired on strangers assaulting his house, police were justified in pouring a hail of bullets into an apartment complex without a clear line of sight. Imagine if that had been a middle class loft building; it’s unthinkable; every white resident in the complex would be suing the shit out of the city for just the bullet holes in their walls. If one of them had died, the mayor would have moved a mountain to get those cops off the force! But then again, urban cops don’t make those kinds of raids in middle class neighborhoods. 

But the evidence gathering in Breonna’s case was doomed from the start. The incident report, more blank than filled in, did not note any fatalities. The blue wall had plenty of time to close in on itself, to synch stories and claim loss of memory for any contradictory details. By the time the outcry demanded an investigation, any real understanding of what happened was lost or covered up. For instance, there are reports that a suspect arrested in the drug network that was the subject of the raid was offered a deal to implicate Breonna in the drug activity in exchange for a lighter sentence. Gathering evidence in this case was like struggling through a swamp dotted with quicksand.  

The public will never know what evidence was presented to the grand jury, although the attorney for the family is calling for a release of the transcripts. That is unlikely to happen, although pressure from the governor may result in some compromise. But almost certainly, very little pertained to Breonna’s death, since the charge was reckless endangerment of apartment dwellers rather than the legality of police activity. Since prosecutors exclusively determine charges and who is charged, those choices dictate what evidence will and will not be presented. They don’t have to consult or explain their thinking to anyone. A grand jury can only decide on the charges from the evidence presented, both completely controlled by the prosecutor. Garbage in, garbage out.

The settlement that Breonna’s mother received is important for her financial future and more than that, an agreement to some changes in police procedures was unusual. But, that baby step should be considered in the context that the procedures used in conducting the raid on her home were the result of previous reforms. The details pieced together primarily by the press demonstrate that actions by officers on the scene can send any incident off the rails, no matter what the procedure books say. But that settlement in no way holds the officers or the police department accountable. Kentucky tax payers are shelling out those millions; not even the police department will lose a dollar from its budget.

Accountability, that’s what’s missing from the system. The defiant expression on the cop who strangled George Floyd with his body weight transferred through his knee into Floyd’s neck says it all. He knew he was impenetrable, he’d already survived another shooting complaint. Police can do whatever they damn well please, without penalty, except maybe a few weeks of desk work or leave without pay. Even when they are fired, they can go on to another job in a different district or be reinstated per union contract. For those who’ve faced trial, the police union is covering their legal bills. Only 3 or 4 in the recent past have been convicted and they were people of color and a woman. Juries seem more willing to sacrifice the minority cop; they have more trust in their heroic white man in blue to keep them safe. These juries are almost all white and made so as part of the defense strategy; these lawyers know how to play to racial biases. 

In the case surrounding Breonna’s death, were there no penalties for violating police procedures? Failure of the police to announce their presence, the incomplete incident report, the failure to report a fatality, the offer of a deal for false testimony about Breonna and its cover-up, irregularities in obtaining the warrant, failure to communicate that the suspect was already in custody and whatever else has not been disclosed. It’s a veritable clusterfuck of mismanagement that, because these are people who shoot bullets, resulted in the death of an innocent woman, not just a minor mishap. 

No, justice for Breonna Taylor was never possible in the US criminal injustice system where Black lives are lost at the hands of the police regularly. But her case may provide a road map for points of intervention to begin to change that. Not just changes in priorities in police budgets, because some funding must be shifted from military weaponry and maneuvers into flipping anti-Black racism in the police departments to anti-racism. The legal profession, judiciary and their associated staff must be included in that effort as well. Those who can’t make the switch will have to seek employment in other fields. But the road map to a fairer justice system is the subject of a blog discussion in the near future.

On September 27, 1958 Citizens of Little Rock Arkansas voted to close public schools rather than integrate.

IT’S NOT IN AMERICANS TO DEFEAT COVID-19

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Tank and Memorabilia in Normandy by Denise Raynor

When FDR called on Americans to fight for Democracy in WWII, they stepped up. They were willing to ration food, to grow vegetables in victory gardens, forgo new consumer goods and donate old ones for scrap metal. Women turned their lives upside down; they left their children to be tended by others to join assembly lines to make weapons and military equipment. Women supported their boyfriends, brothers and husbands risking their lives in the fight. Young men abandoned their professional goals to fight in the war. Whites were willing to allow colored people to rise to higher skilled jobs and God forbid, work alongside them! They couldn’t make the leap to letting Black soldiers fight next to them, but at least they let a few of them fight in segregated units where they racked up extraordinary records without their valor ever being acknowledged. Still, everyone believed they were all in it together.

Compare that to today. There is no “we all”. There’s the Trump/Fox News devotees who live in a land apart from everyone else, which they must defend from “the others” who are trying to get in. We have liberals and progressives, who are scratching their heads over how the Trumpophants can sleep at night and look themselves in the mirror. How has it come to pass that hundreds of thousands (millions?) believe in the absurdity of Q, a conspiracy theorist that has no face. We have African Americans who as always are never completely included in any entity run by whites. We have followers of Islam, various nationalities from Spanish speaking countries, indigenous peoples, Asians and other assorted immigrant groups suspended in between or within the other entities. Where have all the independents gone? Someone dropped the melting pot on a cement floor and the contents splattered in all directions.

We have a president who thinks that he governs only a narrow slice of the nation. That part is holding the rest of the country hostage. As the RealityTVPresident visits areas ravaged by floods, hurricanes and fires in Iowa, Texas, Louisiana, California and Oregon, he tells us his concept of the presidency. He is a continuous campaigner, beginning on January 1, 2016 to keep his flock close. His governance is based on decisions that will maintain his flock intact. He brings no messages of condolence or empathy to those who are suffering. He brings no confirmation of emergency aid. He speaks no national themes. He meets only with officials, not victims which would have to be screened for political agreement to prevent any challenges to his worldview. His rhetoric is hard and mean, directed toward the people who are not there, his slice of the nation.

 During his most recent visit to California, a state he knows is firmly in his enemy camp, he railed against the science of climate change and rather than offer aid, threatened to withdraw it, as if his MAGA Nation is simply another version of his own Trump Inc. Certainly, he thinks he can find a way to withhold aid, as apparently he has done before. But it is not within the presidential powers envisioned by the Founding Fathers.  

“We” slipped out of our consciousness as each melting pot morsel skidded into its own puddle. The Trump/FoxNews octopus has multiple tentacles, the Qanon movement, the white nationalist arm, the conservative media platforms, armed militias, etc. Those are the loud arms and the octopus’s central brain, the nerve center that maneuvers the tentacles, relies on them to capture the electoral process. The nerve center grew from the Koch brothers decades long strategy that included funded conservative think tanks, university institutes, political strategists, PACs, the Federalist Society to name only a few. Their objectives were simple, to center in the Republican Party the idea that government should be small and not regulate business or individuals, and then seize power to deconstruct the government. Integral to that political approach was the breaking of the “we” into “us”– white people and “them”– nonwhite people. As cultural themes spearheaded the GOP’s populous charge, “them” came to include LGBT individuals, nonevangelical religions, women’s rights advocates and literally anyone who doesn’t support the hegemony of cis white males.

Mask of the day by Denise Raynor

These are not, by the way, Trump’s beliefs; he doesn’t have any. His populism squeezed him into a position which afforded him the power “to rule the world”, the wet dream of every narcissistic, power hungry sociopathic. It was the continuous adulation that sealed the deal. Transactional Don is just in it to cart away as much money as he can get his hands on and to spread the cash to cronies who can adore him up close, away from the maddening crowd.   

The largest distance travelled from the “we’re all in this together” is this new definition of freedom which borders on an infant tantrum. “My freedom means that I can do whatever I want whenever I want” regardless of how many rights of others may be trampled in the process. It is a license to discriminate, to “revolt” against laws with which one doesn’t agree; to brandish automatic weapons in any place, as long as you’re white. Somehow, all bolloxed up with conspiracy theories, it became “I have the right to kill others with an infectious disease.” 

So there is no communication between the PiedPiperPresident’s ratpack of freedom fighters and the rest of us. They literally live in a different universe conversant in a different language, like aliens visiting from another planet. Trump captured the mother tongue and interprets the world outside for them but in ways that resemble it not at all.

Perhaps the best evidence of the depravity comes from this president who remarked that not counting the COVID19 deaths in the blue states, we’re doing better than a lot of other countries, maybe the best. There are no words. It’s a festering wound spawning maggots. For this man, NoLivesMatter. This man has no shame. It is the country’s collective responsibility that it has sunk to this level of vileness. If you think that this is not what you want, just remember that there are a substantial number of your fellow citizens who do, seduced by the allure of power and greed to the dark side of man’s inhumanity to man. What are you going to do? The responsibility for evil doings lies with those who stand silently by, watching. 

That pretty much leaves defeating coronavirus up to the rest of us, an impossibility since we live in proximity to “them”. They won’t process any of Bob Woodward’s tapes, even if they happen by them. Honestly, the only thing they reveal is that 45, understanding the risk, chose purposely to mismanage the national response to the pandemic in an attempt to displace the blame onto Democratic governors. It is clear that because he doesn’t really trust science, he initially underestimated the economic impacts of stay-at-home orders imposed by the state governors, despite what he was told by advisors. His solution was to encourage revolt against them. Of course he had only to watch other national economies falter as they battled the virus, but if it’s not on the 12 hours of Trump/FoxNews he watches daily, he probably didn’t see it. In any case, he’s sure that his “ab-b-rain” is superior to any other. None of this information is surprising or out of character for anyone who has watched the RealityTVPresident for the last 3 years. But there is no scandalous behavior that his Trumpophants won’t support. 

Our unanticipated economic devastation is nowhere to be found in the Trumpverse. The pandemic is over and the economy is coming back stronger than ever. The Denier in Chief continues to encourage his brood to rebel against appropriate public health precautions. He called his last indoor rally, with the majority of the unmasked crowd shouting throughout, a protest. How can the leader of the government protest against his own government? He says he’s all powerful, why doesn’t he just fix it. Fix what? Not even he is powerful enough to roll back time; no amount of protest can do that. He can create new problems but he can’t erase those past. Completely nonsensical. But remember Q.

Something about the repeated large rallies suggests that a renowned germaphobe who would walk into an unventilated auditorium potentially brimming over with COVID-19 may be losing it a bit. Or is it a science skeptic’s disbelief in airflow spread and superspreader events? Is he thinking that the death toll from his rallies won’t peak until after the November election? Or is he engaged in a deliberate attempt to speed the spread of infection to advance the development of “herd mentality[immunity?]”? Or has he just decided that his only hope is a combined strategy of election rigging, voter suppression and voter intimidation at the polls to support his multipronged legal assault to foil the peaceful transfer of power if he loses? He’s working the rigged election theme hard as he revels in the rally adulation along the way.

(An aside: I just have to chuckle at a scenario where Covid19 finally fells 45 before the election. The ballots will already be printed and mailed out. Will his people have to write in a Pence/Pompeo ticket? The freedom fighter rat pack will have to bring pens to the polls, not their AKs. According to the Constitution, the election date can’t be changed. They can bring their guns into the street, but that won’t resurrect their fearless leader.) But maybe they’ll start wearing masks?

The hearts of Americans have shriveled like grapes into raisins, with empathy for people who don’t look exactly the same all squeezed out. Instead the crevices have filled with contempt. People just don’t care about each other or the nation. Can we finally attack this coronavirus infiltrator? Not without a lot of individual and group sacrifice. 

Photo by Naim Benjelloun on Pexels.com

Americans look at the Europeans sending their children to school, returning to restaurants and bars, returning to work and they want all those things too. They are salivating over fans cheering on soccer teams in Europe and baseball in Korea. They want their sports back. They want to freely interact with their church brethren, have big bash weddings and tailgate parties. But what they’ve disregarded is the hard work Asians and Europeans put in to achieve those things. 

Those countries rapidly imposed real lockdowns, not a series of erratic state by state stay home guidelines that were actively resisted in intellectually more backward individuals who denied the existence of an aggressively infectious virus. In a fit of myopia, because they couldn’t see it next door, it didn’t exist. Some Americans secretly relished the suffering on the east and west coasts. But in other countries, police enforced the orders, and kept people off the streets. There were very few essential worker designations. And in Asia, Australia and New Zealand, they had effective testing, quarantine procedures and contact tracing. Germany stands out among European countries with an effective testing and isolation program. For the most part, these programs were severe but short lived. Even with that, the virus has proven a wily foe, as it seems to be resurging all across countries that appeared to have defeated it in Europe and Korea, New Zealand and Australia. Coronavirus is a powerful enemy.

Unfortunately for those of us who have been conscientious about masks, physical distancing and minimizing activity outside our homes, we’ve been doing this for what feels like forever and has actually been almost 7 months. We’re watching Southerners, Sunbelters, and Midwesterners frolic around without masks while the virus spreads around them, invisible without a critical tool: testing. In essence, without an aggressive federal emergency response like that mounted in countries that have controlled the virus, we’ve just been putzing around while almost 200,000 Americans are dying. 

Congressional pandemic relief threw a blanket over wealthy businesses and corporations while they threw a few pennies over their shoulders into a fountain to wish the common man luck.

In the meantime, millions of people closed their businesses putting millions out of work because commerce came to a halt, not just in the US but in the rest of the world as well. And without the provision of basic services, like medical care and wages in other countries, millions struggled to find food and keep their dwellings where they might stay home. Much like Nero fiddled while Rome burned, Congress bargained over how many corks they wanted to plug the holes in what admittedly is a dike that was only partially constructed before its dismantling began. They threw a water resistant blanket over wealthy businesses and corporations while they threw a few pennies over their shoulders into a fountain to wish the common man luck. And then Republicans thought to bide their time pretending they were concerned as the enormity of the problems revealed by the pandemic response blossomed. They were playing the politics that sports their disdain for the constituencies they represent. Empty phrases about suffering for which the Democrats are responsible, because it is after all an election year. So afraid are conservatives that someone other than they will have a shot at economic mobility, they make Scrooge look like Bill Gates. 

Clearly Americans lack the leadership that might have teased them out of their obsessive focus on themselves and inspired coming together to save our collective selves. It’s no secret that we have the exact opposite. Here’s what we don’t have but need, an all hands on deck approach. We have to minimize interactions with other people and those that do occur must be physically distanced and masked when they can’t be. We need to shift our focus to appropriate ventilation for an airborne virus, and stop obsessing about surface cleaning while continuing to vigorously wash our hands. And we have to test, test, test. We need rapid tests that may be less accurate but readily available to everyone. Testing must be frequent, but then, people need to buy into acting on the results, isolating if positive even if that means away from their families in private or state supported facilities with necessary services for their families. Ideally, people could test before they leave their house and stay home if positive. The advantage of less accurate tests is their extremely low cost and their lower accuracy improves with the frequency of testing. But people must commit to taking the appropriate action with the results. All that seems unlikely given the current political atmosphere and the insistence of so many Trumpophants to be knuckleheads of the highest order.

Looked at another way, over 6.5 million cases have been reported in the US, probably an underestimate, given the state of testing. Assuming a population of 330 million and some immunity against the virus after recovery, the country is slowly working its way toward a point where coronavirus will have fewer people to infect than it has already infected. At the current rate, 7 million in 6 months, it will take 300 months, yes over 20 years to get there.

Perhaps, a thoughtful comprehensive approach to testing will allow for a reasonable path to open and selectively restrict activity in ways that allow Americans to expand their activity even as the virus still swirls around us. The entertainment industry and professional sports have shown the power of aggressive testing; we just need the will and the money to make that happen, oh hear us federal government because the president doesn’t think it’s politically expedient. Hopefully, the uptake of a vaccine will further diminish the threat much sooner or there may be no recovery. The current political climate around a vaccine fast tracked to emerge in the winter suggests that a vaccine will not be helpful because less than half of the population will take it.

No matter how we look at it, it’s still a long road ahead and given the stinginess in the minds of elected officials and the federal bureaucracy, the economic effects will be far reaching and likely go unaddressed, precipitating a significant recession. The healthcare system has suffered a significant financial blow and the number of medical personnel who will leave after the trauma of the COVID19 experience will compromise delivery of services. The tourism industry will have ongoing difficulty, particularly if international travel remains restricted because of high US case counts. A US passport won’t take us anywhere and no one will want to come here. Schools from preschools to universities will need to reconstitute themselves, as some private institutions will cease to exist and students will be struggling to make up educational and social deficits in a fractured system. On the bright side, these are opportunities for innovation and diminution of inequities, if we are willing to accept change. But one thing is certain, the haves will continue to get theirs, as in the $434 billion that billionaires have so far made during the pandemic, and the rest of us will have to keep limping along.

On September 20, 2007, 15,000 people in Jena LA protested the attempted murder prosecution of 6 Black teens for fighting with white students who hung a noose from a tree on their high school campus.

REMEMBERING 9/11

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9/11 Fallen by Denise Raynor

We have just passed the 19th anniversary of 9/11 where memorial ceremonies were curtailed by the ever present virus. There was no lengthy reading of the names of those who perished, perhaps now redundant as the memorial itself lists them all. But the grieving families appear to need annual recognition of their grief by the entire country. For how long? We have not had a national day of mourning for those lost in the attack on Pearl Harbor, the only other foreign attack on national soil in its history with the exception of the burning of the White House in the War of 1812. They were the first of many American soldiers and civilians to perish in WWII, just as the deaths in the World Trade Center towers were among the millions of people to be maimed or die in the resulting wars on terror. They were not even the first victims; the first World Trade Center bombing, the USS Cole, the US Embassy in Nairobi were earlier big instances; others may not even be completely known. I don’t mean to imply that 9/11 is trivial or unimportant. I am simply asking why the ritualized observations continue?

9/11 remains one of those “where were you when it happened” events for many, many Americans, some of them first responders  from across the country who came to help recover bodies from the rubble. A lot of them are dying from diseases spawned from the pollutants in the site. New York also has a giant imprint on commercial media which continues to command the country’s attention and shape coverage across media platforms. If it isn’t a media hegemony or the presence of a large number of affected survivors, or the loss of federal intelligence agents, perhaps it’s because 9/11 is an affront to our national pride. How did a ragtag bunch of brown people that this great power has long dominated manage this? 

As it happens, by serendipity, I’ve been streaming “The Looming Tower” on Hulu. The movie tells the story of our intelligence services bungling the investigations that could have foiled the 9/11 plot. It is a study in misdirection; a rivalry between the CIA and the FBI which led the former to sabotage the latter by withholding valuable information. The CIA led by 2 messianic egotists viewed the FBI as the enemy and luxuriated in its power to withhold information, based on its assessment that the agency was a collection of bumbling thugs who consistently unraveled CIA operations. In the meantime, the FBI had Al-Qaeda plotters in its sights but without CIA information, ran out of time.

Two themes emerged from the movie which demonstrate an inherent fallacy in intelligence gathering. One is what Daniel Kahneman calls WYSIATI: what you see is all there is. WYSIATI is an unconscious mental error that leads us to form an untenable conclusion and validate it no matter how much evidence there is to the contrary. The Agency worked under the foreign policy dictate that Saudi Arabia is the nation’s most valuable ally in the Middle East and the toppling of that regime would lead to a proverbial domino effect in the region, forever changing the balance of power to an anti-American bent. This idea from the 90s continues to dominate in El Trumpe’s reign, ignoring the creation of radical Islamism, the fomenting of Al-Qaeda terrorism, the war in Yemen and the murder of Jamal Kashoggi. Hey if dominos worked in Southeast Asia in the 70s, why wouldn’t it be valid in the 90s? Maybe it reflects inbred state department “deep staters” who can’t let go of the preprogrammed misconceptions from the Dulles Brother days?

WYSIATI–What you see is all there is

The CIA wanted to suppress all information that the pilots of the 9/11 planes were Saudis who learned to fly in a program arranged through the State Department and the Saudi Arabian regime, another in the long list of Saudi transgressions easily misremembered under the decades of propaganda (and Saudi Congressional lobbying) used to support the wars in Iran and Afghanistan, bilateral agreements and weapons purchases. 

Perhaps the most ominous lesson of 9/11 is the destination where the politicization of intelligence ends. “The Looming Tower” ends with an order that Bush 43 wanted intelligence to attribute the plot to Sadam Hussein while the FBI already had the evidence that it was an Al-Qaeda operation. Bush was jonesing to fulfill Bush 41’s Operation Desert Storm ultimate conclusion–rid the world of the dictator who attacked Kuwait. Of course, the CIA had to falsify some information so that Colin Powell could be convinced to give that speech at the UN to bless the Iraq War as an international effort but that was all in a day’s work. 

This newest round of politicization of the intelligence agencies is meant to usher the US off the world stage in service to an old foe, the former USSR. The Russians worked diligently to install a Putin wannabe in the White House, succeeding by just a hair. Putin has continued to work this easily deluded, narcissistic, self-aggrandizing coward, already enamored with the man himself, through what is likely a combination of flattery, the prospect of material gain and kompromat if Trump hesitates. The Russians believe that every favor creates a debt. Throughout, the Russians have helped amplify the avalanche of missives that try to fill that unquenchable thirst Trump has for any notice at all. 

Putin has only invested in the RealityTVPresident, to further his vision to reestablish a preordained Russian dominated Eurasian empire.  The crippling of NATO, if not its outright dissolution, will leave Putin free to reconquer the Soviet republics, positioning Russia to create a modern economy untethered to oil and gas production. The European Market will fracture, as it has already begun to do, without the mutual defense pact within NATO which is a large part of the glue. His message to the world is that the Russian gangster oligarchy is an alternative to the tyranny of the Chinese private/state economy, the European social democratic collaborative and the US capitalist oligarchy.

One other legacy from Bush 43’s administration, the Unitary Executive, has been wholeheartedly adopted by El Trumpe, the better to mirror his beloved Vlad. Bush used it to plunge the country into a surveillance state that continues to invade individual privacy and trample the civil rights of people of color. Down an even darker path, he ushered the country into routinely torturing captives, with an open endorsement in defiance of international law, yet another gut punch to our international reputation. Sure, economic clout determines international power, but we’d rather not be radicalizing enemies around the world. 

As dark as that was, Trump has taken the concept to even more depraved depths, now asking taxpayers to pay for his defense against a slander suit brought by a woman he raped in the 90s (I’m not going to bother with the allegedly, given his undisputed pattern of behavior). It will only be a relative pittance, since moving the case to federal court will effectively end it because the federal government can’t be sued for slander. Unfortunately, since it is a delaying tactic to sidestep a subpoena for the Donald to submit a DNA sample and reveal his tax returns, it will add up to quite a pile of legal fees, what with the number of US attorneys that will be assigned and the number of appeals. Ultimately, the Grabber in Chief is banking on his SCOTUS boys to once again bless his shenanigans. The court will take its long tedious path to the forgone conclusions. WYSIATI strikes again… And the lecher in chief finds one more way to leech off the American taxpayer.

9/11 memorials have been neatly cleaved from the aftermath– the wars built in a fantasy that radicalized generations of terrorists across the globe from hopeless youths to suicide bombers ready to die rather than continue in misery. The invocations have been disconnected from the hundreds of millions of migrants emptying the Middle East of the talent that would make those countries prosperous to literally waste away in squalid camps. The prayers have been detached from the ongoing vilification and persecution of Muslims and the racist, anti-immigrant response that rose not only here, but in Europe. Those countries have been tasked with absorbing a mass of brown humans that is larger than their native white homogenous populations. They fear this will obliterate their centuries old identities. The exaltations of honor have been abstracted from the dishonorable behavior of our government, military and populace that followed. There is no honor in lying, a lesson so forgotten that the current president’s first and generally only impulse is to lie and citizens simply accept it without questioning his fitness for office. His Greek chorus of Trumpophants, in government and out, sing that there is no such thing as truth, only “alternative sets of facts”, a pithy phrase for a lie. Over the last several years 45, following in the footsteps of Putin, has tried to create a space where “No one really ever tells the truth, perhaps there is no truth, so let us simply repeat the things we like to hear and obey those who say them.” (from Russian TV station, RT) Meantime, the objective reality is an invisible RNA virus that has ended more lives than WWI, the Korean War and the Vietnam War combined. Trump’s botched federal response has devastated the economy, destroying millions of businesses and jobs, sending people to food distribution lines, etc. You can tell a lie but you can’t make it reality.

on September 14,1874, a white supremacist militia attacked New Orleans and overthrew Louisiana’s elected, racially integrated state government