#^d 2020-06-08 #^h Weekend Roundup
While this week was unfolding, I've been reading a book by Sarah Kendzior: Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America. She is a journalist based in St. Louis, with a Ph.D. in anthropology and a specialty in post-Soviet Central Asia and its descent into mafia capitalism and oligarchy. She sees Trump as part of a vast criminal enterprise, anchored in Russia, which she insists on describing as "hostile to America." I think she has that analysis ass-backwards. Capitalism's driving force everywhere is greed, which constantly pushes the limits of custom and law. The only thing that separates capitalists from criminals is a democratic state that regulates business and enforces limits on destructive greed. The former Soviet Union failed to do that, but the United States has a checkered history as well, with the major entrepreneurs of the 19th century known as Robber Barons, and a sustained conservative assault on the regulatory state at least since 1980. Trump may be closer to the Russian oligarchs than most American capitalists because of his constant need to raise capital abroad, but he is hardly Putin's stooge. Rather, they share a common desire to suppress democratic regulation of capital everywhere, as well as an itch for suppressing dissent. Arguing that the latter is anti-American (treason even) ignores the fact that that's a big part of the program of the reigning political party in the US.
Kendzior's arguments in this regard annoy me so much I could go on, explaining why the supposed US-Russia rivalry is based on false assumptions, and why Democrats are hurting themselves by obsessing on the Trump/Russia connection. I was, after all, tempted at several points to give up on the book. But I stuck with it: it's short, and anyone who despises Trump that much is bound to have some points. Also, I lived in St. Louis a few years myself, so was curious what she had to say about her battleground state. My interest paid off with her discussion of the 2014 protests against police brutality in Ferguson, a majority-black suburb just north of St. Louis with a predominantly white police force that was largely self-funded by arrests and fines. This is history, but it's also today in microcosm (pp. 164-166):
Understanding Ferguson is not only a product of principle but of proximity. The narrative changes depending on where you live, what media you consume, who you talk to, and who you believe. In St. Louis, we still live in the Ferguson aftermath. There is no real beginning, because [Michael] Brown's death is part of a continuum of criminal impunity by the police toward St. Louis black residents. There is no real end, because there are always new victims to mourn. In St. Louis, there is no justice, only sequels.
Outside of St. Louis, Ferguson is shorthand for violence and dysfunction. When I go to foreign countries that do not know what St. Louis is, I sometimes joke, darkly, that I'm from a "suburb of Ferguson." People respond like they are meting a witness of a war zone, because that is what they saw on TV and on the internet. What they missed is that Ferguson was the longest sustained civil rights protest since the 1960s. The protest was fought on principle because in St. Louis County, law had long ago divorced itself from justice, and when lawmakers abandon justice, principle is all that remains. The criminal impunity many Americans are only discovering now -- through the Trump administration -- had always structured the system for black residents of St. Louis County, who had learned to expect a rigged and brutal system but refused to accept it.
In the beginning, there was hope that police would restrain themselves because of the volume of witnesses. But there was no incentive for them to do so: no punishment locally, and no repercussions nationally. Militarized police aggression happened nearly every night, transforming an already traumatic situation into a showcase of abuse. The police routinely used tear gas and rubber bullets. They arrested local officials, clergy, and journalists for things like stepping off the sidewalk. They did not care who witnessed their behavior, even though they knew the world was watching. Livestream videographers filmed the chaos minute by minute for an audience of millions. #Ferguson, the hashtag, was born, and the Twitter followings of those covering the chaos rose into the tens of thousands. But the documentation did not stop the brutality. Instead, clips were used by opponents of the protesters to try to create an impression of constant "riots" that in reality did not occur. The vandalism and arson shown on cable news in an endless loop were limited to a few nights and took place on only a few streets.
National media had pounced on St. Louis, parachuting in when a camera-ready crisis was rumored to be impending, leaving when the protests were peaceful and tame. Some TV crews did not bother to hide their glee at the prospect of what I heard one deem a real-life Hunger Games, among other flippant and cruel comments. The original protests, which were focused on the particularities of the abusive St. Louis system, became buried by out-of-town journalists who found out-of-town activists and portrayed them as local leaders. The intent was not necessarily malicious, but the lack of familiarity with the region led to disorienting and insulting coverage. Tabloid hype began to overshadow the tragedy. Spectators arrived from so many points of origins that the St. Louis Arch felt like a magnet pulling in fringe groups from around the country: Anonymous and the Oath Keepers and the Nation of Islam and the Ku Klux Klan and the Revolutionary Communist Party and celebrities who claimed they were out of deep concern and not to get on television. Almost none of the celebrities ever returned.
In fall 2014, the world saw chaos and violence, but St. Louis saw grief. Ask a stranger in those days how they were doing and their eyes, already red from late nights glued to the TV or internet, would well up with tears. Some grieved stability, others grieved community, others simply grieved the loss of a teenage boy, unique and complex as any other, to a system that designated him a menace on sight. But it was hard to find someone who was not grieving something, even if it was a peace born of ignorance. It was a loss that was hard to convey to people living outside of the region. I covered the Ferguson protests as a journalist, but I lived it as a St. Louisan. Those are two different things. It is one thing to watch a region implode on TV. It is another to live within the slow-motion implosion. When I would share what I witnessed, people kept urging me to call my representative, and I would explain: "But they gassed my representative too."
By the way, here are the latest section heads (as of 7:37 PM CDT Sunday) in The New York Times' Live Updates on George Floyd Protests:
A couple items there look like major breaks with the past. While the "progressive" mayors of Minneapolis and New York seems to have spent much of the last week being intimidated by the police forces that supposedly work for them, the balance of political forces in both cities may have shifted to viewing the police as the problem, not the solution. I started off being pretty skeptical of the protests, and indeed haven't been tempted to join them. But it does appear that they're making remarkable progress. And while I abhor any violence associated with the protests, one should never allow such noise to distract from the core issue of the protests. Indeed, given that so much of the violence the media likes to dwell on is directly caused by the police and the government's other paramilitary forces, it's hard not to see that the only way this ever gets resolved is by restoring trust and justice -- which is to say, by radically reforming how policing is done in America.
I expected such sprawl at the start of the week that I decided not to bother organizing sublists. Still, some fell out during the process, but I haven't gone back and organized as many as might make sense. In particular, there are several scattered pieces on the "jobs report": the one by Robert J Shapiro is the most important, but I got to it after several others.
This wound up running a day late. Only a couple links below came out on Monday, and I tried to only pick ones that added to stories I already had (e.g., I added Yglesias' piece on economic reporting, but didn't pick up the one on Biden's polling).
Here's a piece of artwork from Ram Lama Hull occasioned by the recent demonstrations. I pulled this particular one (out of many) from his Facebook page. Some are also on Imgur.
Qualified immunity is a legal doctrine that has come up a lot recently, as it makes it very difficult to hold police officers liable for their acts, even the use of excessive or deadly force. For example:
Nathaniel Sobel: What is qualified immunity, and what does it have to do with police reform?
Patrick Jalomo/Anya Bidwell: Police act like laws don't apply to them because of 'qualified immunity.' They're right.
John Kramer: George Floyd and beyond: How "qualified immunity" enables bad policy.
Christiana Silva: Cory Booker wants to end qualified immunity for police officers.
Ella Nilsen/Li Zhou: Democrats' sweeping new police reform bill, explained: "Among other measures, Democrats want to end qualified immunity and chokeholds."
CJ Ciaramella: The Supreme Court has a chance to end qualified immunity and prevent cases like George Floyd's.
Parting tweet (from Angela Belcamino):
Who else but Trump could bring back the 1918 pandemic, the 1929 Great Depression, and the 1968 race riots all in one year?
Some scattered links this week:
Anne Applebaum: History will judge the complicit: "Why have Republican leaders abandoned their principles in support of an immoral and dangerous president?" Why does she think "Republican leaders" have principles any different from their president? Applebaum is especially concerned about Lindsay Graham. I can't find the reference, but have a clear memory of Graham, when he was in the House in the 1990s, explaining that Republicans have to secure as many long-term posts of power as possible, before demographic changes make it impossible for R's to win fair elections. So he was always a practical, anti-democratic schemer. Back in 2016, Trump may have offended his sense of what's possible, but by winning he sealed his case, and won Graham over. Applebaum asks, "what would it take for Republican leaders to admit to themselves that Trump's loyalty cult is destroying the country they claim to love?" The answer is catastrophic defeat at the polls, so bad it sweeps all of them out of office. Losing the Senate seats of Graham and McConnell in 2020 would be a good start.
David Atkins/Dante Atkins: Trump thought brutalizing protesters would save him. He was wrong. "His gamble on creating a militarized culture war has done the opposite of what he hoped for."
Even before the brutal killing of George Floyd by officers of the Minneapolis Police Department, Trump knew that he would need to maximize his culture war appeal to non-college whites to make up ground lost to the faltering economy. There can be little doubt that Trump saw opportunity in the protests that followed to dust off the Nixon playbook, vowing to restore "law and order" in a country furious that the law seemed to protect only some, while enforcing a brutal order on others. If Trump's actions threatened to turn the culture war into an active shooting war, that would just be collateral damage on the road to his political recovery.
The Trump orbit considers the iconography of jingoistic militarism and the violent suppression of protest to be a political winner. . . . Trump, like Nixon before him, uses "law and order" as a way of "talking about race without talking about race." In this narrative, a president who supports American "traditional culture" and stands strong against people who agitate for racial justice will win over a "silent majority" of people who just don't want to be disturbed and want to have some peace and quiet from their politics. . . .
In one sense, [Trump]'s right: people are exhausted with chaos, and they do want a respect for law and order. The problem for Trump? The chaos is in large part of his own making, and insofar as it isn't, he's in the way of solving the problems created by institutional racism and overlapping hierarchies of oppression. The massive wave of police brutality has woken even many previously disengaged white people up to the need for true equality under the law, and an order in which everyone, including police and the president, are held to account. And many of the same people Trump is trying to persuade now believe that kicking him out of the White House is a necessary prerequisite for making that vision a reality.
Dean Baker: The jobs report was good, but the economy is still bad. But see Shapiro, below.
Peter Baker/Maggie Haberman/Katie Rogers/Zolan Kanno-Youngs/Katie Benner: How Trump's idea for a photo op led to havoc in a park.
Kevin Baron: Trump finally gets the war he wanted.
Katelyn Burns:
Cities and states are barring police from using chokeholds and tear gas.
Joe Biden now has the delegates needed to clinch the Democratic nomination.
Trump's latest tweets are from an alternate reality where the protests are out of control.
6 Atlanta officers have been charged in violent tasing incident: "A 22-year-old student was left with a fractured arm ad needed 20 stitches from the encounter, according to his attorney."
Trump called governors "weak" and said they need to "dominate" George Floyd protesters.
John Cassidy: Trump represents a bigger threat than ever to US democracy.
Sean Collins:
Trump's push for "law and order" only led to more chaos in DC Monday night. This is worth looking at, if just for the pictures, which show both the horror of the military occupation of DC and the vanity of Donald Trump and his entourage in staging his photo op.
Tray Connor/Lisa Khoury: Every Buffalo cop in elite unit quits to back officers who shoved elderly man to ground. Two officers were suspended for attacking a 75-year-old protester, cracking his head against the ground and leaving him bleeding. Fifty-seven quit to protest the suspensions.
Mark Danner: Moving backward: Hypocrisy and human rights.
Derek Davison/Alex Thurston: Expect more military "liberal interventionism" under a Joe Biden presidency: My first instinct was to play this down, but the sheer number of likely foreign policy mandarins mentioned, as well as Biden's alleged desire to hire anti-Trump Republicans, makes me nervous. One reason I doubt we'll see more interventionism is that I think the current generation of military leaders, many burned from Afghanistan and Iraq (and Syria and Libya), are likely to resist -- especially pleas on "humanitarian" grounds. Also, as I recall, Biden pushed for a more minimal policy in Afghanistan under Obama. On the other hand, his career in Congress always supported the hawks. People do tend to get more cautious with age, so there's that. But I do agree there is reason to fret over his personnel decisions.
Elizabeth Dwoskin/Nitasha Tiku: Facebook employees said they were 'caught in an abusive relationship' with Trump as internal debates raged.
Ariel Dorfman: Trump isn't a dictator. But he has a dictator's sense of impunity.
Rob Eshman: What the old Jewish radical taught me about George Floyd: Our friend, Marsha Steinberg.
Franklin Foer: The foundations of the Trump regime are starting to crumble.
Over the course of his presidency, Donald Trump has indulged his authoritarian instincts -- and now he's meeting the common fate of autocrats whose people turn against them. What the United States is witnessing is less like the chaos of 1968, which further divided a nation, and more like the nonviolent movements that earned broad societal support in places such as Serbia, Ukraine, and Tunisia, and swept away the dictatorial likes of Milosevic, Yanukovych, and Ben Ali.
Matt Ford: The police were a mistake: "Law enforcement agencies have become the standing armies that the Founders feared."
Masha Gessen: Donald Trump's fascist performance.
Donald Trump thinks power looks like masked men in combat uniforms lined up in front of the marble columns of the Lincoln Memorial. He thinks it looks like Black Hawk helicopters hovering so low over protesters that they chop off the tops of trees. He thinks it looks like troops using tear gas to clear a plaza for a photo op. He thinks it looks like him hoisting a Bible in his raised right hand.
Trump thinks power sounds like this: "Our country always wins. That is why I am taking immediate Presidential action to stop the violence and restore security and safety in America . . . dominate the streets . . . establish an overwhelming law-enforcement presence. . . . If a city or state refuses . . . I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them. . . . We are putting everybody on warning. . . . One law and order and that is what it is. One law -- we have one beautiful law." To Trump, power sounds like the word "dominate," repeated over and over on a leaked call with governors.
Chip Gibbons: Donald Trump's "Antifa" hysteria is absurd. But it's also very dangerous. I have a lot of trouble with "antifa": I'm not sure they exist, but if they do, I'm pretty sure they aren't part of the left -- which I'd define as the movement to universalize equal rights, secure peace, and enhance community through cooperation. Fascists hate the left for just these reasons, but more often than not they also hate other people, often for very arbitrary reasons (like race, religion, or favorite football teams). So it stands to reason that there are people who don't have any particular commitment to the left but still hate fascists -- because, well, hate begets more hate. After all, we live in a society that still puts a lot of stock in violence.
Ben Collins/Brandy Zadrozny/Emmanuelle Saliba: White nationalist group posing as antifa called for violence on Twitter.
Sean Illing: "They have no allegiance to liberal democracy": An expert on antifa explains the group: Interview with Mark Bray, who wrote Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, as near as I can tell because there was no such thing, and he wanted to sell himself as an expert when/if anyone asked.
Neil MacFarquhar: Many claim extremists are sparking protest violence. But which extremists?
Ben Zimmer: Why Trump is so obsessed with antifa.
Susan B Glasser: #Bunkerboy's photo-op war.
Constance Grady: A reading list to understand police brutality in America.
Garrett M Graff: The story behind Bill Barr's unmarked federal agents. Also see: Washington DC now controlled by gunmen under William Barr's command, and William Barr's unaccountable nameless army suppresses dissent and threatens democracy, which starts off with Chris Murphy tweeting "We cannot tolerate an American secret police."
Alisha Haridasani Gupta: Why aren't we all talking about Breonna Taylor? Could be that this particular case is complicated by the "war on drugs," which allowed police to "serve a no-knock warrant" in the middle of the night, and guns: she was killed after her boyfriend shot at a suspected intruder, which turned out to be armed police who returned fire massively and blindly (or at least that's how I understand it went down). As both the reason for the break in and the firefight were deliberate choices made by police, it's hard not to think that this could have been handled differently, in a way where no one got shot, and it's hard to dismiss the idea that racism didn't factor into those choices, even if the police never saw the person they were killing. But doesn't this also raise a key question about guns? A big part of the common rationale for owning a gun is the idea that you can use it to defend your home from invasion -- but clearly that doesn't work in cases where the police are the invaders. Maybe that rationale isn't as smart as its advocates think?
Sean Illing:
Will he go? "A law professor fears a meltdown this November." Interview with Lawrence Douglas, who has a book on this: Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020. This strikes me as something not worth worrying about now, although that anyone can raise such questions reminds us that Trump has no regard for the Constitution and the rule of law. I can't imagine that anyone in a position of power would support Trump in spite of a clear electoral defeat.
Why the policing problem isn't about "a few bad apples": "A former prosecutor on the fundamental problem with law enforcement: 'The system was designed this way.'" Interview with Paul Butler, Georgetown law professor, former federal prosecutor, author of Chokehold: Policing Black Men.
Quinta Jurecic/Benjamin Wittes: The law-enforcement abuses that don't bother Trump: "The president believes that those who oppose him should be punished, but that those who support him should be free to do as they please."
Fred Kaplan:
Roge Karma: Chris Hayes on how police treat black Americans like colonial subjects: Interview with Hayes, who wrote a very clear book on the subject, A Colony in a Nation.
We're seeing tactics of policing that are usually used on people that are outside of view: pressure, harassment, and ultimately domination.
I think the word domination is so remarkable. The president has been explicit on this: The goal is domination. And what does domination look like? It looks like a knee on the neck. In fact, a boot to the neck is like the oldest trope we have to represent domination and represent tyranny. What is the flag of the colonies? It's a snake that reads, "Don't tread on me." Do not step on me. Do not place your foot on me. That is domination. And if you do, I will react.
Annie Karni/Maggie Haberman: How Trump's demands for a full house in Charlotte derailed a convention.
Amit Katwala: Sweden's coronavirus experiment has well and truly failed.
Philip Kennicott: The dystopian Lincoln Memorial photo raises a grim question: Will they protect us, or will they shoot us?
Catherine Kim:
Poll: Americans are more concerned about police violence than violence at protests.
The protests are growing larger, calmer, and more community-oriented.
The fatal arrest of Manuel Ellis, another black man who yelled "I can't breathe," explained: "A medical examiner ruled Ellis's death as a homicide caused by a lack of oxygen and physical restraint."
Jen Kirby: The disturbing history of how tear gas became the weapon of choice against protesters: "The chemical weapon was originally marketed to police as a way to turn protesters 'into a screaming mob.'" Interview with Anna Feigenbaum, author of Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of World War I to the Streets of Today.
Ezra Klein: America at the breaking point: "The social upheaval of the 1960s meets the political polarization and institutional dysfunction of the present." I don't have time to write about this piece, but probably should refer to it at some point when I finally try to sum up what's going on. I've always hated the notion that the 1960s divided and broke America. Rather, events exposed hypocrisies and weaknesses, but rather than heal them, political reaction took over and turned us into fantasists. That the same fractures have returned -- sure, plus some new ones -- should remind us that failure to heal can only be ignored for so long.
Elizabeth Kolbert: How Iceland beat the coronavirus.
Paul Krugman:
Donald Trump is no Richard Nixon: "He -- and his party -- is much, much worse." The subhed is critical, because is less the leader of his party than the vessel into which fifty years of megalomania and cynicism has been poured, the creature grown out of such vile soil. The first comparison I recall between Trump and Nixon concerned their respective convention acceptance speeches in 1968 and 2016: Nixon's was much more concise, and much more cunning, a carefully constructed pitch to the American people that exploited their feelings while betraying little of Nixon's real ambitions, whereas Trump's was, despite being scripted, an incoherent mess. Their presidencies have followed from those initial premises, but they started out from different places, and to my mind that makes Nixon more culpable for the ensuing disaster. In fact, when Trump apes Nixon's law-and-order rants, he's not just repeating past mistakes but testifying to Nixon's continued legacy. So I really don't have much patience when liberals like Krugman point out that Nixon put his signature to some pieces of progressive legislation (like the Clean Air Act) that Trump has sought to trash. Nixon was smart enough to bend with the wind, but he was also devious enough to put Donald Rumsfeld in charge of the Office of Economic Opportunity, and subvert LBJ's "Great Society" programs from the inside.
Trump takes us to the brink: "Will weaponized racism destroy America?"
Heather Long/Andrew Van Dam: The black-white economic divide is as wide as it was in 1968: "14 charts show how deep the economic gap is and how little it has changed in decades. The covid-19 recession is also hitting black families and business owners far harder than whites."
German Lopez:
How violent protests against police brutality in the '60s and '90s changed public opinion: "The backlash to unrest in the '60s gave the country Richard Nixon, one study found. But we don't know if that will apply today." One thing not noted here is that we tend to conflate two different things when we remember "violence in the '60s": "race riots" which flared up in various cities from 1965-68, most often in response to local police acts; and the police riot against anti-war demonstrators at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Neither of these should be framed as "protests against police brutality" -- sure, they were occasioned by and exemplified by police brutality, but they weren't organized as protests. I've long felt that the former were pent-up explosions of anger, a release of pressures that had built up over decades of racism and impoverishment, as I noted that it was very rare for any city to "riot" more than once. Repeated experiences were prevented not by police dominance but by community leaders organizing bases of political power. (Also helpful were cases where white political leaders responded by getting out into the streets and making their concerns visible, as John Lindsay did in New York. RFK, campaigning in Indianapolis when Martin Luther King was killed, was also effective as keeping anger from turning into riot.) It is true that Nixon cultivated a backlash against blacks and anti-war protesters, but one thing that helped him was that he was out of office when the "violence" happened, unlike Trump. Of course, Nixon was responsible for much of the violence after he became president in 1969 -- in America, and much, much more around the world.
How to reform American police, according to experts.
Kate Maltby: Viktor Orbán's masterplan to make Hungary greater again.
Peter Manseau: The Christian martyrdom movement ascends to the White House: "A former professor of Kayleigh McEnany, Trump's new press secretary, explores her enduring obsession with religious persecution and death."
Branko Marcetic: American authoritarianism runs deeper than Trump.
Josh Marshall:
Farce, tragedy and photo op: Early in the week, I was thinking Marshall's "editors' blog" entries might be worth following, but I hit the paywall here. I used to look at his site first thing every day, but the returns have been so paltry with such added nuisance factor I hardly bother any more.
Dylan Matthews: How today's protests compare to 1968, explained by a historian. Interview with Heather Ann Thompson, author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy.
Ian Millhiser:
Black Lives Matter sues Bill Barr for order that led to tear gas attack on peaceful protesters.
The 3 former officers who aided Derek Chauvin are charged in George Floyd's killing: These guys were police officers who at the very least stood by while police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd. They've since been fired for their conduct, so technically now they are former officers, but it seems disingenuous to refer to them as "former" when they were active when they committed their crimes. Indeed, I can't think of any other case where the press takes such pains to dissociate criminals from their occupation at the time of the crime. When Watergate burglar Gordon Liddy was described as "ex-CIA," that's because he was no longer employed by the CIA when he broke into Watergate.
The charges against former Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin, explained.
Terry Nguyen: There isn't a simple story about looting.
Tim Noah: Donald Trump is celebrating the wrong economic accomplishment: "The president wants credit for a largely illusory blip of improvement in the job market. He should be going all-in on the $600 sweeteners."
Anna North/Catherine Kim: These videos show the police aren't neutral. They're counterprotesters.
Osita Nwanevu: Tom Cotton and the elite media's dalliance with illiberalism. The New York Times published an op-ed by the Arkansas Republican called Send in the troops, demanding that the US military "restore order" -- a task that same military has repeatedly failed to do in Afghanistan and Iraq (indeed, a sober analysis would recognize that the US military only made those situations worse, and not for lack of arms or brutality). The Times justified printing Cotton with its commitment to airing "all" voices (meaning conservative ones)
Zack Beauchamp: The New York Times staff revolt over Tom Cotton's op-ed, explained.
Michelle Goldberg: Tom Cotton's fascist op-ed.
Before Donald Trump became president, most newspaper op-ed pages sought to present a spectrum of politically significant opinion and argument, which they could largely do while walling off extremist propaganda and incitement. The Trump presidency has undermined that model, because there's generally no way to defend the administration without being either bigoted or dishonest.
David Roberts: The Tom Cotton op-ed affair shows why the media must defend America's values.
Libby Watson: At The New York Times, an uprising over James Bennet's incompetence. Bennet subsequently resigned.
Alice Miranda Ollstein/Dan Goldberg: Mass arrests jeopardizing the health of protesters, police.
Richard A Oppel Jr/Lazaro Gamio: Minneapolis police use force against black people at 7 times the rate of whites.
Alex Pareene: The police take the side of white vigilantes: "Over the past week, cops have shown that they share a coherent ideology."
Daniel Politi:
Linda Qiu: Trump's false claim that 'nobody has ever done' more for the black community than he has: "The records of Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon B Johnson, among others, beg to differ." Assuming pre-Lincoln presidents are ineligible, I thought it might be easier to list the ones who had done less (or who had done more harm). Andrew Johnson was more blatantly racist than practically anyone. And Woodrow Wilson did major harm in segregating the federal government. But beyond that just makes my head hurt.
David Remnick: An American uprising: "Who, really, is the agitator here?"
Brian Resnick: Rubber bullets may be "nonlethal," but they can still maim and kill: "The dangers of 'nonlethal' police weapons -- like rubber bullets, flash-bangs, and tear gas -- explained." As I recall, Israeli soldiers, who use a lot of rubber bullets on Palestinians, like to aim for eyes.
The group found 26 studies on the use of rubber bullets around the world, documenting a total of 1,984 injuries. Fifteen percent of the injuries resulted in permanent disability; 3 percent resulted in death. When the injuries were to the eyes, they overwhelmingly (84.2 percent) resulted in blindness.
David Roberts: The coronavirus crisis has revealed what Americans need most: Universal basic services. Interview with Andrew Percy, co-author with Anna Coote of The Case for Universal Basic Services.
Katie Rogers: Ivanka Trump blames 'cancel culture' after college pulls her commencement speech: She was scheduled to address graduates of Wichita State University "Tech." (What is this "Tech"? Looks like the former Wichita Area Technical College [WATC], which is to say it it's not even the real third-tier state college in Kansas. I attended WSU for a year back when my only credential was a GED, and parlayed that into a scholarship at a much fancier college. WATC was originally an adult extension of the Wichita East High vocational program.) I'd like to know more about how this got contracted (and what the kill fee is). If Ivanka wanted to look for a prestige spot to speak, she settled pretty low. On the other hand, I can't imagine anyone there thinking she's just what WSU Tech needed to burnish its image -- unless, of course, one of the Kochs (who have a lot of pull at WSU) whispered in their ears. How it got canceled is no mystery. It was such a patently stupid idea, all it took was for one of the faculty to circulate a petition, which damn near everyone signed. "Cancel culture" is another new one for me (although evidently not for Vox). Controversial figures often get scheduled for events then canceled, but it's almost never due to a vogue for canceling. Usually, some hidden power (like the Kochs) stomps on the autonomy of some student group. Or sometimes, as in this case, a popular uprising spoils some shady insider deal. For more, see Daniel Caudill: WSU Tech reverses course; Ivanka Trump will not be a commencement speaker. Main additional piece of news here is that WSU Tech President Sheree Utash "serves on the American Workforce Policy Advisory board," giving her a connection to Ivanka, probably via Mike Pompeo (Trump's Secretary of State, formerly US Representative for Wichita area).
Philip Rucker/Ashley Parker/Matt Zapotosky/Josh Dawsey: With White House effectively a fortress, some see Trump's strength -- but others see weakness. Also by Dawsey, with David Nakamura/Fenit Nirappil: 'Vicious dogs' versus 'a scared man': Trump's feud with Bowser escalates amid police brutality protests.
Noam Scheiber/Farah Stockman/J David Goodman: How police unions became such powerful opponents to reform efforts.
Michael Shank: How police became paramilitaries.
That beat cops so often look like troops is not just a problem of "optics." There is, in fact, a "positive and statistically significant relationship between 1033 transfers and fatalities from officer-involved shootings," according to recent research. In other words, the more militarized we allow law enforcement agents to become, the more likely officers are to use lethal violence against citizens: civilian deaths have been found to increase by about 130 percent when police forces acquire significantly more military equipment. . . .
Law enforcement has, in fact, been training for a moment like this -- specifically by learning techniques and tactics from Israeli military services. As Amnesty International has documented, law enforcement officials from as far afield as Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, Arizona, Connecticut, New York, Maryland, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Georgia, Washington state, and the D.C. Capitol have traveled to Israel for such training. These programs, according to research backed by Jewish Voice for Peace, focus on exchanging methods of "mass surveillance, racial profiling, and suppression of protest and dissent."
Robert J Shapiro: No, the unemployment rate didn't really drop in May: "Donald Trump bragged about a bogus jobs number and defiled George Floyd's name in the process." This strongly suggests that the BLS cooked the books to give Trump a number (13.3% unemployment) he could brag about. This did this by not counting 9 million people who weren't working but could be construed as still having jobs (e.g., unpaid furloughed workers). The true number is closer to 19.0%.
Rebecca Solnit: As the George Floyd protests continue, let's be clear where the violence is coming from: "Using damage to property as cover, US police have meted out shocking, indiscriminate brutality in the wake of the uprising."
Jeffrey St Clair: Roaming charges: Mad bull, lost its way: I don't particularly like him, and rarely read him, but some weeks deserve one of his laundry lists, and he notices somethings that few other people do. For instance, he dug up a headline from 2003: "Rumsfeld: Looting is transition to freedom," adding: "Perhaps Rumsfeld will write an amicus brief on behalf of the more than 10,000 protesters arrested for rioting, looting and just pissing off cops."
Yeganeh Torbati: New Trump appointee to foreign aid agency has denounced liberal democracy and 'our homo-empire': Meet "Merritt Corrigan, USAID's new deputy White House liaison."
Emily VanDerWerff: America's contradictions are breaking wide open: "On Donald Trump, standing outside a church, pretending to be strong." Vox's TV critic, but isn't it all TV these days?
Alex Ward:
The president is a danger to the US military: "Even Trump's former Secretary of Defense James Mattis agrees." The James Mattis piece is in The Atlantic. PS: Mike Mullen, former Joint Chiefs chairman, made an even more emphatic statement. We've also heard from retired General John Allen and retired Admiral James Stavridis. And, of course, there's also Colin Powell, whose reputation is so tarnished that Trump struck back, taunting him as "very responsible for getting us into the disastrous Middle East Wars."
The Insurrection Act, the 1807 law Trump could use to deploy troops to curb protests, explained.
Australia wants the US to investigate a police attack on 2 Australian reporters: "Videos show the on-air journalist and cameraman were attacked by a federal law enforcement officer outside the White House."
Adam Weinstein: This is fascism: "Trump is sending an unambiguous message to a country in turmoil -- and his armed supporters, from cops to vigilantes, hear it loud and clear."
Philip Weiss:
George Floyd killing highlights issue of US police training in Israel:
At least 100 Minnesota police officers attended a 2012 conference hosted by the Israeli consulate in Chicago, the second time such an event had been held.
There they learned the violent techniques used by Israeli forces as they terrorise the occupied Palestinian territories under the guise of security operations.
The so-called counterterrorism training conference in Minneapolis was jointly hosted by the FBI.
Also:
Exchanges between US police and the Israeli army promote a brutal military occupation as a positive model for community policing. Under the banner of "counter-terrorism" training, Israel is presenting lessons learned from 50 years of illegal military occupation over a Palestinian population deprived of human and civil rights.
-/James North: NYT's meltdown on Tom Cotton recalls its four op-ed pieces justifying slaughter of Gaza demonstrators.
Jordan Weissmann: Here's what happens if Republicans let those $600 unemployment benefits expire.
Robin Wright: Is American becoming a banana republic?
Matthew Yglesias:
It's way too early to declare "mission accomplished" on the economy.
The US economy added 2.5 million jobs in May. Unemployment rate for May dropped from 14.7% to 13.3%. See Shapiro above for a better explanation of this.
Vandalism and theft aren't helping.
But while navigating these issues on a practical level is tricky, on an ethical level it's an easy problem -- those looting and vandalizing are in the wrong, and police officers who focus their ire on peaceful protesters while letting vandals roam free are also in the wrong, and political leaders like Trump who use the existence of vandals as a hazy excuse to fire tear gas into law-abiding crowds are the wrongest of all.
Growing calls to "defund the police," explained. Also see:
Kate Aronoff: Defunding the police is good climate policy.
Melissa Gira Grant: The pandemic is the right time to defund the police.
Jack Norton: Cut the carceral system now.
Farah Stockman/John Eligon: Cities ask if it's time to defund police and 'reimagine' public safety.
Alex S Vitale: We must defund the police now.
The most chilling aspect of Trump's Monday night crackdown on law-abiding protesters.
Trump's politics are full of these little dominance rituals. To verbalize agreement with Trump because you genuinely agree with what he says proves nothing -- it's willingness to say things that neither you nor anyone else believes that truly proves your devotion.
Monday night's use of force was similar in structure but more alarming in practice. Would law enforcement officials fire tear gas at an unarmed crowd that wasn't breaking the rules? That federal agents were deployed instead of DC police officers is perhaps a sign that there were some doubts. Regardless, one can never know for sure what kind of orders will be followed until they are given. A 7:01 pm dispersal wouldn't prove anything, whereas a 6:36 pm dispersal proved a great deal.
Gary Younge: What Black America means to Europe. The size of the protests has surprised me everywhere, but especially in Europe. Still, as a placard in a photo here says, "The UK is not innocent."
George Floyd's killing comes at a moment when America's standing has never been lower in Europe. With his bigotry, misogyny, xenophobia, ignorance, vanity, venality, bullishness, and bluster, Donald Trump epitomizes everything most Europeans loathe about the worst aspects of American power. . . .
Although police killings are a constant, gruesome feature of American life, to many Europeans this particular murder stands as confirmation of the injustices of this broader political period. It illustrates a resurgence of white, nativist violence blessed with the power of the state and emboldened from the highest office. It exemplifies a democracy in crisis, with security forces running amok and terrorizing their own citizens. The killing of George Floyd stands not just as a murder but as a metaphor.
Li Zhou:
The trope of "outside agitators" at protests, explained. Interview with Howard law professor Justin Hansford.
Embattled Rep. Steve King has lost his primary: Nine-term House representative (R-IA), so racist he had become an embarrassment even to the Republican Party (and scarier for them, his hold on his previously safe seat had become tenuous).