STRESS begin in 1971 in Detroit. “Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets” (STRESS) was a police program to patrol the streets of Detroit.
Historian Jill Lepore’s excellent piece “The invention of the police“starts with the history of the king needing men (sorry, women!) to maintain the peace. However, modern policing didn’t begin there, nor did it begin with Thomas Pain’s diction ‘the law is king’. Modern policing began because of slavery, Lepore said.
She reminds us that “the government of slavery was not a rule of law. It was a rule of police.” Lepore doesn’t forget the history of slave laws beginning in the U.S. as early as 1680, or the slave patrols. The horror of free blacks -especially the ones calling for violent uprising or equality under the law – led many cities to form police forces for the first time.
Policing may have been developed to deal with the threat of free slaves, but ipolicing isn’t limited to the black community in any way.
Between 1840 and the nineteen-twenties, mobs, vigilantes, and law officers, including the Texas Rangers, lynched some five hundred Mexicans and Mexican-Americans and killed thousands more, not only in Texas but also in territories that became the states of California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. A San Francisco vigilance committee established in 1851 arrested, tried, and hanged people; it boasted a membership in the thousands. An L.A. vigilance committee targeted and lynched Chinese immigrants.
In addition,
In the eighteen-seventies and eighties, the U.S. Army engaged in more than a thousand combat operations against Native peoples. In 1890, at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, following an attempt to disarm a Lakota settlement, a regiment of cavalrymen massacred hundreds of Lakota men, women, and children. Nearly a century later, in 1973, F.B.I. agents, SWAT teams, and federal troops and state marshals laid siege to Wounded Knee during a protest over police brutality and the failure to properly punish the torture and murder of an Oglala Sioux man named Raymond Yellow Thunder. They fired more than half a million rounds of ammunition and arrested more than a thousand people. Today, according to the C.D.C., Native Americans are more likely to be killed by the police than any other racial or ethnic group.
By the turn of the 20th century, at which time Jim Crow laws had been upheld by the Supreme Court, the police forces had been turned into military forces by former military men. Domestic policing adopted “the kinds of tactics and weapons that had been deployed against Native Americans in the West and against colonized peoples in other parts of the world, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.” Today’s police officers are disproportionately veterans of U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, many suffering from post-traumatic stress, Lepore reminds us, and that it has been found that “officers who are veterans are more likely than their non-veteran counterparts to be involved in fatal shootings. In general, they are more likely to use force, and more likely to fire their guns.” Police still use military weapons, even in situations where no weapon at all is necessary.
Regarding men in the police, for instance, in Philadelphia in 1911 about eleven per cent of people arrested were African-American. When a new police chief, a veteran of the Spanish-American war, and thee Philippines-American War, took over “that number rose to 14.6 per cent in 1917. By the nineteen-twenties, a quarter of those arrested were African-Americans, who, at the time, represented just 7.4 per cent of the population.”
In the “Progressive Era” 1920s “police patrolled Black neighborhoods and arrested Black people disproportionately; prosecutors indicted Black people disproportionately; juries found Black people guilty disproportionately; judges gave Black people disproportionately long sentences; and, then, after all this, social scientists, observing the number of Black people in jail, decided that, as a matter of biology, Black people were disproportionately inclined to criminality.” This hasn’t changed.
Currently, by population, by per capita incarceration rates, and by expenditures, the United States exceeds all other nations in how many of its citizens, asylum seekers, and undocumented immigrants are under some form of criminal justice supervision.
The effort to police any community that’s not white has long been a bipartisan effort. Lyndon Johnson declared a ‘war on crime’ in 1965 asking Congress to supply police departments with military-grade weapons. During the Watts riot that year the LAPD said fighting protesters was ‘very much like fighting the Viet Cong’. Johnson also asked Congress to pass the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which had the effect of diverting money from social programs to policing. Richard Nixon ended the era of many social programs completely, and focused on building more prisons.
The line ‘crime is a national-defense problem’ could be attributed to many people, but it was Joe Biden who said this in 1982. In 1984 “Biden and other Democrats in the Senate introduced legislation that resulted in the Comprehensive Crime Control Act,” and a decade later Biden helped draft the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, whose provisions included mandatory sentencing, Lepore reminds us. In 1991 Biden also introduced the Police Officers’ Bill of Rights, which provided protections for police under investigation. It’s an odd choice to nominate the person for president who helped develop our modern criminal justice system in this era of protests against police brutality.
In Detroit when the police developed STRESS they worked in disguise as taxi drivers or a ‘radical professor’. So many black men were killed that black police officers demanded the program be disbanded. This, Lepore, says, was the beginning of the movement to defund and reform police departments. The police in America are not the kings men; they are public servants and despite attempts to make it otherwise policing is not a partisan issue. Even police are police reform. It’s time to end STRESS against communities and create a system that affirms society, rather than oppresses it.
Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has put out a two trillion dollar plan to “boost investment in clean energy and stop all climate-damaging emissions from U.S. power plants by 2035.” (StarTribune)
At this point all people who Biden told ‘don’t vote for me!‘ should now be jumping up and down at the opportunity to vote for Biden, yes?
First, let’s look at target year of 2035: Michael Mann in 2014 published an article in ScientificAmerican. Although the article was published on April 1, it’s not a joke. The article, titled “Earth Will Cross the Climate Danger Threshold by 2036” says that if the world continues to burn fossil fuels at the current rate, global warming will rise to two degrees Celsius by 2036, crossing a threshold that will harm human civilization.
We have, at best, until 2036 (that’s 16 years from now) – a very short period of time. One might hazard a guess that Biden’s plan chooses 2035 for this reason.
In reality, we have a lot less than sixteen years. Last month The Guardian published an article suggesting saying the world has six months “in which to change the course of the climate crisis and prevent a post-lockdown rebound in greenhouse gas emissions that would overwhelm efforts to stave off climate catastrophe.” The executive director of the International Energy Agency said ‘the next three years will determine the course of the next 30 years and beyond’.
By 2050 – at which point most people who grew up using cell phones and apple computers are middle-aged – climate change will impact suitable croplands for four top commodities—corn, potatoes, rice, and wheat—will shift, in some cases pushing farmers to plant new crops, say researchers at the International Food Policy Research Institute project. We’ll have food, but what that food is, and where it grows will be completely different. Not long from now.
We’re already seeing to results of climate change. Today, the same day most papers published reports of Biden’s triumphant plan, the paper also published a report of rising sea levels. Atlantic and Gulf state cities on the water could expect high-tide flooding 25-75 days a day in a few decades – a huge rise in what used to be a few days of flooding a year. No one wants to live in a city with failed infrastructure and frequent flooding. Although the NOAA has been told by Trump not to use the word climate change it acknowledged that that rise in ocean levels is likely caused by climate change, and man-made carbon emissions.
While it would appear that Biden’s plan appeals to the progressive left, The Star Tribune, unlike most of the AP articles on Biden’s proposal, report that
Biden’s proposal seemed designed to avoid antagonizing independents or moderate Republicans considering backing him.
The plan makes no mention of banning dirtier-burning coal or prohibiting fracking, a method of extracting oil and gas that triggered a natural gas boom in the United States over the last decade. The issue is especially sensitive in some key battleground states such as Pennsylvania.
Really, Biden is trying to avoid antagonizing independents, please the companies most responsible for carbon emissions, and appeal to the left all while producing a plan that is inadequate and insufficient.
We don’t have fifteen years.
This is a story about the Russia of history and current affairs. Part of the title refers to “The Great,” the story “satirical, comedic” story of Catherine the Great. But this story is neither “satirical” or comedic,” although it begins with, and was inspired by, the story of Catherine the Great.
THE GREAT
Catherine (née Sophie Friederike Auguste) was born in what was then Prussia to the prince of Anhalt-Zerbst, an area now in the middle of Germany. She was a a grand-niece of Frederick the Great of Prussia, and first cousin to Swedish kings. At fourteen she was sent to Russia (St. Petersburg was the capital) to marry the heir apparent to the Russian throne, Peter of Holstein- Gottorp, who was the grandson of Peter the Great.
According to the Russian mini-series Ekaterina after seven years of marriage (they were married in 1745), Peter and Ekaterina (Catherine) had yet to have sex. Peter is portrayed as a great lover of music, and an adequate musician. He would sit in a theatre in the palace, and command people to act for him. He would join in the acting. He loved dogs, in the same way Ramsy in Game of Thrones loved dogs. Peter loved Lutheranism (very popular in Germany) and hated Russian Orthodoxy. He played with toy soldiers but understood very little about the life of a soldier.
It was another decade before Peter’s aunt, the Empress Elizabeth – really somewhere between a regent and a usurper – died and Peter III succeeded to the throne in January of 1762. Despite the fact that the royalty of Russia were of German descent the German states (Prussia, Saxony) were enemies of the Russians. Under Elizabeth Russia allied with France and Austria, and Russia itself was fighting against Frederick the Great of Prussia at the time of Elizabeth’s death.
Peter III, a great lover of Lutheranism and an admire of Frederick the Great, immediately ended war with Prussia. Now, on the face of it, this sounds pleasant for anyone against war. However, by all accounts, Russia was winning the war and had taken Berlin at the time that Peter told his troops to retreat. After thousands of deaths and an apparent victory, no fighting force likes to be told to retreat, and receive nothing for their efforts. Peter didn’t end the war; he merely decided that the Prussians were his allies, and his allies the Austrians were enemies. He did this against advice and against the interest of his country. Meanwhile, his troops returned home.
His relationship with Catherine, which was never good, was terrible. Both of them were likely in extramarital affairs and were living separately. Various motion-picture renditions have them quarreling at dinners, and Peter refused to call Catherine an honorable name, such as “her excellency”. Although the mini-series Ekaterina either glossed over it or I missed it (the show is in Russian, with subtitles) Catherine spent time making friends with the noble families that felt spurned by Peter, either because of his foreign or domestic policies.
On the night of July 8-9, 1762 (happy anniversity!), one of Catherine’s co-conspirators was arrested (the show missed this part), and it was decided that immediate action was needed, before Peter’s expected marriage to a noble-woman / lady in waiting, and Catherine’s invalidation as the Empress Consort. With support of the military Catherine forced her husband to abdicate. Peter III died on July 17. Six years later, Catherine, well-ensconced in the power of the throne despite a war against the Ottomans in the south and the Poles in the west, and domestic uprising by “pretenders” claiming to be Peter, was declared Catherine the Great.
THE BUSINESSMAN
Now let’s focus on current affairs. No leader of a state or a country is referred to as The Great, but politics hasn’t changed.
In 2016, mainly out of desperation caused by a system that had been ignoring the populace for years, the United States elected businessman Donald Trump because he promised – falsely – to provide better healthcare and better jobs. Oddly, these are the same conditions Catherine the Great provided to her empire.
Trump loves the arts – or rather, he loves profiting off them. Like Peter, he he relishes in undoing the alliances and domestic policies his predecessor had maintained or put in place. It’s likely that both Donald and Peter did this and do this out of spite.
For decades the United States has been allied with countries that oppose Russia and its allies. Under Trump, this did an about-face, and Russia became our friend while we shunned states and countries that we had worked to build alliances with for security and humanitarian reasons. This is quite like how Peter pulled his armies back from a win, and decided that his enemy was his friend, and his friend was his enemy. (Whether the U.S. needs Russia as an enemy is not the point. It’s the rejection of former alliances – who mainly share our ideals – that is nonsensical.)
Trump is a businessman, not a politician. The alliances he cancels and the alliances he forms has nothing to do with national security. His actions are for his own business interests. Like Peter III Trump never served in the military, but he’s never been as interested in playing war the same way Peter did. Trump has merely continued the wars he inherited, while pushing away the allies that were – at least, they think they were – helping in the war, including the non-state allies of the Kurds.
There is nothing Great about Trump. He’s a businessman. Nothing he does is “satirical” or “comedic,” not even in the commedia dell’arte style. He does remind us though, of Peter III, who, in his short reign, tried to undo the alliances and systems that he inherited.
_______________
As an addendum, it’s important to acknowledge Peter’s good qualities. He abolished the secret police – the only short time, since Peter the Great, that Russia didn’t have secret police. He was in favor of democratic reforms.
Trump, on the other has, has made little effort to reduce the security state that he inherited, and has not promote democratic reforms. It is true, though, that he operates in a two-party system and the his opposition party (Democrats) just prevented him from withdrawing troops from Germany (our ally, until the Trump years) and Afghanistan (which we’ve been at war with before and during the Trump years.
This is not a game
Israel’s plan to annex large portions of the West Bank as soon as next week reminds me of a video game. In Europa Universalis (World of Europe) stronger states get to vassalize weaker states and make them pay homage – taxes (and in a real world, manpower). After years of pleasant relations the stronger state, having vassalized the weaker state, then get to annex the weaker state, and all the land and taxes and men now belong to the strong state, and after several more years those conquered vassalized and annexed lands become part of the mother country.
There are parameters of course for good relations, and stability, which of course could lead to revolt and a separatist movement. There’s also parameters for religion – where, if you convert the heathen, they become less likely to rebel, etc. In the game, you can only annex countries of your own religion with whom you have good relations, and a royal marriage (which, in the real world, might or might not lead to good relations). (You can also annex through war). A country asked to be annexed could refuse – perhaps at the loss of stability in their own land.
This is not a game
More than seventy-two years ago the United Nations proposed partitioning historic Palestine into two states. Although the UN had no authority to create states, for years the international community has been fixated on the two-state solution.
Where the borders for two states would be is unclear. Israel has never declared a clear border; the Palestinians have never had a chance to express what borders they envision for a truncated version of their indigenous land. The Green Line – the truce lines of the end of the Seven Day War of 1967 are the theoretical borders between the two states.
This is not a game
The only manner in which the current state of affairs mimics Europa Universalis is that there is no parity between the states. There is no equal negotiating power between the the Israelis an the Palestinians. There is no equal economy.
What the game is missing is the influence of superpower states. If you dare to annex another country in the game your relations with most states diminish, and it might be a good idea to prepare for the likely result that more than one alliance will declare war on you. Israel doesn’t want to move ahead with annexation without permission from the United States, and because of the United States nobody wants to put in real effort to prevent annexation.
Every major agency working to bring peace between Palestinians and Israelis is either committed to the two-state solution or to the more general idea of “peace”. Not only was the Partition Plan a two- state solution, but it was reaffirmed after 1967 that that was the only answer, and Oslo in 1993 reiterated that. At Oslo, both the Palestinians and Israelis agreed to the two-state solution, agreeing that definites (like the control of Jerusalem) would be decided later.
Twenty-seven years after that agreement of Olso the vassalization and colonization of Palestinian land has increased, leading to a reality in which the two-state solution is impossible, and Israel might annex all or parts of Palestinian land as soon as next week.
This is not a game. The two-state solution is a pipe-dream that always ensured that Palestinian land and the Palestinian people would be vassals of Israel. (By actual definition, of course, only the Palestinian Authority might be a vassal to Israel).
When was the last time someone tried to annex you? And what was your response?
Those of us who don’t know history are bound to repeat it, and I’m sure those of us who remember history are doomed to stand by and watch. The best we can do is to remember and remind ourselves of history in a valiant attempt to learn from the past.
There are striking parallels between the past and the present; this would be the case whether we remember history or forget history. The important part is whether the history we know is used to our advantage to not continue making the same mistakes over an over, or to improve the future by recognizing the past.
One hundred and six years ago on this date – June 28 – Archduke Franz-Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was assassinated. As an immediate result, World War I (The “Great War,” or the “War to End all Wars”) began. As a concurrent result the lines of Europe and the Middle East were redrawn, and the isolationist policy of the United States ceased to exist.
The Archduke was in Austro-Hungarian province Boznia-Herzegovinia on June 28, 2014. He was sent there as inspector general of the imperial army by his father. The visit, the Brittanica says, was not a popular one. It was on the anniversary of a “black date in Serbian history: it was the anniversary of the Turkish victory over Serbia at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. This fanned the flames of dissent among Serbian nationalists even further.” The neighboring kingdom of Serbia wanted the land of Bosnia.
One can almost hear the parallels between this and Trump’s decision not long ago to schedule a rally in Tulsa that was to happen on June 19 (Juneteenth) – the day that all black American slaves were told they were free. Although Trump surprisingly rescheduled his rally we can only speculate what would have happened if the Archduke had rescheduled or cancelled that visit.
Instead, we know that The War To End All Wars led to the Peace to End All Peace, and that world affairs were forever altered. The Great War and the Peace to End All Peace led to World War II, nuclear weapons, a Cold War, and technology and globalization we would never have experienced in the same way. All because the Archduke was assassinated, which itself was an act of ethnic strife.
History effects the present. Know the history and how we got here so that we can change the course of the present to effect the future in a way that some history does not have to repeat itself.
Although the art and culture beyond my native American (USA!, USA!) culture has always interested me, including art from the Orient and the Middle East, I’ve never paused to consider Iraqi art.
We’ve been at war with with Iraq for most of the last thirty years, I know (and I know some of the root causes and actions that led us to be there), if “being at war” is the term for bombing the living daylights out of a country that doesn’t have the capability to fight back.
The internet interesting is a fascinating place.
Today marks 27 years after Layla Alattar death by the U.S. missile attack on the Iraqi Intelligence main building which was just behind her house, ordered by U.S. President Bill Clinton. The building was hit by 24 rockets. pic.twitter.com/YVJz7Wgw8l
— Haider Husseini (@haider_husseini) June 27, 2020
Not only am I not big on Iraqi art, I’ve also never heard of Layla Al-Attar. It is true that she, her husband, and her housekeeper died in a U.S. missile attack in 1993. Al-Attar was the director of the Center for National Art (now the Iraqi Museum of Modern Art), and was one of the most famous artists in Iraq.
With the frequency and intensity of U.S. bombings around the world just imagine how many great artists there no longer are that we never hear about.
It’s been a tough election year. Not just candidates dropping out of the race to endorse Joe Biden, who has previously had to drop out of presidential races due to plagiarism. Not only because the election results for California took a week to show up before Bernie Sanders was declared ahead. Partly because Biden, who’s running against the current administration has bungled the response to a pandemic, is not ahead by triple digits in every national poll and every battleground state. And definitely because this is a moment-in-history that shouldn’t exist.
Today marks 7 years since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act.
Since then, states with a history of voter suppression have closed 1,688 polling places throughout the South.
It couldn’t be more blatant: pic.twitter.com/94D5Q9zSGq
— Robert Reich (@RBReich) June 25, 2020
There’s no longer a Voting Rights Act. Although HR 1 – hoping to remedy this is some way – is sitting on McConnel’s desk he has refused to bring it to the Senate for the vote.
This has partly been a bad election year – a voting year – because of the lines at the polls. The lines where people have had to wait hours to cast their vote in Nevada, Georgia, and Kentucky (among others) weren’t accidents. They were designed to repress the vote and there’s no Voting Rights Act to turn to.
BY JOHN K. WILSON
When Ilana Feldman was appointed interim dean of the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University (GWU) last month, it was an obvious choice. Feldman is a highly respected scholar who was already serving as vice-dean with no complaints about her work. But quickly this became what is probably the most widely attacked appointment of an interim dean in the history of higher education, and there was only one reason: Feldman supports the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement against the Israeli government. …
As a preface, I wrote this piece about a week ago, and sent it in to CommonDreams for submission. I don’t know if they’ve accepted or rejected it; it’s time to publish it here.
Trump has led us right to where we should be as a country. Joining most of the world in the dismay of the devastating but all-to-predictable election of Trump I figured his presidency would lead us to something like this. How and when I didn’t know.
“Something like this” is a woke society that is rebelling against oppression and the status quo. It should surprise nobody that Trump has led the economy into a combination of depression and recession, especially after tax-cuts for the wealthy and more recently stimulus money for large corporations instead of for people.
Something like this is a sustained nonviolent movement to end violence. Propelled by far too much state-sanctioned violence known as “police killings” people are now in the street and they’re in the street until tax dollars are reallocated to fund for people rather than oppress them (also known as “defunding the police”).
The logical conclusion upon the election of Trump was that his policies would allow us to transform bad policies into something better. Something like this is how that done. It takes a sustained nonviolent movement that has convinced several cities to end violent policy tactics, convinced universities to stop cooperation with local police departments, convinced other cities to disband the police and create a community-led public safety system, and renewed calls calls to abolish ICE.
A movement like this allows us to re-envision society and build something that ensures that tax dollars are spend representing the needs of the people rather than the oppression of the people. The only silver lining of a Trump presidency is a movement like this that can transform action into policy that represents that people.
“It was at a retrial for colluding with Hamas yesterday that the Brotherhood leader collapsed in his sound proof box and was transferred to hospital…”
The full atrticle at: Obituary: Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s first, democratic president
The Dole Blog 