Law Enforcement, Race and the Gun Culture – Discussion

This is the fourth in this series. I recommend that you read or re-read Part I here, Part II here, and Part III here.

I have received two comments on the first two posts and I want to share those with you, together with my responses:

Michael Cerratto Esq. of Westville, New Jersey, wrote:

Good, something I don't feel so intimidated commenting on!

 The closing incident reminds me of a comment I once heard about the "cops vs. bad guys dynamic" being nothing more than our young delinquents vs. THEIR young delinquents. In any event, there are just too many dead bodies littering the streets lately, and the fact that we are only just now beginning to ask the questions which will, I pray, lead to some explanation of what is going on does not speak well of us. But then, again, I wonder if we really want the answers? Time will tell.

To which I replied:

You ask: "But then, again, I wonder if we really want the answers?"

According to CNN we do not.

I quote from my blog: "Law Enforcement, Race and the Gun Culture - I”:

How many people are shot by police every year? Nobody seems to know the exact number (something that is itself disturbing -- no official government agency tracks the full data for the entire country)

… nobody wanted to fund it and the (police) departments didn't want it. They were concerned with their image and liability. They don't want to bother with it.''

If you have any observation on my later post, I welcome it.

And Bob Russo of Montclair, and its former mayor, chimed in with:

I loved your 20 year old letter to the Editor... and the reference to the Ham sandwich being indicted...the more things change, the more they STAY the same, I think is the correct version. Anyway, I think you are absolutely right on all counts. I just have a hard time as former Mayor and Deputy Mayor demonstrating against my police department as I have been asked to do by protestors of police brutality, which I believe really does exist, but should probably be referred to as overzealous excessive use of force. I just don't know what the solution to mistrust of police based on legitimate fears and negative past experiences is...while we still need the security provided by adequate community policing and foot patrols. I think we should be putting more police on the streets and devoting more resources to public safety and security at this time of increased violence and potential terrorism.....but the nation does not seem to care.....We should devote energy to securing our communities,  especially urban areas and cities,  rather than spending billions on foreign adventures that seem to only fan the flames of more hatred toward us....and we should fix our bridges and infrastructure which are crumbling due to neglect.   We really need another TR and FDR with a public works agenda to make things right again......sorry to write so late......I was just catching up and that is my commentary on yours tonight! 

Which prompted this response from me:

Sorry about not getting the idiom correct. I usually check things on the web, rather than relying on my memory, but in this case, apparently, I felt so comfortable with the form I used, (incorrectly) that I never thought of checking it.

On the substance, neither a TR nor an FDR, nor an LBJ, would make any difference. They all had collaborative Congresses, and overwhelming majorities in those Congresses. Congress does make a difference. And it used to be that politics ended at the water’s edge. All that is gone. 

The Supreme Court is no longer a judicial body, but a purely political one, with power greater then that of either the President or that of Congress. The Congress can be vetoed by the President, and the President can be overridden by 2/3rd in both houses, but SCOTUS can only be overridden but 2/3 of both houses and 3/4th of the legislatures of the states. That is awesome power, and when it is abused, e.g. Bush v. Gore, or the United case, which effectively legalized bribery and extortion, it does harm far beyond what people realize. Had Gore been allowed his victory, as was in fact the intent of the voters, the Supreme Court would have a totally different composition, would be handing down entirely different decisions, and even elections might be run differently, if a different court where to strike down the outrageous suppression of voters and the gerrymandering.

I have become convinced that SCOTUS must be weakened. I think 5-4 decisions should be treated as a tie and of no force and effect. I am aware that this might means that the upcoming 5-4 decision on gay marriage would be of no effect, but that would still leave most of the US with legal gay marriage. I assume that in any case giving effect to the Constitution’s, Full Faith and Credit clause (Article VI -Section 1) so that each state has to recognize a legal marriage in another state, is unavoidable even for the Right wing nuts on the Court. The language in the Constitution is too plain.

As for the police, I don’t think that we have inadequate forces. That may have been true once - I don’t think it is true any longer. But the police must be held accountable. If they are not, we are in deep trouble. But it goes way beyond the police. It is our whole criminal justice system, as I will elaborate in future posts.

As for "securing our communities, especially urban areas and cities” the best way to secure them in the long run is to deal with their economic and social problems. The outrageous under-financing of their schools, which should not be financed by local property taxes, which by their very nature finance poor neighborhood schools poorly, and wealthy ones extremely generously.  But, schools are not enough, unless we attack the underlying poverty and the social and cultural problems that have arisen from years, indeed generations of persecution, under-employment, and neglect.

As for "foreign adventures” I believe we must guard against isolationism (that has never served us well), while guarding against foolish involvement. Examples of sound involvement were the actions taken by Clinton in Bosnia and by George H.W. Bush in stopping the invasion of Kuwait, while Iraq, and of course, Vietnam were major errors. I think we are doing the right thing in punishing an expansionist Russia, but as I have indicated, we are wrong to allow an expansionist Israel.

Well, that’s a lot of area to cover in a nutshell, but on the criminal justice system, stay tuned.

Comments, questions, or corrections are welcome, and will be responded to and distributed with attribution, unless the writer requests that he/she not be identified. However, please give your full name and the town and state in which you reside or have an office. 

Reality Check!!

In the wake of the re-election of Barack Hussein Obama there is elation in liberal and Democratic circles and soul searching in the Republican folds.

The focus is on the fact that “Democrats have won the popular vote in four out of the last five Presidential elections — including the 2000 race in which Al Gore got 500,000 more votes than George W. Bush nationally, but wound up losing the electoral vote by two votes, courtesy of the Supreme Court.” See here. Of course, at the same time it overlooks that Obama, is the only Democratic President since F.D.R. to be granted a second term by a popular majority. See here.

But the first part sounds good! Makes for good headlines! Even has Republicans eating crow. Thus Governor Bobby Jindal in the most dramatic words of any Republican spokesperson said:  

We’ve got to stop being the stupid party… It’s time for a new Republican Party that talks like adults. It’s time for us to articulate our plans and our visions for America in real terms… We are not the party of big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts, big corporate loopholes or big anything…We must not be the party that simply protects the well off so that they can keep their toys.

So is it a whole new ball game. Have Republicans seen the light? Or in the immortal words of Yogi Berra, is it  “deja vu all over again".

It is a mere six years since I posted an article on my blog entitled "Euphoria and Reality" in which I pointed out that despite the big win in mid-term elections, the ability to govern was far from our grasp. After 2008 euphoria was even greater, but it was still a very big slog to get real reform enacted. To get the stimulus enacted, three Republican votes had to be found to overcome a filibuster, and the three votes were bought by diluting the crucial funding of state governments, leading to enormous job losses in the state’s public sectors, and a drag on job creation in the private sector.

But now in the elation of 2012 we seem to have forgotten what happened a mere two years ago. That was a real drubbing. As a result in 25 of the 50 states Republicans have complete control of all three branches of government, and 30 of the 50 states have Republican governors.  This came at a very propitious time for them since it followed the 2010 census, allowing them to redraw Congressional and even state legislative lines so as to assure them of a majority in State legislatures and in the House of Representatives into the indefinite future. See here. As of this year Democrats will hold complete sway in only 13 states. See here.

But what of the new Republican awakening as outlined by Jindal? Just recently he introduced into his state legislature a plan to “eliminate Louisiana's income and corporate taxes and pay for those cuts with increased sales taxes…” which according “to the Institute onTaxation and Economic Policy, would end up cutting taxes for the wealthiest Louisianans while raising taxes on the bottom 80 percent of Louisianans. So much for “We must not be the party that simply protects the well off so that they can keep their toys.” The talk has changed! The reality has not!

And is Jindal this new Republican moderate on other issues? According to Raw Story he favors "allowing creationism to be taught in biology classes, opposes abortion in all cases, votes against expanding federal funding for stem cell research and supports a constitutional ban on marriage equality."

So what does he mean when he says we have to stop being “the stupid party"? He means that they have to be better at obfuscation.

The fact is that the shift in state taxes from income to sales taxes, increases the burden on lower incomes, and decreases the burden on upper incomes, and it is happening in Republican controlled states, through out. For example Republicans in North Carolina are pushing such a plan. Kansas, which cut its income tax significantly last year, may trim further. Oklahoma, which tried to cut income taxes last year, is expected to try again. See here.

But far more ominous are Republican attempts to fix not only congressional elections by gerrymandering, but fixing the electoral votes by changing the rules.

They tried to suppress the vote in the last election. It didn’t work, or at least it didn’t work well enough. As the Washington Post wrote, now Republicans:

...who have control of states that went for President Obama in the 2012 election are pushing for their states to change how they award electoral votes. While almost every state awards electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis, Republicans want these states to instead award one vote to the winner of each congressional district. 

The other two electoral votes that each state has likely would be given to the statewide winner, as they are in the two states that currently employ this method: Maine and Nebraska. 

The new system would allow Republicans to consistently win electoral votes (and quite possibly a majority of electoral votes) from states like Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Virginia, regardless of whether they win the statewide vote. 

All five of these states went for Obama in 2012. Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania have consistently gone blue at the presidential level, and Virginia is tilting in that direction, which would make winning any electoral votes in these states a victory for the GOP. 

Why does it matter? 

It matters because the congressional district method gives the GOP a much better chance of winning, since a strong majority of U.S. congressional districts lean Republican. 

In fact, if every state awarded its electoral votes by congressional district, it’s likely that Mitt Romney would have won the 2012 presidential election despite losing the popular vote by nearly four percentage points. See here.

They are talking about a new party. They are talking about being more inclusive. About courting the Hispanic vote by supporting legalization of the 11 million illegal aliens in the US. Watch what they do, not what they say. It is already no legalization until the borders are secure, and of course we have been trying to make the borders secure for decades. They will never be secure enough to suit these pretend converts. They are owned lock stock and barrel by a majority of Caucasians, mostly rural, who founded this country on slavery and will never, never, accept the idea that they may no longer be the majority. They will do whatever it takes to keep the vote in their hands. Charles Krauthammer writing in the Washington Post speaks for them. “There is an obvious solution: enforcement first.” Even if somehow Republicans in the Congress agree to legalization, i.e. Green Cards, the will never agree to citizenship. Would they really allow 11 million more non-whites to vote, particularly if they are more then likely going to vote Democratic? I think not! Or as the Christian Science Monitor explains: 

In addition to sinking $1 billion into the failed "virtual fence," the US government has spent $2.6 billion for 650 miles of solid border. This wall doesn’t deter people – but it does defy the laws that protect the land.

As for the idea that the illegal aliens have to go to the end of the line before being considered for legalization that is the biggest hoax of them all. As was pointed out in a recent article in the New York Times:

If we really want to tackle unauthorized migration, we need to understand why it exists in the first place. The most important cause is our system of allocating green cards, or visas for permanent residency, which stipulates that no country may have more than 7 percent of the total each year. With an annual ceiling of 366,000 family- and employer-sponsored visas, the per-country limit is 25,620. 

“In practice, this means it is easy to immigrate here from, say, Belgium or New Zealand, but there are long waits — sometimes decades — for applicants from China, India, Mexico and the Philippines. These four max out on the limit every year. When critics admonish prospective immigrants — as well as the 11 million plus undocumented migrants currently in America — to “go to the back of the line,” they should realize that for many people the line is a cruel joke.

Republicans may go along with allowing illegal immigrants, who in the words of Senator McCain are, “… individuals to mow our lawn, serve our food, clean our homes and even watch our children, while not affording them any of the benefits that make our country so great, … I think everyone agrees that it’s not beneficial to our country to have these people hidden in the shadows.”

Republicans may allow them to come out of the shadows, but I predict that giving them citizenship and the right to vote is something that they will fight to the bitter end.

For a history of attempts at immigration reform, see here.

Marco Rubio, a descendent of Cubans, who won his Florida Senate seat, by less than 50% of the vote because his opposition was split, has been touted as the great immigration reformer. Is he? See here.

The cry of  “no amnesty” may no longer be the rallying cry, but citizenship and the right to vote is another matter all together. Of course that “no amnesty" cry was always phony, for we have statutes of limitations for every crime except murder. Why would we not have a statute of limitations for aliens having come here illegally decades ago?

But people who have made lives for themselves in this country, who have been here for decades, who have families here, are entitled to not only come out of the shadows, but to have full participation in our Democracy. Nothing else can or should be accepted.

Comments, questions, or corrections, are welcome and will be responded to and distributed with attribution, unless the writer requests that he/she not be identified.

In Defense of Romney

In my last post entitled "Congress and the Public - Kudos to Sarah Palin," which was distributed on Friday the 13^th, I addressed three issues: the huge amount of money influencing, one might say controlling, our public servants; the lies that dominate our public discourse, so as to bring government into greater disrepute; and the insider trading that is prevalent in Congress.

Paul Negri of Clifton, NJ expressed the view that what is behind the money cursing through our political, and indeed our economic system, and is the reason for scandals such as the insider trading in Congress is “greed and opportunism, (and that these) to a greater or lesser degree, are part of human nature, … and develop more in those who have, through circumstance, the best access to ways and means to self-advancement. The question is how do we push the equation to the lesser, rather than the greater, degree?”

I think the answer has to be through effective legislation, which in our present system can only be brought about by the use of money in the cause of fighting the misuse of money, at least until such a time, when money does not dominate our public discourse. One example that illustrates this, is the Gay Marriage issue in NY. Gay Marriage was legalized recently in New York because some courageous Republicans broke party ranks, and supported its legalization. As a result the Conservative Party of New York State threatened to withhold from them their endorsement and the considerable amount of money that goes with it. Now backers of Gay Marriage have countered by promising to offset the withdrawal of money by their own financial contributions. See here. Something similar can be done with respect to insider trading in Congress. Single issue campaigns are always more effective than broad ideological ones, and here it might be possible to draw money from all sides of the political spectrum, demanding of our law makers that they sign a pledge to support a bill drafted by the organization along the lines of the Palin recommendations.

But greed is not always bad. There is little doubt that greed is what drives our capitalist system, and it does not inevitably lead to the destructive greed of a Gordon Gekko in the movie “Wall Street.” But that is why we need laws and regulations. Left unchecked the engine of creation becomes an engine of destruction. The entrepreneur, while lauding competition, hates competition and seeks monopoly, which is why we have anti trust laws that have not been enforced adequately lately. The investor while lauding good research, seeks a leg up, by seeking or selling insider information, which is why we have laws against that, which have not been enforced until lately.

The banks seek to exploit their credit card customers, making them think that they can spend more than they make, and encouraging them to pay back tiny installments, so that they run up their interest debt at outrageously high interest, and then if they overlook one monthly payment hit them with even higher interest rates and penalties, so that their debt often ends up a multiple of their original one, and then using their money clout in Congress to deny them that, which every business has available, i.e. bankruptcy protection and also using its financial clout to prevent the capping of interest rates from becoming usurious. Even the Mafia never charged more. See here and here.

But what Mitt Romney did at Bain Capital is quintessentially good, beneficial capitalism. It is the essence of “Creative Destruction” so ably described by Joseph Schumpeter, the conservative Austrian economist. See here. Its essence is that inefficient entities must be made efficient or be eliminated, and in the long run the economy as whole will benefit, and while some jobs may be lost in the process, in the long run more will be created. It is ironic that the Right, which claims to be the apostle of free enterprise, should attack Romney for practicing the essence of Capitalism. But I guess the saying that “all is fair in love and war” applies! Is it inter-party war?

What has come out of this, however, is that it illustrates just how unfair our tax system is. The Republican Party has long argued that our “graduated tax system is unfair” in that it taxes the rich more than those with small, or at least much smaller incomes. But what we are seeing is that the system is indeed unfair, it taxes the rich at a rate that is barely distinguishable from the rate applied to much smaller incomes. Romney has now admitted that even though his income is in the millions annually, his tax rate is close to 15%. See here.

I wonder how many of my readers have an effective tax rate of 15%! When Warren Buffett caused a sensation by declaring that his secretary paid taxes at a higher rate than he did, the Right Wing blogosphere went wild with denunciations, and they all stayed on message. One even had a headline, “AP fact check: Secretaries don’t pay more taxes than their bosses," except when the article is accessed no reference to an AP fact check can be found. What percentage of their “income” the rich pay in taxes depends on how “income” is defined. Is it “earned income”, is it “taxable income” or is it total income the way most people would define it?

What causes this anomaly is that as people go up the income ladder more and more of their income comes from capital gains income and dividends. Thus the top 1% of earners on average get 43.4 % of their total income from Capital Gains, Interest and Dividends compared to the next highest quintile who only get 21.4% of their income from Capital Gains, Interest and Dividends, and the lowest quintile only get 1.3% of their income from Capital Gains, Interest and Dividends. The result is that the top 1% who make an average annual income of $1,873,000 pay an effective Income and Payroll tax rate of 20.6% (a lot more than Romney pays) as compared to the top 20% who make a fraction of that at $264,700 (which puts them in the upper middle class) pay almost the same tax rate at 20.1%. See here.

This is neither fair nor sensible. No tax reform, no matter how much the tax is graduated, can deal with this unfair anomaly, unless all types of income is taxed the same. In a country that prides itself on its Puritan work ethic, the discrimination against those who earn their income by working, as opposed to those who earn it by investing, is difficult to understand, and even more difficult to justify. This is even more evident when we consider that most of the rich started out in life with a substantial inheritance, which they could then use to generate more capital and it is further aggravated by our tax law, which forgives even capital gains taxes on inherited stock or other appreciated assets. See here, which is well worth reading.

Romney claims that, “What I got from my parents when they passed away I gave away to charity and to my kids. And so what I’ve earned has been earned through my education, my values, living in the greatest country in the world, through some luck and through hard work.”

Even if that is true, and the reader will forgive me if I am skeptical, he at the very least got an education that most people can only dream of. How often can the child of a blue-collar worker possibly obtain such an education? How likely is a child of a blue collar, or even of the average white collar worker, going to afford a pre-school education beginning at the age of two at $20,000 a year, giving that child a jump by the time it starts grade school. Then when public school begins, how likely is it that it can afford private school at more than the $20,000 mentioned? And even if a “Romney” goes to a public school, you can be sure that it will be an excellent one. On the other hand, with our system, where schools are frequently financed by local property taxes, the schools in a well to do neighborhood will be properly financed, while those in a disadvantaged area will never have what they need to support a first class education. And how many, with all these obstacles will get to, and through college, with their even greater financial burden. Some will. I did. But I would not have made it through college and eventually law school if my college had not been tuition free, something that has long since passed from the scene. 

But none of this should disqualify Romney, except that he is an exponent of this system and an exponent of making it even more unfair.

But most of all I object to his inauthenticity. His father must be turning in his grave, for that former Governor of Michigan, and once Presidential aspirant, put the greatest value on authenticity. See here.

Phoniness is not leadership. Opportunism is a serious character flaw. Inauthenticity is, or should be, disqualifying.

Comments are welcome and will be distributed with attribution unless the writer requests that he/she not be identified.