Homelessness in the U.S.

I've been keeping my eye on this story, "Adding Homeless Shelters Is a Political Risk, but de Blasio Sees No Alternative." New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is running for reelection on the politically perilous pledge to build 90 new homeless shelters in five years. There are 60,000 people in New York City shelters currently, with countless others living on the street.

New York City is the capital of homelessness, surpassing Los Angeles, and far surpassing my city, Seattle. The big spike in NYC homelessness occurred under Mayor Mike Bloomberg's watch when the city's rental subsidy program collapsed.

Homelessness is at a crisis point in the United States. On any day walking to work along a major east-west arterial I bear witness to the new urban gestalt: a steady state of great affluence and what appears to be full employment spiced with numerous kernels of destitution. The homeless shuffle among the affluent like zombies. The Hoovervilles and hobo villages sprout up everywhere, particularly in the slivers of land along the Interstate.

De Blasio and Seattle's Ed Murray are trying to erect some sort of institutional foundation to shore up the societal collapse brought on by neoliberalism. The homeless in big U.S. cities are refugees akin to those from Africa and Middle East seeking safe harbor in northern Europe; they're economic casualties.

Guess What? We Don't Need to Live in a Police State

Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, the former Clinton and Obama administration power broker and macho-posturing one-percenter, is in trouble. As Monica Davey reported the other day, "Rahm Emanuel, Under Siege in Chicago, Shows Contrite Side":

Mr. Emanuel swept into the mayor’s office in 2011, helped in part by what black Chicagoans knew about him at the time: that Mr. Obama trusted him. Four years later, he faced a steeper climb in a city that had gotten to know him better. He was forced into a runoff with Jesus G. Garcia, a county commissioner who was seeking to become the city’s first Latino mayor, partly because of critics who said Mr. Emanuel was too brusque and more attentive to the wishes of downtown interests than the needs of residents from some poorer neighborhoods.

The mayor, whose clash with public schoolteachers helped set off the city’s first teachers’ strike in a quarter-century, drew special anger in 2013 for overseeing the closing of nearly 50 public schools, many of them in black and Latino neighborhoods. After winning the unexpectedly tense campaign in April, Mr. Emanuel promised that he had gotten the city’s message.

The start of Mr. Emanuel’s second term already was complicated by the city’s fiscal problems. Facing mounting pension payments and sinking credit ratings, Mr. Emanuel pushed through the largest property tax increase in the city’s modern history. Also, the possibility of another teachers’ strike looms.

The fatal shootings Saturday morning occurred on the city’s West Side, the police said, after officers answered a call about a domestic disturbance and were confronted by a “combative” man who relatives said was wielding a baseball bat. The man, Quintonio LeGrier, was shot dead, as was a bystander, Bettie Jones, a first-floor tenant who the police said was hit accidentally by officers’ shots. Mr. LeGrier’s relatives said that he had mental health problems and that the deaths raised questions about the Police Department’s handling of mental illness and about its use of weapons near bystanders.

Mr. Emanuel’s spokesman said the mayor was monitoring the events closely and had been in communication since early Saturday with the Police Department and his office. Mr. Emanuel spoke to the family of Ms. Jones on Sunday to offer his condolences, his spokesman said.

“Anytime an officer uses force, the public deserves answers, and regardless of the circumstances we all grieve anytime there is a loss of life in our city,” the statement from Mr. Emanuel said. “With that in mind, I have been informed that the Independent Police Review Authority has opened investigations into each shooting, and that all evidence will be shared with the Cook County state’s attorney’s office for additional review in the days ahead.”

But the focus of criticism against Mr. Emanuel has been the McDonald case. For months after Mr. McDonald, 17, was killed on the Southwest Side on Oct. 20, 2014, the city kept a police dashboard camera video of the shooting private. It showed Officer Jason Van Dyke firing at Mr. McDonald even after he lay crumpled on the ground. Mr. McDonald had been carrying a knife, but he appeared to veer slightly away from officers when Officer Van Dyke fired the fatal shots. 

Mr. Emanuel has said the city’s longstanding policy is to keep videos private until prosecutors’ investigations are complete. In Mr. McDonald’s case, the city announced in April that it would pay his family $5 million even before a lawsuit was filed. Yet the city refused to make public the video until a judge ordered it last month; only hours before the release, the Cook County state’s attorney, Anita Alvarez, charged Officer Van Dyke with murder in the shooting. 

Since then, Mr. Emanuel has fired his police superintendent, Garry F. McCarthy; replaced the head of an agency that investigates the most egregious complaints against officers; appointed a task force to recommend changes to the department; and met this month with Justice Department officials as they started a broad review of the Police Department. Mr. Emanuel, who says he did not view the McDonald video until the rest of Chicago saw it in November, made an emotional speech before the City Council apologizing for the death and pledging reforms. 

Yet demonstrators here complain that Mr. Emanuel should have released the video months ago. They question whether his stressful re-election bid played a role in the city’s quick settlement with the McDonald family and its efforts to keep the video private — claims Mr. Emanuel’s office vehemently denies. Regardless, the demonstrators say Mr. Emanuel should have demanded changes in the Police Department, with its well-documented history of mistreating black residents, long ago.

The problem for big city mayors, as New York City's Bill de Blasio discovered last year around this time, is any criticism of the "thin blue line" can lead to an open revolt. Then metropolitan citizens of the indispensable nation are confronted with the ugly realization that they actually belong to a banana republic. To question the sovereign infallibility of the police is to invite retribution. I saw it up close during the Seattle WTO when my neighborhood, home to a community college with a radical activist student body, was perceived to be a hotbed of protest and anti-police sentiment. For a week or two following the ministerial it felt like we were under quarantine.

Last week Naked Capitalism posted Matthew Haywood's helpful outline of the post-Ferguson state of affairs for American policing, "The Logic of the Police State in America," the gist of which is that police forces across the country, feeling the pressure of Black Lives Matter, are attempting to protect their "above-the-law" privileges.

The problem for the popo is in their main argument, which Haywood summarizes as follows:

If you’ve been listening to various police agencies and their supporters, then you know what the future holds: anarchy is coming — and it’s all the fault of activists.

In May, a Wall Street Journal op-ed warned of a “new nationwide crime wave” thanks to “intense agitation against American police departments” over the previous year. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie went further. Talking recently with the host of CBS’s Face the Nation, the Republican presidential hopeful asserted that the Black Lives Matter movement wasn’t about reform but something far more sinister. “They’ve been chanting in the streets for the murder of police officers,” he insisted. Even the nation’s top cop, FBI Director James Comey, weighed in at the University of Chicago Law School, speaking of “a chill wind that has blown through American law enforcement over the last year.”

According to these figures and others like them, lawlessness has been sweeping the nation as the so-called Ferguson effect spreads. Criminals have been emboldened as police officers are forced to think twice about doing their jobs for fear of the infamy of starring in the next viral video. The police have supposedly become the targets of assassins intoxicated by “anti-cop rhetoric,” just as departments are being stripped of the kind of high-powered equipment they need to protect officers and communities.  Even their funding streams have, it’s claimed, come under attack as anti-cop bias has infected Washington, D.C.  Senator Ted Cruz caught the spirit of that critique by convening a Senate subcommittee hearing to which he gave the title, “The War on Police: How the Federal Government Undermines State and Local Law Enforcement.” According to him, the federal government, including the president and attorney general, has been vilifying the police, who are now being treated as if they, not the criminals, were the enemy.

Haywood goes on to describe how violent attacks against the police are at all-time low. What is more problematic for the police state is the case of New York City, where the end of aggressive law enforcement, in the form of stop and frisk, led not to a spike in crime, as many pundits and cops predicted, but to a significant drop in crime. This from yesterday's unsigned editorial: "New York City Policing, by the Numbers":

The warnings began even before Bill de Blasio was sworn in as New York City’s mayor in January 2014. A safe New York depended on the aggressive policing tactics that began in the 1990s and flourished under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his police commissioner, Ray Kelly. Without those tactics, the doomsayers said, the city would be swamped by a 1970s-style crime wave. 

After a federal judge ruled in 2013 that the Police Department’s “stop and frisk” policy was so sweeping that it violated the Constitution, Mr. Kelly was furious. “Violent crime will go up,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “No question about it.” 

That prediction has, of course, been proved wrong, as crime in the city remains at historic lows under Mayor de Blasio and his police commissioner, William Bratton, even as arrests, stops and summonses continue to plummet after a peak in 2011. 

An illuminating new report released by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice provides the most comprehensive analysis yet of the numbers behind the rise and fall of police “enforcement actions” over the past decade. Between 2011 and 2014, the report found, the total number of these actions — defined as arrests for felonies and misdemeanors, criminal summonses, and stop-and-frisks — fell by more than 800,000, or 31 percent. 

The biggest drop was in street stops, which had skyrocketed to more than 685,000 in 2011 from 160,000 in 2003. Some officers admitted they felt constant pressure to meet arbitrary productivity quotas, but the effect was to disproportionately target young African-American men, most of whom were doing nothing wrong. By 2014, the number of stops was under 46,000 — a 93 percent decline in only three years, with stops going down most sharply in those poorer and minority neighborhoods where they grew the fastest over the previous decade.

Guess what? We don't need to live in a police state.

NYPD: This is What the U.S. Police State Looks Like

I always thought it was interesting that the day before the December 20 murder of NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos by Ismaaiyl Brinsley Juan Gonzalez appeared on Democracy Now! to tell the show's leftist listeners that NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio is the real deal. Here is the blurb that accompanies Gonzalez's December 19 segment:

Democracy Now! co-host Juan González discusses his exclusive year-end interview with New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. "The list of his accomplishments in just one year has shocked even me — a total skeptic after more 35 years of covering urban politics in this country," writes González in his latest column. "And it’s not just the big issues like education, affordable housing, reform of police-community relations, or new contracts and pay raises for city workers. It’s also a host of less publicized but important measures affecting ordinary New Yorkers. Things like paid sick leave and a living wage for low-income workers. Like the lowest rent increase in memory for 800,000."

So what we have to consider is that the ongoing quasi-"sit down" strike that the NYPD is engaged in (see yesterday's "For Second Week, Arrests Plunge in New York City" by J. David Goodman and Al Baker) is a politically reactionary statement, a coup d'état of sorts. It is reminiscent of the situation in Cairo right before the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces removed Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi in a coup. Policing had effectively ceased.

Vivian Yee sums up the precipitous drop off in policing in New York City in today's "Life in New York City, Where Arrests Are Down and Tickets Are Rarities":

In a city of more than eight million people and 33 million subway rides a week, police officers arrested or ticketed just 22 people for jumping the turnstile last week. In the same period a year ago, nearly 1,400 fare-beaters were caught. 

Tuesday morning’s alternate-side parking period found 25 cars on the wrong side of one block in Park Slope, Brooklyn, still occupying the spaces they were required to leave an hour earlier, without a single ticket in sight. None of this appeared to faze the street sweeper moving down the block — or the police cruiser just behind it, which did not stop. 

At New York City housing projects from the Bronx to Staten Island, residents said they had seen fewer officers patrolling their hallways and streets, leaving some people relieved and others frightened for their safety. 

And on Burnside Avenue in the Bronx on Tuesday morning, Leyni Soto relished sipping from a Red Bull in a brown paper bag. When he did the same thing two months ago, an officer asked him what was in the bag.

But this time was different. “They slowed down their pace, they looked at me, they looked at the bag and they kept going,” said Mr. Soto, 28, an assistant manager of a cellphone store. “It felt really good.” 

If the Police Department’s own statistics are any indication, Mr. Soto was not simply getting a lucky break. For two consecutive weeks, New York City police officers have seemed to sit back, ignoring minor offenses and parking transgressions so completely that only 347 criminal summonses were written in the seven days through Sunday, down from 4,077 in the same period a year ago. 

Such startling numbers reflect a continuing conflict between rank-and-file officers and Mayor Bill de Blasio, on whom they have literally turned their backs. But for the New Yorkers in the middle, the slowdown has not appeared to translate to a spike in serious crime so much as in a fading, for good or ill, of the blue line that keeps the city’s streets in order.

The question is whether the collapse in "broken windows" enforcement is necessarily a bad thing. There will certainly be a loss of city revenue from all those unwritten tickets. But major violent crime will most likely be unaffected. My experience of having lived five years in New York City at a time when it posted the highest numbers of homicides annually is that I had more to fear from the police than from any criminals. And I lived and moved about on the street in Washington Heights' 34th police precinct, one of the more dangerous places in New York City.

One thing is for sure. The Gray Lady thinks the police rebellion is a very bad thing. While originally stoking police ressentiment by publishing numerous stories connecting the Black Lives Matter protests and the murders of Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos with a return to the social upheaval and "white flight" decline of the Big Apple in the early 1970s, The New York Times has published several hard-hitting unsigned editorials blaming the NYPD for fascistic overreach. Today's iteration is quite good, "No Justice, No Police." I'm going to quote the whole thing:

Mayor Bill de Blasio has been in office barely a year, and already forces of entropy are roaming the streets, turning their backs on the law, defying civil authority and trying to unravel the social fabric. 

No, not squeegee-men or turnstile-jumpers. We’re talking about the cops. 

For the second straight week, police officers across the city have all but stopped writing tickets and severely cut down the number of arrests. The Times reported that in the week ending Sunday, only 347 criminal summonses were issued citywide, down from 4,077 over the same period last year. Parking and traffic tickets were down by more than 90 percent. In Coney Island, ticketing and summonses fell to zero. 

The city has been placed in an absurd position, with its police commissioner, William Bratton — a pioneer of “broken windows” policing who has just written a long, impassioned defense of that strategy as an essential crime-fighting tool — leading a force that is refusing to carry it out. 

Police union officials deny responsibility for the mass inaction. But Edward Mullins, president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, said officers had talked among themselves and “it became contagious,” apparently like the flu. 

Call this what it is: a reckless, coordinated escalation of a war between the police unions and Mr. de Blasio and a hijacking of law-enforcement policy by those who do not set law-enforcement policy. This deplorable gesture is bound to increase tension in a city already rattled over the killing by the police of an unarmed man, Eric Garner, last summer, the executions of two officers in Brooklyn last month, and the shootings on Monday of two plainclothes officers in the Bronx. 

Mr. Bratton spoke delicately at a news conference on Monday. He said there could be other explanations, like officers being too busy handling police-reform demonstrations and attending funerals. He promised to investigate — and to “deal with it very appropriately, if we have to.” 

Mr. de Blasio’s critics foretold doom when he was elected a year ago. They said graffiti, muggings and other crime would rush back with a vengeance. They were dead wrong — crime rates continued to decline to historic lows in 2014 — but now it seems the cops are trying to help prove them right. 

The madness has to stop. The problem is not that a two-week suspension of “broken windows” policing is going to unleash chaos in the city. The problem is that cops who refuse to do their jobs and revel in showing contempt to their civilian leaders are damaging the social order all by themselves. 

Mr. de Blasio, who has been cautious since the shootings, found his voice on Monday, saying for the first time that the police officers’ protests of turning their backs at the slain officers’ funerals had been disrespectful to the families of the dead. He was right, but he needs to do more. 

He should appeal directly to the public and say plainly that the police are trying to extort him and the city he leads. 

If the Police Department’s current commanders cannot get the cops to do their jobs, Mr. de Blasio should consider replacing them.

He should invite the Justice Department to determine if the police are guilty of civil rights violations in withdrawing policing from minority communities. 

He should remind the police that they are public employees, under oath to uphold city and state laws. 

If Mr. de Blasio’s critics are right and the city is coming unglued, it is not because of what he has done. He was elected by an overwhelming vote, because he promised action on police reform, starting with the end of stop-and-frisk tactics that corralled so many innocent New Yorkers into the criminal-justice system. The city got the mayor it wanted — and then, because of Mr. de Blasio, it got Mr. Bratton. 

Mr. Bratton’s faith in “broken windows” needs rethinking. But nothing will be fixed as long as police officers are refusing to do their jobs. 

A video emerged this week of a New York cop, apparently with nothing better to do, horsing around on the hood of a squad car, falling off and hitting his head. It would hard to invent a more fitting image of the ridiculous — and dangerous — place this atmosphere of sullen insubordination has taken us.

De Blasio will not "throw down" with the NYPD, as helpfully outlined by the Gray Lady. He is a shrewd politician. He knows the police are doing more damage to themselves than he could ever do by firing police commanders or demanding a DOJ investigation. This is an educable moment. People are aroused and alert because of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner and the Black Lives Matter movement. Now here comes the NYPD acting like a bully throwing a tantrum, arguing that police safety trumps public safety, comporting themselves as if risk, sometimes deadly, is not part of their job description. (Get a building trades guy talking about whose job is more dangerous, his or the police, and you will find out what he thinks about the risk of police work compared to construction.)

The educable moment that the NYPD is treating us to is on the nature of fascism. We must genuflect to and honor the authority of a violent, privileged, corrupt gang that rules over us with impunity, regardless of any code of ethics or set of laws. Those of us who have a certain skin color, mental illness, or come from a particular ethnic group can be slaughtered. This is the police state within which we reside. It is now on full display in the cultural capital of the United States.

Poor, Poor POPO: NYPD Casts Black Lives Matter Protesters as Terrorists

Saturday, December 20 was the day that Ismaaiyl Brinsley gunned down two NYPD officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, while they sat in their patrol car in Bed-Stuy. As a result, for the last two weeks the Black Lives Matter protest movement has been crowded out of the newspapers, replaced by the ceremonial charade of Patrolmen's Benevolent Association president Patrick Lynch taking shots at NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio and de Blasio meekly, apologetically replying.

The mainstream media prefers this type of reporting -- tit-for-tat squabbles between camps of officials -- to actually covering popular movements because it requires less work. The reporter gets a quote from one camp, a reply from the other camp, rehashes the main markers of the conflict followed by next steps, and Shazam! Story finished. That is what you have in "Police Unions’ Leaders Air Grievances in 2-Hour Meeting With de Blasio," by Matt Flegenheimer and J. David Goodman.

One interesting quote by a police union official in the Flegenheimer and Goodman piece conflates the Black Lives Matter protests with the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks of 9/11:

Officials with the administration seemed to bet that some of the union leaders might act as peacekeepers, or at least supply more measured voices, in the conflict with the patrolmen’s union. 

However, in an email to members on Tuesday, Roy T. Richter, president of the Captains’ Endowment Association, said that he would allow the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association to “lead any conversation.” He added that he stood “in solidarity with them as they express raw outrage against the forces that caused the coldblooded assassination of our two brother police officers.” 

Mr. Richter compared the emotional climate of the day to that immediately following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He wrote that he had met privately with Mr. de Blasio — “at his request” — just before Christmas “to give him a blunt critique of the hostile antipolice environment” in the city.

There you have it. Police union leadership blaming protesters for the death of Liu and Ramos, comparing the Black Lives Matter protests and the 9/11 terror attacks. This is the direction we are headed: lawful protest conflated with terrorism.

To highlight the imbalanced, aggrieved state of mind dominant now in the NYPD is yesterday's report by Al Baker and J. David Goodman, "Arrest Statistics Decline Sharply; Police Unions Deny an Organized Slowdown." The NYPD is engaged in a form of wildcat sit-down strike, refusing to make arrests:

. . . [T]he latest official statistics came in. 

Arrests for crimes large and small, as well as tickets for minor infractions, are down drastically across the city. The department has not said whether it believes that officers are acting in concert — as a result of a specific job action — or whether the officers’ deaths produced a spontaneous response.

The two precincts most directly affected by the deaths — the 79th, where Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were gunned down as they sat in their patrol car on a Brooklyn street; and the 84th, where they were usually assigned — saw a single criminal summons in the week that ended Sunday, according to Police Department statistics. Officers in those precincts wrote no parking or traffic tickets. By contrast, the combined tally of criminal summonses alone during the same week last year reached 130, the department statistics showed. 

Mr. Bratton said on Monday that a “weeklong period of mourning” and demonstrations that were straining resources were contributing to the drop-off in arrests and summonses. But he said the slowdown should not concern New Yorkers. “I would point out it has not had an impact on the city’s safety at all,” Mr. Bratton said. 

A top union official flatly denied that there was a job action and pointed to the orders to double up and the need to police demonstrations as the main reasons. 

“No one has sanctioned a slowdown or stoppage,” said Edward Mullins, the president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association. “That is not something that anybody came out and said to do.” 

He added: “We have demonstrations every night of the week, to which cops are being pulled into every night. We have had two officers killed that has changed the everyday duties of what we are doing, and one of those changes is the consistency of patrol cars backing each other up on radio assignments.” 

He said summonses were simply not a priority at moments like this. 

Still, one senior police official who reviewed precinct-level data across the city said the decline had the signs of an organized effort and was continuing this week. 

It is not uncommon for a grieving station house to ease up on enforcement for a brief period. Enforcement numbers can fluctuate from station house to station house, and from week to week, for a number of other reasons, too, including shifts in personnel or directives from commanders. The holidays can also be a factor. 

But the drop-off in activity in Bedford-Stuyvesant and in Downtown Brooklyn could not explain the sharp slowdown in routine enforcement in each of the city’s 77 police precincts, from the 120th in Staten Island to the 47th in the Bronx.

In the week after Officers Ramos and Liu were killed on Dec. 20, the number of summonses for minor criminal offenses, as well as those for parking and traffic violations, decreased by more than 90 percent versus the same week a year earlier. And arrests over seven major categories of felony offenses were nearly 40 percent lower, the numbers show.

My neighborhood was protester ground zero for the historic "Battle in Seattle." For several weeks following the WTO my perception was that policing of the Capitol Hill neighborhood effectively ceased. This was the police's way of saying, "You rise up against us, we will find a way to get back at you." New York City is experiencing something similar.

And all of this in an environment where crime continues to drop (J. David Goodman and Al Baker, "Murders in New York Drop to a Record Low, but Officers Aren’t Celebrating"). So clearly we are dealing here with a sense of police entitlement under siege.

And while for the last two weeks the Gray Lady has dropped her focus on the Black Lives Matter protests, which continue across the country, choosing instead to follow the NYPD tantrum, she published a terrific unsigned editorial the other day, "When New York City Police Walk Off the Job":

The list of [police] grievances adds up to very little, unless you look at it through the magnifying lens of resentment fomented by union bosses and right-wing commentators. The falling murder rate, the increased resources for the department, the end of quota-based policing, which the police union despised, the mayor’s commitment to “broken-windows” policing — none of that matters, because many cops have latched on to the narrative that they are hated, with the mayor orchestrating the hate. 

It’s a false narrative. Mr. de Blasio was elected by a wide margin on a promise to reform the policing excesses that were found unconstitutional by a federal court. He hired a proven reformer, Mr. Bratton, who had achieved with the Los Angeles Police Department what needs doing in New York. The furor that has gripped the city since the Garner killing has been a complicated mess. But what New Yorkers expect of the Police Department is simple: 

1. Don’t violate the Constitution. 

2. Don’t kill unarmed people. 

To that we can add: 

3. Do your jobs. The police are sworn public servants, and refusing to work violates their oath to serve and protect. Mr. Bratton should hold his commanders and supervisors responsible, and turn this insubordination around.

I think the NYPD must be sensing now that business as usual is not going to fly here. But rather than moderate its messaging, it appears to be doubling down. The story by Al Baker this morning, "Man Threatened to Kill Officers, Authorities Say," plays up the poor, poor POPO motif:

The Police Department has now investigated in the past dozen days more than 90 threats it deemed serious among the hundreds that have streamed in from 311, 911, online postings and tips, including eight made on Wednesday through social media sites. 

The first step in analyzing them is to separate angry speech, hate speech and a threat “where someone is indicating they intend to act,” said John J. Miller, the deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism. 

“What we’ve found in a number of these are, you’ve got dangerous people with serious criminal records, some of whom possessed weapons, who are making these threats,” he said. “And in other cases we’ve found guys who are big and bad over the computer but when the cops knock at their door, they are reduced to tears, saying they were drunk and never really meant anything by it.”

The way that the NYPD has responded to the Black Lives Matter protests after the Liu and Ramos shooting has been fascinating. Petulant, scared, vulnerable yet tough, in command and demanding obeisance from the citizens and elected leaders of the metropolis, it is a portrait of a balling infant coming to understand that mother's body is separate. Baby is on his own.

Hallowed Ritual Meant to Convey Activity and Good Faith

Yesterday Lakhdar Brahimi announced that there would be no Geneva II peace talks in November. Brahimi said that he would meet again with U.S. and Russian diplomats at the end of the month to try to put something together. But after that date one wonders how long Brahimi will stick around. There has been no movement on the most basic issue of who should attend -- which rebel groups, which nations. Nick Cumming-Bruce and Rick Gladstone have the story, "Diplomats Fail to Agree on Details for Syria Peace Talks":

Mr. Brahimi made it clear that the lack of preparation on the part of Syria’s opposition was an acute and immediate cause for delaying a peace conference. “They are divided, that’s no secret for anyone, they are facing all sorts of problems,” he said. 

The opposition National Coalition has no leverage over the armed groups battling Mr. Assad, particularly the jihadist militants linked to Al Qaeda who are among the most effective fighters. They have said that any insurgents who participate in Geneva peace talks would be regarded as traitors. 

Mr. Brahimi also acknowledged that the diplomats had been unable to agree on whether Iran, Mr. Assad’s most important regional ally, would be invited to a peace conference. “Iran is definitely one of the issues that will be discussed further,” he said. 

Saudi Arabia, Iran’s regional rival and a major supporter of the Syrian insurgency, remains opposed to Iranian participation in peace talks. Western governments, recognizing Iran as an important participant, have appeared less resistant to Iran’s attendance. But diplomats say a major obstacle is Iran’s reluctance to endorse the communiqué of the first Geneva conference in June 2012, which called for a transition under a government formed by mutual consent. 

The question of Mr. Assad’s role in a transition government looms as a major obstacle. In a meeting with Mr. Brahimi in Damascus last week, Mr. Assad said “only the Syrian people are authorized to shape the future of Syria,” a formula that rejects American insistence that he step down as part of any peace process. “We are not going to Geneva to hand over power,” Syria’s information minister, Omran al-Zoubi, said on Monday, according to Syria’s official SANA news agency. “President Bashar al-Assad will remain head of state.”

Further talks in Geneva to prepare the way for a Geneva II summit are like Kerry shuttling between Netanyahu and Abbas, a hallowed ritual meant to convey activity and good faith while maintaining a status quo of perpetual war and occupation.

In a troubling sign, the odious Samantha Power was back in the news denigrating the Syrian government and questioning the accuracy of its declaration to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. The OPCW has said verification is on schedule and the Syrian government is complying. Once again this sets up the familiar conflict between the United States and an international agency responsible for administering a United Nations Security Council resolution. U.S. warmongering goes unsupported by its people, but it is supported by elites and the foreign governments that maintain those elites. So warmongering will continue.

This despite proof that the policy of fomenting war and rebellion is having the opposite effect of the overarching U.S. national security mission (at least as it is formulated for public consumption) of eradicating Al Qaeda and its affiliates. Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) continues to consolidate its hold on northern Syria. The caliphate springs up on the border of NATO.

Attempting to break the logjam, Russia is offering to host informal talks between the Syrian government and members of the opposition.

Since I have mentioned "a hallowed ritual meant to convey activity and good faith," I should note that yesterday was Election Day in the United States. There wasn't a whole lot to celebrate. Bill de Blasio, a progressive Democrat, won the New York City mayor's race in an impressive landslide. That's good news. Corporate Democrat and uber-Clintonite Terry McAuliffe was elected governor of Virginia over a Tea Party troglodyte Ken Cuccinelli. One can debate the merits of McAuliffe's victory. In Washington State, the bad news is that I-522, a GMO-labeling initiative, is headed for defeat. It shared the fate of last year's GMO-labeling initiative in California -- buried by a blizzard of negative advertising paid for by corporate behemoths like Monsanto and PepsiCo.

What Does a Huge Win by de Blasio Portend?

If you haven't been following New York City's mayor race all you need to know is that a progressive Democrat, Bill de Blasio, an advocate for the Sandinistas in his youth, is poised to wallop the Republican candidate, Joe Lhota, by a margin not seen since Ed Koch won his third term in 1985 by 68 percentage points. De Blasio will be the first Democrat elected mayor since David Dinkins in 1989 (when I lived in the Big Apple).

Here's a good snapshot of the race from this morning's story, "De Blasio in Position to Win Mayor’s Race by Historic Margin, Poll Shows," by David Chen and Megan Thee-Brenan:

Mr. de Blasio won the Democratic primary by running as the most liberal of the major candidates in the field; he has proposed raising taxes on high-income New Yorkers and has supported greater oversight of the Police Department. Nonetheless, one in five Republicans are supporting him for mayor, suggesting in follow-up interviews that they are looking for change after eight years with Rudolph W. Giuliani as mayor followed by 12 years with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. 

“I think de Blasio’s policies will be a change for the better from the Bloomberg era,” said Duane Dowden, a 33-year-old Brooklyn Republican who is a student in social work. Oswald Ramotar, a 51-year-old Queens Republican, agreed, saying, “I’m voting for de Blasio because I think he would bring better changes than Lhota would, like creating more jobs.” And Erick Washington, a 59-year-old Brooklyn Republican, said, “I’m not voting for Lhota because I feel that would be the same as voting for the Giuliani administration.”

Exhaustion with twenty years of Republican executive leadership is not the only issue motivating New Yorkers; the recent Tea Party contrived federal government shutdown is also a factor: "The recent federal government shutdown did not help Mr. Lhota: 47 percent of likely voters said that the shutdown made them more likely to vote for a Democrat, while only 6 percent said it prompted them to back a Republican."

To find answers as to how de Blasio's New York City strength plays nationally check out Thomas Edsall's opinion piece from last week, "Bill de Blasio and the New Urban Populism." As I've said frequently, Thomas Edsall's online column for the New York Times is one of the best sources available for divining the shifts underway in our national politics. I don't always agree with his conclusions and forecasts, but I think that his chosen areas of focus -- income inequality, the gradual diminishing of whites to minority status in the electorate, the war in the GOP between organizational elites and the Tea Party -- are on the money.

Speaking of money, the money passage in Edsall's column on the New York City mayoral election is as follows:

DEMOGRAPHICALLY, New York City is already where the nation will be sometime in the latter part of this century. Whites are 33.3 percent of the city’s population. Hispanics are close behind, at 28.6 percent, and blacks are at 22.8 percent. This demographic profile,as shown in Figure 2, is significantly different from what it was 1990, a year after the last mayoral victory by a liberal Democrat, David Dinkins. In 1990, whites were the clearly dominant plurality group at 43.2 percent, with roughly equal numbers of blacks, 25.2 percent, and Hispanics, 24.4 percent. 

More important in terms of both election outcomes and policy making, the city’s electorate – the people who actually go out and cast ballots – shifted from a 56 percent white majority in 1989 to a 46 percent minority in 2009, during the last mayoral election. If that transition continues at roughly the same rate, about 1 percentage point every two years, the 2013 electorate for the mayoral election will be 44 percent white. 

Among the reasons the electorate in New York has a higher percentage of whites and a smaller proportion of minorities than the city’s population as a whole is that a higher percentage of whites are of voting age and a higher percentage of minorities are not citizens and are thus ineligible to vote.

As whiteness evaporates nationally the country will become more progressive. Why? Because blacks and Hispanics are not as reflexively conservative and individualistic as whites:

By almost every measure, whites are more economically conservative than blacks and Hispanics. Surveys conducted over 36 years by American National Election Studies have found that blacks, by margins of 2 or 3 to 1, believe that government should “see to it that every person has a job and a good standard of living,” while whites, by margins nearly as large, believe that “government should just let each person get ahead on their own.”

The A.N.E.S. surveys did not break out Hispanic responses to this question. A Pew Research Center report from April 2012, “Hispanics and Their Views of Identity,” did compare the views of Latinos to the general population. It asked the question “would you rather have a smaller government providing fewer services, or bigger government providing more services?” A majority of all voters favored smaller government by a 48-41 margin, but Hispanics preferred a bigger government decisively, by 75 to 19 percent. 

There is a fundamental disagreement along racial and ethnic lines about what causes poverty. This is demonstrated in a June 2012 Pew survey that asked, “In your opinion, which is generally more often to blame if a person is poor, lack of effort on his or her own part, or circumstances beyond his or her control?” Whites were split, 41-41, but strong majorities of blacks and Hispanics answered “circumstances beyond his or her control,” 62-28 and 59-27, respectively. The premise of the de Blasio agenda is that people are poor because of circumstances beyond their control and therefore government intervention is essential. How you responded to the Pew question is likely to correlate strongly with whether you support or oppose de Blasio and how deeply felt your choice is.

The Supreme Court rulings on campaign finance -- the 2010 Citizens United decision, the upcoming decision on Buckley -- as well as its striking down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 are attempts to keep the progressive hordes at bay. But the progressive hordes are coming. They already elected an Obama twice. And even though Obama governs as a Clinton New Democrat he campaigned and won his elections as a progressive.

Edsall sees trouble ahead for the Democrats. He thinks that while there is a fraction of wealthy progressives who will stick with a de Blasio progressive Democrat through thick and thin even when he raises their taxes substantially, soon down the road as the national Democratic Party tilts more and more to the left the wealthy will abandon the organization:

In addition to the growing leverage of minority and low-income voters in the Democratic Party, the center-left coalition includes many upscale, well-educated social liberals, who have found common ground with their less fortunate allies in shared animosity toward the Republican Party. 

The stronger the pro-government poor-to-lower-middle class wing gets, the more likely the coalition will fracture along class and economic fault lines. 

As many affluent progressive-leaning voters move to the suburbs (by 2010 New York lost 129,165 residents who had been between the ages 25 and 34 in 2000), have children, buy homes and pay significant property taxes, they are more likely to join the ranks of those who oppose a political party that seeks to increase their tax burdens. They will become legitimate targets for recruitment by a Republican Party that is reasonably conservative — if that stops being an oxymoron. 

Will de Blasio and the new urban populism alienate the party’s upscale wing? In New York and other major American cities, there are many affluent liberals who are willing to support policies redistributing their income to those struggling to make ends meet. But they don’t make up a majority of the affluent voters who are currently alienated by Republican extremism — and these voters are an essential component of the coalition Democratic strategists plan to use to map out their political future. The growing leftward tilt of the national Democratic Party reflected in political trends in New York is as likely to provoke intraparty conflict as it is to usher in an era of revived liberalism. There are risks and benefits to standing foursquare in support of the least advantaged.

I think, yes, Edsall is right. Intraparty conflict is coming down the pike, much as it is the norm now in the Republican Party. It will be on display as Hillary gears up for a run in 2016. The organizational elite will trot out corporate Democrats who are progressive on social issues like gay marriage -- look at Seattle's mayoral race -- but hew to the same old exhausted neoliberal nostrums. At best this is only a strategy that buys a bit of time. Change is coming. The current paradigm is broken; we need a shift.