The Bloomberg Doomsday Scenario

The goalposts now move to Nevada and South Carolina where Hillary will attempt to remake herself as a champion of the black underclass, as Lambert Strether notes in his "Water Cooler":

“Clinton is set to campaign with the mothers of Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner, unarmed African-Americans who died in incidents involving a neighborhood watch representative and law enforcement officers, respectively. And the campaign, sources said, is expected to push a new focus on systematic racism, criminal justice reform, voting rights and gun violence that will mitigate concerns about her lack of an inspirational message” [Politico].

After failing to deliver a clear victory in Iowa or a decent showing in New Hampshire, Team Clinton, and the pundits of the mainstream, are banking on the allegiance of black and brown voters. With Republican voters seemingly ready to embrace Donald Trump whole hog, the ruling elite has a lot riding on Nevada and South Carolina. If she shows continued morbidity in these two states, March 1 Super Tuesday might not be the knockout blow for Sanders that Hillary's campaign is promising.

Yes, a lot is riding on the remaining weeks of February. Meanwhile, overseas Russia and Syria are routing the U.S. backed jihadis and U.S. clients, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, are having a tantrum. Enormous pressure is being put on the Obama administration to up the ante with either anti-aircraft missiles or ground troops. As Aleppo returns to government control, NATO warships will now patrol the Aegean to try to prevent more refugees from landing on European shores. In Afghanistan, U.S. ground troops are -- unbelievably -- back in Helmand Province to try to save Poppystan from falling completely to the Taliban.

Things are spinning out of control. In 2016 we should see some sort of dramatic paradigm shift (if we haven't already).

A doomsday scenario we can look for is an election tossed into the House of Representatives, something that hasn't occurred in the United States since the election of 1824 when John Quincy Adams was selected over the Donald Trump of the day, Andrew Jackson. This becomes a possibility if Mike Bloomberg runs for president as an independent. The latest news is that he is "itchin'" to make a go of it.

I don't think Bloomberg will run unless Hillary continues her collapse, which will begin in haste if her Dixie firewall collapses. Hillary now is the champion of a sick and dying global regime. Can her corpse continue its ambulatory miracle of reanimation? So far it has been less miracle and more smoke and mirrors. But money can turn the world upside down. Let's see what happens in Nevada.

The Walter Scott Homicide: 1984 in Reverse?

With the latest video of lethal force by the police -- in this case, a South Carolina officer, Michael Slager, nonchalantly gunning down a fleeing Walter Scott -- topping the national news for a second day, the question I have is how often does this happen? It seems like every other week -- whether it is a homeless guy in Los Angeles, a kid playing with a toy gun in a snowy Cleveland park, or Michael Brown or Eric Garner, to name a few -- we are confronted with another example of the police ruthlessly committing homicide.

A problem I have with television police drama like The Shield, even though I watched all seven seasons, is the body count that the cops rack up does not seem believable to me. Certainly they would be suspended constantly pending interminable investigations conducted by the local department, the FBI or the Justice Department. Right?

Well, apparently not because the Justice Department and the FBI don't know how many of these shootings take place. So, in answer to the question, "How often does a Walter Scott incident take place?" We don't know.

As Michael Schmidt explores today in "Scant Data Frustrates Efforts to Assess Number of Shootings by Police":

Under current federal laws, there is nothing requiring any of the 18,000 police departments and other law enforcement agencies across the country to report to the public or to the Justice Department anything about shootings involving officers.

Roughly 91 percent of departments and agencies in the country voluntarily report crimes like murders, rapes, car thefts and burglaries to the F.B.I., which releases an annual report.

But under the current reporting systems, there is no category for episodes in which the officer’s use of force was not deemed legally justified, and there is no category to report police shootings in which the officer has not killed a person. There are categories for “justifiable” or “excusable” homicides by police officers, ones in which officers kill a felon.

The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund keeps data on how often people shoot police officers, and departments willingly share that data. But the statistics on the police shooting civilians are much harder to find.

In the aftermath of police officers’ using lethal force in Staten Island, Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere last year, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, have strongly advocated changing reporting requirements. A White House task force created to look into the episodes made similar recommendations in a report released in March.

So far, though, those efforts have not provoked much interest on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers would most likely need to pass legislation to require departments and agencies to report figures to the Justice Department.

In January, Mr. Holder spoke about the issue at a Justice Department ceremony honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington.

“I’ve heard from a number of people who have called on policy makers to ensure better record-keeping on injuries and deaths that occur at the hands of police,” he said. “I’ve also spoken with law enforcement leaders, including the leadership of the Fraternal Order of Police, who have urged elected officials to consider strategies for collecting better data on officer fatalities. Today, my response to these legitimate concerns is simple: We need to do both.”

Mr. Holder said that in the 1990s, Congress passed a law that was intended to help the Justice Department collect better statistics about shootings involving officers. But that law was ultimately not effective because the reporting was optional, and local departments and agencies may not have the proper resources to be able to make reports to the Justice Department in a timely manner.

In a speech in February about the relationship between the police and minorities, Mr. Comey said that during the riots in Ferguson last summer, he had asked his staff members for figures on the number of blacks who had been shot by the police. They told him there were no uniform statistics on such shootings.

“They couldn’t give it to me, and it wasn’t their fault,” Mr. Comey said. 

Mr. Comey said that law enforcement officials and minorities “must find ways to see each other more clearly.” He added, “Part of that has to involve collecting and sharing better information about encounters between police and citizens, especially violent encounters.” 

Mr. Comey said he had spoken with the police chief in a major American city who said that he did not know whether the Ferguson police “shot one person a week, one a year or one a century.”

Since Congress is controlled by a neo-Dixiecrat GOP, I wouldn't expect a mandatory reporting law for the nation's 18,000 police departments anytime soon. Police use of lethal force overwhelming targets blacks, and that works well for the 113th Congress. The more the people are divided -- whether by race or sect -- the better for the money bags that run the show.

Another aspect of the Walter Scott murder that needs to be addressed is the positive role played by technology; here, a smartphone camera. Lately I am coming closer to the conclusion that the explosion of digital technology is creating a dystopia rather than utopia, that The Postmodern Condition leads us to a "dream machine" of endless passivity and distraction and not the upturning of old, rancid power narratives.

But smartphone videos capturing the police in the act of homicide prove that the Panopticon can be turned back on the jailers, a sort of 1984 in reverse.

#Black Lives Matter Movement Has Legs, Runs Past Power Elite

Yesterday I sensed a shift. I don't know if it is entirely subjective on my part. I'm tired of the massive police presence downtown. Every night I get off the train I'm greeted by milling pockets of law enforcement -- from the sheriff's department to the city police, with a robust helping of transit security. 

Last night there had to be a dozen bicycle cops from the sheriff's department clogging the platform of the transit center. I banged my left leg, tender from a hamstring pull while out on a run Sunday morning, on the front wheel of one of their trail bikes. I apologized. The cop said nothing.

There is a new surliness. When I got topside out of the station there where so many police at the entryway I brushed chests with one of them. He could pick up my vibe, which was not happy and welcoming.

As I walked east, passing more pockets of law enforcement, I could see or hear no evidence of protest that could possibly justify such a display of force. And in the end that is what we are dealing with here -- a naked display of force.

During Occupy which from what I can tell put a lot more protesters on the street than the last couple weeks of the #Black Lives Matter intifada, there was nowhere near the amount of police. During Occupy, there was usually a bunch of bicycle cops, but that was mostly it.

So what has changed? Why suddenly is all the machinery of the American police state visible?

I think if has something to do with the "flash mob"nature of these "die-ins" that are targeting gigantic corporate retailers. It is holiday season, a time when the corporate behemoths make most of their sales; so mayors are being pressured to mobilize the gendarmes to guard the gates of the citadels of consumption. In comparison, Occupy, with its myriad centrally-located encampments in cities coast to coast, seems old fashioned; easily policed at least. There would often be marches that would originate at the Occupy encampments, spreading out from there. But, once again, these could be easily policed.

The #Black Lives Matter Movement is much more disposed than Occupy to put bodies on the gears -- to shut down highways and mass transit and commercial holiday hubs. Call it today's equivalent of the Deep South Woolworth lunch counter of the Jim Crow era.

To her credit, so far the Gray Lady has been on board the #Black Lives Matter Movement. But yesterday, when news of the Berkeley weekend protests was topping Google News, nothing could be found on the New York Times web site. I didn't spend a lot of time searching. But usually when there is breaking news of importance the Gray Lady pushes it to the top of her home page. Nothing. Then this morning the story by Carol Pogash and Barbara Grady, "Berkeley Protesters Block Freeway Over Garner and Brown Killings," is a tepid rehash of some of the standard rhetorical devices meant to diminish a protest movement: 1) play up property damage, 2) accentuate division among the protesters and 3) never tarry too long on police violence. For example, note the following from the Pogash and Grady article:

On Saturday night, demonstrators had clashed with the police, who used tear gas on the crowds, drawing criticism for tactics seen as heavy-handed. On Sunday night, the police held back while some people set garbage fires and smashed windows at Wells Fargo, Chase, Citibank and other buildings, primarily ones occupied by big corporate tenants. The vast majority of shops along Shattuck Avenue, the main shopping district, were left untouched. 

“It’s ironic that the place with probably the strongest supporters is being trashed,” said Tom Bates, Berkeley’s longtime mayor, said in a telephone interview. “What we have are a lot of people who are outside agitators who want to disrupt and cause violence with the police.” 

Mr. Bates said he was “totally devastated and disappointed” that “what could have been peaceful deteriorated into people attacking the police and doing damage.”

If you have ever been involved in protests, you can read between the lines and piece together what really happened in Berkeley over the weekend. The police went apeshit on Saturday and attacked protesters, the overwhelming majority of whom were orderly, with volley after volley of tear gas. This pissed people off and brought more into the streets the next night at which time the police let the Black-Bloc types trash some corporate storefronts. Vandalism then becomes the primary focus for the media, not police tactics; hence, the quotes from Berkeley mayor Bates denouncing "outside agitators," that old chestnut, for causing the violence with the police.

Imagine if that had been the focus of the Gray Lady's Hong Kong team of Chris Buckley and Alan Wong. Chief executive Leung Chun-ying would have been given prominent placement to dismiss the Umbrella Movement protesters as outside agitators. Instead the Gray Lady focused her attention overwhelming on the police use of tear gas to clear protesters from Hong Kong government buildings, an incident that originated the Umbrella Movement to begin with (umbrellas to protect protesters from pepper spray and the sun).

So based on this report of the weekend protests in Berkeley it appears that the Gray Lady might be trimming back her advocacy of #Black Lives Matter. The protests are getting too broad and showing signs of continued life. Obama's diffident pronouncements regarding the edicts of the Mike Brown and Eric Garner grand juries are eroding his support among his last solid constituency, blacks. As Julia Hirschfeld Davis and Michael Shear note in "Unrest Over Race Is Testing Obama’s Legacy,"

At this point, Mr. Obama’s response to Ferguson, Staten Island and the unrest across the country has diminished his image with important groups, according to new polling figures. Half the respondents in a Pew Research Center survey conducted Wednesday to Sunday disapproved of the president’s handling of race relations, compared with 40 percent who approved — a reversal from August, when 48 percent approved and 42 percent disapproved. While the majority of African-Americans still said the president had handled race relations well, support among them had dropped 16 points since polling in the summer.

Charles Blow had a generally positive view of the #Black Lives Matter Movement in a column yesterday, "A New Age of Activism: From Eric Garner and Michael Brown to the Ballot Box," but he misses the mark when he directs the protesters to move to the voting booth:

Indeed some activists have already moved beyond chants for “change” and begun to develop sophisticated answers to the retort, “change what?”. The trick is to redirect the passions before they dissipate, to maintain momentum when the media attention fades, and to amplify raised voices with votes cast. 

I believe — because the optimist in me must — that votes will soon, somehow, follow the passion, that people will come to see marching not as a substitute for voting but a supplement to it, that more people will work to effect change inside the system as well as outside it.

Blow should know that Obama's presidency itself is all the proof people need to know that voting does not deliver change. More is needed. Direct action must proceed the election of captive politicians. The #Black Lives Matter Movement knows this.

Personal Encounters with New York City Policing

I lived in New York City for five years beginning in the late 1980s. This was when the city had yet to undergo its surge in gentrification that really got rolling under Giuliani; for instance, Times Square was still a squalid strip of peep shows, adult bookstores and rundown steak houses. 

I had my run-ins with the police. One time, when I was living in a neighborhood of Dominicans and Hasids tucked up against the eastern entrance to the George Washington Bridge a white undercover cop accosted me as I was crossing 181st Street on my way back to my apartment. He demanded to see some identification; he wanted to know what I was doing. He puts his hands on me and went through my pockets. I told him I lived in the neighborhood and was on my way home.

The cop was incredulous. He couldn't imagine a white rock'n'roller young man living willingly among blacks and orthodox Jews. The neighborhood was notorious for being the preferred destination for suburbanites to acquire street drugs. It is a narrow part of northern Manhattan conveniently bisected by Interstate 95.

Finally, I defused the situation by inviting him up to my apartment. I told him something like, "If you don't believe me, come on up. I'll show you where I live."

He dismissed me with the imperative to stay out of trouble, warning me that he would be watching.

I wasn't really upset by the encounter, more dumbfounded than anything else. It seemed ludicrous, comical that undercover police could bodily search and interrogate a person in broad daylight on a busy thoroughfare with zero cause besides falling within the parameters of an overly broad profile. Nonetheless I can vividly recall the encounter more than twenty-years on.

This was not my only run-in with New York City's finest. I actually got into an altercation late one Friday night with a Transit Authority police. The location was 136th Street 1-line subway stop. The cop ended up calling for backup. A gang of undercovers arrived and frogmarched me at high velocity up a long flight of subway-station stairs and threw me in the back of their cruiser. Off I went at breakneck speeds with sirens wailing to a Harlem police station to spend the night locked up.

What had I done? I asked why the Transit Authority police was hassling my friend for having an unlit cigarette on his lips. Smoking is not allowed in the subway but he wasn't smoking. The Transit Authority police responded to my inquiries by telling me to "Shut the fuck up and put your hands above your head."

My retort? "Fuck you!"

And that's when the altercation began. The people on the platform -- all black and Latino -- formed a circle around me and the Transit Authority cop as we grappled and chanted, "Police brutality! Police brutality!"

I had forgotten about this incident until this week when the Garner grand jury refused to indict the undercover policeman, Pantaleo, for homicide.

Not all of Gotham's constabulary are Gestapo types. During my residence in the Big Apple I came across several, particularly the ones who were my age, in their 20s, who were approachable, more so than your typical big city West Coast police who affect sort of a sterile haughty professionalism.

The Garner murder has struck a chord. It is a stain on the credibility of the U.S. You'll be less likely in the immediate aftermath of the ongoing #BlackLivesMatter protests to witness John Kerry climbing up on his high horse to hector other nations about good government.

Something has shifted from business-as-usual patterns. Even Hillary, who anticipates success by roping crackers into the Democratic Party at the same time keeping the "Obama coalition" loyal, is sounding off about racial justice. According to Peter Baker and Amy Chozick's "Some Conservatives Say Deadly Force Used to Subdue Garner Didn’t Fit the Crime":

. . . Mrs. Clinton drew broader conclusions. “Each of us has to grapple with some hard truths about race and justice in America,” she said, speaking at a conference in Boston. “Because despite of all the progress we’ve made together, African-Americans, most particularly African-American men, are still more likely to be stopped and searched by police, charged with crimes and sentenced to longer prison terms.” 

Mrs. Clinton endorsed Mr. Obama’s decision to form a task force to review police tactics and praised the Justice Department’s decision to investigate Mr. Garner’s death. She called for changing police tactics, overhauling the prison system and demilitarizing police departments. At times, she struck the personal tone some had expected of Mr. Obama. 

“The most important thing each of us can do is to try even harder to see the world through our neighbors’ eyes,” she said. “To imagine what it is like to walk in their shoes, to share their pain and their hopes and their dreams.”

For Hillary to take this stand you know it has been vetted by campaign operatives and focus-group tested. The politics of outrage over racial injustice have gone mainstream.

The Gray Lady's editorial board bears this out. Over the last two days some of the best items written on the Garner homicide can be found in the unsigned editorials. Two things stand out in "It Wasn’t Just the Chokehold: Eric Garner, Daniel Pantaleo and Lethal Police Tactics." First:

But among the many needed reforms, there is one simple area that risks being overlooked. Besides the banned chokehold used by Officer Daniel Pantaleo, who brought Mr. Garner down, throwing a beefy arm around his neck, there was lethal danger in the way Mr. Garner was subdued — on his stomach, with a pile of cops on his back. 

This breaks a basic rule of safe arrests, especially for people who, like Mr. Garner, are overweight and have medical problems like asthma. When the New York medical examiner’s office ruled Mr. Garner’s death a homicide, it cited “compression of neck (choke hold), compression of chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police.” 

As early as 1995, a Department of Justice bulletin on “positional asphyxia” quoted the New York Police Department’s guidelines on preventing deaths in custody. “As soon as the subject is handcuffed, get him off his stomach.Turn him on his side or place him in a seated position.” 

As Michael Baden, a former chief medical examiner of New York City, told The Times: “Obese people especially, lying face down, prone, are unable to breathe when enough pressure is put on their back. The pressure prevents the diaphragm from going up and down, and he can’t inhale and exhale.” 

Which is exactly what Mr. Garner was trying to tell the officers who were on top of him.

 Next:

The Garner killing must lead to major changes in policy, particularly in the use of “broken windows” policing — a strategy in which Officer Pantaleo specialized, according to a report in September by WNYC, which found that he had made hundreds of arrests since joining the force in 2007, leading to at least 259 criminal cases, all but a fraction of those involving petty offenses. The department must find a better way to keep communities safe than aggressively hounding the sellers of loose cigarettes. 

And while defenders of the police like to point to thousands of nonfatal misdemeanor arrests as evidence that officers are acting in a way that is reasonable and safe, there can never be a justification for any lethal assault on an unarmed man, no justification for brutality.

The outrage in New York, echoed by anguished protesters in Ferguson, Mo., and in Cleveland, where the Justice Department has found a pattern of excessive force by the police, is based on a genuine fear of aggressive, abusive cops.

Something is Happening Here

There are numerous differences between the Eric Garner and Michael Brown police homicides -- Garner's murder was a death by choking on the streets of Staten Island which took place several weeks before Brown's and involved a bevy of undercover cowboy cops; whereas Brown's shooting death was the result of a lone police gunman in a St. Louis suburb -- but the foremost difference is that Garner's murder was clearly caught on video; that, and the fact that the medical examiner ruled Eric Garner's death a homicide.

The video evidence and medical examiner's determination bolstered normally timid politicians, and hence we have calls from New York City's congressional delegation, along with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, for a federal investigation, something that the Justice Department has signaled it will undertake.

According to Vivian Yee, in what is the best single story in the Gray Lady today (and, to the Gray Lady's credit, there is ample coverage of the Staten Island grand jury's decision not to indict the police, Daniel Pantaleo, who murdered Eric Garner as well as the protests that broke out last night in New York City), " ‘I Can’t Breathe’ Is Echoed in Voices of Fury and Despair: In Chokehold Case, Protesters Revive a Staten Island Man's Dying Words":

“The failure to indict is a stunning miscarriage of justice, and makes clear that equal protection under the law does not exist for all Americans,” said Hakeem Jeffries, a Democrat from Brooklyn who, along with other members of New York’s congressional delegation, spoke at the Capitol to call for a federal investigation into Mr. Garner’s death. 

“What more does America need to see?” Mr. Jeffries said. “We are better than this as a country.” 

Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, called Mr. Garner’s death “a tragedy that demands accountability.”

To my knowledge, nothing similar happened -- no calls for a DOJ civil rights investigation were made by the St. Louis congressional delegation and Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill -- on behalf of Michael Brown.

Certainly, New York City is different from St. Louis. New York City is a multi-cultural Mecca and magnet for educated, aspiring youth; along with Los Angeles and Oakland and Portland and Seattle and San Francisco and D.C., it is a progressive city that at certain moments can tilt towards the radical. The multiple protests last night were an encouraging sign.

Staten Island, where the grand jury that refused to indict Pantaleo took place, is the reddest of New York City's five boroughs. While there are pockets of gumba white supremacy in Brooklyn and Queens, terra firma of white working-class ressentiment has always been Staten Island.

What makes Vivian Yee's article stand out is all the person-on-the-street quotes:

Yet this was no Ferguson, where conflicting witness accounts obscured the circumstances of the confrontation between Michael Brown and Darren Wilson, the white officer who shot him. This encounter was recorded at close range on a cellphone camera, the fact that kept many on Wednesday asking: How? Why? 

“You can see the video,” said Diane Moss, 63, of Staten Island, her voice strained with disbelief. “It’s one thing if it’s ‘he said, she said,’ but when you see the video — the guy wasn’t resisting.” 

Her neighbor, Marjorie Fabre, 53, seethed next to her.

“They keep on showing the tape on TV, over and over and over,” she said. The officer, Daniel Pantaleo, had been trying to arrest Mr. Garner for selling loose cigarettes. “I mean, over a cigarette?” 

What could you say, people asked, when the evidence could not seem clearer. What conclusion could you draw, other than: 

“It looks like there’s no change,” said Jesse Love, who was one of a few dozen protesters who gathered at the scene of Mr. Garner’s death, outside a beauty supply store and opposite a humble park. No change in police behavior, in the way African-Americans are treated by the legal system, in race relations. 

“We had a video. How can we win? We can’t win,” said a man who gave his name as James. 

The Staten Island grand jury's refusal to indict not only casts doubt on the legitimacy of the grand-jury process itself but on the merit of supplying police body cameras as a way to increase law enforcement accountability.

Something is happening here. The public reaction to the Michael Brown and Eric Garner verdicts strikes me as different from business as usual.

Once again when I emerged from the train station last night after work there were clumps of police arrayed in front of the big downtown department stores. A blatant show of force.

I walked a few blocks to the main public space in the heart of the downtown commercial district, the place where Occupy Seattle was launched over three years ago. The Christmas displays -- the Star of Bethlehem on the Macy's building, Santa's Corner, a busy Christmas carousel -- were prominent. There were TV trucks and lots of police, some in riot gear. The protest underway was tiny, sponsored I think by the Freedom Socialists. Some young guys with beards milled around handing out a leaflet on Jim Crow justice while a women angrily spoke into a bullhorn. A few steps a way children happily rode the rapidly circling Christmas carousel.

Bizarre. The police presence was total out of proportion to the protest. Why? I think the power elite, even at the city level, sense that a shift is occurring. People are fed up. Even if the number of protesters pale in comparison with previous popular mobilizations (Iraq, Occupy), there is a sense that the many lies that constitute the status quo are exposed. Plutocracy, white supremacy, the warfare state, underemployment. Just keep going on down the list. These things can no longer be credibly denied. A compelling canard is not available to paper over the injustice that is the everyday reality in the U.S. And that is scary for those in charge.