Obama's America

I'll admit that by titling this post as I have and tying it to the riots in Baltimore I'm running this risk of being misunderstood. First of all, lets keep what's happening in perspective. Compared to the LA riots after the initial Rodney King trial, or the many conflagrations that consumed American inner cities during the 1960s, what happened today is like a firecracker going off next to a keg of dynamite. A few cops got injured, a few stored got looted and few cars were burned. By comparison, the LA riots resulted in 53 deaths and over 2000 injuries.

Secondly, I have no doubt that there are plenty of white bigots and racists who are already blaming the president for what they are seeing on their teevee screens. And while I agree with them that a large share of the blame DOES reside with our feckless commender-in-chief, it certainly is NOT for the reasons they think: namely that this is all part of the "socialist-communist-muslim" Obama's "plan" to "undermine" America and turn it over to the Islamic State...or something equally ridiculous.

No, Obama deserves much of the blame for plenty of other reasons. It was, after all, his 2008 campaign that raised the hopes and dreams of black Americans and led them to foolishly believe that having one of their own in the White House would mean they would finally have someone in a position of high power who understood the very real institutional barriers still preventing them from achieving economic parity with whites. It was Obama himself who then deliberately sold out those hopes and dreams by not lifting a finger to help black America (or anyone else who isn't rich) once in office. Obama's administration has presided over an even greater spread of wealth inequality between the rich (mostly white men) and everyone else (blacks included), and his so-called economic recovery has benefitted only about the top 10% of the population, while the lower 90% finds itself more economically stressed than at any time since the Great Depression. Obama has also greatly contributed to this country's culture of violence and the idea that settling disputes requires guns, bombs, missiles and predator drones aimed at non-whites overseas who refuse to to accept American hegemony over the planet.

But finally and most importantly, Obama and his administration has stood around with its thumb up its ass while police killing incident after police killing incident has occurred without any attempt to have his Department of Justice forcefully step in with aggressive civil rights prosecutions--as Daddy Bush did after the Rodney King trial not guilty verdict. Time after time, from George Zimmerman to Darren Wilson and now on to a steady onslaught of cases, cops and cop wannabees have been killing young black men in cold blood without being punished while Obama has done nothing except for what he's best at--running his fucking mouth. Conversely to what the racists and bigots think, it is my contention that Obama's presence in the White House actually served as a distraction that PREVENTED this kind of rioting from breaking out sooner. Eventually, however, as incident after incident unfolded the pressure was going to inevitably increase to the boiling point.

In his seventh year in office, we have reached the point where Obama's America is finally approaching maturity. Thanks to the hopes he raised in order to con his way into the Oval Office and his complete subservience to a corporate America he no doubt hopes will make him a very rich man upon leaving office (as it has the Clintons), the fault lines that were already there are deepening and widening ever so slowly to the point where we are now feeling the first minor tremors presaging a potential future major earthquake that will shake our body politic to its foundations. For awhile now those tremors could be heard in the increasingly hateful right-wing rhetoric being employed against blacks, gays, Muslims and the poor. And as of today, they can now be seen in the looted stores and burning police cars dotting the streets of downtown Baltimore.

Bonus: "There was a shooting...police on my back"

The "Mafia" Has Gone Legit

HBO's John Oliver hit another one out of the park this past Sunday with a brilliant rant on municipal fines and the predatory private companies that are now profiting on the backs of our poorest citizens (video embedded below). Watching it, I was reminded of some passages in Gus Russo's book, The Outfit, about the history of organized crime in Chicago, in which he makes a strong comparison between "the underworld" and "the upperworld" and how most of the great American "legitimate" fortunes were made either by using extortionist tactics similar to those of the mafia or through actual organized crime connections.

Russo cites a quote from robber baron Cornelius Vanderbilt, then one of America's richest men, who confessed that: "You don't suppose it is possible to run a railroad in accordance with the statutes, do you?" He also cites the example of John Factor, brother of cosmetics baron Max Factor, who began his business career with a huge, multimillion dollar white collar scam in his native Great Britain, then fled to America an became involved in the Chicago mob in the 1930s. Factor not only avoided extradition thanks to mob influence, at one point with mob help he actually faked his own kidnapping in order to send a business rival to prison for 20 years. Eventually, he ended up running a Las Vegas casino for The Outfit. Late in his life, Factor tried to obscure his criminal background with many philanthropic efforts, and actually broke down in tears when asked by a reporter about his various unpunished crimes. "How many good deeds does a man have to do to erase his past?" he reportedly sobbed. Old Joe Kennedy was probably wondering the same thing right after his son was assassinated.

The point to all of this is that in this age of the war on terrorism, the mafia doesn't make many headlines anymore. That's partly because the FBI and Department of Justice did such an effective job during the 1980s and 1990s of smashing traditional organized crime, particularly the legendary "five families" in New York. But it is also in part because the primary activities the mob made its money on (gambling, loansharking) are now legitimate businesses in the form of widespread casinos and payday lending operations, and because labor unions have been so effectively neutered that they are no longer the cash cow they once were.

As Oliver points out below, incredibly another common mob practice has not only been legalized but is now being perpetrated by private companies on behalf of municipal governments. The video features the victims of legal shakedowns, indigent minor offenders who often ended up paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars in "late fees" because of their initial inability to pay their fines. Difference being that these shakedowns are backed by the threat of imprisonment rather than the target having an arm or leg broken. In fact, Oliver doesn't explicitly make the connection but it is likely that the people shown in his video were not only being shaken down by these private "probation companies" but were also ensnared by legal loan sharks--taking out car title or payday loans in a futile effort to keep paying the ever escalating "vig" on their tiny original fines (last year, Oliver also attacked the payday loan industry--see second embedded video below).

Oliver ends the video with a brilliant point that the "right" to "pursue happiness" should also include the right to fuck up every once in awhile with getting fucked by your own government, or privately hired goons acting on behalf of your government. Of course, rich people already enjoy that right. Robert Durst has been in the news a lot lately, but to me the most astonishing aspect of his case was his acquittal on murder charges after he killed and dismembered his neighbor. Only someone with the millions to afford to buy the best legal defense possible could ever hope that a "self defense" defense could possibly be successful in such a situation.

This is all happening because of a phenomenon I cited in my last post: namely voters in this country idiotically paying the closest attention to the one election that has the LEAST importance to their daily lives and which their vote has become utterly meaningless (for president), and paying the LEAST attention to the elections that not only have the most effect on their daily lives but in which a relatively small number of them could in most cases actually change the outcome (for state and local officials). Now all we have to do is convince them to turn off American Idol (how is that POS show still drawing high ratings after 14 excruciating years?) and get them involved politically in their own communities. Yeah, right...good luck with that.


Bonus: Why does it take an Englishman to so deftly point out what is going wrong in America (Part 2)

No Kids, This is NOT "What Democracy Looks Like"

Okay, they're high schoolers, so I will cut them a little bit of slack:

Today, in response to the Friday night killing of unarmed black teen Tony Robinson by Wisconsin police, nearly 1,000 high school students marched the streets of Madison in protest, and stormed the state capitol demanding justice. "This is what democracy looks like," they shouted.

Sorry, kids, but I beg to differ.

Real democracy is boring. And it's a LOT of hard work. Just a few years ago in your own state of Wisconsin, the unions tried to effect supposedly democratic change against your asshole governor by storming the capitol in even far bigger numbers. They even went so far as to try and recall Scott Walker by referendum. And what was the ultimate result of all that fuss and fury?

When the Wisconsin State Assembly dropped the hammer on the state’s labor movement, the State Capitol was as quiet as a library. Maybe half a dozen ragged protesters stood outside the chamber hollering weakly, but the rest of the building and the grounds were serene. After two short post-vote press conferences, Madison sailed calmly on.

(snip)

Regardless of whether you’d characterize the right-to-work law as fanatical or not, it’s remarkable the extent to which Madison kept mum about its passage. Besides a few dozen Democratic legislators and a few hundred labor protesters the day before, the famously liberal city was placid as the conservative legislation rolled along. The liberals who have faced Walker have lost, and lost, and lost again, and progressive Wisconsinites’ stores of outrage seem, at least for the moment, to be exhausted.

Now, you could argue that Walker won in part because of the huge amount of money ($30 million) he was able to raise, mostly from out of state big business interests. But I would argue that he also won because the protests were co-opted by the hopelessly corrupt Democratic Party, which then put up a mealy-mouthed candidate running offering the same old lame ass centrist bullshit when, as the protests showed, what was needed was some good old fashioned angry leftist populism. That might have sustained the energy of the protests through the recall election and helped overcome the big money pumped in by the Koch Brothers (the percentage of the vote won by Walker in the recall election was nearly identical to that of his initial election victory despite the big money he raised). It also seems that once the protests themselves died down, most of those who participated put away their signs and went home to resume watching American Idol or whatever--sort of an echo to what happened with the Occupy protestors.

In and of themselves, protests are NOT representative of democracy but tend to happen when democracy is either being denied or has broken down. Take the case of 1960s America. The civil rights protests were followed up by years of hard work by such figures as Martin Luther King until civil rights laws were passed that finally put Jim Crow into his long overdue grave. The antiwar protests and the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention fiasco were followed by years of work by young leftist political activists that resulted in election reforms that led to the primary election system that (very temporarily) democratized the selection of candidates within the two party system. It was only when the voters, "exhausted" by years of protest, stupidly went back to sleep that the oligarchs saw their opportunity to begin slowly reversing the political changes wrought during the 1960s and early 1970s.

So while I applaud the protestors in this instance for at least getting angry about the latest questionable violent police action against a young black person, I caution them that they should not think a few days of sign waving at the state capitol is going to change anything. Get involved and stay involved and keep fighting the bastards with everything you've got. It's hard, it's often boring and not nearly as much fun as the rush that comes from taking to the streets. But if you're not willing to to do that hard work, which is the REAL work of democracy, then there is really no point in protesting in the first place.


Bonus: The whole world may be watching, but that doesn't mean it gives a damn

DOJ Reports Show that the REAL Cause of Michael Brown's Death was Citizen Apathy

The two DOJ reports on the epic fuckery going on within the Ferguson, Missouri, criminal justice system ought to send a chill up the spine of every American, not just because of the blatant racism of the city police department but because of what the whole shitty situation says about the state of so-called American democracy. It's hard to know where begin with this hideous story. We could start with the fact that a part time municipal judge who apparently routinely jailed people for being late paying small municipal fines was paid over $56,000 a year for holding exactly TWELVE annual circuit court sessions--at a robust taxpayer funded hourly rate of $1,500. Oh, and that same asshole judge also owes the federal government $170,000 in back taxes. Motherfucker's got some gonads on him, I'll say that.

Even more appalling was the fact that from 2012-2014, 93% of all arrests made by the Ferguson PD were of black people. Additionally, two Ferguson cops and the county clerk have lost their jobs for sending racist e-mails, which is amazing given that the asshole police chief said that he would not fire Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown (Wilson resigned after the grand jury failed to indict him). E-mailing is worse than killing--that's the message here, I guess. And even before the DOJ reports were released, one of the Wilson grand jurors attempted to sue the county prosecutor for his mishandling the presenting of the case, and it was further reported that the prosecutor knowingly allowed one of the witnesses to lie to the grand jury.

So given all of the above, particularly the appallingly racist arrest record of the Ferguson PD, the key question is: how did all of this happen in a community in which as of the 2010 census more than two-thirds of the citizenry are black? Because, my friends, just as I stated in a much different context in my recent post about Hillary Clinton's e-mails, most American voters simply do not give a shit about the rampant abuse, fraud and corruption going on at all levels of their god damned government.

How else does a town that is overwhelmingly black end up with a nearly all white police department, and a racist one at that? How else does all the other corruption and petty bullshit that was going on in Ferguson happen for years on end with nothing being done about it? How else do the city officials get so fucking arrogant as to not only engage in these practices but then to order the jackbooted thuggery we saw being employed against the citizenry when it finally, many years too late, erupted into protest last year? I'll tell you how:

Voter turnout in the most recent mayoral election was approximately 12%. The Mayor ran unopposed.

The sad fact is that everyone in that town, black and white, protestor or not, should take a moment and reflect upon their own culpability at electing the shitheads who created the climate in which the Michael Brown shooting became inevitable. Darren Wilson pulled the trigger. He got away with the killing by claiming he feared for his safety. But by his own admission he was hassling Brown and his friend for the "crime" of walking in the street instead of on the sidewalk, and though we'll never know Brown's side of the story it seems likely HE reacted as the resident of city in which the police were viewed by most as an occupying army but the adult citizenry were to damn apathetic to do anything about it until after he was killed.

But don't get too cocky even though you may not live in Ferguson. It is exceedingly likely that your dismal 2016 presidential choice will be between the twin oligarchs Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. And THAT is the collective result of more that three decades of the vast majority of Americans being so ill informed that they--Republican, Democrat or even independent--have been making increasingly shitty choices, degrading the electoral system at the national level to the point where realistically there is no longer any more choice than there was for mayor of Ferguson last time around.

This does not mean that I advocate participating in sham election like the 2016 presidential contest other than to maybe cast a third party protest vote. But at the very least people ought to pay attention to what is going on at the local level, because the people who have control over your local government have the most direct control over your day-to-day life. Had literally just a few hundred voters in Ferguson lined up behind a reformist candidate for mayor last time around, Michael Brown might still be alive today.

So RIP Michael Brown. Sadly, it took your violent and completely avoidable death to wake up your friends and neighbors and get them to demand that things finally change in Ferguson, Missouri. What it would take to do the same on the national level I can't even begin to imagine.


Bonus: "I don't wanna be no mothafuckin 'accident'"

Because, Your Honor, the Defendant is a Fucking Moron

When contemplating the many factors that are leading America towards its own spectacular downfall, one must maintain one's sense of humor lest depression grip ahold of one like a giant vice and squeeze all remnants of sanity from one's mind. Keeping that basic rule in mind, I'm always on the lookout in the news for a good laugh that might leave others who remain blissfully unaware of where our country is heading scratching their heads. Today's such story features a student from my graduate school alma mater, the University of Illinois at Chicago, who decided it might be fun to reenact scenes from the inexplicably popular 50 Shades of Grey.

I've not seen the movie, nor likely will I ever, but thanks to its ubiquitous presence in the media right now even I know enough about its plot to realize that if the idea of recreating its graphic sex scenes turns you on it would probably be a good idea to clue in your intended partner and obtain her consent. Alas:

Hossain used a knit cap to cover the woman's eyes, Karr said, and removed the woman's bra and underwear. He then began striking the woman with a belt. After hitting her several times, the woman told Hossain he was hurting her, told him to stop "and began shaking her head and crying," said Karr.

Hossain continued striking the woman — including with his fists, according to an arrest report — and she managed to get one arm, and then another, free. But he then held her arms behind her back and sexually assaulted her as she continued to plead for him to stop, according to Karr.

(snip)

During police questioning, Hossain reportedly admitted the assault and "doing something wrong" but said he and the woman had been reenacting scenes from 50 Shades of Grey.

Okay, so far it is yet another grim story of a male college student who thinks his female classmates are there solely for his own sexual gratification. Nothing funny about that, until I came to this quote that demonstrated the cluelessness of the judge assigned to the case:

After public defender Sandra Bennewitz noted Hossain's record of student leadership, Judge Adam Bourgeois Jr. responded: "Sandra, how can someone involved in all that let a movie persuade him to do something like this?"

Because your honor, he's obviously a fucking moron. It doesn't matter that he's a college student and not just pumping gas or flipping burgers for a living, nor does it matter how good his grades are or what "leadership" activities he's supposedly engaged in. Nope, being a modern day American means being well trained by Hollywood and the media in monkey see-monkey do. Hossain is in fact not at all different than the moron from Indiana who recently got so riled up after watching Fox News (while consuming 45! beers) that he went out and set a nearby mosque on fire.

I guess what amazes me is that a judge in this day and age could spend years on the bench watching as a parade of American losers passes before him and remain credulous that being a student in our completely broken higher education system might render one immune from being stupid enough to imitate something he saw in a popular a movie. It's the ability to engage in critical thinking, not IQ level or formal educational achievement, that prevents such stupidity, and America's modern education system is specifically designed to snuff out or at least prevent the development of a student's ability to think critically. Students are repeatedly told to get good grades and standardized test scores and not rock the boat, or they won't be able to get a good job when the graduate--trouble being that those who are capable of critical thinking tend to be boat rockers by their very nature.

So yes, your honor, the defendant's excuse is that he's a typical American moron who happens to have lower than normal impulse control. Really, he's not so unusual at all.


Bonus: Bill's likely review of 50 Shades of Gray likely would have been the same as it was years ago for Basic Instinct: "Piece of shit"

Down the Memory Hole: The Assassination of Alan Berg

In wake of the appalling Charlie Hebdo attack this week, I found it somewhat bemusing to see lots of American right wingers--in their haste to waste no opportunity to smear all Muslims as freedom hating terrorists--valiantly defending a publication they normally would not have stooped to wipe their asses with given that its lampoons of Christianity were every bit as biting as those against Islam. Charlie Hebdo was an equal opportunity basher of religion, and that normally isn't the kind of stance that will get you invited to answer loving, softball type questions as a guest on Fox and Friends.

I frequently make a point on this blog of demonstrating that there is very little difference between America's two major parties, but I will never say the same thing about liberals (however much I loathe mealy-mouthed mainstream liberalism) versus hardcore conservatives, who now unfortunately make up an overwhelming majority of the conservative movement. Because the fact is a liberal will (usually) defend and respect freedom of expression as defined by the Constitution (Congress shall pass no law, etc, etc) whereas far right wingers (who profess to wear the Constitution on their sleeves) often make no bones about how they would love to see those they disagree with silenced by whatever means necessary.

As an example of what I'm saying, one needs to look no further that the most notorious American parallel to the Charlie Hebdo slayings...namely the 1984 (now THERE is irony for you) assassination of liberal Denver radio talk show host Alan Berg. Though it seems difficult to imagine in these times in which talk radio has become a wasteland of rightwing shouters each trying to out-outrage the other, in his day Berg was the liberal equivalent of Rush Limbaugh. His schtick was to spout his unabashed anticonservative views and then rip into those semicoherent callers to his show dumb enough to try and take him on.

Berg must have been quite good at what he did, because he managed to whip up a murderous rage on the part of a white nationalist group called The Order. The group ambushed Berg outside of his home, shooting him twelve times at close range. Two members of The Order were subsequently convicted of the killing. It was by any definition an act of terrorism--one that has sadly been mostly forgotten today despite being fictionalized a few years later in the Oliver Stone movie Talk Radio. Alan Berg was killed for exercising his freedom of expression, just as the staffers of Charlie Hebdo were. Yet the brevity of his Wikipedia page, which doesn't even include the word "terrorism" in the section about his murder, should be an indication of how such acts that do not fit the prevailing narrative get excluded from our national conversation--even at a time when they are quite relevant.

Another aspect of Berg's murder that never gets discussed is whether as an act of terrorism it wasn't actually a huge success. Liberals are always quick to blame corporate media consolidation in the 1990s for the fact that conservatives rule the radio airwaves, and certainly that has been a factor. Conservatives counter that there is no market for liberal radio talk shows as demonstrated by the Air America debacle during the Bush junior years.

I would actually split these arguments. On the one hand corporations are still motivated by profits, and a liberal host who could score big ratings would certainly not be kept off the air. On the other, for some reason the liberal hosts who were on the air in 1990s when media consolidation began failed to survive (there was a halfway decent rabble rouser I used to listen to on WLS when I lived in Chicago in the early 1990s, though I forget his name) just as Air America failed to draw ratings. Why is that?

Could it be that conservative hosts are safe in knowing that they can routinely make base emotional appeals to their audience without worrying about their personal safety? After all, it is hard to imagine a Volvo-driving, Chardonnay drinking, global warming worrying, gun control advocate blowing away Rush Limbaugh. On the flip side, did liberal radio hosts in this country circa 1984 begin to consciously of unconsciously tone down or deliberately intellectualize their arguments after seeing what happened to Alan Berg? And did the resulting lower ratings then give Clear Channel, for example, the excuse it needed to cancel them in favor of another Sean Hannity clone? We'll never know for sure what kind of chilling effect Berg's murder had on his professional colleagues at the time, but it is difficult to imagine that it didn't have any. If I'm right, Berg's death is a major early milestone in the creeping fascism that has been overtaking America these past 35 years.

So RIP, Alan Berg. Unlike the cowards in patriotic guise who killed you, you were a true American hero.


Bonus: "I'm here to lead you by the hand through the dark forest of your own hated and anger and humiliation"

Soon it Might Not Just Be "Open Season" on Black Teenagers

The reaction in many quarters to the Michael Brown shooting and verdict have been quite interesting. It was disappointing for example to see that James Howard Kunstler, whose 2005 book The Long Emergency served as my wake up call for the issues of Peak Oil and resource depletion, has used his recent blog posts to expose himself as a typical old white latent racist of the "get those kids off my lawn" variety. Being Jewish, Kunstler is no doubt familiar with the old Holocaust anecdote that begins with "First they came for the Jews, but not being Jewish I did not speak up," and ends with the narrator himself being hauled away by the Gestapo with no one left to speak up for him. But Jim seems completely oblivious of the fact that by failing to speak up for the young black men being executed on the streets of America by unaccountable cops there may well come a day when it will be "open season" on radical authors who repeatedly agitate against the government and Wall Street--even if they happen to be grumpy old white men.

Surprisingly, one writer who has been pretty sensible about all this is Market Ticker's Karl Denninger, who pointed out how Darren Wilson was allowed to lie to the Grand Jury even as the local prosecutor deliberately steered that same jury to a no bill:

Nobody, with the exception of this site and, believe it or not, one particular thread on Daily Kos, have examined the actual issue -- the fact that the physical evidence did not support the police officer's narrative -- not originally, not as the case developed and not in the Grand Jury testimony.

Further, there is plenty of hard, documentary evidence of intentionally false instructions being given to the Grand Jury -- specifically, the standard for the use of deadly force by officers was presented to them as the pre-Supreme Court decision in 1985 (Tennessee .v. Garner) on shooting fleeing felons. The Grand Jury was instructed that this was permissible when in fact this has not been for 30 years. That's not an accident, it is intentional and willful misconduct on the part of the authorities. Were you or I to give an intentionally false presentation to a Grand Jury we'd find ourselves in prison and with good cause. The Prosecutor will not face that same punishment, yet it was a direct and proximate cause of the no-bill decision.

But now we have the NYC case in which there was a refusal to indict as well -- and this is even more outrageous as the conduct in question, a police choke-hold that was found by the medical examiner to be the cause of death as he ruled it a homicide is a banned practice in most police departments -- including in NYC.

What has been most revealing and particularly disheartening about these cases going all the way back to the Trayvon Martin travesty is the reflexive rallying of support for the shooters. It has been reported that over $500,000 has been raised for cold blooded killer Wilson (and yes, given that Wilson said in an interview he'd do it all over again the exact same way, I have no hesitation in labeling him a sociopath), and a similar online fundraising effort was undertaken on behalf of Zimmerman. Worse yet was the rash of police officers around the country publicly posting or proclaiming "I am Darren Wilson," which ought to make any conscientious citizen of any race, creed or color's blood run cold.

What you see here is an America that is rapidly regressing in area where true progress had ever so recently been made. After repeated public disclosures of police corruption and abuse that were published and broadcast starting in the late 1960s and early 1970s there was a nationwide effort to clean up and improve the profession. College degrees became far more common for officers as Criminal Justice became a sought after university major. "Civilian oversight" became a common catch phrase that was begrudgingly welcomed by the leadership of departments that knew they needed to get rid of at least the worst of their bad apples and shore up their public image.

Unfortunately, the aftermath of 9/11 had the same kind of corrosive effect on law enforcement that is has had in so many other aspects of American life. The images of NYPD officers rushing into to the towers and losing their lives to save their fellow citizens turned them into heroes--in much the same way as were the soldiers and Marines going off to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq to "avenge" those who died in the towers. Unfortunately, the hero worship of police officers has persisted, making them virtually immune from criticism in many circles, particularly among those who believe "law and order" is far more important than numerous Constitutional amendments--save, of course, the 2nd.

Dovetailing the 9/11 hero halos placed upon the police, was the militarization of police forces as federal homeland security money was generously heaped upon departments so they could purchase the excess military grade hardware being churned out by American defense war contractors. Historically, one thing that has separated America from being like the tin pot dictatorships and banana republics around the world is that we don't send tanks and regular army units into the streets to restore order. But with our police now driving APVs, outfitted like the stormtroopers on the Death Star and carrying high power weaponry, the distinction is rapidly fading.

Though petty police corruption such as taking small bribes to ignore misdemeanors may not be as prevalent today as it was a couple of generations ago, with their repeated displays of wanton violence against citizens police departments are more out control today than they ever have been. Worse yet is when the asshole prosecutors, whose fucking JOB it is to protect the public from criminals, even and ESPECIALLY those criminals who wear the badge, through their actions sanction and condone executions of unarmed citizens, America steps that much closer to becoming a police state. Chickenshit Obama has the option of ordering the Department of Justice to conduct federal civil rights investigations in these cases, as Daddy Bush did after the initial Rodney King verdicts. His failure to do so is inexcusable, though at this point I am beginning to wonder if the U.S. has become so polarized that it might be impossible to get even a federal jury to convict a cop of murder these days.

I'd like to close this particularly grim post by saying that these events, and the public's reaction to them, should finally dispel any notion by liberals or progressives that the election of Barak Obama showed that America had finally moved past its long history of racism. The disgraceful overt cheering on of sociopathic murdering assholes George Zimmerman and Darren Wilson and the repellent attempts to smear the character of their innocent victims demonstrates that racial hatred is not only alive and well among a substantial portion of the population, but is deepening and hardening is ways that portend some potentially very scary future scenarios as America continues to slowly sink into the economic abyss.

Next time it might not be a black teenager impudently walking in the street instead of on the sidewalk who gets gunned down for defying authority, it might be a grouchy old Peak Oil writer who dares to tell the frothing supporters of Zimmerman and Wilson that soon they will no longer be able to exercise their "God given right" to hog the roadways in the Hummers and F-250s with the "Global Whining" stickers plastered prominently on the back bumper. No one will likely speak for you then, Jim, because by when your white skin is no longer sufficient to shield you it really will be too late.


Bonus: "Fucking with me, 'cause I'm a teenager, with a little bit of gold and a pager"

Metals Thefts Spike More Than 450 Percent In Baltimore County

This is a good companion to the story I posted Sunday about the 70,000 pounds of copper wiring being stolen from a Seattle light rail system. Here is a local Maryland radio station with the details:

Baltimore County Police have set up a special team to investigate the spike in thefts of metals.

Chief Jim Johnson has created a Metals Theft Team. He tells WBAL Radio that since 2009, there has been a more than 450 percent increase in metal thefts in the county.

Johnson says aluminum bleachers, poles and products are also been stolen, dismantled and scrapped.

"What we have experienced in the past is a lone individual perhaps stealing a few pounds of copper. Today, we are seeing a more sophisticated network of copper thieves and middle men holding the copper and watching for an increased copper commodity price on the global market and they then move the products," says Johnson.

The police department has teamed up with BGE to try and create more awareness around the theft of metals. Chief Johnson says BGE is now going to paint their copper wires lime green color to make it more identifiable when it is moved through a scrap processor.

Chief Johnson says the police department is receiving cooperation from scrap metal processors in the area.

He says that four years ago copper was going for about $2.50 a pound compared to the last year when it reached $4.80 a pound.

Johnson says its expensive for owners to replace copper gutters for example if those are stolen from a home.

The police department is asking residents to take photos of their metals items around the house that may be stolen to help if authorities are called to investigate. In addition he says citizens can watch out for any suspicious activity involving trucks and scrap metal.

Chief Johnson says the issue is not just local but on a national level.

Sounds to me than in its increasing economic desperation, this country is literally tearing itself apart.

Thieves Steal Four Miles Of Copper Wire From Seattle Light Rail Line

I've posted stories here before about copper thefts, but this one really takes the cake. Here is the Seattle PI.com with the details:

Thieves stole 70,000 pounds of copper cable from Sound Transit's Link light rail line between Tukwila and Sea-Tac Airport, the agency reported Friday.

Thieves ripped the wire from inside an elevated guideway that supports the tracks, probably over the last several months. From end-to-end, about four miles of cable was stolen, Sound Transit spokesman Bruce Gray said.

"This isn't something that would have been done overnight," Gray said. "Whoever did this knew what they were going after and had some sophisticated knowledge of how to get in."

The wire runs along the guideway's hollow interior to protect it from low-level electrical current that strays from the rails, and directs it to the ground. The current would otherwise corrode the structure's rebar over time, Gray said.

Grounding for the train's power line is run separately. At no time was train service affected or the public in danger, Gray said.

Maintenance workers discovered the missing wire Thursday during track inspections. One worker noticed something out of place and went for a closer look.

While workers walk the tracks twice a week for inspection, the guideway's interior is inspected only once a year, Gray said. Thieves took advantage of that.

"There could be trains running overhead and track walkers out on top and they would never know someone was inside," Gray said.

The stolen wire probably was cut into segments of two or three feet in length, he said.

Make no mistake about it, this is the type of crime that happens to a society undergoing collapse. Whatever else you might say about whomever committed this crime, they are nothing if not industrious. It took a lot of hard work to pull this off. People clever enough and hardworking enough to get away with such a scheme wouldn't be risking going to prison like this if there was a more gainful way for them to make a living.


Bonus: "The sound of a train not running has been keeping me awake"

What A Shock: "Stand Your Ground" Apparently Only Applies To White People

You might want to sit down before you read this, but it turns out that apparently Florida's hideous "Stand Your Ground" law only applies to white (or half-Hispanic) people who shoot others in self defense. I know, I couldn't believe it either. Here is Atlantic Wire with the details:

What happened to Marissa Alexander sure sounds a lot like 'standing your ground': her abusive husband came after her, choked her, and when she finally broke free, she grabbed a gun fired a single warning shot into ceiling ... so why is she set to serve 20 years in jail? As Touré points out, her husband's deposition had a similar account, though he's providing a newer, conflicting report.

Well, we imagine her prosecutor Angela Corey (who's also charging George Zimmerman) and her team, have the unfulfilling answers. The Florida Times Union's Charles Broward reported on April 21, "A judge denied [Alexander] immunity in a Stand Your Ground hearing. And after a jury found her guilty, she faces a mandatory term of 20 years in prison." Yes, there's the rage-inducing fact that Zimmerman who allegedly pursued and (not allegedly) killed Trayvon Martin was allowed to walk free that night while Alexander is going to spend 20 years of her life in prison for a single warning shot while in her own home. But it's also complex in that, those seeking justice for Trayvon Martin may have to side with a prosecutor who denied Alexander's (and the NAACP's) plea for a "stand your ground" ruling, like the one that was initially afforded to Zimmerman.

"There's a double standard with stand your ground," says Isaiah Rumlin, president of the Jacksonville Chapter of the NAACP. "The law is applied differently between African-Americans and whites who are involved in these types of cases." As Time's Touré points out, "there is one last sliver of hope left for Alexander: the court will soon hear arguments for a retrial." Jacksonville's News 4 added yesterday, "Judge James Daniel set a post-trial motions hearing for 8:30 a.m. Thursday. Daniel said if the motions are denied, she could be sentenced as soon as next week."

What is really appalling about this case is that Alexander should have been acquitted on grounds of self defense regardless of Stand Your Ground. But rather than argue about whether the law is being applied in a discriminatory manner, how about we just go ahead and repeal it already?


Bonus: I think The Fixx was in in this case...Bada Boom!

The War on Drugs Sinks To A New Low

This story below from NBC San Diego is simply so horrifying in what it reveals as to just how far America has declined as a nation that I feel I have to post it in its entirety:

Daniel Chong, the UC San Diego student who was left in a Drug Enforcement Agency holding cell for nearly five days, said the time spent in his cell was a life-altering experience.

Before holding a press conference Tuesday afternoon, the 23-year-old spoke with NBCSanDiego and said he was increasingly worried throughout the days he spent in a 5 ft. by 10 ft. cell, where he could not spread his arms out wide.

“They never came back, ignored all my cries and I still don’t know what happened,” he said. “I’m not sure how they could forget me.”

Chong and his lawyer spoke to the media on Tuesday afternoon to discuss the claim they will file with the federal court system on Wednesday.

“He was at the wrong place at the wrong time,” said his lawyer Gene Iredale, who compared Chong’s experience to Abu Ghraib.

Chong said he was at a friend’s house in University City celebrating 4/20, a day many marijuana users set aside to smoke, when agents came inside and raided the residence. Chong was then taken to the DEA office in Kearny Mesa.

He said agents questioned him, and then told him he could go home. One agent even offered him a ride, Chong said. No criminal charges were filed against him.

But Chong did not go home that night. Instead, he was placed in a cell for five days without any human contact and was not given food or drink. In his desperation, he said he was forced to drink his own urine.

“I had to do what I had to do to survive….I hallucinated by the third day,” Chong said. “I was completely insane.”

Chong said he lost roughly 15 pounds during the time he was alone. His lawyer confirmed that Chong ingested a powdery substance found inside the cell. Later testing revealed the substance was methamphetamine.

After days of being ignored, Chong said he tried to take his own life by breaking the glass from his spectacles with his teeth and then carving “Sorry mom,” on his wrists. He said nurses also found pieces of glass in his throat, which led him to believe he ingested the pieces purposefully.

Chong said he could hear DEA employees and people in neighboring cells. He screamed to let them know he was there, but no one replied. He kicked the door, but no one came to get him.
By the time DEA officers found Chong in his cell Wednesday morning Chong was completely incoherent, said Iredale.

“I didn’t think I would come out,” Chong said.

He said when employees discovered him in the cell that they looked confused and nervous. A DEA employee rode with him to the hospital, where they paid for Chong’s visit.

He spent three days in the intensive care unit at Sharp Hospital and his kidneys were close to failing.

The DEA has not apologized to Chong, said Iredale.

The incident also caused Chong to miss his midterms at UCSD. He said he does not know if he will return to school, as his perspective on life has changed since his isolation.

San Diego defense attorney Gretchen Von Helms said the victim could get millions if he files a lawsuit.

"In all my years of practice I've never heard of the DEA or any Federal government employee simply forgetting about someone that they have in their care," she said.

"There has to be repercussions if people do not follow the safety and the care when they have a human being in their custody."

Before I continue, I just wanted to point out that the only reason this story is getting a lot of media coverage is because the victim of this gross governmental abuse of power was a middle class college student. Does anyone really believe that this is the first time anything like this has happened in the DEA’s detention cells? If so, I’ll take that bet. The agency’s “bad luck” in this case was that Chong wasn’t some poor, black kid from the projects.

There are so many levels of Fail in this story that I hardly know where to begin. Let’s start with the DEA busting into a private residence trying to defeat the “deadly scourge” of college students smoking pot. Really? In this day and age in which governmental resources are being stretched to the breaking point and vital agencies like the National Weather Service and the Department of Agriculture are undergoing cutbacks—not to mention that none of the criminals on Wall Street who crashed the economy back in 2008 have been arrested or punished?

Then there is the issue of Chong’s five day confinement, which was so profoundly negligent as to beg the question of whether it was done intentionally. As far as we can determine from the story, Chong was arrested for mere possession of marijuana, a misdemeanor offense at best. Given how, as I have documented numerous times before on this blog, the court system, including the federal courts, are also facing steep cutbacks in budgets and personnel, it seems highly possible that Chong’s case would have eventually been simply dismissed—and don’t think for a minute that those who locked him in that cell and then “forgot” about him didn’t know that.

Does it seem incredible to you that the DEA might have made an example out of Chong in order to send a chilling message to the other potheads at his school? If so, then you need to read some to the articles Exiled reporter Yasha Levine wrote about the treatment that he and other Occupy LA protesters received at the hands of the police after their encampment was raided. There is a cold, Machiavellian logic to the idea of sending a message that since the courts cannot be counted on to hand out stiff punishments to the young miscreants who are no longer going along with the program, they should expect to be badly abused during their time in custody to serve as a deterrent. From Chong’s comments about how “his perspective on life has changed since his isolation,” I’d say he got the message loud and clear.

And let’s also not lose sight of who it is that is ultimately responsible for this abuse of power—President Hopey-Changey himself. Maybe we can’t pin the Occupy LA abomination on the “Constitutional Scholar” in the White House, but the DEA is a federal agency directly under his control. The president absolutely does have the authority to stop this kind of bullshit if he wants to, but given that Obama has gone so far as ordering a federal crackdown on medical marijuana dispensaries, he has conclusively shown which side he is on. Any young people thinking of making the mistake of voting for him again this November should take that under consideration.

All in all, the arbitrary indefinite detention of citizens for minor offenses in inhumane conditions is one of the key hallmarks of any authoritarian regime. While it is hyperbolic to say that America has already become a dictatorship, the overall trend could not be more alarming. Chong’s lawyer was absolutely right to conjure up visions of Abu Ghraib, and he might have mentioned Guantanamo as well. We citizens are now reaping what we have sown by not loudly condemning the crimes of the empire around the globe. It was inevitable that the evil at first being perpetrated against brown skinned foreigners overseas would eventually find its way back to our shores, and that by the time it did it would be far too late to stop it from beginning to consume us all.

Addendum: After I wrote the initial post, it was reported that the DEA apologized to Chong. Sorry, but there are times when merely saying your sorry just doesn't fucking cut it. This is one of those times.

Addendum 2: Another news report indicated that a large stash of Ecstasy was found in the
house where Chong was arrested, but that the DEA agents who detained him quickly realized he was not involved with the drug stash.


Bonus: Roll another number

A Sucker Born Every Minute: The Franklin Mint Ripoff

Ever watch one of those ridiculous Franklin Mint commercials and wonder how a company peddling such a blatant ripoff could ever possibly stay in business? I mean, just how dense, for instance, does a person have to be to believe a "one ounce silver collectable coin" contains much if any silver when it is selling for half or less of the current spot price of the precious metal? Well, now we know the answer as shown by this letter sent to Financial Advisor Malcom Berko and published in the Herald-News:

Dear Mr. Berko: During the past 25 years, I purchased more than $47,000 in collectible silver coins and beautiful non-silver coins from the Franklin Mint for my retirement because I thought the scarcity and limited-edition minting of these coins would drive up their value over the years and because I believed the silver content in the silver coins would also increase in value. Now I’m 64 and decided to sell these coins to a coin dealer who offered me $2,500 for the whole lot. He told me most of the coins were worthless, and the only coins that had any value were those with silver in them. I was devastated because when I was buying all those coins, the people at the Franklin Mint told me these coins were minted in limited production and would be more valuable to collectors in the future. I called two coin dealers in Detroit (these coins are too bulky to carry around) and both said they had no interest in Franklin Mint coins and said they don’t know any dealers who would buy them from me. My son told me to write you because he said you might know of buyers for them, and at this point I’d be very happy to get at least half of what I paid for them if possible. Please help me if you can. And if you cannot help me, do you think I can sue the Franklin Mint and recover my cost? And could you recommend a lawyer for me to sue them?

DA

Troy, Mich.

Okay, I dabble a little bit in precious metals myself as I am sure many of you do who are part of the reality based community, so it was probably very cruel of me to be literally laughing my ass off when I read this. Sorry to be such a bastard. I just couldn't help myself. And how perfect is it that the letter writer is from TROY, Michigan. I tell you, the Gods these days are gleefully mocking us dopey chimps.

Actually buying a couple of Franklin Mint pieces of crap is one thing (I think the wife and I have a phone ordered "collectable" or two lying around somewhere). Blowing $47,000 over a quarter of a century without ever ONCE checking with someone who doesn't work for the company to find out the real value of the merchandise places this guy (or gal?) very high on the list of the world's all time biggest suckers.

Being a much better man than I am, Malcom Berko was far more diplomatic in his response to this inquiry than I would have been:

Dear DA: Certainly, you can sue the Franklin Mint. Frankly, it’s their fault you purchased those coins, it’s their fault you overpaid for the coins, it’s their fault the coins did not increase in value and it’s their fault the coin dealer in Troy won’t give you $47,000 for your collection or the dealer in Detroit doesn’t know a soul who would pay you at least $23,500 for your collection. And because it’s the Franklin Mint’s fault, I can’t help you recover your costs. But some lawyers will do their best to get you a settlement, demanding an advance fee before they pick up a pen. However, that settlement will probably be a 20 percent discount on your next Franklin Mint purchase and no shipping charges. But any attorney I know will tell you that you don’t have a chance in China for recovery.

In 1984, I purchased a die-cast, 1935 Mercedes Benz 500K Roadster from the Franklin Mint and sent them a check for $150. Although it was “to scale, “ it was made in China, poorly and cheaply constructed; parts and pieces would fall off, and when the Mint wouldn’t return my money, I tossed the Benz in the garbage. They also make limited edition plates, knives for collectors, figurines, Star Trek plaques and other ridiculous collectibles. One of the Mint’s biggest coups a dozen years ago was the sale of millions of dollars of collectible plates, jewelry and dolls with the image and likeness of Diana, Princess of Wales. Today, that stuff isn’t worth a penny, shilling or pound. You gotta be careful out there.

You overpaid for those coins by orders of magnitude. And you probably paid five or six times the value of the silver content for the silver coins you purchased. So while sliver has tripled in price since 1984, the silver value of those coins is still way less than your cost. I don’t know of a single item produced by the Franklin Mint that can be sold today for its original cost. The Franklin Mint, like the Danbury Mint, the Washington Mint and others with grand-sounding names are selling organizations that place full-page, impressive and official-looking advertisements in local papers with high-sounding words that give the impression of U.S. government affiliation. (It’s disappointing that some newspapers accept those advertisements because the acceptance gives instant credibility to those claims.) The advertisements always are carefully prepared with clever buzzwords designed to infer great value and urgency but grossly misleading to most readers who lack the knowledge to make an intelligent buying decision.

DA, you’ve been snookered, and there’s no chance for recovery. However, I suggest that you separate the silver content coins from the hundreds of medallions and other junk coins and visit the coin dealers once again. But be mindful that most of those dealers will try to swindle you. They recognize you’ve been swindled before (they know this is Franklin Mint stuff) so they figure you are an easy mark. You may have to wear out a lot of shoe leather till you find a dealer who is willing to give you a fair shake. Then try to sell the worthless coins on eBay, and you might get 100 bucks.

Okay, I've composed myself and am going to stop being so mean to the letter writer. After all, he or she really isn't any different than people who bought houses at the peak of the housing bubble because they believed the shysters who told them that home prices only go up, or people who have been furiously pumping their money into their 401(k) accounts and continue to do so even though they have seen little in the way of real returns these past 12 years and have actually lost a huge amount of their nest eggs due to inflation, or really anyone who falls for any of the countless scams being perpetrated by corporate America these days--fleecing their customers in pursuit of ever larger profit margins. Our whole "free market" economy has become one big swindle. The letter writer in this case just got taken a little easier than most people do.


Bonus: The letter writer would have been far better off investing in the New Pornographers' most recent CD

Oregon Court System Braces For Additional Layoffs

If you are a career criminal, you might want to consider relocating to the Great State of Oregon. Not only is the Beaver state closing prisons, and thinking about halting death investigations, but it is also experiencing mass layoffs in its court system. Here is the StatesmenJournal.com with the details:

Lines for services at Oregon courthouses could get longer as the court system moves ahead with elimination of 95 full-time positions by May 1.

The Oregonian reports the layoffs will mean fewer employees to accept payments for tickets, answer questions, pull files from archives and staff courtrooms.

The latest staff cutbacks will mean the loss of 296 positions since 2009, a 17 percent decrease, and it’s causing concern for the Oregon Judicial Department.

“People come to courts with life-changing problems: They’re accused of crimes. They might lose their homes. They’re being harassed or stalked,” said Phil Lemman, a department spokesman. “The more you scrimp and save on justice, (the more) philosophically troubling.”

Some positions were vacant as administrators anticipated budget problems, but dozens of current employees are expected to be laid off.

The operations budget for the Judicial Department was $243 million for 2007-09 and dropped to about $241 million for 2011-13.

The overall department budget increased from $372 million to $424 million in 2011-13. However, much of the increase goes for judges’ salaries, which are protected in statute at $114,468 a year, plus courthouse security, law libraries and Oregon eCourt, a web-based court document system predicted to eventually cut staff time and save money.

Chief Justice Paul De Muniz, the administrative head for the Judicial Department, said employee cuts follow years of searching for efficiencies, such as cutting travel and education.

State courts will be closed nine days over the two-year budget cycle that ends in June 2013. Also, employees will be required to take up to five additional days off without pay.

Doug Bray, trial court administrator in Multnomah County Circuit Court, said the cutbacks are the worst he’s seen.

“This is a huge shock wave for the court,” he said. “It is an enormous organizational change.”

Yet another example of the slow collapse of the American criminal justice system.


Bonus: Just for you, Oregon, another sweet, sad song from Portland's very own indie rock masters, Typhoon

Budget Cuts May Kill Death Investigations In Lane County (Oregon)

Thanks to reader Raeven at Silent Country for alerting me to this story.

The implications of this story are rather frightening. Here is the the Eugene Register Guard with the details:

The latest round of Lane County government budget cuts may kill a vital local service: death investigations.

Autopsies and signed death certificates also will be casualties, Oregon’s deputy state medical examiner for Lane County warned in an e-mail to area health care, mortuary and public safety agencies.

Because of staff cuts, come May 20 there will be no medical death investigators to respond to local reports of accidental, suspicious or unexplained deaths, the deputy medical examiner, forensic pathologist Dr. Dan Davis, wrote in the letter earlier this month.

Without such investigations and a morgue in which to perform autopsies, he will be unable to determine death causes and sign death certificates, he wrote. This will complicate far more deaths than the handful each year investigated because of crashes, homicides or suspected foul play, he and others said.

In a given year, the Lane County Medical Examiner’s Office investigates about 1,000 deaths — some merely because the person died of undetermined causes while not under a doctor’s care.

Without death certificates, burials and cremations cannot occur, and estates cannot be settled. The investigators’ absence will create an “ongoing local disaster” for area hospitals, nursing homes, paramedics, police, mortuaries and “most significantly, the citizens of Lane County,” Davis wrote.

Jobs in the medical examiner’s office are just a few of the many county government positions slated for cutting this spring in a financial crunch brought on by rising personnel costs and what is likely to be a steep reduction in so-called timber payments from the federal government. Also on the chopping block are lawyers and support staff in the district attorney’s office, sheriff’s patrols and jail staff, and animal services — although the job eliminations have not yet been carried out and officials are scrambling for alternatives.

Lane County District Attorney Alex Gardner confirmed this week that he has notified two full-time and five part-time medical death investigators that they will lose their jobs after his office stops funding their work effective May 19. Collectively, those employees provide 24/7 response to accidental, homicidal, suspicious or unexplained deaths.

The DA’s office also will stop funding the part-time morgue attendant and supplies needed for Davis to perform autopsies in a basement room of Sacred Heart Medical Center, University District.

The meaning of this story ought to be pretty clear--the American criminal justice system is on the verge of beginning to break down due to decreasing resources. Prepare accordingly.


Bonus: "Go ahead, and give it to me"

Drug War FAIL: Cocaine Is Cheaper Than Ever

If one of the goals of the asinine war on drugs is to make them less available to users, then this is yet another example that it has been a dismal failure. Here is Slate with the details:

In laying out an argument for drug legalization in his Washington Post column Tuesday, George Will notes that the price of cocaine has dropped between 80 and 90 percent over the last three decades. Why has coke gotten so cheap?

Economies of scale. Cocaine prices are indeed much lower than they were in the early 1980s, but that’s mostly because of a precipitous change in the drug market during the Reagan era. Until then, cocaine was a small-time business, with coca leaves’ being processed in the basements of rickety houses in Colombian suburbs. Trafficking was a usually one- or two-man operation. In their early days, even legendary drug kingpins like Pablo Escobar and the Ochoa brothers had to smuggle their cocaine out of the country in their own suitcases. With the surge in demand that began at the end of the 1970s, however, the kingpins built out their empires, modernizing processing, transport, and retail networks, and managed to lower prices by more than 60 percent over the next 10 years.

It took traffickers a little while to ramp up production at first. Within two or three years, many owned small planes that could transport a metric ton of cocaine in a single shipment. (You can’t fit much more than 50 kilograms of cocaine in a suitcase.) By the end of the 1980s, cocaine was traveling on submarines and cargo ships, too. Kingpins owned sprawling processing complexes that employed hundreds of workers and could churn out several tons of cocaine per week. They concocted clever risk-spreading mechanisms. Multiple producers broke their shipment into segments and pooled them together, so that a single interdiction couldn’t deliver a devastating economic blow to any one of them. Escobar offered insurance to smaller traffickers: For a 10 percent fee, he would replace any seized drug shipments. All of these moves drove down the cost of delivering drugs to the market, and the drug lords passed those savings on to the consumer.

Since then, the price has dropped more slowly, down to approximately $140 for a gram of pure cocaine in 2007. (That’s almost 80 percent less than it cost in 1982.) Some of the continued decline is attributable to increased production and softening demand, but a large component likely has to do with changes on the retail end. According to figures compiled by Jonathan P. Caulkins of Carnegie Mellon University and Peter Reuter of the University of Maryland, around 33 percent of the price of cocaine went toward compensating smugglers and dealers for the risk of violence in 1990. Gun violence is way down since that time, so dealers likely aren’t demanding the same risk premium. (The recent surge in violence in Mexico, however, may have partially offset this trend on the smuggling side.) Technology has also contributed to the labor savings. Dealers used to have to stand on street corners hoping to make a deal. Today, they arrange their transactions in advance using cellphones. That innovation enables them to make more sales per day, and reduces their exposure to violence and arrest. Another factor is that people who have been arrested a few times for dealing have a hard time finding other work. After 30 years of widespread arrests, incarcerations, and releases, there may be a surplus of labor in the drug industry.

It should be noted that enforcement of drug laws has added substantially to the cost of street drugs, but those increases haven’t been enough to outpace efficiency gains in the industry.

Aside from the libertarian argument that what any adult chooses to ingest into their own body in the privacy of their own home should be their own damn business and no one else's, the war on drugs should be halted because of its sheer stupidity. As long as there is big money to be made by the contractors that support the war and drug companies that would lose sales if they had to compete with narcotics currently illegal narcotocs, however, that is unlikely to happen.


Bonus: Sing it, J.J.

Otter Creek Correctional Center in Wheelwright (Kentucky) Closing, 170 Jobs Lost

This is yet another story that leaves me torn. On the one hand, I am sad to see people losing their jobs. On the other hand I'm thrilled to see a private, for-profit prison shutting down. Here is a local Kentucky television station with the details:

Otter Creek Correctional Center in Wheelwright will be shutting its doors at the end of June.

Officials say with capacity being added at other facilities in Kentucky, the state did not feel the need to continue using Otter Creek and did not renew its contract with the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA).

"The department did not have a need for the continuation of that contract beyond its current term," said CCA spokesperson Steve Owen.

More than 170 people from the Wheelwright area work there, but after June 30 they will no longer have jobs.

"A lot of them live within the city and a lot of them live in the community, you know. We're a tight knit community around here," said Wheelwright Mayor Andy Akers.

"We are preparing our employees for the fact that at the end of June we will not have a population in that facility, and so we want to work very closely to take care of them," said Owen.

He said if those employees are willing CCA will try to help them relocate to other facilities in the state and across the country.

Mayor Akers says the prison's closing could be devastating to the local businesses, and Wheelwright's economy could suffer.

"If you don't have jobs you can't spend money at them. Money keeps rolling over and over when you spend it," said Akers.

Hats off to Mayor Akers for grasping what so few economists, politicians and corporate "leaders" in American seem to understand these days.


Bonus: Prison song

Whistleblower Accuses IT Giant Of Immigration Fraud

It's bad enough that American jobs are being shipped overseas because of globalization. It's even worse when cheap foreign labor is being imported into the United States with the complicity of the federal government. Here is CBS News with the details:

We've all had this happen: you call an American company's 800 number for help, and end up talking to someone in a foreign country. It's called outsourcing. American firms do it because foreign labor can be cheaper.

But now, one company is being accused of bringing those lower-paid workers to the U.S. illegally and that may be costing Americans jobs.

The allegations are the subject of a federal probe and CBS News has been investigating this story for months. The allegations have been made against a giant Indian information technology firm called Infosys. The charges are coming from inside the company, from an employee who has never spoken publicly before.

Jay Palmer is a principal consultant at the company called Infosys. He is also the whistleblower whose charges sparked the federal investigation. Palmer says Infosys, the global high-tech giant, engaged in a systematic practice of visa fraud, a charge the company denies.

Palmer said the first thing to catch his attention was an employee that had been in the U.S. from India several times before.

"He came up to me and he was literally in tears," Palmer said. "He told me he was over here illegally and he didn't wanna be here. He was worried that he would get caught."

Palmer says he began digging into how and why Infosys seemed to be bringing in large numbers of workers from its corporate headquarters in Bangalore, India, into the U.S.

Palmer says at first, most came over on H-1B visas. These visas are for people with specialized talents or a level of technical ability that can't be found among American workers.

When asked if all the people had some special expertise that couldn't be found in the U.S., Palmer said, "Absolutely not. Not even close. Many of them is what we call freshers. People that would just come over, whoever they could get to come over. Whoever got accepted for a visa."

Many of the people brought in, in fact, didn't know what they were doing at all, Palmer said. "There was not a project or program that I was involved in that we did not remove somebody because they had no knowledge of what they were doing," he said.

So then what's the motive to bring them in? You could hire an American who is trained in that particular discipline and do better.

Palmer said, "It's purely profit."

Palmer says the Indian workers on his team were paid substantially less than an American would have made in the same job.

When the U.S. State Department began to limit the number of H-1B visas, Palmer says Infosys began using another type of visa, the B-1. The B-1 is meant for employees who are traveling to consult with associates, attend training or a convention. But Palmer says the employees were brought in not for meetings, but for full time jobs.

Palmer said the jobs were in "Everything from coding software to testing software to fixing software to installing."

So why would Infosys do this? And what advantage did it give them in the marketplace?

Palmer said, "They could outbid everybody or underbid everybody on every contract (because they were paying less.) For example...if I'm gonna pay you $15,000 a year why would I pay an American or a legal worker $65,000 a year? It makes no - it's just economics."

And Palmer says the B-1 workers never paid U.S. taxes because they received their salaries from India.

"They're basically a lot of times being paid on a cash card or a debit card where money was put in their account," Palmer said. "And the fact is, is they're just taking that money out and they're never paying U.S. taxes."

Infosys may not be a household name to many Americans, but in the technology business, the company is a powerhouse. It is one of the biggest consulting firms in the world with more than $6 billion in revenues last year alone, and 145,000 employees in 32 countries. But the bulk of its business comes from the U.S., re-engineering the computer systems of some of the biggest names in corporate America.

Federal officials say Infosys employees have 6,000 B-1 visas good for 10 years. Palmer says if just half of those employees were working on U.S. soil that would earn the company more than $150 million a year more than if they paid Americans the prevailing wage.

Infosys declined CBS News' repeated requests for an on-camera interview with a company executive or with chief executive officer and chairman S.D. Shibulal. But the company's chief financial officer, V. Balakrishnan, has denied the charges on Indian television, saying, "I think we are very clear that we have not violated any of the rules. We believe we have a strong case."

Infosys did give CBS News a statement saying, in part, "Any allegation or assertion that there is or was a corporate practice of evading the law in conjunction with the B-1 visa program is simply not accurate, and we will vigorously defend the company against any false allegation to that effect."

But one of Palmer's most serious allegations is that top company executives not only knew of the alleged fraud, but wanted to expand on it to increase profits. Palmer says during a 2010 meeting at Infosys' corporate headquarters in Bangalore the practice was discussed with a group of executives, including a senior vice president.

Palmer told CBS News, "There was some conversations about how to increase the share price, which is - in America is the stock price. So it's really about getting people over no matter what the cost or whatever. And you know, I think that's the first time I heard the term, you know, 'Americans are stupid.'"

If Palmer is telling the truth here, and I am inclined to believe that he is because as a whistleblower against a multi-national corporation he is the one who has placed his ass on the line, that assessment is absolutely correct, Americans ARE stupid. Forget for a moment whether or not Infosys is committing visa fraud. If they are, the company should obviously be vigorously prosecuted. What's even more outrageous is that at a time of record high unemployment, the U.S. government agreed to grant 6,000 visas for Infosys employees to come to work in the U.S. in the first place.

Does anyone still need to be shown a more glaring example of how the federal government now represents the interests of multinational corporations over those of the American people? There is NO justification for the U.S. to be importing cheap foreign labor, even if it was being done legally, when so many people are struggling to find work. It is all being done in the name of globalization, which was always a scam to enrich the elites at the expense of everybody else. We can only hope that these outrageous charges will be thoroughly investigated and the vigorously prosecuted if found to be accurate. But I'm not holding my breath on that last point.


Bonus: But don't worry, President Hopey-Changey feels your pain...he really does

Penn State Economists: Walmart Breeds Hate Groups

Regular readers will know that my sheer loathing for the predatory Walmart corporation knows few bounds. That said, even I had to laugh at the truly daffy conclusions reached by a report that appeared this week in Social Science Quarterly. Raw Story has the details:

The more Wal-Mart stores a county has, the more likely it is to have active hate groups in the area, according to Penn State economists.

“Wal-Mart has clearly done good things in these communities, especially in terms of lowering prices,” Stephan Goetz, professor of agricultural economics and regional economics, explained. “But there may be indirect costs that are not as obvious as other effects.”

The study, published in Social Science Quarterly, found that the number of Wal-Mart stores was a better predictor of hate group participation than the unemployment rate, high crime rates and low education.

There were 1,018 active hate groups in the United States in 2011, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, up from 1,002 in 2010.

The researchers believe that the correlation between Wal-Mart and hate groups exists because of breakdown of the community. Small local businesses are more likely to be members of civic groups and involved in the community. They are also more likely to have closer relationships among their employees.

“While we like to think of American society as being largely classless, merchants and bankers are part of what we could call a leadership class in a community,” Goetz said.

In contrast, people are more likely to feel alienated by big-box retailers like Wal-Mart, the researchers explained.

Hoo-boy, where to start on this one. Stretch Armstrong would have a hard time wrapping his arms around these findings. While the argument can certainly be made that big box stores have caused breakdowns in communities and lead to alienation among shoppers, asserting that they cause people to be more likely to join hate groups is a leap wider than the one Evel Knieval tried to make over the Snake River Canyon. Confusing association with causation is a basic logical fallacy, of course, and one you would think a couple of Penn State economists would scrupulously try to avoid.

There are a number of plausible reasons, in fact, why there might tend to be more hate groups in areas where there are more Walmarts that have nothing whatsoever to do with the company itself. One that I can think of right off the top of my head is that Walmarts predominate in smaller towns and cities that are usually less multicultural than the larger cities, and thus people who live there have far less exposure to those of other races, religions or national origin. People who live in such regions also tend to have less formal education on average because, as in my own case in having to leave my hometown for good after I graduated from college, there are far fewer white collar career opportunities available. Additionally, people living in such areas usually earn far less money and are less financially secure, which can cause them to look for scapegoats to blame for the dissatisfaction they feel in their own lives (though I would note that Walmart IS a factor in driving wages down, which directly contradicts the assertion made by Stephan Goetz above that Walmart's lower prices are a GOOD thing for these communities).

I think even the authors of this study realize that they are on shaky ground, because they qualified their conclusions with this statement:

“We’re not trying to pick on Wal-Mart,” said Goetz. “In this study, Wal-Mart is really serving as a proxy for any type of large retailer.”

“We doubt strongly that Wal-Mart intends to create such effects or that it specifically seeks to locate in places where hate groups form,” the researchers said.

What a relief it is that they only "doubt strongly" that Walmart is INTENTIONALLY responsible for their conclusions. Glad to know the billionaire members of the Walton clan don't secretly have Ku Klux Klan robes or SS Stormtrooper outfits tucked away in the back of their bedroom closets. Well, maybe. After all, the researchers didn't actually say they were willing to rule it out 100%.


Bonus: "I know politics bore you, but I feel like a hypocrite talking to you...and your racist friend"

Ha-Ha! Law Firm Sues Wells Fargo After Falling For Nigerian Wire Fraud Scam

This story really made my day. Here is the Minneapolis-St.Paul Business Journal with the details:

An Edina law firm that lost nearly $400,000 in a Nigerian wire-fraud scam is claiming that Wells Fargo, which handled the fund transfers, should cover its losses.

The Star Tribune reports on the lawsuit by Milavetz, Gallop & Milavetz, which three years ago received an e-mail from someone purporting to be a Korean woman who needed the firm's help to collect a settlement. You can probably see where this is going: When the dust settled, Milavetz, Gallop & Milavetz was a lot poorer. It has parallels — down to the account numbers involved — to a investigation into a Nigerian fraud ring that targeted law firms; two people have been indicted in that investigation.

In his suit, Robert Milavetz argues that Wells Fargo & Co. should have recognized the red flags involved — a counterfeit check used in the scam had the bank's address spelled wrong, he claims. The suit also says the bank told the firm the check had cleared, only to later say it hadn't, really — but the firm had already wired the money away by that point. Wells Fargo said it will defend itself in the case.

Gee, you hardly know who to root for in this case. I guess the best outcome would be a long, drawn out court case that costs both concerns a shit pot load of money.


Bonus: What the heck, how about a song from an album that was actually recorded in Lagos