Democracy Now reruns Amy Goodman’s interview with Matt Taibbi:
In part two of our holiday special, we feature our April 2014 interview with Matt Taibbi about his book, “The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap.” The book asks why the vast majority of white-collar criminals have avoided prison since the financial crisis began, while an unequal justice system imprisons the poor and people of color on a mass scale.
Continue reading “Who goes to jail?”
There are still cops who have a conscience, thank God:
A top Bronx cop was caught on tape telling an NYPD whistleblower to specifically target “male blacks 14 to 21” for stop-and-frisk because they commit crimes.
Stop “the right people, the right time, the right location,” Deputy Inspector Christopher McCormack is heard saying on the recording.
“He meant blacks and Hispanics,” Officer Pedro Serrano, who made the secret recording, testified Thursday in Manhattan federal court.
“So what am I supposed to do: Stop every black and Hispanic?” Serrano was heard saying on the tape, which was recorded last month at the 40th Precinct in the Bronx.
McCormack said to focus on the Mott Haven section, where the problem “was robberies and grand larcenies.”
“I have no problem telling you this,” the inspector said on the tape. “Male blacks. And I told you at roll call, and I have no problem [to] tell you this, male blacks 14 to 21.”
During cross examination, City lawyer Brenda Cooke got Serrano to admit that McCormack never said he wanted Serrano to stop all blacks and Hispanics.
“Those specific words, no,” he told her.
Serrano’s tape and testimony were introduced as evidence in a class-action lawsuit against the NYPD’s controversial stop-and-frisk tactic brought by four black New Yorkers who claim they were targeted because of their race.
Little did these kids know their school would be closed in a few months. They were just pawns in the game.
Once again, a Philadelphia charter school is closing unexpectedly, leaving students and parents in the lurch and screwing the school district out of $1.5 million illegally gotten:
The fallout from the abrupt closing of the Walter D. Palmer Leadership Learning Partners Charter School spreads.
Teachers say they fear they won’t be paid money they’re owed for working in December. And amid rumors that the charter’s flagship building in Northern Liberties would be liquidated to pay creditors, several teachers decided to retrieve personal items from the building on Monday – and were initially thwarted by security.
Frustrated parents held a protest.
“It’s unfair to receive notification over the weekend that the school will be closed,” said Jihan Pauling, a parent who organized a rally outside the charter’s main campus.
Citing insurmountable financial obstacles, the Palmer charter sent letters to families and staff on Friday informing them that the school would close permanently Wednesday.
The move sent teachers on quests for new jobs and information about filing for unemployment and left families of the school’s 675 students in kindergarten through eighth grade scrambling for new schools.
The younger students were based in Northern Liberties. The fifth through eighth graders had attended classes in the former St. Bartholomew Catholic school on Harbison Avenue in Frankford.
Continue reading “Charter schools are such a scam”
GREAT piece. Go read it.
Swamp Rabbit and I huddled next to the wood stove and pored over a cheery Christmas article by economist Arthur C. Brooks, who wants people to make an attitude adjustment regarding possessions. He urges readers to “collect experiences, not things,” and to “steer clear of excessive usefulness” meaning don’t make it a rule to do only those those that are a means to some practical end. And to “get to the center of the wheel” — to belief in something that transcends wealth and fame and other temporal joys.
“Who’s this here article for?” the rabbit said. “I ain’t got nothin’ in the world but a head of lettuce and that bottle of Wild Turkey you give me for collectin’ this here firewood.”
“He wrote it for the one percenters who feel guilty about their piggishness and want to be absolved,” I said. “He takes it for granted that all of his readers are wealthy, or close to it.”
I pointed to the one instance in the New York Times article where Brooks mentions Americans who don’t fit his target demographic: “For those living paycheck to paycheck, a focus on money is understandable. But for those of us blessed to be above poverty, attachment to money is a means-ends confusion.”
“I don’t know anybody ain’t livin’ paycheck to paycheck, or without no paychecks at all,” the rabbit said. “What planet is this guy on?”
“It’s not so much a planet as an alternate universe,” I said. “The other 99 percent of us don’t exist in his universe, unless there’s a need for babysitters or someone to clean the windows.”
I told the rabbit that Brooks is president of the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank whose boosters include Newt Gingrich, Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney. This helps explain why he writes things like “Celebrate the bounty that has pulled millions out of poverty worldwide” instead of mentioning that income inequality in the U.S. has been increasing since the 1970s. It’s why he focuses on the angst of the affluent rather than on the millions in the world who can’t make ends meet, despite their so-called bounty.
His message is that the well-off should embrace their possessions without becoming “attached” to them, because all things must pass. It’s a contemporary version of Billy Graham-style Protestantism, with the same underlying message: Enjoy your wealth but praise the Lord. Throw a bone to the poor to confirm you are unselfish and worthy of heaven. Fight big government efforts to feed the poor, that’s socialism.
“He’s part right,” the rabbit said. “You can’t take it with you. Ain’t it obvious?”
“What’s not obvious is his agenda,” I said. “He pretends to be turned off by the commercialization of Christmas but he’s a crusader for the free-market capitalism that has made Christmas so ugly. He pretends he has transcended materialism in order to advance it. ‘Abundance without attachment’ is a bullshit expression, a contradiction in terms. I’d like to punch him in the face. His editor, too.”
“Get a grip, Odd Man,” the rabbit said, reaching for his bottle. “A couple of hits of this will take the edge off.’
I could smell the bourbon as soon as he broke the seal. “I might take you up on that,” I said. “But I’m afraid I might become too attached to the stuff.”
Geeze, they’re not even subtle anymore. If there was any doubt that the fox was in the henhouse, this little episode has clarified things considerably, am I right? Think about this: The president of the United States and unindicted criminal Jamie Dimon were working together to push a bill that will bail out Wall Street’s losses at the gambling table.
That’s a potential of $303 TRILLION for which taxpayers are on the hook:
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon made calls to lawmakers on Thursday urging them to support the “cromnibus” spending bill, House Financial Services Committee ranking member Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) told reporters.
Dimon’s involvement came amidst progressives enraged that the House “cromnibus” included a provision that they said would weaken Wall Street regulations.
“I think we got hurt when Jamie Dimon and the president started to whip,” Waters told reporters after the vote. “That’s when I think we lost some votes.”
The Washington Post first reported news of Dimon’s involvement in the negotiations.The House voted to approve a $1.1 trillion bill funding most of the government through September on a 219-206 vote. Fifty-seven Democrats voted for the bill, while 139 Democrats — including Waters — opposed it.
Waters and progressives opposed the budget due to changes to the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Law that were supported by Dimon and other big banks.
“What does it say? It just seems very odd,” Waters said. “It is just very strange that the two of them would be working for the support of this bill.”
When asked if she thought that Obama had sold out to Wall Street, Waters replied: “That’s not for me to determine. I know that the president was whipping. I know that Jamie Dimon was whipping and calling directly into members’ offices. And that’s odd. That’s an odd combination.”
In other news, Jamie Dimon has been pronounced free of cancer. Now he just spreads it around Washington instead!
Funny, how interested they get when there’s real competition:
Why is one bandwidth-hungry town building its own 1Gbps fiber network for its citizens whenAT&T already offers them 6Mbps DSL? That’s the question AT&T would like to ask city leaders in Chanute, Kansas, a small town of roughly 9,000 people that is petitioning the state to allow it to offer greater access to the high-speed fiber network that it built to support town utility operations.
RELATED: The FCC wants states to stop killing municipal fiber networks that put AT&T to shame
The Wichita Eagle reports that AT&T is concerned about this development and “filed to officially intervene in the case and was granted that permission on Tuesday morning” this week.
“Any decision made by the KCC could impact AT&T’s business operations in the area, which is why we asked to intervene in the proceeding,” AT&T told The Eagle. “AT&T remains interested in both broadband issues and the work of the KCC.”
It’s true that a 1Gbps fiber service would definitely impact AT&T’s business operations in the area and likely for the very worse.
Continue reading “The bandwidth bandits are getting nervous”
The Department of Health is claiming there was no way for this to happen safely, but how did they manage to work around it in so many other states? This is just unconscionable:
(Reuters) – New York state health officials have stopped a nonprofit group from providing free medical care to thousands of patients lacking health insurance during a four-day dental conference that starts Friday.
The nonprofit, Remote Area Medical, had raised $3 million and enlisted hundreds of volunteer doctors and other medical workers to offer a range of health services, including dental care, new eyeglasses and other services. The group had planned to treat about 7,000 patients at the New York Sate event.
In September, the New York State Department of Health told the volunteer group, founded in 1985, that it could not treat patients at the conference unless it partnered with an established, state-licensed medical organization.
Despite last-minute efforts, the partnership could not be arranged in time, and the nonprofit group said it found out this week that the state would not waive the requirement.
“This was incredibly disappointing and will mean that thousands of patients won’t get the care they desperately need,” said Stan Brock, the founder of Remote Area Medical.
Continue reading “This makes me really, really angry”
Combined with the Ferguson and Clayton police preparations, McCulloch’s entire demeanor seemed to say, “Your move,” and either way the black community was fucked. If they didn’t riot, then the rotten system that lets white cops get away with killing black kids and prosecutors get away with using the law to absolve them works. Even a peaceable demonstration of disgust and refusal to some extent absolves the machine that churns up bodies. You have your vote, you have your First Amendment, and if nothing changes, then that must mean what we have is the most just compromise we can strike. Even if striking it requires turning your town into a fortress to make sure that we can all shake on the deal and walk away.
But they did riot, and you could see the smug radiate off Twitter from every white armchair general in the modern American race war. “The blacks” sank to the expectations set so low by images of the fortress state of their town. Set aside the fact that turning a town into a fortress to “contain” the calls for redress from a population is an act so offensive that it itself should provoke a riot. The great authoritarian trick about preemptively implying that everyone in a town is a lawless goddamn animal is that there is no immoral law or immoral selective suspension of the law that they can then rebel against without confirming the echoing pre-judgment that they are animals.
Continue reading “Watching Ferguson burn”
