States Eliminating Aid for "the takers" as Shutdown Forces Cuts

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CitizensforLegit

States are planning to idle workers and cut services because federal funding is drying up as a partial U.S. government shutdown extends into a 10th day. Michigan is preparing to put as many as 20,000 workers on unpaid leave and eliminate cash and food aid to the poor. North Carolina sent 366 employees home and closed its nutrition aid program to tens of thousands of women and children. Illinois this week may issue furloughs to hundreds of federally funded employees, including workplace safety inspectors.

Pentagon admits to Staging phony arrival ceremonies for dead soldiers around inoperable planes

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CitizensforLegit

The Department of Defense unit charged with recovering servicemembers' remains abroad has been holding phony "arrival ceremonies" for seven years, with an honor guard carrying flag-draped coffins off of a cargo plane as though they held the remains returning that day from old battlefields. The Pentagon acknowledged Wednesday that no honored dead were in fact arriving, and that the planes used in the ceremonies often couldn't even fly, and were towed into position. NBC News writes that the ceremonies have been known among some of the military and civilian staff at the base as The Big Lie.

Watch your Back and your Mouth: "Undercover NYPD, Just About Everywhere,"

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NYT

It may not have occurred to people that New York City needed to deploy an undercover detective to spy on Occupy Sandy, a relief operation run by activists that delivered food and supplies to parts of the city ruined by the hurricane. But Detective Wojciech Braszczok, who embedded with the Occupy Wall Street forces under the nom de activist Albert, was putting posts on Twitter last November about the Sandy operation, which, by the way, received consistently high grades from people for its nimble, effective work.

The city now has a sturdy legion of undercover officers who have taken up residence in many surprising regions of civic life. Much of this began in early 2003, when a federal judge lifted many restraints on spying by the Police Department. The city had been failed by the federal intelligence services, and thousands died on Sept. 11. Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg created an independent intelligence capacity.

So before and during the Iraq War, the organization of antiwar rallies was regarded as a fit matter for police surveillance; so were the monthly Critical Mass bicycle rallies, as well as groups protesting at the Republican National Convention in 2004, and a range of Islamic facilities, from mosques to college student clubs. Undercover New York police officers showed up at activists’ meetings all over the country, carrying guitars and knapsacks. Handlers left money for them in the wheel wells of cars. Field reports were stamped “NYPD Secret.” Anyone who left a scrap of paper on the desk at the Intelligence Division’s headquarters in Chelsea was apt to get his or her knuckles rapped by the commander, a former Central Intelligence Agency man who brought that agency’s custom of fastidiousness to the mess of the city.

The unrestrained surveillance in New York public life is the physical embodiment of what has been taking place online over the last decade under operations of the National Security Agency revealed by Edward J. Snowden. To borrow the title of a 1918 novel about nosy Irish villagers, we have become The Valley of the Squinting Windows.  

But it was all O.K. because the mayor and the police commissioner said so, though from the outside, no one could really say what they were up to.

Detective Braszczok was arrested this week and charged with being part of a gang of motorcycle riders who turned a traffic dispute into a smallish riot directed against a man at the wheel of a sport utility vehicle with his family inside. The detective’s credential as an undercover officer jolted many people into paying attention. “We sent out his pictures to everyone on our list this morning, and asked if anyone knew him,” said Bill DiPaola, a leader of Time’s Up, an organization that advocates for improved circumstances for bicycles.

Soon, the detective’s participation in Occupy Wall Street was documented with pictures. No doubt video will surface soon: every one of us is now a videographer in an age of free-range history. Gothamist reported that he posted on Twitter as @evovillen about the Occupy Sandy operation:  

“*SANDY SPECIAL PART 3* REBUILDING OCCUPY TO CONNECT, MOBILIZE AND CO-CREATE WITH, assembly Happening at 60 wall today.”

Gothamist’s Web site quoted a member of the Sandy relief operation saying that the detective was a regular at the two main distribution depots set up by the group in Brooklyn. He attended an activist’s birthday party at the Blarney stone in Lower Manhattan.

One of the large, undiscussed questions of such surveillance is how civic dialogue can be influenced or distorted by police agents — perhaps as provocateurs, or possibly with no motive beyond maintaining cover. During the Republican convention, after a group making a film was arrested, a redheaded man standing on the street pounded on the back window of a police van, urging that the people inside be let go. A day later, the same man was videotaped being briefly put under a fake arrest, leading to tumult in the street from others who objected to his incarceration. They were unaware that the man was an undercover police officer who was walked down the street by uniformed officers, hands behind his back but uncuffed, and sent on his way: catch and release.

The city has maintained that the expanded surveillance is necessary to keep society safe. No one in the Bloomberg administration has discussed the limits on their participation in public dialogue. Or, for that matter, why they ought to be standing alongside people handing out bags of groceries.

Conservatives' Biggest Fear: (a Black planet) Being Called Racist

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MotherJones

In Pacific Standard, Tom Jacobs writes about a new study that tries to figure out why so many people love to watch and listen to "outrage-based radio and television programs." After conducting a series of in-depth interviews, their answer, in a nutshell, is that unlike conversations with actual friends and neighbors, these programs provide a safe space where you don't have to worry about saying something that might get you ostracized:

But why is their pull apparently stronger among conservatives, who gravitate to such programming in much greater numbers than liberals? Based on their interviews, the researchers believe the answer lies in the fact those on the right have more to fear in terms of social condemnation for their views.

In conversation with conservatives, liberals risk being called naïve or willfully blind to potential threats—not very pleasant labels, but not especially damaging ones, either. In contrast, conservatives risk accusations of racism—and “being called a racist carries a particular cultural force,” the researchers write.

“The experience of being perceived as racist loomed large in the mind of conservative fans (we interviewed),” they report. Every single conservative respondent raised the issue of being called racist, and did so without even being asked.

“What makes accusations of racism so upsetting for respondents is that racism is socially stigmatized, but also that they feel powerless to defend themselves once the specter is raised,” the researchers add. “We suspect that this heightened social risk increases the appeal of the safe political environs provided by outrage-based programs, and may partially explain the overwhelming conservative dominance of outrage-based political talk media.”

It's worth noting that this is not, plainly, a representative sample of conservatives. It's specifically a sample of conservatives who listen to right-wing radio and TV, where they're barraged daily with affirmations that the entire liberal project is based on unfairly slurring conservatives as racists. So it's no surprise that this is at the top of their minds.

That said, this is still something I struggle with. It's obvious that race infuses a tremendous amount of American discourse. It affects our politics, our culture, and our history. Racial resentment is at the core of many common attitudes toward social welfare programs; our levels of taxation; and the current occupant of the White House. There's no way to write honestly about politics in America without acknowledging all this on a regular basis.

At the same time, it's also obvious that, in many ways, a liberal focus on race and racism is just flatly counterproductive. When I write about, say, the racial obsessions displayed by Fox News (or Drudge or Rush Limbaugh), it's little more than a plain recitation of obvious facts, and liberals applaud. Ditto for posts about the self-described racial attitudes of tea partiers. But conservatives see it as an attack. And why wouldn't they? I'm basically saying that these outlets are engaged in various levels of race-mongering, and by implication, that anyone who listens to them is condoning racism. That's such a uniquely toxic accusation that it makes any real conversation hopeless. Cognitively, the only way to respond is to deny everything, and that in turn forces you to believe that liberals are obviously just lying for their own partisan ends. This feeds the vicious media-dittohead circle, and everyone withdraws one step more.

I know I'm not saying anything new or insightful here. But just as there's no way to not talk about this, I wish there were some way to talk about it that didn't instantly estrange conservatives even further—but that also didn't water the truth down into mush. I imagine I'll be wishing for that for a very long time.

The real story of the shutdown: 50 years of GOP race-baiting

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Salon

On the day the Affordable Care Act takes effect, the U.S. government is shut down, and it may be permanently broken. You’ll read lots of explanations for the dysfunction, but the simple truth is this: It’s the culmination of 50 years of evolving yet consistent Republican strategy to depict government as the enemy, an oppressor that works primarily as the protector of and provider for African-Americans, to the detriment of everyone else. The fact that everything came apart under our first African-American president wasn’t an accident, it was probably inevitable.

People talk about the role of race in Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”: how Pat Buchanan and Kevin Phillips helped him lure the old Dixiecrats into the Republican Party permanently. Far less well known was the GOP’s “Northern Strategy,” which targeted so-called white ethnics – many of them from the Catholic “Sidewalks of New York” like my working-class family, in the words of Kevin Phillips. Without a Northern Strategy designed to inflame white-ethnic fears of racial and economic change, Phillips’ imaginary but still influential notion of a “permanent Republican majority” would have been unimaginable.

“The principal force which broke up the Democratic (New Deal) coalition is the Negro socioeconomic revolution and liberal Democratic ideological inability to cope with it,” Phillips wrote. “Democratic ‘Great Society’ programs aligned that party with many Negro demands, but the party was unable to defuse the racial tension sundering the nation.” Phillips was not trying to defuse that tension, far from it – he was trying to lure those white ethnics to the GOP (although he later broke with the party he helped create.) But his Northern Strategy truly came to fruition in 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan. Where Nixon swept the South, Reagan was able to take much of the North and West, too.

I loved Chris Matthews’ book “Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked,” but as I said in my interview with him, I think he let Reagan off the hook when it came to race. Ronald Reagan picked up the political baton passed to him by Barry Goldwater and Pat Buchanan, and played his role with genial gusto. Reagan had trafficked in ugly racial stereotyping over the years, about “young bucks” buying T-bone steaks with food stamps and Cadillac-driving welfare queens. But the Reagan who got elected president was better at using deracialized language to channel racial fears and resentment. He and his strategists had succeeded in making government synonymous with “welfare,” and “welfare” synonymous with lazy people, most of them African-American. [MORE]

USA Gymnastics 'Disappointed' in Racist Remark from White girl

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ABC

USA Gymnastics is asking Italian gymnastics officials for an explanation of the racially charged comments that were aimed at new world all-around champion Simone Biles.

Italy's Carlotta Ferlito apologized Tuesday on Twitter for comments she made at the world championships in Belgium. After fellow Italian Vanessa Ferrari and Ferlito finished fourth and fifth on balance beam — just behind Biles — Ferlito said with a laugh, "I told Vane that next time we'll have our skin black also so we can win, too."

Biles won the all-around title earlier in the week, the first black gymnast to become world champion. At last year's London Games, Gabby Douglas became the first black woman to win the Olympic all-around title.

Detroit city official files complaint against one of Kevyn Orr's White appointees, claims racism

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Detroit Free Press

Detroit officials announced late Wednesday they will investigate claims that one of emergency manager Kevyn Orr’s top appointees made racially insensitive statements on the job, demeaned black women and at one point asked, apparently in jest, if he could “shoot someone in a hoodie” during Angels’ Night.

Cheryl Johnson, who is black, was demoted from finance director to city treasurer on Oct. 3. She said in a letter addressed to Mayor Dave Bing, Orr and other top city officials that Jim Bonsall, the city’s chief financial officer whom Orr appointed in July, routinely demeans and berates employees openly during meetings — but in a manner that “is more pronounced with minority women,” according to the letter obtained Wednesday by the Free Press.

Reached outside his office at City Hall on Wednesday afternoon, Bonsall, who is white, said he was unaware of the letter or the allegations and declined to comment. He said he would confer with Orr’s office and then consider responding. He did not respond by Wednesday night.

Orr spokesman Bill Nowling said Orr met with Bonsall on Wednesday afternoon and told him the city would investigate the accusations.

Connecticut Police Union says Racial Profiling Does Not Exist

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NBCConnec

Police are raising concerns about an update to the state's racial profiling law. Officers now have to collect more information from people they pull over for traffic stops.

"This is going to take away some police officers' ability to actually stop crime and we believe the public should be opposed to that," said Eric Brown, staff attorney for AFSCME Council 15, which represents more than 60 police departments and 4000 officers.

Officers have to issue a piece of paper that advises drivers of their rights if they think they have been racially profiled during a traffic stop. Now the union is speaking out saying it detracts from true policing.

"It's presuming that police officers don't have enough integrity to make proper investigative stops," said Brown.

The Alvin Penn Act was first implemented in 1999. It requires police to keep track of who they stop, to make sure people aren't being targeted because of their race, ethnicity, age or gender
The updated law requires police to gather more information and also requires it for every traffic stop as well as seat belt and D-U-I checkpoints.

The union says there is no proof that racial profiling is a problem.

Confrontation With Arizona Border Patrol Turns Violent

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ColorLines

A routine traffic stop in Tucson, Ariz., became an immigration protest on Tuesday night, and then turned violent. Local law enforcement pulled over a driver for a missing license plate light, and called Border Patrol after they suspected the diver and his passenger were undocumented immigrants.  A crowd gathered shortly after the driver and passenger were detained, and more than 100 people made a circle around the Border Patrol vehicle in order to prevent it from leaving.

According to eyewitnesses, the demonstrators were then sprayed in the face with pepper spray and shot at with rubber bullets when they wouldn't move away from the vehicle. Border Patrol took the two immigrants into custody, and also allegedly arrested at least one demonstrator.  Immigration advocates held a press conference today in Tucson and are calling for Police Chief Roberto Villaseñor to step down. Police say they were following regulations set by Arizona S.B. 2010. 

Hunger Strike by California Inmates, Already Large, Is Expected to Be Long

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Nearly 29,000 inmates in California state prisons refused meals for the third day Wednesday during a protest of prison conditions and rules. The protest extended to two-thirds of the 33 prisons across the state and all 4 private out-of-state facilities where California sends inmates, corrections officials said.

Thousands of prisoners also refused to attend their work assignments for a third day, and state officials were bracing for a long-term strike.

Once the state tallies the official number of participants, the hunger strike could become the largest in state history. A similar hunger strike over several weeks in 2011 had about 6,000 participants at its official peak, corrections officials said, and a strike that fall had about 4,200.

The protest is centered on the state’s aggressive solitary confinement practices, but it appeared to have attracted support from many prisoners with their own demands for changes in prison conditions.

Jules Lobel, the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights and the lead lawyer in a federal lawsuit over solitary confinement, said he expected the strike to go on for much longer than previous ones because inmates would refuse to accept anything less than a legally binding agreement for immediate changes.

“Last time, they took promises of reforms, but they are not going to do that again, because two years later the reforms have not materialized in any real way,” Mr. Lobel said.

“This could become a very serious situation over time, because it seems we have a substantial group of people who are prepared to see it to the end if they don’t get real change,” he said.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation does not officially recognize a strike until inmates have refused nine consecutive meals; officials said the number of prisoners who had gone that far would not be tallied until Thursday.

California is facing the threat of being charged with contempt of court after a Supreme Court order in May 2011 to reduce its prison population by 10,000 inmates this year. The court said crowding and terrible conditions inside the prison system constituted inhumane treatment in violation of the Eighth Amendment. On Wednesday, the state filed for a stay of the court’s order to release prisoners.

Gov. Jerry Brown has repeatedly said that the state has gone as far as it can to release low-level offenders and reduce crowding at the prisons, and that it is providing adequate medical care for inmates. But last month, a federal judge criticized the system for allowing potentially lethal valley fever to spread through two jails in Central Valley and ordered the state to move 2,600 inmates at risk of catching the disease.

NY TIMES

A small group of inmates in solitary confinement at the maximum-security Pelican Bay State Prison, in a remote area near the Oregon border, called for the protest months ago. They have complained that inmates are being held in isolation indefinitely for having ties to prison gangs. Some have been held for decades without phone calls, access to rehabilitation programs or time outdoors.

Ten inmates at High Desert State Prison in Northern California began their own hunger strike last week and were being monitored by medical staff for signs of distress, officials said. Their demands, made in a letter, include cleaner prison facilities, better food and more access to the prison library. Prisoners at several other facilities also issued demand letters, which were displayed on a Web site supporting the strikers.

The organizers timed the protest to coincide with the start of Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting, which began this week; state officials said that would make it more complicated to determine how many prisoners were fasting out of religious obligation rather than in protest.

Prison officials said the protests had not caused any major disruptions. [MORE]

Israel hospital director complains that too many African babies are being born

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ElectronicIntifada

It’s a “problem” that too many babies are being born to parents from Africa, a leading Israeli medical official has told lawmakers at the Israeli parliament.

Israel’s Maariv reported yesterday the official’s comments in Hebrew:

“In Tel Aviv, today, there live approximately 80 thousand infiltrators from Africa, who constitute about 15 percent of the city’s population. In the last year about 700 babies were born to Eritrean and Sudanese mothers, and we currently have an average of about two births a day,” thus reported today Professor Gaby Barabash, director of the Ichilov Medical Center, in a hearing the Knesset held by the lobby for returning the infiltrators.

“The problem is that they closed down the fence, but they did not close down the natural growth, and the number of Eritreans born here rises from year to year,” said Barabash.

Barabash’s use of the term “infiltrators” as a general term for Africans marks his comments as part of the long-standing campaign of racist incitement by Israeli leaders and officials that has resulted in horrifying demonstrations and pogroms targeting Africans in Israel, many of whom arrive as refugees.

In December, David Sheen profiled Israel’s “racist ringleaders,” the political leaders and public figures most responsible for racist incitement.

Barabash’s comments are also in keeping with the general outlook in Israel where it is socially acceptable to define the births of non-Jewish babies as undesirable or as a “demographic threat” to the so-called “Jewish and democratic state.”

Even more disturbing, Barabash played on common racist tropes of Africans and people of color as bearers of diseases, recognizable from racist discourses in other places and times, including traditional European anti-Semitic rhetoric:

Professor Barabash reported high percentages of intrauterine deaths, and also contagious viral diseases among the delivering mothers: tuberculosis, malaria, and AIDS. The African population constitutes one third of the new cases of AIDS carriers [sic] diagnosed in Israel, and half of the cases of malaria carriers.

All of this testimony was taken at a parliamentary hearing organized by members who voice vocal support for mass expulsions of Africans and for the construction of a desert prison camp to hold them.

Recently, women of Ethiopian origin have accused Israeli officials of forcing them to take long-term contraceptives, allegations that came to light following an investigation into the precipitous drop in births to Ethiopian women in Israel in recent years.

A long tradition of Israeli baby-hatred

Barabash’s shocking comments also recall those made by Dr. Yitzhak Ravid, a senior researcher at the Israeli government’s Armaments Development Authority at the Herzliya Conference in 2003, who called for Israel to “implement a stringent policy of family planning in relation to its Muslim population.”

Ravid added: “the delivery rooms in Soroka Hospital in Beersheba,” an area with a large Bedouin population, “have turned into a factory for the production of a backward population” (“Herzliya conference sees verbal attacks on Israeli Arabs,” Haaretz, 18 December 2003).

Palestine’s indigenous Bedouin population has long been the target of Israeli forced removal from their lands and other racist practices.

And as David Hirst wrote of Prime Minister Golda Meir in his classic book The Gun and the Olive Branch, “The Palestinians’ birth-rate was so much higher than the Jews’ that her sleep was often disturbed, she would say, at the thought of how many Arab babies had been born in the night.”

White Man indicted for sending ‘KKK forever’ letter to Obama

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TheGrio

A West Virginia man has been indicted on charges he threatened to kill President Barack Obama and the first family in a letter filled with profanity and racial slurs.

Twenty-year-old McMechen resident Ryan Kirker could face as many as five years in prison and a $250,000 fine if convicted.

His arraignment is set for Tuesday morning before U.S. Magistrate James Seibert in Wheeling.

U.S. Attorney William Ihlenfeld says Kirker threatened the president in an April letter that was sent to the White House and that closed with the phrase, “KKK forever.” The case was investigated by the U.S. Secret Service.

Kirker remained at the Northern Regional Jail on Wednesday.

New Publication: A Primer on Felony Disenfranchisement

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The Sentencing Project 

The dramatic growth of the U.S. prison population in the last 40 years has led to record levels of disenfranchisement, with an estimated 5.85 million citizens banned from the polls today. Felony Disenfranchisement: A Primer provides an introduction to the issue, covering: an overview of state felony disenfranchisement policies; the history and impact of felony disenfranchisement; state-level reform efforts; disenfranchisement policies in an international context; and the impact of felony disenfranchisement.