Finally -- California primary

This display of topical piñatas in the Mission seems about right to me.

The crazy in this year's election has everything to do with Barack Obama's presidency. There is some fraction of the electorate that can't get its gut around the fact that for eight years, the president has been a Black man. (A lot of the same ones are probably equally allergic to the idea of a girl president.) And so, Trump.

David Axelrod, Obama's chief political operative, called this out in January.

“The most influential politician in 2008 won’t be on the ballot,” I wrote to Senator Obama in 2006. “His name is George W. Bush.”

... Today, after seven eventful years, attitudes toward President Obama will shape the selection of his successor. ... So who among the Republicans is more the antithesis of Mr. Obama than the trash-talking, authoritarian, give-no-quarter Mr. Trump? His bombast allows no room for nuance or complexity. He proudly extols his intolerance as an assault against “political correctness,” and he vows to bring the world to heel, from Mexico to China to Syria and Iraq. ...

Whenever I get worried that the GOPer's campaign of “ambient viciousness” will overwhelm us all, I drop in at Sam Wang's Princeton Election Consortium and look at Obama's approval rating at the top of the page. Today he's running at plus 3% -- the best in months. Looking good for November.

And so, finally, this Democratic primary will end today. Bernie has given us a vision of a social democratic future. If we have a decent future, I'm sure it will be a social democratic one; nothing else will work in a time of greed, increasing longevity, and robotics. But the Bern could not, yet, overcome the country's racial divides. Race matters in this country and there is no decent future that does not dismantle structural white supremacy. The rest of the country has not noticed yet, but this has begun to happen in California. Though still deeply troubled, we are a different sort of racial cauldron than in the 1990s when the white electorate hoped it could simply vote away the Black and brown.

I should hesitate to generalize from anecdotes, but I am guessing Hillary Clinton will win in California by a larger margin than expected. Two long time Bernie supporters have confided to me that in view of the "Trump national emergency" they've jumped to Hillary. I could easily be wrong. In any case, she'll clinch tonight.

More and more, I think smart progressives should understand the "Trump national emergency" as a chance to chip away at the state and local levels where Republicans have been winning.

In California, gaining Congressional seats will depend on whether Democrats make it through our asinine, undemocratic (small "d") "top two" primary system. Results to watch include CA-24, an open seat around Santa Barbara where Democrat Lois Capps is retiring and where split Democratic votes might put two Republicans in the November race, locking out the Donkey Party. Likewise CA-21 where a Republican holds a Democratic leaning seat in the Central Valley. In the year of the Trump, if a Dem gets into the final, that seat could be a pick up. Otherwise, California Congressional seats are probably about defending the status quo for both parties.

The nearest Senate contest to California likely to matter in November is in Nevada where Harry Reid is retiring. This one is the only plausible pick up opportunity for the Koch-party, so watch the money fly and hope former Dem Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto can win it.

Meanwhile, today's primary seems to have brought people into the electorate, all to the good here in California. The LA Times reports that California has seen 650,000 new voter registrations for the primary, 74% of them Democrats. That's more than some states have voters! We're big.***Anyone still looking for San Francisco voting advice (I keep getting emails), my take is here.

LGBT realities

It would be tempting to think that legalization of marriage equality and general easing of mainstream recoil from gay people and our lives would mean that our life chances have become more similar to those of everyone else. (We're about 4% of the U.S. population, by the way.)

Not so, according to this data from the Williams Institute at the UCLA Law School:

That last figure doesn't take into account that only between a quarter and a third of us are raising kids, a major impediment to economic success for many people.

What kind of society is this which makes raising the next generation a harm to the parents?

Booktalking

If you missed Erudite Partner speaking about American Nuremberg at the Bay Area Book Fair on Saturday (seen here with co-panelist David Dayen, author of Chain of Title), you can catch her at a benefit for Radio KPFA on June 15. The event is Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar Street, in Berkeley at 7:30pm. More at the link.

After the panel, EP signed books and answered questions from the curious.

The U.S. trashed a promise to the poor ... who cares?

As this endless primary season sputters to a close, I'd be remiss if I didn't call out something that did not happen. There's been a lot of re-litigating the previous Clinton presidency. The Donald, dick-obsessed, seems to think it was about Bill's organ. Bernie and progressive Democrats generally lament the permission given to our finance oligarchs to grow their criminal casino economy.

But, despite occasional mentions, there's been little focus on what was probably the worst domestic crime of that presidency: the 1996 "welfare reform" which ended the federal promise of cash assistance to women and children (AFDC) if they became too poor to survive. The Depression era program was racist from the start, effectively limited "deserving" white mothers who fell on hard times, but was gradually agitators extended its coverage to most women and children who desperately needed a hand up. The "reform" ended the promise with a blizzard of regulations and exclusions and a new state run offering (TANF) which cheapskate (read Republican-governed) states could cut back as they chose. And they did.

You don't have to take my word for it. Here's Robert Pear in the Times.

The welfare law has indisputably achieved one of the goals that Mr. Clinton announced in his first campaign for president, to “end welfare as we know it.” Nationally, the number of people receiving cash assistance has fallen to 4.1 million, from 12.3 million in 1996. In Arizona, the number of cash assistance recipients has plummeted to 20,495, from a monthly average of 155,000 in 1996-97.

The 1996 law reversed six decades of social welfare policy, eliminating the individual entitlement to cash assistance for the nation’s poorest children and giving each state a lump sum of federal money with vast discretion over its use. The amount of the main federal block grant has remained at $16.5 billion annually since the law was adopted, but inflation has shrunk the value of that money about a third.

In addition, the reach of the program has been greatly reduced. In 1996, for every 100 families in poverty, 68 received cash assistance. That fell to 23 for every 100 in 2014. And in a dozen states including Arizona, the number is fewer than 10 in 100.

As Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer have exhaustively documented, for most of the truly destitute, "they just don't give welfare anymore."

Instead, the U.S. responds to the "deep" poverty of 6.6% of us (up from 4.5% before "reform) with bureaucratic fiddling: the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit, food stamps (SNAP) etc., all of which benefit people who are less poor more than the very poor!

Both Bernie and Hillary back proposals that would add additional layers of needed support for our poor people. But they've been unwilling to buck the majority of us who hold to the moral notion that those who don't work need not be fed.

That's too bad. There is no reason that a country this rich needs to immiserate poor women, their children, and too far many physically and mentally challenged individuals.

Here's Jonathan Chait back in February bemoaning the cowardice of our Democratic champions:

In 1992, Bill Clinton ran for president promising to “end welfare as we know it.” In 2016, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders should promise to bring welfare back.

Thus far, they are doing no such thing. Neither Clinton nor Sanders has a welfare-reform proposal, despite the raft of options they have floated for helping lower-income families. Neither Clinton nor Sanders brings up welfare when discussing what good they would do for the poor.

Didn't happen.

We know how to combat poverty: poor people need money. Apparently that simple truth is more than anyone in the political arena dares utter.

Champ rehabilitated

Nothing to add to the reminiscences of Muhammad Ali but this: when I was a young person in the Sixties, his willingness to buck the draft and denounce our immoral war and racism at home was inspiring. He was a hero, while mainstream Amerikkka pour hatred on him.

Hence, on a trip through Louisville in 2006, I was stunned to see that this city had embraced the former pariah, naming a main downtown street/shopping mall for its famous resident. Here's the Google Street View:

How views (fashions?) change.

For the families of San Franciscans killed by the SFPD ...

the pain does not end.

Here Refugio Nieto tells the story of his son Alex Nieto, murdered by the SFPD on March 21, 2014. Lorena Melgarejo provided translation.

Fifty-nine bullets were fired into my son, into his body and his head. We had to have his casket closed ...

Two cousins and a brother of Luis Gongoro Pat are in San Francisco from Yucatan, trying to understand why the police shot their homeless relative on April 7th of this year. Lorena again translated:

They say Mexico is a corrupt country -- but here we get no answers. Here it is just sad. How do we get answers? We feel powerless in this country ...

At this listening meeting on Thursday at St. John the Evangelist organized by Faith in Action, Supervisor David Campos described his plan to try to dilute the mayor's monopoly of power over the police department by creating an office of a Public Advocate like the one in New York City. Supervisor John Avalos is proposing that the supervisors place a kind of hold on part of the SFPD budget next year, pending measurable reforms.

Meanwhile, it's still the case that, since 2000, the SFPD has killed 40 civilians; no officers have been charged.

This woman was just convicted of lynching!

How's this for a perversion of the intent of a law? As far as I can figure out, from reading news accounts here and here, in the aftermath of a Black Lives Matter protest, Pasadena police moved to arrest a Black woman for an altercation unrelated to the protest; nearby BLM folks tried to pull the arrestee away; and two days later a BLM leader was charged with "lynching" -- "the taking by means of a riot of any person from the lawful custody of any peace officer" as the California Penal Code puts it.

On this Wednesday, a Pasadena jury found Jasmine Richards guilty of the offense. She faces sentencing on June 7 and could receive as much as four years for the felony. Jamilah King reports:

Richards is the second black female protester to be charged with felony attempted lynching in California in 2016, though she is the first one to be convicted. In April, 20-year-old Maile Hampton was charged in Sacramento with attempted felony lynching when she tried to intervene in the police arrests of activists during a protest near the state Capitol. Those charges were later dropped.

Richards' charges were not. In a statement, Black Lives Matter denounced her conviction. "The perverse nature of this case is stark both because of the law's tragic name but more importantly because police, who have long exercised poor and deadly judgment in cases impacting Black communities, cannot be trusted to make lawful arrests or to guarantee arrestees will make it home alive," the group wrote. "Given that, removing a black person from police custody can be a life-saving action."

King provides historical background on lynching laws.

Lynching has a long history in the United States. In the years following the Civil War, black men and women who were accused of crimes (often falsely) were kidnapped from their homes, courthouses or jails by so-called "lynch mobs," crowds of angry whites who rioted in favor of vigilante justice. Some were hanged from trees or lampposts; others were burned alive or mutilated and tortured to death.

For decades after the Civil War, lynching was used as an act of racial terrorism against African-Americans. Between 1877 and 1950, nearly 4,000 people, most of whom were black, were lynched in the United States. ...

Thanks largely to a decades-long campaign waged by the NAACP, the country's first anti-lynching law was passed in 1922 to help curb the violence. But in more recent decades, law enforcement has used a specific interpretation of the law to crack down on left-wing activists.

Lynching was organized and community-approved white terrorism, torture and murder to enforce white supremacy over black citizens. Police and prosecutors have plenty of options for charging people who interfere with them if they think they must; charging Richards with lynching is obscene. ***Color of Change has a petition ...

Friday cat blogging

Ms. Meow (aka Tokyo) luxuriates in this new bed and breakfast where she is visiting for a season. Morty is not sure about the interloper. But no fur has flown ... yet.

Our occupying army and the community it fails to serve

A police chief is out, but San Francisco still has a police force that, over the last two years, has shot five people of color, (3 Latino men; 1 Black man, 1 Black woman) in circumstances that look like wanton murder. No officers have been brought to trial or even disciplined internally (as far as we are allowed to know -- see below.) In two other, separate, cases, racist text messages between officers have come to light. Something is rotten in the SFPD; the mayor can make promises, but words won't cut it. This militarized force acts like a hostile occupying army, instead of as protectors of the public safety.

And so, citizens have to keep up the pressure. Here Daniel English from Faith in Action and Fr. Richard Smith of Saint John Episcopal Church deliver a banner and signs to the ongoing Wednesday evening vigil outside the Mission police station. Activists and neighbors are demanding that District Attorney George Gascon bring the officers who shot Amilcar Perez Lopez to trial. Despite the autopsy evidence that Amilcar died from six shots in the back, the hope for a trial of the shooters seems a long shot. Since 2000, the SFPD has killed 40 civilians; no officers have been charged.
***Meanwhile family members of the dead, their friends, and their communities are struggling to assert detailed demands for police reform that will have meaningful impact and a chance at success. With five recent victims, multiple political authorities at the city level with some jurisdiction over the police, and calls for outside investigations by both the state Attorney General and the federal Department of Justice, winning policy improvements seems a complex business that will probably proceed by fits and starts, if at all. The Police Officers Association stonewalls reforms. Cops feel under siege; perhaps they might be more secure if policy demanded they de-escalate rather than dominate.
***Meanwhile, at the state level, craven Democrats (and most Republicans, but hey, this is California where Dems run the legislature) deep-sixed a police transparency bill that would have pried information about police encounters with citizens from secretive departments. The pols were scared to buck the police unions in defense of their constituents. It's worth contemplating the sort of information the bill sought to order departments to release -- and which aggrieved Californians are still barred from asking for from law enforcement agencies. Had this become law, citizens might have sought:

(A) A record related to the investigation or assessment of any use of force by a peace officer that is likely to or does cause death or serious bodily injury, including, but not limited to, the discharge of a firearm, use of an electronic control weapon or conducted energy device, and any strike with an impact weapon to a person’s head.

(B) A record related to any finding by a law enforcement agency or oversight agency that a peace officer or custodial officer engaged in sexual assault, an excessive use of force, an unjustified search, detention or arrest, racial or identity profiling, as defined in subdivision (e) of Section 13519.4, discrimination or unequal treatment on the basis of race, color, ethnicity, national origin, age, religion, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or mental or physical disability, or any other violation of the legal rights of a member of the public.

(C) A record related to any finding by a law enforcement agency of job-related dishonesty by a peace officer or custodial officer, including, but not limited to, perjury, false statements, filing false reports, or destruction or concealment of evidence.

If sworn "peace" officers are going to engage in these practices, it does seem we ought to know about it. In theory, they work for us. But apparently not.

Now for a satisfying factoid ...

According to Priceonomics, impersonating a presidential candidate has not been good for The Donald's hotels:

Bookings at Trump Hotels are down big time: they have decreased 59% compared to the same period last year on Hipmunk. It seems that customers willing to spend $500 a night on a Trump Hotel room may not be fans of Trump the political candidate.

Recent news reports indicate that Trump went begging to the Republican National Committee because his campaign doesn't have the money to go on TV in June and most of July before the GOP convention.

It behooves the rest of us to make the most of the opportunity created by a repulsive and floundering Trump to replace as many sitting Republicans as possible at all levels. Sure, lots of the Democrats we elect will present their own problems. But let's elect as many as we can and then beat them into shape.

Residues of campaigns past

In this nasty electoral season, I'm pondering the observations of two smart, decent men who've lived through similar electoral travesties.

First, here's Charles Blow, recollecting the contest between Democrat Edwin Edwards (the corrupt old "crook") and David Duke (former Grand Wizard of the KKK) for Louisiana Governor in 1991.

... In the end, Edwards won with a coalition of blacks and affluent, “business-oriented conservatives” in a record turnout for a state gubernatorial general election, but Duke did win the majority of the white vote.

Though he didn’t win, Duke’s imprint on the state was real. As The Times reported in 2014: “Two decades later, much of his campaign has merged with the political mainstream here, and rather than a bad memory from the past, Mr. Duke remains a window into some of the murkier currents in the state’s politics, where Republicans have sought and eventually won Mr. Duke’s voters, while turning their back on him.”

Whether or not Trump loses in November to “crooked Hillary,” as he has dubbed her, he may well be an important part of the future of his party. He has given his Republican supporters permission to vocalize their anti-otherness rage, and that will not easily be undone.

As a Louisiana boy experiencing a confounding sense of déjà vu, let me assure you: There is no way to un-cook the gumbo.

Then I came across this blog post from Scot Nakagawa, an experienced justice advocate from Oregon. In 1992, a "Christian" right wing group proposed an "Abnormal Behaviors Initiative" to embed anti-gay discrimination in the state constitution. Against initial polling and conventional wisdom, this measure was defeated by a path-breaking campaign whose elements Nakagawa summarizes: 1) opponents convinced voters the measure was extreme, "went too far;" 2) LGBT people like him threw themselves heart and soul into the campaign; and 3) allies came out in support, forging new relations in the struggle. He celebrates that victory, but strives to bring the lessons of this experience to bear on the horrid morass of racist, misogynist bigotry that is the Trump eruption.

We need to defeat the bigoted, fear-mongering positions that Trump has built his campaign on because, win or lose, those arguments will live on after the election. By becoming the presumptive GOP nominee, he’s made those arguments legitimate in the context of national politics, at least for now. ...

... On election day in 1992 I broke down into tears at the news that Ballot Measure 9 was rejected by Oregon voters. I felt like my community had said, we got your back. ... [But] the measure still won 43.53 percent of the vote. ... That number, 43.53 percent, more than four in ten in support of naked, vicious bigotry, reminded us that the fight is never over. ...

Platforms for progressive activism exist now that might never have been created if not for the thousands of people who came forward in 1992, people from every walk of life including farm workers, unionists, Black, Asian, Latino, Native American, Arab American, and diverse faith community leaders, and the many other ordinary people who came to our defense even as the mainstream LGBTQ community failed at times to provide the warmest welcome.

Allies play a key role in every struggle, and Oregon has truly struggled through years of being targeted by vigilante white supremacists and right wing evangelical groups. In 1992 we saw the many targets of these groups begin to come together.

The battles that have been fought on so many issues since then have taught many in Oregon’s progressive community that solidarity is not a me for you thing, but a we for us thing. It begins with understanding that democracy is the best defense against those who would prey on us, and there is no democracy unless it includes all of us.

The fight is never over. You gotta love the fight, but in order to do that, you gotta love the people. This year, the targets of right wing bigotry need some love. Maybe enough of that love will help us find our way from me for you to we for us.

It's going to be a long electoral season. But hard won fights too can leave their residues. And those can be very good indeed.

When you go to war, people die

For this Memorial Day, here are some thoughts from J. Kael Weston who served the U.S. State Department at the UN and deployed as a political advisor alongside U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. He discussed his book, The Mirror Test, with Terry Gross on Fresh Air. During his Iraq deployment, his decision to send Marines to guard Iraqi polling places in Anbar province had the consequence that 31 young men were killed in a helicopter crash. He will mourn these soldiers for the rest of his life.

WESTON: I think that war refocuses you on right and wrong wars. And I'm not anti-war, but I'm anti-wrong-war. And I feel that Iraq met that standard of being a wrong war. ...

GROSS: ... And since Memorial Day is coming up, I'd like to hear what Memorial Day means to you and why you chose to make those visits on a Memorial Day weekend?

WESTON: It means we need to take very seriously not just the weekend of when we remember our dead - there's a memorial in South Boston for Vietnam dead that says if you forget my death, only then will I have died in vain. And I think that's the cleanest, most powerful message that should apply to every war, whether a right war or a wrong war.

So remembering the cost of war, remembering the dead, I think, is the role, as citizens, that we have. I also think there's a responsibility and an obligation, really, to think hard over Memorial Day weekend about who our commanders in chief are. I vote based on that profile - which person, male, female, Republican, Democrat, is going to be the commander in chief that our troops deserve and need, especially at a time when these two wars go on and on and on.

And so I think Memorial Day is reflection, reckoning but also responsibility. And I think citizens shouldn't just do the barbecue or go shopping at the sale or go to the beach. We should think hard about, you know, when you go to war, people die. And is that person making the ultimate decision worthy of that sacrifice?

Summing up Obama: revisiting Rev. Wright and the race speech

Since we're enduring an election, I'm giving a lot of attention to 538 Politics, the site where Nate Silver has landed his "data journalism" under ESPN auspices. Silver's choice of conglomerate overlord is appropriate; much of 538's coverage reads like ephemeral sports trivia. But occasionally they produce fascinating insights bringing to bear the sort of stats mojo in which they specialize.

In this vein, I want to recommend a podcast and documentary video looking back to the 2008 campaign, Inside The Five-Day Stretch When Obama Found His Voice On Race. This tells the story of the moment in that campaign when major media spotlighted some of Obama's pastor Jeremiah Wright's sermons which were not complimentary about U.S. national pretensions to global moral preeminence. Obama responded with his More Perfect Union speech in Philadelphia and commentators declared that he'd managed to push the racial camel through eye of the public's needle about his potential presidency.

The 538 gang, assisted by senior writer Farai Chideya, have produced a fascinating look back at whether, in fact, that moment in the campaign really deserves to have been seen as the turning point many of us thought it was at the time. On simple data grounds, they suspect not.

Harry Enten: This is the funny thing about studying events in real time — it’s difficult to disentangle one thing from another. For instance, John McCain had his largest lead of the campaign against Obama right around the time of the controversy, but was that because of Wright or because McCain clinched the nomination around the same time? I honestly don’t know.

farai: I also think we in the media sometimes think we’re more influential than we are. Not everyone watches wall-to-wall politics coverage. And network news ratings have been declining for years. So although this was a huge firestorm in the media, I also wonder how deeply it saturated the electorate. ...

harry: To Farai’s point, a CBS News poll taken during the controversy found that 28 percent had heard a lot about the Rev. Wright’s statements. That compares to 23 percent who had heard nothing at all about it. Most had heard some, not much or nothing at all.

So, outside the media, most people had either already formed their opinions of Obama, for good or ill, or weren't listening. Yet, they still find much to be learned from this episode:

natesilver: It showed us a little bit about how Obama stayed cool under pressure instead of wetting the bed. ...

Micah Cohen: … the response to Wright was an early sign that there would be a not insignificant group of Americans who would traffic in these race-freighted “controversies” regarding Obama, right?

farai: First off, there has never been a moment in American history when race didn’t matter … just more and less contentious moments. ...nonetheless, once Obama was elected, there was a period of racial detente, followed by a backlash. A 2010 Gallup poll found 13 percent of Americans said they were greatly worried about race relations; today that figure is 35 percent. ...

Mike Fletcher: And let’s face it, the clips of Rev. Wright’s most inflammatory sermons played into a fear narrative. If the question of whether or not Obama wore a flag pin was news, this was certainly going to be a running story. In a perfect world, it would have been presented in the context of black church traditions, but …

harry: What’s interesting here that gets lost now and may get lost to a younger generation is that this election was a pretty big freaking deal. ...Obama ... was not only likely to be the first non-white major party nominee, but he also had a very good shot at the presidency. And then here comes a story that plays in to the worst fears of a certain segment of white voters, who saw Wright as radical on race and thought maybe he could be offering advice to the next president. The fact that voters saw through that and trusted Obama was a turning point that I’m not sure would have been accomplished 15 years earlier, when a majority of Americans still didn’t believe in interracial marriage.

My strictly anecdotal memories of these events are naturally very different; having long been exposed to the Black theology of liberation via Dr. James Cone, Wright's views were unsurprising. But I certainly was anxious -- would white people freak out? The smooth competence Obama displayed in defusing this moment convinced me of his political gifts -- and left me bemused and frustrated when he couldn't seem to summon such capacity at many later moments in his presidency.

This podcast is an early entry in a "Summing Up" genre that we're going to see a lot of as Barack Obama leaves office. What did the rise and incumbency of this extraordinary figure mean, if anything enduring? I expect to write many entries about these items here, some less approving than this one.

San Francisco discontents

The tourist with the camera may think he's capturing a manifestation of a worthy working class cause in front of City Hall here in Left Coast City.

Sadly, not so. The tableau was brought to you by a Carpenters Union local on behalf of real estate developers who object to city regulations requiring more construction of affordable housing units. Talk about being in bed with the bosses; I guess these carpenters can still afford beds -- probably somewhere else.

Californians have a chance to Do Something

A little over a year ago, it is undisputed that Dylann Roof murdered nine worshippers in Charleston's Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church. This week, the Attorney General announced she would ask for the death penalty at his trial.

Ta-Nehisi Coates responded to this Department of Justice announcement:

... if nonviolence isn’t always the answer, [Dr.] King reminds us to work for a world where it is. Part of that work is recognizing when our government can credibly endorse King’s example. Sparing the life of Dylann Roof would be such an instance—one more credible than the usual sanctimonious homilies delivered in his name. If the families of Roof's victims can find the grace of forgiveness within themselves; if the president can praise them for it; if the public can be awed by it—then why can't the Department of Justice act in the spirit of that grace and resist the impulse to kill?

Perhaps because some part of us believes in nonviolence not as an ideal worth striving for, but as a fairy tale passed on to the politically weak. The past two years have seen countless invocations of nonviolence to shame unruly protestors into order. Such invocations are rarely made to shame police officers who choke men to death over cigarettes and are sent back out onto the beat. ...

Moreover, killing Roof does absolutely nothing to ameliorate the conditions that brought him into being in the first place. The hammer of criminal justice is the preferred tool of a society that has run out of ideas. In this sense, Roof is little more than a human sacrifice to The Gods of Doing Nothing. ...

This fall, Californians will have the opportunity to Do Something. Justice that Works has put a measure on the November ballot replacing death sentences with a maximum penalty of life without parole. This ain't perfect, but it's a start. Let's start.

Friday cat blogging

Morty says "Scratch my belly. I probably won't grab you with my claws." I'm seldom fooled, whereupon he looks a little silly.

They've got your number ...

or if not, they want to give you one. At Mother Jones there's a terrific Pro Publica report on a ranking system widely used in jails and courts to predict which persons hauled in by law enforcement are likely to re-offend. It will surprise no one who has been paying attention that these "risk assessments" seem to routinely finger Black people as more potentially dangerous than other people.

The practice is becoming ever more common.

Rating a defendant's risk of future crime is often done in conjunction with an evaluation of a defendant's rehabilitation needs. The Justice Department's National Institute of Corrections now encourages the use of such combined assessments at every stage of the criminal justice process. And a landmark sentencing reform bill currently pending in Congress would mandate the use of such assessments in federal prisons.

A company called Northpointe peddles its scoring tool to many jurisdictions. It's rankings seem to routinely rank Blacks as a potential danger to the community.

Northpointe's software is among the most widely used assessment tools in the country. The company does not publicly disclose the calculations used to arrive at defendants' risk scores, so it is not possible for either defendants or the public to see what might be driving the disparity. ...

Northpointe's core product is a set of scores derived from 137 questions that are either answered by defendants or pulled from criminal records. Race is not one of the questions. The survey asks defendants such things as: "Was one of your parents ever sent to jail or prison?" "How many of your friends/acquaintances are taking drugs illegally?" and "How often did you get in fights while at school?" The questionnaire also asks people to agree or disagree with statements such as "A hungry person has a right to steal" and "If people make me angry or lose my temper, I can be dangerous."

It seems pretty obvious what is going in this scoring: a person receives a lower risk number to the extent that he/she provides answers that approximate those of a white middle class suburbanite. This risk assessment testing follows the pattern set by "intelligence testing" -- IQ measurements. As I've explored previously, IQ tests were developed to prove that Southern and Eastern European immigrants were inferior to northern European whites. Later they shored up racial assumptions:

Robert Yerkes, a president of the American Psychological Association, got a chance to test the I.Q. of soldiers drafted for World War I and labelled "89% of negroes" as "feeble-minded." The content of his tests, which essentially measured familiarity with the mores and artifacts of upper middle class U.S. culture in his era, have been described acidly as a "kind of early 20th century Trivial Pursuit."

Nowadays, we're locking people up on the basis of this commercialized pseudoscience.

Upgrade hell

If, like me, you cringe every time you get an upgrade nudge from your laptop or your phone, you are not alone. Yes, often, upgrading software and operating systems seems to break as much as it improves.

But we have the federal government's predicament as a horrible example of what happens when cost, inertia, and complex systems leave our technological infrastructure unimproved over time.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The government is spending about three-fourths of its technology budget maintaining aging computer systems, including platforms more than 50 years old in vital areas from nuclear weapons to Social Security. One still uses floppy disks.

... The Defense Department's Strategic Automated Command and Control System, which is used to send and receive emergency action messages to U.S. nuclear forces. The system is running on a 1970s IBM computing platform, and still uses 8-inch floppy disks to store data. "Replacement parts for the system are difficult to find because they are now obsolete," GAO said. The Pentagon is initiating a full replacement and says the floppy disks should be gone by the end of next year. The entire upgrade will take longer.

... Social Security systems that are used to determine eligibility and estimate benefits, about 31 years old. Some use a programming language called COBOL, dating to the late 1950s and early 1960s. "Most of the employees who developed these systems are ready to retire and the agency will lose their collective knowledge," the report said. "Training new employees to maintain the older systems takes a lot of time." Social Security has no plans to replace the entire system, but is eliminating and upgrading older and costlier components. It is also rehiring retirees who know the technology.

There's much more at the link.

I'll try to remember this every time I resist a prompt to upgrade. I can learn to do things technological a new way -- yes, I can -- yes, I can... But don't ask me to be happy about it. My tech is a tool, not a life.

Time for a "left love child"

Tarso Ramos, executive director of the essential think tank Political Research Associates, proposes a left response to the Donald Trump phenomenon which we would all do well to internalize.

Beyond Trump: Disrupt, Defuse, Compete
... the racism that once helped to build the White middle class has for decades been strategically redeployed by the Right to undermine public support for democratic institutions and antipoverty programs. The result: falling real wages and accelerated income and wealth inequality even among Whites. Simply put, racism is destroying the American middle and working classes.

But that story is not told clearly, loudly, or often enough. Most liberal discussion of the economy addresses race, if at all, in terms of disproportionate economic hardship. And much of the current national discussion about racism only addresses jobs and the economy in order to pivot away from the realities of racism. What we need is a synthesis.

As Heather McGhee and Ian Haney-López have argued, “The progressive movement should expand from a vision of racism as violence done solely to people of color to include a conception of racism as a political weapon wielded by elites against the 99 percent, nonwhite and white alike.” Call it the love child of Black Lives Matter and Occupy. Let’s make it clear that racism is not a viable vehicle for economic advancement for the growing White precariat. ...

Recent movement eruptions have called out what's wrong (Occupy) and that it will take stubborn self-love that's both smart and principled (Black Lives Matter) to change those things. The Donald makes sitting on the sidelines unacceptable.

Too many hours in Logan Airport at Boston yesterday

The food was bad. The wifi was nonexistent. But the souvenir shop saw commercial potential in the national clown show.