Category: Civil Rights
Racist Reflex or ?
A 21 year-old man was released without charges after being arrested near the Delmar Loop MetroLink in St. Louis on Saturday. The police officer who arrested the 21-year-old experienced a minor head injury. The St. Louis Dispatch and KMOV report that the officer was breaking up a fight that allegedly drew a crowd of between 50 and 100 people, including many teenagers.
In response to the “incident” and complaints that teens who are “not from University City,” are “wandering,” “roaming” and “brushing up against customers,” along the Delmar Loop, a Tuesday meeting was called between Delmar Loop business owners, representatives from Mayor Slay’s office, University City officials and representatives of Washington University. (Washington University’s Office of General Counsel denied any involvement in this meeting).
Several proposals emerged from the meeting. These include “lowering the city’s curfew to 6 p.m.,” rounding up teenagers to “let them sit in a paddy wagon for three hours,” adding a police substation to process them and “closing the Loop’s MetroLink station early on Fridays and Saturdays.” To curb the influx of “unruly” young adults, the University City manager promised “active enforcement of all ordinances.”
“In God We Trust” Signs Going Up in Missouri Public Buildings
This morning I spotted this article on FriendlyAtheist.com and thought I should share. Apparently Dee Wampler, Christian Lawyer, is sending letters and drafts of proposals to every city administration in Missouri to officially declare allegiance to God and to post this motto on the interior and exterior of every City Hall. Go read the first link for all the details.
The sad thing is that it is working. His method is to treat the issue as resolved, and to goad each city board into merely ratifying his contention that this is a Christian nation, has always been so, and every entity should visibly so proclaim.
Several counties have already unanimously approved and signed into law his proposal.
Theocracy, here we come!
It is dangerous to quote the United States Constitution in America
Here’s a cool idea: Write the Fourth Amendment on your chest in a marker, and then refuse electronic scanning at an airport, henceforth removing your shirt and thus displaying the Fourth Amendment.
Actually, it’s not a cool idea, Aaron Tobey used this technique of self-expression, and here’s what the TSA did, as described at Lowering the Bar:
they cuffed him, interrogated him, had the airport police charge him with “disorderly conduct” (favorite of official thugs everywhere), and then contacted the cops at his university and suggested that they report Tobey to the Dean of Students.
Here’s a copy of Tobey’s lawsuit. A link provided in this same article suggests that the body scanners used at many airports might be emitting ten times as much radiation as previously claimed.
The political left chokes–allows Bradley Manning to be tortured
There are a few news media figure who are taking principled stands regarding the the horrific way that the United States government is treating Bradley Manning, who has not been convicted of any crime. Glen Greenwald is one of the few with scruples. Other principled voices can be read at Alternet, including Lynn Parramore, who (rightfully) suggests that we’d be outraged if we viewed a fictitious movie of someone being treated as badly as Manning, but since it’s happening in real life we don’t give a shit. Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake has admirably covered the story. Andrew Sullivan has weighed in. Barack Obama has fully earned the title of America’s Second Modern Torture President. This is not hyperbole. Bradley Manning is being tortured by the United States. We are enthusiastically treating Manning the way we treated the (mostly innocent) prisoners at Gitmo. We are doing to Manning what we criticize when other countries do it.
Dylan Ratigan of MSNBC has also presented the story with energy. The torture is bad enough, but the silence by mainstream Democrats is infuriating. We’re running a great country, aren’t we? No need to speak out about Wall Street corruption, massive problems with health care “reform,” the right to assassinate U.S. citizens, government spying on its own citizens, and not blatant torture.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
How We Got Here: The Debate II
The Whiskey Rebellion more or less blew up in Alexander Hamilton’s face. The tax he pushed through congress on whiskey that triggered the entire affair was shortly thereafter repealed and it was a while before the federal government tried to impose internal taxes. One of the stated goals of the revolution was to end taxation without representation, but in practical terms this meant an end to taxation, period.
The federal government used tariffs and land sales to pay off the debt incurred by the revolutionary war. Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana was still done by a combination of the two plus borrowing. Generally, tariffs were kept low, to encourage volume of trade. Some high tariffs were employed in the 1820s and 1830s as protectionist measures to level the field with Britain, which was in the midst of its “workshop of the world” period. The South hated these tariffs because it raised the price of manufactures and shipping, which impacted on their trade which was almost entirely agricultural.
It was different in the states. Property taxes early became a source of state revenue. The definition of “property” for the purposes of such taxes stretched far beyond the bounds we would recognize or accept today and under Jackson came to include just about anything a person owned. Local reaction to such impositions varied by city and state, but rarely rose to the level of rebellion.
Federal internal taxes did not come into play until the Civil War. The need to raise revenue in huge amounts and quickly necessitated the creation of the first income tax, among others, including a vast array of excise taxes and licensing. There were special corporate taxes, stamp taxes for legal documents, and inheritance taxes.
Most of these were phased out after the Civil War. Interestingly, the Republicans—a new party formed just before the Civil War which became the second national party, supplanting the archaic Whigs—kept two elements of the new tax system: high tariffs and taxes on liquor and tobacco. High tariffs were protectionist measures. The excises on liquor and tobacco were not greatly challenged because they coincided with the growing Temperance Movement, which was becoming politically significant.
[More . . . ]
How We Got Here: the Debate I
This will be a rather lengthy piece. It is my intention here to examine the historical underpinnings of what is happening today in the fight between the Right and everyone else. This will be part one of a two-part essay. Bear with me, it all does lead somewhere.
The talking heads have been bloviating for decades now about the function of government vis a vis a so-called Welfare State. The Right claims that having the government “take care of” people is a violation of the American tradition of independence and self-reliance and will sap our resources, both fiscal and moral. The Left has argued that such government programs are there to protect people who have few resources from the depredations of the wealthy and an economy that fluctuates as a normal element of its functioning and that it is the responsibility of the better-off to aid those who are left without recourse in such a system.
That’s the basics of the debate. The Right says no, people should look out for themselves. The Left says many people can’t and it isn’t right to let them starve in the streets. The Right says it has no desire to see anyone starve in the streets but rejects the idea that others are responsible for the perhaps bad choices of individuals who have been unable to take advantage of an open system. The Left counters by pointing out the system is not as open as the Right believes and built in to its workings is the inevitability that a certain number of people simply won’t be able to participate. Even if the Right then agrees, they assert that it is not the job of the State, using tax payer money, to off-set this imbalance. The Left says it is if people vote for it and even if they don’t there’s a moral imperative involved. The Right counters that the State is not the instrument for pursuing moral imperatives.
Well.
Let me be up front here—I think the Right has it wrong. They base their philosophy, if that’s what it is, on an idea of equality that is unsupportable. In the narrowest sense, they argue that our system is open to the extent that everyone has an equal shot at some measure of success and if they fail it is either because they were lazy, foolish, or unlucky. The government can functionally do nothing about any of that.
The argument falls apart on its face. Equality in this country is a principle concerning representation before the State. The State in this sense is the community as a whole, both public and private. The ideas that we are not born to a Station in life which determines at the outset how far an individual might go through his or her own efforts. It was never intended as an assessment of talent or a measure of will or a guarantee of achievement. It is only a promise of access. Because people are not equal as individuals.
They aren’t and there’s not much point in arguing about it. Intelligence, physical attributes, proclivities, all these things vary widely throughout any population group and to argue that, if somehow we could take away all social obstacles, everyone would be exactly the same is absurd.
The Right seems to argue that because this is true, the rest of us have no responsibility for the fundamentally unequal achievements of any one, or group of, individual. They discount social obstacles. Not completely, because when an individual rises above a certain level, reaches the precincts of success, and has done so from straitened beginnings, many on the Right like to point to that individual as an exemplar of succeeding in spite of the circumstances of his or her life. So there is a tacit recognition that social conditions matter, but only as an ennobling aspect to a Horatio Alger story. The question really is why those conditions keep so many others down, but that, as much as the successful individual’s achievement is credited to personal qualities, is a matter of personal failure, not attributable to anyone else.
Which seems to make success and failure a matter of choice. Exclusively. Ergo, the tax payer, through the medium of the State, has no responsibility for such failures.
This can only be true if the assertion of equality is true as an innate quality.
[More . . . ]
After the revolutions
Over at Daylight Atheism, Ebonmuse discusses what comes after the dust settles in Egypt, Tunisia and potentially other countries in the Middle East, focusing on women’s rights.
Banning sharia law?
Submitted without comment.
Justin Elliott at Salon.com writes in What sharia law actually means that a Tennessee Republican legislator introduced a bill to make following sharia law a felony, punishable by up to 15 years in prison.
Okay, one comment: America, where you are free to practice any brand of Christianity you want.
PayPal freezes account of Bradley Manning legal defense fund
Since when is it against the law to help anyone–ANYONE–afford their legal bills? Well, PayPal has decided that it has an “internal policy” that justifies shutting down the account of a group that is attempting to help Bradley Manning pay his legal bills. This shutdown is despicable. With this logic, we should also shut down all public defender offices and thus require all poor people accused of crimes to fend for themselves. If you would like to write to PayPal to express your opinion on this matter, follow this link provided by Firedoglake.
Here’s FDL’s suggested template:
According to the Bradley Manning Support Network, PayPal has frozen the account of the group that supports Pfc. Bradley Manning’s legal defense.
Citizens around the world have donated to the Bradley Manning Support Network to fund the legal defense of Pfc. Manning. This grassroots activism is now hindered because of a political policy decision by PayPal to block these funds.
The Bradley Manning Support Network has not been accused of any impropriety. Your company has essentially admitted that there is no legal reason to shut down account access, and that it is simply an internal policy decision. Additionally, the organization has complied with every reasonable demand from PayPal to restore access to its account – short of the extraordinary and unnecessary step of providing PayPal direct access to its checking account.
PayPal should drop its unreasonable demands of the Bradley Manning Support Network and restore access to the group’s PayPal account.
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