Totalitarian Rule in America - The Other Side of American (Wet) Dream

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Paul Craig Roberts: NATO Provides Cover for US Aggression

The Saker: It has become rather obvious to many, if not most, people that the USA is not a democracy or a republic, but rather a plutocracy run by a small elite which some call "the 1%". Others speak of the "deep state". So my first question to you is the following. Could you please take the time to assess the influence and power of each of the following entities one by one. In particular, can you specify for each of the following whether it has a decision-making "top" position, or a decision-implementing "middle" position in the real structure of power (listed in no specific order)

Federal Reserve
Big Banking
Bilderberg
Council on Foreign Relations
Skull & Bones
CIA
Goldman Sachs and top banks
"Top 100 families" (Rothschild, Rockefeller, Dutch Royal Family, British Royal Family, etc.)
Israel Lobby
Freemasons and their lodges
Big Business: Big Oil, Military Industrial Complex, etc.
Other people or organizations not listed above?

Who, which group, what entity would you consider is really at the apex of power in the current US polity?

Paul Craig Roberts: The US is ruled by private interest groups and by the neoconservative ideology that History has chosen the US as the "exceptional and indispensable" country with the right and responsibility to impose its will on the world.

In my opinion the most powerful of the private interest groups are:

The Military/security Complex
The 4 or 5 mega-sized "banks too big to fail" and Wall Street
The Israel Lobby
Agribusiness
The Extractive industries (oil, mining, timber).

The interests of these interest groups coincide with those of the neoconservatives. The neoconservative ideology supports American financial and military-political imperialism or hegemony.

There is no independent American print or TV media. In the last years of the Clinton regime, 90% of the print and TV media was concentrated in 6 mega-companies. During the Bush regime, National Public Radio lost its independence. So the media functions as a Ministry of Propaganda.

Both political parties, Republicans and Democrats, are dependent on the same private interest groups for campaign funds, so both parties dance to the same masters. Jobs offshoring destroyed the manufacturing and industrial unions and deprived the Democrats of Labor Union political contributions. In those days, Democrats represented the working people and Republicans represented business.

The Federal Reserve is there for the banks, mainly the large ones.The Federal Reserve was created as lender of last resort to prevent banks from failing because of runs on the bank or withdrawal of deposits. The New York Fed, which conducts the financial interventions, has a board that consists of the executives of the big banks. The last three Federal Reserve chairmen have been Jews, and the current vice chairman is the former head of the Israeli central bank. Jews are prominent in the financial sector, for example, Goldman Sachs. In recent years, the US Treasury Secretaries and heads of the financial regulatory agencies have mainly been the bank executives responsible for the fraud and excessive debt leverage that set off the last financial crisis.

In the 21st century, the Federal Reserve and Treasury have served only the interests of the large banks. This has been at the expense of the economy and the population. For example, retired people have had no interest income for eight years in order that the financial institutions can borrow at zero costs and make money.

No matter how rich some families are, they cannot compete with powerful interest groups such as the military/security complex or Wall Street and the banks. Long established wealth can look after its interests, and some, such as the Rockefellers, have activist foundations that most likely work hand in hand with the National Endowment for Democracy to fund and encourage various pro-American non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in countries that the US wants to influence or overthrow, such as occurred in Ukraine. The NGOs are essentially US Fifth Columns and operate under such names as "human rights," "democracy," etc. A Chinese professor told me that the Rockefeller Foundation had created an American University in China and is used to organize various anti-regime Chinese. At one time, and perhaps still, there were hundreds of US and German financed NGOs in Russia, possibly as many as 1,000.

I don't know if the Bilderbergs do the same. Possibly they are just very rich people and have their proteges in governments who try to protect their interests. I have never seen any signs of Bilderbergs or Masons or Rothchilds affecting congressional or executive branch decisions.

On the other hand, the Council for Foreign Relations is influential. The council consists of former government policy officials and academics involved in foreign policy and international relations. The council's publication, Foreign Affairs, is the premier foreign policy forum. Some journalists are also members. When I was proposed for membership in the 1980s, I was blackballed.

Skull & Bones is a Yale University secret fraternity. A number of universities have such secret fraternities. For example, the University of Virginia has one, and the University of Georgia. These fraternities do not have secret governmental plots or ruling powers. Their influence would be limited to the personal influence of the members, who tend to be sons of elite families. In my opinion, these fraternities exist to convey elite status to members. They have no operational functions.

The Saker: What about individuals? Who are, in your opinion, the most powerful people in the USA today? Who takes the final, top level, strategic decision?

Paul Craig Roberts: There really are no people powerful in themselves. Powerful people are ones that powerful interest groups are behind. Ever since Secretary of Defense William Perry privatized so much of the military in 1991, the military/security complex has been extremely powerful, and its power is further amplified by its ability to finance political campaigns and by the fact that it is a source of employment in many states. Essentially Pentagon expenditures are controlled by defense contractors.
Paul Craig Roberts: NATO Provides Cover for US Aggression - Russia Insider

 

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Leadership: Corruption In The American Military

March 30, 2015: The U.S. Army has stopped trying to pretend that growing corruption among their officers does not exist and is not a serious problem. The other services are in a similar situation and are right behind the army in being open about it and seeking solutions. This is not a new problem. Actually it arrives and departs in cycles. The last time around corruption peaked during the late 1960s in Vietnam and in the 1970s the army made a real, and effective, effort to clean it up. But once more, during a war, the corruption has returned. During Vietnam the corruption crept back in part because better communications created a faster news cycle and enabled senior commanders and politicians to have direct control of the troops that was never possible before. This led to all sorts of problems that only got worse when the Internet became popular and allowed even more leadership problems. The core problem is what the military calls micromanagement and it led to impossible and unreasonable demands on commanders and troops which then led to the troops rationalizing cutting corners and telling their bosses what they wanted to hear, whether it was true of not. The impact of this was first noted a few years after September 11, 2001 when the army found that an unusually high number of junior officers were leaving the army. When these officers were asked why, one reason that kept coming up was a loss of trust in their commanders and the belief that junior officers could not rely on honest answers from their bosses, who were often more concerned about the opinion of the media or politicians back home. Army researchers and analysts began to monitor this sort of thing and have been releasing more and more data on what they have found and a lot of that dirt is becoming public knowledge. The growing lack of trust led to more cheating and corruption in general as subordinates strived to meet the unreasonable ("zero tolerance") demands made on them.

Those studying the current problem found that if they looked at the U.S. military during Vietnam, where there was a similar pattern of corruption. Micromanagement, first seen during the Vietnam War when advances in communications allowed someone in Washington to speak directly with commanders in combat, reached new heights during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and caused major headaches for another generation of battlefield commanders with serious micromanagement problems.

All this got really bad in 2004 when the U.S. Department of Defense decided to provide the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) with a real time combat command capability. This meant that the JCS, led by its chairman, now had a combat command center in the Pentagon where they use satellite communications to directly observe, and sometimes control, combat forces anywhere on the planet. Now all these senior officers learned, early on in their military training, the importance of giving subordinates their mission and leaving their subordinates to figure out a way to do it. But now, with a generation of senior commanders with no experience of being micromanaged platoon leaders in Vietnam, the insidious and crippling micromanagement disease crept back into the White House and Pentagon. Field commanders were being second guessed by nervous superiors half way around the world. These same superiors were now calling in lawyers to help them make the right (for the guy in Washington) decision while the troops were under fire and waiting for permission to proceed. It wasn't always this way.

It was only in the past century that a government gained the ability to exercise any control at all over armed forces far from the capital. This was first done with the introduction of overland and undersea telegraph lines in the 19th century and world-wide radio broadcasting equipment early in the 20th century. Before that an admiral or general was sent off with orders to accomplish a mission and pretty much allowed to get it done as they saw fit. The generals and admirals rather liked this approach, as their job was hard enough without a bunch of politicians looking over their shoulder and second guessing their every decision. Even with the radio messages from back home, the combat commanders were still left to sort things out on their own. The radio was used mainly to report progress, or lack of it, not ask permission for every move.

But by the 1960s it was possible to patch through a telephone call from the White House to an infantry battalion commander deep in the Vietnamese bush. And it wasn't just the dreaded phone call from the president you had to worry about. The beleaguered battalion commander might have brigade, division, and corps commanders circling overhead in helicopters, all of them observing and offering advice or giving orders. This "micromanagement" was much disliked by the guys on the ground, trying to run a battle they were right in the middle of.

After Vietnam the Department of Defense tried to deal with this problem by establishing regional commands to cover the entire planet and then appoint four star generals or admirals to command all American forces in that region if there were a war (the rest of the time they would keep an eye on things and get ready for any possible war). These commanders in chief (or CINCs as they are still called, unofficially) were sometimes guilty of micromanagement, although all experienced combat commanders recognized that it was best to leave the commanders of the fighting units alone. This was the lesson of history. Micromanagement was bad but it persisted. Why?

Blame it on the media. Just as military communications had improved so had the ability of the media to get the story back to their audience (of voters, pundits, and unfriendly politicians). In the past the commander on the spot might do things that did not look good in the media but it took so long to get the story back that the operation was over by the time it did. If the battle was won many sins would be forgiven. That no longer works. Communications now allow reporters to deliver color commentary while a battle is going on. The president, the ultimate (by law and in fact) commander in chief, is held responsible for whatever the troops do. It is not possible, politically, to wait for the combat commanders to finish their job before the president, or his aides, issues new orders.

Examples of micromanagement were abundant in the recent Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Washington often had to be consulted before sensitive attacks were made (like having a Predator UAV launch a Hellfire missile at some guy on the ground who might be Osama bin Laden, or some tall Afghan with a beard, a new SUV, and a commanding manner). The JCS Command Post was an attempt to deal with this problem. The JCS and the Secretary of Defense are the president's senior, and most frequent, military advisors. Ultimately, the buck stops with the JCS. So by plugging the JCS into a world-wide command system, politically sensitive decisions can be resolved quickly (in minutes, or at least in less than an hour). The more frequent contact between the president, the Secretary of Defense, and the JSC with combat commanders might build up a degree of trust that would enable sensitive decisions to be made more quickly. This would happen, in a best case situation, because the JCS Command Post had developed confidence in the judgment of the commanders out there.

But the JCS Command Post has just become another layer of management that slows down decision making without improving the ability of the troops to get the job done. To solve this problem it's proposed that the CINC be reduced to the status of a staff officer. The CINC and his people (several hundred staff officers and support troops) would be the repository of knowledge about the local situation and would take care of all those logistical and support details that enable the combat operations to happen. So far, the CINCs have successfully resisted this, but it's happening anyway whenever the folks back in Washington want to throw their considerable weight around.

Speaking of staff work, one thing combat staffs are increasingly concerned with is how to deal with politically delicate situations that the media could run with (often in uncomfortable directions). This sort of thing has been seen frequently since September 11, 2001. For example, when sandstorms seemed to have "stalled" the American advance on Baghdad in 2003, the president, or at least the Secretary of Defense, had to be in touch with the commanders inside the sand storm and then say something to the press that would defuse the story and wouldn't blow up later if it proved to be false. For those who didn't catch the follow up on the stand storm, the troops were delayed by the need to resupply (especially fuel for their very thirsty M-1 tanks) and the storm actually helped because the Iraqis thought they could safely move Republican Guard divisions under cover of it. They couldn't, as there were American satellites, UAVs, and sensors on the ground that could see right through the sand. Iraqi tanks and troops got shot up on a massive scale before they realized that the airborne sand blinded them more than the Americans.

The ability to quickly communicate between the battlefield and the Pentagon came in handy after Baghdad fell and the Baath party diehards continued to resist with ambushes. But all of this communication was improvised. That experience naturally led to the idea that better preparation for that situation would have improved communications and decision making. The Pentagon and White House already expected to see real time UAV video coverage of critical events. But there are often dozens of video feeds running through Department of Defense satellites, and the JCS Command Post tries to sort it all out and have the most important videos marked for the attention of the president, Secretary of Defense, and Chairman of the JCS, or for release to the media.

Micromanagement originally appeared because the technology was there to make it possible. New technology keeps showing up, making more mischief, or benefits, possible. As always, it's up to the people using the technology to make things happen or screw things up. All this is another example and unintended consequences, when something new is available and when it is used unexpected bad things result. It takes a while for people to sort out the cause and effect and even longer to decide on a cure. Meanwhile the problem continues to fester and create a corrupt atmosphere.

Leadership: Corruption In The American Military

 

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Hypocrisy Empire (I)
Back to Roots: American Democracy and Slavery

There have been many pretenders to world domination. They have all aspired to hegemony and claimed to have a unique mission to accomplish but each of them had special traits. What is the main specific feature of the American Empire to distinguish it from other empires in history? I believe it's unparalleled hypocrisy penetrating the life in America and the country's foreign policy.

There is nothing new here. The phenomenon has been described by Machiavelli and many others. At that the history teaches that rulers normally understood that being an absolute hypocrite did not stand them in good stead so they stopped at some point. The American politicians and state leaders do not realize the extent of double standards practiced by the United States and based on the principle Quod licet Jovi non licet bovi («Gods may do what cattle may not» or «what is permitted to one person or group, is not permitted to everyone»). They find it normal to combine the blind faith in America as an example of real democracy with the conduct on the international scene which is incompatible with the principle of freedom. The inconsistency has always been a specific feature of US history forming the world vision of America's ruling circles and it is deeply enrooted in conscience.

The double standard mindset was formed because since its birth the United States has always existed simultaneously in what appears to be two parallel worlds. On the one hand, it was the most modern state structure, a kind of «a shining city on a hill», on the other hand, the US was an egregious example of horrible slavery. Those times defined the mindset which allows for being a democrat with modern thinking and a slave owner treating people like cattle at the very same time. Recently archeologists have unearthed the remains a hidden passageway used by slaves at the estate of George Washington's presidential home. It was designed so Washington's guests would not see slaves as they slipped in and out of the main house. Washington lived and conducted presidential business at the house in the 1790s, when Philadelphia was the nation's capital. They also found a large basement with chains and tools for torture to punish the slaves. If the founder of the United States tortured people, then why not torture them at Guantanamo?

It's worth to note that 59% of Americans support such methods of interrogation in case the people to be tortured are allegedly involved in terrorist activities. But it matters who is going to hand down a ruling and decide that the accusations were substantiated or not. The issue of slavery was not even taken into consideration when the US Constitution was written. Instead the founding fathers resorted to hypocritical circumlocutions. The section 2 of the Article IV states that «The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States». The people are still divided into blacks and whites as the events in Fergusson and other American cities confirm.
Gustave de Beaumont.

Democracy in America, (De la D̩mocratie en Am̩rique) by Alexis de Tocqueville was published in two volumes, the first in 1835 and the second in 1840. It is the most well-known globally and still unparalleled publication devoted to US political system, a kind of Holy Scripture for many generations of liberals. The book provides a brilliant description of the way the people's mindset was formed in America. Alexis de Tocqueville emphasized that it expedient to read his book along with the study Marie, ou, L'esclavage aux Etats-Unis (Marie or Slavery in the United States) published by his friend Gustave de Beaumont, a novel describing the separation of races in a moral society and the conditions of slaves in the USA. In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont, two liberal-minded French aristocrats, were sent by the French government to study the American prison system. In his later letters Tocqueville indicates that he and Beaumont used their official business as a pretext to study American society instead. They spent nine months traveling the United States collecting information on the country, including its religious, political, and economic character. It should be noted that the book by Alexis de Tocqueville is recommended for study in the US universities while mentioned Gustave de Beaumont's investigation on slavery in America, was first translated into English and saw light as a small-circulation publication only in 1958 Рin the times of Martin Luther King! The both books were elements of one comprehensive fundamental study. At that only the part more palatable to the national consciousness was offered to public.

The main idea of the study is stated in the introductory part. The author believed that the racial prejudice which presupposed that people can be categorized as an inferior race doomed to live in slavery would have fatal consequences for American society, «Each day it deepens the abyss which separates the two races and pursues them in every phase of social and political life; it governs the mutual relations of the whites and the colored men, corrupting the habits of the first, whom it accustoms to domination and tyranny, and ruling the fates of the Negroes, whom it dooms to the persecution of the whites; and it generates between them hatreds so violent, resentments so lasting, clashes so dangerous, that one may rightly say it will influence the whole future of American society».(1) The author wrote that the American blacks lived in inhumane conditions and it ran contrary to God's purpose and the natural rights of individuals. Over and over again Beaumont repeats that slavery corrupts free people making them inclined to double thinking – something that puts their lives under risk. According to the author, evidently sooner or later the conditions would change to make slaves take revenge for their humiliation.(2)

Beaumont dissipates the widely spread myth that the disgrace of slavery took place only in the American South while the North was consistent in its fight for the rights of Blacks. According to the author, slavery was forbidden in the North for very pragmatic reasons. There were few colored people living there and the North had no desire to introduce slavery because it would inevitably increase their numbers. At the same time, life showed that «in the most enlightened Northern states, the antipathy separating one race from the other remains the same, and, what is worthy of note, several of these states have decreed in their laws the inferiority of the blacks».(3) Even free blacks did not enjoy the same rights as whites. There was a long list of what was forbidden and inaccessible for them. Beaumont describes the numerous cases when blacks were subject to bloody pogroms for trying to exercise the most fundamental rights in such «free» cities as New York and Philadelphia. As a result, colored people escaped in a great quantity being afraid for their lives and, subsequently, trying to find a refuge wherever it was possible, «Thus, the Negroes, freed by the North, are forced by tyranny into the Southern states, and find refuge only in the midst of slavery».(4) The habit to view others as soulless agricultural tools led to callous tyranny practiced by masters towards their slaves. As the author puts it, «It is the coldest and most intelligent tyranny ever exercised by the master over the slave».(5) Beaumont thought that it couldn't last forever, he believed that «The storm is visibly gathering, one can hear its distant rumblings; but none can say whom the lighting will strike».(6) The Alexis de Tocqueville's book is perceived almost as an eulogy to the American system. But he shared the opinion of his friend in regard to the slavery in the United States. Simply his study was devoted to other issues. At that he noted those the book written by Beaumont was recommended for those who wanted to understand how extremely cruel could become those who defied the laws of nature and humaneness.(7)

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that «Generally speaking it requires great and constant efforts for men to create lasting ills; but there is one evil which has percolated furtively into the world: at first it was hardly noticed among the usual abuses of power; it began with an individual whose name history does not record; it was cast like an accursed seed somewhere on the ground; it then nurtured itself, grew without effort, and spread with the society that accepted it; that evil was slavery».(8) Trying to look into the future he noted that «The moderns, then, after they have abolished slavery, have three prejudices to contend against, which are less easy to attack, and far less easy to conquer, than the mere fact of servitude: the prejudice of the master, the prejudice of the race, and the prejudice of color. It is difficult for us, who have had the good fortune to be born among men like ourselves by nature, and equal to ourselves by law, to conceive the irreconcilable differences which separate the negro from the European in America. But we may derive some faint notion of them from analogy. France was formerly a country in which numerous distinctions of rank existed, that had been created by the legislation. Nothing can be more fictitious than a purely legal inferiority; nothing more contrary to the instinct of mankind than these permanent divisions which had been established between beings evidently similar. Nevertheless these divisions subsisted for ages; they still subsist in many places; and on all sides they have left imaginary vestiges, which time alone can efface. If it be so difficult to root out an inequality which solely originates in the law, how are those distinctions to be destroyed which seem to be founded upon the immutable laws of nature herself?» He added, «I see that in a certain portion of the territory of the United States at the present day, the legal barrier which separated the two races is tending to fall away, but not that which exists in the manners of the country; slavery recedes, but the prejudice to which it has given birth remains stationary. Whosoever has inhabited the United States, must have perceived, that in those parts of the Union in which the negroes are no longer slaves, they have in nowise drawn nearer to the whites. On the contrary, the prejudice of the race appears to be stronger in the states which have abolished slavery, than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known».(9)

Of course, as the men of vision, the both Frenchmen wrote that slavery gave rise to double conscience and influenced the internal evolution of US people. But the home-grown hypocrisy of American politicians rapidly spread on foreign policy. That's why they behave like masters towards other peoples (the sounds of whip used by slave owner is heard behind them) and practice double standards in international relations. The history provides plenty of such examples. Slavery is the main driving force behind the gradual process of turning the United States of America into a total empire of hypocrisy with no historic analogues.
Hypocrisy Empire (I) | Oriental Review

 

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Hypocrisy Empire II

This is the year of great events in the United States as the country marks the 150-year anniversary of the Civil War. No other moment of American history has influenced more its national self-identification. The war has become an inalienable part of political mythology and a symbol of atonement as the country washed away the sin of slavery established in the society since the nation was born. It is perceived as the triumph of good over evil. In reality it was not a war to free slaves – this perception has nothing to do with real historic events and shows how hypocritical the whole US national ideology is. The free interpretation of national history to foster the self-esteem of Americans and the US prestige leads to the same attitude practiced by American researchers toward the historic heritage of other countries as well.

* * *

There was no talk about slavery for a long time after the Civil War between the North and the South sparked in 1861. Slavery was an issue to divide the belligerents but it was not what caused the war. It's important to emphasize that the warring sides did not take arms over this particular issue.

Abraham Lincoln got only 40% of popular vote in 1960 to become President. The «President –Liberator» did not think that slavery was an efficient economic model. He was an outspoken racist to solemnly promise not to change the established order. During the pre-election campaign he said, «I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And in as much as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race». (Debate at Charleston, Illinois, September 18, 1858).

In his first inaugural address on March 4, 1861 Lincoln said, «I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so. Those who nominated and elected me did so with full knowledge that I had made this and many similar declarations and had never recanted them». He promised to abide by law and return runway slaves from the North to the South. According to Lincoln, «There is much controversy about the delivering up of fugitives from service or labor. The clause I now read is as plainly written in the Constitution as any other of its provisions: No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall in consequence of any law or regulation therein be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due».

Only then generations of researchers turned the war started during the President's tenure into «the struggle for liberty» and painted an aureole over the head of Lincoln, the Liberator – the image he did not really deserve.

The Compromise of 1850, a series of legislative bargains over the western territories and slavery, when each side promised to preserve the status quo, suited perfectly the slave-owning South as it was eyeing Central and South America (full annexation of Mexico, buying Cuba etc.). At that the South questioned the existing economic and political order. Southerners believed Washington grabbed too much power. The South and the North argued about a wide range of issues. Slavery was not one of them. Southerners believed the plight of slaves was even worse in the North. Suffice it to say that General Robert Lee, the Commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia in the American Civil War from 1962 to until his surrender in 1865, was a convinced opponent of slavery(1), while General Ulysses S. Grant, the Commander of the Union's Army to become the 18th President of USA (1869–1877), was an outright racist and xenophobe.(2)


The South did not particularly like the North's tariff policy and the dependence on the New England's banks. The South accounted for 60% of US total cotton exports. But it had to import industrial goods. The South wanted free trade. The North tried to protect its young industry from competitors. All the ships that took cotton from Southern ports to come back with industrial goods belonged to Northerners. Financial institutes in the South were mainly under the control of Northerners who did not intervene with slavery – the source of their income.

Slaves worked to grow cotton which was exported to bring in profit. At that 40 cents out of every dollar were left in New York. Southerners did not like the dependence. One of them said that it was like financial slavery.(3) James Henry Hammond, the governor of South Carolina in 18420-1844, the state which initiated the cessation, said in his diary (August 7, 1844) that he did not see how the Union could remain intact as the North was resolutely and successfully imposing taxes on the South to pursue its interests. He said peaceful disunion was his only hope. Hammond believed that secession was inevitable. It could have been done peacefully and decently. He said back then that in a few years it would lead to bloodshed and turn the South into an enslaved land. The Democrats' victory at the 1856 election allowed reducing tariffs to record low 17% in 1857. The same year the country was hit by economic crisis and financial panic. To large extent it was explained by the consequences of Crimean War of 1853-1855 (the US grabbed the Russia's share of world markets but had to give ground as Russia bounced back from the devastation of war while America faced an economic slump). With Lincoln in power the tariffs increased the effective rate collected on dutiable imports by approximately 70% (Morill Tariff). There were other issues to divide the sides. For instance, there was no agreement on the status of slavery in the new Western territories and the construction of railroads there (should they be built across the Southern states or through the lands lying in the country's north?), the distribution of state resources and the share of power in general were contentious issues dividing the South and the North. The problem of tariffs dominated the agenda to finally determine the South's aspiration for independence.

The slavery issue came to the fore in about two years since the war started when the Confederate Army was winning the battle. A paradox: the successes achieved by the Confederate Army led by Robert Lee, not the victories held by the Northern forces led by Ulysses Grant, finally led to the liberation of slaves in America. In the spring of 1862, the Union Army of the Potomac took the offensive on the Virginia Peninsula, where its ultimate target was Richmond, the Confederate capital. Back then Lincoln did not even give a thought to the issue of slavery.

Throughout 1861–62, Lincoln made it clear that the North was fighting the war to preserve the Union. In late 1862 freeing the slaves became a war measure to weaken the rebellion by destroying the economic base of its leadership class. Abolitionists criticized Lincoln for his slowness, but on August 22, 1862, Lincoln explained: «I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be «the Union as it was». "¦ My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that». (Letter to Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862).(4) The issue of slavery became important when in summer and autumn General Lee repelled all the attacks by Northerners and moved to Washington. Anti-war feeling grew stronger among the people of Northern states. They resisted the 1862 conscription. The French Foreign Minister said that by September 1862 no serious politician in Europe believed that the North could have won.(5)
Abraham Lincoln, 16th US président in office 1861-1865

Under the critical circumstances the President signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Lincoln and his advisors limited the proclamation's language to slavery in states outside of federal control as of 1862, failing to address the contentious issue of slavery within the nation's border states. In his attempt to appease all parties, Lincoln left many loopholes open that civil rights advocates were forced to tackle in the future. Slavery lasted till the end of war in the territories under the Northern control and the adjacent slave states that stayed in the Union (Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware). Only America's propensity to «double thinking» allowed this war to be called «the war against slavery». The North had to abolish slavery for the simple reason of having around 200 thousand blacks under arms in the Union's army by 1865. They made the Union's victory possible. Actually blacks liberated themselves. On August 1863, when the tide of war turned in favor of the Union, General Grant wrote to Lincoln: «have given the subject of arming the Negro my hearty support. This with the emancipation of the Negro is the heaviest blow yet to the Confederacy. The South raves a great deal about it and professes to be very angry. But they were united in their action before and with the Negro under subjection could spare their entire white population for the field. Now they complain that nothing can be got out of their negroes».(6)

The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, and by the House on January 31, 1865. The amendment was ratified by the required number of states on December 6, 1865. On December 18, 1865, Secretary of State William H. Seward proclaimed its adoption. It was a forced measure. Blacks never got real freedom. We can witness it today. According to historian William Gillette, the majority of white Americans had absolute belief in the superiority of their race. This attitude doomed any effort to really guarantee the rights of black people. Whites perceived blacks as lower race which was not ready or able to fully participate in the country's life. In their eyes the war that had just ended had no relation to the struggle for liberty. All attempts to grant blacks equal rights were misunderstood and only evoked exasperation.(7)

The US has its own vision of how the Civil War between the North and the South is interrelated with the contemporary war in Ukraine. The stereotypes of the confrontation between the forces of «good and freedom» and the forces of «evil and enslavement» are deeply enrooted in people's conscience. This fact is taken advantage of.

Alexander Motyl, a Ukrainian-American Political Scientist, Rutgers University, has been working for Western research centers since a long time ago. According to Huffington Post, Motyl is angry that «Many journalistic accounts – as well as the Kremlin's propaganda machine – depict the Russian-speaking population in eastern Ukraine's separatist Donbass region and the Crimea as an aggrieved ethnic minority clamoring for nothing more than greater autonomy and cultural and language rights. Seen in this light, Kiev and ethnic Ukrainians are the victimizers. The Donbass and its Russians are the victims.

To put the conflict in American terms, Kiev is white America and the Russian-speaking regions are black America». To counter such vision of things Motyl resorts to the double standards he has learned in the United States. For instance, he says that it were Russians who neglected the physical needs and civil and cultural rights of the peninsula's Crimean Tatars and ethnic Ukrainians since 1991.

According to him, the two Donbass provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk have also had «de facto autonomy» from Kiev. Since the 1930s, they've been the bastions of «Ukraine's Stalinist Communist Party», which remained highly influential until the revolution and war of 2013-2014. That's why, as he puts it, «both the Crimea and the Donbass witnessed the absolute hegemony of Russian language and culture». This way the Russian language is declared to be «the language of «oppressors» and «the followers of Stalin».

Motyl affirms that Russians in Ukraine belonged to «white race, while Ukrainians were «blacks». More to that, Motyl emphasizes that Russians «have also proven to be the most reactionary, intolerant and illiberal population within Ukraine». American Ukrainian Motyl does not even wink an eye comparing the supporters of the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics with Ku-Klux-Klan and the racists of American Deep South. He also draws parallels between «peaceful Maidan protesters» and Martin Luther King. He says the right-wing Svoboda party's leader, Oleh Tyahnybok, has sounded remarkably like Malcom X Tyahnybok, a fighter for the purity of race, will hardly feel happy about such a comparison.

Hypocrisy Empire II | Oriental Review

 

[sorcerer]

Re: Totalitarian Rule in America - The Other Side of American (Wet) Dr

American Police Killed More People in March Than UK Cops Have Since 1900
Here's a sobering statistic: police in the United States killed more people in the month of March of this year than British police have in more than 100 years.

The number of fatalities involving the police is at more than 100 in the past month — 111 to be exact — which comes to about three people killed by police each day in the United States.

The White House Task Force on 21st Century Policing issued a report last month recommending that the police focus on tactics that would "de-escalate" a situation to make it less likely that someone would end up getting shot and killed.

The report says that excessive and deadly use of force is used way too often, and that further training should be implemented to make sure situations that start out as relatively minor don't turn deadly, such as the incident where a New York City man accused of illegally selling loose cigarettes died after being placed in a chokehold.

The task force also recommends that the type of training that would be done to diffuse a situation should also pay particular attention to how it is working in communities of color, as those are the ones who come in the most contact with police.

The report suggests that the police need to be more transparent and held accountable when it comes to collecting data on police activity – including both fatal and non-fatal shootings – and that it include more than just shootings, but also stops and arrests, and any other number of encounters between people and the police, and that the data include information on race and gender and disability.

"Policies on use of force," the task force says, "should also require agencies to collect, maintain, and report data to the federal government on all officer-involved shootings, whether fatal or nonfatal, as well as any in-custody death."

Read more: American Police Killed More People in March Than UK Cops Have Since 1900 / Sputnik International

 

[sorcerer]

Re: Totalitarian Rule in America - The Other Side of American (Wet) Dr

US Militarism Far Bigger Threat to American Liberty Than Russia

George Washington pointed out, "Overgrown military establishments, which under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty."

Wise words by the father of our country, but ones, unfortunately, rejected by modern-day Americans, who love and idolize the enormously overgrown military establishment that now characterizes our federal governmental system.

Eastern Europeans are getting a gander at America's overgrown military establishment. Yesterday, the New York Times reported that a huge contingent of U.S. military forces is winding its way through Eastern Europe as some sort of good-will tour and also to serve as a message to Russia that the United States is ready to go to war to protect Eastern Europe from Russia's aggressive designs.

Never mind that it is America's overgrown military establishment that gave rise to Russia's so-called aggressive designs. Ever since the end of the Cold War, NATO has been absorbing Eastern European countries with the ultimate aim of absorbing Ukraine, which would enable the U.S. military to place bases and missiles on Russia's borders.

There was never a possibility that Russia was going to let that happen, any more than the U.S. national-security establishment would permit North Korea to place military bases and missiles on Mexico's side of the Rio Grande. In the eyes of those who believe that America's overgrown military establishment can do no wrong, that makes Russia the aggressor in the crisis.

But let's face it: These people are ingenious at producing crises and then playing the innocent. The fact is that NATO should have been dissolved at the end of the Cold War. It wasn't dissolved for one big reason: in order to produce endless crises with Russia so that Americans would feel the need to keep their overgrown, Cold War-era, military establishment in existence.

Moreover, under what authority is America's overgrown military establishment telling Eastern Europeans that the United States will come to their defense in a war against Russia? I thought that under the U.S. Constitution it is the responsibility of Congress to decide when America goes to war. The U.S. military march through Eastern Europe is just another sign of how the national-security branch of the federal government — the most powerful branch — calls its own shots when it comes to foreign policy.

Moreover, it's a sign of the times when America's overgrown military establishment is our country's good-will ambassador. It used to be that the American private sector served that purpose. Not so anymore. Now, it's U.S. generals and other military personnel who serve that purpose, as they parade through Eastern Europe showing off their tanks and other military equipment, just like the Soviets did in their May Day parades.

Meanwhile, America's overgrown military establishment is also engaged in a massive military exercise called Operation Jade Helm, only this one isn't in some foreign country but instead right here at home. With more than 1200 participants, including Army Special Forces, Navy Seals, and Marine Special Operations, this large-scale military operation is slated to launch in around 20 cities in the American Southwest.

Perhaps it would be wise to review America's founding principles regarding overgrown military establishments and the threat they pose to the liberty of the citizenry, in addition, that is, to the sentiments against overgrown military establishments expressed by America's first president, George Washington:

James Madison: "A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence agst. foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people."

Patrick Henry: "A standing army we shall have, also, to execute the execrable commands of tyranny; and how are you to punish them? Will you order them to be punished? Who shall obey these orders? Will your mace-bearer be a match for a disciplined regiment?"

Henry St. George Tucker in Blackstone's 1768 Commentaries on the Laws of England: "Wherever standing armies are kept up, and when the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction."

Commonwealth of Virginia in 1788: ""¦ that standing armies in time of peace are dangerous to liberty, and therefore ought to be avoided, as far as the circumstances and protection of the community will admit; and that in all cases the military should be under strict subordination to and governed by the civil power."

Pennsylvania Convention: ""¦ as standing armies in time of peace are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up; and that the military shall be kept under strict subordination to and be governed by the civil power."

U.S. State Department website: "Wrenching memories of the Old World lingered in the 13 original English colonies along the eastern seaboard of North America, giving rise to deep opposition to the maintenance of a standing army in time of peace. All too often the standing armies of Europe were regarded as, at best, a rationale for imposing high taxes, and, at worst, a means to control the civilian population and extort its wealth."

Finally, let's wrap up this piece with the warning that President Eisenhower issued in his 1961 Farewell Address regarding America's new, Cold War-era, overgrown military establishment:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. . . .Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. . . . In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.
The Biggest Threat to American Liberty - The Future of Freedom Foundation

 

[prohumanity]

Re: Totalitarian Rule in America - The Other Side of American (Wet) Dr

Yea, this has always been the case. The inferiority complex of indians prevented them from speaking out against the west before.

Most Indian leaders were educated in LONDON....starting from Gandhi, Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Man Mohan Singh , Rahul kid and so many more. They all were deeply brainwashed by western mindset and suffered from colonial mentality and lacked courage. First time, truly Indian born, raised and cultured group of people are ruling India. Namely PM MODI, Raj Nath Singh, Sushma Swaraj ...all patriotic and dedicated to Indian civilizational values.
Year 2014 was a watershed moment in Indian politics. It will lead to a self confident, resurgent India with a straight backbone.
As for USA, liberty and justice for all, freedom of speech and individual privacy are all going downwards as wished by Bin Laden. Sad and unfortunate indeed.

 

[mattster]

Re: Totalitarian Rule in America - The Other Side of American (Wet) Dr

Paul Craig Roberts: NATO Provides Cover for US Aggression

The Saker: It has become rather obvious to many, if not most, people that the USA is not a democracy or a republic, but rather a plutocracy run by a small elite which some call "the 1%". Others speak of the "deep state". So my first question to you is the following. Could you please take the time to assess the influence and power of each of the following entities one by one. In particular, can you specify for each of the following whether it has a decision-making "top" position, or a decision-implementing "middle" position in the real structure of power (listed in no specific order)

Federal Reserve
Big Banking
Bilderberg
Council on Foreign Relations
Skull & Bones
CIA
Goldman Sachs and top banks
"Top 100 families" (Rothschild, Rockefeller, Dutch Royal Family, British Royal Family, etc.)
Israel Lobby
Freemasons and their lodges
Big Business: Big Oil, Military Industrial Complex, etc.
Other people or organizations not listed above?

Who, which group, what entity would you consider is really at the apex of power in the current US polity?

Paul Craig Roberts: The US is ruled by private interest groups and by the neoconservative ideology that History has chosen the US as the "exceptional and indispensable" country with the right and responsibility to impose its will on the world.

In my opinion the most powerful of the private interest groups are:

The Military/security Complex
The 4 or 5 mega-sized "banks too big to fail" and Wall Street
The Israel Lobby
Agribusiness
The Extractive industries (oil, mining, timber).

The interests of these interest groups coincide with those of the neoconservatives. The neoconservative ideology supports American financial and military-political imperialism or hegemony.

There is no independent American print or TV media. In the last years of the Clinton regime, 90% of the print and TV media was concentrated in 6 mega-companies. During the Bush regime, National Public Radio lost its independence. So the media functions as a Ministry of Propaganda.

Both political parties, Republicans and Democrats, are dependent on the same private interest groups for campaign funds, so both parties dance to the same masters. Jobs offshoring destroyed the manufacturing and industrial unions and deprived the Democrats of Labor Union political contributions. In those days, Democrats represented the working people and Republicans represented business.

The Federal Reserve is there for the banks, mainly the large ones.The Federal Reserve was created as lender of last resort to prevent banks from failing because of runs on the bank or withdrawal of deposits. The New York Fed, which conducts the financial interventions, has a board that consists of the executives of the big banks. The last three Federal Reserve chairmen have been Jews, and the current vice chairman is the former head of the Israeli central bank. Jews are prominent in the financial sector, for example, Goldman Sachs. In recent years, the US Treasury Secretaries and heads of the financial regulatory agencies have mainly been the bank executives responsible for the fraud and excessive debt leverage that set off the last financial crisis.

In the 21st century, the Federal Reserve and Treasury have served only the interests of the large banks. This has been at the expense of the economy and the population. For example, retired people have had no interest income for eight years in order that the financial institutions can borrow at zero costs and make money.

No matter how rich some families are, they cannot compete with powerful interest groups such as the military/security complex or Wall Street and the banks. Long established wealth can look after its interests, and some, such as the Rockefellers, have activist foundations that most likely work hand in hand with the National Endowment for Democracy to fund and encourage various pro-American non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in countries that the US wants to influence or overthrow, such as occurred in Ukraine. The NGOs are essentially US Fifth Columns and operate under such names as "human rights," "democracy," etc. A Chinese professor told me that the Rockefeller Foundation had created an American University in China and is used to organize various anti-regime Chinese. At one time, and perhaps still, there were hundreds of US and German financed NGOs in Russia, possibly as many as 1,000.

I don't know if the Bilderbergs do the same. Possibly they are just very rich people and have their proteges in governments who try to protect their interests. I have never seen any signs of Bilderbergs or Masons or Rothchilds affecting congressional or executive branch decisions.

On the other hand, the Council for Foreign Relations is influential. The council consists of former government policy officials and academics involved in foreign policy and international relations. The council's publication, Foreign Affairs, is the premier foreign policy forum. Some journalists are also members. When I was proposed for membership in the 1980s, I was blackballed.

Skull & Bones is a Yale University secret fraternity. A number of universities have such secret fraternities. For example, the University of Virginia has one, and the University of Georgia. These fraternities do not have secret governmental plots or ruling powers. Their influence would be limited to the personal influence of the members, who tend to be sons of elite families. In my opinion, these fraternities exist to convey elite status to members. They have no operational functions.

The Saker: What about individuals? Who are, in your opinion, the most powerful people in the USA today? Who takes the final, top level, strategic decision?

Paul Craig Roberts: There really are no people powerful in themselves. Powerful people are ones that powerful interest groups are behind. Ever since Secretary of Defense William Perry privatized so much of the military in 1991, the military/security complex has been extremely powerful, and its power is further amplified by its ability to finance political campaigns and by the fact that it is a source of employment in many states. Essentially Pentagon expenditures are controlled by defense contractors.
Paul Craig Roberts: NATO Provides Cover for US Aggression - Russia Insider

Just one comment and one big question for anyone who read this article:

Comment: Please tell me something I don't know. The elite 1% have a disproportional influence in US politics, finance, foreign policy, etc. Please show me a country where the elite 1% do not have a disproportional influence. Sorcerer, are you telling me that you and the Ambanis have the same level of influence ? Show me just one freaking country on this planet where this is not true ?
Are you saying this is not the case in India or better yet China....where 7 old men consisting of the Standing Politburo Committee control every single major policy decision. Wow if you compare US to China .....in China the elite 0.0000000000001% control everything ?

Where.... Oh where is this paradise where the elite 1% and the biggest industrial powerhouses(military or otherwise) do not own the politician and the legislative bodies. At least in the US...one could argue that we still have an independent judiciary....which most other countries don't even have.

Are you saying that the billionaire industrialists in China, Korea, Japan, Russia, UK, France, Germany don't have huge influence in policy making and the ear of the politicians.


Question: Isn't the main thrust of Paul Craig Roberts argument also equally true for every major economic or military power in the world today ? Is it a problem ? Off-course it is...any fool can see that, and its a bigger issue in the US because the US is the preeminent power.

This is not such an easy problem to solve. The rich and powerful have always been able to game the system to their advantage !

 

[sorcerer]

Re: Totalitarian Rule in America - The Other Side of American (Wet) Dr

Just one comment and one big question for anyone who read this article:

Comment: Please tell me something I don't know. The elite 1% have a disproportional influence in US politics, finance, foreign policy, etc. Please show me a country where the elite 1% do not have a disproportional influence. Sorcerer, are you telling me that you and the Ambanis have the same level of influence ? Show me just one freaking country on this planet where this is not true ?
Are you saying this is not the case in India or better yet China....where 7 old men consisting of the Standing Politburo Committee control every single major policy decision. Wow if you compare US to China .....in China the elite 0.0000000000001% control everything ?

Where.... Oh where is this paradise where the elite 1% and the biggest industrial powerhouses(military or otherwise) do not own the politician and the legislative bodies. At least in the US...one could argue that we still have an independent judiciary....which most other countries don't even have.

Are you saying that the billionaire industrialists in China, Korea, Japan, Russia, UK, France, Germany don't have huge influence in policy making and the ear of the politicians.


Question: Isn't the main thrust of Paul Craig Roberts argument also equally true for every major economic or military power in the world today ? Is it a problem ? Off-course it is...any fool can see that, and its a bigger issue in the US because the US is the preeminent power.

This is not such an easy problem to solve. The rich and powerful have always been able to game the system to their advantage !

Yes..You are right..but in US the companies with their influence DRAG the country to WAR with tax payers money. Hope you understand the situation and context of the article.

India China.Korea..etc..the companies do influence the Govts to gain monopoly on resources for their estabishments..its more of economical to gain advantage inside the country and elsewhere than taking the country to war with tax payers money. Has any other country send its State resources (soldiers) to foreign land to take over oil wells other than US and its NATO minions?

C'mon dont tell me US soldiers are not controlled by Priavte corporate interests unlike other countires. Other countries do business with foreign lands.but its more of diplomatic arrangements..the way India,China, Kore, Japan etc does business in the middle east without even support of a single soldier from their respective land.

As you can see the whole article revolves around military and security establishments of US, controlled by business houses, being able to influence govt decisions..the media etc to "install" democracy I meant dictatorship in foreign lands.

Independent Judiciary...Oh please!!!
I have recently read a report on how your big corporates are taking over your so called independent judiciary. I will dig it up and post it here for you.Its a PDF file.

Big Business Taking over State Supreme Courts
How Campaign Contributions to Judges Tip the Scales Against Individuals

In state courts across our country, corporate special interests are donating money to the campaigns of judges who interpret the law in a manner that benefits their contributors rather than citizens seeking justice. Americans are starting to wake up to this danger, according to recent polls, and are worried that individuals without money to contribute may not receive a fair hearing in state courts. In a recent poll 89 percent of respondents said they "believe the influence of campaign contributions on judges' rulings is a problem."

Thats a start.
From there google!!

You can surely argue that its the problem in other countries too..
But I wonder why your independent judiciary didnt question your Govt on the decades long war and wastage of tax payers money. or Have they done it cuz it surely isnt showing.

In India such an issue will be taken up by the Honourable Supreme court themselves, so is with many Asian countries.

Its not because US is rich and powerful, its a bigger issue in US because citizens are powerless to act against the Govt or pull down the billion dollar installation (Read US govt) done by MNC's

To summarise:
My point is 1% or less than 10% do control and influence the Govts in their land, but the Govt knows how to control them back without creating skirmishes or escalations.
With US the 1% controls the Govt by taking it into skirmishes.

Its the" type of control" that matters

 

[sorcerer]

Re: Totalitarian Rule in America - The Other Side of American (Wet) Dr

Big Business Taking over State Supreme Courts
How Campaign Contributions to Judges Tip the Scales Against Individuals

Introduction and summary
In state courts across our country, corporate special interests are donating money to the campaigns of judges who interpret the law in a manner that benefits their contributors rather than citizens seeking justice. Americans are starting to wake up to this danger, according to recent polls, and are worried that individuals without money to contribute may not receive a fair hearing in state courts. In a recent poll 89 percent of respondents said they "believe the influence of campaign contributions on judges' rulings is a problem."

Judges swear an oath that they will answer to the law, not campaign contributors. If a person is wronged, he or she can hope to find impartial justice in a court, where everyone—rich or poor, weak or powerful—is equal in the eyes of the law. But this principle is less and less true with each passing judicial election.Thirty-eight states elect their high court judges,
and enormous amounts of money are pouring into judges' campaign war chests. Fueled by money from corporate interests and lobbyists, spending on judicial campaigns has exploded in the last two decades. In 1990 candidates for state supreme courts only raised around $3 million, but by the mid-1990s, campaigns were raking in more than five times that amount, fueled by extremely costly races in Alabama and Texas.

The 2000 race saw high-court candidates raise more than $45 million. Since then, corporate America's influence over the judiciary has grown. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in particular, has become a powerful player in judicial races. From 2001 to 2003 its preferred candidates won 21 of 24 elections. According to data from the National Institute on Money in State Politics, the chamber spent more than $1 million to aid the 2006 campaigns of two Ohio Supreme Court justices, and in the most recent high court election in Alabama, money from the state's cham ber accounted for 40 percent of all campaign contributions.

Corporate interest groups are finding more ways to circumvent disclosure rules and limits on campaign contributions. Spending by independent groups (not officially affiliated with the candidates) has increased dramatically, surpassing high court candidates' spending in 2008.

According to Justice at Stake, more than 90 percent of special interest TV ads in 2006 were paid for by pro-business interest groups. Conservative groups spent $8.9 million in high court elections in 2010, compared to just $2.5 million from progressive groups.
These spending figures are incomplete because the disclosure rules for outside spending vary, so the source of the money in state court elections is often hard to discern.
The public can expect even more money to flood this year's judicial elections. Since the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission
, corporations, unions, and individuals are now free from limits on campaign spending.

North Carolina is the only state with a robust public financing system for judicial elections, and it is also the first state to see a super political action committee, or super PAC—an entity spawned by Citizens United that allows for unlimited campaign spending—established to support a pro-corporate judge in this year's election.The U.S. Supreme Court has also made it harder for public financing systems to remain viable by ruling that "matching" funds, distributed to publicly funded candidates when their opponents' spending exceeds a
certain level, are a violation of free speech rights. If recent history is any guide, the trends are ominous for individuals suing corporations. The states that have seen the most money in judicial elections now have supreme courts that are dominated by pro-corporate judges. The Appendix to this report lists all high court rulings on cases where an individual sues a corporation from 1992 to 2010 in the six states that have seen the most judicial campaign cash in that time period—Alabama, Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Michigan.
The data includes 403 cases from 2000 to 2010, and in those cases the courts ruled in favor of corporations 71 percent of the time.

The high courts that have seen the most campaign spending are much more likely to rule in favor of big businesses and against individuals who have been injured, scammed, or subjected to discrimination. With money playing such a large role in judicial elections, the interest groups with the most money increasingly have an advantage. In courtrooms across our country, big corporations and other special interests are tilting the playing field in their favor. Many Americans perceive our government and corporate institutions as
interdependent components of a system in which powerful elites play by a different set of rules than ordinary citizens. Some feel that only those donating money can play a role in governing. The cozy relationship between government and big business has become increasingly clear in our judicial elections.

This report discusses how the soaring cost of judicial elections led to state supreme court decisions that favor corporate litigants over individuals seeking to hold them accountable. The report provides illustrations from six states— Alabama, Texas, Ohio, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Michigan—of how corporate interest groups that desire a certain outcome have donated money to judges, and the same judges have then interpreted the law in a manner that achieves their corporate donors' desired outcome

For some states, the report discusses how, after an influx of money from corporate interest groups, judges have abruptly changed the law by overruling recent precedent. In Ohio, for example, the insurance industry donated money to judges who then voted to overturn recent cases that the industry disfavored. In other states, such as Texas, the corporate-funded high court has interpreted the law to reach certain results that the state legislature rejected. This judicial policymaking by the Texas court has resulted in case law that favors energy companies funding the judges' campaigns.

This problem is spreading to states that have never before seen expensive judicial races, such as Wisconsin, where independent spending by interest groups overwhelmed the state's public financing system in the 2011 election. This trend is threatening a fundamental aspect of our democracy: the right of Americans to a fair trial. When judges operate like politicians, those who lack political influence cannot expect fairness.

The vast majority of legal disputes in the United States —95 percent—are settled in state courts. Those who have been harmed by an unsafe product or an on-the- job injury would most likely look to state courts for justice. With judges backed by big business taking over our courts, are there any remaining institutions that can hold powerful corporations accountable?

Americans will have a harder time using the courts to force employers and manu facturers not to cut back on safety to save money. Consumers will face steeper hurdles in holding accountable banks, payday lenders, and credit card companies that treat them unfairly. Millions of Americans have recently found themselves in state court for foreclosure proceedings. How would one of these struggling homeowners feel if the judges hearing the case had accepted campaign funds from big banks? Ordinary Americans cannot expect to get the same access to justice as special interests that donate millions to judges' campaigns.


The explosion of money in judicial elections has led Americans to experience a crisis of confidence in their judiciary. According to a 2011 poll, 90 percent of those surveyed said judges should recuse themselves from cases involving campaign contributors, but recusal is extremely rare.A party to a lawsuit in West Virginia repeatedly asked a state supreme court justice to recuse himself after an executive with the opposing party, a coal company, spent more than $3 million through an independent entity to support the judge's elec
tion. The judge refused and cast the deciding vote overturning a $50 million ver dict against the coal company.

In 2009 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the judge should have recused himself. The court noted that the executive's contribution was three times more than the spending by the justice's own campaign. The U.S. Supreme Court stated, "Just as no man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, similar fears of bias can arise when ... a man chooses the judge in his own cause." Even judges are alarmed at the growing influence of money on courts. A 2002 survey found that 84 percent of state judges are concerned about interest groups
spending money on judicial campaigns.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court recently warned of an inherent risk "that the public may inaccurately perceive a justice as beholden to individuals or groups that contribute to his or her campaign." Justice Paul Pfeifer, a Republican on the Ohio Supreme Court, has criticized the money flowing into his state's judicial campaigns. "Everyone interested in contribut
ing has very specific interests," Pfeifer said. "They mean to be buying a vote. ...whether they succeed or not, it's hard to say."Before the flood of corporate money began, media reports focused on judges being influenced by campaign donations from trial lawyers with cases pending before them.

Corporate interests were concerned that donations from trial lawyers resulted in courts that favored individuals suing corporations. Businesses that were the frequent target of lawsuits, such as insurance and tobacco companies, pushed legislation to limit litigation. This phenomenon also spurred big business to enter the fray of judicial politics.As this report shows, this effort has been very successful. Even if the practice of trial lawyers donating to judicial campaign to influence judges was a problem, the corporate interests have more than compensated for any perceived disadvantage they faced. Donations from corporate America are now overwhelming donations from trial lawyers, labor unions, and groups that support progressive judicial candidates.


Big Business Taking over State Supreme Courts Some press reports and academic studies on this subject emphasize that a correlation between donations and a judge's rulings does not necessarily prove that the donations caused the judge to rule a certain way. Former Ohio Chief Justice Thomas Moyer, a supporter of public financing and tough recusal rules, suggested that interest groups donate based on "voting patterns" of the judges, not to influence a vote in a particular case.

In other words, some argue special interests are donating to obtain a judge with a certain philosophy, not a result in a particular case. This distinction, however, misses the point.
Wealthy special interests should not be able to shape the law, whether through buying a vote or buying a certain judicial philosophy. In the pages that follow, the eport details how this is happening in six important states and presents a few recommendations to address this problem. To prevent the appearance of corruption, states can implement strong recusal rules to ensure parties before the court do not donate money to judicial campaigns to influence specific cases. State legislatures also should pass strong disclosure rules, so that citizens know who is funding political ads for judges.

Big business is tightening its grip on our courts. Instead of serving as a last resort for Americans seeking justice, judges are bending the law to satisfy the concerns of their corporate donors.

[pdf]https://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/StateCourtsReport.pdf[/pdf]

 

[sorcerer]

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Several San Francisco Police Officers Suspended Over Highly Racist Texts

Several San Francisco police officers have been subject to suspension upon being accused of sending racist and homophobic texts between 2011 and 2012, including repeated mention of lynchings, burning crosses and 'White Power.'

There are discrepancies among reports of whether it was seven or eight officers involved in these reprehensible acts.


These allegations come at a time when police brutality against minorities and other racially motivated police action has hit the nation. The severe misconduct of these officers is not being taken lightly by the Police Chief or the District Attorney's office.

Chief of Police Greg Suhr is calling for an immediate termination of the unidentified officers. He announced at a press conference that he has urged the oversight committee to approve the firing of the officers.

Authorities say that the violent messages are of deplorable hateful speech and targeted African-Americans, Mexicans, Filipinos, and gay men. One text read "All n**gers must f***ing hang." Another: "Cross burning lowers blood pressure! I did the test myself!"

Chief Suhr is sickened by the content of these texts, saying in a statement he gave to Time, that they "are of such despicable thinking that those responsible clearly fall below the minimum standards required to be a police officer."

A protest group called the Act Now to Stop War and End Racism Coalition (ANSWER) vowed to "flood the subways" in New York with demonstrators carrying placards bearing such
The text messages were discovered by Federal authorities while holding an investigation on another matter entirely. At the time of uncovering this scandal, the Feds were looking into a former sargeant, Sargeant Ian Furminger, who was convicted of corruption in December 2014 and sentenced to 41 months in prison. The texts were disclosed in court filings during Furminger's trial, pointing to fourteen officers and employees sending or receiving the racists texts.

In light of the case, San Francisco leaders have voiced their concern that the officers' prejudicial views may have contributed to mistreatment and racially biased actions that lack validity.

District Attorney George Gascon announced that his office will review all cases dating back ten years regarding cases where policemen wrote reports, submitted evidence or testified in court.

Another county prosecutor, San Francisco's public defender Jeff Adachi stated that he believes authorities need to re-examine some 1,000 cases involving those officers.

He went on to say at the press conference that, "This casual dehumanization leads to real-life suffering and injustice. It foments a toxic environment in which citizens fear and distrust the police, brutality reigns, and good officers are less effective."
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Read more: Several San Francisco Police Officers Suspended Over Highly Racist Texts / Sputnik International

 

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Killer Cops Boost Body Count in War on Black America

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival"¦." – Frederick Douglass, July 5, 1852

"When President Obama insists that racism is not, and has never been, 'endemic' to this country, he is simply identifying himself as an active participant in the ongoing slaughter."

The United States produced a bumper crop of what Billie Holiday would call "Strange Fruit," in March: at least 111 bodies, the majority of them unarmed men of color, shot down by police in the blood-fertilized streets of American cities. If one just counts the unarmed victims, that's a rate of about two extrajudicial executions per day, roughly twice the "one every 28 hours" cited by the Malcolm X Grassroots Network's 2012 report, Operation Ghetto Storm.

Yet, in the same month, President Obama declared Venezuela a threat to the national securityof the United States, based largely on the death of 14 "dissidents" during a period of anti-government disturbances back in 2014. Many of the dead were pro-government activists killed by "dissidents." By contrast, Philadelphia police have been shooting an average of one person a week for the last eight years, the overwhelming majority of them Black and brown, according to a new U.S. Justice Department report. As Frederick Douglass said, "for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival."

All across the country, the granting of impunity for the perpetrators of summary execution of Black men, women and children is "everyday practice" – now certified as "best practice" by Attorney General Eric Holder, who claims court precedents preclude prosecution of killer cops except under the most extreme conditions. (See "It's Not the Law – but Prosecutors – That Give Immunity to Killer Cops," December 10, 2014.)

Given the odds against prosecution, officer Michael T. Slager probably counts himself the unluckiest white man in South Carolina. A neighborhood resident's phone camera captured Slager firing repeatedly into the back of 50 year-old Walter L. Scott, a Black North Charleston father of four with no criminal record who had been stopped for a minor traffic violation, tussled with the officer, and tried to run away.

"All across the country, impunity for the perpetrators of summary execution of Black men, women and children is 'everyday practice.'"

Despite his claims to have been in fear for his life, Slager was charged with murder – a fate he would surely have avoided had he been under the jurisdiction of St. Louis prosecutor Bob McCulloch. Last year, McCulloch's team led grand jurors to believe that "the law" allowed police to use deadly force against unarmed persons fleeing a felony, as Ferguson officer Darren Wilson claimed was the case with Michael Brown. However, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled such shootings unconstitutional in 1985, as every public defender knows – and McCulloch surely knew, as well. The South Carolina cop also had the bad judgment to commit murder in clear view of a private citizen's well-held camera.

Last weekend in the town of Zion, Illinois, about 30 miles north of Chicago, cops killed 17-year-old Justus Howell with two shots to the back while he was running away, according to the coroner's office. Initially, the police reported no weapon on his body, but later the cops claimed the teenager had stolen a gun from another man minutes earlier, leading them to give chase. In time, the cops produced a gun, which they will connect to the other Black man, who was held on $15,000 bail, and thereby seek to justify the killing of the unarmed, fleeing teenager Justus Howell.

Cleveland cop Michael Brelo distinguished himself as the most murderous member of a mob of 104 cops on a chase-and-shoot spree in Cleveland, Ohio, back in November, 2012. Mistaking a car engine backfire for a gunshot, the crazy cop caravan careened through Cleveland at speeds reaching 100 miles an hour, cornering Timothy Russell, 43, and Malissa Williams, 30, in a school parking lot. Russell and Williams, unarmed, died in a hail of 137 bullets – 49 of them fired by Officer Brelo, now on trial for voluntary manslaughter. Brelo and his partner fired 15 bullets through their own windshield at the Black victims' car. Then, at a point when, according to the prosecutor, no cop's life was in danger (except from other officers), Brelo jumped on the hood of the victims' car and fired 15 more shots at the mortally wounded man and woman. Today, the cop says he has no recollection of the entire episode.

In December, the U.S. Justice Department concluded that Cleveland cops routinely useexcessive force and are unaccountable to the public. The month before, in November, a city cop killed 12 year-old Tamir Rice as he played with a toy gun at a park. The officer shot the child twice after observing him for a total of two seconds.

"The cop says he has no recollection of the entire episode."

Officer Brelo's blank memory on the shootings of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, and officer Timothy Loehmann's blink-of-an-eye deliberations on terminating Tamir Rice, point up the utter lack of value U.S. society places on Black lives. The high-profile killings this week, the obscene death toll last month, the unreported and delayed deaths, are a constant in the bloody history of America. When President Obama insists that racism is not, and has never been, "endemic" to this country, he is simply identifying himself as an active participant in the ongoing slaughter.

The police, as guardians of the State, believe they are simply doing their jobs. They must be right, since they continue to receive praise, protection and overwhelming white support for carrying out their mission as an army of occupation in Black America. The advent of the Internet and a heightened Black community awareness of police depredations, especially since the murder of Trayvon Martin, in February of 2012, has created the perception among many African Americans that police violence has dramatically increased in recent years. However, history and irrefutable statistics tell us that the "militarization" of the police and the criminalization of Black people as a group are fundamental aspects of a national mission begun in earnest in the late Sixties. Michelle Alexander calls it the "New Jim Crow." Some of us at BAR prefer the term Mass Black Incarceration State, to describe the superstructure of Black control that has been erected over the past 45 years, a machinery that has so relentlessly criminalized the Black community that one out of every eight prison inmates on Earth is an African American. Any genuine movement for criminal justice "reform" must, therefore, aim to abolish the Mass Black Incarceration State, root and branch, by removing the "occupation" army from Black areas and replacing it with a force of Black people's own choosing.

"History and irrefutable statistics tell us that the 'militarization' of the police and the criminalization of Black people as a group are fundamental aspects of a national mission begun in earnest in the late Sixties."

The U.S government set in motion the mass Black incarceration regime in the late Sixties for the purpose of counter-insurgency. The structures of Black containment, control and incarceration are now central to the workings of criminal justice in the United States – to the misfortune of lots of white youth who get sucked into the system as unintended "collateral damage." The logic of the project dictates that those who attempt to dismantle the Black counter-insurgency regime will be treated as insurgents, themselves – a central fact for the Black Lives Matter movement to grapple with.

The wave of state violence that smashed the Black Panther Party when it challenged the police "army of occupation" in the late Sixties, never subsided, but was instead hard-wired into the criminal justice system, nationwide. That's why the system's operatives are still trying to kill Mumia Abu Jamal, a former Black Panther and probably the world's best known political prisoner. That's why so many other Party comrades are still behind bars – because they are symbols and icons of insurgency, and U.S. police and prison structures have been on a counter-insurgency mission for nearly half a century. And, that's why the Black Is Back Coalition will hold a national conference on Black Community Control of Police, in St. Louis, April 18 and 19 – because there will be no justice and no peace until the occupying army is gone from our streets.

Black people must decide how that can be accomplished – by any means necessary.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at [email protected]
Killer Cops Boost Body Count in War on Black America | Global Research - Centre for Research on Globalization

 

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Contradictions and Inconsistencies in the Ismaaiyl Brinsley Case
Unanswered Questions in the NYPD Shootings
by CAROL LIPTON

As of November 2014, national and international protests over the police killings of unarmed black men, particularly Eric Garner and Michael Brown, were reaching critical mass, as thousands of people across the United States, following in the footsteps of Ferguson residents, engaged in spectacular mass demonstrations, civil disobedience and street theater actions in over 175 cities, replicating the wildfire spread of the Occupy Wall Street encampments during the fall of 2011.

The #blacklivesmatter movement gained tremendous momentum on November 25, following the decision by a Staten Island grand jury not to indict Office Daniel Pantaleo, for the murder of Eric Garner, who died as the result of an illegal chokehold by Pantaleo.

The chokehold killing of Garner, a tall man who weighed over 300 pounds and suffered from diabetes and heart disease, was potent in its impact because of the utter pathos of it, captured entirely on video. It showed Pantaleo approaching Garner, and with no provocation from Garner and no apparent grounds, attempting to arrest him. After Garner verbally asked Pantaleo to leave him alone and to stop harassing him, Pantaleo crooked his arm tightly around Garner's neck, holding him with all his strength.

The officers then brutally knocked Garner to the ground, pinning him down as he cried out 11 times, "I can't breathe". Then there was silence, as he lost consciousness and then died. The medical examiner ruled his death a homicide, yet no charges were brought against Pantaleo.

Garner's death was amplified by the deaths of other unarmed black men and women shot by police and racist vigilantes, notably John Crawford, shot in a WalMart while talking on his cell phone while holding a gun for sale in the store, Akai Gurley, shot in the stairwell of the Brooklyn housing project where he lived, and 12 year old Tamir Rice, shot by Ohio police while carrying a toy gun.

Emboldened by politically astute young black leadership that forged the #blacklivesmatter movement, the demonstrations were creative in ways that equaled or even exceeded those of the 1960s Civil Rights movement and seemed to be benefitting from what I've named "the Occupy Effect". There were actions never before seen in the history of modern protest, such as the New York City Council members who walked off their jobs, and held a die-in stopping traffic on lower Broadway, and members of the Congressional Black Caucus and congressional staffers walking out en masse onto the steps of the nation's capital. Medical schools, law schools, and colleges held huge die-ins. Even junior high school students in Denver took to the street. Athletes protested at games, wearing "I Can't Breathe" t-shirts.

With Christmas approaching, demonstrations increased in frequency and intensity, with even more tactics added: marches into Saks Fifth Avenue, Toys 'R' Us and the 5th Avenue Apple store; the reading of the names ceremonies in Grand Central Station; marches onto the FDR Drive, West Side Highway; and almost daily shutdowns of the Holland and Lincoln tunnels. A sea of protesters took to the streets on December 5 and 6, shutting down most of midtown Manhattan, disrupting the tree lighting ceremony at Rockefeller Center, and marching into Macy's, striking at the very heart of Thanksgiving in America. There were also massive demonstrations throughout Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Staten Island.

This culminated in the December 13, 2014 march down Broadway, in which an estimated 60,000 people assembled in front of Macy's, marched to Foley Square, and held an enormous rally. Protestors then crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, marching almost 10 miles into Crown Heights, to the housing project where Akai Gurley was killed, while others shut down the Manhattan Bridge.

On December 19, a bitterly cold night, at least 2,000 demonstrators marched in lower Manhattan, confronting a pro-police rally.

NYPD and Mayor DiBlasio seemed powerless to stanch the tide of protest. In response to the initially hands-off and conciliatory approach taken by Mayor DiBlasio, who in a press conference had shared his concerns about his biracial son, Dante, NYPD escalated its hostility, eager to return to the brutality against demonstrators that was the endemic during the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations.

The next day, December 20, before several large protests planned for Christmas, an event occurred that could not have been more advantageous to the NYPD's desire to turn the tide of public opinion against the protesters and stop the movement dead in its tracks, had they designed it themselves.

At approximately 2:47 p.m., in broad daylight, a Brooklyn-born Baltimore man, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, 28, ambushed and killed two NYPD officers, 40-year-old Rafael Ramos and 32-year-old Wenjian Liu, as they sat in their patrol car while stationed outside a housing project in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.

Brinsley's background:

Brinsely's background is obscure. He had reportedly been dating Shaneka Thompson for under a year. He was reportedly not from Maryland, and his current address was unknown [CBS News]. However, other sources report that he had fathered two children in Brooklyn, and that his last known address was on Eastern Parkway [N.Y. Daily News].

He had lived with various relatives as a child, but dropped out of high school in the 10th grade. His family reported a history of mental illness. At an August 2011 court hearing, when asked if he'd ever been a patient in a mental institution, he reportedly said "yes".

According to his mother, he tried to hang himself a year ago and was estranged from his family, who were afraid of him. Nawaal Brinsley, a sister who lives in Atlanta, said she hadn't seen him in two years. [N.Y. Times].

Brinsley reportedly had 15 prior arrests in Georgia for various offenses, including assault, shoplifting, grand larceny and gun possession, and 4 arrrests in Ohio for robbery and misdemeanor threat. He served two years in prison in Georgia for criminal possession of a weapon [CBS News]. He also had an arrest record in Brooklyn [CBS News].

However, the Baltimore Sun, citing online records from Georgia's Fulton County sheriff's office, reported that Brinsley had been arrested only 9 times since 2004. [Baltimore Sun, December 20, 2014, 11:39 p.m.]

Investigators say Brinsley was at a protest in Union Square on December 1, before a grand jury decided against charging Officer Pantaleo, and recorded part of the protest on his phone. [ABC Eyewitness News December 23].

Brinsley's First Shooting Victim, Shaneka Thompson:

Shaneka Thompson grew up in Winnsboro, SC, and attended Francis Marion University in Florence, SC. [Post Wires].

She had been a health service manager at Pope Army Airfield in Fayetteville, NC before transferring to the Veterans Administration in Baltimore, where she worked as a health insurance specialist [The Daily Mail]. However, the NY Times reported that she was currently employed by the Maryland Department of Welfare.

AP reported that Thompson's grandfather, James Delly, told AP that Thompson had worked in banking and moved to Maryland from Fayetteville, NC six months ago for work, and had been seeing Brinsley for less than a year [Wall Street Journal] [NY Times]

Time line of the events of December 20, 2014:

5:30 a.m. Brinsley arrives at the upscale apartment of Shaneka Thompson, 28, in the Greenwich Place Development located at 10090 Mill Run Circle in Owings Mills, Maryland, just northwest of Baltimore [Daily Mail UK Dec. 21, 2014].

The apartment complex overlooks the Owings Mill AMC Cinema Parking lot in the Owings Mills Mall [Daily Mail].

Here's a map of the Owings Mills Mall and Greenwich Place.

Contrary to unofficial reports, Brinsley, who did not have a key to Thompson's apartment, gains entry to the lobby of the secured building and knocks on her door, which she opens [ABC Eyewitness News December 23].

5:35 a.m. Thompson calls her mother, complaining about Brinsley being there. Her mother overhears the two arguing, and stays on the line with Thompson, until her phone goes dead. According to Thompson, Brinsley had not mentioned any plans to commit violence against police during their argument or even mentioned police [CBS News, WBALTV].

Brinsley then puts the gun to his own head, but Thompson talks him out of pulling the trigger {ABC Eyewitness News, New York Daily News].

The dispute continues, ending in gunshots, and her phone goes dead [ABC Eyewitness News, December 23] [NY Times]

5:45 a.m. A neighbor reportedly hears a woman scream 'You shot me, you shot me!", and hears him run out the door. [NY Times] Thompson bangs on neighbor Yvette Seay's door yelling, "I can't die like this! Please help me!". Seay sees the bloodied victim through her peephole and calls 911. [Post Wires] Thompson, an Air Force reservist, is rushed to the University of Maryland Medical Center where she is listed in critical condition. She had served in the 440th Medical Squadron, based at Pope Field in Ft. Bragg, N.C. [The Baltimore Sun]

5:48 a.m. Baltimore County police are dispatched to Thompson's apartment [ABC]

5:50 a.m. Yvette Seay's sister leaves the apartment at approximately 5:50 a.m. to go to work and sees a man running across the parking lot. After watching news reports about the New York shooting and seeing the suspect's photo, she realized that this was the man who had shot her next door neighbor [Maryland Associated Press, December 22, 2014].

Google maps give us a clear picture of the route that Brinsley would have had to take to get to the Owings Mills stop. The parking lot of the Greenwich Place Houses is located behind the apartment complex, towards Messina Way.

Google maps show that in order to get from the Greenwich Place apartments to the Baltimore Bolt Bus, the closest Metro station is Owings Mills. But if Brinsley was headed to the Owings Mills station, he would have had to run in the opposite direction from the parking lot, towards Grand Central Avenue, then go left on Grand Junction Lane, a 7-minute walk. If Brinsley was running across the parking lot, it seems that he was running towards his car, not to the Metro station.

5:51 a.m. Baltimore police arrive and find Thompson on the third floor of the apartment building, with a gunshot wound to the abdomen. She is conscious, and tells them her boyfriend shot her and fled with her cellphone, leaving his behind [Rachel Maddow, WBALTV]. Thompson gives Baltimore County police his name and description, and they immediately broadcast information about Brinsley to local law enforcement. [WBALTV]. It would have been routine protocol for police to ascertain who was Thompson's next of kin, and contacted her mother.

6:05 a.m. According to the N.Y. Daily News, one of the first newspapers to break the story, "After shooting his ex-girlfriend in Maryland, NYPD said Brinsley drove to Brooklyn, where he ambushed Officers Ramos and Liu" [N.Y. Daily News, December 21, 2014, 12:01 p.m.].

The Daily News maintains its narrative that Brinsley drove to NYC in his own car, as shown in its updated story on the evening news [N.Y. Daily News, December 21, 2014, 7:49 p.m.]

The Daily News also reported, citing NYPD sources, that Brinsley's car, with Maryland plates, was later discovered at the corner of Myrtle and Nostrand Avenues [N.Y. Daily News, December 21, 2014].

The only way that NYPD could have concluded that the car belonged to Brinsley would be if they ran the plates through Maryland DMV and confirmed the vehicle was registered to Brinsley. According to NYPD Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce, Brinsley calls Thompson's mother, saying that he shot her daughter by accident, and hopes she will survive [NY Times, Rachel Maddow].

Brinsley discloses enough information to Thompson's mother that she knows where he is headed.

After receiving Brinsley's 6:05 a.m. call, Thompson's mother calls Baltimore police [NBC, Owings Mills-Reisterstown Patch] However, according to the New York Times, at 6:05 a.m., Brinsley was "making his way" to the bus station, which one news source identifies as the Bolt Bus station [Rachel Maddow].

The Baltimore Bolt Bus depot is located at 1610 St. Paul Street. The only other Bolt depot is farther away, in Greenbelt, Maryland.

The distance from Thompson's apartment to 1610 St. Paul Street is approximately 19 miles. Traveling on I-95, it would have taken Brinsley 23 minutes in light traffic to get there by car. But it does not make sense that he would have driven to the bus depot and abandoned his car to take the bus, when he could have driven all the way to New York City.

If Brinsley had taken public transportation, he would have arrived at the Bolt Bus station at 8:00 a.m.

6:32 a.m. – Baltimore police begin tracking the activity on Thompson's cell phone [Maddow, ABC Eyewitness News. WBALTV]

6:35 a.m.– Brinsley boards a Bolt Bus in Baltimore that is bound for NYC [N.Y. Times via AP, December 21, 2014 1:40 p.m.] While Baltimore Police could have readily ascertained the destination of the 6:35 a.m. Bolt Bus that Brinsley boardred, by contacting the dispatcher, news reports all give the source of information regarding Brinsley's movements as the "pinging" on Thompson's cell phone.

7:46 a.m. –Baltimore police get a signal from Brinsley's phone showing he's left Baltimore, and is headed north on I-95. [Maddow] Signals from the phone show a general location along Interstate 95, near the Susquehanna River. Baltimore County police notify the JFK barracks of the Maryland State Police [iWatch, Official Baltimore County Police & Fire's Facebook Wall] The bus, like all NYC bound vehicles on I-95, has to go through a number of major tollbooths and bridges on I-95, all of which have cameras. Additionally, it is customary for buses traveling on the I-95 corridor to pull over at a rest stop on the NJ Turnpike.

8:30 – 10:30 a.m. – Brinsley is tracked on Thompson's cell phone north through New Jersey. [Maddow, WBALTV.com] He is constantly on his cell phone during this time period, and calls Thompson's mother several times to find out her condition [NY Times] During this time, police in Baltimore notice Brinsley posting to Thompson's Instagram account about a threat to New York officers as they track his movements [CBS New York, December 21, 11:56 p.m.]. This would signify that police did not need to obtain this information from another source, i.e., Brinsley's family members.

10:24 a.m. – Brinsley enters the Lincoln Tunnel [Maddow] 10:49 a.m. Brinsley disembarks from the bus, as shown by his phone signal near 43rd Street and 8th Avenue. A video camera captures him getting on a Brooklyn-bound N train [NY Times, ABC, NBC, CBS]

11:00 a.m. – Baltimore police reportedly track Brinsley's movements on a Brooklyn-bound subway from the Times Square subway stop, which is connected to the Port Authority 8th Avenue subway line via a long underground passage, where the 2, 3, N, and R trains run [Maddow] Police next track him as he emerges in the Barclay Center in Brooklyn.

11:00 – 12:00 a.m. – Once in Brooklyn, Brinsley uses Thompson's phone to make posts to Instagram. One shows a leg of his camouflage pants and his bluish shoe, spattered in blood. The other showed his pistol. "I'm Putting Wings on Pigs Today They take 1 of Ours "¦Let's Take 2 of Theirs #ShootThePolice," he wrote [NY Times]

According to the Washington Post, and several blogs, Brinsley was tracking NYPD using the Police Alert App, WAZE, a navigation app that allows millions of users to help each other track traffic, road hazards, construction zones, and the whereabouts of police officers in speed traps, among other things. It's enormously popular with people who spend a lot of time on interstates.

Brinsley posted a screen shot from WAZE, and a conversation he had about police in the Staten Island area with a friend "Nita Boo".

11:47 a.m. Brinsley starts posting threats to kill NY police officers on Instagram [NY Post]

"I'm Putting Wings on Pigs Today:" "They Take 1 Of Ours ."‰."‰. Let's Take 2 of Theirs," the post continued, ending with, "This May Be My Final Post." [Associated Press, NY Post, NY1]. He posts several photos as well, of him alone and with male friends, and videos of him playing music, at a club, and discussing his dreams of having a line of clothing.

The Instagram pages include the photo of a silver automatic handgun with a wooden handle, which according to NYPD, matched the Taurus 9 mm semi-automatic recovered from Brinsley [NY Post]. According to Special Agent in Charge Aladino Ortiz of the Atlanta BATF, Brinsley's gun was purchased in 1996 at a local pawnshop by a man who worked at a local auto dealership.

That man sold the weapon to a co-worker at the dealership in 1998 — when Brinsley was about 12 years old. "At this point, the individual doesn't remember who he sold the gun to," Ortiz said. "We are continuing to follow the leads, but the trail is a little cold at this point. "¦ We may never know how Mr. Brinsley got it into his hands." [Baltimore Sun, December 23, 2014].

According to Rachel Maddow, Thompson's family starts contacting the Baltimore news media, informing them about Brinsley's posts [Rachel Maddow, MSNBC, December 22, 2014]

12:07 p.m. – Brinsley arrives at the Atlantic Mall and disappears after being captured on several security cameras carrying a large Styrofoam food container, which police now believe contained his gun. The phone keeps pinging, and the Baltimore County police contact NYPD in Brooklyn [NY Times].

Surveillance videos from the Atlantic Terminal Mall show Brinsley chatting on a cellphone while casually walking around while carrying a white plastic bag, which appears to be covering a container, that he is attempting to hold upright and steady [Daily Mail UK].

Brinsley reportedly discards Thompson's cell phone, hiding it behind a radiator in a small shopping mall across from the Barclays Center, where NYPD later find it [CBS News, December 22, 2014 5:35 p.m.].

For the next 2 hours, Brinsley's whereabouts are unknown. Although the NYPD's top detective has asked the public to help them trace what Brinsley was doing for those two hours between his last Instagram picture and the shooting, no further information has emerged.

12:00 -2:00 p.m. Friends and family of Thompson come forward and tell Baltimore police that Brinsley was posting "all over the internet, all day", including photos on Instagram, that he had shot his girlfriend.

1:30 p.m. – In contradiction to coverage by the NY Post and NY1, ABC News and Rachel Maddow claim that this is the time that police in Baltimore discover Brinsley has made posts from his Instagram account that threaten to kill officers, and determine the posts are being made from Brooklyn [ABC News, Maddow]

1:45 p.m. –Baltimore police finish composing a Wanted flyer, stating that Brinsley plans to kill police officers in NYC that day [Maddow]. According to Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, Baltimore authorities had send a Wanted flier between 1:30 and 2 p.m. to NYPD and other agencies warning them of Brinsley. [CBS News] Bratton states that flier is sent out by NYPD to local police precincts at essentially the same time the officers were being ambushed by the suspect, a 2:48 pm.mt. [CBS News] .

2:10 p.m. – In the version reported on MSNBC, Baltimore County police call the 70th precinct, near where the signal on the discarded cell phone had been detected, advising NYPD that the phone of a suspect in the Owings Mills shooting is pinging in Brooklyn, [Maddow].

According to ABC News, at 2:10 p.m., a detective from the Baltimore Violent Crimes Unit telephones NYPD's 60th Precinct in Brooklyn to advise that a suspect wanted for a shooting that morning might be in New York and has posted threats against police.

The Baltimore detective is directed to another Brooklyn precinct, the 70th Precinct, because the phone most recently had been tracked to that precinct. [ABC Eyewitness News].

According to some stories, the Baltimore detective speaks with an NYPD officer for about 30 minutes, providing all known details about the situation. During the phone call, the NYPD officer views the Instagram posts, which include photos of Brinsley [ABC Eyewitness News].

In this version of events, the two police departments first discuss the Instagram posts, and Baltimore police fax a wanted poster of Brinsley to NYPD, along with information about Brinsley [ABC News, NY Times].

At this time, NYPD knows everything that it needs to know to send out an All Points Bulletin to officers on the street in Brooklyn, warning them that an armed, dangerous fugitive is in Brooklyn, planning to kill police officers.

Yet, NYPD does not do any of this.

According to the NY Times, "It was not clear if the fax was received. Police Commissioner William J. Bratton said on Saturday that it did not show up until about 2:45 pm." [NY Times]

2:45 p.m. – Brinsley walks up to two people on the street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, and asked them what gang they belonged to. He urges them to follow him on Instagram, and tells them, "Watch what I'm going to do." [NY Times, ABC, Maddow]

2:46 p.m. At the conclusion of their 30-minute conversation with NYPD, Baltimore police fax the Wanted poster they had prepared an hour earlier, at 1:45 pm., but it is too late [Maddow, ABC Eyewitness News].

2:47 p.m. – Brinsley walks past the patrol car where Officers Wenjian Liu, 32, and Rafael Ramos, 40 are sitting, near the corner of Myrtle and Thompkins Avenue, a busy intersection in Brooklyn near the Tompkins Houses. [NY Times, NY1, Maddow]. Officer Ramos is sitting in the driver's seat, and officer Liu was sitting in the passenger seat [CNN Wire, December 20, 2014, 4:57 p.m., CBS TV News].

According to some reports, they were stationed there because they were working overtime as part of an anti-terrorism drill [NBC].

However, the Boston Globe quoted Police Commissioner Bratton as saying that the two officers were stationed in front of the Thompkins housing project "in response to an uptick in violence there this year", which is reported by some NYC papers as well [Boston Globe December 20, 2014].

According to Brooklyn Council member Robert Cornegy, both officers are eating lunch at the time they are shot [WPIX December 20].

However, Commissioner Bratton's press statement on January 12, 2015, urges that police officers to be "more vigilant" than ever, staying alert during their patrols, and not "texting away". "So if both of them are sitting in the car and they're busy texting away or not paying attention of the surrounding area, they're much more vulnerable to attack" [CBS-TV, January 12, 2015].

2:48 p.m. According to Bratton, Brinsley emerges from the Thompkins housing projects, crosses the street and approaches the officers' car from behind, walks to the passenger window, assumes a shooting stance, and fires four shots through the front passenger window, killing both men [NY Times, NY Post].

Commissioner Bratton states that Brinsley shot "multiple rounds" into the head and upper bodies of the officers, who never drew their weapons [NY Times]. The only known eyewitness to the shootings, Charlie Hu, the manager of a liquor store at the corner, claims to have seen the two police officers slouched over in the front of their patrol car. Both appeared to have been shot in the head, and one had blood spilling out of his face [NY Times].

However, a witness named Courtney Felix, 23, who was at a friend's apartment nearby, hearing the shots from a window, sees the cop on the drivers' side [Officer Ramos] who "was clutching his neck, catching himself and fading out" as he fell to the ground. He states that both officers opened the doors to the police car. "They were trying to get cognizance of where they were hit". The other cop was clutching his collarbone as he stumbled, Felix added." [New York Daily News, December 20, 2014, 3:26 p.m., WPIX December 21, 2014, New York Newsday, December 20, 2014 11:59 p.m.].

This story, which contained interviews with witnesses at the scene, has since been removed. However, the story was picked up by WPIX-11 and the Pan-African Newswire, which printed it in its entirety. It is the only story that contains statements by eyewitnesses.

A witness who asked to remain anonymous said, "I saw it. One was shot in the face. There was blood coming out of his face." [WPIX December 21, 2014].

Despite the statement by Charlie Hu, none of the crime scene photos or videos taken immediately after show any blood on the exterior of the door or on the sidewalk where the officers had lain in their final seconds alive.

The NY Post online was the only major news source to publish a video of the immediate aftermath of the shootings.

2:49 p.m. – Brinsley takes off running to the nearest subway stop, the Myrtle-Willoughby subway station, an avenue block away, to the westbound subway platform [WHOTV.com, 7:20 a.m., December 21, 2014]

According to the N.Y. Post, Con Ed workers see Brinsley fleeing and follow him in their truck as he ambles away from the carnage, still holding his silver Taurus semi-automatic. When they confront Brinsley on the street, attempting to stop him, he levels the gun at the them, asking them, 'You want some of this?' The two back off, and Brinsley ducks into the nearby G-train station. The Con Ed workers then call police to say he went into the station [Rachel Maddow, MSBC, December 22, Gothamist, December 21, 2014].

However, there is another version of what happened, that a worker in a deli store on the street sees Brinsley running and alerts police on the scene, who chase him into the subway. [NY Times, ABC]. Brinsley heads to the westbound platform of the Myrtle Avenue G station. Carmen Jimenez, 32, a social worker from Bed-Stuy, is on the subway platform when Brinsley runs in. "It looked like two cops came in. There was lots of yelling and they said, 'Everybody get down.' People were screaming. People were trying to run. I threw myself on the floor. I was afraid for my life and afraid for my baby." [New York Post, December 20, 2014, 4:07 p.m.].

The video was filmed from an apartment several stories over the scene, and gives an unobstructed view of the driver's side of the car. Both officers are visible on the ground, with policemen surrounding them, administering CPR and then loading them onto stretchers. In viewing the video several times without any enhancement, there does not appear to be any blood stains or trail of blood that one would expect from a person who was bleeding profusely from two gunshot wounds to the head. Looking at the passenger side of the car, you can see Officer Liu lying on the ground with three policemen hovering over him, administering CPR. After Liu is loaded onto a stretcher, there is no sign of blood on the ground. With the cops pursuing him, Brinsley then turns the gun on himself [Gothamist, December 21, 2014]. Brinsley and the two police officers are taken to Woodhull Hospital, and all are pronounced dead on arrival.

Unanswered questions:

The highly inconsistent narrative of the killing of Officer Ramos and Officer Liu raise serious questions as to NYPD's competence. There is no doubt that NYPD, with its vast technological and communications resources, had the ability to capture Brinsley and prevent this tragedy from occurring. There is also the more disturbing possibility, that NYPD allowed these killings to happen, in order to advance their political agenda, which was unabashedly to stop the protests, and change the focus of public and media attention.

NYPD had every possible advantage in this case. Brinsley, unlike killers such as the infamous Zodiac, gave police all of the information they needed: dozens of photos posted to the internet, a cell phone pinging that allowed police to track his movements, and a shooting victim who was still conscious and alive, and able along with her mother, to give police information on his background and criminal record.

A case riddled with contradictions and inconsistencies:

* BPD knew, at the time they arrived on the scene, that Brinsley had a gun and had fled the scene. Why didn't BPD, who were informed by Thompson that Brinsley had taken her cell phone, not have put up immediate roadblocks at all points of departure from Baltimore?

* A major unanswered question is did Brinsley drive his car to NYC or take the Bolt Bus? The evidence seems to strongly point to him driving to New York. That would make his arrival time in Manhattan at least an hour earlier than the Bolt Bus, putting him in NYC by 10:00 a.m.

* If Brinsley did indeed take the 6:35 a.m. Bolt Bus, why didn't BPD or NYPD, which sent an entire team of detectives down to Baltimore, interview the dispatcher or the driver, which would have known its destination? Wouldn't they have been concerned for the safety of the public that an armed fugitive was aboard the bus?

*How was it possible for Brinsley to travel by public transportation from Thompson's apartment to the Baltimore Bolt bus stop in under 45 minutes, when the trip takes close to 2 hours?

* Why didn't the BPD, who were tracking Brinsley for 4 ½ hours, alerted all tollbooth operators on the Maryland and Delaware bridges, as well as the New Jersey Turnpike, and set up roadblocks on I-95 North

* Once the bus entered the Lincoln Tunnel, why didn't BPD alert NYPD to be waiting for him on the platform?

* According to CBS, BPD knew that Brinsley was posting threats to Thompson's Instagram account, because they were tracking her cell phone, by 10:30 a.m. According to the New York Post, Brinsley began posting threats to kill NYPD officers at 11:47 a.m. BPD and NYPD had 3 hours to act to stop Brinsley.

* While the New York Post and NY1 reported that BPD were aware of Brinsley's photos and threats on Instagram at 11:47 a.m., Rachel Maddow and ABC News put the time of NYPD's awareness at 1:30 pm.

* Even if this is true, NYPD would have had all the relevant information it needed by 1:30 p.m., in order to issue an APB that Brinsley was coming to Brooklyn armed with a semiautomatic weapon, and planning to kill police officers. That was approximately 1 hour 18 minutes before the shootings, sufficient time for NYPD to email a notice to all of the precincts, as well as to radio officers stationed on the street.

* ABC Eyewitness News reported that a BPD detective discussed Brinsley with an NYPD officer in Brooklyn for 30 minutes, providing all known details about the situation, and the NYPD officer viewed all of the Instagram posts. Yet, rather than take immediate action between 2:10 p.m. and 2:40 p.m., NYPD allegedly requests that BPD fax them a Wanted poster.

* Why would BPD and NYPD have required 30 minutes, starting at 2:10 p.m., to have a conversation about Brinsley? I can't imagine how the basic facts and Instagram links could have been sent in a matter of minutes, with NYPD taking immediate action. NYPD claimed in December 2014 that it was conducting a full investigation into the matter, and sent a team of detectives down to Baltimore. So far, there has been no word, and the story has gone cold.

CAROL LIPTON was born and raised in the Pelham Parkway housing projects, where she learned how to sleep pressed up against the wall in the summer. She was admitted to Music and Art High School on Art and Bronx H.S. of Science, and went to Science, a decision she had no control over. Largely self-taught in art, she began exhibiting and selling her watercolor paintings at age 14. Her favorite sports were punch ball, dodge ball, stickball, kickball, cycling, and Ringaleevio. She invented the first aerodynamic skully cap. Carol began playing piano at age 4 ½, and studied piano and music theory for 11 years. She was a professional musician and composer, playing the restaurant, bar and college circuit in D.C. She went to NYU on an IBEW and Regents scholarship, where she graduated with Honors in philosophy and Political Science. She was co-editor of the poetry journal, and was a student strike coordinator in the aftermath of Kent State. After graduation, she led a cross-country 450-mile cycling trip through Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. She graduated from the Catholic University School of Law. She was a grants administrator for the Expansion Arts program at NEA, responsible for making decisions to community arts programs. As a legal services fellow in Kentucky, Carol became an anti-nuclear activist, and co-produced a special for NBC on the Maxey Flats nuclear waste site. She has co-produced specials for ABC's 20/20 on the militia/tax protest movement, and for NBC, on a Guatemalan political asylum claimant she represented through Human Rights First, where she trained under the late Arthur Helton. She consulted to the Haitian Refugee Center, where she handled an immigration appeal. She has worked in public interest law, for Legal Services, and in private practice, specializing in consumer fraud, employment discrimination, bankruptcy, housing, and appellate litigation. She has been a member of the Appellate Division's Assigned Counsel panel for 23 years, and is a member of the National Lawyers Guild.


Unanswered Questions in the NYPD Shootings » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

 

[sorcerer]

Re: Totalitarian Rule in America - The Other Side of American (Wet) Dr

Contradictions and Inconsistencies in the Ismaaiyl Brinsley Case
Unanswered Questions in the NYPD Shootings
by CAROL LIPTON

As of November 2014, national and international protests over the police killings of unarmed black men, particularly Eric Garner and Michael Brown, were reaching critical mass, as thousands of people across the United States, following in the footsteps of Ferguson residents, engaged in spectacular mass demonstrations, civil disobedience and street theater actions in over 175 cities, replicating the wildfire spread of the Occupy Wall Street encampments during the fall of 2011.

The #blacklivesmatter movement gained tremendous momentum on November 25, following the decision by a Staten Island grand jury not to indict Office Daniel Pantaleo, for the murder of Eric Garner, who died as the result of an illegal chokehold by Pantaleo.

The chokehold killing of Garner, a tall man who weighed over 300 pounds and suffered from diabetes and heart disease, was potent in its impact because of the utter pathos of it, captured entirely on video. It showed Pantaleo approaching Garner, and with no provocation from Garner and no apparent grounds, attempting to arrest him. After Garner verbally asked Pantaleo to leave him alone and to stop harassing him, Pantaleo crooked his arm tightly around Garner's neck, holding him with all his strength.

The officers then brutally knocked Garner to the ground, pinning him down as he cried out 11 times, "I can't breathe". Then there was silence, as he lost consciousness and then died. The medical examiner ruled his death a homicide, yet no charges were brought against Pantaleo.

Garner's death was amplified by the deaths of other unarmed black men and women shot by police and racist vigilantes, notably John Crawford, shot in a WalMart while talking on his cell phone while holding a gun for sale in the store, Akai Gurley, shot in the stairwell of the Brooklyn housing project where he lived, and 12 year old Tamir Rice, shot by Ohio police while carrying a toy gun.

Emboldened by politically astute young black leadership that forged the #blacklivesmatter movement, the demonstrations were creative in ways that equaled or even exceeded those of the 1960s Civil Rights movement and seemed to be benefitting from what I've named "the Occupy Effect". There were actions never before seen in the history of modern protest, such as the New York City Council members who walked off their jobs, and held a die-in stopping traffic on lower Broadway, and members of the Congressional Black Caucus and congressional staffers walking out en masse onto the steps of the nation's capital. Medical schools, law schools, and colleges held huge die-ins. Even junior high school students in Denver took to the street. Athletes protested at games, wearing "I Can't Breathe" t-shirts.

With Christmas approaching, demonstrations increased in frequency and intensity, with even more tactics added: marches into Saks Fifth Avenue, Toys 'R' Us and the 5th Avenue Apple store; the reading of the names ceremonies in Grand Central Station; marches onto the FDR Drive, West Side Highway; and almost daily shutdowns of the Holland and Lincoln tunnels. A sea of protesters took to the streets on December 5 and 6, shutting down most of midtown Manhattan, disrupting the tree lighting ceremony at Rockefeller Center, and marching into Macy's, striking at the very heart of Thanksgiving in America. There were also massive demonstrations throughout Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Staten Island.

This culminated in the December 13, 2014 march down Broadway, in which an estimated 60,000 people assembled in front of Macy's, marched to Foley Square, and held an enormous rally. Protestors then crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, marching almost 10 miles into Crown Heights, to the housing project where Akai Gurley was killed, while others shut down the Manhattan Bridge.

On December 19, a bitterly cold night, at least 2,000 demonstrators marched in lower Manhattan, confronting a pro-police rally.

NYPD and Mayor DiBlasio seemed powerless to stanch the tide of protest. In response to the initially hands-off and conciliatory approach taken by Mayor DiBlasio, who in a press conference had shared his concerns about his biracial son, Dante, NYPD escalated its hostility, eager to return to the brutality against demonstrators that was the endemic during the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations.

The next day, December 20, before several large protests planned for Christmas, an event occurred that could not have been more advantageous to the NYPD's desire to turn the tide of public opinion against the protesters and stop the movement dead in its tracks, had they designed it themselves.

At approximately 2:47 p.m., in broad daylight, a Brooklyn-born Baltimore man, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, 28, ambushed and killed two NYPD officers, 40-year-old Rafael Ramos and 32-year-old Wenjian Liu, as they sat in their patrol car while stationed outside a housing project in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.

Brinsley's background:

Brinsely's background is obscure. He had reportedly been dating Shaneka Thompson for under a year. He was reportedly not from Maryland, and his current address was unknown [CBS News]. However, other sources report that he had fathered two children in Brooklyn, and that his last known address was on Eastern Parkway [N.Y. Daily News].

He had lived with various relatives as a child, but dropped out of high school in the 10th grade. His family reported a history of mental illness. At an August 2011 court hearing, when asked if he'd ever been a patient in a mental institution, he reportedly said "yes".

According to his mother, he tried to hang himself a year ago and was estranged from his family, who were afraid of him. Nawaal Brinsley, a sister who lives in Atlanta, said she hadn't seen him in two years. [N.Y. Times].

Brinsley reportedly had 15 prior arrests in Georgia for various offenses, including assault, shoplifting, grand larceny and gun possession, and 4 arrrests in Ohio for robbery and misdemeanor threat. He served two years in prison in Georgia for criminal possession of a weapon [CBS News]. He also had an arrest record in Brooklyn [CBS News].

However, the Baltimore Sun, citing online records from Georgia's Fulton County sheriff's office, reported that Brinsley had been arrested only 9 times since 2004. [Baltimore Sun, December 20, 2014, 11:39 p.m.]

Investigators say Brinsley was at a protest in Union Square on December 1, before a grand jury decided against charging Officer Pantaleo, and recorded part of the protest on his phone. [ABC Eyewitness News December 23].

Brinsley's First Shooting Victim, Shaneka Thompson:

Shaneka Thompson grew up in Winnsboro, SC, and attended Francis Marion University in Florence, SC. [Post Wires].

She had been a health service manager at Pope Army Airfield in Fayetteville, NC before transferring to the Veterans Administration in Baltimore, where she worked as a health insurance specialist [The Daily Mail]. However, the NY Times reported that she was currently employed by the Maryland Department of Welfare.

AP reported that Thompson's grandfather, James Delly, told AP that Thompson had worked in banking and moved to Maryland from Fayetteville, NC six months ago for work, and had been seeing Brinsley for less than a year [Wall Street Journal] [NY Times]

Time line of the events of December 20, 2014:

5:30 a.m. Brinsley arrives at the upscale apartment of Shaneka Thompson, 28, in the Greenwich Place Development located at 10090 Mill Run Circle in Owings Mills, Maryland, just northwest of Baltimore [Daily Mail UK Dec. 21, 2014].

The apartment complex overlooks the Owings Mill AMC Cinema Parking lot in the Owings Mills Mall [Daily Mail].

Here's a map of the Owings Mills Mall and Greenwich Place.

Contrary to unofficial reports, Brinsley, who did not have a key to Thompson's apartment, gains entry to the lobby of the secured building and knocks on her door, which she opens [ABC Eyewitness News December 23].

5:35 a.m. Thompson calls her mother, complaining about Brinsley being there. Her mother overhears the two arguing, and stays on the line with Thompson, until her phone goes dead. According to Thompson, Brinsley had not mentioned any plans to commit violence against police during their argument or even mentioned police [CBS News, WBALTV].

Brinsley then puts the gun to his own head, but Thompson talks him out of pulling the trigger {ABC Eyewitness News, New York Daily News].

The dispute continues, ending in gunshots, and her phone goes dead [ABC Eyewitness News, December 23] [NY Times]

5:45 a.m. A neighbor reportedly hears a woman scream 'You shot me, you shot me!", and hears him run out the door. [NY Times] Thompson bangs on neighbor Yvette Seay's door yelling, "I can't die like this! Please help me!". Seay sees the bloodied victim through her peephole and calls 911. [Post Wires] Thompson, an Air Force reservist, is rushed to the University of Maryland Medical Center where she is listed in critical condition. She had served in the 440th Medical Squadron, based at Pope Field in Ft. Bragg, N.C. [The Baltimore Sun]

5:48 a.m. Baltimore County police are dispatched to Thompson's apartment [ABC]

5:50 a.m. Yvette Seay's sister leaves the apartment at approximately 5:50 a.m. to go to work and sees a man running across the parking lot. After watching news reports about the New York shooting and seeing the suspect's photo, she realized that this was the man who had shot her next door neighbor [Maryland Associated Press, December 22, 2014].

Google maps give us a clear picture of the route that Brinsley would have had to take to get to the Owings Mills stop. The parking lot of the Greenwich Place Houses is located behind the apartment complex, towards Messina Way.

Google maps show that in order to get from the Greenwich Place apartments to the Baltimore Bolt Bus, the closest Metro station is Owings Mills. But if Brinsley was headed to the Owings Mills station, he would have had to run in the opposite direction from the parking lot, towards Grand Central Avenue, then go left on Grand Junction Lane, a 7-minute walk. If Brinsley was running across the parking lot, it seems that he was running towards his car, not to the Metro station.

5:51 a.m. Baltimore police arrive and find Thompson on the third floor of the apartment building, with a gunshot wound to the abdomen. She is conscious, and tells them her boyfriend shot her and fled with her cellphone, leaving his behind [Rachel Maddow, WBALTV]. Thompson gives Baltimore County police his name and description, and they immediately broadcast information about Brinsley to local law enforcement. [WBALTV]. It would have been routine protocol for police to ascertain who was Thompson's next of kin, and contacted her mother.

6:05 a.m. According to the N.Y. Daily News, one of the first newspapers to break the story, "After shooting his ex-girlfriend in Maryland, NYPD said Brinsley drove to Brooklyn, where he ambushed Officers Ramos and Liu" [N.Y. Daily News, December 21, 2014, 12:01 p.m.].

The Daily News maintains its narrative that Brinsley drove to NYC in his own car, as shown in its updated story on the evening news [N.Y. Daily News, December 21, 2014, 7:49 p.m.]

The Daily News also reported, citing NYPD sources, that Brinsley's car, with Maryland plates, was later discovered at the corner of Myrtle and Nostrand Avenues [N.Y. Daily News, December 21, 2014].

The only way that NYPD could have concluded that the car belonged to Brinsley would be if they ran the plates through Maryland DMV and confirmed the vehicle was registered to Brinsley. According to NYPD Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce, Brinsley calls Thompson's mother, saying that he shot her daughter by accident, and hopes she will survive [NY Times, Rachel Maddow].

Brinsley discloses enough information to Thompson's mother that she knows where he is headed.

After receiving Brinsley's 6:05 a.m. call, Thompson's mother calls Baltimore police [NBC, Owings Mills-Reisterstown Patch] However, according to the New York Times, at 6:05 a.m., Brinsley was "making his way" to the bus station, which one news source identifies as the Bolt Bus station [Rachel Maddow].

The Baltimore Bolt Bus depot is located at 1610 St. Paul Street. The only other Bolt depot is farther away, in Greenbelt, Maryland.

The distance from Thompson's apartment to 1610 St. Paul Street is approximately 19 miles. Traveling on I-95, it would have taken Brinsley 23 minutes in light traffic to get there by car. But it does not make sense that he would have driven to the bus depot and abandoned his car to take the bus, when he could have driven all the way to New York City.

If Brinsley had taken public transportation, he would have arrived at the Bolt Bus station at 8:00 a.m.

6:32 a.m. – Baltimore police begin tracking the activity on Thompson's cell phone [Maddow, ABC Eyewitness News. WBALTV]

6:35 a.m.– Brinsley boards a Bolt Bus in Baltimore that is bound for NYC [N.Y. Times via AP, December 21, 2014 1:40 p.m.] While Baltimore Police could have readily ascertained the destination of the 6:35 a.m. Bolt Bus that Brinsley boardred, by contacting the dispatcher, news reports all give the source of information regarding Brinsley's movements as the "pinging" on Thompson's cell phone.

7:46 a.m. –Baltimore police get a signal from Brinsley's phone showing he's left Baltimore, and is headed north on I-95. [Maddow] Signals from the phone show a general location along Interstate 95, near the Susquehanna River. Baltimore County police notify the JFK barracks of the Maryland State Police [iWatch, Official Baltimore County Police & Fire's Facebook Wall] The bus, like all NYC bound vehicles on I-95, has to go through a number of major tollbooths and bridges on I-95, all of which have cameras. Additionally, it is customary for buses traveling on the I-95 corridor to pull over at a rest stop on the NJ Turnpike.

8:30 – 10:30 a.m. – Brinsley is tracked on Thompson's cell phone north through New Jersey. [Maddow, WBALTV.com] He is constantly on his cell phone during this time period, and calls Thompson's mother several times to find out her condition [NY Times] During this time, police in Baltimore notice Brinsley posting to Thompson's Instagram account about a threat to New York officers as they track his movements [CBS New York, December 21, 11:56 p.m.]. This would signify that police did not need to obtain this information from another source, i.e., Brinsley's family members.

10:24 a.m. – Brinsley enters the Lincoln Tunnel [Maddow] 10:49 a.m. Brinsley disembarks from the bus, as shown by his phone signal near 43rd Street and 8th Avenue. A video camera captures him getting on a Brooklyn-bound N train [NY Times, ABC, NBC, CBS]

11:00 a.m. – Baltimore police reportedly track Brinsley's movements on a Brooklyn-bound subway from the Times Square subway stop, which is connected to the Port Authority 8th Avenue subway line via a long underground passage, where the 2, 3, N, and R trains run [Maddow] Police next track him as he emerges in the Barclay Center in Brooklyn.

11:00 – 12:00 a.m. – Once in Brooklyn, Brinsley uses Thompson's phone to make posts to Instagram. One shows a leg of his camouflage pants and his bluish shoe, spattered in blood. The other showed his pistol. "I'm Putting Wings on Pigs Today They take 1 of Ours "¦Let's Take 2 of Theirs #ShootThePolice," he wrote [NY Times]

According to the Washington Post, and several blogs, Brinsley was tracking NYPD using the Police Alert App, WAZE, a navigation app that allows millions of users to help each other track traffic, road hazards, construction zones, and the whereabouts of police officers in speed traps, among other things. It's enormously popular with people who spend a lot of time on interstates.

Brinsley posted a screen shot from WAZE, and a conversation he had about police in the Staten Island area with a friend "Nita Boo".

11:47 a.m. Brinsley starts posting threats to kill NY police officers on Instagram [NY Post]

"I'm Putting Wings on Pigs Today:" "They Take 1 Of Ours ."‰."‰. Let's Take 2 of Theirs," the post continued, ending with, "This May Be My Final Post." [Associated Press, NY Post, NY1]. He posts several photos as well, of him alone and with male friends, and videos of him playing music, at a club, and discussing his dreams of having a line of clothing.

The Instagram pages include the photo of a silver automatic handgun with a wooden handle, which according to NYPD, matched the Taurus 9 mm semi-automatic recovered from Brinsley [NY Post]. According to Special Agent in Charge Aladino Ortiz of the Atlanta BATF, Brinsley's gun was purchased in 1996 at a local pawnshop by a man who worked at a local auto dealership.

That man sold the weapon to a co-worker at the dealership in 1998 — when Brinsley was about 12 years old. "At this point, the individual doesn't remember who he sold the gun to," Ortiz said. "We are continuing to follow the leads, but the trail is a little cold at this point. "¦ We may never know how Mr. Brinsley got it into his hands." [Baltimore Sun, December 23, 2014].

According to Rachel Maddow, Thompson's family starts contacting the Baltimore news media, informing them about Brinsley's posts [Rachel Maddow, MSNBC, December 22, 2014]

12:07 p.m. – Brinsley arrives at the Atlantic Mall and disappears after being captured on several security cameras carrying a large Styrofoam food container, which police now believe contained his gun. The phone keeps pinging, and the Baltimore County police contact NYPD in Brooklyn [NY Times].

Surveillance videos from the Atlantic Terminal Mall show Brinsley chatting on a cellphone while casually walking around while carrying a white plastic bag, which appears to be covering a container, that he is attempting to hold upright and steady [Daily Mail UK].

Brinsley reportedly discards Thompson's cell phone, hiding it behind a radiator in a small shopping mall across from the Barclays Center, where NYPD later find it [CBS News, December 22, 2014 5:35 p.m.].

For the next 2 hours, Brinsley's whereabouts are unknown. Although the NYPD's top detective has asked the public to help them trace what Brinsley was doing for those two hours between his last Instagram picture and the shooting, no further information has emerged.

12:00 -2:00 p.m. Friends and family of Thompson come forward and tell Baltimore police that Brinsley was posting "all over the internet, all day", including photos on Instagram, that he had shot his girlfriend.

1:30 p.m. – In contradiction to coverage by the NY Post and NY1, ABC News and Rachel Maddow claim that this is the time that police in Baltimore discover Brinsley has made posts from his Instagram account that threaten to kill officers, and determine the posts are being made from Brooklyn [ABC News, Maddow]

1:45 p.m. –Baltimore police finish composing a Wanted flyer, stating that Brinsley plans to kill police officers in NYC that day [Maddow]. According to Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, Baltimore authorities had send a Wanted flier between 1:30 and 2 p.m. to NYPD and other agencies warning them of Brinsley. [CBS News] Bratton states that flier is sent out by NYPD to local police precincts at essentially the same time the officers were being ambushed by the suspect, a 2:48 pm.mt. [CBS News] .

2:10 p.m. – In the version reported on MSNBC, Baltimore County police call the 70th precinct, near where the signal on the discarded cell phone had been detected, advising NYPD that the phone of a suspect in the Owings Mills shooting is pinging in Brooklyn, [Maddow].

According to ABC News, at 2:10 p.m., a detective from the Baltimore Violent Crimes Unit telephones NYPD's 60th Precinct in Brooklyn to advise that a suspect wanted for a shooting that morning might be in New York and has posted threats against police.

The Baltimore detective is directed to another Brooklyn precinct, the 70th Precinct, because the phone most recently had been tracked to that precinct. [ABC Eyewitness News].

According to some stories, the Baltimore detective speaks with an NYPD officer for about 30 minutes, providing all known details about the situation. During the phone call, the NYPD officer views the Instagram posts, which include photos of Brinsley [ABC Eyewitness News].

In this version of events, the two police departments first discuss the Instagram posts, and Baltimore police fax a wanted poster of Brinsley to NYPD, along with information about Brinsley [ABC News, NY Times].

At this time, NYPD knows everything that it needs to know to send out an All Points Bulletin to officers on the street in Brooklyn, warning them that an armed, dangerous fugitive is in Brooklyn, planning to kill police officers.

Yet, NYPD does not do any of this.

According to the NY Times, "It was not clear if the fax was received. Police Commissioner William J. Bratton said on Saturday that it did not show up until about 2:45 pm." [NY Times]

2:45 p.m. – Brinsley walks up to two people on the street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, and asked them what gang they belonged to. He urges them to follow him on Instagram, and tells them, "Watch what I'm going to do." [NY Times, ABC, Maddow]

2:46 p.m. At the conclusion of their 30-minute conversation with NYPD, Baltimore police fax the Wanted poster they had prepared an hour earlier, at 1:45 pm., but it is too late [Maddow, ABC Eyewitness News].

2:47 p.m. – Brinsley walks past the patrol car where Officers Wenjian Liu, 32, and Rafael Ramos, 40 are sitting, near the corner of Myrtle and Thompkins Avenue, a busy intersection in Brooklyn near the Tompkins Houses. [NY Times, NY1, Maddow]. Officer Ramos is sitting in the driver's seat, and officer Liu was sitting in the passenger seat [CNN Wire, December 20, 2014, 4:57 p.m., CBS TV News].

According to some reports, they were stationed there because they were working overtime as part of an anti-terrorism drill [NBC].

However, the Boston Globe quoted Police Commissioner Bratton as saying that the two officers were stationed in front of the Thompkins housing project "in response to an uptick in violence there this year", which is reported by some NYC papers as well [Boston Globe December 20, 2014].

According to Brooklyn Council member Robert Cornegy, both officers are eating lunch at the time they are shot [WPIX December 20].

However, Commissioner Bratton's press statement on January 12, 2015, urges that police officers to be "more vigilant" than ever, staying alert during their patrols, and not "texting away". "So if both of them are sitting in the car and they're busy texting away or not paying attention of the surrounding area, they're much more vulnerable to attack" [CBS-TV, January 12, 2015].

2:48 p.m. According to Bratton, Brinsley emerges from the Thompkins housing projects, crosses the street and approaches the officers' car from behind, walks to the passenger window, assumes a shooting stance, and fires four shots through the front passenger window, killing both men [NY Times, NY Post].

Commissioner Bratton states that Brinsley shot "multiple rounds" into the head and upper bodies of the officers, who never drew their weapons [NY Times]. The only known eyewitness to the shootings, Charlie Hu, the manager of a liquor store at the corner, claims to have seen the two police officers slouched over in the front of their patrol car. Both appeared to have been shot in the head, and one had blood spilling out of his face [NY Times].

However, a witness named Courtney Felix, 23, who was at a friend's apartment nearby, hearing the shots from a window, sees the cop on the drivers' side [Officer Ramos] who "was clutching his neck, catching himself and fading out" as he fell to the ground. He states that both officers opened the doors to the police car. "They were trying to get cognizance of where they were hit". The other cop was clutching his collarbone as he stumbled, Felix added." [New York Daily News, December 20, 2014, 3:26 p.m., WPIX December 21, 2014, New York Newsday, December 20, 2014 11:59 p.m.].

This story, which contained interviews with witnesses at the scene, has since been removed. However, the story was picked up by WPIX-11 and the Pan-African Newswire, which printed it in its entirety. It is the only story that contains statements by eyewitnesses.

A witness who asked to remain anonymous said, "I saw it. One was shot in the face. There was blood coming out of his face." [WPIX December 21, 2014].

Despite the statement by Charlie Hu, none of the crime scene photos or videos taken immediately after show any blood on the exterior of the door or on the sidewalk where the officers had lain in their final seconds alive.

The NY Post online was the only major news source to publish a video of the immediate aftermath of the shootings.

2:49 p.m. – Brinsley takes off running to the nearest subway stop, the Myrtle-Willoughby subway station, an avenue block away, to the westbound subway platform [WHOTV.com, 7:20 a.m., December 21, 2014]

According to the N.Y. Post, Con Ed workers see Brinsley fleeing and follow him in their truck as he ambles away from the carnage, still holding his silver Taurus semi-automatic. When they confront Brinsley on the street, attempting to stop him, he levels the gun at the them, asking them, 'You want some of this?' The two back off, and Brinsley ducks into the nearby G-train station. The Con Ed workers then call police to say he went into the station [Rachel Maddow, MSBC, December 22, Gothamist, December 21, 2014].

However, there is another version of what happened, that a worker in a deli store on the street sees Brinsley running and alerts police on the scene, who chase him into the subway. [NY Times, ABC]. Brinsley heads to the westbound platform of the Myrtle Avenue G station. Carmen Jimenez, 32, a social worker from Bed-Stuy, is on the subway platform when Brinsley runs in. "It looked like two cops came in. There was lots of yelling and they said, 'Everybody get down.' People were screaming. People were trying to run. I threw myself on the floor. I was afraid for my life and afraid for my baby." [New York Post, December 20, 2014, 4:07 p.m.].

The video was filmed from an apartment several stories over the scene, and gives an unobstructed view of the driver's side of the car. Both officers are visible on the ground, with policemen surrounding them, administering CPR and then loading them onto stretchers. In viewing the video several times without any enhancement, there does not appear to be any blood stains or trail of blood that one would expect from a person who was bleeding profusely from two gunshot wounds to the head. Looking at the passenger side of the car, you can see Officer Liu lying on the ground with three policemen hovering over him, administering CPR. After Liu is loaded onto a stretcher, there is no sign of blood on the ground. With the cops pursuing him, Brinsley then turns the gun on himself [Gothamist, December 21, 2014]. Brinsley and the two police officers are taken to Woodhull Hospital, and all are pronounced dead on arrival.

Unanswered questions:

The highly inconsistent narrative of the killing of Officer Ramos and Officer Liu raise serious questions as to NYPD's competence. There is no doubt that NYPD, with its vast technological and communications resources, had the ability to capture Brinsley and prevent this tragedy from occurring. There is also the more disturbing possibility, that NYPD allowed these killings to happen, in order to advance their political agenda, which was unabashedly to stop the protests, and change the focus of public and media attention.

NYPD had every possible advantage in this case. Brinsley, unlike killers such as the infamous Zodiac, gave police all of the information they needed: dozens of photos posted to the internet, a cell phone pinging that allowed police to track his movements, and a shooting victim who was still conscious and alive, and able along with her mother, to give police information on his background and criminal record.

A case riddled with contradictions and inconsistencies:

* BPD knew, at the time they arrived on the scene, that Brinsley had a gun and had fled the scene. Why didn't BPD, who were informed by Thompson that Brinsley had taken her cell phone, not have put up immediate roadblocks at all points of departure from Baltimore?

* A major unanswered question is did Brinsley drive his car to NYC or take the Bolt Bus? The evidence seems to strongly point to him driving to New York. That would make his arrival time in Manhattan at least an hour earlier than the Bolt Bus, putting him in NYC by 10:00 a.m.

* If Brinsley did indeed take the 6:35 a.m. Bolt Bus, why didn't BPD or NYPD, which sent an entire team of detectives down to Baltimore, interview the dispatcher or the driver, which would have known its destination? Wouldn't they have been concerned for the safety of the public that an armed fugitive was aboard the bus?

*How was it possible for Brinsley to travel by public transportation from Thompson's apartment to the Baltimore Bolt bus stop in under 45 minutes, when the trip takes close to 2 hours?

* Why didn't the BPD, who were tracking Brinsley for 4 ½ hours, alerted all tollbooth operators on the Maryland and Delaware bridges, as well as the New Jersey Turnpike, and set up roadblocks on I-95 North

* Once the bus entered the Lincoln Tunnel, why didn't BPD alert NYPD to be waiting for him on the platform?

* According to CBS, BPD knew that Brinsley was posting threats to Thompson's Instagram account, because they were tracking her cell phone, by 10:30 a.m. According to the New York Post, Brinsley began posting threats to kill NYPD officers at 11:47 a.m. BPD and NYPD had 3 hours to act to stop Brinsley.

* While the New York Post and NY1 reported that BPD were aware of Brinsley's photos and threats on Instagram at 11:47 a.m., Rachel Maddow and ABC News put the time of NYPD's awareness at 1:30 pm.

* Even if this is true, NYPD would have had all the relevant information it needed by 1:30 p.m., in order to issue an APB that Brinsley was coming to Brooklyn armed with a semiautomatic weapon, and planning to kill police officers. That was approximately 1 hour 18 minutes before the shootings, sufficient time for NYPD to email a notice to all of the precincts, as well as to radio officers stationed on the street.

* ABC Eyewitness News reported that a BPD detective discussed Brinsley with an NYPD officer in Brooklyn for 30 minutes, providing all known details about the situation, and the NYPD officer viewed all of the Instagram posts. Yet, rather than take immediate action between 2:10 p.m. and 2:40 p.m., NYPD allegedly requests that BPD fax them a Wanted poster.

* Why would BPD and NYPD have required 30 minutes, starting at 2:10 p.m., to have a conversation about Brinsley? I can't imagine how the basic facts and Instagram links could have been sent in a matter of minutes, with NYPD taking immediate action. NYPD claimed in December 2014 that it was conducting a full investigation into the matter, and sent a team of detectives down to Baltimore. So far, there has been no word, and the story has gone cold.

CAROL LIPTON was born and raised in the Pelham Parkway housing projects, where she learned how to sleep pressed up against the wall in the summer. She was admitted to Music and Art High School on Art and Bronx H.S. of Science, and went to Science, a decision she had no control over. Largely self-taught in art, she began exhibiting and selling her watercolor paintings at age 14. Her favorite sports were punch ball, dodge ball, stickball, kickball, cycling, and Ringaleevio. She invented the first aerodynamic skully cap. Carol began playing piano at age 4 ½, and studied piano and music theory for 11 years. She was a professional musician and composer, playing the restaurant, bar and college circuit in D.C. She went to NYU on an IBEW and Regents scholarship, where she graduated with Honors in philosophy and Political Science. She was co-editor of the poetry journal, and was a student strike coordinator in the aftermath of Kent State. After graduation, she led a cross-country 450-mile cycling trip through Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. She graduated from the Catholic University School of Law. She was a grants administrator for the Expansion Arts program at NEA, responsible for making decisions to community arts programs. As a legal services fellow in Kentucky, Carol became an anti-nuclear activist, and co-produced a special for NBC on the Maxey Flats nuclear waste site. She has co-produced specials for ABC's 20/20 on the militia/tax protest movement, and for NBC, on a Guatemalan political asylum claimant she represented through Human Rights First, where she trained under the late Arthur Helton. She consulted to the Haitian Refugee Center, where she handled an immigration appeal. She has worked in public interest law, for Legal Services, and in private practice, specializing in consumer fraud, employment discrimination, bankruptcy, housing, and appellate litigation. She has been a member of the Appellate Division's Assigned Counsel panel for 23 years, and is a member of the National Lawyers Guild.


Unanswered Questions in the NYPD Shootings » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

 

[Tshering22]

Re: Totalitarian Rule in America - The Other Side of American (Wet) Dr

Recent events like Ferguson suggest that the US is not a real democracy, but a "rich and powerful" Police State, a lot like Singapore or South Korea. Democracy is "Rule of People" and not "Rule of Law".

Singapore and South Korea?

FYI these two countries have 50 times more freedom in social matters than India has. Have been there many times and seen them closely.

In our country, freedom means to shout slogans in a group on streets, shit and piss on the roads and spit on the walls. Point a finger at any political MLA and see what happens individually to any one of you; as an ordinary citizen that is (without political connections).

I think when government gives facilities like Singapore and Korea does, there is hardly any reason to complain for people in any way. You can study what you want, you go become what you want, no one will look at you at night when you walk down the streets with your wife/fiance etc, if you forget your wallet in Singapore, the shop will contact you (if you have your card with your details in it) and give it to you. Can you imagine this in our country? Or the salary packages in our country? Or the freedom to even drink on the streets?


USA of today is more comparable to a rich version of USSR.


Their police is now bullied by their government to buy all military surpluses and therefore they have to spend it in a specific time with no rules.


Sometimes looking at US I feel happy how ill-equipped our colonial police forces are. Imagine the rude and cruel police officers of many of our states where they'd use any means and any weapons to subdue people.

 

[sorcerer]

An Open Letter to the Pope on Institutional Racism at the World Bank and G-20


Your Holiness,

Speaking of the ills of economic and social exclusions you stated that “Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are no longer society’s underside or its fringes – they are no longer even a part of it. The excluded are not the ‘exploited’ but the outcast.”

I cannot think of a more compelling prophetic voice than yours to speak against institutionalized racial discrimination in global organizations such as the World Bank and against the virtual exclusion of over a billion Africans from global economic forums such as the Group of Twenty (G-20).

The G-20 bills itself as “the premier forum for global economic and financial cooperation” and proclaims that its overarching objective is to “lift growth across the developed and developing world to benefit people in all countries.” Each item in the G-20 agenda has a far- reaching impact on all regions, most importantly on the poor in Africa.

The systemic inequality in representation of different regions in the G-20 is shocking. The rich in Europe and North America account for 14 percent of the world population and occupy 9 of the 20 seats at the coveted G-20 table. Asia has six seats including Australia. Latin America has three and the Middle East has one. Africa, which represents 16 percent of the world population occupies one seat – South Africa. The average per capita income for Sub Saharan Africa is $3,300, a very different economic reality than what South Africa represents with $12,500 per capita income.

The poor in Africa are segregated out of the G-20, whose purported vision statement is to “build an inclusive and sustainable global economy for all.” The virtual exclusion of Africa from the G-20 has far-reaching consequences in the day-to-day economic management of African countries because the G-20 controls 75 percent of the voting power in the World Bank. The 47 Sub Saharan African countries that account for 25 percent of the Bank’s member countries are allotted 5.4 percent voting power.

No voice in the World Bank boardroom means no role in its administration. The World Bank website shows 1732 Bank-financed projects, of which Africa accounts for the largest regional percentages both in terms of the number of countries and projects. Yet, people of African origin are excluded from positions of influence in the institution.

Out of the 126 “lead economists” that are scattered throughout the Bank as top technical experts of general economic issues, only two are black (1.6 percent). Similarly, according to the Bank’s 2015 diversity index, blacks account for 1.4 percent of the professional cohort in the Development Economics vise presidential unit. This is where the Bank’s strategic decisions are formulated. As Justice for Blacks noted, “Africa is orphaned and put under guardianship in the World Bank.”

Six World Bank reports attribute the exclusion of Africans from influential technical and managerial positions to “systemic racial discrimination.” As Dr. E. Faye Williams, Chair of the National Congress for Black Women, noted, “A simple Google search will confirm the racial injustice, producing several pages of articles with shocking titles that seem to describe another era or a faraway place.”

The problem resides in the sovereign immunity that the Bank enjoys. The institution exists outside of the jurisdiction of national courts. Victims of discrimination are confined to an internal Administrative Tribunal – an entity that neither recognizes nor honors the due process rights of blacks.

In a recent case that triggered a worldwide uproar, the World Bank required a widely praised African to manage a high-profile international program from behind the scenes, while fronting a white consultant to the outside world as the program’s manager. The African was told “Europeans are not used to seeing a black man in a position of power.”

Since the Bank’s personnel policy did not allow consultants to perform managerial duties, the white consultant was used as a front to keep the African out of the limelight. Noting the dehumanizing practice, the Bank’s Peer Review Panel reported to senior management that the Bank’s actions “cannot be explained by business reasons” and strongly recommended that “the Bank immediately enter into binding mediation.” The Bank ignored the recommendations. The Bank’s former Senior Advisor for Racial Equality, the Chief Ethics Officer and the Ombudsman pleaded with several senior World Bank officials to address the dehumanizing treatment, but to no avail.

The degrading treatment was intolerable, causing the African psychological stress and physical illness. As part of his complaint the African filed five medical certificates, including a report by a certified psychiatrist and hospital records. Sadly, he learned that the Tribunal does not consider medical certificates filed by a black complainant of racial discrimination. In contrast, the Tribunal routinely considers medical certificates filed by white claimants. The issue is not the validity or lack thereof of the medical reports under consideration. Rather, the issue is an inexplicable judicial practice of treating black and non-black complainants differently.

Having systematically suppressed over 100 material facts supporting the claimant’s allegations of racial discrimination and retaliation, the Tribunal ruled that the Bank’s actions were justified by business reasons. Adding insult to injury, the Bank terminated the African. In a separate ruling the Tribunal found his termination “unlawful and an abuse of discretion,” but ruled that he should not be reinstated because “he has criticized his managers” and “has made no secret of his contempt” for the status quo.

The only black judge on the Tribunal’s panel sent the aggrieved staff a written apology, acknowledging that he did not agree with the Tribunal’s judgment on his racial discrimination case, but still voted with the other two judges because he “did not find it fit then to dissent.” He wrote: “I was not yet ready for such a momentous step” of voting his conscience against the status quo.

Clearly, the judge failed to perform with fidelity his judicial duties that he was bound by oath. This is a violation of due process. Nonetheless, the Bank’s official position, as articulated by the its Chief Counsel, is that “Allegations of due process violations by the Tribunal are not cognizable under the statue of the Tribunal.” Moreover, the Chief Counsel requested the Tribunal to sanction the African for criticizing the Tribunal’s unjust judgment.

It is this culture of institutionalized injustice that triggered the formation of the DC Civil Rights Coalition. The case also resulted in an unprecedented intervention of the US Treasury Department, the US Board of Director to the World Bank, the Chair of the US Senate Appropriations Committee, the US Congressional Black Caucus, African Diaspora organizations, and leaders of over 500 faith- based organizations. None met with success.

How rampant is the problem? The Bank’s former Senior Advisor for Racial Equality is on the record that his office alone received and reviewed over 450 cases of racial discrimination in just five years. Another World Bank report puts the figure much higher. A simple extrapolation of the 450 figure over 20 years yields 1800 cases of discrimination (some file as many as 7 cases). Yet, not a single claimant has prevailed.

Since 1997, The Bank’s African Board of Governors have been pressing senor management to change this dehumanizing culture. Unfortunately, their meager collective 5.4 percent voting power is not enough to enforce change. The leaders of the G-20 countries who are in control of the lion’s

share of the voting power are indifferent, if not complicit. When those who wield power lack the moral imperative to act, religious leaders carry the burden of espousing the causes of those who are powerless to fend for themselves.

Your Holiness,

Institutional racism represents a violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. More importantly, it is a sin against the Will of God. I write on behalf of those whose human dignity has been breached and whose cries for justice have been ignored to urge you to appeal to the Bank’s powerful Board of Governors to establish a high-level external commission to investigate the Tribunal for human rights violations.

I humbly ask of Your Holiness, also, to speak against the exclusion of over one billion Africans from the G-20. Representation on a global body such as the G-20 should not be determined solely based on economic power. Adding Nigeria, the largest economy and most populous country in Africa, along with another African country will provide the G-20 moral legitimacy and conscience as a forum for global economic governance.

I await for your blessed actions in high hopes and unshakable faith.

Jesse Jackson is the founder Rainbow/Operation PUSH.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/05...titutional-racism-at-the-world-bank-and-g-20/

 

[sorcerer]

America’s Transition from a Democracy to a National Security State, in Five Easy Steps

There seems to be a formula for a superpower’s intent to dominate the world: massive surveillance + use of military might in foreign wars and domestic control of citizens (e.g. armored cops; packed prisons, etc.) + control of each method by elites for their own interests = international and domestic dominance by fear and force. Domestically this is called the National Security State. It is a state which is now in place in the U.S. government.

The National Security State is a state that has the following characteristics (from Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, Brave New World Order; Gary Wills, Bomb Power; and Andrew Bacevich, Washington Rules):

1) It is fixated on alleged foreign enemies and the “threat” they pose to the homeland;

2) It uses the “threat” for the justification of any military solutions to “pacifying” those enemies.

3) It maintains political and economic power not primarily in the people, but in the military (and defense contractors).

4) It uses propaganda methods to narrow the parameters of political debate and to put fear in the populace regarding perceived state enemies (e.g. the Truman Doctrine speech of 1947: “Totalitarian regimes” anywhere in the world “undermine…the security of the United States”).

5) It uses many appeals to “national security” as a rationale for its drive toward more expansive hegemony.

Here is how the formula works.

1) Make hegemony the goal of the state, whether domestic or foreign (Chomsky calls it “the imperial grand strategy”—see Hegemony or Survival, Ch. 2). It is the “We must rule” syndrome(see Andrew Bacevich, Washington Rules). Dominance is generally defined as forcing others to live by ruler-chosen patterns, and that is what hegemony is about: Washington determining the rule of other nations. This, in my view, is part of the new understanding of the doctrine of “American Exceptionalism” that started after WWII and is culminating in the Bush and Obama years. It implies that the U.S. is not just qualitatively different from other nations, but “better” or “above” others, and thus “naturally” suited to dominate others.

2) Observe (i.e. by clandestine and electronic surveillance) and eliminate any potential competition for hegemony. The practice arguably began in 1945 with the organization of the Strategic Services Unit, a secret intelligence and counter-espionage unit of the U.S. government, which was gradually absorbed by the CIA, starting in 1947, culminating in the creation of National Security Agency organization. By 1952, a full National Security State was already in place, ready for any alleged threat to the U.S.

The rhetoric of the National Security State slants the rationale for this action as “a threat to our national interests,” when really it is only a threat to the interests of the agents doing the bidding of the state complex. Examples of it abound in U.S. history. In just recent history, we can see it in President Reagan’s “War on Terror” in Central America in the 1980’s, to the U.S. war on Iraq, Libya, and Syria, to the government and media’s rhetoric concerning those who question U.S. foreign policy as “anti-American” or even “terrorist.” Add to that the fact that the U.S. has approximately 755 U.S. military bases around the world, that they attempt to topple national leaders, from Iran to Cuba to Venezuela. When they are not toppling, they are spying on world leaders, such as Angela Merkel of Germany and Dilma Vanna Rousseff of Brazil. We see it all in Obama’s alarming widening of Bush’s “war on terror,” by rebranding the “war on terror” as “challenges to America’s interest,” while maintaining Bush-era policies of the war on terror.



3) Use domestic terror—i.e. appeal to the idea of “Supreme Emergency” by an “ongoing threat”—e.g. Communism; al Qaeda; terrorism; Isil; Isis

Defined by political scientist Michael Walzer (in Just and Unjust Wars) as a threat that causes a fear beyond the ordinary fears of war. This threat and the fear it generates may “require” certain measures that the war convention bars. The “war convention” is the set of norms, customs, professional codes, legal precepts, religious and philosophical principles, and reciprocal arrangements that shape our judgments of military conduct—set forth most explicitly in international law.

The problem here is that most of what governments classify as “Supreme Emergency” is not only a permanent or ongoing state, but is at root only an expression of institutional self-interest or expediency, the direct result of the impetus toward hegemony. Further, under this category, “Supreme Emergency” becomes the rule rather than the exception, and then the institutional mindset of the government becomes a “State of Exception” (see Georgio Agamben, States of Exception) rather than a “State of Emergency.” For example, we now know that during WWII, when Winston Churchill used the term of “Supreme Emergency” to describe Britain’s situation in 1939, it was a rhetorical phrase designed to weaken the resistance of the British people and government to maintaining the war convention’s proscription of extreme brutality.

This very practice of using Supreme Emergency to justify draconian government policies has continued today. Some examples under President Bush include Bush’s claim to have the power to detain, without charge, any person—including U.S. citizens—he declared to be “enemy combatants” or “suspected terrorists;” his claim to power of preventive war and indefinite detention; and the “Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003,” which empowers the state to rescind one’s citizenship for providing any type of “material support” to an organization that the state has deemed to be involved with terrorism.

The practice of Supreme Emergency has continued under President Obama. For a few examples: Obama’s claim to have the executive power to order the assassination of U.S. citizens; his continuing the concentration camps in Guantanamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan; his failure to halt all practice of torture; and his escalating drone attacks in Pakistan and Yemen, all of which are done under the banner of “responding to terrorist threats,” or more directly, “preventing attacks against America.”

And as ever, the U.S. mainstream media act as enablers of all of this. Glenn Greenwald and the reporters for The Intercept present regular and substantive examples of this, as does Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. For one of the latest excellent analyses, see Greenwald, “The Greatest Obstacle to Anti-Muslim Fearmongering and Bigotry: Reality” (6/24/15).

Thus we can see that the point of “Supreme Emergency” is to keep the citizens in fear, and thus in hatred of the “different other,” whether it be a “foreign threat” or a racial threat (e.g. fear of African-Americans, Muslims, etc.) to enable foreign and domestic dominance. Any “threat” will do. The method here is to build up the “threat” while in fact, the government and its agencies see citizens and their power as enemies—i.e. as threats to State dominance.

Because this practice has now been established, U.S. citizens have grown numb to it. As a result, the government no longer even appeals to specific threats. Rather, government officials now only appeal to a vague “threat” intended to serve the purpose of keeping fear alive. For example, the FBI continues to make statements to the effect that they have “prevented x number of terrorist attacks” through surveillance, while detailing none of them. The last such “terrorist threat” was the July 4 weekend (see Fair.org, “Got to be Thwarting Something,” 7/11/15).

4) Regular, unannounced, non-Congressionally-approved wars

Use the following two-step mechanism:

a) “The National Security State has automatic Just Cause for any military action.” The National Security State sees any state that does not cater to its dictates as an enemy, thus creating a casus belli. This is precisely the opposite of the ethical and legal concept of “Just Cause,” which means that an attack from another nation is either occurring or imminent.

For example, consider recent Mideast military actions, done directly or by proxy. From whence comes the oil of the future, and where is the greatest potential anti-U.S. unrest that threatens U.S. hegemony? Experts generally agree upon the following list: Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Angola, Libya, Nigeria, Sudan, the Caspian Sea area (consisting of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan), and Latin America (consisting of Venezuela, Mexico, Columbia, and Ecuador).

What are the U.S. global strategies for securing its dominance in these regions for the 21st century? Among other actions, the U.S. and NATO now have troops and military bases established in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, and now, critically, in Ukraine. The first four of these countries have agreed to supply oil and natural gas to NATO countries, thus undermining agreements and sought-after agreements involving these countries and Russia, China, and Iran. In conjunction with this, the U.S. is directly undermining the attempts of Russia, China, and Iran to continue their agreements with Central Asian countries for oil and natural gas. This is especially true with the TAPI (Turmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) gas pipeline to run from the Caspian Sea to India, which killed the Iranian-Pakistan-India deal to run a pipeline between them (IPI). In sum, TAPI is the finished product of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. NATO will be expected to use military power to protect the pipeline, and thus consolidates Western power in the region (see Rick Rozoff, “Wars Without Borders: Washington Intensifies Push into Central Asia,” Global Research, January 30, 2011).

Similar U.S. machinations were undertaken with West Africa and even Latin America. For example, the U.S. has established smaller-type military bases– what the Defense Department refers to as “lily pads”—in an arc running from the Andes in South America through North Africa and across the Middle East, to the Philippines and Indonesia. These locations are consummate with the fact that the bases are located in or near the oil-producing states of the world. In Latin America, the U.S. military uses bases in Paraguay to monitor, and to be in position to move against the Bolivian and Venezuelan governments, since both countries nationalized their oil companies.

Furthermore, according to The London Guardian, the April, 2002 military coup in Venezuela was clandestinely supported and organized by the U.S. in response to President Hugo Chavez’s nationalizing Venezuela’s oil company, PDVSA.

Don’t be fooled by the recent U.S. agreement with Iran. The U.S. still has military eyes targeting Iran. It is widely known that the Bush administration nearly went to war with Iran twice during Bush’s tenure. Also, Obama himself attempted to foment a coup within Iran through proxy, through “The Green Revolution” in 2009. The role of Iran is dual: geographic and geologic. Geographically, Iran sits between three important sea shipping lanes: the Caspian Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Sea of Oman, and is the geographical point of intersection for the Middle East, Asia, and the steppes of Russia. Geologically, next to Saudi Arabia (264.3 billion barrels), Iran has the largest oil reserves in the world (132.5 billion barrels). That the U.S. wants control of Iran is beyond doubt. Iran is completely surrounded by U.S. military bases, in the Persian Gulf, in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, in Turkey, in Iraq, in Cyprus, in Israel, in Oman, and in Diego Garcia. Iran itself has become an “Observer State” (along with India and Pakistan) to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Created by China in 2001, and with members including Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, these members and have pledged mutual economic and military aid.

b) “The National Security State is its own Proper Authority.”

The U.S. has a long history of doing what it wants, regardless of U.N. resolutions or International Law. But if one begins with the Bush administration and the American writers who supported the war in Iraq, they made it clear that they did not believe that the U.S. needed U.N. authorization to pursue “preventive war.” However, simultaneously and in contradictory fashion, they all likewise stated that in attacking Iraq they were enforcing UNSCR 687 and 1441.

Contradictory to the U.S. position stands international law. The Nuremberg Tribunal concluded: “preventive action in foreign territory is justified only in case of ‘an instant and overwhelming necessity for self-defense, leaving no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation’.” By this definition attacks on Iraq, Libya, and Syria were all unjustified.

Further, the idea that the U.S. can bypass international bodies and use only its own authority to send its military into another country presumes that unilateralism trumps international law by allowing one dominant nation to determine what is best for both itself and the world and then to act on it, whether or not it is in concert with the rest of the world. Because it excludes dialogue and more importantly the demands of universality of principle required by ethical thinking, the idea of any nation being its own proper authority to wage war has no place in a moral or legal analysis of war.

Finally, a violation of the U.N. Charter is concomitantly a violation of Article IV of the U.S. Constitution, which says that “all Treaties made…under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land…”

Therefore, the proper authority criterion is not met by U.S. and NATO incursions in other countries today. Further, it risks setting the world on fire with war, possibly even using nuclear weapons. (For more on this point, see Michel Chossudovsky, Toward a WWIII Scenario, and The Globalization of War)

Part Two will complete and analyze this shift.

Dr. Robert Abele holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Marquette University and M.A. degrees in Theology and Divinity. He is a professor of philosophy at Diablo Valley College, in California in the San Francisco Bay area. He is the author of four books, including A User’s Guide to the USA PATRIOT Act, and The Anatomy of a Deception: A Logical and Ethical Analysis of the Decision to Invade Iraq, along with numerous articles. His new book, Rationality and Justice, is forthcoming (2016).

http://www.globalresearch.ca/americ...nal-security-state-in-five-easy-steps/5465206

 

[punjab47]

With any collapsing society, banditry becomes the norm. In these western, colder countries cost of living is very high.

I.e 100s each month in heating or cooling costs plus others.

It is natural that armed forces turn to look after their own, melechas were never paragons of character during good times either. :biggrin2:

Faster they collapse, faster we

 

[sorcerer]

Muslim woman ejected from Donald Trump rally after silent protest

Rose Hamid, who wore a shirt that read ‘Salam, I come in peace’, was aggressively heckled as she was escorted from the campaign event in South Carolina


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Rose Hamid was ejected from a Donald Trump rally in Rock Hill, South Carolina.
Amanda Holpuch in New York


A Muslim woman was escorted from a Donald Trump rally on Friday night, after she stood silently behind the Republican frontrunner wearing a shirt that read: “Salam, I come in peace.”



Rose Hamid, who was also wearing a hijab, said people near her in a crowd of more than 6,000 people in Rock Hill, South Carolina, were kind to her until she began her protest.

“My purpose for going there,” Hamid said, “is I have a sincere belief that if people get to know each other one on one then they’ll stop being afraid of each other and we will be able to get rid of all of this hate in the world, literally.”

Hamid and immigration attorney Marty Rosenbluth stood when Trump said Syrian immigrants should not be allowed into the US. Both were wearing yellow star-shaped badges that bore the word “Muslim” and were intentionally reminiscent of the yellow badges Jewish people were forced to wear under Nazi rule.

They were then escorted out of the venue.

Hamid said that before her protest, people sitting nearby had spoken with her and shared popcorn. Once she stood, though, the crowd around began to chant “Trump, Trump”. Hamid said one person accused her of having a bomb. Reporters said they heard people making “ugly” comments all around the rally.

Trump, whose rally in Burlington, Vermont on Thursday was repeatedly disrupted by protesters, has called for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the US, a policy he introduced in South Carolina in December. He promoted the policy in his first campaign ad, saying such a ban should remain in place “until we can figure out what’s going on”.

Hamid, 56, said she had not been afraid to go into the crowd because she believed people would have stopped more serious threats. But she said the crowd’s reaction to her protest was indicative of the power of Trump’s rhetoric.

“It was really quite telling and a vivid example of what happens when you start using this hateful rhetoric and how it can incite a crowd,” she said.

“I don’t even think he believes in the rhetoric he is spewing.”

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 9, 2016
South Carolina rally last night was so unbelievably exciting (and fun). I am now off to Iowa for two big rallies - packed houses. Love it!


The GOP frontrunner hosted a rally in Burlington, Vermont, among Sanders faithful, while the president took part in a live townhall to discuss gun control
Read more
Rosenbluth later said he was removed from a Trump rally in South Carolina last month, when he and others donned the yellow Muslim badge as Trump promoted his plan to ban Muslims from entering the US.

Friday night’s rally was the third that Rosenbluth, who is Jewish, has attended while posing as a Trump supporter.

“We are all out and safe,” Rosenbluth wrote on Facebook on Friday. “Once again we got them to disrupt their own rally. We were standing there quietly and they started shouting. It went on for about 15 minutes. They should have let us stand.”

On Saturday John Kasich, the governor of Ohio who is also running for the Republican presidential nomination, said the crowd’s booing of Hamid and her fellow protester was “terrible”.

“We’re not a country that feels good about yelling or insulting people,” he said on CNN. “Maybe it was a Friday night, who knows.”

Kasich also said the video of Hamid and Rosenbluth being booed and taken out of the Trump event would be shown around the world, potentially damaging America’s standing with Muslim countries, allies in the fight against Islamic State.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair), meanwhile, called on Trump to apologize.

“The image of a Muslim woman being abused and ejected from a political rally sends a chilling message to American Muslims,” Cair’s executive director, Nihad Awad, said in a statement.

“Donald Trump should issue a public apology to the Muslim woman kicked out of his rally and make a clear statement that American Muslims are welcome as fellow citizens and as participants in the nation’s political process.”

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...man-ejected-donald-trump-rally-silent-protest

 

[Panjab47]

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...ina-you-can-have-sex-at-16-but-you-cant-sext/
Insanely two NC minors charged as adults for taking pictures of themselves while minors.. WTF.

Lol also case where detective who wanted to chemically induce erection in 17yr old to take pics as 'evidience, got charged as a pedo! LOL
--
North Carolina high school student faces five child pornography for sexting with his girlfriend.

Of the five charges he faces, four are for taking and possessing nude photos of himself —final charge is possessing one nude photo of his girlfriend.

The young woman was charged with two counts of sexual exploitation of a minor—but was listed on warrant as both perpetrator and victim.

On July 21, 2015, the young woman took a plea deal whereby the felony charges were dropped, but she pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge, which will be expunged after she completes a year of probation. Over the next 11 months, she is not allowed to possess a cell phone, among other restrictions.

The two teens have to face the charges as adults.

"What we are seeing now is that people don't understand—it's a big deal when the young lady and the young man apply for a job [and these photos are online]," Sgt. Sean Swain, a Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office (CCSO) spokesman, told Ars.

"This technology and this problem that we’re having with this case, we don't know where it’s going to go in five years when they apply for college," he said. "We don't know where these pictures are going to go. We’re more or less saving the kids from themselves because they’re not seeing what’s going to come down the road."

Swain also admitted that such cases are rare, although on Wednesday the CCSO announced that it had arrested another 17-year-old student who faces 23 charges of sexual exploitation of a minor in yet another unrelated case.


From Comments:
I will patiently await the first case where a toddler gets hold of his parents phone and takes a picture of himself and is charged with child pornography.

LOL LAND OF FREE HOME OF BRAVE