So. President Clinton got heckled by BLM, and it seems they hit a nerve. His response was not his usual cool character.
Keep in mind, the point of BLM is that the behavior of law enforcement is different for suspects based on race. Just to make things really clear, they homed in on the specific example of black suspects getting shot more, which is pretty much impossible to ignore, and that’s the point.
A close cousin of this particular pattern of unequal justice is the treatment of suspects in drug cases. Besides whatever criticism there may be of law enforcement and the actual operation of the courts, this unequal treatment was effectively codified by laws which made punishment for crack worse than for coke.
Connecting back to Clinton, we look at the logic that used to make the law this way. This logic is what Clinton lectured the protesters on. Namely, you take people caught for drug-related crime, put them away for a long time, and by doing so, break the power of gangs who make money from selling drugs, and reduce gang violence. Sounds like a reasonable sales pitch at first glance — prevent violence by eliminating drugs.
Somewhere distantly related to this sales pitch are the lessons learned from the prohibition, that making drugs illegal creates crime. We’re going to forget that completely, there’s no need to go to anything that theoretical.
Completely non-theoretical: in the name of reducing violent crime, you are putting very large numbers of non-violent offenders in jail. For long enough to pretty much destroy their lives. It happens they’re disproportionately likely to be black, by a lot. And the law is structured in a way that if a white person is caught with an equivalent amount of coke, the consequences to them are much less.
So with all that in mind, when Clinton was confronted by a BLM protester, instead of “I feel your pain”, which was really all he needed to say, he delivered a somewhat condescending lecture about how the protesters are “defending those who get hopped up on crack and kill 13 year old girls”. That was a cheap misrepresentation of their criticism, a little bit of an ugly stereotype, and a complete evasion of the real issue. Pretty dumb. To top it all off, and I didn’t know this until today, Bill went up in front of the NAACP and said all the “right things” on this issue, a couple months ago, so obviously he was perfectly well informed.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/darrensands/after-clash-with-black-lives-matter-ny-activists-question-bi
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2010/08/03/data-show-racial-disparity-in-crack-sentencing
I don’t want to go too negative or depart from the issues, but hey, I lived in NYC for a while so this is just funny for someone who was my Senator for 8 years (in addition to being a resident of the state for almost a full year prior to being elected and another 8 since).
Turns out that the US foreign policy establishment completely misread the Sunni vs Shia thing. With this most flimsy excuse, author launches into his own exposition of us-vs-them behavior patterns, and comes up with some novel angles, I think.
WARNING: long!
link: http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/
[via facebook]
bonus from the same site — a bit more oddball, best read when tired, comes across as more profound that way. Wonder if this has anything to do with US pop culture finally coming around to inequality?
On the subject of third parties…
The debate between Jason Schulman of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and Barry Finger of New Politics about how to build a party to the left of the Democratic ‘Party’ in the 21st century has largely ignored actually existing third-party efforts and focused instead on whether it is possible to use the Democratic Party for progressive ends in light of the astounding success of the 2016 presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders. Schulman along with DSA argue that yes, it is possible — in certain situations under certain conditions — while Finger says no, it is not possible in any situation or under any conditions. For Schulman and DSA, working within the Democratic Party could help lead to the formation of a left-of-Democratic Party wheras Finger contends that all roads within the Democratic Party framework lead inevitably to dead ends.
The best way to settle this debate is to look…
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Sanders wins Wisconsin by about +13% vs Clinton. (as of now, with 87% precincts reporting).
Just for future reference, the past week’s polls had him in a range of between +1 and +8%.
In RCP’s latest compilation of flawed but still useful polls, Sanders leads Clinton by 2% nationally, continues to outperform Clinton in pairings vs ALL republican opponents, and is closing in on her in NY and PA, as is his pattern.
As usual, most of the media portray Sanders’ chances as minimal. In fact the Democratic race is actually closer than the Republican one, with Clinton’s shrinking lead is about +11%, or +252 delegates out of 2300 pledged delegates awarded so far, with about 2000 more to go. This is in contrast to the Republican race, where Trump’s shrinking lead is +226 delegates out of 1206 delegates that Trump and Cruz have so far, bigger percentage-wise.
However, some Republican primaries are winner-take-all, so a few narrow wins in key states can change things a lot, and if Cruz replicate his success in the midwest in the big coastal states, he is likely to tie Trump, or at least deny Trump a clean majority, leading to a showdown at the Republican convention.
While the Democrats can be proud of actually assigning pledged delegates proportionately, the Democratic primaries feature the not-even-slightly-democratic “Superdelegate system”. Basically, superdelegates are individuals selected by the party who have the same say as tens of thousands of regular voters. Major media has automatically assumed the vast majority of them will go to Clinton from the very first day of the race. If Clinton’s record of supporting belligerent foreign policy weren’t enough, or her association with deregulation and policies to favor transfer of wealth to big business, the Democratic party’s leaning on the scales for her via the superdelegates is also a compelling reason not to vote for her, IMO. [update – see this for more perspective on the superdelegate system ]
More polling, interesting analysis and graphs, including a great one showing how different candidates’ supporters break down on the issues. (Most divisive: health care, immigration, abortion. Least divisive: social security, US global involvement, free trade). As Phil points out, “differences among voters are not necessarily reflected in policies of candidates.”.
Quick review of methodology: Looks like it was done with care.
Date: Mar 17-27.
Cel/landline: 75/25.
Sample weighting: corrected for age, race, gender, education, and cel/landline usage
Population being estimated: general population per census** – vs the population per historical voter turnout rates, which some polls do. This detail is something that I recently tuned in to, as it makes a 10-20 point difference on some questions.
I think the current crisis of American politics is the inability to fit three radically different political movements—for change in our capitalist system (Bernie Sanders), for change in our democratic system (Donald Trump, Ted Cruz) and defenders of the status quo (Hillary Clinton, John Kasich).
Evidently voters see things differently. Recent Pew Research polls, summarized in the chart above, show that the opinions of American voters on most issues are divided very clearly along party lines.
I was surprised that fewer Sanders supporters said they are angry at the government than are supporters of any of the Republican candidates.
I was not surprised that Trump supporters are more united in opposition to free trade than supporters of any other faction, but I was surprised that Sanders supporters favor free trade in almost the same numbers as Clinton supporters.
The only big difference among the candidates that overlaps party lines is…
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Ran across this ad campaign by a civil society group called represent.us.
With a staff full of bright-eyed advertising people, and a slick website, they’re selling something. The banner says “anti-corruption” – a code word, in other countries, for a restorative regime change, formally using judicial means but with popular support and private sponsorship, to rein in populist movements when they get out of control. Hopefully that’s not what this will be.
Our electoral system is indeed corrupt. The 6-member FEC has been paralyzed by deadlock along political lines since 2008, the Citizens United supreme court case interpreted the first amendment as protecting unlimited election spending by corporations. The US electoral system is backwards compared to most other developed democracies, lacking basic things like proportional representation. Political participation in the US is poor, some easily fixable reasons for this become obvious if you compare voting in the US to other countries, but the government has no interest in increasing voter turnout. So what we’re talking about are real problems.
Below is their video. It looks cool, so far, aside from simplifying the presentation to a kindergarden level, which makes me suspicious that the campaign is intentionally designed to selectively attract the most trusting individuals. There is also this criticism. Personally, what I am looking out for is to check that it is not an organization built to steer the movement for political reform in a corporate-sponsored direction.
If they’re legit they will press hard for a clean, uncomplicated end to Citizens United. My wishlist would include targeting the Democrat/Republican duopoly as a central source of “the problem”, and consistently mention reform of the electoral system, as the US’s electoral system lacks proportional representation, which is kindof basic, IMO. Another critical electoral system feature to break the D/R duopoly is Instant Runoff Voting.
[traceability: this video came to me via WordVirus]
