Time for the Leaders to Lead

The tragic shooting deaths of two New York City police officers in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn over the weekend is a grim reminder of how America has lost its way, allowing hatred, partisanship, and revenge to overwhelm tolerance, cooperation, and reason.

Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were sitting in their car near Myrtle and Tompkins Avenues when Ismaaiyl Brinsley fired several shots without warning. Police and city officials called the attack an assassination.

Patrick Lynch, the head of the Police Benevolent Association, said it was a sign of how Mayor Bill de Blasio had made police a target. Others shot disdainful looks at President Barack Obama, U.S. Attorney Eric Holder, the Rev. Al Sharpton, and the tens of thousands of protesters who have expressed outrage after several incidents in which white police officers have killed unarmed black men and children without facing charges.

Regrettably, very few people in positions of authority noted or took stock of the violence that permeates our society at a time when crime is steadily declining. That Brinsley was armed with a misguided grudge, a silver Taurus 9-millimeter handgun, and a history of mental issues was ignored during the effort to score rhetorical points.

Take Lynch for example. The head of the NYPD's largest police union was quick to say that the officers' blood "starts on the steps of City Hall" in general and "in the office of the mayor" in particular. He also lead a protest in which police officers turned their backs on the mayor at the hospital where the officers were pronounced dead.

Others have warned that the shootings of the two officers, both of whom are being mourned by their family, friends, fellow officers, and the citizenry, were acts of war.

According to a message attributed to police, but which the PBA denies issuing, the NYPD has become "a 'wartime' police department."

"We will act accordingly," the missive declared.

Meanwhile, a who's who of reactionary Republican politicians from former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to former New York Gov. George Pataki to U.S. Sen. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, assailed de Blasio for expressing support for the rights of protesters, saying he had created a dangerous climate for police officers by indulging lawlessness.

Ignored, of course, is a very basic truth: when police and civilians do not trust each other, do not work together, do not seek common ground then we are all in danger. And when those who are supposed to lead retreat to their partisan rhetorical corners nothing will ever be accomplished.

Let us understand some very simply things. America has married the worship of guns to a delegitimizing of authority -- an authority often steeped in abuse and overreach. Because Brinsley allegedly cited the deaths of Eric Garner in Staten Island and Michael Brown in Ferguson as reasons for his rampage, few people are looking at the things that are at the heart of such violence. 

The deaths of Officers Liu and Ramos are not the manifestation of protests against excessive police abuse. Nor are their deaths the desired result that most people sought in voicing their displeasures with police actions. Their deaths can be tied to a mental health system that is almost non-existent, our gun culture, the inability to see each other's humanity, the rationalization of excessive violence in the name of safety, and on and on and on.

When James Eagan Holmes opened fire in a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., on July 20, 2012, conservatives, Republicans, and the National Rifle Association went to great lengths to blame the violence on a single twisted mind, arguing that those deaths had nothing to do with lax gun policies and over the top rhetoric that adulated guns. The same occurred when Adam Lanza killed 26 innocent children in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, 2012.

We heard it again when many defended the torture of prisoners by the Central Intelligence Agency, and others decided that Garner died not because of pressure applied to his throat and chest, but because he was obese and had asthma.

The humanity of those who died was denied.

For example, in making his claims that the citizenry hates the police, Lynch failed to recognize that it was the mother of Brinsley's shooting victim in Baltimore who sought to help police find him, and it was two civilians who followed an armed and dangerous Brinsley to the subway station so as to point him out to police.

Members of a society that hates police do not take such action. Yes, there are those who in their ignorance will rejoice in the officers' deaths. Such people are not reflective of society. Many people in this country have either friends or relatives who are police officers, and those people worry each night if those loved ones will return home.

It is the same with civilians who wonder if their parents, siblings, relatives, and friends will make it home at night, who fear that a life can be easily snuffed by a person puffed on his or her own sense of authority.

It is why everyone who seeks to end or to at least curb the violence must speak up. 

So far, it has been the protesters and the families of those who have suffered the most at the hands of the violence that have been the most reasonable.

"I hope and pray that we can reflect on this tragic loss of life that has occurred so that we can move forward and find an amicable path to a peaceful coexistence," Lucy Ramos, an aunt of Officer Rafael Ramos, said late Sunday afternoon.

"An act of violence is against humanity," Carmen Perez, a co-founder of Justice League NYC, told The New York Times in an interview. "It's not mutually exclusive. We can mourn Eric Garner and the two officers. It's O.K. to do that."

Indeed it is.

"We need to use the pain that all of us are experiencing and turn it into purpose," Eric Adams, a former NYPD captain and current Brooklyn borough president, said, adding that "calling for police reform is not a call for harm of police officers."

Adams' words reflect the reasonable response that many seek and the city so desperately needs. To question police department tactics and policies is not to attack police.

The problem is that for too many anything short of total capitulation and admiration of the police is an attack on the nation's men and women in blue.

But somewhere along the line, the good police and the good citizens have to come to grips with a fundamental truth: As long as the bad guys operate with impunity, regardless of whether they are police officers or rogue citizens, all of us are in danger.

And no amount of partisan rhetoric will change that.  

The Insanity of America's Cuba Policy

Insanity, people say, is doing something the same way over and over, and expecting different results. That also has been the definition of United States policy toward Cuba, and those who have sought to maintain that misdirected policy.

For a little more than half a century America has waged an economic war against the island nation and its people in an effort to topple the Castro regime. It hasn't worked. Fidel Castro, who stepped down as President in 2008, outlasted 10 U.S. presidents before turning power over to his younger brother, Raul. Still, too many political hacks have wanted to stick with the same outdated and unproductive policies toward Cuba. They were unable or unwilling to recognize that something different was needed.

President Barack Obama finally made the correct decision for them: On Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2014, he announced the United States would seek to normalize diplomatic relations with Cuba. Under the agreement, the United States will open an embassy in Havana, and Obama will call for the lifting of the Cuban embargo. In addition, Cuba released Alan Gross, who had been imprisoned there for 5 years, and another man who had been imprisoned for nearly 20 years. The United States released three Cubans convicted of espionage. (Early reports of the agreement also suggested that Cuba would release more than 50 political prisoners.)

"We will end an outdated approach that for decades has failed to advance our interests and instead we will begin to normalize relations between our two countries," Obama said. "These 50 years have shown that isolation has not worked. It's time for a new approach."

Obama's noon announcement from the White House was met with the usual hand wringing, hyperbole, and kvetching.

Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida blasted Obama's actions as "another concession to tyranny," and vowed that he and other Republicans would do all in their power to thwart Obama's efforts, particularly any efforts to roll back the economic embargo.

"This whole new policy is based on an illusion, on a lie, the lie and the illusion that more commerce and access to money and goods will translate to political freedom for the Cuban people. All this is going to do is give the Castro regime, which controls every aspect of Cuban life, the opportunity to manipulate these changes to stay in power," the Cuban-American senator said -- as if the Castro government was set to fall any minute now.

Democrat Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey was just as opposed. "Let's be clear," said Menendez, who is Cuban-American, "this was not a 'humanitarian' act by the Castro regime. It was a swap of convicted spies for an innocent American. President Obama's actions have vindicated the brutal behavior of the Castro government."

Republican presidential wannabe Jeb Bush said Obama was rewarding the Castro brothers' "heinous" behavior, a remarkable comment considering it was Jeb's brother who defiled America's reputation abroad through mendacity, torture, and an unjustified, decades-long war in Iraq.

Of course the irony and hypocrisy of the criticisms are lost on Republicans, many of whom have spent the last week or so defending the torture methods used during George W. Bush's administration. According to Republicans, Obama's overtures to Cuba are misguided because the Castro brothers preside over a corrupt and totalitarian government that does not respect democratic principles.

That should sound very familiar to the party that added a possible bailout of the nation's six largest banks in a must pass budget bill; shut down the federal government to get its way; oversaw a sweeping expansion of government spying on its own citizens; passed laws that made it harder for people to vote; seeks to deny women control over their own bodies; pushes a conservative Christian theocracy in a nation founded on the principles of the separation of church and state; is shamelessly in the pockets of corporate America, particularly the Koch brothers; seeks to deny health care to poor Americans; and justifies police killings of unarmed black men by saying its black people's fault police are killing them. 

Nonetheless, many Cuban-Americans in Union City, N.J., and Miami showed muted enthusiasm. While many of the older generation lamented that nothing will change for Cubans until the Castro brothers were gone, many in the younger generation were delighted that the United States and their homeland would move toward normalization.

As they should be.

The issues that have kept this country from correcting a five-decade old wrong are dying with many of those who fled Cuba after Fidel's fighters moved from the mountains into the Presidential Palace.

Surveys by Gallup since 1999 show a shift in how Americans view Cuba, with a majority -- ranging from 55 percent to 71 percent at any given time -- favoring normalizing diplomatic relations. Among Cuban-Americans, support for normalization ran as high as 79 percent in Florida and 73 percent nationwide. A similar poll by Florida International University found that 68 percent of Cuban Americans favor normalized diplomatic relations, while 69 percent want travel restrictions relaxed, and 52 percent want the embargo lifted, according to an article published on The Atlantic's web site.  In addition, the old Cold War complaint that Cuba is a communist country no longer carries the same weight considering U.S. relations with Russia, China, and Vietnam.

That so many Americans would want an end to an economic war on a country whose most serious crime appears to have been an association with this country's worst Cold War enemy has not moved Republicans.

"I would argue that, instead of lifting the embargo, we should consider strengthening it," Jeb Bush said in a speech earlier this month. According to The Miami Herald, "the crowd of donors, the backbone of Cuba's exiled elite, applauded loudly."

But not loud enough to drown out the calls for America to end one of its longest and possibly most unjust wars in history. 

The True "Racial Hucksters"

So much for that post-racial America.

 

Anyone hoping for some form of justice, or at least an attempt at justice, after the slaying of 18-year-old Michael Brown was quickly brought back to reality when a Ferguson, Mo., grand jury declined to indict Officer Darren Wilson this week.

 

That the grand jury did not indict was not unexpected. Whenever a police officer kills a civilian, whether that civilian is armed or not, the chances of an indictment are slim to none because all the officer has to say is that he or she felt that his or her life was in danger. Once such a statement is made the officer is given the benefit of the doubt with little done to ascertain if the supposed threat was real and the actions taken justified.

Such was evident from the beginning of the Ferguson case. The St. Louis County Prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, had all but signaled that there would be no indictment. The same was true of many Missouri officials. Legal precedent had already told Americans which way the wind was blowing.

The only way a white cop will be indicted on state charges for shooting an unarmed black male is the circumstances of the case must be so revolting, so egregious that even white America is appalled. Indeed, some white Americans were, especially when they saw the heavily armed police response to protests in the aftermath of Brown’s death.

But a majority of white Americans, or at least those who were given the largest megaphones, saw little wrong with the police tactics either in the slaying or during the post-slaying protests that ensued. To them, a white cop waving an automatic weapon at protestors and calling them animals that he would kill was a reasonable response. That police withheld the identity of the officer for days; that the officer disappeared from public; that anonymous police sources were quoted as saying Wilson was beaten “almost unconscious;” or that he suffered a broken orbital bone did not stir questions about police practices.

No.

The problem as they saw it was the black male.  

And there is the rub.

A white police officer kills an unarmed black teenager and Rudolph Giuliani, the man who was once dubbed “America’s Mayor,” proclaims on “Meet the Press” that the problem is not with police or police-community relations: It is with black people.

“White police officers wouldn’t be there,” Giuliani told the nation and Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson, “if you weren’t killing each other.”

He also said: “Ninety-three percent of blacks are killed by other blacks. I would like to see the attention paid to that that you are paying to this.”

“Black people who kill black people go to jail,” Dyson said. “White people who are policemen who kill black people do not go to jail.”

Sometimes the white killer does not have to be a police officer.

An unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was killed by a dime-store vigilante and wannabe hero, and it was Martin whose character was assassinated. Trayvon’s killer walked free after a trial.

 

Yet, the most compelling cases seem to always involve police, who seem to have been conditioned to consider every black man a threat. In describing why he killed Michael Brown, Officer Darren Wilson went to great lengths to describe Brown in hulking and animalistic terms. Brown was Hulk Hogan to Wilson, who said he felt like a 5-year-old in trying to defend himself. Brown made a “grunting, like aggravated sound,” his fist clenched, before charging.   

But black men do not have to exhibit animalistic characteristics to be a threat.

In August, John Crawford, a 22 year old black man, was killed by police while carrying a toy gun in a Wal-Mart in Beavercreek, Ohio.

Recently, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was killed when officers claimed he pulled a toy gun from his waistband in a Cleveland park. According to police, Tamir did not point the gun at police or make any verbal threats. He was shot twice, nonetheless.

In Brooklyn, Akai Gurley was fatally shot by a rookie police officer when Gurley entered the seventh floor landing at the Louis H. Pink Houses. The officer, Peter Liang, his weapon drawn, was on the eighth floor landing. Liang’s weapon, according to Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, discharged accidentally from 11 feet away. The weapon of Liang’s partner was still holstered.

An even more egregious case involved Jonathan Ferrell, a 24-year-old former FAMU athlete, killed in the Charlotte area in 2013. Ferrell had been in a serious traffic accident, and appeared to be seeking help when he was fatally shot for running toward three police officers. One of the officers was charged with voluntary manslaughter, meaning the officer is accused of using excessive force in self-defense.  

The Ferrell case is the rarity where an officer claimed self-defense, but still faces felony charges.

More often, there are no charges, just as there is no clear idea of how many people are killed by police officers every year in America.

According to a Nov. 24 article on The Washington Post web site, 27 police officers were killed in the line of duty in the United States in 2013. That is down from 49 in 2012. Meanwhile, there is no reliable data on how many civilians were killed by police.

The best we know is that America’s 17,000 law-enforcement agencies self-report about 400 “justifiable homicides” per year, according to FBI statistics. Of course, journalists and scholars who study police shootings estimate that as many as 1,000 people are shot and killed by police each year.

Instead of taking that information and using it to ask questions or demand answers, the pundit class – and particularly those who wish to blame black people – decry black activists, saying that those activists are the real issue. Such was the case when Adam Brodsky wrote recently in The New York Post that the real problem with blacks being killed by police are blacks themselves.

According to Brodsky, blacks have failed to take advantage of the opportunities afforded them, instead relying on such “racial hucksters” as the Rev. Al Sharpton. Blacks, Brodsky claimed, need to be more like Jews who do not complain about anti-Semitism. Brodsky does not discuss that Jews have the anti-Defamation League, B’nai Brith, and other organizations that battle anti-Semitism every day.

Of course the more appropriate response would be to ask if there is a problem with local police and the communities they serve, and whether each could work to change the perceptions each has of the other.

 

To do that, of course, would mean that the “racial hucksters” have to be stopped in their tracks, which won’t be done. After all, what would FOX News, conservative politicians, and all those white pundits do if they can’t blame black people and engage in race-baiting.

The Dangers of Perception

There is a saying that one’s perception of reality can be just as dangerous as reality. Last week’s midterm elections are proof positive to that point.

 

Despite six years of Republican obstructionism that has wreaked havoc on the nation, voters in several states rewarded the petulant children that make up the GOP with a resounding victory that gave Republicans the U.S. Senate and expanded the Republican majority in the U.S. House.

Journalists and the pundit class have offered several post-mortems on the elections, and there will be many more such pieces down the road. So far, several things appear clear: Most people have no idea what they are talking about, and too many rely on conventional wisdom without realizing that wisdom is anything but conventional.

If the exit polls are correct and many people voted for the Republicans because they are displeased with the direction in which the nation is headed or because they feel government is not working, then we must ask in exactly which direction do the voters wish the country to go and what makes them think the dysfunction that is the GOP will cease to exist come January?

Despite the sabotage from Republicans and the dire, “sky-is-falling” warnings from their sycophants the economy is doing remarkably well. Preliminary jobs numbers released by the U.S. Department of Labor last week showed that the nation created 214,000 jobs in October. That means the nation has gained an average of 235,000 jobs a month for the last six months. The averages are 224,000 over the last three months, and 220,000 over the last 12 months. The October numbers marked the 56^th month of job gains. In addition, the unemployment rate dipped to 5.8 percent in October, and, more important, the four-week average for unemployment claims hit a 14-year-low the previous week.

The good news does not stop there. Bankruptcies were down 13 percent for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30; gas prices are below $3; the third quarter gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 3.5 percent; the budget deficit has dropped to 2.8 percent of GDP; the Dow keeps setting records; and the labor force actually grew.

Of course, there is some bad news to go with the good news. Most revealing is that wages continue to be stagnant, although many business leaders and economists say the continued reduction in the unemployment rate should provide upward pressure on wages. And as Daily Beast writer Michael Tomasky reported on Nov. 6, median household income fell each year from 2009 to 2012. While it grew to $52,100 in June 2013, the growth is not enough to make up for the losses American households have endured since 2000 when median household incomes dropped to $55,987 after hitting a peak of $56,080 in 1999 under President Bill Clinton.

So what does all that have to do with the midterm elections?

Apparently very little because according to some exit polls 78 percent of those who voted on Nov. 4 felt that the country is headed in the wrong direction economically. Such a number says either the voters who responded to those exit polls were not being totally truthful, or that they are extremely ignorant of current events. Both may actually be true.

Because if a lack of faith in the direction of the economy and a disdain for dysfunctional government were the motivators for voters then why would Republicans win? It was Republicans who blocked a vote to increase the minimum wage, an issue that passed ballot initiatives even in states that voted for Republican legislatures and governors.  It also were Republicans who blocked efforts to help jump start the economy by improving the nation’s infrastructure, something nearly all agree must be done eventually. Most important, it was Republicans who took the nation hostage, shutting down the government in an effort to overturn the Affordable Care Act and threatening default during the debt ceiling brinksmanship.

As Paul Krugman wrote in a Nov. 6 post on The New York Times web site:

“…the biggest secret of the Republican triumph surely lies in the discovery that obstructionism bordering on sabotage is a winning political strategy. From Day 1 of the Obama administration, [Mitch] McConnell and his colleagues have done everything they could to undermine effective policy, in particular blocking every effort to do the obvious thing — boost infrastructure spending — in a time of low interest rates and high unemployment.

“This was, it turned out, bad for America but good for Republicans. Most voters don’t know much about policy details, nor do they understand the legislative process. So all they saw was that the man in the White House wasn’t delivering prosperity — and they punished his party.”

Apparently, some pundits are just as clueless. David Brooks of The New York Times and Dana Millbank of the Washington Post each offered his take on the election.

In his Nov. 6 post on The New York Times website, Brooks basically argued that the Republican Party’s massive victory on Nov. 4 occurred because the party had grown up, that its leaders had pulled “back from the fever swamps” that followed the injection of Sarah Palin and the like onto the national stage. The key, according to Brooks, was that Republicans returned to their stalwart roots.

“Republicans didn’t establish this dominant position because they are unrepresentative outsiders,” Brooks proclaimed after reciting Republican gains. “They did it because they have deep roots in four of the dominant institutions of American society: the business community, the military, the church, and civic organizations.”

In support of his argument, he offered up several examples: Larry Hogan, who won the governor’s race in Maryland; David Perdue, who was elected to the Senate from Georgia; Thom Tillis, who was elected senator in North Carolina; Bruce Rauner, who was elected governor in Illinois; and James Lankford, the Senator-elect from Oklahoma who ran “the nation’s largest Christian camp.”

Of course Brooks did not mention, for example, that Rauner has been accused of questionable practices in how his private equity firm, GTCR, has handled Illinois’ pension fund, which Rauner now says cannot pay retirees the promised nearly $2,500 a month in benefits. Brooks also does not mention that Tillis championed the 2011 North Carolina bill that would have forced women seeking abortions to view an ultrasound against their wills. Brooks also did not mention several other extreme candidates, including Joni Ernst of Iowa.

Millbank, in his Nov. 5 post to the Washington Post web site, simply decided the real problem was that President Obama did not humble himself after the midterm election, that he did not take serious the idiocy of an American electorate that gave control of the government and economy to the very same people who wrecked it six years ago, an electorate that passed a referendum calling for a hike in the minimum wage while electing people who have vowed to fight any such increase.

That Republicans have spent the last six years rejecting all of the President’s overtures in an effort to embarrass him is of no consequence to Millbank. To Millbank, the fact that an exit poll showed that 33 percent of the voters who responded said their vote was to show disapproval of Obama was all that mattered. Apparently Millbank did not notice that 47 percent of the American electorate voted against Obama in 2012, or that if 33 percent said they wanted to show disapproval of the President that would also suggest that 67 percent had other reasons for voting as they did.

Simply, there is no single reason why Democrats were trounced during this year’s midterm elections. There appears to have been several factors involved – a lack of understanding of the political process, an aversion to facts, low voter turnout, a party ashamed of its leader – and many of those things may not be easily fixed. That is the reality, and it is froth with as much danger as the one many perceive.