No Rights a White Cop is Bound to Respect

Footage from rallies after the Sean Bell verdict.

So the verdict has come down, and the three officers who shot Sean Bell and his friends fifty times have been found not guilty. The New York Times article is predictably awful. It has this tone of reminding the rest of the country that Black folks really aren't too mad about this, so all is well. I must say that this article is rather discordant with my own conversations, which have revealed a universal anger over the verdict. As the videos show as well, people are pissed. As well they should be. This ruling, while insignificant legally, has ideologically taken us back to the days of Dred Scott, when Chief Justice Taney famously ruled that African Americans "have no rights which the White Man is bound to respect." Make no mistake, this case sent a message that minorities gunned down by the police shall have no recourse to the law. The only recourse available is that taken by the folks above: rabble rousing.

Closing note-
Cops are not heroes. All this nonsense about how dangerous of a job they have is pure mythology. Fisherman are fifteen times more likely to die on the job than cops. Garbage collectors have a higher on the job fatality rate than cops. As Tim Wise points out, the hagiography of the police is part of a conscious strategy to legitimize events like the Sean Bell murder.

*Update*
Prisoner of Starvation has an excellent summary of the case.

Iraq's Militias

Two good articles on Iraq this week:

Ron Jacobs on the recent Green Zone proposal to exclude any party from Iraqi elections which has an armed wing. (Hmmmm, I wonder who that could be aimed at?). Jacobs' best quote: "The suggestion that Iraq should pay for its reconstruction assumes that the Iraqis asked to be destroyed by the US military."

Pepe Escobar on the militias, with a good focus on the Kurdish Peshmerga. The Peshmerga have been out of the news for some time now, but their role in stirring the cauldron of ethnic hatred in Iraq has been crucial. There've also been reports of the Peshmerga being used for operations in Southern Iraq, a sure way to increase Shi'a-Kurdish animosity.

Democracy in Iraq

Maliki says the troops should go. Bush says Hell no!

But it's not an occupation cuz Iraq is a democracy, dontcha know.

What Democracy Looks Like (From Above)

White House Press Secretary Dana Perino at press conference:

Q The American people are being asked to die and pay for this, and you're saying they have no say in this war?

MS. PERINO: I didn't say that, Helen. But, Helen, this President was elected --

Q Well, what it amounts to is you saying we have no input at all.

MS. PERINO: You had input. The American people have input every four years, and that's the way our system is set up.

National Review on Race

Obama has been praised to the high heavens the last few days for his speech on race. The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and the Washington Post heaped approbation on the speech, noting especially Obama's declaration that the idea that racism is "endemic" in America today is "profoundly distorted."

Praise from liberal newspapers is par for the course for Obama, but this time around he's picked up a few unlikely fans: columnists for the conservative rag National Review. Indeed, Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, a book which argued Black folks are genetically inferior to whites, described the speech as follows: "As far as I'm concerned, it is just plain flat out brilliant—rhetorically, but also in capturing a lot of nuance about race in America. It is so far above the standard we're used to from our pols." Abigail Thernstrom, who gained fame in the 1970s attacking the Voting Rights Act, was right on Murray's heels. National Review, remember, was a journal started in the 1950s to provide intellectual support to the terrorist campaign of massive resistance in the South.

For decent analysis of Obama's speech, check out Prisoner of Starvation, Lenin's Tomb, and Once Upon a Time...

Hoisting My Own Petard

Self-indulgence is, at root, what blogging is all about. In that holy spirit I present the following article of mine which has just been published in the journal Reconstruction. The article is about the Black Left in the 1930s and its response to McCarthyism. The whole issue is packed with wonderful articles, so take a look.

Two on Iraq This Week

Patrick Cockburn on the lies used to justify the occupation. He includes a thorough demolition of the horse-shit story in February about al-Qaeda using mentally retarded people as suicide bombers (just when we thought they couldn't get any more eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeevil!).

Pepe Escobar surveying Baghdad in the wake of Cheney's visit.

Rev. Wright is Right!

There's been a whole lot of hoopla recently concerning statements made by Obama advisor Rev. Jeremiah Wright. All sorts of pundits have been calling on Obama to dissociate from this "radical" preacher spreading anti-Americanism. For the record, I want folks to be able to read the two offending pieces by Wright, and see if you don't disagree:

The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people," he said in a 2003 sermon. "God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."

"We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye," Rev. Wright said in a sermon on Sept. 16, 2001.

"We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost," he told his congregation.

All I can say is that I wish I had a pastor like that when I was a kid.

More Crackers for Clinton

I don't plan on voting for any Democrat in November, but Hillary Clinton's campaign sure makes me want to vote for Obama. Her consistent race baiting throughout the primaries is a disgusting bulwark for racism in the US at the same time that Obama's success points to the potential, at least, for a blow against it. Here's the latest, from Rep. Geraldine Ferraro:

An unapologetic Geraldine Ferraro said Wednesday morning that her comments about the electoral impact of Barack Obama's race have been taken out of context, and that she stands by her words. Ferraro stirred controversy with her recent remarks that Obama's campaign was successful because he was black..."Any time anybody does anything that in any way pulls this campaign down and says let's address reality and the problems we're facing in this world, you're accused of being racist, so you have to shut up," she told the (Torrance, California) Daily Breeze. "Racism works in two different directions. I really think they're attacking me because I'm white. How's that?"

This poor old lady seems to be confused about what racism is. I think to explain it clearly to her, the following should happen. Rep. Ferraro can be driving along in her car some day, when she is pulled over by a police officer. Soon another squad car pulls up, so there are now four officers standing around her vehicle. They ask her to step out of the car, and proceed to stomp a mud hole in her ass. As they are walking away, one of the cops says "That is what it is like to be attacked because of your color."

Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan

"By September, Iraq war costs will trounce those of the 12-year Vietnam War"

I guess we've been saying this all along, but holy shit. That's a lot of zeros.

Bush gives yet another green light to torture

This Saturday Bush is going to veto legislation banning the CIA from using water boarding. Though this is yet another disgusting, though not unsurprising, Bush act, what is equally as troublesome is that the vaunted 'anti-torture' legislation still allows the CIA to use some 19 interrogation techniques in the field! If anyone has skimmed through the Kubark Manual, the CIA's how-to torture technique compiled through rigorous torture and experimentation on Vietnamese, South and Central Americans, and Irish people throughout the 20th century, it is clear that anything short of banning torture will be useless.


By the way, Waterboarding was a common tactic in the Spanish Inquisition.

UN: Palestinian Violence Inevitable Result of Occupation

From Ha'aretz.

Pictures from Israeli Protests of the Massacre in Gaza

From Gush Shalom.

Chavez: If capitalists produce, they're not so bad

Interesting op-ed about Chavez's recent definition of Bolivarian and agrarian socialism.

It's in Spanish.