The Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a regular feature of Daily Kos.
Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old African American EMT, was gunned down by Louisville police in her own home March 13, shot eight times in a fusillade of at least 20 bullets. Her boyfriend, who acted in self defense, was shot in the leg and arrested for the attempted murder of a police officer, a charge that was soon dismissed as the circumstances became clearer. Radley Balko at The Washington Post writes—The no-knock warrant for Breonna Taylor was illegal:
The Louisville police didn’t find any drugs. We now know that Taylor wasn’t even the person police were investigating. Their main suspect, Jamarcus Glover, and his accomplices were already in custody by the time the police raided Taylor’s home.
In the affidavit for the no-knock warrant for Taylor’s home, a detective claimed to have consulted with a postal inspector, who confirmed that Glover had been “receiving packages” at Taylor’s address. But the Louisville postal inspector has since said that he was never consulted by the officers and that there was nothing suspicious about the packages. A source with knowledge of the case has since told me that the packages contained clothes and shoes.
Much of this has been previously reported. Here is what has yet to be reported: The no-knock warrant for Breonna Taylor's home was illegal.
In the 1995 case Wilson v. Arkansas, the court recognized for the first time that the “Castle Doctrine” and the “knock and announce” rule are embedded in the Fourth Amendment. The Castle Doctrine, which dates back centuries to English common law, states that the home should be a place of peace and sanctuary. Accordingly, except for the most extreme circumstances, the police must knock, announce themselves and give time for the occupants of a home to answer the door peacefully and avoid the potential violence and destruction of a forced entry.
Seth W. Stoughton, professor of law at the University of South Carolina,
Jeffrey J. Noble, former deputy chief of police at the Irvine Police Department in California, and
Geoffrey P. Alpert criminology professor at the University of South Carolina write at
The Atlantic—How to Actually Fix America’s Police. Elected officials need to do more than throw good reform dollars at bad agencies.
George floyd’s death is the latest in a long series of brutal encounters between the police and the people they are supposed to serve. Police abuse has targeted people of every race and class, but members of vulnerable populations and minority groups, particularly young black men, are especially at risk.
This is well known. The solutions are also well known. Prior tragedies have resulted in a string of independent, blue-ribbon commissions—Wickersham (1929), Kerner (1967), Knapp (1970), Overtown (1980), Christopher (1991), Kolts (1991), Mollen (1992), and the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing (2014)—to make recommendations for meaningful change that could address police misconduct. These groups have developed well-reasoned conclusions and pointed suggestions that are widely discussed and enthusiastically implemented—but only for a time. As public attention shifts, politics moves on and police-reform efforts wane. The cycle continues unbroken. [...]
At the federal level, Congress should focus on three objectives.
The first is getting rid of qualified immunity.[...]
A second thing Congress could do is pass legislation to further encourage better data collection about what police do and how they do it. For example, no one really knows how often American police use force, why force was used, whether it was justified, or under what circumstances it is effective. [...]
The final thing the federal government should do is dedicate significantly more resources to supporting police training, local policy initiatives, and administrative reviews. Police agencies around the country regularly fail to meet what are generally recognized as minimum standards for use-of-force and arrest training, frontline supervision, and internal investigations. [...]
Heather Digby Parton at Salon writes—Many presidents have faced moments of chaos and disorder: None has ever handled it worse:
For all of Donald Trump's alleged branding genius, he never seems to come up with anything original. In business he just slapped his name on any consumer item that would pay him a couple of dollars for the privilege. In politics he's stolen his slogans from previous presidents. His most famous, "Make America Great Again," was Ronald Reagan's campaign slogan in 1980. And he seems to be under the impression that these two, which he's used intermittently before but is rolling out again, are Trump originals. They are actually patented Richard Nixon lines:
On some subconscious level these phrases connect with ideas Trump has heard before, but his narcissism requires that he convince himself he actually thought of them. If only he had a real grasp of history and the same level of competence as even the worst and stupidest of his predecessors, the country might not be in the situation it is in today. His handling of this latest crisis makes all of them look like geniuses by comparison.
Harold Meyerson at The American Prospect writes—Sending In the Troops: A Brief History. It’s been done for good reasons and bad—but never before for such crass electoral posturing:
Within just a single hour on Monday afternoon, Donald Trump broke new ground for an American president in two distinct ways. First, in awkwardly and hesitantly brandishing a Bible outside St. John’s Church, he became the first U.S. president to publicly demonstrate how unaccustomed he is to actually holding a book. (“A Bible? I won’t have to read from it, will I? Is this the same one I got sworn in on? Can I just take the oath for my second term and be done with all this election shit?”)
Second, and more importantly, Trump also casually announced he’d send in the troops—which could mean federalizing the National Guard or actually unleashing the Army on America’s cities—if he thought governors and mayors weren’t sufficiently beating the crap out of protesters or rioters (it wasn’t clear which from what he said, and from the way such actions usually play out). What was clear was that he saw such action as a way to intensify his campaign against the Democrats in this year’s election: He’d come off as the tough guy (and presumably more effectual than he’s been in dealing with the pandemic and the economic collapse), while painting the Democrats as the world’s worst wusses.
It’s the absence of all calculations save the political that makes Trump’s intervention something new under the American sun. After all, presidents have sent in the troops before under a range of conditions. Rutherford B. Hayes sent in the Army to break the nationwide railroad strike of 1877, while Grover Cleveland did the same during the Pullman Strike of 1894. Interventions on behalf of equal rights have happened, too: In 1863, Abraham Lincoln sent Union troops (some of whom were still recovering from fighting at Gettysburg) to New York to suppress an anti-draft riot that had turned into a mass lynching of African Americans. In 1957, Dwight Eisenhower sent troops to Little Rock to protect the first nine black children to integrate a school there. And throughout most of his two terms as president, Ulysses Grant deployed federal troops to the South to enforce Reconstruction and suppress the Ku Klux Klan.
Leonard Pitts Jr. at The Miami Herald writes—Too many see no evil and hear no evil of racism, but they certainly speak it:
After George Floyd became the latest unarmed African American killed by police.
After cars were overturned and cities were burned.
After armies of angry people filled our streets with raw screams.
After all that, a white man with an impressive title went on CNN to explain things. “I don’t think there is systemic racism,” opined National Security Adviser Robert C. O’Brien. “I think 99.9 percent of our law-enforcement officers are great Americans.”
So why do these great Americans seem to have such trouble not killing unarmed black people? There are, said O’Brien just “a few bad apples that have given law enforcement a bad name.”
One did not know whether to laugh or cry.
Not that there’s anything new here. O’Brien comes from a school of thought common among those who are unable to face the ugly truth of this country. For them, racism is a character flaw, not unlike having a bad temper. It’s something a person ought to work on, yes, but it has no larger resonance.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—The mass nonviolent uprising reflects the life of our democracy, not its death:
Faith, as the letter to the Hebrews tells us, is “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Yet we also speak of “signs of faith,” moments when transcendence breaks through to reassure us that our faith is neither irrational nor a convenient invention.
And those signs are all around us. The mass nonviolent uprising is an index of the life of our democracy, not its death. In scores of cities and towns, hundreds of thousands of Americans, led by the young, have joined in multiracial gatherings to say: Enough. The mobilization in response to Floyd’s murder goes far beyond any previous public expression of outrage over police killings of African Americans. Something snapped in our country. And polling indicates that the response to Floyd’s death and the ensuing demonstrations have increased support for the Black Lives Matter movement and decreased opposition.
It’s also striking that liberal politicians, who can become squeamish when the peaceful outspokenness of the vast majority is accompanied by the lawlessness of a small minority, have — so far at least — refused to be intimidated into withdrawing support for this movement. They condemned the destruction, as have the organizers of this symphony for equality, but expressed understanding of the rage.
In what may be a turning point in the 2020 campaign, former vice president Joe Biden condemned Trump for turning the nation into “a battlefield riven by old resentments and fresh fears,” spoke with candor about our nation’s failure to confront “systemic racism,” and proposed concrete steps forward. Far from reflecting a fear of white backlash, Biden’s speech suggested an awareness that the moment requires resolve, not timidity.
Nina Lakhani at The Guardian writes—Berta Cáceres was exceptional. Her murder was all too commonplace
Fifty-one months ago today, Berta Cáceres was gunned down by hired assassins at her home in western Honduras. [...]
Cáceres was exceptional, but her murder was not. Honduras is one of the most violent countries in the world; in 2009, a military-backed coup ushered in an authoritarian pro-business political party, which has since been accused by Honduran prosecutors of deep-seated corruption, and implicated by American prosecutors in drug trafficking and money laundering. The nightmare which has unfolded over the past 11 years has forced hundreds of thousands of men, women and children to flee a toxic mix of poverty, dire public services, corruption, gang- and state-sponsored violence.
They risk kidnap, extortion, rape and even death at the hands of criminal gangs and corrupt state forces as they travel 1,500 or so miles overland through Mexico in hopes of reaching the United States. Like migrants and refugees from neighbouring Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico, those fleeing Honduras are looking for safety, prosperity and dignity, but what they find is an increasingly hostile country willing to violate international and national laws to keep them out. [...]
Cáceres’s murder triggered international condemnation but failed to stop the bloodshed. At least 25 land and environmental defenders have been murdered in Honduras since 2 March 2016. Latin America remains the most dangerous region in the world to defend land and rivers from megaprojects like mines, dams, fracking, logging and biofuel cash crops, which are almost always licensed without proper consultation or compensation. Between March 2016 and November 2019, 340 defenders were killed in the Americas, according to Global Witness, a not-for-profit group. These high-impact, targeted assassinations go largely unpunished. Impunity breeds more violence.
Paul Heideman at Jacobin writes—To Break the Power of the Police, We Need to Mobilize the Power of Labor:
Among the many buildings torched this past week, one stands out as an odd target: the AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, DC. While some have speculated that protesters set the lobby ablaze Sunday night because of the labor federation’s failure to pursue racial justice with sufficient gusto, the more likely explanation is that protesters saw it as just another fancy edifice.
That’s a tragedy. The headquarters of the country’s most important labor federation should be widely viewed as a symbol of racial and economic justice. That the union hall was of no special importance to the people rebelling is an indictment of the AFL-CIO. As the DC area local of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) put it in a press release yesterday, “Why did young black and brown workers, frustrated with constant injustice, not view the AFL-CIO as their natural ally with over a century of experience in the struggle for equality? Why did they not recognize that act as burning their own house?”
Some unions, including the ATU, have given a glimpse of the best of American labor — one at the forefront of fighting all forms of oppression. In Brooklyn, when the police attempted to use a city bus last week to transport arrested protesters, the bus driver stepped off and refused to drive it. His union backed him up. In Minneapolis, after a rank-and-file bus driver declined to transport police, his ATU local issued a statement affirming members’ right to refuse to assist police operations. The national Transport Workers Union (TWU), which represents workers from San Francisco to New York, issued a statement saying their drivers are under no obligation to act as police chauffeurs.
All of these workers and unions took their place in the long history of anti-racist action by organized labor in the United States. While far too many perpetrated or ignored racial injustice, some unions, particularly those connected to the socialist or communist left, threw themselves into struggle in a way that provides a model for today.
Kristina Karisch at The Washington Monthly writes—Why Are Student Loan Borrowers Being Kept Out of the Coronavirus Recovery?
Even from the outset of the pandemic, it was clear that the ensuing tumult would exacerbate the nation’s pre-existing economic woes and inequities. Low-income workers in the hospitality, retail, and restaurant industries were more likely to lose their jobs. African American and Latino communities have been more susceptible to infection.
Democrats in Congress quickly recognized that this new reality would also impact the millions of student loan borrowers. [...]
That’s why Democrats in March put forward a series of proposals to forgive large portions of student debt as part of the first coronavirus recovery package. House Democrats wanted to forgive $30,000 per borrower (which was never realistic) while Senate Democrats presented a plan to forgive $10,000 across the board. The House plan applied only to public loans, while the Senate proposal authorized the Department of Education to make payments on behalf of borrowers with all loan types.
But the ideas were quickly shot down by Republicans. Instead, the $2.2 billion aid package, known as the CARES Act, suspended interest, payments, and involuntary collection for all federal loan borrowers until September 30. That doesn’t cover every borrower, though; it excludes those with Federal Family Education Loans and Perkins Loans, meaning eight million borrowers still owe monthly payments on their federal student loans.
Anna North at Vox writes—What it means to be anti-racist:
The idea of anti-racism has been getting a lot of attention in recent days as Americans around the country rise up against police violence. But the idea is far from new, with roots in decades of civil rights work by black Americans, said Malini Ranganathan, a faculty team lead at the Antiracist Research and Policy Center.
In recent years, thanks to the work of Kendi and others, the term itself has come to be used to describe what it means to actively fight against racism rather than passively claim to be non-racist. Anti-racism involves “taking stock of and eradicating policies that are racist, that have racist outcomes,” Ranganathan said, “and making sure that ultimately, we’re working towards a much more egalitarian, emancipatory society.”
Part of that work is acknowledging our own positions in a white supremacist system. So I should acknowledge that I am a white woman, and as such, I can’t talk about what it feels like to experience racism, or to fight against it as a person of color. But it’s also not the responsibility of people of color to fix racism, or explain to white people how not to be racist. As Dena Simmons, a scholar and practitioner of social-emotional learning and equity and author of the upcoming book White Rules for Black People, put it, “Don’t ask the wounded to do the work.”
Austyn Gaffney at In These Times writes—The Miners Who Fought for Workplace Safety Have a Thing or Two to Teach OSHA Right Now:
Although OSHA, which monitors most major employment sectors, including the agricultural, construction and service industries, has been criticized for lax regulations for almost 50 years, Covid-19 has brought worker safety back into the forefront of national news and rekindled the conversation around reform. If such reform is to happen, advocates say regulators can look for guidance from a conglomerate OSHA doesn’t monitor: the mining industry.
According to Tony Oppegard, an attorney who specializes in miner safety, the Mine Act is so much stronger than OSHA that “there’s no comparison.” Enacted in 1969, the inherent dangers in mining meant stricter regulations were implemented from the get go.
The Mine Act made mining much safer, and fatalities continue to decrease, with 24 on-the-job fatalities in 2019. While the decrease might be related to a loss of jobs—the coal industry has flatlined in recent years—experts say it’s also related to regulations in the Mine Act: For example, underground mines have to be inspected, at minimum, four times a year.
Meanwhile, OSHA guidelines have no requirement for the minimum number of inspections. That means a lot of businesses can essentially go unregulated. Along with a lack of inspections, there’s a lack of inspectors. While mines have about one inspector for every 50 miners, OSHA has just one inspector for every 79,000 workers. According to data compiled by the AFL-CIO, over 3.5 million injuries were reported to OSHA in 2017. In 2018, an average of 275 laborers died each day from workplace-related illnesses or injuries.
Barbara Ransby at TruthOut writes—“Mrs. America” Television Series Sidelines Black Feminists:
Race has been at the center of the long and circuitous struggle for gender justice since Sojourner Truth made the intersectional declaration “Ain’t I A Woman” at a Women’s Rights conference in Akron, Ohio, in 1851. The recent FX/ Hulu mini-series, “Mrs. America,” that concluded this week, chronicles one chapter in that long history: the decade long fight for the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) in the 1970s, and the issue of Black women’s representation warrants both recognition and criticism. “Mrs. America” gives a tepid nod to inclusivity by incorporating the stories of women like Black Brooklyn Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm and radical lawyer-activist, Flo Kennedy, but it ultimately errs more to the right than the left and marginalizes Black feminism yet again.
The nine-part mini-series, which ended on May 27, focuses on six prominent women from the era, notably Feminine Mystique author, Betty Friedan and Ms. Magazine founder, Gloria Steinem, along with the right-wing anti-feminist crusader Phyllis Schlafly. Portrayed by Cate Blanchett, Schlafly gets far too much screen time, minimizing the breadth of Black and Latinx women’s activism in this period and shortchanging viewers in the process.
Series creator Dahvi Waller, admitted in an Esquire interview that she herself had not even heard of Chisholm until the 2008 election. However, to Waller’s credit, she devotes one of “Mrs. America’s” episodes to Chisholm’s unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination for president in 1972. It is a lesser-known chapter in U.S. political history but one that resonates today in many ways. [...]
Three other Black feminists who were involved in this period are portrayed but identified by first names only, as if they were simply there to add a little color to the story.
The editorial board at Bloomberg opines—As the Country Burns, Trump Gives Up:
A more comprehensive abdication of leadership could scarcely be imagined.
America has now lost more than 105,000 people to a still-uncontrolled virus. Some 40 million are out of work, with the economy in free fall. From coast to coast, cities are burning, protests raging and chaos spiraling in an immense outpouring of pain and anger over police violence that seems only to intensify by the day. Not since the Vietnam War has the country been gripped with such unrest, or faced with so many serious crises at once.
And what is the president of the United States doing amid all this? Tweeting, mostly.
To ask this president to get serious seems almost comically futile at this late date. Except it isn’t funny. [...]
A normal president would recognize the horror of Floyd’s death and all it represents. He or she would insist that riots accomplish nothing productive, while still conceding that the frustrations they express come from centuries of discrimination.
Melanye Price at The New York Times writes—Please Stop Showing the Video of George Floyd’s Death:
I was 18 when Rodney King was beaten. Videos of police brutality were rare then, but now I’m 47 and they are ubiquitous. With the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the threats against Christian Cooper in Central Park, the nation’s attention has turned again to images that show how law enforcement can be weaponized against black people. These videos are necessary not only because they generate outrage among whites, outrage that is ever-present for African-Americans. But also because the political leaders empowered to stop this are not outraged enough.
I don’t know if it’s ethical, though, to repeatedly show and share what are essentially snuff films with African-American protagonists. The news media must rethink their decisions to binge broadcast these images and reconsider how much of the content should be shown. Additionally, citizens need to think more critically about whether to share them on social media. There are alternatives. Media outlets can put a moratorium on broadcasting the content 48 hours after the videos are released, or place them online with plenty of warnings for people who want to find them. We should spread images of the victims that give us a fuller sense of their humanity.
Why do these videos have to be on a constant loop on every news show and across social media platforms? [...]
These videos are fodder for ratings, clicks and increased trauma as much as rage. What is the efficacy of rampant sharing?