Question: When is shooting a 12-year-old child reasonable?

October 12, 2015

By Vincent Warren, Center for Constitutional Rights

Answer: When the child is Black and the shooter is a police officer.

Welcome to America, where #BlackLivesMatter is a trending hashtag, but police impunity is a lethal reality of Black life.

There’s an old saying that the definition of a consultant is “someone who borrows your watch to tell you what time it is.” That is true when it comes to police experts as well.  Cops and prosecutors come from the same culture. So it surprises no one that the experts hired by Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty to investigate the fatal shooting of Tamir Rice are reading the time from the watch supplied by law enforcement and have come to the same conclusions as the county police and (let’s be honest) McGinty himself: that the shooting was “reasonable.”

Tamir Rice, 12-year old, killed by police November 23, 2014

The System That Failed Eric Garner and Michael Brown Cannot Be Reformed

 by Mychal Denzel Smith, The Nation blog, December 3, 2014

 

That a grand jury decided not to indict NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo for killing 43-year-old Eric Garner the same week that President Obama proposed spending $75 million in federal money to outfit 50,000 police officers across the country with body cameras would seem to be hack Hollywood writing with neatly applied plot points. Garner’s death was caught on video—video that the police were aware was being taken—and it still was not enough to indict anyone, least of all the man responsible for choking Garner to death, for any type of wrongdoing. It’s as if this decision was handed to us at this time in order to get us to say, “Now what?”

Europe: No pretense of democracy when the bankers of empire slash and burn the people

[TIME magazine has detailed what amounts to a bourgeois confession about the class nature of the state.  Often wrapped in theatrical “democratic” disguise, the modern capitalist state is always the loyal servant of capitalism, and the enemy of the working class and the majority of society.  The reality of bourgeois rule is usually concealed behind populist rhetoric, selective privileges, corruption, xenophobia, and media deceptions which create an ongoing  culture of confusion.  But times of severe crisis rip this veil and expose the reality, as seen this week in the events in Greece and Italy. — Frontlines ed.]

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Regime Change in Europe: Do Greece and Italy Amount to a Bankers’ Coup?

By Stephan Faris,  TIME magazine, Friday, Nov. 11, 2011

The voice of the people isn’t something the markets seem to want to hear these days. First there was Greece, the cradle of democracy itself, where early this month, the merest mention of a referendum offering its citizens a say in a series of severe austerity measures was enough to send the markets into a tailspin. The ultimate result: the collapse of Prime Minister George Papandreou’s ruling coalition, the rejection of any notion of bringing the proposal before the people, and the installation of a caretaker government under the leadership of Lucas Papademos, a former vice president of the European Central Bank and, until earlier this week, a visiting professor at Harvard.

Then came Italy. As Athens threatened to go under, Rome found itself under pressure not so much for its level of debt — which though high is generally considered within the limits of sustainability — as much as for the erratic behavior of its flamboyant prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. On Monday, investors seemed to make the collective decision that he could no longer be trusted at the helm of the euro zone’s third largest economy and sent Italy’s cost of borrowing up towards crisis levels. By the end of the week, not only was Berlusconi finished, so was the very idea of holding a vote to replace him. The markets had spoken, and they didn’t like the idea of going to the electorate. “The country needs reforms, not elections,” said Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council on a visit to Rome Friday.

Indeed both Papandreou and Berlusconi had been respectively berated and belittled by Angela Merkel of Germany and Nicolas Sarkozy of France. It is almost as if Franco-German displeasure combined with the disapproval of the markets was enough to bring about regime-change. As in Athens, the plan in Rome is to replace the outgoing prime minister with somebody from outside the political class. Mario Monti, a neo-liberal economist and former EU commissioner who seems designed with the idea of calming the markets in mind, is expected to take over from Berlusconi after he resigns Saturday. For many in the two battle-scarred capitals, the fact that Papademos and Monti aren’t directly accountable to the public isn’t a problem. It’s the reason they’re being called in.

A Formal Funeral for the Two-State Solution

How the PA’s Statehood Bid Sidelines Palestinians

Ali Abunimah
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/68193?page=show

ALI ABUNIMAH is the author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. He co-founded the Electronic Intifada [1] and is a policy adviser to Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network.

The Palestinian Authority’s bid to the United Nations for Palestinian statehood is, at least in theory, supposed to circumvent the failed peace process. But in two crucial respects, the ill-conceived gambit actually makes things worse, amplifying the flaws of the process it seeks to replace. First, it excludes the Palestinian people from the decision-making process. And second, it entirely disconnects the discourse about statehood from reality.

Most discussions of the UN bid pit Israel and the United States on one side, fiercely opposing it, and Palestinian officials and allied governments on the other. But this simplistic portrayal ignores the fact that among the Palestinian people themselves there is precious little support for the effort. The opposition, and there is a great deal of it, stems from three main sources: the vague bid could lead to unintended consequences; pursuing statehood above all else endangers equality and refugee rights; and there is no democratic mandate for the Palestinian Authority to act on behalf of Palestinians or to gamble with their rights and future.

Underscoring the lack of public support, numerous Palestinian civil society organizations and grassroots leaders, academics, and activists have been loudly criticizing the strategy. The Boycott National Committee (BNC) [2] — the steering group of the global Palestinian-led campaign for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel that has been endorsed by almost 200 Palestinian organizations — warned in August that the UN bid could end up sidelining the PLO as the official representative of all Palestinians and in turn disenfranchise Palestinians inside Israel and the refugees in the diaspora. A widely disseminated legal opinion by the Oxford scholar Guy Goodwin-Gill underscored the point, arguing that the PLO could be displaced from the UN by a toothless and illusory “State of Palestine” that would, at most, nominally represent only Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip [3].

Surge in police shootings seen in Chicago

[In this AP news report, note how AP repeats, without any journalistic data, the police mantra that “it’s all caused by violent youth.” — Frontlines ed.]

Jul 24, 2011

by Kelsey Wheatcroft

CHICAGO, IL (AP) -A published report says 40 suspects have been shot by Chicago Police this year, including 16 who died.The number of deadly officer-involved shootings already outpaces all of last year, when 13 people died in police shootings.Total police shootings, deadly and otherwise, so far in 2011 are nearly as many as in all of 2010. Such shootings are at a midyear high compared to the past four years.Some officers blame the increase on a new boldness among youth who start shootouts with police.

(Copyright 2011 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)