Category: Black Lives Matter

𝑾𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝑪𝒐𝒍𝒐𝒓 𝒊𝒔 Your 𝑷𝒓𝒊𝒗𝒊𝒍𝒆𝒈𝒆? Now Available!

F.I. GoldhaberLeave a comment

A collection of 72 political statements in poetic form, What Color is Your Privilege? examines the wide spectrum of ways our society marginalizes people. Although many people on society’s fringes still have some privilege, society maligns, excludes, and abuses them because of their skin color, religion, disabilities, neurodivergence, sex, sexual orientation, gender, immigration status, age, financial position, housing arrangements, etc.

What Color is Your Privilege? opens a window on the suffering many are privileged to ignore.

“Serving a truth serum for hate and hypocrisy, F.I. Goldhaber is writing with a hammer and speaking with a tongue of fire. In What Color is Your Privilege?, they sing a book-length blues song decrying racial, gender, religious, and sexual intolerance in America. With courage and a rejection of conventionality rarely found in contemporary verse, this book shines a bright, beaming light on the ‘hostile world’ we live in and the revolution being fought for the soul of America.” — John Warner Smith, Louisiana State Poet Laureate 2019-2021.

Now available from Left Fork books and your local bookstore as well as from Bookshop.org. You can also order from Barnes & Noble and Amazon.

Left Fork is a small “unashamedly progressive press” based in Southwest Oregon, overlooking the West (left) Fork of Oregon’s Illinois River.

Oregon Legislature Proposes Rolling Back Police Restraints

F.I. GoldhaberLeave a comment

First published on The Big Smoke.
February 23, 2022

In 2020, I watched hours and hours of live stream video showing the protests in Portland from various points of view. Every single time, the protesters (most of them very young people) were at the worst mischievous (moving fences around, painting court and police buildings with graffiti, throwing dildos, pig food, and water bottles at cops). Most of the time, they listened to speeches and music, marched, chanted, ate, and danced.

Photograph of the Oregon State Capitol building with gold man on top and cherry trees in front of the building's wingsBut regardless of how peaceful the protests against police brutality were, they were almost always met with police violence. Police would charge out of their precinct buildings and attack: shooting so-called “less than lethal” weapons directly at protesters (including at their heads), pulling their masks down and spraying pepper in their eyes and mouths, beating them with batons and fists, throwing them onto concrete curbs, including people following their specific orders to disperse, with enough force to break bones including spines and skulls; sending many to the hospital.

The cops filled the streets of Portland with tear gas (a weapon banned for use against civilians of other countries) and other chemical weapons, making people cough (during a pandemic of a virus spread by respiratory emissions), cry, vomit, etc. Many of the victims of tear gas exposure, including nearby residents in their own homes, people who happened to be driving by, children, and babies in their cribs, are still experiencing long-term major physical and mental health problems to this day. The trees in downtown Portland have yet to recover from the environmental damage caused by caustic chemicals filling the air.

The Portland Police used tear gas even when ordered not to do so by the mayor/police commissioner, the U.S. Department of Justice, courts of law, and the state legislature. When told they could only use tear gas to control rioting, they simply declared a riot and/or “unlawful assembly” every single night.

Police refused to say who declared those assemblies unlawful and for what reason. Often during those “declarations” there was no illegal activity of any kind in progress and it was only too obvious to objective observers that “unlawful assembly” was being used as an excuse to attack protesters.

Oregon House Bill 4131 includes an egregious rollback of the little protection offered by previous legislation, sponsored, at the urging of Portland Police, by Republican legislators representing rural areas that have no experience with the harm that these chemicals and weapons cause and a Republican gubernatorial candidate looking to score political points.

There is no excuse, ever, to use these weapons of war against citizens of the U.S., Oregon, and Portland. Police have other resources, including just staying inside and avoiding confrontations. (It’s important to note that on those few nights the police stayed inside there was no violence, because the only rioting that’s been done in Portland has been police and federal agents brutally attacking protesters who were practicing their First Amendment right “to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” and white supremacists from out of state assaulting local citizens standing up against fascism.)

The state legislature, to quote Martin Luther King Jr., “…must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. And in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard.”

Giving police more weapons, funding, and the ability to kill, hospitalize, and arrest more people will not quell any riots. Those actions just ensure authoritarian rule and eliminate any pretense that we live in a free society. If the legislature wants to stop people who live in Portland from rioting, listen to what they are saying. Take action to address their very real concerns about police brutality, housing inequality, wage theft, food insecurity, etc.

National Day of Mourning

F.I. GoldhaberLeave a comment

First published on The Big Smoke.
November 24, 2021

This week in the U.S., those who can afford it are traveling, shopping, and cooking in preparation for a manufactured holiday that (in reality) celebrates the damage done to the lives and society of the Wampanoag Tribes after the English arrived in Plymouth. Incorporating recipes developed during the U.S. occupation of Mexico City, it was proclaimed into existence by a president who only “freed” the slaves to “save the union” not, as many believe, because he was an abolitionist.

Those who don’t have the resources will, if they have homes and kitchens, line up for boxes of food they can cook. If they’re houseless they might queue up at whatever charities are handing out paper plates filled with slices of turkey, or a vegetarian equivalent, stuffing/dressing, potatoes, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie for which they’ll be expected to pray to a god they may not believe in or show their gratitude in some other demeaning way.

Painting of Trail of Tears for the Creek People showing Indigenous people on foot, horseback, and in wagons being forced to travel thousands of miles from their homeBut, for many Indigenous peoples and their allies in the U.S., Thursday is the National Day of Mourning, a reminder of genocide, theft of Native lands, and erasure of Native cultures–a protest against the racism and oppression that Indigenous people continue to experience.

The United States was built on the backs of enslaved Africans and the blood of Indigenous peoples. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights all were written to impose and maintain white supremacy. Congress was designed to favor states allowing slavery. The Electoral College exists to give slave-owning southern and rural red states a greater voice in electing the president. And the police forces throughout the country were developed from slave patrols to protect the property of white men.

Every acre of land occupied by settlers was stolen from those who lived here for millennia before Europeans arrived. Colonialists perpetrated the World’s Longest Holocaust, the slaughter of more than 100 million Native people. Intentional and unintentional methods of murder included blankets deliberately tainted with small pox; bounties paid on scalps sliced from the heads of Native men, women, and children; wars and massacres; thousands-miles-long forced relocations during which thousands died from disease, starvation, and hypothermia; and exposure to yellow fever, measles, typhoid, and influenza. Many of those who survived were enslaved, raped, imprisoned on often desolate reservations, and/or had their children stolen.

This genocide, theft, and erasure continue to this day.

  • Thousands of Native women and girls are reported missing or murdered each year.
  • Four out of every five Indigenous people experience violence in their lifetimes.
  • The Navajo Nation suffered more COVID-19 deaths per capita than any U.S. state.
  • Chemawa Indian School just east of Keizer, Oregon, one of the last four off-reservation boarding schools run by the federal government, is still killing Indigenous students.
  • Artificial “national borders” separated families and cut off trade routes in existence since long before Europeans invaded. “Prehispanic inhabitants of North America lived in a world that stretched from Canada to Panama,” anthropologist Mikael Fauvelle notes. “Goods traded included food (fish, pine nuts, meat), tobacco, beads, shell products, furs, basketry, minerals (obsidian), and textiles, as well as feathers and birds.” Lee Edward Littler, Public Educator at Elden Pueblo Public Educational Project, writes: “Exotic items clearly imported from Central America have been repeatedly uncovered in the archaeological records within the traditional territory of the northerners collectively known aptly as the ‘Pueblo’, or town peoples.” Yet Indigenous peoples attempting to cross the U.S. southern border–fleeing violence, natural disaster, economic destitution, and/or a pandemic–are routinely assaulted, arrested, raped, sterilized without consent, imprisoned in inhumane conditions, and have their children torn from their arms, caged and, because no one is keeping accurate records, handed over to white people for fostering and adoption while they’re “deported” south.
  • The U.S. government continues to violate Native treaty rights by allowing multi-national companies to build pipelines and mines through and on Native lands and burial grounds, destroying sacred sites and endangering access to clean water while police, military, and private security forces arrest, assault, injure, and kill those trying to protect their land and water.

While the Indigenous Americans lost their lives and their territory to the rapacious plundering of Europeans, Africans were ripped from their homes and those who survived the horrendous conditions during the months-long Atlantic crossing were tortured, raped, and forced to labor under wretched circumstances to mine coal, plant and harvest crops, and build plantations, railroads, wealth for white people, and even the White House.

Many white people in the U.S. would like to believe, and teach their children, that slavery ended in 1865 with passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. But that amendment is carefully worded to allow the continuation of slavery.

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. [emphasis added]

That same year saw the enactment of Black Codes which replaced the Slave Codes and became the basis for the criminal legal system in the U.S. These “laws” trapped Black people in slavery-in-all-but-name conditions. Their former “owners” conspired to keep wages artificially and punitively low while the Codes made not having a job a crime. Punishment for such “crimes,” many of which only applied to Black people, was a fine. The inability to pay those fines meant the county court hired out the “criminals” until they worked off their balances. So both the vast disparity in how Black and white “offenders” are treated by the U.S. criminal legal system and the criminalization of poverty began during Reconstruction.

In the week preceding the 2021 National Day of Mourning, we witnessed even more very specific examples to pile on top of myriad others of the inequity on which this country was built and that the “Thanksgiving” celebration perpetuates.

Rittenhouse caricature by DonkeyHoteyThe most blatant example is the acquittal on all charges of the white supremacist teenager who was driven across state lines by his mother to play vigilante and who murdered two BLM supporters–36-year-old Joseph Rosenbaum and 26-year-old Anthony Huber–while allegedly protecting a car dealership. The same right-wing talking heads who called Adam Toledo a 13-year-old man referred to then-17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, armed with an AK-47 a little boy. His acquittal came after:

  • All but one person of color was eliminated from his jury.
  • Judge Bruce Schroeder, whose cell phone interrupted proceedings playing the theme song from Trump rallies, ruled against almost every prosecutorial motion and in favor of every motion the defense made, including that the murdered men could not be described by prosecutors as victims but that they could be called rioters, looters or arsonists by the defense; called for a round of applause on both Veterans’ Day and the birthday of the U.S. Marine Corps for a defense witness, the only self-identified veteran in the courtroom; refused to let the jury see videos of Rittenhouse hitting a girl who was arguing with his sister in June 2020 and stating he wished he had his rifle so he could shoot people he believed were looters from August 2020 as well as still photos of him posing with members of the Proud Boys in a bar, and flashing a white supremacist hand signal, after he was released on bail; and believed the defense claim that increasing the size of a video image manipulated the footage using artificial intelligence.
  • Rittenhouse made a show of sobbing, dry eyed on the witness stand, side eyeing the jury (at 30 seconds) to make sure they appreciated his performance.

Of course the jury’s decision wasn’t surprising to anyone familiar with the white supremacist realities of the U.S. criminal legal system. A 2013 study of U.S. homicides by the Urban Institute found that killings involving “a white perpetrator and a black victim are 281 percent more likely to be ruled justified than cases with a white perpetrator and white victim.” And, although Rittenhouse’s victims were not Black, they were protesting in support of Black lives. “While this trial was not about white men shooting targeting Black people, it was about a radicalized white youth taking arms against those willing to stand in support & defense of Black lives,” said Mac Smiff, owner and editor of We Out Here and chair of Black Liberation & Racial Justice Committee of the NAACP Portland branch among other projects. “The case reminds that defending Black people’s rights is punishable by white violence.”

“The victims were white.” Kendra Pierre-Louis posted on Twitter. “The message is if you align with Black people, however nominally, your whiteness will not protect you. The consequence of that verdict seems designed to erode solidarity.”

As Michael Harriot, journalist, historian, and author of Black AF History: the Un-Whitewashed Story of America, notes: in “the entire criminal justice system…Only white people’s perceptions are made into a reality that everyone else must abide by.”

After the verdict was announced, President Joe Biden, architect of civil asset forfeiture and sponsor/co-author of the 1994 crime bill that resulted in the incarceration of hundreds of thousands of Black Americans, told reporters “I stand by what the jury has to say. The jury system works.”

Rittenhouse’s acquittal has further empowered far-right domestic terrorists. They are celebrating and making plans, under the hashtag #WhiteBoyWinter, to hunt Black, Latiné, and Indigenous people as well as Jews and Muslims. They do so with the expectation that, like Rittenhouse, they will be hailed as heroes for such slaughter.

The day after the verdict, Harriot posted one of his famous threads contextualizing history: “A brief history of white vigilantes at Black protests” because of “speculation about what could happen if people like Kyle Rittenhouse are allowed to get away with murder. But, as usual, it’s never ‘if’ but ‘when,'” he wrote.

On the day that Rittenhouse was acquitted, Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt tweeted in response to the verdict: “The work to reform our criminal justice system is evident, it is urgent and I am here for it” for which he was thoroughly ratioed by people pointing out he is “part of the problem“. He did so while his staff was demanding Multnomah County Judge Melvin Oden-Orr send Alexander Dial to prison for preventing a Nazi from injuring participants at a 2019 Portland anti-fascist counter-protest with a hammer. Dial was charged with assault, riot, unlawful use of a weapon, and criminal mischief, despite video proving he prevented an American Guard white nationalist from hitting protesters with the hammer and the fact that “the prosecution was unable to identify anyone as a victim.”

Dial, who acted to defend members of his own community from out-of-state white supremacist invaders, spent more than three months in jail, was required to wear an ankle monitor for more than two years, and incurred tens of thousands of dollars in debt to pay bail and pretrial fees. In addition, he was prohibited from attending protests, drinking alcohol, and leaving his house after dark.

As often happens across the U.S., Dial was coerced into pleading “no contest” to a misdemeanor riot charge and two felony assault charges by Schmidt’s predecessor who threatened Dial with Measure 11 crimes and the mandatory minimum sentencing that could have put him in prison for almost six years. Schmidt, who ran on the promise to “make the system fair” including getting rid of cash bail, ignored numerous and repeated pleas from the community and did nothing to mitigate Dial’s ordeal.

Despite acting in self-defense and the absence of any victim, Dial was sentenced to 80 hours of community service, in lieu of a $1,000 fine, and almost three years of probation. Although the terms of the probation only prevent Dial from attending “unlawful assemblies,” in reality he still is essentially prohibited from exercising his First Amendment rights. Portland Police regularly and capriciously declare peaceful protests “unlawful assemblies” and are likely to do so if that would give them an opportunity to arrest Dial for probation violation in support of their white supremacist friends and neighbors from outside Portland who are angered by Dial’s release.

This is just one instance of the vast and outrageous disparity in the U.S. criminal legal system.

  • Two days before the Rittenhouse verdict, an Indigenous woman was sentenced to six and a half years in federal prison for killing her rapist when he came after her the next day. She is just the most recent example. As Brie Loskota tweeted upon learning of the verdict: “Women rotting in prison who killed their abusers in self-defense would like a word”. The “only correct battered woman when talking about self-defense is a dead one,” according to Sue Osthoff, co-founder of the National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women. “By engaging in violence in order to live, a woman cannot be a victim. Her survival itself becomes reason to condemn her.” Women’s prisons are filled with those who killed in self defense, “at least 30 percent of those serving time on murder or manslaughter charges were protecting themselves or a loved one from physical or sexual violence.”
  • Throughout 2020, thousands of protesters (AP put the tally at 10,000 at the beginning of June and protests/arrests continued through the Fall) were arrested for marching in the streets. They carried no weapons. They murdered no one. Thousands were beaten, shot with impact munitions, drenched in chemical weapons, and arrested on unsubstantiated charges such as interfering with a peace officer, disorderly conduct, and resisting arrest. Of those arrested, the vast majority were released but only after they were exposed to COVID-19 by law enforcement officers who refused to wear masks and often ripped the ones worn by the protestors off their faces. But, many of the protesters were forced to pay out money for cash bail and/or spend time in fetid, filthy jail cells where some, including at least one minor, were sexually assaulted.
  • On August 29, 2020, 48-year-old Michael Forest Reinoehl believed he and a friend, a “person of color”, were about to be stabbed by Aaron “Jay” Danielson, a member of the right-wing Patriot Prayer group and a participant in a violent rally in downtown Portland. In self defense, Reinoehl shot and killed Danielson. Reinoehl never had the opportunity to explain how he feared for his life to a jury. He was executed by law enforcement from several jurisdictions less than a week later. And although those cops couldn’t get their stories straight, they still were absolved of all responsibility for Reinoehl’s death.

“White violence is not just slavery, it’s also abolishing slavery without administering justice and then creating a police force to ensure we don’t come looking for it.” Smiff tweeted last week. “White violence is not just genociding the indiginous, it’s celebrating it with an Autumn harvest holiday.”

Police ≠ Public Safety

F.I. GoldhaberLeave a comment

First published on The Big Smoke.
November 16, 2021

For more than 100 days over the summer of 2020, thousands of Portlanders took to the streets to protest racial injustice, especially police brutality against Black, Brown, and Indigenous people. Those protests were met by the Portland Police with horrific violence which included:

  • filling the streets with chemical weapons (poisoning from which many have yet to fully recover);
  • beating people (including random residents who were not protest participants) with batons, fists, and weighted gloves;
  • firing impact munitions at close range into people’s chests, backs, heads, faces; and
  •  arresting them on spurious charges.

The results were minuscule, mostly superficial, changes to the outrageously out-of-proportion percentage of the city budget flowing into Portland Police Bureau (PPB) coffers. The city even refused to increase funding for the Portland Street Response, the one public safety initiative that actually was helping people, because the Portland Police Association (PPA), which represents Portland Police officers and protects their jobs even when they murder unarmed civilians, objected.

Photo of the back of a person with Portland Police emblazoned on their jacket, a helmet on their head, standing between partial views of Portland Police vehicles by Tito Texidor IIIYet, last month when the City Budget Office announced a $62 million general fund surplus ahead of the Fall Budget Monitoring Process, Mayor Edward Tevis “Ted” Wheeler quickly maneuvered to give a significant amount of that money to the police.

Wheeler, who is also the Portland Police Commissioner, immediately came up with erroneously named “public safety programs” to add almost $8 million, more than a quarter of the $31 million of the surplus allocated for city programs, to the PPB’s already bloated budget. His proposal includes:

  • hiring additional white supremacist bullies police officers, with no evidence more cops reduce crime;
  • allowing recently retired officers, who timed their departure to maximize their retirement benefits, to double dip return to work;
  • paying a $25,000 (more than many Portland residents earn in a year) signing bonus to “qualified” applicants;
  • wasting almost $3 million on body-worn cameras1 (BWCs)–which have no proven impact on police misconduct–despite the fact that only data showing BWCs increase police accountability were gathered in flawed studies created by manufacturers to sell cameras; and
  • dropping $225,000 on the Gang Enforcement Team (GET) Gun Violence Reduction Team (GVRT) Focused Intervention Team (FIT) Office of Violence Prevention to “assist gun violence reduction work”.

Wheeler, also wants to further persecute insecure, already-suffering, often-despondent, and scared unhoused residents by carving a significant amount of money from funds allocated to help them and instead use that money “increase homeless camp cleanups, or sweeps, ‘fivefold.'”

Last Wednesday, almost 300 Portlanders spent seven hours (mostly) telling the City Commissioners not to spend any of the surplus on more cops. Those who testified in favor of expanding the police department, including business owners who erroneously believe that police prevent burglaries and robberies, spoke without evidence that more cops would solve the problems they presented. They repeated copaganda and used talking points promulgated by the dark-money lobbying group People for Portland that pushes a pro-cop narrative and falsely accuses unhoused Portlanders of perpetuating crime.

Those who spoke against expanding the police department more often cited actual facts. “‘The mayor peddles law enforcement as a deterrent to crime,’ said Seemab Hussaini, an organizer with Unite Oregon. ‘These solutions aren’t based on sound data.'”

In fact, only two days before this meeting, a data analyst, a community organizer, and a public health researcher released a report which uses the Portland Police Bureau’s own statistics to prove that there is absolutely “no correlation between crime levels in Portland and officer staffing levels.” Analyzing almost six years of data points, they found that increasing PPB staffing results in no decrease in crime. This directly contradicts the PPA contention that “The connection between the diminished police presence in Portland, the lack of and availability of resources, and the rise in crime is glaringly obvious.”

Families of homicide victims were among those speaking out in favor of more police. But again, there is no data showing increasing police presence reduces homicides. “Police do not create safety,” Dr. Amara Enyia, policy and research coordinator for the Movement for Black Lives, stated. “Policing is largely reactionary. They come onto the scene after the fact.”

“While police and allies have attempted to use data to tie ‘bail reform’ and racial justice protests to this past year’s rise in murders,” Scott Hechinger, a civil rights attorney, wrote in The Nation, “those claims are contradicted by the geography of the rise in homicides, which occurred across the country: in red and blue states, in jurisdictions that have seen some measured wins for criminal and civil justice and those that haven’t, in jurisdictions that saw protests against police violence, and those that haven’t–and all despite massive police budgets.”

The report repeatedly cited by media sensationalizing the increase in murders–which might be a result of COVID confinement, mass unemployment, or a statistical fluke in historically low and decreasing violent-crime rates–also showed a decline in all other major crimes. If that information gets mentioned by the media, it’s buried.

In reality, additional police presence, which routinely results in oppressive surveillance of and violence against Black, Brown, and Indigenous people, “makes communities less safe and less healthy,” Takenya Nixon Brail, a public defender in Cook County, Illinois, wrote in teenVogue. “Not only does policing fail to prevent violent crime, it creates conditions that allow for even more violence.”

We’ve known for decades what works and what doesn’t to reduce violence and crime. And nothing involving police makes any positive difference including increased police presence, drug resistance education, copaganda police newsletters, scared straight schemes, and home detention or any other carceral programs.

If Portland, or any other city, really wanted to reduce crime and violence, they would redirect the funds sucked up by the police department and put it toward housing support (both for those already unhoused and those in danger of losing their housing), medical (including mental health) care, education (including early childhood education, and childcare programs for working parents, and job training), and food security. Reducing the number of cops would also remove some of the most violent, murderous, repeat offenders who consistently act as if the law does not apply to them from the streets of Portland.

Restorative justice approaches to addressing the root causes of violence and crime have been proven to result in actual improvements in public safety. But, these aren’t as easy to condense to one-sentence hyperbole plastered on billboards across the city and don’t generate generous political donations from businesses and pro-police lobbyists. So Wednesday the Portland City Council is expected to ignore data, the testimony of hundreds,  the demands of organizations representing Black Portlanders such as the NAACP, and the protest of thousands. At least three of the five will vote to throw more millions of dollars at violent criminals with an erroneous expectation that will result in any public safety improvements.

1 BWCs have been suggested by U.S. Department of Justice monitors of the city’s non-compliance with the DOJ Amended Settlement Agreement in its lawsuit against the city for abuse of people with mental health issues as one option for bringing the city into compliance. However, the policies required by the monitors are in direct opposition to those demanded by PPA.

Voices of the Unheard

F.I. GoldhaberLeave a comment

First published on The Big Smoke.
June 16, 2021

June. Midsummer. Pride Month. And, for many jurisdictions, the month to pass an annual budget.

Overwhelmingly, those budgets prove that elected officials do not listen when they invite their constituents to attend “hearings” about how they should spend taxpayers’ money. We saw it in their faces on Zoom. We watched them turning off cameras, eating their lunch, sending texts, driving, or, in the ultimate message about how much value they put on their constituents’ opinions, relieving themselves.

“They don’t listen. They just nod.”

Photo of a laptop computer with a zoom meeting, faces blurred, on the screen. A ceramic coffee mug sits next to the keyboard. The back of a chair, matching distressed dining room table, is visible behind the cup.This month, city after city and county after county are following the example set by the U.S. government and even the most “progressive” states when approving their budgets. Either they have unconditionally retreated or completely circumvented any political promises to protesters that they would reduce police funding. They continue to pour billions of dollars–often at the expense of key government programs, mental health services, education, housing, etc.–into the always gaping, never appeased, maw of police/sheriff/trooper budgets to the benefit of almost no one except those wearing the uniforms/badges.

In Minneapolis, where the city council promised to replace the police department with a public safety department after a cop, with three others watching, murdered George Floyd, voted instead to spend $6.4 million to hire dozens of officers  while the police chief coordinated with public relations professionals to protect his budget.

In the U.S. Congress, the so-called George Floyd Act, which would not have saved George Floyd’s life, hands $750 million more to police. “Protesters have been demanding to defund the police to keep us safe; not spend millions of dollars to investigate how we die. We know how we die–the police.”

In cities around the world, millions of people took to the streets over the summer to protest police brutality and abuse. Across the United States, hundreds of municipal, county, and state governments held hearings during which thousands of people demanded they stop militarizing law enforcement (which neither reduces crime nor increases officer safety) and slash police budgets.

Every single elected body then ignored their constituents to one degree or another. Instead, they listened to the lies pushed by slave patrols police officials and the associations that represent them about how they cannot provide what they call public safety without more funds and complete immunity for the crimes they commit while on duty.

Except police define “public safety” as protecting property owned by the wealthy, the corporations, the privileged. As anyone who does not fit into those categories and has had their house burgled, their car stolen, their wallet/identify lifted will report, the police do nothing to prevent or solve the crimes they are victims of. Those who are beaten, raped, murdered–even when the police are not the ones committing the offenses–rarely receive assistance from cops. Police certainly do not prevent any of those crimes. They often enable them by ignoring complaints of violence committed by white people against those who have dark skin, speak a foreign language, wear religious clothing, are not straight, etc.

At best, the cops might arrest someone after someone has been crippled, traumatized, killed; coerce a confession from them; and close the case. Whether or not the person arrested was the actual perpetrator does not matter much to them. Especially if that person is Black, brown, or Indigenous; houseless; consumed drugs at any time in their life; shoplifted groceries when they were hungry; painted some graffiti art; or once got a speeding ticket. Those demographics and behaviors make anyone arrested for any reason a criminal who should be locked up for life according to cops who routinely consume drugs stolen from suspects and evidence rooms, pilfer millions of dollars from innocent civilians through forfeiture, vandalize vehicles at protests and through malicious traffic stops, ignore all traffic laws, and commit a multitude of other crimes.

And the refusal of elected and appointed officials to listen to their constituents is not limited to police funding. A few examples:

  • The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT), ignoring all data proving that building more freeways does not decrease traffic congestion and tolling the highway creates traffic problems on surface streets, is pushing both agendas despite the objections of everyone in the city of Portland (except, of course, the contractors and developers who stand to make millions). Meanwhile, people continue to die on Portland streets classified as state highways that “ODOT refuses to fix with basic safety measures”.
  • Missouri lawmakers, claiming “voters didn’t understand the potential cost”, are sabotaging a voter-approved amendment to the state constitution which would have given thousands of low-income adults access to health insurance.
  • In Florida, voters passed a constitutional amendment aimed at allowing felons who have served their sentences to vote. Lawmakers immediately circumvented voters by requiring felons to pay “legal financial obligations” before their rights could be restored. In addition, Florida Republicans are now trying to prevent ballot-initiative drives by restricting fundraising capabilities.
  • People in the three-county (Washington, Multnomah, and Clackamas) Portland metropolitan area demanded transit police be defunded and that money used to eliminate fares. Instead, Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office took command of TriMet’s Transit Police after Portland Police Bureau participation was withdrawn by the city council.
  • Idaho voters passed a ballot initiative to accept federal funds for Medicaid expansion. Not only did Idaho’s legislators attempt to prevent state residents from receiving benefits, in retribution they also worked to curtail the ballot initiative process.
  • South Dakota state legislators repealed voter-approved restrictions on campaign finance and lobbying.
  • Sheriffs in 20 of Washington’s 39 counties are refusing to enforce restrictions on access to and use of so-called assault weapons which were overwhelmingly approved by voters.
  • State legislators in Utah overhauled both medical marijuana and Medicaid expansion bills drafted and supported by voters.
  • After collecting hours upon hours of video showing that Portland Police routinely and brutally attack peaceful protesters and journalists with weapons of war (attacks which have already resulted in at least one settlement with the city with multiple additional lawsuits filed) and numerous complaints about “peace police” telling other protesters how they should behave, the city of Portland decided to spend thousands of dollars on “conflict resolution training for…the protesters”.

Since voters making their opinions known via the ballot box, initiative petitions, and public “hearings” are getting between elected officials and their donors, the obvious solution for elected officials is to eliminate the ability of many of those people to vote. Almost 400 voter suppression bills have been put before legislatures in all but two of the “united” states just this year.

Those elected officials have made it clear that it does not matter to them what the vast majority of citizens wants. They are elected to represent a small minority dedicated to sustaining white supremacy and the privileges it grants them. Clinging to power, the wealthy, the corporations, the privileged, and their elected toadies will do everything to retain it.

Voting, testifying at public hearings, initiatives, petitions, and letter writing campaigns will not change that.

“There are many in our community that want to pretend last year did not happen,” Portland City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty told a group of protesters memorializing George Floyd on May 22, 2021. “That it was a bad dream … and they just want to wake up and go back to normal. I refuse to go back to an unjust normal.”

It is going to be a very long, very hot summer.

You. Can. Not. Reform. This.

F.I. GoldhaberLeave a comment

First published on The Big Smoke.
April 19, 2021

On Friday, Portland, Oregon, police murdered an unarmed man who had no home, had expressed a long-time (unfortunately validated) fear of cops, and who may have been experiencing a mental health crisis. They were responding to a call about a different man possibly experiencing a mental health crisis in Lents Park. The cops fired impact munitions at Robert Douglas Delgado’s body and prevented anyone from offering medical attention until seven and a half minutes after police shot him (four minutes after arriving at the scene) almost five full minutes after he finally stopped moving, attacked with chemical weapons those who gathered to mourn the victim and protest his murder, and ate pizza over the corpse which they left lying in the grass for hours while they tried to “find” the gun they claimed was in his hand when they shot him. (Some reports before the fact that they had shot the “wrong” man was released, included the existence of a replica handgun, but cops are known to carry those to drop at a scene when they’ve murdered yet another unarmed person. Three days after the shooting, police produced a photograph of a toy handgun with an orange tip identifying it as fake that they allegedly found at the scene. Audio released at the same time “does not indicate that Delgado had a gun — or replica gun — in his hand at the time he was shot. … none of the officers on the ground say they see a gun in Delgado’s hand before” shooting him.)

This all took place:

  • after police in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, murdered 20-year-old Daunte Wright in front of his girlfriend during a traffic stop and then brutally attacked those who rallied to protest his death and the reporters who covered those protests;
  • before a “trigger happy” cop placed on administrative leave for sexually abusing a child murdered three people in Austin, Texas;
  • during the same week that Chicago police finally released the video showing how many times and how many ways they lied about their murder of 13-year-old Adam Toledo;
  • while Derek Chauvin’s defense attorneys did their best to put his victim, George Floyd, on trial for Floyd’s own murder including smearing him with false overdose theories and other lies.

Image of a black sign with "Defund Brutality" written in white block print over three red fists and the outlines in white of two raised hands.For reference, Brooklyn Center police — who shot at protesters from tanks and continued using tear gas and other “crowd control munitions” after the Brooklyn Center’s city council passed a resolution “banning dangerous crowd-control tactics including the use of rubber bullets, tear gas, and protester kettling” – gained national recognition as a “police reform model” last summer.

In Portland, a federal judge found in February of 2020 that the police department was in “substantial compliance” with a settlement agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice reached after DOJ found officers often used excessive force on people who were experiencing a mental health crisis. Portland recently launched a pilot program in Lents — the Portland Street Response team — which is supposed to answer calls for anyone experiencing a mental health crisis rather than police. The Portland Street Response was not sent to the scene because the caller (possibly a member of a group notorious in Lents for attacking the houseless and which organized a “back the blue” rally the day after the murder) claimed that a man “acting erratically” had a gun. It also should be noted that the murderer, Zachary Delong, has expressed support for Michael Brown’s killer Darren Wilson and that Delong’s boss, East Precinct Commander Erica Hurley, is under investigation by the Secretary of State for violating Oregon law last month. In addition, Portland Police are currently under investigation by the DOJ for brutal attacks on protesters, failing to file use of force reports, and using flawed, possibly unconstitutional logic to clear themselves of alleged misconduct.

All of the above represents just a few of the incidents that occurred in less than a week of egregious police malfeasance and murder in the United States of America.

Over and over again, politicians at federal, state, and municipal levels play the “reform” game. They pass laws, enact codes, and implement policies which police then ignore, fight in court, and/or claim are in violation of their contracts. Most of the time, even if the police obeyed them, the laws/code/policies changes touted by reform politicians won’t even prevent the most egregious violence and brutality that police inflict. The U.S. House of Representatives’ so-called “Floyd Act”, passed March 3rd, “could not have even saved George Floyd’s life” or all those police have murdered since Floyd died, begging for his life, on May 25th, 2020.

Portland is preparing to revive, yet again, the racially biased, ever name changing Gang Enforcement Team (GET) Gun Violence Reduction Team (GVRT) Focused Intervention Team without ever discussing with those who experience and understand the causes of gun violence whether or not this program offers any solutions. “Adding more police is like putting sugar on shit. It makes it taste a little better, but it’s not really changing anything. You may prevent murders, but you won’t stop the problem. You’re just going to have a lot more guys in jail… a lot more families without fathers. Then what?” asks Mike “Bretto” Jackson, former gang member who’s now a hip hop artist and youth mentor.

Meanwhile, using gun violence as an excuse, the agencies that claimed deputizing local law enforcement as federal officers last year was only temporary have announced a “gun violence collaboration” that includes Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt, who ran for office as a progressive reformer. Collaborating with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), Portland and Gresham police and the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office “entered into a voluntary agreement … to “deputize a small contingent of local law enforcement officers”.

Because Portland public officials don’t understand, or refuse to acknowledge, that correlation does not equal causation. In reality, gun violence spiked across the country during the pandemic, resulting in overall gun homicides at the highest rate in more than 20 years. “The COVID-19 pandemic worsened many of the underlying conditions that contribute to community gun violence risk — poverty, unemployment, food and housing insecurity, ” according to Nicole Kravitz-Wirtz, who researches violence prevention at the University of California.

One of the centerpieces of reform is the call to require police to wear body cameras. But there has been no reduction in police violence as more and more departments spend millions of dollars incorporating this requirement and citizens with smart phones fill the Internet with videos of egregious police conduct. And we have a multitude of video evidence of police brutally attacking and maiming the thousands of people who gather to protest police behavior, no matter how peaceful.

“Rather than thinking that they ought to be chastened by being caught on tape beating, tear-gassing, and pepper-spraying protesters, perhaps doing all this in full view of the public is the point. They’re not afraid of being filmed, because being filmed simply reinforces the central theme: If you come to protest, an action that explicitly challenges the order and my place in it, this is the consequence,” Patrick Wyman wrote last June. It’s “about sending a message: Try to hold us accountable, and we’ll find you. Whether the violence is real or merely threatened, the goal is public acknowledgement of this order, rooted in racial inequality and the protection of property.”

Mass arrests of protesters across the country are “all about intimidation” of people who vocally oppose police brutality, said Detroit Will Breathe organizer Tristan Taylor. “It says something about the nature of policing when that’s a uniform tactic.” The vast majority of citations and charges against protesters were ultimately dropped, dismissed, or otherwise not filed, but “police response created this whole additional public health crisis that wasn’t something people talked about much, but, in the moment, that was one of the biggest issues we were concerned about,” said Tyler Crawford, the National Lawyers Guild director of mass defense.

Reform is not possible when, as Colin Kaepernick stated in his introduction to a 30-part series demanding abolition, “The central intent of policing is to surveil, terrorize, capture, and kill marginalized populations, specifically Black folks.” He echoes the words of Huey P. Newton, Black Panther Party co-founder, “The police are in our community not to promote our welfare or for our security or our safety, but they are there to contain us, to brutalize us, and murder us.”

Organizations with roots in capturing and punishing Africans who attempted to escape carceral slavery, whose members ignore the law themselves while using it to capture, incarcerate, and kill those who are not white, cis, straight, able-bodied, males — or otherwise do not fit in what their limited worldview defines as citizen — cannot be reformed. They must be abolished.

Abolish The Police

F.I. GoldhaberLeave a comment

For political reasons, I temporarily changed my social media avatar from “Abolish The Police” to “Black Lives Matter”. Since the reason no longer applies, I changed my avatar back. Almost immediately, someone on Facebook Abolish the Police asked the standard liberal question “And do what about crime?” (She deleted her comment after I a) documented the fallacy of her question and b) informed her how lazy and inconsiderate it was.)

Given that others still don’t understand why we will never end white supremacy and systemic racism without eliminating slave patrol/union busting cops, here’s some places to start. (And, these are only starting points. Many of my articles point to other articles/authors and there are long and detailed reading lists available at many libraries and online.)

1) Much of what you call “crime” (except that involving bodily harm) was created by laws written to continue slavery based on the wording of the 13th amendment (and have precedence in imprisoning uppity peasantry).

https://www.thoughtco.com/the-black-codes-4125744

2) #Police ≠ #PublicSafety
In fact, cops are hazardous to public health.

https://goldhaber.home.blog/2020/08/20/bioweaponizing-a-pandemic/

https://abcnews.go.com/US/black-man-wrongfully-detained-maskless-police-officer-tests/story?id=74967778

3) Police do not prevent or solve crimes. They show up after a “crime” has been committed, ask for the public’s help and/or tap into your business/personal surveillance video to figure out who did it, and then lie to get confessions/convictions.

https://goldhaber.home.blog/2020/06/06/defund-the-police-to-end-police-violence/

4) Police are criminals and liars.

https://thebigsmoke.com/2020/08/29/blue-crime-matters/

https://twitter.com/fodderyfodder/status/1297405642848837633

https://thebigsmoke.com/2020/09/09/peaceful-protests/

(Also, see thousands of hours of OTG video contradicting fabricated police reports “documenting” protest events in which police instigate and are the primary perpetrators of violence and murders of unarmed Black people.)

5) There are no good cops.

https://goldhaber.home.blog/2020/11/17/no-good-cops-still-on-force/

https://goldhaber.home.blog/2020/07/18/rotten-apples/

If you want to stop crime, use the money wasted on police to make sure everyone has enough to eat, a safe place to live, an education, and health (including mental health) care.

https://goldhaber.home.blog/2020/06/06/defund-the-police-to-end-police-violence/

Also, eliminate the oligarchy that rewards corporations and billionaires who constantly steal from the rest of us and never face any penalties.

If you want to know more, you should do your own research. If you do not know where to start, I regularly post on Facebook and on Twitter on this topic.

I also write about it here and on The Big Smoke America as well as in much of my poetry.

Protesters, Press, Police

F.I. GoldhaberLeave a comment

First published on The Big Smoke.
December 16, 2020

In 1983 — when USA Today began changing the way, and what, newspapers covered as “news”, when Reagan’s deregulation started enabling the consolidation that would become mega media mergers, eventually leaving the U.S. with almost no locally-owned newspapers and television stations — I walked away from newspaper reporting as a career after only six years.

In that short time, I exposed discrepancies in federal loan subsidy application handling, local political manipulation of the federal bidding process, the impact of the Reagan administration’s first major union busting move, a medical clinic’s prescription misuse and inappropriate use of federal funds, a local coal baron’s questionable financial dealings and tax avoidance, and a local agency’s conflict of interest — all while reporting for very small newspapers. My stories resulted in state and federal investigations, tens of thousands of dollars in back taxes paid, contracts terminated, and Flight Service Station siting changes.

But, after a year of watching major metropolitan newspapers, including my own employer, remake themselves in McPaper‘s image, I walked away when my boss demanded I go out and cover a non-event (except on the police scanner), that required invading someone’s privacy. If didn’t, he said he would fire me. I quit.

The story I refused to report is one you have read dozens of times since. One that, instead of condemning the system that created the problems, merely makes you feel sympathy for the victim, or treats them as a hero, or vilifies them for crumbling under the weight of a society that deliberately breaks people.

Over the years, my decision was repeatedly validated as television and newspapers became worse about disrespecting everyone’s privacy, more and more mistakes appeared in print and on the air, and entertainment and celebrity coverage drowned out actual news. Bigger and bigger media conglomerates gobbled up local newspapers and television stations, and most media now is owned by a handful of mega corporations. [see two examples at the end of this article]

Now, we have so-called journalists who believe they’re empowered to invade other people’s lives and private property for their clickbait and sixty seconds of infotainment spotlight. They work for companies with right-wing, racist, misogynist, anti-LGBTQ, anti-immigrant agendas and do not care whose lives they destroy to get their “stories.”

When activists politely ask them not to take a photograph or collect video of an event, they scream about freedom of the press and their First Amendment rights. Except most of them have never, apparently, actually read the First Amendment. Because it doesn’t give them any rights at all to invade other people’s lives and steal their stories. It states that:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press” [emphasis mine]

Nothing requiring anyone talk to the press; no mention of allowing the press to invade private property in order to report on an event. Case law, specifically libel and sunshine laws, allow the press to write about public figures and celebrities without worrying about being sued and require government officials, both elected and appointed, to produce information to the press as representatives of their constituents.

But, if a broadcast “journalist” sticks a microphone in your face or points a camera at you, they are invading your privacy without your consent and if you don’t want to enrich them by sharing your information and/or photograph for their broadcast, you have the right to insist they stop and/or walk away. I have done both. As an author and a business owner, I also have been interviewed more than once by a reporter who took the facts I gave them and inadvertently misinterpreted or deliberately twisted them to meet their own narrative, rather than reporting mine.

Too often, people who have watched television footage of victims sobbing, witnesses sharing details, and families wailing their grief, believe they’re obligated to answer questions in front of a camera. But, footage like that is lazy reporting and rarely includes factual information.

Moreover, police view that footage and use it to target activists who protest police brutality and demand their elected officials stop funding military police forces in urban areas; who fight gentrification and sweeping houseless camps during a pandemic; who stand up against armed Nazis marching in our streets.

White Supremacist terrorist groups like the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer use video and photographs posted by media to doxx and menace anti-fascist activists and their families with violence, including rape and death threats.

Right-wing “journalists” edit video to remove any mitigating circumstances, such as self defense. Edited video, claiming a “random lone protester fights with multiple proud boys” led to the arrest of a local Black man who defended himself with a knife in Washington D.C., when dozens of out-of-town white Proud Boys surrounded, trapped, and attacked him. It should be noted, that the Proud Boys, who were openly carrying hand and long guns in violation of D.C. laws, had already vandalized black churches, and roaming mobs of them attacked multiple counter-protesters, reporters, and random passersby with fists, chemical spray, weighted gloves, flag poles, and other weapons. But police arrested the Black man and they will use the edited video against him in court.

Those at home, scrutinizing photographs and video on television, websites, and social media, forget that U.S. law requires a presumption of innocence. With broadcast and print media frantically regurgitating inaccurate, deceptive, and outright deceitful police reports, viewers judge someone guilty before they’re tried, sometimes before they’re even charged with a crime, based on seeing often-doctored video.

Invasively filming and photographing people involved, sometimes only peripherally, in news events puts lives in danger. “Any journalist who has embedded with military forces knows there are times you DO NOT take photos,” investigative journalist Robert Evans tweeted recently. “A picture is not worth life.”

When I was a reporter, I was the first to report a national story from a small town newspaper because I worked to develop relationships with sources and to protect them. But, even back then, one of my sources lost his job because his superiors were able to determine, based on our locations and history, that he had to be the person I had spoken with. Today, with all the surveillance tech available to authorities, those who protest police brutality, evictions during winter and a global pandemic, stolen land, and other forms of capitalistic-enforced inequality are in even more danger from an authoritarian government.

At a recent active eviction defense in Portland, The Oregonian complained about being denied access making “it difficult to provide the public with a full account of the ongoing occupation“. This was after the newspaper printed false information, including calling the event an “occupation”. The only other “journalist” quotes routinely endangers protesters by deliberately filming their faces.

In addition to endorsing Portland’s much-hated Mayor Edward Tevis “Ted” Wheeler, The Oregonian, owned by Advance 1, is run by John Maher who also chairs the Portland Business Alliance which heavily funded Wheeler’s election campaign. Urban Housing Development, which purchased the Red House at a foreclosure sale, belongs to the Home Builders Association of Metropolitan Portland (HBA) which is affiliated with the Portland Business Alliance (PBA). HBA and PBA, along with Realtors and developers, also were among the entities behind United for Portland, created in the final months of the mayoral campaign to spend money targeting male voters to discredit Wheeler’s female opponent.

The Oregonian continuously uses language such as “become known as the ‘red house'”. Well, it’s a house. And, it’s red. So people call it the red house — hardly worthy of repeatedly wasting words. The Oregonian also deliberately contrasted the $260,000 the current owner paid at auction in 2018 with the more than $308,000 raised to buy it back via GoFundMe without acknowledging the $20,000 in property taxes also required as part of the proposed agreement, possible legal fees, and the costs of major repairs to the house required after law enforcement deliberately trashed it, including destroying the plumbing fixtures. It faulted the family for failing to pay the mortgage for nearly a year and half without mentioning that they paid the mortgage until it was sold and two different companies demanded payments. Although the family has made it clear how they want to be contacted, The Oregonian called one of the individuals on the phone and then made a big deal about reporting that he hung up, despite the fact that they had specifically asked not to receive phone calls.

Meanwhile, a reporter with KATU, owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, 2 refused to leave the property when asked and kept filming people despite their repeated requests that she not do so. Her camera was knocked from her hand and stomped on to prevent her from further filming. She was injured slightly (although she tried to make it appear worse than it was, including erroneously claiming her hand was broken) when she tried to pull it out from under someone’s foot.

“By treating this like a regular news story you are, inadvertently or not, antagonizing the participants”, an activist who uses the handle @imlaceyimfine, posted in response. “You, and especially your camera, are a threat, whether you believe that to be true or not. The fear your camera inspires in people who have been brutalized and arrested all summer, is very real and in my opinion incredibly valid. Not only are the protesters rightly afraid of retribution, they are also traumatized. Many of them may be triggered by your presence. If you want the story, right or wrong, you need to make allowances for that fact.”

The “reporter” cried (literally) “crocodile tears” on Twitter and demanded the right to invade people’s privacy on private property with signage clearly stating filming was not allowed.

“If you have been following KATU’s limited coverage at the protests or the press conferences, you know they are not capable of telling the entire story,” TeamRaccoonPDX, volunteers who cleans up trash at protest events, noted.

Many of KATU’s reports about the Red House Eviction Defense were inaccurate and/or just a series of quotes from Portland Police Bureau, Multnomah County Sherriff’s Office, and Wheeler. The station played down Wheeler’s and Police Chief Charles Lovell‘s threats against and lies about the family and activists that resulted in racist death threats and attacks by fascists. KATU was among the media breathlessly reporting that the four generations of family fighting to retain ownership of the “infamous ‘Red House'” also own another home.

When an agreement was reached with the city and the barricades protecting the house from police raids were removed Monday, December 14, KATU claimed “those who live in North Portland” — an area that encompasses more than fort-five square miles, 25,883 households, and the University of Portland — were “still concerned” about the few blocks surrounding the house. Sources for this included an “anonymous person” who allegedly lives in “the area” (already defined as North Portland, so, not necessarily anywhere near the Red House) and the Coalition to Save Portland (another entity formed to push Wheeler’s reelection) were still upset about the “occupation”.

During its “coverage”, the station also interviewed another person who doesn’t even live in “the area”, who was upset because some activists legally carried firearms. (This person also complained in that article he was unable to get “the city’s help to get his concealed handgun license”.  Licenses to carry concealed handguns are issued by the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office not the city of Portland.)

These few “complaints” ignored numerous neighbors, including businesses, who supported efforts to fight the gentrification that has driven almost all Black homeowners out of a traditionally (redlined) Black neighborhood as well as efforts by activists protecting the eviction defense area to provide food, clothing, and medical supplies to those in need and to help remove graffiti from local businesses.

Other reporters — who respect their sources and do not film them without consent and/or who edit their video to remove information that can be used to identify, arrest, and doxx someone — had no difficulty providing accurate coverage of the events.

“This Oregonian article is nonsense. I’ve been at Red House nearly everyday since Tuesday. I’ve taken pictures & interviewed people without issue,” tweeted Garrison Davis a young, dedicated, and effective journalist who has covered protests in Portland since they started in May. “You don’t need to film 24/7 to “accurately” report. Write, take notes, it’s in the name, ‘Journal(ism)’.” Unlike reporters who pretend to be objective while working for right-wing media owned by oligarchs, Davis makes no effort to hide which side he sympathizes with.

“It’s not a matter of being objective, it’s really about being transparent,” Andrew DeVigal, chair in journalism innovation and civic engagement at the University of Oregon, told Portland Monthly.

“Not choosing a side, when one side is oppressed, means choosing, through inaction, the side of the oppressor”, freelance journalist Lady Rosie G. Riddle points out. “if you’re not an anti-fascist FIRST and press SECOND, then chances are, you’re helping fascists.” As she and numerous other BIPOC journalists and pundits state repeatedly, “objective journalism upholds white supremacy.”

If you do not believe that statement, compare any mainstream coverage of Portland BIPOC protesters in trying to prevent a local family from losing its home in winter, in the middle of a pandemic, while providing food, clothing, and PPE supplies to any in need, to the coverage a few years ago when heavily armed, out-of-state, anti-government white men took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, threatened local residents and law enforcement, and did major damage, including removing fences and plowing roads in defense of two men who had pleaded guilty to arson further.

1The Oregonian/OregonLive is owned by S.I. Newhouse-founded Advance which also owns Condé Nast (Architectural Digest, Allure,  Ars Technica,  Bon Appétit,  Epicurious, Glamour,  GQ, House & Garden, Teen Vogue, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Wired, and more), American City Business Journals (BizEquity, The Business Journals, Bizwomen, etc.), among others and is also among the largest shareholders in Charter Communications, Discovery (HGTV, Food Network, TLC, Animal Planet, Cooking Channel, American Heroes Channel, Now This, Thrillist, to name a few) and Reddit.

2KATU is owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group which owns 190 television stations in 88 markets that are affiliated with all major broadcast networks plus 23 regional sports network brands. In May, 2020, it paid the largest civil penalty by a broadcaster, $48 million, to the Federal Communications Commission for violating the FCC’s sponsorship identification rules as part of its attempt to acquire Tribune Media. In addition to slanting its reporting to the right, Sinclair requires talent at its subsidiary stations to spout pro-Trump propaganda and right-wing opinions such as “comparing removal of Confederate statues to destruction of archaeological treasures“.  The Guardian calls it ” the most dangerous US company you’ve never heard of”.

Meet the New Boss … Same As the Old Boss

F.I. GoldhaberLeave a comment

First published on The Big Smoke.
November 10, 2020

Despite

  • more than a quarter million mostly preventable deaths from COVID-19
  • thousands of children imprisoned in concentration camps
  • at least 660 children who may never again see their parents
  • hundreds of asylum seekers who were sexually assaulted, physically abused, and then deported to hide the evidence
  • hundreds of women whose uteruses were involuntarily/unnecessarily removed and who are now being deported to hide the evidence
  • a $2 trillion increase in U.S. debt
  • 12.6 million unemployed
  • 40 million on the brink of eviction
  • and 12 million who lost access to health care

while

  • a handful of billionaires increased their wealth by $1 trillion
  • the president, his family, and cronies stole millions of dollars from the U.S. Treasury
  • the president violated the U.S. Constitution daily since January 20, 2016
  • he and his staff lied constantly (thousands of times)
  • and the president, his children, son-in-law, and staff committed treason

more than 71 million U.S. citizens voted to keep the current administration in office. And many of them lied about it. Because the only reason 99 percent of them had to vote for him is to support white supremacy.

And yet, despite four years of numerous analysts explaining in myriad articles, Twitter threads, YouTube videos, Facebook posts, etc. that racism is their primary reason for supporting him, there are still people insisting we need to “understand” why people vote for white supremacy and that we must not blame them for doing so.

Mike Stanfill, who creates Raging Pencils, went so far as to claim voter fraud in favor of the president because “in no rational universe could that walking bolus of bile and malice garner 71 million votes, 8 million more than in 2016, without significant covert aid.”

The only reason for anyone to not understand why and to not blame the people who subjected BIPOC, LGBA, transgender and two-spirit folx, immigrants, non-christians, people with disabilities, and others to four years of abject terror is to assuage their own, covert racism and/or white supremacy.

Black voters, Indigenous Americans, and many other people of color fought attempts to disenfranchise them; risked their lives; lost wages they couldn’t spare; traveled for hundreds of miles; stood for hours in the rain, the heat, the snow; registered thousands of new people to vote, and drove those who had no other way of getting there to the polls. All so they could hold their noses, after eschewing more progressive and representative choices in the primary, and vote for the slightly less evil, racist white man who has only marginally better impulse control. Because, they knew they couldn’t count on white voters to make the right decision last week.

“White pundits and talking heads still cannot say White folks voted for racism,” Marley K. said on Sunday. “When you can’t get White people to acknowledge there was no reason on earth to vote for Trump except racism, there’s no way in hell you can address the problem.”

Anyone who is still shaking their head, “reaching out” to racists, trying to understand why people vote for a narcissistic con man, is complicit in white supremacy, whether or not they’re an active participant.

More than 71 million U.S. citizens voted for a treasonous criminal because he allows them to brazenly display their hatred for people who are not straight, cis, white, xtianist, third generation; to be proud of their homomisia, transmisia, Islammisia, xenomisia, misogyny, and racism; to deny anyone they see as other civil rights, access to medical care, housing, food, bodily autonomy if they’re not cis males; and “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.

That complicity includes the entire Democratic party that

  • actively worked to prevent any progressive candidate from topping the ticket
  • sabotaged progressive candidates for vulnerable Congressional seats only to have the moderates they supported for those seats lose to the Republican incumbents
  • within moments of network news declaring a winner began haranguing against any attempts to move the party toward the left.

If “we are going to run on Medicare for All, defund the police, socialized medicine, we’re not going to win,” House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) proclaimed despite

  • at least half a dozen Democratic centrists losing their seats in the House
  • every single swing seat member who co-sponsored Medicare for All winning re-election
  • only one of the 93 House co-sponsors of the Green New Deal who ran for re-election losing

Because white people in the U.S. will forfeit healthcare, retirement, affordable education, childcare, breathable air, drinkable water, etc. rather than allow BIPOC the same benefits. The people who were comfortable with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal because Black people were deliberately excluded, their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren consistently vote to impoverish themselves rather than improve the living standards of a single BIPOC.

“White Americans are the rich world’s most hostile, ignorant, violent, cruel, and selfish social group — by a very long way,” Umair Hague explains.  “White Americans want America to be a failed state — and that is its fundamental, deep, and long standing problem.”

So, while liberals wring their hands and shake their heads, while they try to understand, while they believe the “long nightmare” (four years isn’t long when your people have been oppressed for four centuries or four millennia) is over because the oligarch was elected instead of the autocrat, the reality is that for anyone who isn’t white, straight, cis, neurotypical, and abled; for all the people who stood in line for hours and hours; for those already at work in Georgia on the runoff elections, the nightmare continues, as it has for centuries.

If* the president-elect takes office, he plans to “work with all my heart with the confidence of the whole people, to win the confidence of all of you,” making it clear that he learned nothing from the previous administration in which he served as vice president about what happens when you put bi-partisanship over getting things done.

He refuses to back programs that eliminate insurance companies as arbitrators over who gets access to health care; has given only lukewarm support to the Green New Deal, which although it might have been meaningful a few years ago, now is in itself inadequate; will do nothing to stop police from murdering BIPOC; and has made it clear he has no intention of mitigating a Supreme Court poised to reverse Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges. The latter is despite

  • the fact that the vast majority of the people who live in this country approve of both women’s bodily autonomy and marriage equality
  • there’s no restriction in the U.S. Constitution on the number of SCOTUS judges
  • five of the nine justices were appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote and confirmed by a senate representing fewer than half the people in the U.S.

The protests will continue despite whoever is in the White House, because the occupant doesn’t really matter to those who are poor, houseless, hungry, BIPOC, LGBTQ2S, immigrant, non-christian, different abled, neurodivergent, etc. (and it’s no coincidence that many of those categories overlap).

The problems in this country that feed white supremacy — racism, patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, misogyny, homomisia, transmisia, Islammisia, xenomisia — are systemic. They are literally built into the foundation (and founding documents) of the U.S. and all attempts to remove them, from the very beginning, have failed.

I am not alone in the belief that 400 years of white supremacy, genocide, colonialism, never-ending wars, planetary destruction, unfettered exploitative capitalism, patriarchy, and enslavement/murder of BIPOC is enough.

The coup* started June 1 when the president ordered the U.S. military to attack civilians exercising their First Amendment rights. Defense Secretary Mark Esper had no problem with that, although he apparently drew a line in the shifting sands wide enough to get himself fired Monday, paving the way for someone with even fewer scruples. Also on Monday, Richard Pilger, the director of the Department of Justice’s elections crime branch, stepped aside after Attorney General William Barr — who has actively been trying to suppress dissent for the past six months by arresting protesters on trumped up (pun intended) federal charges — released a memo making it clear he intends to have the DOJ interfere in the election results. The second U.S. Civil War is already in progress.

Older Black voters who consistently pull the U.S. back from the brink of self-destruction are tired and dying. And the younger ones, who are in the streets now, see no reason to continue the colonialist wars of aggression, extraordinary resource theft, and oppressive racist systems that the rest of the world learns from (e.g. German Nazis).

The reality is that this is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a United States. It’s a bunch of very different states with very different values, and with many value differences within individual states. The GOP, unsatisfied just controlling a bunch of states where not many people live, has been working for decades to force the rest of us to fall into line with its colonialist, patriarchal vision of America circa 1784.

None of this started with the current White House occupant and it won’t end if/when he’s removed from power. The slaughter/incarceration of BIPOC didn’t pause under the previous administration. Children were still separated from their parents at the border. The concentration camps that this administration stuffed full were built before this president took office. The Shelby County v. Holder decision gutting the Voting Rights Act is named after the previous administration’s attorney general for a reason … it was handed down in 2013.

The Affordable Care Act didn’t get health care to BIPOC because it was written to appease insurance companies and then eviscerated by various states. So BIPOC are dying in far greater numbers from COVID because they don’t have access to medical care and because even if they have insurance they’re turned away from hospitals and their symptoms ignored. (Did no one else notice the not-so-subtle shift in the administration’s attitude toward the virus when the numbers came out that more BIPOC were dying than white folks?)

People in the U.S. are houseless. They are starving. The police are beating and murdering them. They are dying for lack of medical care. In much of the world people are drowning because of climate change the U.S. and its fossil fuels companies caused. And the president-elect will not do one damn thing to change any of that.

The biggest difference if he is able to boot the current occupant from the White House? Liberals will blithely brush off their hands as if they had accomplished something when all they did was put some crazy glue on the massive crack opening in the dam.

No Good Cops Still On Force

F.I. Goldhaber1 Comment

After a conversation on Twitter last month, I volunteered to collect examples of “good cops”, both to make them available for reference and to provide a forum where folks could add to the list.

I was reluctant to do so on Twitter, because that would allow any chud, cop apologist, white supremacist (sorry, getting redundant), to hijack the conversation. So, I decided to start the list here where anyone can comment, but I control whether or not those comments get seen (which also allows for anonymously adding to the list).

Unfortunately, all the examples I found of “good cops” — police who reported or tried to stop malfeasance by other cops — are no longer working in law enforcement. They had been killed, fired, suspended, or driven off the force.

Below I’ve listed (in order of the media reports I link to, not necessarily in order of occurrence) 19 “good cops” all of whom suffered repercussions for trying to do the right thing. They represent less than .003 percent of the approximately 697,000 full-time law enforcement officers employed in the United States.

If you know of a cop who, while on the force of a police or sheriff’s department in the United States during this century, spoke out against police brutality; reported another cop for malfeasance; interfered with/reported when a cop violated department policies, broke the law, and/or harmed someone; testified against a cop who was guilty of police brutality or other misconduct and who as a result was fired, killed, or driven off the force, and you have documentation, such as a link to a news stories in a “reputable” publication (which eliminates Faux News, social media, etc.), please share that information in the comments.*

  • Shannon Spalding and Daniel Echeverria suffered “years of ostracism and intimidation at the hands of commanders and fellow officers” of the Chicago Police Department after they “were part of a 2012 investigation which led to charges against” two officers who were accused of stealing proceeds from drug dealers. Spalding and Echeverria filed a federal lawsuit because “‘My life, my safety my freedom was threatened,’ Spalding told NBC 5 Investigates. ‘I was subjected to daily harassment.'”
  • Curt Stansbury was fired by the Wilmington (North Carolina) Police Department after sending a hostile workplace environment complaint to a city official. “I told him that rookies were being hazed and pressured to quit. I informed him that divisions were not communicating with each other and that the communication was at an all time low and that is cause of some of the violent crime issues.”
  • Adrian Schoolcraft was forcibly hospitalized in the psychiatric ward at Jamaica Hospital by the New York City Police Department after recording conversations at the 81st Precinct which documented corruption and abuse within that precinct. He started recording those conversations after “he came to believe that the NYPD’s obsession with statistics was driving a wedge between police officers and the community”. He was suspended and harassed until, unable to get anyone in the NYPD to investigate his misconduct reports, he went public. The information on the tapes resulted in a series of articles in the Village Voice.
  • Andrea Heath was demoted to trainee status, put on disability retirement, and driven to suicide by Desert Hot Springs police officers who retaliated against her for cooperating with an FBI investigation into use of excessive force. She “saw many Desert Hot Springs (California) officers ‘falsely arrest, beat, tase, pepper-spray and otherwise torture’ detainees and arrestees, according to court documents.”
  • Max Seifert was forced into early retirement by the Kansas City, Kansas Police Department after investigating a road-rage incident and finding that a Kansas City man, Barron Bowling, was the victim of excessive force from a Drug Enforcement Agent and testifying for the defense when Bowling was falsely charged with felony criminal damage to property. “Seifert was shunned, subjected to gossip and defamation by his police colleagues and treated as a pariah”. It should be noted that the DEA agent, Tim McCue, was promoted to a recruiter for the agency, despite an $833,250 jury award against him for the injuries he inflicted on Bowling and a Federal judge’s opinion that “much of McCue’s testimony in the case lacked credibility”. Meanwhile, the retaliation against Seifert followed him to a civilian job with the Wyandotte County Sheriff’s Office.
  • Christopher Dorner was stripped of his badge by the Los Angeles Police Department after reporting his training officer for kicking a houseless man in a misuse of force, went berserk as a result, and was hunted down by law enforcement.
  • Laura Schook was fired by the New Albany (Indiana) Police Department Merit Commission after she informed the Merit Commission of “serious criminal conduct by members of this department, an alleged corrupt police administration and facilitation of a discriminatory and hostile work environment”. Of course, the “report issued in the case found no wrongdoing because the “alleged offenders were allowed to investigate themselves”.
  • Shanna Lopez was terminated by the Dallas Police Department the after she mentioned illegal activity by her training officer, David Kuttner, to another trainer. Kuttner, who “came under scrutiny several times”, committed suicide after he was finally arrested, nine years later, for sexual assault.
  • Joe Crystal resigned from the Baltimore City Police Department after he was harassed and threatened and his career destroyed, because he blew the whistle after witnessing an off-duty cop brutally beat a handcuffed suspect, a detective covering it up “with a police report full of lies”, and his sergeant approving the whole thing. “Police in Baltimore have rallied around cops who have killed or beaten suspects, cops facing criminal charges, and cops who turn a blind eye to misconduct. But one thing some Baltimore police couldn’t tolerate was a ‘snitch.'”
  • Sean Gannon was fired by the Boston Police Department after taking evidence to the FBI about a colleague who framed innocent black teens and fabricated evidence in a “gruesome murder case” and was guilty of at least one case of sexual assault that the department helped cover up. The colleague, Trent Holland, retired after an on-camera appearance led to his identification by the victim as her rapist when she was a minor, 14 years previously. “Holland has a long history of prevailing against complaints of official wrongdoing.”
  • Stephen Mader was fired by the Weirton (West Virginia) Police Department for refusing to shoot an emotionally disturbed, suicidal man during a domestic disturbance. Another officer fatally shot the man “minutes later and within seconds of arriving at the scene”. In addition, the city punished Mader through a campaign of press conferences, misinformation, and falsehoods about his performance. “To tell a police officer, when in doubt either shoot to kill, or get fired, is a choice that no police officer should ever have to make and is a message that is wrong and should never be sent.”
  • Matt Swanson took concerns about a detective’s “gross misconduct”, including ignoring child sex abuse allegations and making racist comments about crime victims, to his supervisors. Instead of investigating the detective, the Clackamas County (Oregon) Sheriff’s Office “supervisors created a hostile work environment” for Swanson.
  • Isaac Lambert was removed from the Chicago Police Department’s detective division and reassigned to a patrol shift as retaliation after he refused to approve a false investigatory report covering up the 2017 officer-involved shooting of an unarmed teen. “Officers who try to do the right thing are not only not protected, but retaliated against.”
  • Sean Suiter was murdered by the Baltimore Police Department the day before he was scheduled to testify in a federal case against eight officers of the Baltimore Gun Trace Task Force. “The Baltimore Police Commissioner was quick to rule out any foul play” and months later police “concluded that Suiter’s cause of death was not murder after all — it was suicide.” The Baltimore City Police sergeant who led the investigation, James Lloyd, was charged with kidnapping and extortion involving a home improvement project several years later.
  • Cariol Horne was fired (one year short of qualifying for her pension) by the Buffalo Police Department for intervening when a colleague had a suspect in a chokehold. “The message was sent that you don’t cross that blue line and so some officers — many officers don’t.” Edited 4/19/21 to add: Thirteen years later, the New York State Supreme Court vacated a previous ruling upholding Horne’s firing and she now will receive her pension as well as back pay and benefits through August 4, 2010. According to the judge, “the current societal view toward the use of chokeholds and physical force in effecting arrests along with the City of Buffalo’s expression of specific disapproval of such force by legislative enactment, has altered the landscape”.
  • Florissa Fuentes was fired by the Springfield (Massachusetts) Police Department after she expressed support on her private Instagram account for her niece who attended a Black Lives Matter rally. “There’s a lot of officers who are afraid to speak up about this issue and don’t want to be targeted as well.”
  • Ja’Quay Williams was fired by the Greensboro (North Carolina) Police Department after he made a TikTok video in which he said “I am disgusted with the things that happened in Minneapolis. Pure and point-blank, things could have went way different. At the end of the day, let’s talk facts: Guy’s on the ground. He’s laying on his stomach. He had handcuffs on. It’s four of y’all, one of him. Four of y’all, one of him. Who has control of the situation? It’s not much one person could do against four people.” In the video, “Williams is wearing his uniform and is seated in his patrol car, but doesn’t identify himself as a Greensboro police officer and the agency isn’t identifiable on his badge.”
  • Austreberto Gonzalez is on leave from Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department “and in fear for his life” after testifying about deputies who “have matching tattoos and belong to a violent clique called the Executioners”.
  • Tom Gissler quit his position as an Atlanta police officer rather than charge Black renters with violations so they could be kicked out of their Section 8 housing by an apartment building owner who wanted to empty his building, tear it down, and replace it with expensive apartments. As a result, Gissler was forced to leave the city because, in retribution, false reports alleging child abuse were filed against his family with DFCS as well as a false allegation of animal abuse. He stated that “APD is filing random charges and administrative punishments around the department to discourage the hemorrhages in staffing. It has worked and people are quieting and hiding. It effectively stops officers from transferring or retiring if they are under investigation.”
  • Liani Reyna, the first gay Latina woman assigned to the Portland Police Department’s Special Emergency Reaction Team (SERT) suffered “vicious retribution”, blacklisting, and was denied work opportunities when she raised concerns on numerous occasions about inappropriate conduct, including excessive use of force, lying, sexist and appalling hazing, and other criminal conduct. She was “marked as a troublemaker who could not be relied on” The officer misconduct “was swept under the carpet and the offenders escaped discipline.” Those few SERT officers who were disciplined received weak punishment such as letters of reprimand. (Added 12/16/20)
  • Sgt. Javier Esqueda shared footage with a reporter showing how his colleagues slapped a handcuffed Black man in medical distress, restricted his airway, shoved a baton in his mouth, and drove him to the police station instead of hospital hours before his death and then tried to cover it up. Prosecutors cleared the cops caught on camera torturing the dying man “of any criminal wrongdoing.” Esqueda on the other hand, now faces up to 20 years prison for releasing the footage and was expelled from the Joliet Illinois Police Union. (Added 11/17/21)

*Comments aren’t visible until I approve them so please also note whether or not you want to be credited and with what name/handle. As long as I can verify the link, information can be added to the list anonymously. (For now, I’m not including corrections officers, former officers who file report after they leave the force, or members of police oversight boards.)