A Blog from David Crump
Mehdi Hasa is a British journalist who wears many different hats. I always 
try to listen to him when I can. Over the years he has done reporting for the British version of the Huffington Post, Al Jazeeera (which I also watch regularly), The Intercept, and MSNBC.
He recently did on editorial on American fascism that I believe is worth watching and digesting. I hope you will listen to what he has to say:
Adolph Reed is emeritus professor of political science at the University of
Pennsylvania. He recently appeared with journalists Katie Halper and Matt Taibbi on their pod/video cast Useful Idiots.
Taibbi asks Prof. Reed to discuss the best-selling book White Fragility. Reed then expands his horizons and places the book in the broader context of the “anti-racist” movement currently at work in this country.
Reed discusses ways in which much of the energy invested in liberal anti-racism efforts become a shallow distraction
from the far more significant underlying structural issues of class division, neo-liberal economics, and the bi-partisan political hierarchy defending the status quo.
I happen to agree 100% with the professor.
Here is the link to his interview. He begins speaking at about the 57:40 mark. I encourage you to take a listen.
Officer A. Cab has written a powerful autobiographical article at Medium confessing and repenting of his 10 years as a cop.
He describes, from the inside, why police “reform” will never work. He also makes the argument for why “defunding” (though that word is misleading and unhelpful) the police is essential if we hope to see real change.
I hope you will read the entire piece. I have excerpted select sections below. You can find the entire article here. It is worth your time.
I was a police officer for nearly ten years and I was a bastard. We all were.
This essay has been kicking around in my head for years now and I’ve never felt confident enough to write it. It’s a time in my life I’m ashamed of. It’s a time that I hurt people and, through inaction, allowed others to be hurt.
——
While every cop’s individual biases come into play, it’s the profession itself that is toxic, and it starts from day 1 of training.
Every police academy is different but all of them share certain features: taught by old cops, run like a paramilitary bootcamp, strong emphasis on protecting yourself more than anyone else. The majority of my time in the academy was spent doing aggressive physical training and watching video after video after video of police officers being murdered on duty.
——-
Once police training has – through repetition, indoctrination, and violent spectacle – promised officers that everyone in the world is out to kill them, the next lesson is that your partners are the only people protecting you.
——
The question is this: did I need a gun and sweeping police powers to help the average person on the average night? The answer is no. When I was doing my best work as a cop, I was doing mediocre work as a therapist or a social worker.
——
Police officers do not protect and serve people, they protect and serve the status quo, “polite society”, and private property. Using the incremental mechanisms of the status quo will never reform the police because the status quo relies on police violence to exist.
Over the past few years, The Intercept has produced a series of investigative articles covering questions of police brutality, budgeting, and reform in America.
Most recently Alice Speri, Alleen Brown, and Mara Hvistendahl have written “The George Floyd Killing in Minneapolis Exposes the Failures of Police Reform” giving greater depth to a point I made here.
Below is an excerpt.
“Reform is not the answer, we’ve been trying it for decades, and as you can see,
we’re just not getting anywhere,” he said. “We need a new paradigm of policing in the United States. It needs to be completely dismantled and reconstructed, not changing a policy here or there.”…
…“And what does it say about the limits of reform that the city of Minneapolis and the Minneapolis police department could be part of a multi-year, multimillion-dollar national project to enhance police community relations, and after all of that, here we are?”
After years of investment in improved policing with no results to show for it, “the conversation has changed,” she added. “There’s much more of a public awareness and conversation about abolition, and what that means and what that might look like. … I think people were radicalized by Jamar Clark and Philando Castile. And then they saw the contradictions around Justine Damond.”
Montgomery, the director of Black Visions Collective, said that organizers are tired of just calling for prosecutions. “We’re moving past a conversation around prosecuting the police and individual officers — that doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t prevent another Philando Castile or George Floyd,” said Montgomery. “To me and many of my comrades, police reform is irrelevant.”
Some demands have shifted to community control. Organizer Sam Martinez told The Intercept that the Coalition for Justice 4 Jamar wants a board similar to a city council or school board to run the police: controlling its budget, approving union contracts, and deciding disciplinary actions. Martinez says the board would have to be fundamentally different from previous civilian police review councils that law enforcement has mostly ignored.
You can read the entire article here.
Umair Haque thinks the answer to that question is Yes.
His article is entitled, “It’s Not that I’m Negative, America Really is Screwed.” I am not an economist, but my inclination is to agree.
Here is an excerpt:
The economics of American collapse say that it’s probably too late to fix America. It’s probable that this is the new normal. Chaos, decline, incompetence, malice, poverty, hopelessness, despair.
Let me explain, as clearly as I can.
You can see, right about now, that America is what political scientists call a failed state. A President who tells people to drink bleach during a pandemic. 90,000 dead, of which 90% are needless. A society that’s not able to provide basics for it’s citizens anymore. A nation in which income, savings, life expectancy, happiness, trust are all in free-fall. This is the stuff of epic social collapse.
Now, the reason that America collapsed is straightforward. Americans never invested in building expansive social systems, unlike Europe. Systems to provide healthcare, retirement, childcare, finance, and so forth.
The result has been twofold. One, the average American now goes without these things. That’s because they’re largely unavailable. For example, the fresh food that I can get on any block in Europe is simply absent in huge chunks of the States. You buy processed food, or you don’t get food. The same is true of many, many things, like, say, education, or income. You don’t have a job with guarantees and protections like in Canada or Europe. You have a lower quality — not just quantity — of income.
Two, the the average American pays prices that the rest of the world considers absolutely absurd — because they are — for the very same things. Having a child? That’ll be $50K, thank you. An operation? That’ll be more than a house. Want to educate a kid? There go your life savings. Want a few fresh apples? That’ll be ten times the price Canadians or Europeans pay. These things — the basics of life — are eminently affordable in the rest of the rich world. In America, though, they cost more than the average person can afford.
How do I know that? Because the average American now dies in debt…
You can read the entire article here.
Over at the Medium website, Francis Taylor details the many ways that corona virus has exposed the deepening chasm separating the rich from everyone else in America.
His article is “COVID 19 Has Exposed the Class Divide.” Below is an excerpt.
Throughout the pandemic, American billionaires have continued to make fabulous profits. As Tommy Beer of Forbes reports, their total net worth has increased by more than $400 billion since March 18. While the poorest struggle simply to survive, the rich see their fortunes grow. And some have even show their willingness to throw workers into the thresher of capitalism. Both Tilman Fertitta and Lloyd Blankfein have called for the economy to re-open, knowing full well that they will not be exposed to the worst of the risks.
But special mention has to go to Jeff Bezos and his Amazon empire. The massive conglomerate, having provided an extra $2 an hour for the warehouse workers braving a pandemic, now plans to end the increase by the close of May.
It should be noted that the additional wage has been in place for less than three months.
This terminated increase follows Amazon’s decision to scrap unlimited unpaid leave for workers who fear the Coronavirus and its dismissal of Christian Smalls after he spearheaded a walkout at their Staten Island Warehouse over safety concerns. Although the company maintains that Smalls and other protesting workers were fired for violating internal policies, Tim Bray, a former vice president at Amazon Web Services, avers that past workers have been “turfed” for whistleblowing. He also quit the company earlier this May, citing these punitive measures as the main reason.
It would seem then that Amazon is sending a clear message to its workers: the lot of you are interchangeable cogs, and if you squeak with acrimony you can always be replaced.
You can read the entire article here.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said that “riots are the language of the unheard,” because rioting is the only way for the oppressed to grab the oppressor’s attention.
I can’t help but notice that those who are comfortable, content with the
status quo, and not at risk of being brutalized or murdered by the police, are also first in line to condemn rioting.
Let’s face it. A white person, especially a wealthy, white person, is rarely threatened by police violence – unless you are someone like Jeffrey Epstein who threatens to expose the hypocrisy and corruption of other rich, white people.
The hysterical pearl-clutching we are now witnessing from comfortable, white citizens condemning the riots in Minneapolis is the socially acceptable way of condoning police brutality.
After all, these commentators (like Tucker Carlson) have considerable excess energy stored up from their lack of protesting (much less rioting) against the grotesque acts of excessive force used by police as they regularly murder black people in this country.
Members of the white establishment are free to jog down their streets without fear. Whereas, black joggers are always at risk of being shot by white vigilantes, racists who know they can probably get away with murdering a black person (unless a video of their crime happens to go viral).
The video of George Floyd’s murder shows not one but three police officers kneeling on Mr. Floyd’s passive body, pinning him to the ground. His hands
are secured behind his back as he repeats his last words, “I can’t breathe.”
The cop looking towards the camera is unmoved, ignoring the dying man’s pleas for help, for just enough room to breathe. His conscience is unfazed as he literally snuffs the life out of Mr. Floyd.
It’s not the first time America has heard a black man’s suffocating request for breath. Nor will it be the last. At least, not as long as there are public officials like this Mississippi mayor who defended the police by saying, “If you can say you ‘can’t breathe, then you are breathing.”
Prosecuting the cops involved is just another sop thrown from the master’s table.
Yes, prosecution and conviction need to happen. But America’s violent, over-the-top policing problems are not due to a few bad apples. No, the bad apples are spilling out of rotten barrels.
Don’t forget that the cop pressing his knee into Mr. Floyd’s neck had been reported for the excessive use of force numerous times. Yet, no action was ever taken to discipline him, to address his misbehavior, or to evaluate his penchant for cruelty, much less to get him off the streets.
The state prosecutor is already talking about the extenuating circumstances that may work in the policeman’s favor when the case finally goes to trial.
Week after week we see the class-based, racist, violent culture of America’s law enforcement establishment. All of it testimony to the fact that our police academies, training, and supervisory mechanisms are all broken. In fact, the entire policing establishment of this country needs to be torn down to the ground and rebuilt from scratch.
Our police are too militarized. They are obviously trained to protect themselves first instead of serving their communities.
Too often they approach the public as it we are the enemy – an attitude
entrenched by America’s ludicrous cross-training with the Israeli military, an army which exists only to pulverize Palestinians. It’s no wonder that pulverizing people of color has become a weekly news item for us.
The well-known “solid blue wall” of uniformed unity, where all cops are expected to cover for other cops no matter their crimes, weeds out the honest men and women who refuse to conform to the prevalent culture of might makes right.
What else can we conclude but that there is an element in police culture that condones sadism.
Let’s be honest. Power is intoxicating. Holding power over others can be an elixir to certain pathological personalities. Giving a gun and a badge to someone with an authoritarian personality, twisted by psychopathic tendencies, is a recipe for policing disaster.
Put that person in an environment where his love of control and leanings towards violence are rarely if ever rebuked by his peers (because they have been weeded out as unfit weaklings), and you have what we see in America today.
The police murder people in our streets with seeming impunity.
God’s people need to wake up.
The comfortable white church must shake off the scales of its class-based slumber. The police don’t look at us and assume that we must be criminals, unless perhaps you are among the white under-class struggling to survive. Whereas, that is exactly how they look at people of color, and the poor of all colors, who dare to get too uppity.
Our black, Latino, and Native brothers and sisters live in a completely different world. Frankly, had I been born and raised in their world, I probably would be rioting, too.
Now is a time for white leaders, especially white leaders in the Christian church, to stand up and shout like hell, to rock the boat and insist, not just on prosecutions against murderous cops, but on a complete overhaul of the American system of policing, as it currently exists.
The problem is not a few bad apples but a nation filled with rotten barrels, all spilling rotten, racist, violent thugs into our streets cloaked in blue uniforms. (No, I am not describing all police officers. But don’t evade the point by resorting to straw-man bluster.)
Now is not the time for white Christian leaders to condemn rioting.
Now is a time to repent for our decades of inattention, while we ignored our fellow citizens of color, refusing to take their stories seriously.
Now is the time to listen to the stories of non-white Americans and to confess our self-centeredness that says, “If it doesn’t happen in my neighborhood, then it ain’t my problem.”
Except, wherever the Image of God is being oppressed in this world, it IS the Christian’s problem.
Whenever flagrant, systemic injustice digs its privileged knees into the exposed necks of people loved by God – in a supposedly “Christian country,” no less! – God’s real people must see our national illness as the church’s problem to address.
No, now is not the time to condemn rioting.
Now is the time to condemn the establishment’s war against the poor, the weak, the sick, the powerless, and the marginalized.
Now is the time loudly to condemn social injustice. Now is the time to condemn the power-brokers who exploit their power at the expense of the powerless.
Now is the time for Christian leaders of all colors to stand and shout together, “No more. We demand change. We demand justice for all. And we demand it right now.”
Now is the time for Christian leaders blessed with the expertise, ability, access, and opportunity to roll up their sleeves and work for a more equal, more just society.
The time for peace and quiet is loooooooong gone.
Investigative journalist Sharon Lerner has an important article at The Intercept explaining how U.S. 
pharmaceutical companies, enabled by the recent Corona Relief Bill approved by Congress, are planning to make a killing (pun intended) during the covid19 pandemic. It is entitled, “Big Pharma Prepares to Profit From the Coronavirus.”
Warning: prepare to be disturbed, very disturbed.
Here is an excerpt:
“’Pharmaceutical companies view Covid-19 as a once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity,’ said Gerald Posner, author of ‘Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America.’ The world needs pharmaceutical products, of course. For the new coronavirus outbreak, in particular, we need treatments and vaccines and, in the U.S., tests. Dozens of companies are now vying to make them.
“’They’re all in that race,’ said Posner, who described the potential payoffs for winning the race as huge. The global crisis ‘will potentially be a blockbuster for the industry in terms of sales and profits,’ he said, adding that ‘the worse the pandemic gets, the higher their eventual profit.’
“The ability to make money off of pharmaceuticals is already uniquely large in the U.S., which lacks the basic price controls other countries have, giving drug companies more freedom over setting prices for their products than anywhere else in the world. During the current crisis, pharmaceutical makers may have even more leeway than usual because of language industry lobbyists inserted into an $8.3 billion coronavirus spending package, passed last week, to maximize their profits from the pandemic.
“Initially, some lawmakers had tried to ensure that the federal government would limit how much pharmaceutical companies could reap from vaccines and treatments for the new coronavirus that they developed with the use of public funding. In February, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., and other House members wrote to Trump pleading that he ‘ensure that any vaccine or treatment developed with U.S. taxpayer dollars be accessible, available and affordable,’ a goal they said couldn’t be met ‘if pharmaceutical corporations are given authority to set prices and determine distribution, putting profit-making interests ahead of health priorities.’
“When the coronavirus funding was being negotiated, Schakowsky tried again, writing to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on March 2 that it would be ‘unacceptable if the rights to produce and market that vaccine were subsequently handed over to a pharmaceutical manufacturer through an exclusive license with no conditions on pricing or access, allowing the company to charge whatever it would like and essentially selling the vaccine back to the public who paid for its development.’
“But many Republicans opposed adding language to the bill that would restrict the industry’s ability to profit . . .
“The truth is that profiting off public investment is also business as usual for the pharmaceutical industry. Since the 1930s, the National Institutes of Health has put some $900 billion into research that drug companies then used to patent brand-name medications, according to Posner’s calculations. Every single drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration between 2010 and 2016 involved science funded with tax dollars through the NIH, according to the advocacy group Patients for Affordable Drugs. Taxpayers spent more than $100 billion on that research.”
Read the entire article here.
Matt Stoller is the Director of Research at the American Economic Liberties 
Project. He is the author of the Simon and Schuster book Goliath: The Hundred Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy, which Business Insider called “one of the year’s best books on how to rethink capitalism and improve the economy.” He also worked for a member of the Financial Services Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives during the 2008 financial crisis. (See his full C.V. at the American Economic Liberties Project).
Mr. Stoller was recently interviewed by Democracy Now where he critiqued the Congressional Pandemic Relief Bill. He describes not only the American pandemic response under Trump, but the formulation of this “relief” bill a “total system failure.”
Here are a few excerpts from that interview. You can watch or read the entire interview here.
“Well, I mean, it’s not really a $2 trillion bill. It’s more like a $6 trillion to $10 trillion bill. So, one of the reasons you can tell that the bill is packed with corporate goodies is that, you know, Congress is debating and trying to figure out, oh, you know, is it $2 trillion, a bunch of money for hospitals or money for cities, and meanwhile, a couple days ago, Larry Kudlow is on a press conference and says, “Actually, this is a $6 trillion bill.” And it’s like, how does a bill go from $2 trillion to $6 trillion without anyone really noticing? And the answer is, there’s a bunch of stuff in there — and, you know, there are people on Wall Street chattering about how it’s actually going to be $10 trillion, because, you know, what’s another four? And that’s how you know that the bill is just packed with stuff for Wall Street, for large monopolists.
“And it’s done through a variety of opaque slush funds — the Federal Reserve, the FDIC guarantees a bank debt. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that, you know, some of us who worked in the financial crisis noticed, paid attention to, said, “Oh, that’s where they’re stealing all the money.” And so there’s a bunch of stuff in there that’s going to get to Boeing and airlines, that we know about, has been reported. There’s also a bunch of stuff that’s going to get to the hedge fund guys that are bunkering down in their underground wine caves or whatever. And meanwhile, the stuff that we need, for normal people — the ventilators, the unemployment — you know, that’s going to dribble out. Small business is going to dribble out.
“And so, what you’re going to see is the $4 trillion to $6 trillion to $8 trillion of basically no-cost or low-cost guaranteed credit is going to be used by Citibank, JPMorgan, and then any big monopolist or large company that can get access to it, to buy up their competitors and buy up small business, who are obviously now in a really distressed state because they don’t have any revenue. So that’s what’s going to happen.
“And all of this stuff that’s happening, the handover of power to Wall Street, is happening under the really cynical guise of helping people in a pandemic. A lot of this money is going to go to — some of the money is going to go to hospitals. Some of the money is going to go to help people in the pandemic. So there’s some good stuff here. That, of course, is going to dribble out on the rickety infrastructure of the Small Business Administration and unemployment insurance. Our government has been hollowed out, so this stuff isn’t going to get out quickly.
“If you have — basically, if you have an account at a large bank, if you’re a wealthy investor like Goldman Sachs, there’s a whole set of programs that you can get access to at the Federal Reserve — at least this was the case in 2008, and the Fed says they’re setting up similar structures — where you can borrow from the Fed, and you can gamble with it. And then, if you lose — right? — in your gambling, then the Fed will — you don’t have to pay the loan back to the Fed. So, that’s one of the — you know, and this is one of the programs they say, “Oh, we need to provide liquidity in the markets,” or various other really super boring things that sound like — you kind of go to sleep when you’re like, “Oh, all these alphabet soup programs and all this kind of jargon.” But that’s really what it is. It’s just, you know, “heads, I win; tails, you lose.” And that’s a lot of what these programs are.
“I mean, the Fed has already hired BlackRock, which is one of the world’s largest asset managers, to manage this multitrillion-dollar bailout, and they’ve said that BlackRock is going to be allowed to participate in the bailout. So they’re running the bailout, and they’re participating in the bailout. They’re already stealing, before the vote, the bill has even passed the House.”
David Dayen is executive editor at The American Prospect. Read his article
from yesterday explaining the hidden — and horrendous — details in the pending Congressional “relief” bill slithering its way through Congress.
This bill is a good example of the malicious ways in which corporate capitalists exploit moments of national crisis. Naomi Klein’s important book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, is now essential reading for anyone hoping to understand the economic times in which we
live.
Dayen details some of the ways that Disaster Capitalists, corporate vultures haunting the halls of power, eager to pick over the bones of America’s corona victims, are exploiting the current pandemic to further enrich themselves, just as they did in 2018.
Human nature never changes. As in ancient Greece, the haves are doing what they can for themselves, while the have-nots are suffering as they always do.
Below is an excerpt from the article “Unsanitized: Bailouts, A Tradition Unlike Any Other.”
“This is a robbery in progress. And it’s not a bailout for the coronavirus. It’s a bailout for twelve years of corporate irresponsibility that made these companies so fragile that a few weeks of disruption would destroy them. The short-termism and lack of capital reserves funneled record profits into a bathtub of cash for investors. That’s who’s being made whole, financiers and the small slice of the public that owns more than a trivial amount of stocks. In fact they’ve already been made whole; yesterday Wall Street got the word that they’d be saved and stocks and bonds went wild. BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is running these bailout programs for the Fed, and could explicitly profit if the Fed buys its funds, which it probably will.
“This is a rubber-stamp on an unequal system that has brought terrible hardship to the majority of America. The people get a $1,200 means-tested payment and a little wage insurance for four months. Corporations get a transformative amount of play money to sustain their system and wipe out the competition…
“This bill is an outrageous betrayal, a testament to how power works and saves itself. And Congress is about to put itself on the hook for it. Schumer has the Senate under his thumb, and he praised this bill at 2am this morning, so that’s a done deal. Any House member could deny unanimous consent and stop this, but that would require getting to Washington, forcing everyone else back to Washington in the middle of a pandemic, and delay what is needed (if temporary) relief for everyday people. I doubt anyone will do it. Pelosi purposefully put this in place before turning to remote voting to make such an action toxic…”
Read the entire piece here.
