US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1911

On April 30 2015 12:15 farvacola wrote:

Tell me, outside of the political process, who is tasked with making sure that allegations of state and local discriminatory practices on the part of courts and prosecutors are investigated and dealt with? Here's a hint: it isn't a local office.

On April 30 2015 10:54 xDaunt wrote:

Call it a dodge if you want, but it is not flippant. What's going on in Baltimore is a problem of Baltimore's own making. I certainly don't feel any responsibility for the city's dysfunction, and I absolutely resent being accused of racism whenever the masturacebators decide to take these local incidents national and blame whitey for the woes of the black community. That this narrative has emerged once again is particularly offensive in this instance given that Baltimore is a city largely run by black people (and by enlightened democrats since 1967). Of course, this inconvenient fact would never get in the way of the agenda of someone like GreenHorizons or YoureFired.

On April 30 2015 12:28 YoureFired wrote:


Would you deny that there are other cities experiencing the same problems as Baltimore? The police brutality in New York City, Los Angeles, Long Beach, Atlanta, Savannah, Chicago, Cleveland, Austin, St. Louis, Ferguson... is not linked?

I stopped commenting for a while because of how exhausting it was. I feel like you all are reading a different set of information than I am. It's not just police brutality either; racism is so entrenched and institutionalized, just not in the ways we used to think of as "racism." Saying the n-word is rightfully no longer acceptable, but few people are concerned at the fact that Black men are six times more likely than white men to go to jail.

Criminal justice and law and order sound differently for different people. To you, it might mean security and freedom to move without fear. To communities of color, it means disproportionate levels of surveillance and law enforcement. Black people account for 14% of drug usage but are 37% of those arrested for drug usage. Black teenagers are also twenty-one times more likely than white teenagers to be shot by police. You might see these rates of crime and punishment and think "well, they must just be more crime-prone."

However, you need to look deeper. Why are Black people stuck in some of the most impoverished and underprivileged areas of the country? The American Dream says anything is possible if you try hard enough... right?

Slavery sucked. Let's please agree on this. SLAVERY SUUUUUCKEEEEEEEDDDD. It brought over millions of people of African descent and forced them to work and degraded them to chattel. Notice I'm not blaming anybody who's in this conversation; the people who performed this form of American slavery are long dead. However, the effects of this enslavement have been very, very, very persistent.

The average Black American has 1/8th of the wealth of the average White American. Even when controlling for income, Black Americans have 1/2 of the wealth compared to White Americans. This is because the accumulation of wealth that for many White Americans can be traced back to before the creation of America to Europe only just began (with few exceptions) after Emancipation. Black Americans descended from slaves have, at their best, only had 150 years to accumulate wealth. Being a slave also tends to reduce your general ability to generate wealth because your masters tend to not care about education, health, or really anything about you. Poverty is difficult to get out of when the entirety of your family has literally no property except for their own bodies. Slavery and racism might just be in some people's history books, but others feel their effects every day.



But apparently wanting racial justice is just "an agenda" and calling out institutional racism is "blame whitey."

On April 30 2015 12:18 IgnE wrote:


The constant references to MLK by white people trying to justify their stance is a bit tiresome at this point. MLK's brand of non-violence (which depended upon a violent response from the police for its efficacy) doesn't exist in a vacuum. It was the preferable alternative to the more militant groups forming and protesting at the time, and so owed its success in some large part to the louder and more unrepentant leaders who made MLK look like a good option to those in power. Those leaders were worried about the growing social unrest and undoubtedly viewed MLK as a man who could compromise, some would say to the detriment of his ultimate aims, in order to bring about a return to the status quo as quickly as possible. It's completely off the mark to ignore the cultural context of time, which involved Vietnam, the cold war, and tensions with China, and appeal to some sort of Disney-fied version of MLK in order to condemn the rioters.

I think the South in the 60s is comparable (not identical, obviously) in some ways to Baltimore, but particularly in the specific context, upon which you have not elaborated, of the rioters in Baltimore garnering the attention of the country at large. Why this bothers you is still a mystery to me. Why this doesn't seem like a natural outgrowth of a sentiment that has pinged back and forth across dozens of cities in this country is also a mystery. Before the riots had even stopped there was a news story about an unarmed man in Detroit being shot by an immigration officer. I don't think many people, if any, would say this is just about Baltimore.

On April 30 2015 12:28 YoureFired wrote:


Would you deny that there are other cities experiencing the same problems as Baltimore? The police brutality in New York City, Los Angeles, Long Beach, Atlanta, Savannah, Chicago, Cleveland, Austin, St. Louis, Ferguson... is not linked?

I stopped commenting for a while because of how exhausting it was. I feel like you all are reading a different set of information than I am. It's not just police brutality either; racism is so entrenched and institutionalized, just not in the ways we used to think of as "racism." Saying the n-word is rightfully no longer acceptable, but few people are concerned at the fact that Black men are six times more likely than white men to go to jail.

Criminal justice and law and order sound differently for different people. To you, it might mean security and freedom to move without fear. To communities of color, it means disproportionate levels of surveillance and law enforcement. Black people account for 14% of drug usage but are 37% of those arrested for drug usage. Black teenagers are also twenty-one times more likely than white teenagers to be shot by police. You might see these rates of crime and punishment and think "well, they must just be more crime-prone."

However, you need to look deeper. Why are Black people stuck in some of the most impoverished and underprivileged areas of the country? The American Dream says anything is possible if you try hard enough... right?

Slavery sucked. Let's please agree on this. SLAVERY SUUUUUCKEEEEEEEDDDD. It brought over millions of people of African descent and forced them to work and degraded them to chattel. Notice I'm not blaming anybody who's in this conversation; the people who performed this form of American slavery are long dead. However, the effects of this enslavement have been very, very, very persistent.

The average Black American has 1/8th of the wealth of the average White American. Even when controlling for income, Black Americans have 1/2 of the wealth compared to White Americans. This is because the accumulation of wealth that for many White Americans can be traced back to before the creation of America to Europe only just began (with few exceptions) after Emancipation. Black Americans descended from slaves have, at their best, only had 150 years to accumulate wealth. Being a slave also tends to reduce your general ability to generate wealth because your masters tend to not care about education, health, or really anything about you. Poverty is difficult to get out of when the entirety of your family has literally no property except for their own bodies. Slavery and racism might just be in some people's history books, but others feel their effects every day.



But apparently wanting racial justice is just "an agenda" and calling out institutional racism is "blame whitey."

Public companies in the United States would be required to disclose how the pay of their top executives squares with their overall performance under new rules proposed on Wednesday.

The draft measure by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sparked sharp divisions among the agency's five commissioners, with its two Republicans saying it is too prescriptive, overly broad and should not be a top priority on the agency's rule-making agenda.

The proposal calls for companies to provide a table in their proxy statements that contains the total compensation actually paid to their principal executives, the total shareholder return on an annual basis, and the shareholder return on an annual basis of peer group companies, among other things.

Companies would also have to provide details on the average compensation paid out for other named executive officers, such as chief financial officers.

Large and mid-sized companies would have to provide the disclosures for the past five fiscal years, and smaller companies would need to offer three fiscal years worth of data.

Smaller companies would not have to provide a peer group comparison.

"It should make it easier for shareholders to locate, understand, and analyze executive compensation information before they have to vote," said SEC Commissioner Kara Stein, a Democrat, who supports the plan.

The SEC's plan is part of a package of executive compensation disclosures required by the 2010 Dodd-Frank reform law.

A prisoner sharing a police transport van with Freddie Gray told investigators that he could hear Gray “banging against the walls” of the vehicle and believed that he “was intentionally trying to injure himself,” according to a police document obtained by The Washington Post.

The prisoner, who is currently in jail, was separated from Gray by a metal partition and could not see him. His statement is contained in an application for a search warrant, which is sealed by the court. The Post was given the document under the condition that the prisoner not be named because the person who provided it feared for the inmate’s safety.

The document, written by a Baltimore police investigator, offers the first glimpse of what might have happened inside the van. It is not clear whether any additional evidence backs up the prisoner’s version, which is just one piece of a much larger probe.

Gray was found unconscious in the wagon when it arrived at a police station on April 12. The 25-year-old had suffered a spinal injury and died a week later, touching off waves of protests across Baltimore, capped by a riot Monday in which hundreds of angry residents torched buildings, looted stores and pelted police officers with rocks.

Police have said they do not know whether Gray was injured during the arrest or during his 30-minute ride in the van. Local police and the U.S. Justice Department both have launched investigations of Gray’s death.

Baltimore police said they will wrap up their investigation Friday and turn the results over to the Baltimore state’s attorney’s office, which will decide whether to seek an indictment. Six police officers, including a lieutenant and a sergeant, have been suspended...

Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts has admitted flaws in the way officers handled Gray after they chased him through a West Baltimore housing project and arrested him. They said they later found a switchblade clipped to the inside of his pants. Batts has said officers repeatedly ignored Gray’s pleas for medical help and failed to secure him with a safety belt or harness in the back of the transport van.

Batts has said Gray stood on one leg and climbed into the van on his own.

The van driver stopped three times while transporting Gray to a booking center, the first to put him in leg irons. Batts said the officer driving the van described Gray as “irate.” The search warrant application says Gray “continued to be combative in the police wagon.”

The driver made a second stop, five minutes later, and asked an officer to help check on Gray. At that stop, police have said the van driver found Gray on the floor of the van and put him back on the seat, still without restraints. Police said Gray asked for medical help at that point.

The third stop was to put the other prisoner — a 38-year-old man accused of violating a protective order — into the van. The van was then driven six blocks to the Western District station. Gray was taken from there to a hospital, where he died April 19.

Batts has said officers violated policy by failing to properly restrain Gray. But the president of the Baltimore police union noted that the policy mandating seat belts took effect April 3 and was e-mailed to officers as part of a package of five policy changes on April 9, three days before Gray was arrested.

Gene Ryan, the police union president, said many officers aren’t reading the new policies – updated to meet new national standards – because they think they’re the same rules they already know, with only cosmetic changes. The updates are supposed to be read out during pre-shift meetings.

The previous policy was written in 1997, when the department used smaller, boxier wagons that officers called “ice cream trucks.” They originally had a metal bar that prisoners had to hold during the ride. Seat belts were added later, but the policy left their use discretionary.

On April 30 2015 12:46 farvacola wrote:

Culture is an inherently non-discrete concept and accordingly makes for a poor scapegoat.

On April 30 2015 12:57 Anesthetic wrote:

All I am saying is that in my own personal experiences growing up in various low-income neighborhoods is that African-Americans tended to have a culture that shifts blames to others and absolves personal responsibility. Of course this was something that pretty much all kids did but as we got older I noticed that people of other cultures (mostly asians, and especially nigerians) tended to get rid of this mentality and took responsibility for stuff even if they were wronged, while blacks (and latinos to a lesser degree) tended to blame all their problems on X reason.

Of course not to say that I blame them since black culture arose from a history of slavery, but its simply something that I've observed.

On April 30 2015 13:19 Millitron wrote:

Is it possible that people have jumped the gun again when picking martyrs?

What seemed to happen last time, with Michael Brown, is that people burned themselves out arguing over a convoluted case without much evidence either way. Then, when an obvious case of police brutality happened, i.e. the killing of Tamir Rice, nobody gave much of a shit because they had already used up their "White police shoots and kills innocent black person" capitol.

I really hope that doesn't happen again. I mean, I'm not sold on the whole "Racism causes this" thing, but places like Baltimore and Ferguson really truly do need help.

On April 30 2015 12:51 Danglars wrote:
It's so patently obvious that some here wish they were born so as to be mature adults in the civil rights era. You'll shoehorn every issue into this great civil rights narrative no matter how ill it fits. It's like some kind of millennial catnip. The conclusion is that somebody white is responsible for rioting in Baltimore, whether that be known to the person himself or not. Now that we have our conclusion, let's go about finding proof that might fool others.

I rather hope that comic stays through moderation in this thread's page, it's really too perfect. If you'll take a cesspool situation to be the new front in the eternal civil rights struggle, you'll continue to be laughed at and rightly so. Baltimore's a cosmically mismanaged city and failed in a spectacular manner. Some politically interested people are using the lingering climate of Ferguson to deflect blame, and a bunch of looters know they have supporters willing to dismiss their actions as justifiable.

On April 30 2015 13:19 Millitron wrote:

Is it possible that people have jumped the gun again when picking martyrs?

What seemed to happen last time, with Michael Brown, is that people burned themselves out arguing over a convoluted case without much evidence either way. Then, when an obvious case of police brutality happened, i.e. the killing of Tamir Rice, nobody gave much of a shit because they had already used up their "White police shoots and kills innocent black person" capitol.

I really hope that doesn't happen again. I mean, I'm not sold on the whole "Racism causes this" thing, but places like Baltimore and Ferguson really truly do need help.

On April 30 2015 13:19 Millitron wrote:

Is it possible that people have jumped the gun again when picking martyrs?

What seemed to happen last time, with Michael Brown, is that people burned themselves out arguing over a convoluted case without much evidence either way. Then, when an obvious case of police brutality happened, i.e. the killing of Tamir Rice, nobody gave much of a shit because they had already used up their "White police shoots and kills innocent black person" capitol.

I really hope that doesn't happen again. I mean, I'm not sold on the whole "Racism causes this" thing, but places like Baltimore and Ferguson really truly do need help.

On April 30 2015 21:23 BallinWitStalin wrote:


How exactly does a person sever their own spine?

Like coverpunch said, that's pretty fucking eyebrow raising.

I'm genuinely not even sure it's possible for an individual to do so in a confined space. The likelihood of that happening seems extremely, extremely low.....