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xtruss · 3 years

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The Invention of the Police

Why did American policing get so big, so fast? The answer, mainly, is slavery.

— By Jill Lepore, A Critic at Large

— July 13, 2020 | July 20, 2020 Issue | The New Yorker

The Chinatown Squad, a notoriously harsh police unit in San Francisco, in 1905. Photograph courtesy Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

To police is to maintain law and order, but the word derives from polis—the Greek for “city,” or “polity”—by way of politia, the Latin for “citizenship,” and it entered English from the Middle French police, which meant not constables but government. “The police,” as a civil force charged with deterring crime, came to the United States from England and is generally associated with monarchy—“keeping the king’s peace”—which makes it surprising that, in the antimonarchical United States, it got so big, so fast. The reason is, mainly, slavery.

“Abolish the police,” as a rallying cry, dates to 1988 (the year that N.W.A. recorded “Fuck tha Police”), but, long before anyone called for its abolition, someone had to invent the police: the ancient Greek polis had to become the modern police. “To be political, to live in a polis, meant that everything was decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence,” Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Human Condition.” In the polis, men argued and debated, as equals, under a rule of law. Outside the polis, in households, men dominated women, children, servants, and slaves, under a rule of force. This division of government sailed down the river of time like a raft, getting battered, but also bigger, collecting sticks and mud. Kings asserted a rule of force over their subjects on the idea that their kingdom was their household. In 1769, William Blackstone, in his “Commentaries on the Laws of England,” argued that the king, as “pater-familias of the nation,” directs “the public police,” exercising the means by which “the individuals of the state, like members of a well-governed family, are bound to conform their general behavior to the rules of propriety, good neighbourhood, and good manners; and to be decent, industrious, and inoffensive in their respective stations.” The police are the king’s men.

History begins with etymology, but it doesn’t end there. The polis is not the police. The American Revolution toppled the power of the king over his people—in America, “the law is king,” Thomas Paine wrote—but not the power of a man over his family. The power of the police has its origins in that kind of power. Under the rule of law, people are equals; under the rule of police, as the legal theorist Markus Dubber has written, we are not. We are more like the women, children, servants, and slaves in a household in ancient Greece, the people who were not allowed to be a part of the polis. But for centuries, through struggles for independence, emancipation, enfranchisement, and equal rights, we’ve been fighting to enter the polis. One way to think about “Abolish the police,” then, is as an argument that, now that all of us have finally clawed our way into the polis, the police are obsolete.

But are they? The crisis in policing is the culmination of a thousand other failures—failures of education, social services, public health, gun regulation, criminal justice, and economic development. Police have a lot in common with firefighters, E.M.T.s, and paramedics: they’re there to help, often at great sacrifice, and by placing themselves in harm’s way. To say that this doesn’t always work out, however, does not begin to cover the size of the problem. The killing of George Floyd, in Minneapolis, cannot be wished away as an outlier. In each of the past five years, police in the United States have killed roughly a thousand people. (During each of those same years, about a hundred police officers were killed in the line of duty.) One study suggests that, among American men between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four, the number who were treated in emergency rooms as a result of injuries inflicted by police and security guards was almost as great as the number who, as pedestrians, were injured by motor vehicles. Urban police forces are nearly always whiter than the communities they patrol. The victims of police brutality are disproportionately Black teen-age boys: children. To say that many good and admirable people are police officers, dedicated and brave public servants, which is, of course, true, is to fail to address both the nature and the scale of the crisis and the legacy of centuries of racial injustice. The best people, with the best of intentions, doing their utmost, cannot fix this system from within.

There are nearly seven hundred thousand police officers in the United States, about two for every thousand people, a rate that is lower than the European average. The difference is guns. Police in Finland fired six bullets in all of 2013; in an encounter on a single day in the year 2015, in Pasco, Washington, three policemen fired seventeen bullets when they shot and killed an unarmed thirty-five-year-old orchard worker from Mexico. Five years ago, when the Guardian counted police killings, it reported that, “in the first 24 days of 2015, police in the US fatally shot more people than police did in England and Wales, combined, over the past 24 years.” American police are armed to the teeth, with more than seven billion dollars’ worth of surplus military equipment off-loaded by the Pentagon to eight thousand law-enforcement agencies since 1997. At the same time, they face the most heavily armed civilian population in the world: one in three Americans owns a gun, typically more than one. Gun violence undermines civilian life and debases everyone. A study found that, given the ravages of stress, white male police officers in Buffalo have a life expectancy twenty-two years shorter than that of the average American male. The debate about policing also has to do with all the money that’s spent paying heavily armed agents of the state to do things that they aren’t trained to do and that other institutions would do better. History haunts this debate like a bullet-riddled ghost.

That history begins in England, in the thirteenth century, when maintaining the king’s peace became the duty of an officer of the court called a constable, aided by his watchmen: every male adult could be called on to take a turn walking a ward at night and, if trouble came, to raise a hue and cry. This practice lasted for centuries. (A version endures: George Zimmerman, when he shot and killed Trayvon Martin, in 2012, was serving on his neighborhood watch.) The watch didn’t work especially well in England—“The average constable is an ignoramus who knows little or nothing of the law,” Blackstone wrote—and it didn’t work especially well in England’s colonies. Rich men paid poor men to take their turns on the watch, which meant that most watchmen were either very elderly or very poor, and very exhausted from working all day. Boston established a watch in 1631. New York tried paying watchmen in 1658. In Philadelphia, in 1705, the governor expressed the view that the militia could make the city safer than the watch, but militias weren’t supposed to police the king’s subjects; they were supposed to serve the common defense—waging wars against the French, fighting Native peoples who were trying to hold on to their lands, or suppressing slave rebellions.

The government of slavery was not a rule of law. It was a rule of police. In 1661, the English colony of Barbados passed its first slave law; revised in 1688, it decreed that “Negroes and other Slaves” were “wholly unqualified to be governed by the Laws . . . of our Nations,” and devised, instead, a special set of rules “for the good Regulating and Ordering of them.” Virginia adopted similar measures, known as slave codes, in 1680:

It shall not be lawfull for any negroe or other slave to carry or arme himselfe with any club, staffe, gunn, sword or any other weapon of defence or offence, nor to goe or depart from of his masters ground without a certificate from his master, mistris or overseer, and such permission not to be granted but upon perticuler and necessary occasions; and every negroe or slave soe offending not haveing a certificate as aforesaid shalbe sent to the next constable, who is hereby enjoyned and required to give the said negroe twenty lashes on his bare back well layd on, and soe sent home to his said master, mistris or overseer . . . that if any negroe or other slave shall absent himself from his masters service and lye hid and lurking in obscure places, comitting injuries to the inhabitants, and shall resist any person or persons that shalby any lawfull authority be imployed to apprehend and take the said negroe, that then in case of such resistance, it shalbe lawfull for such person or persons to kill the said negroe or slave soe lying out and resisting.

In eighteenth-century New York, a person held as a slave could not gather in a group of more than three; could not ride a horse; could not hold a funeral at night; could not be out an hour after sunset without a lantern; and could not sell “Indian corn, peaches, or any other fruit” in any street or market in the city. Stop and frisk, stop and whip, shoot to kill.

Then there were the slave patrols. Armed Spanish bands called hermandades had hunted runaways in Cuba beginning in the fifteen-thirties, a practice that was adopted by the English in Barbados a century later. It had a lot in common with England’s posse comitatus, a band of stout men that a county sheriff could summon to chase down an escaped criminal. South Carolina, founded by slaveowners from Barbados, authorized its first slave patrol in 1702; Virginia followed in 1726, North Carolina in 1753. Slave patrols married the watch to the militia: serving on patrol was required of all able-bodied men (often, the patrol was mustered from the militia), and patrollers used the hue and cry to call for anyone within hearing distance to join the chase. Neither the watch nor the militia nor the patrols were “police,” who were French, and considered despotic. In North America, the French city of New Orleans was distinctive in having la police: armed City Guards, who wore military-style uniforms and received wages, an urban slave patrol.

In 1779, Thomas Jefferson created a chair in “law and police” at the College of William & Mary. The meaning of the word began to change. In 1789, Jeremy Bentham, noting that “police” had recently entered the English language, in something like its modern sense, made this distinction: police keep the peace; justice punishes disorder. (“No justice, no peace!” Black Lives Matter protesters cry in the streets.) Then, in 1797, a London magistrate named Patrick Colquhoun published “A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis.” He, too, distinguished peace kept in the streets from justice administered by the courts: police were responsible for the regulation and correction of behavior and “the prevention and detection of crimes.”

It is often said that Britain created the police, and the United States copied it. One could argue that the reverse is true. Colquhoun spent his teens and early twenties in Colonial Virginia, had served as an agent for British cotton manufacturers, and owned shares in sugar plantations in Jamaica. He knew all about slave codes and slave patrols. But nothing came of Colquhoun’s ideas about policing until 1829, when Home Secretary Robert Peel—in the wake of a great deal of labor unrest, and after years of suppressing Catholic rebellions in Ireland, in his capacity as Irish Secretary—persuaded Parliament to establish the Metropolitan Police, a force of some three thousand men, headed by two civilian justices (later called “commissioners”), and organized like an army, with each superintendent overseeing four inspectors, sixteen sergeants, and a hundred and sixty-five constables, who wore coats and pants of blue with black top hats, each assigned a numbered badge and a baton. Londoners came to call these men “bobbies,” for Bobby Peel.

It is also often said that modern American urban policing began in 1838, when the Massachusetts legislature authorized the hiring of police officers in Boston. This, too, ignores the role of slavery in the history of the police. In 1829, a Black abolitionist in Boston named David Walker published “An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World,” calling for violent rebellion: “One good black man can put to death six white men.” Walker was found dead within the year, and Boston thereafter had a series of mob attacks against abolitionists, including an attempt to lynch William Lloyd Garrison, the publisher of The Liberator, in 1835. Walker’s words terrified Southern slaveowners. The governor of North Carolina wrote to his state’s senators, “I beg you will lay this matter before the police of your town and invite their prompt attention to the necessity of arresting the circulation of the book.” By “police,” he meant slave patrols: in response to Walker’s “Appeal,” North Carolina formed a statewide “patrol committee.”

New York established a police department in 1844; New Orleans and Cincinnati followed in 1852, then, later in the eighteen-fifties, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Baltimore. Population growth, the widening inequality brought about by the Industrial Revolution, and the rise in such crimes as prostitution and burglary all contributed to the emergence of urban policing. So did immigration, especially from Ireland and Germany, and the hostility to immigration: a new party, the Know-Nothings, sought to prevent immigrants from voting, holding office, and becoming citizens. In 1854, Boston disbanded its ancient watch and formally established a police department; that year, Know-Nothings swept the city’s elections.

American police differed from their English counterparts: in the U.S., police commissioners, as political appointees, fell under local control, with limited supervision; and law enforcement was decentralized, resulting in a jurisdictional thicket. In 1857, in the Great Police Riot, the New York Municipal Police, run by the mayor’s office, fought on the steps of city hall with the New York Metropolitan Police, run by the state. The Metropolitans were known as the New York Mets. That year, an amateur baseball team of the same name was founded.

Also, unlike their British counterparts, American police carried guns, initially their own. In the eighteen-sixties, the Colt Firearms Company began manufacturing a compact revolver called a Pocket Police Model, long before the New York Metropolitan Police began issuing service weapons. American police carried guns because Americans carried guns, including Americans who lived in parts of the country where they hunted for food and defended their livestock from wild animals, Americans who lived in parts of the country that had no police, and Americans who lived in parts of North America that were not in the United States. Outside big cities, law-enforcement officers were scarce. In territories that weren’t yet states, there were U.S. marshals and their deputies, officers of the federal courts who could act as de-facto police, but only to enforce federal laws. If a territory became a state, its counties would elect sheriffs. Meanwhile, Americans became vigilantes, especially likely to kill indigenous peoples, and to lynch people of color. Between 1840 and the nineteen-twenties, mobs, vigilantes, and law officers, including the Texas Rangers, lynched some five hundred Mexicans and Mexican-Americans and killed thousands more, not only in Texas but also in territories that became the states of California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. A San Francisco vigilance committee established in 1851 arrested, tried, and hanged people; it boasted a membership in the thousands. An L.A. vigilance committee targeted and lynched Chinese immigrants.

The U.S. Army operated as a police force, too. After the Civil War, the militia was organized into seven new departments of permanent standing armies: the Department of Dakota, the Department of the Platte, the Department of the Missouri, the Department of Texas, the Department of Arizona, the Department of California, and the Department of the Columbian. In the eighteen-seventies and eighties, the U.S. Army engaged in more than a thousand combat operations against Native peoples. In 1890, at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, following an attempt to disarm a Lakota settlement, a regiment of cavalrymen massacred hundreds of Lakota men, women, and children. Nearly a century later, in 1973, F.B.I. agents, swat teams, and federal troops and state marshals laid siege to Wounded Knee during a protest over police brutality and the failure to properly punish the torture and murder of an Oglala Sioux man named Raymond Yellow Thunder. They fired more than half a million rounds of ammunition and arrested more than a thousand people. Today, according to the C.D.C., Native Americans are more likely to be killed by the police than any other racial or ethnic group.

Modern American policing began in 1909, when August Vollmer became the chief of the police department in Berkeley, California. Vollmer refashioned American police into an American military. He’d served with the Eighth Army Corps in the Philippines in 1898. “For years, ever since Spanish-American War days, I’ve studied military tactics and used them to good effect in rounding up crooks,” he later explained. “After all we’re conducting a war, a war against the enemies of society.” Who were those enemies? Mobsters, bootleggers, socialist agitators, strikers, union organizers, immigrants, and Black people.

To domestic policing, Vollmer and his peers adapted the kinds of tactics and weapons that had been deployed against Native Americans in the West and against colonized peoples in other parts of the world, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, as the sociologist Julian Go has demonstrated. Vollmer instituted a training model imitated all over the country, by police departments that were often led and staffed by other veterans of the United States wars of conquest and occupation. A “police captain or lieutenant should occupy exactly the same position in the public mind as that of a captain or lieutenant in the United States army,” Detroit’s commissioner of police said. (Today’s police officers are disproportionately veterans of U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, many suffering from post-traumatic stress. The Marshall Project, analyzing data from the Albuquerque police, found that officers who are veterans are more likely than their non-veteran counterparts to be involved in fatal shootings. In general, they are more likely to use force, and more likely to fire their guns.)

Vollmer-era police enforced a new kind of slave code: Jim Crow laws, which had been passed in the South beginning in the late eighteen-seventies and upheld by the Supreme Court in 1896. William G. Austin became Savannah’s chief of police in 1907. Earlier, he had earned a Medal of Honor for his service in the U.S. Cavalry at Wounded Knee; he had also fought in the Spanish-American War. By 1916, African-American churches in the city were complaining to Savannah newspapers about the “whole scale arrests of negroes because they are negroes—arrests that would not be made if they were white under similar circumstances.” African-Americans also confronted Jim Crow policing in the Northern cities to which they increasingly fled. James Robinson, Philadelphia’s chief of police beginning in 1912, had served in the Infantry during the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War. He based his force’s training on manuals used by the U.S. Army at Leavenworth. Go reports that, in 1911, about eleven per cent of people arrested were African-American; under Robinson, that number rose to 14.6 per cent in 1917. By the nineteen-twenties, a quarter of those arrested were African-Americans, who, at the time, represented just 7.4 per cent of the population.

Progressive Era, Vollmer-style policing criminalized Blackness, as the historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad argued in his 2010 book, “The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America.” Police patrolled Black neighborhoods and arrested Black people disproportionately; prosecutors indicted Black people disproportionately; juries found Black people guilty disproportionately; judges gave Black people disproportionately long sentences; and, then, after all this, social scientists, observing the number of Black people in jail, decided that, as a matter of biology, Black people were disproportionately inclined to criminality.

More recently, between the New Jim Crow and the criminalization of immigration and the imprisonment of immigrants in detention centers, this reality has only grown worse. “By population, by per capita incarceration rates, and by expenditures, the United States exceeds all other nations in how many of its citizens, asylum seekers, and undocumented immigrants are under some form of criminal justice supervision,” Muhammad writes in a new preface to his book. “The number of African American and Latinx people in American jails and prisons today exceeds the entire populations of some African, Eastern European, and Caribbean countries.”

Policing grew harsher in the Progressive Era, and, with the emergence of state-police forces, the number of police grew, too. With the rise of the automobile, some, like California’s, began as “highway patrols.” Others, including the state police in Nevada, Colorado, and Oregon, began as the private paramilitaries of industrialists which employed the newest American immigrants: Hungarians, Italians, and Jews. Industrialists in Pennsylvania established the Iron and Coal Police to end strikes and bust unions, including the United Mine Workers; in 1905, three years after an anthracite-coal strike, the Pennsylvania State Police started operations. “One State Policeman should be able to handle one hundred foreigners,” its new chief said.

The U.S. Border Patrol began in 1924, the year that Congress restricted immigration from southern Europe. At the insistence of Southern and Western agriculturalists, Congress exempted Mexicans from its new immigration quotas in order to allow migrant workers to enter the United States. The Border Patrol began as a relatively small outfit responsible for enforcing federal immigration law, and stopping smugglers, at all of the nation’s borders. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, it grew to a national quasi-military focussed on policing the southern border in campaigns of mass arrest and forced deportation of Mexican immigrants, aided by local police like the notoriously brutal L.A.P.D., as the historian Kelly Lytle Hernández has chronicled. What became the Chicano movement began in Southern California, with Mexican immigrants’ protests of the L.A.P.D. during the first half of the twentieth century, even as a growing film industry cranked out features about Klansmen hunting Black people, cowboys killing Indians, and police chasing Mexicans. More recently, you can find an updated version of this story in L.A. Noire, a video game set in 1947 and played from the perspective of a well-armed L.A.P.D. officer, who, driving along Sunset Boulevard, passes the crumbling, abandoned sets from D. W. Griffith’s 1916 film “Intolerance,” imagined relics of an unforgiving age.

Two kinds of police appeared on mid-century American television. The good guys solved crime on prime-time police procedurals like “Dragnet,” starting in 1951, and “Adam-12,” beginning in 1968 (both featured the L.A.P.D.). The bad guys shocked America’s conscience on the nightly news: Arkansas state troopers barring Black students from entering Little Rock Central High School, in 1957; Birmingham police clubbing and arresting some seven hundred Black children protesting segregation, in 1963; and Alabama state troopers beating voting-rights marchers at Selma, in 1965. These two faces of policing help explain how, in the nineteen-sixties, the more people protested police brutality, the more money governments gave to police departments.

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson declared a “war on crime,” and asked Congress to pass the Law Enforcement Assistance Act, under which the federal government would supply local police with military-grade weapons, weapons that were being used in the war in Vietnam. During riots in Watts that summer, law enforcement killed thirty-one people and arrested more than four thousand; fighting the protesters, the head of the L.A.P.D. said, was “very much like fighting the Viet Cong.” Preparing for a Senate vote just days after the uprising ended, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee said, “For some time, it has been my feeling that the task of law enforcement agencies is really not much different from military forces; namely, to deter crime before it occurs, just as our military objective is deterrence of aggression.”

As Elizabeth Hinton reported in “From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America,” the “frontline soldiers” in Johnson’s war on crime—Vollmer-era policing all over again—spent a disproportionate amount of time patrolling Black neighborhoods and arresting Black people. Policymakers concluded from those differential arrest rates that Black people were prone to criminality, with the result that police spent even more of their time patrolling Black neighborhoods, which led to a still higher arrest rate. “If we wish to rid this country of crime, if we wish to stop hacking at its branches only, we must cut its roots and drain its swampy breeding ground, the slum,” Johnson told an audience of police policymakers in 1966. The next year, riots broke out in Newark and Detroit. “We ain’t rioting agains’ all you whites,” one Newark man told a reporter not long before being shot dead by police. “We’re riotin’ agains’ police brutality.” In Detroit, police arrested more than seven thousand people.

Johnson’s Great Society essentially ended when he asked Congress to pass the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which had the effect of diverting money from social programs to policing. This magazine called it “a piece of demagoguery devised out of malevolence and enacted in hysteria.” James Baldwin attributed its “irresponsible ferocity” to “some pale, compelling nightmare—an overwhelming collection of private nightmares.” The truth was darker, as the sociologist Stuart Schrader chronicled in his 2019 book, “Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing.” During the Cold War, the Office of Public Safety at the U.S.A.I.D. provided assistance to the police in at least fifty-two countries, and training to officers from nearly eighty, for the purpose of counter-insurgency—the suppression of an anticipated revolution, that collection of private nightmares; as the O.P.S. reported, it contributed “the international dimension to the Administration’s War on Crime.” Counter-insurgency boomeranged, and came back to the United States, as policing.

In 1968, Johnson’s new crime bill established the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, within the Department of Justice, which, in the next decade and a half, disbursed federal funds to more than eighty thousand crime-control projects. Even funds intended for social projects—youth employment, for instance, along with other health, education, housing, and welfare programs—were distributed to police operations. With Richard Nixon, any elements of the Great Society that had survived the disastrous end of Johnson’s Presidency were drastically cut, with an increased emphasis on policing, and prison-building. More Americans went to prison between 1965 and 1982 than between 1865 and 1964, Hinton reports. Under Ronald Reagan, still more social services were closed, or starved of funding until they died: mental hospitals, health centers, jobs programs, early-childhood education. By 2016, eighteen states were spending more on prisons than on colleges and universities. Activists who today call for defunding the police argue that, for decades, Americans have been defunding not only social services but, in many states, public education itself. The more frayed the social fabric, the more police have been deployed to trim the dangling threads.

The blueprint for law enforcement from Nixon to Reagan came from the Harvard political scientist James Q. Wilson between 1968, in his book “Varieties of Police Behavior,” and 1982, in an essay in The Atlantic titled “Broken Windows.” On the one hand, Wilson believed that the police should shift from enforcing the law to maintaining order, by patrolling on foot, and doing what came to be called “community policing.” (Some of his recommendations were ignored: Wilson called for other professionals to handle what he termed the “service functions” of the police—“first aid, rescuing cats, helping ladies, and the like”—which is a reform people are asking for today.) On the other hand, Wilson called for police to arrest people for petty crimes, on the theory that they contributed to more serious crimes. Wilson’s work informed programs like Detroit’s stress (Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets), begun in 1971, in which Detroit police patrolled the city undercover, in disguises that included everything from a taxi-driver to a “radical college professor,” and killed so many young Black men that an organization of Black police officers demanded that the unit be disbanded. The campaign to end stress arguably marked the very beginnings of police abolitionism. stress defended its methods. “We just don’t walk up and shoot somebody,” one commander said. “We ask him to stop. If he doesn’t, we shoot.”

For decades, the war on crime was bipartisan, and had substantial support from the Congressional Black Caucus. “Crime is a national-defense problem,” Joe Biden said in the Senate, in 1982. “You’re in as much jeopardy in the streets as you are from a Soviet missile.” Biden and other Democrats in the Senate introduced legislation that resulted in the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. A decade later, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden helped draft the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, whose provisions included mandatory sentencing. In May, 1991, two months after the Rodney King beating, Biden introduced the Police Officers’ Bill of Rights, which provided protections for police under investigation. The N.R.A. first endorsed a Presidential candidate, Reagan, in 1980; the Fraternal Order of Police, the nation’s largest police union, first endorsed a Presidential candidate, George H. W. Bush, in 1988. In 1996, it endorsed Bill Clinton.

Partly because of Biden’s record of championing law enforcement, the National Association of Police Organizations endorsed the Obama-Biden ticket in 2008 and 2012. In 2014, after police in Ferguson, Missouri, shot Michael Brown, the Obama Administration established a task force on policing in the twenty-first century. Its report argued that police had become warriors when what they really should be is guardians. Most of its recommendations were never implemented.

In 2016, the Fraternal Order of Police endorsed Donald Trump, saying that “our members believe he will make America safe again.” Police unions are lining up behind Trump again this year. “We will never abolish our police or our great Second Amendment,” Trump said at Mt. Rushmore, on the occasion of the Fourth of July. “We will not be intimidated by bad, evil people.”

Trump is not the king; the law is king. The police are not the king’s men; they are public servants. And, no matter how desperately Trump would like to make it so, policing really isn’t a partisan issue. Out of the stillness of the shutdown, the voices of protest have roared like summer thunder. An overwhelming majority of Americans, of both parties, support major reforms in American policing. And a whole lot of police, defying their unions, also support those reforms.

Those changes won’t address plenty of bigger crises, not least because the problem of policing can’t be solved without addressing the problem of guns. But this much is clear: the polis has changed, and the police will have to change, too. ♦

An earlier version of this piece misrepresented the number of Americans between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four who were treated as a result of police-inflicted injuries in emergency rooms.

— Published in the print edition of the July 20, 2020, issue, with the headline “The Long Blue Line.”

— Jill Lepore, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is a professor of history at Harvard and the author of fourteen books, including “If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future.”

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thepilgrimofwar · 4 years

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The Shalemarchers - Edited Roll20 Logs

[Event Start]

The party of diplomats approach the appointed village where the Shalemarchers had gathered. Judereth had considered bringing soldiers with her as a show of force, but decided against it. For a greater show of force was showing that they did not need them. For they had Lirelle.

Beathyn looks to the others present. Vissehn, Judereth, and Lirelle. “Stenden prefers a peaceful solution to this, and so do we,." he states, trying to set the tone right for the talks about to come.

"I mean that's th'whole point, right,” Vissehn says. “Get this stowed to focus on the wars elsewhere."

Judereth shrugs. "I am here to listen, they are this close to being branded as traitors. But for now, if there's a way to make them see sense, I'll take it."

"What happens is up to them,” says Lirelle. “We're wasting time thinking about anything else."

Vissehn seems in fine form, his Hawk Courier garb slightly less shiny and bright than usual. He'd picked up the set he wore during the war, and looked the part of the child-spy he'd been.

Beathyn nods and sighs. "Let's get to it then. Hopefully they aren't reckless enough to shoot the messenger... If not I guess they'll find that isn't exactly our first profession."

"Speak for yerself!” Vissehn pops his Hawk Courier collar.

Lirelle points at the others in turn, starting with Judereth. "Logistics officer, logistics officer, soldier, Hawk. I think you're the odd one out here Vissehn,"

Beathyn waved away the comments as they made their way towards the village, "Shhhh!"

[The Party Approaches the Village]

As the party approaches the village, they see a large number of armed peasantry. Carrying whatever that could be considered a weapon. Though they were poorly organized, the anger in the air was palpable. There was an energy here that ran electric through the Shalemarchers- A mix of Hope, Fear, and the Breaking of bonds.

The peasants part as they approach, directed towards the square.

Leyla Cinderblossom "Well met," says a girl, barely older than Vissehn. "I am you chose to respond to the missives we sent instead of just responding with swords. I am Leyla, Cinderblossom. Voice for the Shalemarchers." The accent betrayed that she had the trainings of a house-servant behind her. The only sort of education provided to the peasantry where both literacy and articulation were valued.

Beathyn smiled. "Well met, I can see why you were picked as the voice." He began introducing his party. "Beathyn Val'cinder. Vissehn Bladeborn. Lady Dawnbrook. And, your liege as of last week, Lady Swiftquiver."

Judereth regards Leyla, "That's Judereth Swiftquiver. Know that I wasn't nobility until I was... Nominated." She shoots a look at Lirelle.

Lirelle simply remains quiet, folding her arms and looming in the background. Her purpose here was evident, but if the others wanted to attempt a civil discussion first, she would let them.

Vissehn offered a short bow, snatching his cap from his pale hair as he nodded. "Wellmet, Miss." He says it with the right inflection-- the inflection of the villages and the caravans, where Miss isn't a dismissive but how you call the ladies who aren't yet wedded but deserving of more than 'oi, cousin!'

Leyla Cinderblossom raises her eyebrows. "Now that's surprising. Lords and Ladies never take part in negotiations personally." She gestures towards Beathyn, who had come on behalf of the Emberglades. "Too much mud and muck fer their liking."

Vissehn nods sagely. "Ruins th'shiny boots."

Leyla Cinderblossom laughs, and it seems to put the rest of the Shalemarchers at ease, somewhat.

"Hard to get the scent of squalor outa velvet, I heard too." Vissehn looks around, his eyes drifting over the homes and his lips twist sidelong. There is more than sympathy in his eyes-- there's anger.

Judereth speaks up. "So, Leyla. What is this about?" She gestures all around her. At the men and women who had armed themselves. The anger- enough to make them risk life and limb because peasantry, of all peoples, knew exactly what their fates were likely to be when they rose up.

Leyla Cinderblossom's ears flattened against her head, and eyes narrowed. "We are tired. Pushed, and pushed. It has gone on so long that people my age have not known of the elusive thing called -peace-.

"Since the Fall, taxes and levies have been taken for one cause or another. First it had been the Prince's Contributions to the Alliance. Then his Expeditions. After that the Horde, and all their Warmongering..." She lists them off, almost exhaustively. "And after the Phoenix Wars, at last, when there was a promise of peace. Our very own Lords throw us into another pointless War and we are sick of it."

Beathyn nods, slowly but deliberately. "So are we," he says. He wants to add an explanation to why the burden they carried was necessary but decided against it. It would not help things.

Lirelle glances at Judereth. She knew the reasons, whether she would try to share was up to her.

Vissehn nods at her frustrations. "It's the fuckin' short stick, aint it? And always on the ones at the bottom of the ladder to carry the heaviest while getting th'littlest." He snorts. "Like you can bleed a stone. Like you can carve water from a desert."

Leyla Cinderblossom looks at Vissehn, with anger in her eyes. "Exactly. Over and above the regular indignities done against us."

He responds. "Like babes born with th'same nose an' jaws of the manor's masters. Like sons that just don't come back home."

Judereth adds. "And nights where we were too hungry to sleep. I know. My family was no exception. Though we were protected by my father's position in Sederis' court, we were only spared the very worst of it."

Lirelle sighs. She tucks her arms back in front of her from where she was about to give Vissehn a warning nudge.

Leyla Cinderblossom bows her head. "I see that you are nothing like Lord Goodemeber. He did not treat us poorly, but he did not care. The injustices done by the lesser Lordlings, and mercenary officers were rarely answered adequately." She looks at Lirelle, as unnatural as the priestess was, and smiled. "Thank you for dealing with them."

Lirelle looks at Leyla. "I did not deal with them only for this to happen, coming from the very people we saved. I'm hoping that this will not have been a waste of my men's time, yes?"

Leyla Cinderblossom:"While we appreciate the gesture, a single action does not make up for decades of injustices... Though, we are grateful nonetheless."

Vissehn nods. "It's a shit system." He looks to Lirelle and opens his hands. "I known some good nobles in the Sunguard, I known some elsewhere too. Don't change the fact all of this system is out to drain people of their lives to prop up others, whose blood is the same color, whose right is the same." He looks to Leyla. "I ain't sayin' your wrong to want change. Not at all. I'm sayin' that there's power in voices as much as bloodshed, an' I'm hoping if we all scream the same words, we can do as much good without losin life." He presses a hand to his chest. "I'm a bastard born, an' I only got anywhere by signing to fight and die. Now, I'd like to see if I can keep my kith from graves. Keep your lot from familiar graves. Let's talk it to the table, an' see what changes can be made afore we go dyin' and killin."

Leyla Cinderblossom looks at Vissehn, eyes softening as he spoke. "That's selfless of you. Though the men and women around me are the ones deemed unworthy to fight and die- Tis' why we're here and not the militia who're now marching off to fight Illithia in a turn of events. But regardless... What are we to do then? We can't change the system, and we can't bear it either!"

"We can change the system. Sederis tried, an' went barmy there at the end but it was a start. Lord Stenden's already got commonborn folks at the table, speaking for you. Let's see if we can't move forward an' give you more voice." Vissehn speaks with an authority no one gave him, just because he's here and no one's stopped him yet!

[Negotiations Begin Proper]

Beathyn speaks softly to start with. "Then trust that the Lords that are coming into power from this mess of a war will bring the change you want." Riffing off Vissehn's response, pointing at Judereth. Lady Swiftquiver is right here, listening to you. "Yet more evidence that Lord Emberheart is trying to put more voices of the people in power."

Judereth sighs. "I don't expect you to trust me or my decisions right away. But I hope that you can give me a chance- and time to prove that I am worthy. I've been picked by the Lord of the Emberglades yes, but I have yet to be picked by my people-" she looks around her, not only addressing Leyla, but the others around her as well.

Leyla Cinderblossom gives Judereth a look. "Then swear you will do better. Better than the ones who came before you. Witnessed by everyone here today."

Judereth bows her head. "I swear it."

Lirelle unfolds her arms, the tips of the claws beginning to push themselves out of the bark, elongating and spreading in almost a parody of wings. "You would be wise to listen to the words of the others. Judereth might well be the first liege that you have who would listen and care. Best that you negotiate with her rather than with me."

Leyla Cinderblossom receives the threat well, all things considered. "I have no doubt that we will be facing you and yours on the field should the worse come to pass. We do not wish for it, but our choices are limited."

Vissehn steps forward. "On my honor, I ain't lettin a place I call home, or swaer oaths to, take and hurt the people of the land." He clicks tongue to teeth, considering... but then the idea slips off. Instead, he pats his blade. "Pick some folks you think have good heads-- make a coalition of the villages. Magistrates oughta be from merchants or farmers anyroad. See if you can send your own to get educated, an' then they can manage the affairs. I'll put a word in with my merchant friends, too-- they can perhaps see bout new traderoutes, once th'current kerfuffle is finished. Get new money in here-- I know your taxes take much, but of whats left-- this is a breadbasket, yeah? Make that bread. Sell it for more'n its worth to the far North."

Leyla Cinderblossom looks back at the building that housed the representatives of the Shalemarchers next to her. "That sounds like something we can work with. Good heads, not powerful heads, we had to weed out the powerhungry early on in this to make sure we had the best people for the job." She pointed at herself in a brief moment of levity.

Beathyn raises his hand, "AND- And I am sure that Lord Emberheart will be most happy with such an arrangement. He'd rather be loved than feared. I hope his conduct in the war has already shown as much."

Judereth clears her throat to remind Beathyn that it was not infact, up to Stenden. But her. "As Lady of Shalemarch, I will be -your- Lady. I promise you that I will guarantee that if you give me your trust, and your time, you will see this come to pass."

Vissehn speaks up. "She's got the means, an' ain't so far removed from bein' poor herself. It's no farmers daughter on th'throne, but it's a sight better than a fat bastard who keeps his pockets well lined an' cares little for the bastards his solders get on his people."

Leyla Cinderblossom shakes her head, "We will see you uphold what you've sworn first before making any more promises"

Vissehn opens his hands. Fair enough.

“And I would suggest you make your decision quickly,” Lirelle levels her crimson gaze at her. “There is a war going on, whether you asked for it or not. Do not think that what is happening here is a priority for us. We will be winning that, with our without you."

"So we're nothing more than driftwood in the tides of war then." Leyla looks at the men and women around her, looking to her to make the right decision, and that- was not death- not a death that did not matter as was it was quickly shaping up to be.

Vissehn looks her over with sympathy, and calls Beathyn closer. "Look-- I know you're fuckin' tired. I'm fuckin' tired. I watched my mother slave, my cousins die, an' for what. I'm still nothin'. I coulda been a lord-- got offered enough boons for killin' the right people for others, but I didn't take it cause there's no honor in it. I'm born in dirt, an' I'll be buried in it same as everyone else. This war is for the soul of this place; either an old man with no heirs, no plan, nothing but the Old Ways and greed wins... or someone with a lil more sense, a few more ideals, an' a willingness to learn wins. That's the choice; you throw in with Arenias if you stand with weapons now. You stand with him, against the changes to come. Do you wanna die for him, for this?"

Beathyn gestures to Vissehn. "The boy is absolutely right. If you rebel now, regardless of your ideals and what you are trying to martyr yourselves for- You will be seen as doing so on Arenias' behalf. I can almost guarantee that Solendis Emberheart will twist the tale into such. If you want change, this is not the way to do it.

"If you want change- Lasting change- You need to work together. Lord and People. Listening. Compromising. That is the only true way forward. Dying here, in fear and anger in the hopes that your voices and deaths will be statements to something greater will only be washed away in a tide of blood- And victors... Well Victors write the histories don't they?"

Leyla Cinderblossom looks around to the Shalemarchers around her. It appeared that Beathyn's words seemed to be aimed at them rather than just solely her and they were moved, she could see it in their eyes. "Aye," she says. "Then, on behalf of the men and women around me. We have struck an accord. We will go back to our homes- and await the promises you have made to us this day."

Judereth speaks. "All I ask for is a chance, and time to make this a reality."

[Event End]

#Epilogue #Roll20 #Beathyn #Vissehn

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gamergate-news · 6 years

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And here we go again with this shit.

Spider-Man has taken on his share of street thugs and supervillains, sometimes teaming up with the police to face down foes and rescue the people of New York. While Spider-Man on PS4 undoubtedly shows Spidey’s allegiance to his community, it also casts him as a big fan of police and their tactics that sometimes conflict with that civic mindset. From cheesy detective impressions to Rikers prisoner beatdowns, Spider-Man’s uncomplicated approach to crime clashes with the reality of day to day life.

One of the earliest things you do in Spider-Man is go around activating security towers, made by Oscorp but used by the NYPD, that make it easier for Spider-Man to track crimes as they happen. Narratively, these towers allow the police to better surveil citizens; they also give Spider-Man access to police frequencies. They’re always listening, giving out calls to car chases and telling the player about break-in attempts that Spider-Man can thwart before the crime occurs. The uncritical use of these towers struck some players, especially those who live in New York, as odd. An NYU Game Center scholar took to Twitter to note similarities between these towers and the real world real NYC security cameras that IBM recently used to make skin-color profiling technology. Meanwhile, Spider-Man’s enthusiasm for the police—from his stated love of busting drug deals to his cheesy “Spider-Cop” impersonation—had my coworker Tim Rogers calling Spidey a “narc.” While I found Spider-Man as good-hearted and heroic as ever, he was also way more accepting of state power than I expected from a hero with a history of being wrongly maligned by the press and police.

Modern superhero games have trended further and further towards authoritarian extremes. Injustice 2’s core conceit hinges upon the audience believing that Superman, that all-American Kansas boy, could conceivably rise to lead a strict and heartless regime following the Joker orchestrating Lois Lane’s death. That incident, and its extremes, call to mind the reactionary shift in American politics since September 11th, 2001. We can believe in Superman’s militarism because it reflects a 21st century historical reality. Despite Superman’s role as antagonist, the heroes facing off against him—and begrudgingly allying with him once Brainiac enters the story—share a similar authoritarian streak. This is best expressed in Batman’s disturbing “Brother Eye” surveillance system, which can spy on anyone in the world. And while Spider-Man’s Oscorp-made, police-operated surveillance towers aren’t as extreme as Brother Eye, they are features of a similar predictive, Watchdog-esque surveillance state.

Spider-Man have never quite shared Bruce Wayne or Superman’s drive for power or control. He’s the the boy from Queens who rose to the challenge. New York based superheroes have always had a much more intimate feel than other characters. Luke Cage isn’t just a super strong hero; he’s Harlem’s hero. Daredevil is the protector of Hell’s Kitchen. And while Spider-Man often swings around Manhattan, he still can drop in at a bodega for a sandwich in Flushing or Astoria. That street-level, community minded nature clashes with the high-tech surveillance of the game’s towers and the game’s outlook on police.

Police are an unimpeachable group in Spider-Man. They show no real flaws and make no mistakes. They don’t feel like an integrated part of the the community; they pepper cutscenes and sometimes walk the streets but mostly show up as an allied faction in procedurally generated crime events. Even if Spider-Man’s New York is largely a fiction, it points towards a real place. New York is many things, but it is also the city of Eric Garner, stop-and-frisk, and Palantir. Rikers isn’t some fake pastiche location like Arkham Asylum. Real life police are a complicated presence in New York, but in Spider-Man they’re part of Spider-Man’s vigilante quest for justice, rather than members of the communities they’re supposed to protect. This simplification extends to the game’s portrayal of the criminal justice system as well. About half way through the story, villains orchestrate a massive breakout at Rikers Island. It’s treated as a crisis so dire that Spider-Man temporarily abandons his search for a potentially pandemic-causing biological weapon to help the NYPD bust skulls and put down prisoner riots. Without fail, every convict is violent and aggressive.

In reality, New York is moving to close Rikers on a ten-year timeline on the recommendation of organizations like the Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform. The majority of people incarcerated in Rikers’ are people of color, and many are citizens waiting for their trials in a backlogged court system, often for misdemeanors and unable to pay expensive bail. In one of the most most prominent cases, 16-year-old Kalief Browder spent three years in Rikers—a majority in solitary confinement—awaiting trial for the theft of a backpack. He committed suicide two years after his release from prison.

In real life, the conditions at Rikers Island and the systems surrounding it are complex, but games like The Division and Spider-Man flatten that complexity in favor of giving you criminal enemies to overcome. The Division features “the Rykers” as an opposing force for much of the mid-game, and while its radio makes mention of how many prisoners are in jail for minor crimes like drug possession, your primary interaction is to shoot everyone.In Spider-Man, these prisoners function as generic thugs to fight in waves. Despite being a superhero who is on the side of the people, when faced with this element of his city, Spider-Man forgets his allegiances and just enjoys beating the shit out of them.

While Spider-Man’s criminals are one-note, the game features a diverse and, I’ll admit, likable cast of supporting police officers. Spider-Man’s radio contact Yuri Watanabe is beleaguered but reliable, working with Spidey to protect as many people as possible. Miles Morales’ story hinges on the integrity and heroism of his police officer father Jefferson Davis. Watanabe and especially Davis are fun characters who I like spending time with. Their idealism provides a powerful contrast to the cruel, destructive forces of Silver Sable and her mercenary corp, who care little for collateral damage. As they crack down, side quests open up where Spider-Man needs to rescue protestors imprisoned by Sable. In these moments, Spider-Man seems to suggest that if policing is necessary, it must be something more communal, and these standout police characters suggest such a thing might be possible. But this can’t quite overcome the game’s tendency to paint simplistic portrayals of police as good and criminals as evil.

Spider-Man’s simple presentation of crime and policing feels tone-deaf in the modern age, when more and more people are growing aware of the class and race dynamics of policing. This isn’t to suggest that the game needs to take a break every ten minutes to infodump real world statistics, but games are released in the context of their time. We’re post Edward Snowden, living in the age Black Lives Matter. Last week, Dallas police officer Amber Guyger shot and killed 26-year-old Botham Shem Jean in his own apartment. This is the world we live in and the world Spider-Man was released into. While it might be nice to escape into a world where these problems don’t exist, that is a luxury that countless people cannot afford.

Spider-Man’s portrayal of policing feels divorced from reality, to the point that it feels out of line with Spidey’s comic book heritage. Comics often speak to what’s happening in the real world. Captain America assumed the role of Nomad in 1974, the same year that Richard Nixon resigned from office in the wake of the Watergate Scandal. The X-Men have a history of allegorical representation of minoritized and persecuted groups. Spider-Man doesn’t seem interested in reacting to the real world. My colleague Tom Ley wrote about this at Deadspin, noting that nearly every side activity involved aiding the police. This stands in contrast to games like Spider-Man 2, where Spider-Man returned as many lost balloons as he webbed up muggers. Instead of being part of the complex life of the city, this latest Spider-Man sees a black-and-white world of cops and robbers. He aids in state surveillance, standing unquestioningly alongside an overly idealized caricature of the police. He’s still friendly, but I don’t know if he’s part of the neighborhood now.

I bet this she thinks she woke and doing all those black folk favor.

Because police brutality is exactly what I want in my escapists fantasy video game.

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rdesai19 · 4 years

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2020

saturday night

Biden up by 7% in iowa - says one new poll of 800 people. 48% to 41%. is this poll right and all others wrong? is this fake news pushed by the right?

it makes PA the tie-breaker. and PA is very close. So are Georgia, Arizona, Texas, Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, Florida. All these states will most likely break the same way - decisively victory for one of them. Is it more likely that the right takes over or the left?

If history is any guide - the right will take over. The left only wins decisively once in a while. The left's cultural victories are decisive but political victories, not so much. Every once in a while, the left does win - like the continent. But, most of the time, the right wins - in all the continents - not just in Europe. It feels like a very self-centered world in which the time i live through is one of those rare times when the left wins decisively. More likely, this will be like all those other times when the right wins yet another war and extracts a harrowing price. Perhaps, IA is a harbinger.

There is genuine energy in the 30% that the right does not identify with. They will show up in much higher numbers. There is also genuine energy in the right wing. They will show up in force - equally so. The moderates on both sides are very energized. They may not protest, but they will show up. And, whom are they voting for? Maybe enough of them do not identify with the right and show up in much bigger numbers. We will know when the wave breaks.

One of the many outcomes of this Schrodinger’s cat is that the left wins decisively. That could mean so many good things without pissing off the business too much. Techies love the left but are scared of the right. The right does not have the edge in tech. And business is techie these days. So, a decisive victory could mean a lot of awesome, perfectly constitutional legislative remedies to historical injustices.

But, the more likely scenario is that things have to get worse before they get better. So, the right will win all 3 branches and proceed to enforce its will on the rest of the world. They have the $ and the guns. Trump could very well end up being the father of the American Empire. The first emperor. The supreme court will be packed with 13 justices - 10 repubilcans and 3 democrats. All the right lands will be gerrymandered. Elections can become a farce within 4 years.

Who will stop it from getting worse? There is no other nation with the power to stop them. Hitler had the USA. There is no USA that can out-USA USA now. A hundred years ago - there were multiple peer powers. Today, there is only one power.

The only thing that can stop this runaway right wing train with the American Empire as the engine - is nature.

---

sunday night

It seems highly possible that all the wavering states break the same way. Their behavior could turn out to be very correlated. The people who stay at home may be the same kind in all states. Breaking left is highly possible - biden, congress, and the senate. It would likely affect state elections too - continuing the tide of competitive improvement in state legislatures.

A complete control of the left over the law-making machinery is entirely plausible. And there is much old ground that can be reclaimed through laws. Cannabis, Civil rights, Abortion. Title IX, Immigration, Election infrastructure, regulations, etc.

If two branches gang up on a third branch - it is not an even battle. If the congress and the president decide to pack the court, there is nothing that the SC can do to stop it. Notice that Biden has not ruled it out and he had promised to clarify his position before election day. I wonder if he will play his cards close or go big to get the base.

On the other hand, breaking right is highly possible too. Trump and the Senate stay republican. This would empower the right to no end. The project of American Empire would go full steam ahead. The right wing of today is not isolationist in the same way as the Nazi-era right of US. Those guys wanted to stay aloof from peers - these guys want to stay in splendid isolation - imposing their will on the whole world and exploiting resources like it is a race against the clock. The old practices of separate will come back; social injustice will get much worse. The British Empire with today’s tech.

It feels oddly calm even as I feel the wave is breaking big - one way or the other. The uncertainty makes it hard to feel happy about the prospects of Biden victory. The uncertainty makes it easy to feel scared about the prospects of Trump factory. The odd calm is perhaps the onset of the numbness needed to withstand the wave of fear and loathing that will wash over in case of Trump victory. After the numbing will no doubt come the regrouping. The right has risen. We are in for the long haul.

There will be recriminations in hindsight. But, I will need to put it behind me. I will need to put the loathing behind me too. There will be many people who will go to the right, once it rises. We will need to live with them. I will need to bring back my old values about how to be friends with right-leaning people while still being true to myself.

There will be temptations to go extreme. I do not have to be as cautious as I have been all my life. I can be vocal. I can become the thorn in people’s sides. But, I have to avoid these urges to signal virtue. Nothing is to be gained by feeling virtuous. Better to be in human company also, rather than only in my own head.

I feel that I have reached the end of imagination. I do not expect the right to hold back in any way. And, they have so many weapons they have never used. I do not expect them to exercise restraint. They are firm adherents of scorched earth tactics. Overwhelming power. Shock and Awe. SDI. They will not hesitate to bomb China or iran to bits. I do not think the US Military can stop them. There are enough in the US Military who support the right. Expect a major purge of the top level command in the military.

I feel that I have reached the end of imagination I do not expect the right to hold back in any way on the domestic front either. They will enact Christianity as the first among equals religion. Ten commandments, prayer, abortion. They will vent their fury on people like Brij - trans - who have not yet reached the level of LGB in mainstream, They will vent their fury on immigrants. They will push wages down - but unequally. While men’s wages will go down less; the rest will go down more. They will go to any lengths to ensure congress victory in 2022 - gerrymander after 2020 census, suppress vote,...

But, when it comes to the left winning - I do not feel at the end of imagination at all. Stories and novels and sagas remain to be written about how a more just society can be made with more just laws. It is a fascinating human endeavor. What are the just laws I want?

But, right now - it seems untimely to dwell on that.

-------------------------------------

Thursday night.

There is a lightness in my step. A lifting of a cloud in the head. There is a feeling of a return to a good place. Mere certainty of Trump’s loss has brought clarity back to the mind.

It is a relief that I can ignore Trump again. He is so infectiously negative. I marvel at how his 3 old kids have turned out so positive. He stirs up everyone’s negative nerves - whether sad or mad. Never glad.

Trump and Perdue are pegged - thankfully in GA, sadly in other places like KA, NC, MT, IA. The center left wins the presidency and now - the left left has to win the Senate by winning GA again. And, Biden has to get out the base in GA.

GA January may have an even bigger turnout than this time around. It will be an epic battle between the left and the right. A totally different test than this election, Trump will be dousing GA with the flames for two months. Churches could get burnt. Muslims could get rounded up as terrorists. Professors may get fired. All these attacks on civil society could juice up his base to an even higher participation. The backlash to Kamala's win and Trump’s loss could impose a whole new test on GA.

The left has the blacks. They will turn out 100%. They have been working the system. They know the importance of now. John Lewis will be brought up again and again. Biden will talk about LBJ. He will have to turn left. He cannot sit on his haunches and solve just Covid. He will have to spend political capital, perhaps burn some Republican bridges. He will bring out the base.

The left has minorities. Kamala could reach out to Indians - if she can convince more of them to forego their prejudices and economic thinking - maybe the Indians could be a help. These two segments, in spite of their turnout and strengths are no match for the white right.

It all comes down to the left-right split in the whites. GA 2021 is yet another civil war battle. And fittingly, GA is the location of the battle. The white left will turn out big. The youth vote will skyrocket. The senior turnout will get even higher. But, will enough white lefties show up in the fight against the 100% turnout in the white right? I think Biden can do it.

We cannot claim to know what this test will reveal. Such an honest test of the left-right split has never been conducted in any society. No one can predict what happens if there is a 100% turnout. The next few months will be full of drama. There is no return to normalcy. Trump will do atrocities that will shake me up. The Right is not going to suddenly give up. There is no permanent win in my lifetime. GA 2021 will provide an amazingly honest look at the left-right split in the whites. I cannot know whether I will like the test results. No point in thinking about that.

It is still untimely to think of what kind of just laws I want. First, get clarity on what the next two months will bring. Pendulum of emotions. Trump will stir up bad stuff and that is actually very good for the cause. Biden will have to spend political capital on the base, instead of winning the center, like he did in 2020 elections. Seeing a prez do that will be very satisfying. A further step towards an old sjw’s dream. But, the good and the bad will be happening at the same time.

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dippedanddripped · 4 years

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Keary Kase created a legacy not only for himself but Oregon with his classic record “Oowee.” And with recording artists the biggest influencers in the world, during the current widespread of a social issue known as Black Lives Matter, Kase dedicates his star power to bringing awareness to the importance of unity against police brutality and social injustice. Now not a time to make people dance, Keary Kase is here to wake people up.

“We, as humans, have evolved to higher consciousness,” he says. “In the last 5 years, we have experienced a re-awakening. We are aware of our connection to each other and the detrimental effect that negative vibrations have on our development. The days of praising the lord in one breath and cursing the devil in the next are reaching an end. It has become obvious that both of those forces, however, you choose to address them, exist inside every one of us.

The universally recognized symbol of balance, yin and yang, depicts a white shape with a bit of black at its core and a black shape, with a bit of white at its core. That symbol masterfully describes the human race as we are today. Unfortunately, we have a group of people who want to continue with the current version of slavery that allows them to move with a level of impunity and shields their families from everyday struggles endured by those outside of the group for generations to come. The shackles are off. They are not going back on.”

While there have been plenty of celebrities joining the protesters in the streets around the world. There are a majority of celebrities who have shy away from getting involved due to commitments with endorsements and branding. Keary Kase is definitely not one of those individuals and frowns upon those who are more concerned with their bank account than morality.

“I’m definitely not afraid to align with the BLM movement. We saw artists release songs and videos in the days following George Floyd’s murder. I watched Nick Canon’s “I Can’t Breathe Again,” for the first time with one eye opened. I was afraid the Comedian might soften the intensity of the moment. Instead, he came off on point with it. We need more straight talk from artists, now, more than ever. I’m with it 100% and my music will reflect my support. My only issue with the movement is that it may be providing a cloak for any individual or organization wanting to undermine the true BLM agenda. We see politicians attempting to pass legislation at the Senate by feigning support of bills like the Emmett Till Anti-lynching Act while attempting to pass bills designed to lynch us. Love goes out to Senator Kamala Harris, btw, and the finger to Senator Small Paul.”

More than just a protest, Keary Kase involvement in the current movement is extremely personal, like most Black men in America, he ‘s been on the receiving in of police misconduct his entire life. Traumatic experiences due to Police’s abuse of power and authority which has become the normal understanding for Black America.

“When I meet a black man over the age of 25, I assume he has been wrongfully accused, arrested, prosecuted, beaten, judged, and mistreated. Often to the point of ruin (felony), leaving him with very few options to proceed with. Similarly, we are viewed by many white people in just the same way. The only difference is, they assume we are criminals by nature and that we have been justly convicted of any crime found in the record of our criminal history. They believe that aggressive arrests, beatings, and deaths occurring during infraction driven encounters are justifiable incidents in which a person of color did not comply.

When I was old enough to drive (16), I became exposed to police bias and harassment. Several times each month, I would get pulled over and asked to get out of the car so the officers could illegally search my car for drugs and weapons, which I told them I did not have. There is a suburb to Portland called Lake Oswego, which is known by EVERYONE as ‘Lake No Negro.’ If you are “driving while black” in Lake Oswego, you will be followed by the police. If you stay on one of the two main streets that pass through, they will escort you to the city limit and make a u-turn. If you happen to have an ‘intermittent tail light,’ you might get pulled over and hit with multiple tickets. This is Lake Oswego’s way of discouraging black visitors. The Lake Oswego Police Department should definitely be defunded. The first time I had to physically defend myself against police was age 17. There was a biker bar in Southeast Portland where my friend, his wife and newborn child lived. We would walk by the bar going to and from the store, throughout the day, as teens do. One night, as we were walking by, someone standing in front of the bar said ‘NIGGERS.’ We looked across the street where three older white guys, maybe in their 30’s-40’s, were standing and provoking us. We crossed the street to engage them and the entire bar spilled outside to surround us. A fight broke out and the police were called. When they arrived, the 6 or so police officers immediately started hitting us with their batons. I remember getting beaten by 4 officers, while I was on the ground, before being cuffed and placed in the back of a cruiser. Once the officers ran our names and realized we were mostly minors, they drove us home. None of the people in the bar were beaten, cuffed or questioned. It was Just-us. As an adult teen, I was convicted of a crime that I did not commit. The detectives told me it did not matter if I did not commit the crime. They said unless I told them who did commit the crime and the guilty party would verify that I was not involved, I was guilty.

In my twenties, I was shopping at a notoriously racist branch of a store called Fred Meyer, in Beaverton, OR. I had just purchased a karaoke machine and was waiting by the door for my friend to get out of the bathroom. A security officer told me I couldn’t stand there and I needed to leave. I told him that if I was going to be treated that way I was going to go to customer service and return the item. He said I could do it another time but I needed to leave immediately. I walked to the customer service desk where they refused to return the item I had just bought. The security officer grabbed my arm, I reacted and he fell, breaking his glasses in the process. Another security officer grabbed me from behind and put his arm around my neck. I started to blackout and was taken down. The police were called and I was arrested for trespassing. In the police report, they said I had damaged the karaoke machine and demanded a discount. It further said that I started yelling and making threats, then attacked the security officers as they addressed me. Again, I was convicted. After court, the first security officer approached me and said ‘see what happens when you go against us?” I replied, ‘yeah, you get your glasses broke.’

I often ask myself if that really happened because it makes no sense. Police are not our masters. They do not have the right to arrest us, beat us, or kill us when we don’t agree with them. But it’s not just the police who abuse power to the detriment of people of color, it’s the entire judicial system. The police are just the spear’s tip. Arguably, everybody gets the tip but we, especially black people, always end up getting the shaft.My friend, Sgt. James Brown was killed by county jail staff in El Paso, TX while he was serving a 2-day sentence for a DWI. In his final moments, while struggling with the 5 officers who were restraining him, guess what his last words were. Years later the video of his murder was released. I watched my friend, who had just been honorably discharged from the Army after 2 tours in Iraq, gasping and shouting repeatedly, “I CAN’T BREATHE.” He begged the officers, who were killing him, to help him. I became friends with his mother and stepfather in the years following his death. It is still hard to look into his mother’s eyes to this day. Justice for Sgt. James Brown.”

In a radical mood, Keary Kase supplies a soundtrack to the current climate with new music in the works. Displaying that same energy and impact that created classic songs like “Change Gon’ Come,” “What’s Going On” and more, Kase’s knows that today’s music can deliver a similar impact. He explains:

“I won’t be writing any love songs for a while, but for black people, being killed by police, former police, and the likes has become a condition of our reality. This is not news to us. If you listen to Hip Hop from the ’70s, when it was created, all the way up to the hip hop of 2020, (pre- George Floyd) you will hear a steady flow of lyrics about police bias and brutality and the killing of black people at the hands of the police. We don’t even call it “murder” because, until 2020, they were never convicted or even charged with the crime.

Speaking against the system through our music is what we have done since our ancestors were slaves. Today’s field calls may be repeated by a rifle.”

He further elaborates, stating:

“Thanks to the internet, fans will be impacted by the artists of today even more than they were by our predecessors. Whether or not the message will be delivered and who will deliver it is still a question. All of this is still so recent. As an artist, I observe life, collect data, and translate through my perspective. I’m still taking it all in. If other artists are in the frame of mind that I am right now, fans should be expecting to hear some of the most inspirational music they have ever heard from us.”

#keary kase #oowee #music blog #pdx hiphop #portland oregon #lake oswego

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00blackc4t00 · 7 years

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Charlie Winters is a Deus Ex OC featured in the fanfic Sunshine

Her mother - who raised Charlie as a single parent - was a former employee of Page Industries, manufacturing electronics in one of their Detroit factories. In her work, she was exposed to dangerous chemicals that, over the years, led to her developing aggressive lung cancer. Lucky for her, it was around this time that Sarif Industries was making great strides in advanced biotech and cybernetic augmentations. David Sarif had designs for a preliminary Rebreather - something that would allow Charlie’s mother to have her tumors removed and still have a functioning respiratory system. It was still untested and very experimental, though. David offered to personally oversee installation of the Rebreather in Charlie’s mother - free of charge, and any external medical costs would be completely covered by Sarif Industries, as well. Charlie was fifteen when her mother had the operation. It was a success.

Through extensive oncological treatments both before and after the Rebreather implant, her mother’s doctors advised that it was demonstrably clear that the cancer had come from unsafe chemical exposure on the job, and she likely had a very solid legal case against Page Industries. With a team of lawyers who specialized in OSHA violations, she officially filed suit against Page Industries in early 2019. Bob Page was already a respected public figure, and his conglomeration a major force in the business world. Before it even went to court, the case was highly publicized. The sick single mother versus the megacorp. David versus Goliath. It would never come to fruition. A week before the first hearing, Charlie’s mother was found dead in her own home. The investigation was short - no foul play suspected. At eighteen, Charlie Winters was an orphan, and got her first taste of injustice.

She knew her mother was murdered, but lacked the means or power to prove it. Instead, she decided to dedicate her life to making sure nothing like this ever happened to anyone else - to uncovering and sharing the truth, objective truth, no matter how unfavorable it was to the rich and powerful. A powerful hatred for Bob Page and his ilk drove her through college, where she studied journalism and graduated with top marks. She interned with LIMB as well as Picus, but that wasn’t a good fit - a news organization more dedicated to spinning and manipulating the truth than reporting it clearly. In 2025, she landed a job as a junior editor at Detroit Free Press, a small independent paper with no corporate ties or clandestine loyalties. There she thrived, and demonstrated a knack for sniffing out even the most scandalous, deeply buried, deliberately obscured stories - no matter how dangerous or illegal. Her colleagues characterized her as a bloodhound, and had a bail fund pool for her, as she spent many nights in jail after crossing the wrong line or pissing off the wrong person. It was worth it - with her help, Detroit Free Press rose to respectability, renowned for it’s hard-hitting investigative journalism and as one of the few remaining news outlets in the city that reported fairly and objectively.

In 2027, she found herself back in association with David Sarif. Following police radio chatter, she broke into the scene of the Purity First attack at the Milwaukee Junction factory, and stumbled right into the augmented hacker who was attempting to steal Sarif Industries’ Typhoon prototype. She was a witness, privy to dangerous secrets meant for the FBI and CIA. Recognizing her skills, and as a way to keep her close and under watch, David offered her a job as a private media consultant for Sarif Industries.

For the next year she worked closely with Team Sarif. She assisted Adam Jensen in his search for Megan Reed’s missing team of scientists. She and Frank Pritchard dug into the Tyrants, the mercenaries who orchestrated the attack on Sarif Industries months prior, and hacked into their killing floor. Along the way, she furthered her own investigation of her mother’s murder, finding first the cop who covered it up and then the Triad-associated assassin who did the deed and then the high-ranking government official who ordered it. She also uncovered the truth about Jensen’s past and his augmentations, revealing to him that his ex-girlfriend Megan Reed had been experimenting on his DNA, and that David had given him far more augmentations than he actually needed. This all came to a head when she and Faridah Malik traveled to the CDC headquarters in Atlanta, and Charlie walked in on a conversation between Elizabeth DuClare and one of her most trusted agents. Charlie uncovered the Illuminati’s plot to use the new mandatory biochip upgrade to control all augmented citizens, killed the agent, and for the first time became a direct target of the Illuminati herself. When she returned home to Detroit, she anonymously leaked the information about the biochip, urging citizens not to get the upgrade. The public reacted in a rash of fear and confusion, but the leak worked - overall, less people got the biochip upgrade, and so a small amount of damage from the Aug Incident was mitigated.

Charlie was by David Sarif’s side at Panchaea, when Hugh Darrow gave his speech and activated the signal that drove all augmented people with the biochip to violent madness. As chaos and carnage tore through Panchaea station, Jensen rushed to shut down Darrow’s signal while Charlie helped lead groups of survivors to safety. Eventually, she was evacuated along with David, and the station self-destructed beneath them with Jensen still inside.

Her biochip leak had grabbed the attention of several big players, for good and for evil. Janus and the Juggernaut Collective had been watching her for a while. She was obviously skilled, and obviously sympathetic to her cause. After the Aug Incident and the loss of so many she held dear, she was profoundly disillusioned and broken. Sarif Industries and Detroit Free Press were in shambles. For a short while she remained in Detroit with Pritchard, selling corporate secrets and living off the fruits of cybercrime, drinking and using drugs to try and abet the pain she felt. Her recruitment into Juggernaut was swift and easy. She was desperate for purpose, and her anger propelled her. It was almost ruthless, the way she shed her old life. Disappeared from Detroit without a trace or a word, leaving Pritchard and all she'd known behind.

Juggernaut had their eyes in Europe, on a powerful new force - the Augmented Rights Coalition and it’s charismatic leader, German doctor Talos Rucker. ARC could be a helpful tool, but they suspected the Illuminati already had or would soon infiltrate it. They sent Charlie to Berlin, where she joined ARC at one of their clinics as a nameless volunteer. For months she assisted in distributing neuropozyne amongst the poor neighborhoods there, and providing medical care to underprivileged augs. Through cunning, she rose in influence within ARC. She redesigned systems of the clinics to make them more efficient, and increased recruitment tenfold through pamphlets and public relations. It wasn't long before she caught the attention of Rucker himself.

They grew close quickly, personally and professionally. She worked with him directly in Berlin, and when ARC established their headquarters in Prague, she relocated with him - all the while funneling information to Juggernaut and learning the organization inside and out to try and sniff out any Illuminati agents. She worked as Rucker's personal aide, and as the de-facto spokesperson for ARC, dealing solely with the press. It was a demanding job - Rucker had a drinking problem, and Picus seemed determined to paint him in the most negative light possible. He was a real threat, and needed to be undermined.

At ARC's base in Utulek Complex, Charlie made many friends - most notably, Ivan Berk and Viktor Marchenko. She became close to the both of them - close enough to realize that something was up with Viktor. He expressed unusually violent ideas, and seemed to be influencing Ivan towards the same. She wasn't able to prevent the suicide bombing of Ruzicka station, and mourned the loss of her friend Ivan. The incident drove her, and after persistent investigation, she discovered Marchenko's Illuminati ties and the existence of the Orchid poison. She was able to save Rucker's life, and when Task Force 29 sent an agent to question ARC about the Ruzicka bombing, she was ready. It was then that she was reunited with Adam Jensen, a man she believed to be dead, and once again they were united in fighting the Illuminati.

Charlie's continued loyalty to Juggernaut is absolute, but guided by an overarching hatred of the Illuminati, both because of what they've taken from her personally and what she's seen them take from others. Politically she is far left, and believes that every individual in the world, augmented or non, deserves the right to live free of prying influences or oppression. She believes that power corrupts, and is naturally suspicious of authority figures. She is a revolutionary and a guerrilla, but not of the typical sort. Words are her weapon, and she knows how to capture and hold the public's attention. Ferociously idealistic, emotionally driven and unashamed, she lives her life in service to the truth and will follow the fight wherever it takes her.

#( personnel files )#( dissolved girl )#( the absolute basics )

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tanzaniaagainstcorruption · 3 years

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No one escapes KARMA (&Justice)

Not even Presidents of a country.

There is NO get out of KARMA free card.

One beautiful thing about KARMA is the truth that it has NO expiration date. It circles back. Always. It keeps a breathtakingly detailed record-has a ledger-its own Accountability system.

Magufuli, the so called “Bulldozer” promised to end corruption in #Tanzania (they all do that when campaigning for the Presidency) is no more. However, his corruption legacy continues with his replacement.

Corruption is the modus operandi of the CCM.

Magufuli promised to fight corruption and make life for Tanzanian’s great and better. & What did Magufuli do?

He did corruption. And corruption is the business of the CCM in Tanzania and has been for decades.

Stealing elections, stealing investors money, stealing Tanzanians money, stealing the lives and hopes and dreams of the future generations. Corruption is all they do.

Magufuli promised to make life great and better for himself and the CCM elites. Not for Tanzanians. (Especially not for schoolgirls-he banned education for pregnant schoolgirls who were victims of their Pedo teachers. & he pardoned Pedos)

History of Corruption in Tanzania-from Mwinyi (weak on corruption) to Mkapa’s corrupt thug regime (including not following the rule of law or TZ own COA rulings and judgments as witnessed in the Valambhia case) to Kikwete’s power grab from looted funds from EPA scam to the filthy corrupt bloody regime of Magufuli….it’s all corruption! Criminals in power do not make a govt. for the people. They take the govt. of the people hostage for their own ELITE, for their own pockets to deny the people their rights, justice, bread and lives.

Call it state capture or theives in power. The TZ govt. is a criminal enterprise.

Magufuli, instead of fighting corruption, stole eletcions criminalized voices against corruption, took away freedoms of the people, disappeared, killed, tortured journo and Opposition Mps. Gagged the Media and threw innocent people in jail on trumped up charges. Yes. Trumped up charges. Nothing new. Being taking place in Tanzania for decades! & guess where the cash comes from for this great scam project of the CCM? From the Bank of Tanzania.

Donors know all this and more and yet choose to turn a blind eye to this brutal abuse of & weaponization of the legal system in Tanzania against own citizens and the business community. The actual term is “injustice as cash cow”! Yes, the CCM have turned “injustice” into their own cash cow!

Gagging the media started with Kikwete when he suppressed one of the most historical articles revealing grand corruption in Tanzania-“The Most Expensive Legal Suit in Dar’s History” a grand theft of an investor’s legal rights and blatant disregard of TZ’s own courts rulings and judgements in a case of the centry in African or any legal system in the world. Throwing fake cases, manufactued cases on one man and throwing him in all the courts of TZ when he demanded his lawful legal right while the AG Chambers(One of the most corrupt institutions in TZ) & elite CCM lawyers filled their pockets with this gross injustice! They did it to one man in those days, today, they have weaponized the legal system against the people who question the criminals in govt., those who demand their rights, and the OPPosition. No investor or investment is safe under the CCM criminal govt.

Corruption and dayLite robberies at the Bank of Tanzania IS the Modus Operandi of the CCM.

Lets not forget what we witnessed during thuggish bloody rule of Magufuli-we witnessed the first ever assassination attempt on the life of a Tanzanian-Mr. Tundu Lissu-an Opponent of Magufuli from the Opposition party. In broad daylite, he was ridden with bullets! He survived. But to this day there has been no substantial investigation on this brutal act of violence against a Tanzanian and no perpetrators brought to justice! Just like NO substantial investigation at the Bank of Tanzania for all the Fraud and money laundering activtities of the CCM Elite.

What did Magufuli take with him? Did he take all the looted $ from the Bank of Tanzania? Did he take all those unnecessary Dreamliners that he bought instead of building schools, hospitals, etc?

When he was President, he promised to go after the Economic Saboteurs of Tanzania. What he really meant was that he was going after innocent people who had a Q. about his regime, his policies etc. After all, the real Economic Sabotuers are the ones at the AG Chambers, the DPP, PCCB, the Bank of Tanzania and all those Elite CCM criminals Roam Free.

What Magufuli did was let the cancer of corruption metastasized to all institutions in Tanzania while he went after peoples rights and freedoms to protect the looting spree of Tanzania by the Elite criminal cabal!

In the end, he had to face KARMA. There is no escape from KARMA! It circles back.

#Tanzania corruption #impunity

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biofunmy · 5 years

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DealBook Briefing: The Huawei Backlash Goes Global

Good Thursday. (Want this by email? Sign up here.)

The U.S.-China tech fight spreads

More companies around the world are realizing that they have little choice but to turn their backs on Huawei, as the tech rift between the U.S. and China widens.

Huawei’s blacklisting doesn’t just affect U.S. companies. “Under Washington’s export control guidelines, third-country suppliers to blacklisted entities need to apply for licenses if U.S. content exceeds 25 percent of the value of their products or services,” the FT explains. That has left companies scrambling to work out if they need to limit their sales to the Chinese company.

• The British semiconductor designer ARM said it would stop licensing technology to Huawei’s chip unit, because some of its designs contain technology from the U.S. And Panasonic has halted shipments of some components to Huawei for similar reasons.

• Mobile carriers in Britain have stopped offering Huawei phones to some customers, Amie Tsang of the NYT reports. Cellphone companies in Japan are considering similar moves. They’re concerned about Google pulling support for the phones; it has said it will no longer offer Huawei the full version of its Android operating system.

One glimmer of hope for Huawei: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s largest contract chip maker, said on Thursday that its shipments to HiSilicon, Huawei’s chip design affiliate, were not affected, Reuters reports. That’s crucial — Huawei would struggle to replace all the chips it uses with homegrown versions.

More: Here’s a breakdown of Huawei’s supply-chain issues, told through its flagship smartphone, the P30 Pro. And shares of Huawei’s suppliers have tumbled.

Trump’s finances edge toward the light

President Trump’s effort to keep his personal finances secret suffered two blows yesterday, as a federal judge and New York lawmakers authorized moves to make them public.

• A federal judge in Manhattan, Edgardo Ramos, blocked Mr. Trump’s bid to prevent Deutsche Bank and Capital One from complying with congressional subpoenas for the documents.

• New York State’s legislature approved a bill allowing Congress to see his state tax returns, which would largely mirror his federal ones.

These are “the most serious attempts to pierce the veil that surrounds Mr. Trump’s finances,” the NYT reports. “They increase the odds that congressional Democrats, who have become more vocal in their calls to undertake impeachment proceedings against the president, could enter such a fray with ample ammunition about Mr. Trump’s business dealings.”

Judge Ramos was torn. He agreed with Mr. Trump’s claim that turning over financial records to Congress could harm him and his family. But he said the congressional committees’ goals — to investigate potential money laundering — mattered more.

What can Mr. Trump do? He has already appealed a ruling that his auditing firm must comply with congressional subpoenas, so he’ll probably do the same with the Deutsche Bank decision. It’s less clear how he can contest the New York legislature’s maneuver, but he is sure to try.

Can companies weather the trade war?

That’s on the mind of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who said yesterday that he was personally questioning some of America’s largest companies about their plans for surviving the U.S.-China trade skirmish, Alan Rappeport of the NYT writes.

“I can tell you I am monitoring the situation very carefully,” Mr. Mnuchin said. He said he had spoken to Walmart’s C.F.O. this week, for example, to “specifically understand from Walmart what things they can source from other areas and what items they can’t.”

Mr. Mnuchin argues that “a lot of this business will be moved from China,” so tariffs won’t push up many consumer prices. But retail analysts point out that “companies cannot necessarily adjust their business plans as quickly as the trade winds blow,” Mr. Rappeport reports.

The outreach “underscores how sensitive the Trump administration is to the prospect of retailers raising prices and blaming the president’s tariffs as the election cycle draws near,” Mr. Rappeport writes.

More: China’s recent sale of $20 billion in U.S. debt has raised fears that Treasury bonds may be weaponized in the trade war. Could Beijing deprive the U.S. of rare-earth minerals? How traders are playing the trade fight. And China now has a trade war song. All together now: “Trade war! Trade war! Not afraid of the outrageous challenge!”

Qualcomm’s court loss could shake up 5G

The pending antitrust punishment could seriously undercut Qualcomm’s business model — and America’s bid to dominate next-generation 5G wireless technology.

Qualcomm “strangled competition,” according to Judge Lucy Koh of the Federal District Court in San Jose. She found it had made cellphone makers pay licensing fees even if they didn’t buy its chips, refused to license industry-standard patents and paid off device makers to “extinguish” legal action.

Her decision “directly undercuts” Qualcomm’s biggest business, the WSJ points out. “It could lower costs for Apple Inc. and other smartphone makers that have complained Qualcomm’s pricing tactics allowed it to profit off innovations, such as new displays or cameras, unrelated to its patents.”

Shares in Qualcomm tumbled nearly 11 percent yesterday. If the company’s licensing business gets held “to the letter of the law and what Koh has put forth, it’s devastating,” the analyst Christopher Rolland of Susquehanna International Group told the WSJ.

There could be political fallout, too. The Trump administration has deemed Qualcomm a vital player in America’s race against China over 5G, a field in which China is the other leading chip maker.

“We would not be surprised” if President Trump were to step in, Mr. Rolland wrote in a research note.

Deutsche Bank faces angry shareholders

The German lender’s annual investor meeting is today, and shareholders have plenty to complain about.

• Several investors will press the company to make deep cuts to its investment bank, which has struggled with high costs and underperformance.

• Deutsche Bank failed to merge with Commerzbank. Investors will want to know how it plans to shore itself up instead.

• The lender has also endured money-laundering scandals and questions about its relationship with Donald Trump. Just yesterday, it acknowledged that its anti-money laundering software had serious flaws. What’s it doing to clean up its act?

Many investors want to oust Deutsche Bank’s chairman, Paul Achleitner. He is likely to survive — just about — but the pressure for him to quit before his scheduled departure in 2022 is unlikely to let up.

And could there be a vote of no confidence in the management? Prominent advisory firms like ISS have argued that investors have suffered financially from Deutsche Bank’s scandals, so it’s possible.

It’s E.U. Election Day. Trade could suffer.

Populists on the left and the right are poised to make big gains in elections for the European Parliament today, possibly complicating trade negotiations with the U.S., Jack Ewing of the NYT reports.

Populist parties are expected to deny the two main centrist parties a majority in the European Parliament, according to estimates by Teneo, a management consultant. The centrist parties would then “have to cooperate with parties like the Greens, who are skeptical of trade deals with the United States,” Mr. Ewing writes.

“Right-wing politicians do not have a unified position on trade, but there is a strong protectionist faction. At the populist rally in Milan on Saturday, Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Rally party of France, drew applause with her call: ‘We reject uncontrolled free trade that helps only the banks and financiers.’ ”

And E.U. officials think that the U.S. is distracted from negotiations by its trade war with China. “We are ready from the E.U. side to start and we have the mandate,” Cecilia Malmstrom, the EU’s chief trade negotiator, said to reporters in Paris on Wednesday. “But I don’t think the U.S. is ready to start on the tariff negotiations.”

The man who hunts offshore cash

Bloomberg Businessweek takes a look at Gabriel Zucman, a 32-year-old professor who is one of the foremost experts on where the rich stash their cash.

• He has compiled evidence “that the world’s rich were stowing at least $7.6 trillion in offshore accounts, accounting for 8 percent of global household financial wealth.”

• “80 percent of those assets were hidden from governments, resulting in about $200 billion in lost tax revenue per year.”

• Mr. Zucman “has also found that multinational corporations move 40 percent of their foreign profits, about $600 billion a year, out of the countries where their money was made and into lower-tax jurisdictions.”

• Finding that data hasn’t been easy: “Tax collectors such as the IRS generally require taxpayers to report income, not wealth. And much of the world’s wealth is held in forms — homes, art, retirement accounts, non-dividend-paying stocks — that produce no income prior to a sale.”

• Leading Democratic lawmakers like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have all consulted with Mr. Zucman and his academic partner, Emmanuel Saez.

• Expect to hear more from the pair, who have written a book that many 2020 candidates will look to use in order to soak the rich. “The Triumph of Injustice,” to be published by W.W. Norton & Co. early next year, “focuses on how wealth disparity can be fought with tax policy.”

Revolving door

Ken Feinberg was named as the mediator for legal settlement talks involving Bayer’s Roundup weedkiller.

Amplo, a venture capital firm focused on international social problems, has hired the former Obama administration official Susan Rice as a board partner.

The speed read

Deals

• Avon confirmed that it will sell itself to Natura of Brazil. (Reuters)

• The activist hedge fund ValueAct has urged Merlin Entertainment, which runs Madame Tussauds and Legoland, to sell itself. (FT)

• UBS’s plan to turn around its investment bank is faltering. (FT)

• Saudi Arabia is in talks to buy American natural gas from Sempra Energy. (NYT)

• Colony Capital, the investment firm run by the Trump confidant Tom Barrack, plans to invest $5 billion in Latin America. (WSJ)

Politics and policy

• President Trump said that he won’t work with Democrats on an infrastructure plan until they stop investigating him. Relatedly: How “infrastructure week” became a political joke. (NYT)

• Three Democratic senators want to let customers sue companies for mishandling of data as part of a privacy bill. (Bloomberg)

• Harriet Tubman won’t be featured on the $20 bill until Mr. Trump leaves office, according to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. (NYT)

• How the White House is struggling to combat America’s fentanyl crisis. (WaPo)

Boeing

• The Federal Aviation Administration may require a long delay for recertification of the 737 Max jet. (FT)

• China’s three biggest airlines want compensation from Boeing over the grounding of the jet. (NYT)

• The executive in charge of Boeing’s 787 factory in South Carolina is out, after an NYT investigation into manufacturing standards there. (NYT)

Tech

• Amazon shareholders rejected proposals that it reconsider the social impact of its approaches to facial recognition and climate change. (NYT)

• Both Democrats and Republicans bemoaned the lack of regulation of facial recognition at a House committee hearing yesterday. (Wired)

• Hackers are holding Baltimore hostage. (NYT)

• Tech giants sought to assure lawmakers yesterday that they are doing enough to protect the 2020 elections from foreign influence. (Bloomberg)

• Tesla shares hit a 2.5-year low after Wall Street raised concerns about its financial health. And the safety of the company’s autonomous lane-change software is coming under scrutiny. (Business Insider, Consumer Reports)

• Google’s A.I. restaurant-booking service may be impressive, but it often needs human intervention. And the company’s advertising exchange is being investigated over whether it illegally accessed sensitive user data. (NYT, FT)

Best of the rest

• Minutes from the last Fed policy meeting show that officials are in no rush to change interest rates. (NYT)

• Shi Jianxiang, a Chinese fugitive, has been living the high life in L.A. (WSJ)

• Michael Avenatti, the onetime lawyer for Stormy Daniels, is now accused of stealing from her. (WSJ)

• What reparations for slavery might look like. (NYT)

• Women may work more effectively in warmer offices. (NYT)

Thanks for reading! We’ll see you tomorrow.

We’d love your feedback. Please email thoughts and suggestions to [email protected].

Sahred From Source link Business

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#IFTTT #WordPress

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radioleary-blog · 6 years

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The Injustice League

If we had to elect a billionaire womanizer with anger issues, I wish we had elected Bruce Wayne instead. That I could get behind. Think about it, President Batman. How does that sound? Pretty damn awesome, that’s how that sounds! “Pow!” “Biff!” “Ka-Pow!” I love those comic book sound effects that accompany a solid kick to the face or a roundhouse punch on the old Adam West Batman show. I bet “Ka-Pow!” probably hurt a hell of a lot more than “Biff!” or “Pow!”, right? There was definitely a wide range of fight sound effects, I actually did a little research to find some other real examples of superheroes hitting each other, and they weren’t all great:

“Bam!” That’s not a punch, that’s the sound of that obnoxious midget Emeril Lagasse cooking food on TV.

“Zonk!” Sounds less like a mighty blow from Thor’s hammer and more like the stoner from Doonesbury doing blow and getting hammered.

“Boom!” “Crash!” These two word show up a lot in comics, and what scares me is these are the same words they use on Wall Street every day to describe what’s happening to our retirement accounts. It doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence that fluctuations in the market are like Batman’s fist, and my 401K is the Joker’s face.

“Crack!” “Zap!” “Crash!” That sounds like the drug you did, the police hitting you with a taser, and the sound you make as you hit the sidewalk. I would imagine the next sound effects would be “Make-Bail!” “Court-Appear!” and “Do-Time!” “Fap!” “Fwap!” “Sock!” “Bonk!” “Bamf!” “Wank!” “Splooge!” I kid you not, these were all really used in Marvel Comics from the 1980s. But it sounds more like the soundtrack of every teenage comic book nerd discovering masturbation. The next sound effect was most likely “Ma! Don’t You Knock?!”

But I digress. President-elect Batman. The Caped Crusader-in-Chief. The Dark Knight POTUS. Sure, it’s crazy, but I think that actually sounds less insane than our reality here on Earth-Prime, with President-elect Donald J. Trump. What the hell happened? Is it just me, or does it feel a little like we somehow stepped into an alternate reality that really wasn’t supposed to happen. Like someone messed up the timestream, and we all have a residual memory of things having been better somehow in a significantly different world. We can feel it in our bones, that things were intended to go down another way. It’s kind of like The Man In the High Castle, Philip K. Dick’s dystopian novel of an alternative reality where America lost World War II. It was a book I loved as a young man and read over and over, but now I know it as that show that’s supposed to be good that I can’t see because I don’t have Amazon. I preferred the book. There are certainly parallels, Trump actually lives in a high castle. But it’s more like The Man In the Gaudy Ostentatious Gold-Plated Tower. And rather than leading an underground resistance against Nazi and Imperial Japanese rule, he just kind of causes traffic in midtown Manhattan to become a permanent unmoving cluster-fuck from MoMa to The Met.

Maybe Donald Trump is like Batman from an alternate reality where his parents don’t get killed in an alley during a robbery attempt. So rather than devote his life to seeking justice and protecting the city from evil, he instead goes on the Howard Stern show and talks to Baba Booey about third-world swimsuit models he’s banged while he and one of his three wives were “on a break”. You know, Bruce Wayne only pretended to be a shallow, rich, gropey asshole so people would never suspect he was secretly a hero. I don’t think our President is pretending, and I don’t suspect he’s secretly a hero, either. I hope he is a hero, sure, but I still hope Andy Kaufman is just faking his own death, too.

Hey! Wait a minute! This explains why Trump’s eyes are so white while the rest of his face is burnt orange! He wears a mask! Holey Moley, It’s all starting to make sense! But whereas Batman fought the Penguin, The Riddler, and Poison Ivy, Trump mostly just fought Rosie O’Donnell. And a girl in a beauty pageant. And the cast of Hamilton. And I don’t think he actually won any of those fights, either. While Batman keeps the peace in Gotham City, one time on the Celebrity Apprentice Donald Trump kept Meatloaf and Gary Busey from fist-fighting over missing art supplies. Yeah, Batman seems like the better choice to me. Although I wonder what the sound effects would be for a Batman administration? “Veto!” “Photo-Op!” “Fund-Raise!”

As I’ve been thinking about this, and taking this weak premise far too seriously, I’m beginning to realize I may have some real problems with a Batman presidency. Not so much with the hitting and the vigilante stuff. Not with the fact that he’s a lunatic who deludedly thinks he rules a major metropolitan city, and if anyone else in a costume challenges him, he locks them away in Arkham mental asylum. No, my problem is the way he treats Alfred. Batman just may be a republican after all, because he treats Alfred the way the Walton family treat Wal-Mart employees.

How come every villain in Gotham City, from Clayface to Two-Face, they all have dozens and dozens of well-trained mercenary henchmen working for them, but Batman? He’s just has Alfred. He makes Alfred do absolutely everything. Bruce Wayne is like the richest man in Gotham City, but he’s too cheap to hire any real workforce? No wonder Gotham City is constantly overrun by criminals - Bane’s got an elite squad of para-military assassins knocking off the Gotham Bank, and Batman’s got an 85 year old British guy who’s gotta finish a load of laundry before he gasses up the Batmobile.

Alfred is like, “Yeah, right away, ‘Master Bruce’, mind if I put your damn socks away before I do the pre-flight check on the Bat-Copter? ‘Cause if I don’t take them out of the dryer right now, everything is going to be wrinkled AF by the time you get back.”

“You do realize I’ve only been trained to kiss rich people’s asses and serve soup, right? You want me to set the table and get the door? No problem. You want me to load Kryptonite missiles onto the Bat-Tank? Then you better download the manual, Caped Crusader, because they didn’t cover that shit in butler school. It’s bad enough you’ve got me changing the oil in the Bat-Jet while I’m wearing a tuxedo, but then I gotta keep dinner warm all night while you brood over the city from the top of a watertower.”

“You know, you employ like 50,000 people worldwide with this Wayne Foundation and Wayne Industries, and routinely hire thousands more temporary workers and independent contractors. You know that, right? You are on the board of directors. Here’s a crazy idea, let me get back to polishing the silver and ironing your cape, and maybe you bring in some people who are actually qualified to run your advanced-weapons motor pool.”

Is it my imagination or does it look like Alfred works seven days a week? Every crisis I’ve ever seen in Gotham, Alfred is always right there. I’ve never seen him take a day off. You’d think if something happened on a weekend, Bruce Wayne would have like a part-time guy there. “Hey, Travis, is it? Can you hold off on doing those dishes and run down to the Bat-Cave and dig out my underwater Batsuit? Killer croc is starting some shit. No, I don’t know where it is exactly, Have you looked by the giant penny? Or the T-Rex? Alfred has his own system. You guys need to communicate on things like this.”

You think Alfred ever hangs out with Jarvis, the Avengers’ butler, and they just bitch about their jobs? “You just have Batman, you have it easy, Thor leaves his hammer laying around and I can’t move it, I have to vacuum around it, and I always vacuum up Ant-Man. And they ought to call her the Scarlet Bitch, let me tell you.”

But it just goes to show you how old these characters are that they have a butler. Who the hell has a butler these days? Mike Tyson had an entourage of like 50 people, but even he didn’t have a butler. A tiger-wrangler? Sure. A Maori Tattooist? Yes. No butler. Butlers are an anachronism from an antiquated class system. Batman still reflects the culture of the 1930s when he was created. Good thing Batman isn’t from like 70 years earlier than that, or it probably wouldn’t be a white guy working for him, and he probably wouldn’t have a choice. And when he said ‘Master Bruce’, he’d really mean it.

So let me see if I got the story straight here. Alfred raises Bruce from a kid after his parents were killed. And in gratitude, Bruce makes him work like thirty years past retirement age. No pension plan? So he’s just gotta keep working until he drops dead? No 401K? Bruce Wayne is one cheap bastard. No. He’s a Cheap Bat-stard.

Batman is so cheap he won’t even rent a nice place for his Batman stuff, he just lurks in an underground cave full of batshit and stagnant water. I don’t know which he’s gonna catch first, the Riddler, or dysentery. Is he gonna collar a criminal, or just get cholera. A damp cave? Really? It’s a breeding ground for mosquitos. He’ll get the zika virus before he gets the Joker. He’s basically in a subterranean pit filled with bat guano, breathing that shit in, he’ll get double-pneumonia before he gets two-face.

And they thought Howard Hughes was a crazy billionaire. At least Howard Hughes was smart enough to bang some movie stars. Batman? What’s his thought process on a Friday night? “Hmm, what to do tonight...I could date that supermodel who’s been sending me nude selfies….but on the other hand I could impale some junkie mugger with a couple of Batarangs… I gotta go with Batarangs. Hey Alfred!”

Make America and Gotham City great again.

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robgrayofficial · 6 years

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GOOOOOOD AFTERNOON PATRIOTS!This is your girl u/Ivaginaryfriend here back at it again with your weekly Presidential Recap! It's been such a TREMENDOUS week of winning I was almost started to get tired of it all..... almost. Then I watched GEOTUS at his DRAGON ENERGY style rally and realized we'll NEVER get tired of it!Before we get this recap started, if you happened to miss any past recaps you can catch those at this link here!Sunday, May 6th:SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:Giuliani: "I'd rather have the Hillary Clinton Treatment - No under oath, only a Q/A, we get the questions in advance, and they write the report two weeks before."SILENCE IS DEAFENING. The media won't cover Allison Mack TRAFFICKING CHILDREN. The media really is covering for the Elite Pedophiles. PIZZAGATE/PEDOGATE IS REAL.UK: Lauren Southern successfully enters London through refugee method🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:Hate SpeechSunday Gunday: Trump .45Tra la la lala lala fuck McCain.I'm just going to leave this here........Monday, May 7th:TODAY'S ACTION:Vice President Pence Delivers Remarks During a Protocolary Meeting at the OASFirst Lady Melania Trump's Initiative LaunchFifteen Nominations Sent to the Senate TodayPresident Donald J. Trump Proclaims May 7, 2018, as Be Best Day🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:To the great people of West Virginia we have, together, a really great chance to keep making a big difference. Problem is, Don Blankenship, currently running for Senate, can’t win the General Election in your State...No way! Remember Alabama. Vote Rep. Jenkins or A.G. Morrisey!My highly respected nominee for CIA Director, Gina Haspel, has come under fire because she was too tough on Terrorists. Think of that, in these very dangerous times, we have the most qualified person, a woman, who Democrats want OUT because she is too tough on terror. Win Gina!The Russia Witch Hunt is rapidly losing credibility. House Intelligence Committee found No Collusion, Coordination or anything else with Russia. So now the Probe says OK, what else is there? How about Obstruction for a made up, phony crime.There is no O, it’s called Fighting BackThe 13 Angry Democrats in charge of the Russian Witch Hunt are starting to find out that there is a Court System in place that actually protects people from injustice...and just wait ‘till the Courts get to see your unrevealed Conflicts of Interest!“The Great Revolt” by Salena Zito and Brad Todd does much to tell the story of our great Election victory. The Forgotten Men & Women are forgotten no longer!Good luck to Ric Grenell, our new Ambassador to Germany. A great and talented guy, he will represent our Country well!Lisa Page, who may hold the record for the most Emails in the shortest period of time (to her Lover, Peter S), and attorney Baker, are out at the FBI as part of the Probers getting caught? Why is Peter S still there? What a total mess. Our Country has to get back to Business!Is this Phony Witch Hunt going to go on even longer so it wrongfully impacts the Mid-Term Elections, which is what the Democrats always intended? Republicans better get tough and smart before it is too late!The United States does not need John Kerry’s possibly illegal Shadow Diplomacy on the very badly negotiated Iran Deal. He was the one that created this MESS in the first place!National Prescription Drug #TakeBackDay numbers are in! Another record broken: nearly 1 MILLION pounds of Rx pills disposed! Let’s keep fighting this opioid epidemic, America!I will be announcing my decision on the Iran Deal tomorrow from the White House at 2:00pm.SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:Breaking at The New Yorker: Four Women Accuse New York’s Attorney General Eric Schneiderman of Physical AbuseHillary R. Clinton Part 21 of 21 - Detailed analysis of her server accessDHS to push for criminal charges against all border-jumpersBlack Panther on RefugeesPRESS BRIEFINGS, INTERVIEWS, RALLIES:Press Beating🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:Women's rights movement post 90'sSocial Justice Warriors are reaching levels of hypocrisy not previously thought possibleStay On Top Of The Red Wave!My son said he wanted to be a princess and dress up like his sister, so I explained to him...son, you’re a king. The king rules over all-and then I made him this costume. I did not give him hormones. This is good parenting.Tuesday, May 8th:TODAY'S ACTION:Be Best: First Lady Melania Trump's InitiativePresident Trump Gives Remarks on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of ActionCeasing U.S. Participation in the JCPOA and Taking Additional Action to Counter Iran’s Malign Influence and Deny Iran All Paths to a Nuclear Weapon🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:Gina Haspel, my highly respected nominee to lead the CIA, is being praised for the fact that she has been, and alway will be, TOUGH ON TERROR! This is a woman who has been a leader wherever she has gone. The CIA wants her to lead them into America’s bright and glorious future!I will be speaking to my friend, President Xi of China, this morning at 8:30. The primary topics will be Trade, where good things will happen, and North Korea, where relationships and trust are building.John Kerry can’t get over the fact that he had his chance and blew it! Stay away from negotiations John, you are hurting your country!Statement on the Iran Nuclear Deal:(Retweeting The White House) "At the heart of the Iran deal was a giant fiction: that a murderous regime desired only a peaceful nuclear energy program. Today, we have definitive proof that this Iranian promise was a lie."(Retweeting The White House) "Finally, I want to deliver a message to the long-suffering people of Iran. The people of America stand with you."The Iran Deal is defective at its core. If we do nothing, we know what will happen. In just a short time, the world’s leading state sponsor of terror will be on the cusp of acquiring the world’s most dangerous weapons....SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:Schneiderman Is A Hardcore 19th Century Democrat: "He called me his ‘brown slave,’ would slap me until I called him ‘Master’" Somebody Forgot To Tell Him the "Democratic Plantation" Is Only Supposed To Be A Metaphor!Jordan Peterson: “People are talking about Trump voters as if they’re a tribe from another planet. Wait a second: This is half of your population. This isn’t some fringe group. Maybe sit and think about it and not just assume they’re all stupid. Because they’re not."Eric Schneiderman, powerful NY Democrat accused of violence against women and drug abuse, RESIGNS AS STATE ATTORNEY GENERAL!President Trump: "I am announcing today that the United States will withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal."🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:PRESIDENT TRUMP REEEEEEEEEEMOVES THE U.S. FROM THE IRAN DEAL - REDDIT ONCE AGAIN ON SUICIDE WATCHRIP Muh LegacyLet’s get it trending, folksProud of Our First Lady Melania Trump!!!!!!!Wednesday, May 9th:TODAY'S ACTION:President Trump Holds a Cabinet MeetingVice President Pence Hosts a Working Lunch on U.S. Engagement in the Western HemispherePresident Trump Participates in the Celebration of Military Mothers and Spouses EventExecutive Order Enhancing Noncompetitive Civil Service Appointments of Military Spouses🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:The Republican Party had a great night. Tremendous voter energy and excitement, and all candidates are those who have a great chance of winning in November. The Economy is sooo strong, and with Nancy Pelosi wanting to end the big Tax Cuts and Raise Taxes, why wouldn’t we win?The Fake News is working overtime. Just reported that, despite the tremendous success we are having with the economy & all things else, 91% of the Network News about me is negative (Fake). Why do we work so hard in working with the media when it is corrupt? Take away credentials?Candace Owens of Turning Point USA is having a big impact on politics in our Country. She represents an ever expanding group of very smart “thinkers,” and it is wonderful to watch and hear the dialogue going on...so good for our Country!Congratulations to Mike Dewine on his big win in the Great State of Ohio. He will be a great Governor with a heavy focus on HealthCare and Jobs. His Socialist opponent in November should not do well, a big failure in last job!I am pleased to inform you that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is in the air and on his way back from North Korea with the 3 wonderful gentlemen that everyone is looking so forward to meeting. They seem to be in good health. Also, good meeting with Kim Jong Un. Date & Place set.Secretary Pompeo and his “guests” will be landing at Andrews Air Force Base at 2:00 A.M. in the morning. I will be there to greet them. Very exciting!The Failing New York Times criticized Secretary of State Pompeo for being AWOL (missing), when in fact he was flying to North Korea. Fake News, so bad!Looking forward to greeting the Hostages (no longer) at 2:00 A.M.Gina Haspel did a spectacular job today. There is nobody even close to run the CIA!SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:Study: Trump's Polls Improve Despite 90% Negative Media CoverageOh the irony: Trump said he will not allow a regime that chants “Death to America” to gain access to nuclear weapons. AFTER the announcement Iranian lawmakers burned a US flag and chanted “Death to America”.John McCain confirms he gave Trump dossier to James Comey in book ‘The Restless Wave’Boy Scouts Lose 425,000 Boys 1 Week After Announcing Name ChangeWhite House Sources: John Kerry’s Stealth Lobbying Backfired, Helped Kill The Iran DealPRESS BRIEFINGS, INTERVIEWS, RALLIES:Press Beating🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:It's ok if you make a lil mistake, cuz we'll just dab a lil Muh Legacy Green and fix that right up.Now that Obama’s legacy has been removed, we can focus on making America GREAT again instead of fixing prior mistakes. It is a brand new dawn, pedes. Let’s make the future of America, for all Americans, together.The Obama LegacyOutside of my old office in Tel Aviv, Israel. Roughly translated: You’re the man.BREAKING NOW! 9TH DISTRICT RULES KOREAN PRISONERS MUST BE RETURNED!Thursday, May 10th:TODAY'S ACTION:President Trump and Vice President Pence Welcome the Secretary of State and Three American ReturneesPresident Donald J. Trump and First Lady Melania Trump Welcome the Three American ReturneesPresident Donald J. Trump Announces Fourteenth Wave of Judicial Nominees, Thirteenth Wave of United States Attorney Nominees, and Eighth Wave of United States Marshal NomineesFive Nominations and Two Withdrawals Sent to the Senate TodayPresident Donald J. Trump Proclaims May 11, 2018, as Military Spouse DayPresident Donald J. Trump Announces Intent to Nominate and Appoint Personnel to Key Administration Posts🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:On behalf of the American people, WELCOME HOME!Senator Cryin’ Chuck Schumer fought hard against the Bad Iran Deal, even going at it with President Obama, & then Voted AGAINST it! Now he says I should not have terminated the deal - but he doesn’t really believe that! Same with Comey. Thought he was terrible until I fired him!Five Most Wanted leaders of ISIS just captured!The highly anticipated meeting between Kim Jong Un and myself will take place in Singapore on June 12th. We will both try to make it a very special moment for World Peace!Thank you Indiana! #MAGA🇺🇸SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:If you voted for Trump you helped achieve thisReddit liberal edits Wikipedia page to win an argument. The definition of fake news. Sad!Based Ted Cruz on N. Korea Prisoner Release: Trump Ended Obama Policy of 'Weakness and Appeasement'THEY WERE BRIEFED! Dishonest attacks on Trump CIA nominee Haspel over enhanced interrogation techniques. Congress, including Pelosi, knew and was on board. Judicial Watch found the proof.Fake News Network; New York Times!!!!!!!! Busted Again!🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:Quick!!! Bring GEOTUS more shit to fix!!!LOL! Obama Got Called Out on Twitter with Deadly AccuracyI’m staying up to see our President greet the very last US prisoners held by North Korea.He had a future. Barack Hussein Obama left him to die. His only legacyFriday, May 11th:TODAY'S ACTION:President Trump Attends a Roundtable with Automaker CEOsPresident Trump Gives Remarks on Lowering Drug PricesPresident Donald J. Trump Proclaims May 13, 2018, as Mother’s DayPresident Donald J. Trump Announces Intent to Appoint Personnel to Key Administration Post🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:Today, my Administration is launching the most sweeping action in history to lower the price of prescription drugs for the American People. We will have tougher negotiation, more competition, and much lower prices at the pharmacy counter!The American people deserve a healthcare system that takes care of them – not one that takes advantage of them. We will work every day to ensure all Americans have access to the quality, affordable medication they need and deserve. We will not rest until the job is done!Big week next week when the American Embassy in Israel will be moved to Jerusalem. Congratulations to all!Why doesn’t the Fake News Media state that the Trump Administration’s Anti-Trust Division has been, and is, opposed to the AT&T purchase of Time Warner in a currently ongoing Trial. Such a disgrace in reporting!SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:HE'S BACK BABY! ‘Last Man Standing’ Revived by Fox for Season 7 :: Well Done Pedes!!!The Death of Journalism: ABC and NBC Nightly "News" spent 0 minutes last night covering the capture of 5 ISIS leaders last night. Stay ignorant normies.Trump orders FDA to require PRICES of DRUGS in TV ADSJim Acosta thought he could shame her, but just sold out Pepe on Amazon and made her famous instead! Total failure.Ouch!PRESS BRIEFINGS, INTERVIEWS, RALLIES:Press Beating🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:DRAGON ENERGY TONIGHT IN ELKHART, INDIANAYou fucking know it!We Be Like... Our President at 2 AM Preparing To Meet The North Korean PrisonersLawn mower boy pitches inWho Killed Seth Rich?Saturday, May 12th:SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:Barack Obama worked with heroin traffickers to arm cartels and terrorists. While being the president of the United States.‘Melania’ surges in popularity for baby girl namesEU statement opposing US embassy move to Jerusalem is blocked by Hungary, Romania and Czech RepublicMore Winning! North Korea to dismantle nuclear test site May 23-25🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:AWOOOO!!!! This week was a good week!!! MAGA!!! God bless the USA.Border Wall Upgrades Include New Artwork Inspired By Der SpiegelWords cant describe my love for this photoIt's amazing what a REAL man in the White House can do.If Hillary Was PresidentSOOO MUCH WINNING, STILL NOT TIRED!!!!As always; some tunes to help you go through all of this WINNING:The FreshmenTiny DancerFast CarTalk Is CheapDoses & MimosasDrop The GameMAGA ON PATRIOTS! #robgray

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